The Ten Thousand (33 page)
Even with the dim light of morning, the soldiers were too numb to rouse themselves to remove the snow's weight, having only enough energy left to clear out a pocket of air in front of their faces so as not to suffocate. They became somnolent in their cold cocoons. In their bleary-eyed moments of wakefulness they had no idea how much time had passed since they were last awake—whether an hour, a night or the entire past day. The water in their leather canteens was frozen as solid as their minds, and the silence, both without and within, was at the same time comforting and deadly. We began to think that it had always been winter and that we could feel nothing else, just a vague awareness of the passage of time, like a lost childhood phrase that surfaces occasionally in one's speech, or the indistinct tingling of a limb long removed. The entire universe had collapsed in on itself to this tiny, white, dreary place, asleep, infinitely cold, unspeakably far from home.
Many of the pack animals, weakened already from lack of food and water, simply lay down and died—they were found later frozen solid as stones, their eyes open and sightless, their hides too hard even to be flayed for the leather. The men found that as long as they remained still beneath their burden of snow and did not try to shake it off, they could retain enough body heat to survive for a time, the entire night if necessary. Xenophon could not give in to this luxury, however, and finally, just after the gray dawn the next morning, he stood up and shook off the snow. I had already crawled out of my own burrow and was waiting for him, shivering in the semi-shelter of the overhanging boughs of a large fir tree. As I stepped forward, he greeted me with a grim, silent nod, and then we walked around camp to view the remains of our army.
The sight was eerie, and frightening. "This doesn't even look like the same country we saw last night, Xenophon," I whispered in awe. "Have the gods carried us away?"
He, too, looked about him with eyes wide in amazement, then swallowed and licked his cracked lips. "Don't think such things, Theo," he said. "Or if you do, don't speak them."
The entire landscape had changed under the effect of the snow, which was still falling heavily, obscuring all but the hundred feet or so we could see around us. Not a sign of life was visible; not the slightest curl of smoke from an untended fire, not a single snuffle from a horse, not a whisper from the usually profanely joking and singing soldiers. Just the smooth flatness of the frozen riverbed on which we were camped, with soft mounds of boulders under the snow scattered randomly about the gravel flats. All was utterly silent and still, save for the soft plopping sound made by an occasional handful of snow sliding off the branches above. The thought occurred to me that the army had left in the night, forgetting to wake us, or that the enemy had attacked after all, killing all but us fortunate or wretched few who had lain unawares beneath the silent blanket of snow. My spirit said that this could not possibly be true, but no other explanation for the deathly silence and stillness presented itself.
Xenophon, however, shuddering with cold, used his arms to sweep away a mound of snow from the bed of a cart almost invisible under its deep blanket. Then clambering onto it, he took a deep breath, and to my amazement began bellowing into the frozen air, sending a flock of crows frantically flapping and cackling into the sky from the trees where they had been silently observing us. He shouted curses into the stillness, commanding the forest to awaken, ordering the nymphs and the naiads to dress themselves and split him some firewood, calling, as if he had taken leave of his senses, invoking I know not whom—Pan and the satyrs and the other forest gods perhaps—to stand up and praise their Maker for their continued existence, offering a goat for breakfast to anyone who could find one still living under the snow. I watched in wonder as he declaimed to the stillness, exhorting the rocks and the hills, and then I watched in even greater amazement as the rocks and hills answered him in reply.
The mounds and boulders scattered about the riverbed shivered and quaked, cracks appearing in the layer of snow covering them, and then they slowly rose as if being pushed out of the earth from the depths of hell, emerging unsteadily like enormous mushrooms, the snow sliding off into crumpled mounds on the side. Sharp, piercing eyes appeared from beneath, beastlike men with bushy, unkempt beards stood straight up out of the snow, raising their cloaks over their heads and shoulders and shaking the powder off, stamping their feet to bring feeling back to their frozen members, blowing puffs of vapor on their hands and rubbing their dry, cracked palms together. Xenophon stepped up the pace of his harangue, calling upon the men to seek out their brothers who might be too weak or demoralized to emerge from the snow, pleading with them to build their fires high and warm themselves. He denied the bitter cold and threw off his cloak, stripping himself naked in the biting air as if for his morning exercises, insisting that he felt no discomfort. He seized an axe that had been stuck into a tree for safekeeping and began to noisily hack at a rotten stump, until before my very eyes hundreds, thousands of men and surviving animals emerged from their frozen hell and began reentering the land of the living. Someone took Xenophon's axe from his hands and started to split the wood, someone else kindled a fire, and soon the air was redolent again of the fragrance of smoke and oil and roasted mule, the sounds of men groaning and complaining, belching and bitching and farting and scratching, the sounds of ten thousand men, starving and frozen and aching for women, the sounds of an army that has survived its most difficult battle yet, the sweetest sounds on earth.
Taking a head count, we discovered we had lost dozens of men that night to death and frostbite, and uncounted head of pack animals and other livestock. The short journey into the mountains had been disastrous. Conferring with each other, Xenophon and Chirisophus decided that despite the approach of Tiribazus' hordes at the rear, it would be foolhardy to continue on into the mountains under these conditions. The decision was made to billet again under shelter, in the same villages we had departed, if the enemy had not already taken over the hearths we had vacated. The men cheered when it was announced we would be returning—and in their enthusiasm to be again under a warm roof, they made the return trip in half the time as the outgoing one, sliding down the hills on frozen hides or their own backs, whooping like small boys and ignoring the freezing of their outer extremities, which was taking a terrible toll. We arrived at the villages before the enemy had taken them over, though our vanguard had not a little trouble ousting the enemy scouts who had arrived just a few hours before and were beginning to settle in. Those of the Hellenes who had burnt their quarters upon their departure now had their come-uppance, and were forced to beg or bribe sleeping space from their comrades, or make do in chicken coops and livestock pens. This, of course, was Asteria's lot in any case.
That night, Xenophon sent out a squad of scouts to reconnoiter the enemy's position. After searching all night for the fires we had seen earlier, they returned exhausted and empty-handed except for one surprising bit of plunder they had captured: a Persian light-armored regular, the likes of whom we had not seen since leaving Tissaphernes behind weeks before. This sent the captains into a great deal of consternation at first, wondering whether the wily satrap had somehow outwitted us and marched a course parallel to ours this whole time in an effort to entrap us in the wilderness.
It took us several hours of searching before we were able to find an interpreter, as the few Persian speakers that had previously marched among the Hellenes had been killed or lost in earlier engagements. We finally came across an old man of the village, one who had served in the Persian army decades before in Ionia and spoke broken, rusty versions of the two languages, besides a half dozen others. The old lout was rousted from bed, half drunk or dotty and swearing up such a storm in every language he knew, plus several he was most likely inventing on the spot, as to make our own Spartans blush like virgins. When Chirisophus saw him, he was much put off with the man's spouting and refused to have anything to do with him, accusing him of being mad. Xenophon, however, prevailed on him to use the old fellow, pointing out that there might be some residual wisdom in his madness, and claiming that we are all mad to a greater or lesser extent. Chirisophus stared at him a long time, and then walked away in disgust.
The prisoner was not difficult to interrogate. He was simply told that if he did not cooperate he would be stripped and left to die in the nearest snow drift, and this was enough to make the loose-lipped Persian sing like a nightingale. As it turned out, our fears regarding Tissaphernes were unfounded. Our prisoner was a mercenary working for Tiribazus, and had been foraging for provisions when surprised by our scouts. Tiribazus, apparently, had a large force of mercenaries, Chalybians and Taochians, so large, in fact, that he could prevent our passage without technically breaking his truce—which was that the
Armenian
army would not impede us. The mercenaries, said the prisoner, had skirted our position along the back trails of the mountains, picking up local irregulars along the way, and were planning to fall upon us in ambush in the narrow places and canyons along the route, blocking our retreat and annihilating us in the snow.
Upon hearing this the officers were outraged. "Do we need a fucking lawyer to negotiate a simple truce with these barbarians?" Chirisophus asked in disgust. "Do we need to insert clauses to cover main troops, Chalybian mercenaries, farmers with pitchforks, and housewives throwing dirty dishwater at us?"
Furiously, Xenophon ordered the army into battle formation, amid much protest, but the measure was nevertheless necessary. Sitting there immobile, we would soon exhaust all our provisions, and would be allowing Tiribazus and his mercenaries time to collect additional forces and fortify their positions. The grumbling main body of the army marched at once with the prisoner as guide, leaving guards at the villages under the command of Sophainetos the Stymphalian.
The men, in an evil mood, were ready for murder, if not of the enemy then of Xenophon and Chirisophus, but they soon gained satisfaction. The light-armed troops, including Nicolaus' Rhodians, who were plowing through the snow in the lead, surprised a large body of the enemy in their own camp, with their shields down. The Greeks pelted the mercenaries with a withering fire of arrows and sling-stones without even bothering to wait for the heavy troops to arrive, killing dozens at the first volley, then rushing upon them with shouts and further shooting. Asteria, who did her best to make herself useful by distributing spare bullets and offering water, told me that the whole skirmish was like a dream: The attackers ran and floundered through the deep drifts as if flailing through clouds, while the terrified enemy attempted a retreat equally slowly, falling down in the soft snow, slowly rising and again attempting to run through the waist-deep powder. The scene was unreal and nightmarish, with even the combatants' shouts muffled in the silence of the snowy woods. Life only returned to concrete, material reality when the Hellenic troops physically caught up to those of the mercenaries who dared to stay and defend themselves, and the contact of the ghostlike figures suddenly resulted in screams of agony and the spray of blood and limbs across the fluffy, virginal whiteness.
The enemy fled with many killed, and the Rhodians even captured Tiribazus' tent, filled with slaves and gold and silver utensils, proving that the treacherous satrap was directly involved in the proceeding. To us, however, the gold was worthless. More valuable were the twenty purebred cavalry horses left behind, not sufficient to make up for those lost on our previous foray into the mountains, but welcome nonetheless, for the troops were hungry.
THE PRESENCE OF evil in the air was like a stench or a cloud, as I slipped over to Asteria's hut the next evening in an attempt to clear the poisoned atmosphere that had intruded between us. It was not like the constant tension of an army in retreat, an army besieged, which is something different, a background irritation like the distant roaring of a river, or the faint smell of a dead animal that one has not been able to find and bury, but to which one eventually becomes accustomed. The feeling that evening was distinct, a sharp wrenching of the gut, a bristling on the back of the neck, the sense that something was terribly wrong or dangerous in the world, the feeling that one is being watched by an evil deity, or worse, that the evil is in oneself.
Approaching the low doorway of the stone beehive structure, I gave my customary whistle to let Asteria know I was there, and was mildly surprised that she did not answer. Still, this was nothing—she might have been sleeping, or away, and so I stooped low at the waist and entered.
The phosphorescent white drifts reflecting through the door illuminated a sight for which I was not prepared, the consummation of the evil portent I had been sensing. Even before my eyes registered the sight, my ears were assaulted by the muffled, heavy breathing, the barely stifled grunts. Asteria was lying flat on her belly in the dirt, her legs spread out straight behind her, while a large, muscular figure kneeled above her buttocks, his knees digging painfully into the backs of her thighs. His left arm was stretched out toward her neck, and in the faint light I could see in that hand the evil gleam of metal, Asteria's own dagger, while his right hand fumbled clumsily at his groin as he worked at untying and loosening the loin straps under his tunic. He was facing away from me and had not even heard me enter for all his caprine snorting, and all I could see was his smoothly arched back and legs, the dolphinlike dorsal ridge of his spine straining at the skin of his back. What transfixed me, however, leaving me momentarily frozen in astonishment, was the sight of the enormous, pink, puckered burn scar on the brute's right shoulder, as cracked and ugly as the last time I had seen it twelve years before. Asteria had craned her head back over her shoulder to peer at me, her eyes pleading with mine in silent desperation.
Fifty years later I can still recall the snapping of my nerves, the feeling that whether he were man or god he had only minutes left to live. Despite his skills at hand-to-hand combat, Antinous did not stand a chance. Having burst into the hut at his most vulnerable moment, I reacted almost instantly, seizing him by the hair with a roar, lifting him bodily into the air and slamming him back against the wall with all my strength, in one motion. I noticed that if anything he was bigger than I had remembered, but I too had grown, and was now more than a match for his bulk. His face registered a series of emotions: first shock and surprise, followed by pain at being hurled so brutally against the wall, then a glint of recognition and a narrow, evil smile, as he made my face out in the darkness. His loosened clothing had fallen off, exposing his obscene and tumescent nakedness, and in my rage I forced my knee up between his thighs and rammed it three times into his crotch with all my strength. He screamed and rolled his eyes back in his head in pain. When I let go his hair, he collapsed in agony to his knees, then onto his side, gasping for breath, where I left him retching and glaring at me with watery, hate-filled eyes, as he mourned the ten seconds of my rage that had resulted in the permanent loss of his manhood.
I turned back to Asteria without a second glance at Antinous. She had pushed herself up onto her knees and crawled over to the far wall where she now huddled, her arms wrapped around herself, looking at me with eyes as horrified as those of the writhing creature across the floor. As I crouched and reached my hand out to her, she reflexively flinched, as if afraid of me as well, then immediately came to herself, and burying her face in her hands began sobbing frantically.
"He... he was waiting for me when I entered the hut... caught me by surprise, he said he would kill me if I didn't do it..."
I let her sobs run their course for a moment, while the bleeding Antinous rolled and grimaced, all the while staring at us with his face contorted in fury.
Suddenly Asteria's shuddered convulsions stopped, and she was silent for a second, before slowly turning her face to look straight at the man who only moments before had held her life in his hands. She stared silently, as if considering his fate, before whispering to me, in a low, constricted voice, "He will survive."
I must have muttered some comforting platitude to her, about his having learned a hard lesson, but she stopped me with a finger on my lips. I then understood her meaning, and my blood ran cold. Asteria continued to stare at me, and I realized from the silence that Antinous, too, was now lying still, quivering like a freshly caught hare, watching me intently through the penumbra.
My heart sank as I realized what had to be done, and Asteria slowly stood, keeping her eyes fixed on me the whole while as if willing her strength into my backbone. Antinous began muttering at me as I approached him.
"You killed my brother," he grunted, "and now you've destroyed my offspring as well. Have you not taken enough from me?"
I paused for a moment and stared at him, searching his face, but his eyes glared back at me in hate, without a glimmer of remorse. Without further hesitation, I stuffed his filthy loincloth into his mouth and lifted him roughly by the hair. Shoving his dead weight through the low door into the snow outside, I followed immediately behind and then half dragged, half carried him to the dark copse several hundred feet behind the low outbuilding, where I dropped him onto the frozen crust of snow. Antinous lay on his belly, motionless and panting, a dark stain radiating out from his pelvis. As I stepped over his back with one foot to straddle him from behind, my mind flooded with memories, and I wondered that this pathetic creature was the same man who had forced Aedon into such a position years ago in his sadistic training regimen. "You'll live," he had said then, though I would not offer him now this same meager assurance. As I grasped his hair to jerk his head back and expose his pulsing throat, he gave a deep, wrenching shudder. I saw a reflection in his eyes, the disembodied head and shoulders of a man I did not recognize, and I paused for a moment to consider whether this truly was part of the gods' plan.
Antinous held his breath, waiting in agony, as I stared down at him; and then almost against my will, I released my grip on his hair. His head flopped back down onto the crusted snow and I heard him heave a great, convulsive breath. I did not wait to see what he would do next; I felt drained and empty, incapable of even wondering whether he would live or die. I trudged slowly to the hut, without looking back.
The agony of hate, the agony of love. This time there was no separation of the elements.
