I suspect she saved my life.
When the other two were gone, sex was the farthest thing from my mind. I hurt. She rubbed my upper back for a little while. ‘My sister and I would like to sleep in your apartment, lord,’ she said, somewhat dreamily.
I agreed. Of course they wanted to escape.
The next day, I was almost speechless with fever. The fever lasted three days, and when it passed, I was as weak as a child. Despite which, our party was ready to ride for Susa via Babylon, three thousand stades away.
I sent the two Greek women to my ships. I had a farewell conference with Sekla, and directed him to meet me at Ephesus in late winter. I gave him a letter for Artapherenes and another for Briseis, and wished him — and Meglakles and Harpagos — well. I took Brasidas and left the rest of the marines.
If it came to a fight, we weren’t going to cut our way out of Persia.
I sat my three Spartans down on the tiled porch of my magnificent apartment in the palace. My thigh was alternating cold and hot, and I had had two dreams of Herakles and one of the lion’s eyes. But I wasn’t dead, and I needed these men. Because of my wound, I was blunt.
‘I need all three of you to get along well enough to serve together. This is not about Sparta only, but about all of Greece. Bulis, I ask you to treat Brasidas with honour.’
Bulis’s face was as absent of emotion as the lion’s had been. ‘I will do Brasidas all honour,’ he said in his eerily flat voice.
I looked at Sparthius and he laughed his comedian’s laugh. ‘Don’t look at me. I have always honoured Brasidas.’
Brasidas looked at me with the slight smile of a man who has received an unexpected injury from a friend.
I thought, Damn it! Why did I get this wrong?
But the three exchanged a kiss of peace and a hand clasp, and I thought Bulis and Brasidas lingered for a moment.
When they were gone, Hector approached me cautiously. He looked at Brasidas, just walking down the front steps and being greeted by Cyrus. The two were obviously discussing the pack animals.
‘You tell me never to listen to the gossip of slaves,’ Hector said.
I raised an eyebrow. ‘I agree that it’s hard advice to follow,’ I said.
‘Sparthius’s helot has been teaching me some wrestling,’ he said, which neatly implied that I hadn’t. The young are very good at placing the knife. ‘He says. . he says Brasidas exiled himself. He says that Brasidas refused to pay his mess bill and left. But he doesn’t know why, except. .’ Hector had the good manners to blush, since he was now repeating pure hearsay. ‘. . Except that he’s heard of Brasidas referred to as the only man in the world who hates Leonidas.’
I nodded. I could barely think — I was still fevered.
‘And I want to thank you for saving my life,’ he went on, as if that was the less important item. ‘I want to apologise for breaking down last night. Sappho says. .’
I raised both eyebrows.
He turned bright red.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘It’s like that, is it?’ I shook my head. ‘I’m sending her home to Chios, my lad. I’ll send you to the ship to say your goodbyes.’
He stammered something, but he went to the ship eagerly enough.
Youth. Wasted on the young. Or perhaps not.
Riding was agony — first because of my thigh, and second because I was dizzy all the time, but I couldn’t send them on without me, as Cyrus was my escort, not theirs. And the first three days were all climbing — up and up and up into the highlands. We passed a number of ancient monuments in those three days — a statue of an Assyrian king, lording over a slave; a small pyramid that marked some feat of arms by an Aegyptian king — it was like a road of wonders. Truly, northern Syria is where all worlds meet — Persia and Babylon, Urarit and Phrygia and Palestine and Aegypt — and Greece.
Lysistrata had left Hector with thorough directions on my wound, and we put infusions on it, and I drank tea — tea made of something like sage, although it had a bitter taste that was only saved by honey. But the first two weeks of that journey are lost to me, and even the Spartans commiserated, which suggested to me that I was doing well in the endless contest of manhood.
In fact, my recovery dated from the first day we reached a post house on the Royal Road. The Royal Road runs from Susa to Sardis, and does not go south to Tarsus. So we spent two weeks riding north to catch it in central Lydia.
My fever broke — for good — in a small stone post house at what appeared to be the top of the world. I ate, and Hector pressed my hand, and Cyrus admitted that he had feared for my life. It was all very gratifying.
I also discovered that I had slowed them all down. Because after two days on the Royal Road, when I’d eaten a huge meal of mutton and then demanded a few gallops to cheer my restless horse, Cyrus announced we were going to move faster — and suddenly, despite our forty men and ten pack animals, we began to make real time, travelling as far as two hundred stades a day.
The second or third night on the Royal Road, I found that Aristides had put his bedroll next to mine. And Bulis moved Nikeas’s bedroll over two places, and he and Sparthius moved into my corner. Only important royal guests received the right to live in the post houses — which were like small inns. Most people slept outside them, and indeed there were rows of small shelters of varying degrees of craft built outside, and while some post houses were empty of visitors, others were packed with people and herds.
Indeed, the roads and the post houses were among the greatest wonders of the empire.
At any rate, when the satrap’s guardsmen settled down, Aristides rolled as close to me as a lover. ‘It is good to have you back,’ he said. ‘Have you looked in the store houses?’
I hadn’t even seen a store house.
‘They’re stuffed with grain,’ he said. ‘I looked in the grain barn here — it is also packed. There is enough grain in that barn to feed ten thousand men.’ He squeezed my shoulder. ‘I know what I’m saying — I’m a farmer.’
Bulis spoke out of the dark behind me. ‘He’s getting the road ready for his army,’ he said.
I chuckled. ‘Perhaps we could arrange for an army of rats,’ I suggested.
Bulis all but hissed. ‘That would not lead to the contest we desire,’ he said.
As we descended from the mountains into the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the preparations of the Persians and Medes became more obvious. At every town, men were conducting inspections. Every forge was busy making spears and armour. Horse herds were being moved into the autumn grazing, and the harvest was coming in, and there were government men everywhere, collecting, enforcing — the power of the Persian bureaucracy was staggering compared to anything I’d seen in Greece, and their taxation was the heaviest I could imagine on the Babylonians.
It was hot and sticky, and my hip still hurt. I had aches in my back that seemed to connect with my pelvis, and even regular massage — in this, at least, the Persians are our brothers — didn’t seem to fix the injury. Muscles had been damaged. My body was far more deeply hurt than I had thought.
The area between the rivers was the most intensely cultivated I had ever seen. It made Boieotia and Green Plataea appear a howling wilderness. Laced with canals and irrigation ditches, the fields rolled away in an endless embroidery of man’s handiwork on the face of the earth, and the canals and irrigation ditches were old. We passed the ruins of cities that our guides told us were more than two thousand years old — one they claimed was four thousand years old.
Cyrus rode by my side. It was the longest time we’d spent together since my youth, and he was eager to see his home and his father. And we were delighted to find that the friendship of youth had been built on stone, not sand. We fenced with sticks and wrestled and raced our horses and even shot bows, and we were well matched at all but the last, where he was utterly my master.