Cyrus straightened in interest.
"As you know," Proxenus continued, "the king's Immortals are highly trained-possibly the best trained guards and horsemen in the world. That's both their strength and weakness, however. According to this fellow, the Immortals are so disciplined, they are inflexible. They are paralyzed without explicit commands from the king."
Proxenus let this sink in for a moment. Cyrus was familiar with the Immortals, of course, having himself been trained and raised with them, and having his own band of them as bodyguards, but this was an aspect he hadn't considered.
"The entire world is terrified of the Immortals," said Proxenus, "and King Artaxerxes has six thousand of them-utterly loyal to their master, ready to die for him at a moment's notice. The only way of dealing with them is to kill the head, the king himself. One bold strike to take out the king-even by a smaller force, perhaps one carrying out a suicide run-and the entire band of Immortals will be immobilized, and seeing that, the whole Persian army will turn tail."
Cyrus sat frozen, deep in contemplation. Asteria's needle was working more slowly, her eyes now fixed unblinkingly on the prince, much to my irritation. Proxenus was not yet through, though.
"The same goes for the king's general, Tissaphernes," he said. Cyrus started, wrenched out of his reverie by mention of the hated name. "I understand that for all his bluster, he's basically a coward. He likes to take credit, to look good, but when faced with a determined force, even a smaller one, he cringes like a boy facing his father's belt."
There was a sudden movement from the corner behind Cyrus, and I saw Asteria ruefully sucking her finger where she had pricked it with the needle. Her concentration was broken, but before she returned back to her sewing I saw her shoot a glance not at me or at the prince, but unmistakably at Proxenus, who was standing to Cyrus' side. Even through the partial darkness of the tent, I could see that her eyes were full of venom.
The prince remained thinking in his seat for a long time without uttering a word. Asteria did not look up from her sewing again, however, and Cyrus finally dismissed us.
CHAPTER FIVE
OUR ANIMALS SUFFERED tremendously on the march, dying in droves, though the desert somehow provided sustenance for thousands of wild creatures. It would have been a hunter's paradise, though few of us had the energy to stalk the beasts. We were constantly watched, and even accompanied, by troops of fleet-footed wild asses, bustards and gazelles, as well as ostriches, which the men avoided after one of them was killed by a kick to the head. Our native guides even told stories of a mysterious village of pig-faced people in the desert, from which lost travelers never returned sane. Such peasant myths I ignored, but several times I gave chase to the asses, which would appear to be the easiest target of all the local beasts. They ran much faster than our horses, however, often so outstripping me that they would suddenly stop and stand still for a moment, as if laughing and daring me to approach closer. As soon as I did, however, they would streak off again, remaining just beyond bowshot. By hard trial and error, we found they could be killed if horsemen positioned themselves at intervals and hunted in relays, until the ass being targeted simply dropped from exhaustion. In the process, however, we would also exhaust five or six of our own horses and men, hardly an effective means of obtaining meat for the army.
One such chase after a troop of wild asses led me miles away from the main body of the army, into rugged terrain and down a steep ravine, where my horse tripped in a hole. Her leg snapped like a straw and she threw me over her head onto some sharp rocks. I must have lain unconscious for some time, for when I awoke the sun was low in the sky and my companions were nowhere to be found. We had strung ourselves out in the relay hunting technique and they had probably not realized until hours later that I was not among them. My head was pounding like a hammer on an anvil, from both my fall and the heat that had been beating on me all afternoon, and in one very ill-considered moment, I emptied my entire water bag, swilling greedily for a minute and then pouring the rest of the brackish Euphrates water over my aching head, to little relief.
The horse was lying on the ground nearby, screaming like a child and in spasms from the heat and pain of the compound fracture in her leg. She had to be killed, which I did regretfully and with some difficulty, by crushing her skull with a rock. I then climbed to the top of the ridge to take my bearings, and in the last light of the day, I thought I could discern the cloud of dust raised by the army in the distance as it marched across the desert. I struck out in that direction at a trot, accompanied by my ever-lengthening black double, and doggedly kept up the pace for most of the night. I guided myself by the stars, pausing only briefly for rest near the half-buried skeletons of three mules from an earlier party of travelers, the bones so white and clean that they seemed almost incandescent in the moonlight.
The next morning, as the sun rose, I saw again the cloud of dust-but realized to my dismay that it was at the same distance as the night before, and that in reality it was not dust at all, but only the normal smudging of the horizon caused by the waves of heat rising from the sand and rocks. By now I was afraid, and deathly thirsty, for after trotting all night I still had not drunk anything since swigging my last water the previous afternoon. Toward midday I felt I could go no farther, and finding a sparse shelter from the fierce sun in a small rocky ditch, I sank down and prepared to die.
The next morning I awoke to the faint tinkling of bells. My mouth tasted foul and wool-like, and my skin hot and sensitive to the touch. I realized vaguely that I was suffering from fever, and that I must have been for some time, perhaps hours, for in my delirium and irritation I had scratched off the scant garments I had been wearing and they lay shredded in the dust beside me. I stared for a time at the vast, sterile sky, trying to clear my mind, to gain my bearings, wondering why I was not yet dead, when I heard the sound again, the distant tinkle of bells.
Rising shakily to my feet I looked around but could see little from my cramped position in the ditch. My knees wobbling, the impulse to retch rising up in my throat, I consciously and carefully placed my feet in natural toeholds in the slope and pulled myself up to the top. The distance was no higher than a man's head, but for all my weakness it seemed the summit of Mount Olympus. Flopping there on my belly, I rested for some minutes, my eyes struggling to focus, until I was able to lurch to my feet and blearily scan the surrounding area for the source of the sound.
It was not difficult to find. Thirty yards away milled a small flock of yellowish sheep, their filthy coats deeply encrusted with the dust and burrs of the desert, their eyes peering dumbly from beneath unsheared locks of fleece falling over their faces as they meandered calmly down a barely visible trail in the gravel. The powerful, musty smell of their unwashed fleece wafted toward me, an oddly comforting sensation. The sheep were unaware or uncaring of my presence, and continued their soft bleating and clanking of tiny bronze bells as if I were of no greater account than a stump or a wizened desert bush.
Not so their mistress, however. The young girl, who was wearing a flowing and dirty garment the color of her animals, with a thin linen rag tied loosely over her head as shelter from the sun, could not have been more than twelve or thirteen years old. She had been accompanying her flock on the side parallel to my ditch, and now stood no more than fifteen feet away from me, staring in dumbfounded astonishment at the enormous, glassy-eyed giant who had reared up before her stark naked, seemingly from the ground itself. I had not even the presence of mind to cover myself with my hands, or to gesture to her for a swig of water from the sack I saw hanging across her shoulder, for the blackness closed in on me in a rush from the sides of my vision, inexorably narrowing my sight to a mere pinprick of a tunnel, a tiny circle centered on the sweating water bag before me. I stumbled toward her blindly with my hands outstretched, hearing her gasp and scream as if from a tremendous distance, and then even my needle-eye view of the bag went black and disappeared.