The narrow path behind us prevented a clean retreat. The men hurled themselves and forced their way through three or four at a time, as the inferno at their backs threatened a hellish death. Still-flaming victims raced crazily through the ranks, screaming at us to put out their fires, which we were unable to do as the burning substance ravaged without regard to water or dirt thrown upon it. The men were terrified, toppling and trampling one another in their haste to escape, and Thrasybulus' archers on the towers rained arrows down upon us, wounding dozens, further blocking our retreat. I peered back over my shoulder at the towers behind us, and saw the flames abate as the massive oaken door was slid and heaved back into position, the ghastly remnants of the dead and wounded left behind us in writhing, shrieking mounds.
The descent down the mountainside from the barbican was hellish, for the path which earlier we had navigated with difficulty even in daylight was now nearly impossible for troops injured and panicked, fighting downpour and dusk. The men clambered and dropped hand over hand, blundering their way down the rock-strewn hillside made all the more dangerous by the darkness of the shadows and of their own souls. The dead and injured were dragged and pushed, their heads and limbs bouncing over the rocks, while behind them disordered, confused troops bunched in terror. Men clubbed each other with fists and swords to push their way through faster. One terrified wretch leaped onto my shoulders and scrambled forward over the helmets of the soldiers ahead of me. He gained only a few yards before an enraged hoplite cracked him across the ribs with the rolled bronze edge of his shield, leaving him retching in the mud at our feet to be kicked and carried along with the mob. Speed was impossible, and not merely on account of the darkness; the switchbacks were so steep that one misstep in the dark would send a man crashing down onto the helmets, or spear points, of those creeping down the face below. The route led around the fortress, passing over a shelf wedged between the outer walls and the steep gorge, where we were vulnerable to arrow fire from the ramparts above. Xenophon had been ordered to take over a company of archers whose captain had been lost in the assault, and here he deployed them to cover the army's descent by keeping up a steady barrage of arrow fire on any rebels that attempted to shoot or hurl stones on the retreating troops below. In so doing we killed several of Thrasybulus' men, who toppled from their positions on the rampart to land in a sodden steaming mass at our feet. Before we were able to clamber down the narrow path ourselves, however, Thrasybulus sent a detachment to barricade itself at the narrowest point between the outer walls and the gorge cliff, blocking our retreat and preventing reinforcements from coming to our assistance from below. Our hopes of threading our way past just before sunset were dashed when an enormous rebel wearing flame-painted Boeotian armor leaped out at our lead man from behind a boulder. With a powerful stroke of his long sword the rebel split through the man's helmet to the base of the neck, bursting his skull in a shower of brains and leaving the two halves of his head hanging by the neck tendons onto both shoulders. Xenophon thrust a spear into the throat of the rebel, who seized the shaft and attempted to wrench it out before toppling backward against the wall, cursing silently and spitting blood. He was immediately replaced by a swarm of enraged comrades, who flew at us from behind their barricade, driving us back with spears and rocks. We retreated to the shelter of the retaining wall hard by the towers, where we crouched, sodden and miserable, in the now complete darkness between the two enemy forces. We were perhaps fifty in number, and we gazed in frustration at the passage in front of the barbican whence we had been routed only a short time before. The path was illuminated by dwindling flames still hissing in the sticky, noxious fluid that pooled among the bodies. So sudden had the initial blasts of fire been that the first victims were clustered in a single heap, some remaining upright and leaning against the mound of their comrades without room to fall, a phalanx still, even in death. One soldier in plain view, his charred head having fallen cleanly off his crispened neck like a withered grape off a vine, stood guard in the rain against a heap of his comrades, his corpse stiffened like a stump in his armor. Those in the ghastly stack who still lived peered at us desperately in their agony, imploring us with weakening voices to drag them from among the broken and bloodied limbs of their comrades before they suffocated or froze to death. There was nothing we could do.
"Lord Zeus," Xenophon muttered weakly as he swigged water from the flask I held out to him, "what the hell are we doing here? How can the entire army be thrown back by only seventy men?"
I glanced at him in the darkness, but was unable to see his expression. "When we get to Athens you'll be commended for bravery for leading these archers."
He grunted, and was silent. As I reached my hand out blindly to take back the flask, he seized my wrist and I found his grip unnaturally harsh, his hand trembling. I pried my hand away and seized his own wrist, feeling his racing pulse.
"What's wrong with you?" I asked, my concern mounting.
"Nothing. I'm wounded. I can't see it, I don't know."
"By the gods, you didn't say anything. Where is it?"
"Here-my leg."
I stretched out my hand and felt the arrow shaft emerging two feet out of his upper thigh, at an angle toward his torso, as stiff and implacable as if it had been fixed to his flesh by roots. On our retreat from the wall a few minutes before, he had been shot by an archer aiming down on him from straight above. I felt the angle of the shaft in the darkness, concluding that it had not embedded itself in the bone or pierced the artery. Neither, however, had it emerged from the other side, because of the terrible angle of entry-it had traveled through his entire upper leg, lengthwise.
My hand came away sticky with blood. He could not walk far, and even if this were possible, there was no place to walk to. We were trapped here until morning at least, and by that time his leg would have stiffened into a club, if he weren't already dead from loss of blood.
I had no belt with which to make a tourniquet, since we fought naked in our armor but for the stiff skirt of oxhide straps to protect the groin against sword thrust. Casting around blindly in the mud where our company lay, moans and gasps emerging out of the darkness from men bearing their own injuries, I came upon the leather flask I had just dropped. Seizing it, I pulled out my knife and pierced the skin, slitting it along the seam, then slicing it into a single pliable strip the width of a belt. This I tied about Xenophon's leg at the groin, placing my foot on his hip bone and pulling to fasten it tight before securing the knot. Xenophon grunted in pain.
"Are you mad?" he asked. "The leather will tighten even further in this rain. I'll lose the leg."
"Better that than die of bleeding. We have no surgeon here and I can't bind the wound with the arrow still in."
"Then you'll have to take it out."
"The hell you say. I'll do no such thing."
"You're a slave. You'll do as I tell you."
"I'm Gryllus' slave-not yours."
"You're my battle squire. Now grab the shaft."
I crouched for a moment, motionless, wondering whether this was truly what the gods had ordained. The men around us had fallen quiet, and I felt their eyes upon me, even through the darkness, though none volunteered to assist. The only sound was that of the enemy sentries on the tower less than a hundred yards away, calling out the watch. The rain had now hardened into a driving sleet, and I slithered through the frozen mud up to Xenophon's shoulders, facing the fletching of the arrow, then reached down and seized the shaft, again bracing my sandal on his hipbone to give me added purchase.