I lay awake most of that night, watching as the fear and worry gradually left her tense face and her features relaxed into a blissful dream, or perhaps merely into nothingness, into an empty place where the absence of pain and fear, even of love, is the greatest happiness of all. I drifted off for a few minutes at a time, waking at the slightest noise, the discreet coughing of a sentry pacing outside, and then falling back again into a fitful dream. I was asleep, or so she thought, when she finally arose an hour before the first hint of dawn had lit the eastern sky. I watched as if in a dream, through barely opened eyes, as she pulled her shift back down over her slender body and tightened the leather belt around her waist. To this day, I am unsure whether I continued to watch, or had slipped back into dreaming, when she silently drew her knife, considered it closely for a minute in the semidarkness, and then carefully, noiselessly, not daring to touch me with her hand or sleeve for fear of waking me, brought the razor-sharp tip up to the pulsing, blue vein in my neck just below the jaw. Whether truly awake or merely dreaming, I feigned the deepest sleep, fearing that the slightest gesture or flicker of my eyes, the softest catch of my breath, would cause the dagger to be plunged into my throat. She held the tip there for what seemed like minutes, as motionless as one who has seen a gorgon, staring into my just-closed eyes, daring the slightest response. My soul slipped away from my body and floated through her, behind her, to the ceiling of the tent, and I could see her from above, leaning over my frozen body, the tendons in her wrist tense and quivering from the strain of holding the knife in perfect stillness at my neck.
A small drop of blood appeared on my skin just below the tip of the knife, pure and clean, virginal in comparison to the gushing, grime-filled gore I had witnessed the previous day, and seemed just about to slowly make its streaked path down the side of my neck, when it paused, as if to consider whether this was the best course of action, and began slowly to coalesce and gel. This I could see, by all the gods I swear I could see, as if I were a third person in the room, watching helpless and voiceless from behind her back. The drop quivered and hung, like a bead on a necklace, its increasing inner weight straining against its thickening surface, and my eyes from above were unable to focus on anything other than that tiny, malignant, reddish black globe, reflecting, upside down, the wavering flame of the lamp and the oddly distorted and magnified face of the girl. I could see from the reflection that her eyes, too, were focused on the drop as if in a trance, considering all the implications to her life and to mine that were represented in that silently swelling little mass, that tiny, pregnant bulb, which itself appeared to be endowed with growing life, rather than merely reflective of it, and of death.
Without warning she straightened up, bringing the knife again to her eyes and examining the reddened tip for a moment in the soft lamplight, before shaking her head as one does when waking from a deep sleep, and slipping the knife quickly back into the sheath at her belt. She bent down again, silently licked the tiny red drop from my neck with her hot tongue, and just as silently kissed my dry and trembling lips. She then slipped back out to the cold coals of her campfire, as wraithlike as she had entered, and my soul came rushing back into my body, leaving me gasping for breath and shaking in cold perspiration, sitting up alone in the cot as if waking from a nightmare. We had said nothing to each other the entire night, indeed we had never yet spoken a word to each other, but I felt my fate as entirely in the hands of this woman as of the gods, and I realized what an extraordinary, and damnable thing that can be.
BOOK SIX
His white head and gray beard in the dust,
breathing the last of his strong soul, bloody
entrails grasped in his beloved hands…
– LYCURGUS
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS THE stench that finally roused me from my fitful dreams that morning-a smoky, sweet odor not unlike that of meat roasting for the sacrifice, but with an indefinable rankness, as of the burning of tainted flesh, of meat lacking in fat to absorb the heat and flame and allow the fire to cook the substance gradually, rather than rapidly charring it. I rose groggily from my cot, splashed a handful of water on my face from the skin hanging on a peg by the door, and stepped outside.
The morning sky, by contrast with the usual whitish blue palette that spawns and accompanies the desert heat, was today a glowering, malignant yellowish gray. The air was fouled by a vile, stinking smoke that hung low to the ground and drifted as if alive, swirling slowly in small circles, dissipating and coagulating, meandering serpentlike in futile paths that began in death and ended in reluctant oblivion. The churning haze effaced the life-giving rays of the sun, rendering it a dull scab-red in color, pulsing squat and malevolent in the sky, as if loath to make any greater effort to rise or to shimmer. For miles in all directions lay the flat, immeasurably dreary expanse of the desert, stretching unbroken to the horizon with hardly a tree or a range of hills to break the monotony. I had failed to notice earlier the dreadful endlessness of this terrain, forsaken of the gods, bereft of all interest, even as I had marched through it only days before.
As my eyes drifted away from the horizon to the nearer perspective, I saw that contrary to my first impression, the land was indeed composed of many features that had not been immediately apparent, like brush strokes on a painting, or the waves and currents of the sea as observed by the sailor, standing out in relief on the water's infinite flat smoothness. The earth was cracked and broken, split into random patterns that bifurcated and converged like a rash on the skin, strewn with gullies and washes, dry streambeds and low, withered shrubs. It was a foul terrain of pain and frustration, ground that had slowed my frantic return to the camp on horseback the day before. In the middle distance, just beyond a line of small hills that I could barely distinguish from its surroundings, I made out the vast expanse of the Persian army where it had halted in its retreat, massed like a milling column of ants stretching off to the horizon, the Persian battle pennants providing tiny spots of brightness and color on what was otherwise a drab, undifferentiated cloud of men and beasts. I shook my head to concentrate my thoughts, and focused my gaze on the specifics.
For miles around lay the detritus and destruction of the previous day's wide-ranging battle. Upturned wagons smoldered on their sides, their contents of grain and salted fish spilled and half torched, some still spewing a foul, greasy smoke. Spear shafts and javelins were spiked into the hard earth at crazy angles where they had landed, the ends swaying and quivering slightly as if curious, invisible desert gods were testing the depth and the strength of the shanks. My gaze ranged over the broad landscape, flitting sideways from fractured hill to withered clump of grass until I reluctantly, unwillingly permitted it to settle on the dark lumps scattered about the plain in numbers too daunting to count: the twisted bodies of lamed or trampled horses; the oxen and sheep viciously slashed in the abdomen or throat for no other reason than to deprive the Greeks of their sustenance and service; and perhaps least unexpected, yet most horrifying, the men.