The Persians discussed this among themselves in their barbarian tongue, in voices so low that our interpreter could not catch their meaning. Then they rode away without saying a word.
Xenophon stared bleary-eyed at the bundle tossed at our tent the next afternoon by a lone Persian rider, who had swiftly turned heel and raced galloping back to his camp. Hellenic informants from the Persian camp had told us that morning that rather than being honored by the king, Proxenus and Menon had, in fact, been hog-tied, dragged by their feet behind horses to the king's tent, flayed alive of what little skin was still left on their bodies, and beheaded. The two hundred soldiers procuring supplies at the market had suffered a somewhat quicker fate, as they had been cut down almost immediately upon a signal, by armed Persian soldiers manning the market stalls.
Half mad with grief, surrounded by confused and terrified men, wondering what would befall us next, Xenophon asked me to slit open the parcel. We found to our horror that it contained Clearchus' head, his long Spartan braids coiled around it, and obvious signs of his having been brutally beaten before his death. After a day in the hot, humid weather, covered only with a thin papyrus wrapping, the head was already badly disfigured, the eyeballs shriveling, the lips bluish, and the skin swollen. The perpetually angry scar on his temple that had so terrified his men was now pure white on the bloodless skin. Flies buzzed about lazily, waiting for me to again leave them to their business. I felt an unutterable loneliness and sadness. The Syracusan chants from my childhood, which had not tormented me for some time, welled up inside; they were threatening and pressing, and it was only with great effort that I was able to push them aside, shunt them off to a corner of my mind, and focus on the terrible business at hand.
After securing the camp the night before, our immediate task had been to put the souls of the murdered men to rest-which would be difficult, as we were unable even to place the customary obols in their mouths to pay the boatman Charon, or to oil their bodies for burial. The Persians kept their remains and no doubt performed atrocities on them, as they had on Clearchus'. We held a hasty ceremony, improvising eulogies, sacrificing a precious ox in their honor, and burying a single effigy in a grave, representing all the men who had died that evening.
Oddly enough, despite my grief at Proxenus' death, I felt my thoughts returning again and again to Clearchus, and to the terrible loss we had suffered by his treacherous assassination. I had not loved the man; he was incapable of giving love, and would have viewed receiving it as the worst of weaknesses. In fact, I hated him for his arrogance, his testiness, his complete inability to accept compromise and any philosophy other than "might makes right." Nevertheless, I had worshiped him in a way, as one does a harsh god, as a small boy does an overly severe father. I had thought the man to be practically immortal or indestructible, and I was unable to reconcile my mind's vision of Clearchus with the bruised, rotting head lying like a discarded cabbage in a sack in the dust.
In any land but Sparta he would have been crowned king, and have been remembered in history as one of the greatest and most brutal. But he was from Sparta, the only land in the world where such men are in surfeit, and he was Clearchus, the only man in the world more Spartan than even the Spartans, and therefore destined, perhaps, to a death more tragic than Sparta's itself. As unlikely as an encomium to such a man may be, Clearchus, no less than any other of the personages populating this halting record, deserves to be remembered for his accomplishments and excused for his shortcomings, even if belatedly by fifty years. His body was dead, but I prayed, for the sake of our very survival, that his spirit would remain with us some while longer, and settle on a man worthy of bearing it.
BOOK SEVEN
… from deep, chaotic beds of mortal sleep
The gods darkly revealed what erst had been,
and what is now, and what shall follow yet.
– EURIPIDES
CHAPTER ONE
WE SLEPT A restless sleep, each dreaming his own dreams, for dreams, like Muses or men, bear a superficial similarity to one another, but are never truly alike. It is as confounding to say, "I dreamed of a man," as to say, "I felt the sun." The first statement tells us nothing useful about the man, nor the second whether the sun was the benign orb that sustains our existence, or the harsh, killing fire that parches our throat and saps our strength if we attempt to defy it. A dream is the dreamer's alone, and no one can know its meaning without knowing the fears and aspirations of the dreamer. We shift from the dreamer to the dream, from the man to the Muses, seeking to reconcile the halves, to make them one, though dreams, by their very nature, are rarely consistent. Nor, for that matter, are men.
Some call dreams the ruminations and calculations of the unconscious mind, as the spirit assumes control over the intellect, unhampered by pain and the pleasure-seeking conceits of the mortal body. Others claim that dreams are direct messages from the gods, capable of being received only when both the body and the mind are lying dormant and vulnerable. A man takes his life into his hands each night in sleep, as he plunges unarmed and naked into a fast-flowing river of changing perspective, where not even the beating of his heart or the rhythm of his breath would be sufficient to sustain him if he were in his wakeful state. In sleep, the dead sometimes venture into his presence, to entice him to cross or to urge him back to his suffering and worldly condition. It is no accident that Hypnos, blessed god of Sleep, is joined by birth to a twin with whom he works in deep collusion-Hades the Winged One, God of Death.
It is strange that we think so little about sleep, even cursing it for diminishing the useful time available to us. Perhaps a certain humility is required to appreciate such a gift, a humbleness not native to the spirits of most men. When asleep, the philosopher and the traitor are scarcely different from each other, a king can hardly be distinguished from the beggar outside his door. Only the gods, who see of what things dreams are made, could tell the difference, if they cared to.
And who knows? To the extent that the deities are too preoccupied with their own petty squabbles to concern themselves with the daily lives of humans, to the extent that a man actually controls his own destiny, a man's mind, particularly his sleeping mind unburdened by physical weakness, is his god, and a dream the act and consequence of reasoning unbiased by material concerns. Whether sent from outside by the deities, or created from within by a man's own godlike spirit, a dream is a frightening thing to receive, its mandates not to be taken lightly.
Perhaps most frightening is to be sent a dream such as one has not received in years-since childhood perhaps, when the boundaries between one's physical and spiritual worlds are less solid, and dreams and their recollection more forthcoming-to be sent such a dream, and to not know what its mandate is. For such was the dream Xenophon received in his restless sleep the night after Clearchus' death, as he collapsed at my side before the fire. One would think that a dream so portentous and vivid would have been clear in meaning as well, yet to this day I cannot say whether it was an evil omen, or a sign of hope that the gods were watching and would guide us.
"I saw myself standing outside my father's house," he told me, "not at Erchia or Athens, but on a vast, treeless plain-alone-a plain covered in asphodel.