The men sweated and panted, pushing themselves to exhaustion, their eyes fixed only on the summit. One strapping fellow, his chest barrel-thick and his thighs as sturdy as stone pillars, began complaining in a voice that could be heard even over the grunting and swearing of his comrades. I looked closely at the soldier-he was clearly an athlete, or a former one, a man who should have been leading the charge rather than tailing behind and moaning. I was certain I had seen him before, but was unable to recognize him, with his face obscured behind the nasal and cheekplates of his battle helmet. I pointed the man out to Xenophon, and as we watched, he pulled up short and straightened his back, panting, his hand groping behind him in a frantic attempt to scratch his shoulder where the straps to his breast and back plates must have been rubbing him raw.
"Fucking officers!" he burst out in a fury to the men around him. "They ride their stinking horses, while we slog up this mountain in the dirt, lugging our gear like fucking slaves in the salt mines!"
The man continued to rant, but it was this insult that hit Xenophon like a slap in the face, and he turned beet red in fury-it was a look I had seen many times in the past, but mostly adorning the expressions of Spartan drill sergeants, and I had usually managed to avoid its being directed my way. He leaped off his horse without a word, tossing me the reins, raced over to the laggard and placed his face within inches of the enormous, raving brute.
"Get your ass back to camp and help out the laundry girls!" he shouted. He then grabbed the dumbfounded man's shield and began racing up the hill with it himself, no mean feat while wearing his stiff cavalry armor and continuing to bellow at the troops to urge them on. The other men whacked the soldier on the head and back with the flats of their swords as they passed, jeering and insulting him as he stood motionless and dumb. Finally, out of sheer shame, he put his head down and again charged up the hill, bellowing the paean to mighty Apollo, which was soon taken up by the rest of the climbers and the army on the plain below. Catching up, he swiped his shield back with a glare, and Xenophon, exhausted, caught the reins of his horse I threw him and struggled to remount in his armor.
The roaring of both armies below indicated it was a close race. Xenophon was forced back off his horse by the steepness of the pitch, and he struggled to tear off his unwieldy armor to continue the assault on foot. The men were climbing now hand over hand, loose rocks and gravel rolling down on the climbers below as they scrambled furiously upwards, sweating, swearing, struggling to hold onto their shields and swords. The lead climbers were only twenty-five feet from the summit, then ten feet, when I saw to my horror the flat-ridged crest of a bronze Persian helmet appear on the summit from the other side, and then another. The leading Greeks, engrossed in the effort of the climb, did not themselves notice this until the first half dozen of them had flopped in exhaustion on the topmost boulders-and there was a moment of pause as the exhausted climbers from both sides opened their eyes and noticed their mortal enemies facing them not six feet away.
Greeks and Persians struggled to their feet, uncertain whether to come to blows with each other or to peer down the opposite sides of the peak to see how many more of the enemy might be close at hand. The two Persian climbers had far outstripped their fellows in their race for the summit, while practically the entire body of Greeks, at Xenophon's desperate urging, had remained close together during the climb and were now poised to arrive at the summit as a body. As a result, the lead Greeks and Persians did not come to blows at all; for as soon as the Persians looked down both sides and compared the relative distances of the two attacking squads, they decided their best chance for safety was in yielding the summit to the Greeks. With a shout they leaped off their side onto the heads of their fellows below, who quickly turned and half ran, half slid down the steep incline. The cheers on the Persian side of the plain fell silent, while those on the Greek side rose to a deafening thunder. We took the summit without a single loss, and as Xenophon and the remaining hoplites struggled gasping to the top, we peered down on the Persian troops occupying the neighboring height overlooking the road to the north. They, in turn, had ceased their jeering and shooting at Chirisophus' forces below them, and were now standing still, staring up at us in consternation.
"Watch this," Xenophon said to the men with a grim smile. "Theo, wave the attack to Chirisophus."
I tore off my helmet and mounted it on the point of an eight-foot spear I seized from a hoplite standing nearby, and raising it high, pumped it up and down three times in the prearranged signal. A moment later, a tremendous roar lifted up from Chirisophus' troops far below, as they rushed to the foot of the slope and began climbing hand over hand toward the top of the near height; the Persians between our two bodies of men whirled back, startled, to face the onslaught.
Xenophon then bawled, "Attack!" and our hoplites, their eyes gleaming fiercely through the helmet slits and their teeth flashing wolfishly behind their visors, fairly leaped in their rush to descend upon the outnumbered mob of Persian forces below.
The Persians did not wait to see a preordained outcome fulfilled. Dropping their weapons and flailing their arms in terror, they practically rolled down the side of their now indefensible stronghold, in a panic to escape the murderously bellowing hoplites storming them from above and below. After a moment, Xenophon unexpectedly raised his hand in the signal to halt, and it was only with great difficulty that he was able to restrain the fired-up men.
"Let them go!" he shouted, laughing, as the terror-stricken Persians tumbled and fell over each other in the loose gravel of the mountainside in their haste to escape. "Even one broken ankle among us is not worth the sorry booty we might capture from them." The men grudgingly assented and clambered back down to Chirisophus' troops in a jubilant mood.
From that time on, we had no further engagement with Tissaphernes' main forces, although small Persian raiding parties occasionally cut down Hellenes if they strayed too far from the army in their plundering. The Persians sent outriders ahead to burn the rich Tigris villages and crops along our projected path, which we interpreted as a last-ditch sign of desperation on their part. Although it posed considerable hardship for our troops in finding sufficient provisions, we knew this would be only temporary-a native army cannot continue to burn its own country without soon meeting resistance from the people.
And of course we were right, for a few days later Tissaphernes gave up the attack completely, limiting his presence merely to a few isolated scouts who continued to dog us from a distance for a few weeks more as we moved beyond the king's sphere of control. When talking with Asteria that night, as I helped her draw water for the camp followers from a nearby stream, a look of shock passed across her face when I mentioned that we were unlikely to see Tissaphernes again. She stared at me questioningly for a moment, silently asking me once more if I would accept the proposition she had put to me earlier, and I slowly, but emphatically, shook my head no. She sighed, hoisted the heavy leather buckets up to her shoulders with the yoke, and trudged silently up to her camp, where I left her to return to my duties with Xenophon.
CHAPTER TWO
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, just at sunset, as the army's scouts were returning to camp for the evening, I was startled to see Nicolaus emerge from the trees limping painfully, a grimace on his face. His arm was draped over the shoulders of another Rhodian who supported him in his painstaking walk out of the forest, and his right foot was tightly wrapped in a filthy rag torn from his tattered tunic. Despite the swaddling, he left a trail of blood on the earth behind him as he moved.