"Nicolaus, what happened?" I exclaimed, sprinting up and relieving his exhausted comrade of the burden. The loss of any of the Rhodians, whether to death or injury, would be a considerable blow to the army, but Nicolaus in particular, who was developing into a tactician of no mean skill and a valuable advisor to Xenophon, was to be protected at all costs. "Has there been an attack?"
Nicolaus grimaced again and rolled his eyes. "Only on me, for my own stupidity. I walked too close to a badger hole, and the fucker must have been waiting for me. He tore into my foot like a slab of raw meat, and locked his jaws on me. I had to club him to death with a stick, and then use another stick to pry his jaws. He took a chunk off my foot." Nicolaus' comrade proudly pulled the dead creature from a cloth bag slung over his shoulder, its head flattened and pulpy. It was the largest I had ever seen, the weight of a kid goat, with a row of evil, pointed teeth on its lower jaw that protruded around the bared lip in a hideous grin, still stained with Nicolaus' blood. "Can you help me into camp?" Nicolaus asked.
I could not yet tell how serious the injury might be, but any animal bite was notoriously prone to life-threatening fever, and if the badger had been rabid as well-best not to think about the consequences for now.
After draping his thin body carefully over my shoulders and carrying him to the Rhodians' campsite, I raced off to fetch Asteria, who had accumulated a large stash of medical supplies. I found her outside her tent, on her elbows and knees, her face almost touching the ground. She was struggling with the unaccustomed task of blowing on glowing embers to ignite a clumsily stacked pile of unseasoned branches she had gathered. I squatted beside her and spoke her name, startling her. She jumped and looked up, and then with a sheepish expression pushed herself up to a more dignified kneeling position, wiping stray strands of hair from her perspiring face. As she did so, she left a long, sooty finger-smudge across one cheek.
"Asteria, I need help with an injured man," I said. "Bring your medical supplies."
Returning with her to the Rhodians' camp a few minutes later, I pointed out the injured boy, while Nicolaus' comrades stood in awkward and deferential silence, unaccustomed to the presence of a woman in their midst.
Asteria did not shrink from the blood-soaked wrapping, but quickly and efficiently exposed the foot, calling for more light as she did so. As someone trained the glare from a torch directly on it, she muttered softly under her breath. "This is beyond my experience," she finally said. "Clean arrow wounds, broken bones, fevers I have handled, but this-" and she looked almost sadly down at Nicolaus' foot. I bent down myself to have a closer view, and sucked in my breath in dismay.
The limb had already swelled to twice its normal size, engulfing the toes, which emerged from the bulbous foot like tiny, newly sprouted buds on a tuber. Much of the skin had been torn off or hung in shreds, as if flayed with a dull knife, and a large piece of the inner heel was missing, just below the ankle, where I guessed the furious creature had clamped down in his final death throes. The foot was riddled with deep puncture marks where the beast had chewed and gnawed, seeking purchase-some had penetrated down to the bone.
Asteria gently palpated the instep, toes and ankle while Nicolaus writhed and moaned in pain, two of his colleagues pressing his shoulders flat to the ground and muttering reassurance to him.
"I don't think anything is broken," she said finally. "That is fortunate. The foot is a complicated limb and rarely heals properly after being set. I'm worried about this bite, though, and the punctures. This type of injury is ripe for gangrene. Once that sets in, the whole foot is lost-possibly even more."
Of this I was only too aware, for the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh which is symptomatic of this disease was a familiar one in the Greek camp.
Asteria hesitated, staring at the foot, before getting up and strolling impassively over to the nearest campfire, deep in thought. She knelt beside it, poking gently in the embers, pondering her next course of action. After a moment she stood up again, having apparently made a decision, and returned, her eyes avoiding Nicolaus' sweating, inquiring face.
"Sit on his knee, Theo," she commanded in a low voice, "and hold his shin tight. Don't let his foot move." I jumped to the task, eager for something useful to do, and no sooner had I seized the bony shin and calf than she withdrew from behind her back the knife she was holding, which she had brought to a pulsing, red-hot glow in the coals. Kneeling quickly, she pressed the flat of the glowing blade hard against the enormous bite in the flesh of the foot, eliciting a loud sizzling sound from the steaming wound, as of fat dripping from a roasting flank into the fire. The sharp, acrid stench of burning flesh assaulted my nostrils as fiercely as it had when the flaming naphtha had seared the attacking Persians at Cunaxa.
For a moment Nicolaus was silent, perhaps in shock, or during that brief, merciful delay between the touch of burning metal to one's skin and the blinding white explosion of pain that bursts in one's head. Then he erupted into a desperate, sustained howl, a cry of rage and pain that shocked and silenced the rest of the camp, as men for hundreds of yards around stopped what they were doing to listen. His scream died down to a gasping choke as his lungs became depleted, but resumed again as Asteria turned the blade over to the other, still red-hot side and again pressed its sizzling flatness into the now crispened wound. The bleeding ceased almost immediately, and was now reduced to a quiet, insignificant oozing. She gazed at her handiwork in satisfaction. "Almost done, now," she whispered to Nicolaus soothingly, though whatever comfort he may have derived from these words was blotted out when he saw her step back to the fire to plunge her blade again into the coals.
Returning a moment later, she this time gently inserted the red-hot tip into each puncture wound, rotating the searing blade slowly to cauterize all sides of the holes. Nicolaus was passing in and out of consciousness from the excruciating pain, and when lucid, he was reduced to a despairing, breathless whimper.
The ghastly treatment was over as quickly as it had begun, though not soon enough for those of us watching in horrified fascination. Removing a long needle and a length of gut from her kit, she quickly and efficiently sutured the flaps of skin she found hanging freely from around the ankle and instep, and then rummaging again through her bag, found a small ceramic jar sealed with a piece of oiled fabric tied tightly around the top. Opening this up, she dipped in her fingers and swabbed Nicolaus' entire foot, both inside the wounds and out, with a greasy, foul-smelling balm that appeared to give the ashen-faced boy some relief. She then wrapped the entire limb in clean gauze up to the knee, tied it off tightly, and stood up, wiping her hands dry on her hips.
"Theo," she said, in a low voice of authority, "find him some uncut wine to help him sleep. I'll check on him in the morning and change the dressing. If we can stave off fever for three days he'll recover without loss."
I rushed off to take some wine from Xenophon's private store, which he used for libations during the sacrifices, and returned to find Asteria chatting quietly with several of the Rhodian boys, each of whom was asking her about their own wounds and ailments. Asteria patiently answered their queries as best she could, but I could see from her face that she was drained and exhausted, and I gently led her away from the grateful slingers, and sleeping Nicolaus.
Walking quietly back to the camp followers' quarters, we paused near a high hedge to rest. I was deeply impressed with her work on Nicolaus, and told her as much, but she wearily waved off my compliments.