Leaving the body of a fallen comrade on the field of battle is a grievous sin. Chirisophus, who was in as vile a mood as Xenophon and prepared to give as much as he had taken, suddenly became very sober. "Look at the mountains there, General," he said to Xenophon with a sweep of his hand, only a slight note of sarcasm tingeing his voice. "They're impassable. The Kurds have blocked up the routes tighter than a Scythian's asshole. There's only one way up, the steep trail you see ahead of you, and I was trying to occupy the pass before that mob up there seized it. The guides I've captured say there's no other way through."
Xenophon gazed thoughtfully up the mountain where several hundred Kurds were visible, busily rolling boulders and logs to the edge of the path, preparing to defend the route. They were undisciplined, lacking in order and coordination, and even their hastily arranged boulder defenses were scattered and slipshod. Still-there were so many, and their position was very strong. There was no doubt that we could take them and force our way through the pass-but at what cost, and to what end? How many more identical passes with identical defenses would we have to force our way through? Every man lost here would make it that much more difficult to break through the next roadblock, and the next, until the Kurds finally wore us out or starved us by sheer, mule-headed persistence.
The troops were becoming impatient, to either halt for the day or resume the march to a safer location. A blackness almost of night had descended, though it was only mid-afternoon, and the freezing rain had begun to fall in torrents, churning the road into a slurry of mud, chilling us to the bone. Xenophon turned to me.
"Theo, bring up the two prisoners we captured today and tie them to stakes for interrogation."
I did not like the expression in his eye or the tone in his voice, and I balked at fulfilling his request.
"Xenophon, this isn't necessary. Chirisophus' guides have already given us the information you need…"
He cut me off. "I believe I gave you an order," he said, his voice low and menacing, his eyes glaring at me, bloodshot from lack of sleep.
I stared at him in surprise, then hastened to comply and bound the prisoners securely to two adjacent stakes. The first of the men, a small, wiry, wizened fellow with a hard look about his eyes, confirmed the earlier account, swearing that there was no route other than the one before us. His half smile showed that he relished our army's making the attempt to assault the pass, and this infuriated Xenophon. Infuriated-perhaps this is not the best choice of words. The effect on him was more of a transformation, even an aging, as a hard look came into his eyes which I had never before seen on him, a look that bespoke his father, perhaps, or one of the Spartan infantrymen surrounding him, but not Xenophon. Xenophon, taught by Socrates to revere the sanctity of human life, and who, unlike the Spartans, loved war for its intellectual challenge, for its pitting of opposing minds, for the development of strategy; Xenophon, who though never shirking his duty, though unexcelled in wielding a spear and a shield, would never willingly seek out bloodshed for the pleasure of it-this Xenophon was changing before my eyes, becoming someone I had not known before, yet whom I always had. Of course he was changing-the transformation had occurred long before now, the night of his dream, the night he was acclaimed general. Qualities that had lain dormant in him, inherited qualities of leadership and command, coursing quietly through his blood, had risen to the surface that night, qualities of which I had always seen glimmers, tiny, latent specks of genius glowing like flakes of gold in a pan among the mud and gravel. I watched in wonder as they emerged and developed, creating a purposeful man, one who was hard and even godlike, from a man-boy who until now had been wandering vaguely through life.
But such qualities had a darker, more sinister side of which I was not aware, a ruthless side, a desperation that caught me off guard. I had seen it rise to the surface with increasing frequency-in his reaction to my questioning glance after losing Asteria the day before, in the fury on his face when he confronted Chirisophus about not halting to assist the rearguard. Now I saw his rage explode into a physical brutality that astounded me and left me more doubtful of his sanity, and of the fate of the army, than I had ever been before.
He inquired of the prisoner again where there might be alternate roads that could take us around or behind the pass, and this time the prisoner merely jeered at him, jabbering rapid-fire words in his barbarian tongue and broken Persian, which our interpreter refused to even render into Greek for fear of offending Xenophon further.
Trembling with rage, Xenophon placed his face directly into that of the prisoner, screaming at him to tell us the route, losing control of his emotions and his body. The troops nearby fell silent, embarrassed at their commander's loss of discretion, pretending to look the other way. The prisoner smiled coolly and tossed off a wisecrack to his compatriot tied to the stake nearby. Xenophon was rabid. Reaching out and seizing a shield from the nearest soldier, he brutally slammed the rolled bronze edge of the disk hard into the side of the man's face, knocking his head back into the post behind him. The man's smirk was instantly replaced by a mass of blood, his nose flattened against one cheek, and he howled in rage and pain, spitting bits of tongue flesh and shattered teeth out of his mouth until he could scarcely breathe, while Xenophon stepped back a pace and coolly watched the gore sheeting the man's face and dripping into a pool of black mud on the ground. Chirisophus stood nearby, gazing impassively and expressionless as the prisoner vented his rage.
After a moment, Xenophon shoved the interpreter away and then thrust his face back into the prisoner's, wordlessly, simply staring at him. I realized then that the man had become stone quiet, staring straight back into Xenophon's eyes, this time with all trace of contempt erased from his expression, his gaze filled only with malice and fear. The rain poured down on us, on those who were bloodied and those who were sound, making no distinction as to whom it might wash clean and whom it might bespatter with filth, and as I looked down at Xenophon's cloak, I saw that he had drawn his short xiphos sword, and that the tip was resting lightly against the man's belly just below his navel. I tried to call out but I was frozen, unable to move, the words sticking immutably to my tongue like a wad of flax to pine-pitch. I felt a thundering in my ears, the deafening chorus of Syracusan chanting I had so often dreaded, drowning out even the roaring of the torrential rain, and the outside world seemed to become silent and to move unutterably slowly.
Xenophon-you asked the prisoner your question one more time, slowly and deliberately, so quietly that only he could hear your words, though your language was unknown to him. To me all was silence, overpowered by the hellish roaring in my ears. I saw the man stare at you in complete understanding, despite the interpreter's absence, for this struggle of wills was no longer slave to the use of mere speech as a medium but had reverted to something much more primitive, more reptilian in nature, something more base and primeval than I had ever thought you capable of. The medium of communication between you and the man was fear and pain and hate, and in that language you understood each other perfectly. For after considering his options and the fate awaiting him, the man gave you another half smile, as best as he could through his split and bleeding lips, and then closing his eyes he slowly, barely perceptibly, shook his head no, and your fiendish knife did the work for which it had been created, for which it had been manufactured years before by the hairy, burn-scarred hands of a helot blacksmith in a sweltering Spartan foundry. The man's face wrenched in pain and he writhed like a live fish on a skewer, and as I watched, his eyes clouded over and he slumped against his ropes, his vacant orbs still staring at your feet.