I turned back to Asteria without a second glance at Antinous. She had pushed herself up onto her knees and crawled over to the far wall where she now huddled, her arms wrapped around herself, looking at me with eyes as horrified as those of the writhing creature across the floor. As I crouched and reached my hand out to her, she reflexively flinched, as if afraid of me as well, then immediately came to herself, and burying her face in her hands began sobbing frantically.
"He… he was waiting for me when I entered the hut… caught me by surprise, he said he would kill me if I didn't do it…"
I let her sobs run their course for a moment, while the bleeding Antinous rolled and grimaced, all the while staring at us with his face contorted in fury.
Suddenly Asteria's shuddered convulsions stopped, and she was silent for a second, before slowly turning her face to look straight at the man who only moments before had held her life in his hands. She stared silently, as if considering his fate, before whispering to me, in a low, constricted voice, "He will survive."
I must have muttered some comforting platitude to her, about his having learned a hard lesson, but she stopped me with a finger on my lips. I then understood her meaning, and my blood ran cold. Asteria continued to stare at me, and I realized from the silence that Antinous, too, was now lying still, quivering like a freshly caught hare, watching me intently through the penumbra.
My heart sank as I realized what had to be done, and Asteria slowly stood, keeping her eyes fixed on me the whole while as if willing her strength into my backbone. Antinous began muttering at me as I approached him.
"You killed my brother," he grunted, "and now you've destroyed my offspring as well. Have you not taken enough from me?"
I paused for a moment and stared at him, searching his face, but his eyes glared back at me in hate, without a glimmer of remorse. Without further hesitation, I stuffed his filthy loincloth into his mouth and lifted him roughly by the hair. Shoving his dead weight through the low door into the snow outside, I followed immediately behind and then half dragged, half carried him to the dark copse several hundred feet behind the low outbuilding, where I dropped him onto the frozen crust of snow. Antinous lay on his belly, motionless and panting, a dark stain radiating out from his pelvis. As I stepped over his back with one foot to straddle him from behind, my mind flooded with memories, and I wondered that this pathetic creature was the same man who had forced Aedon into such a position years ago in his sadistic training regimen. "You'll live," he had said then, though I would not offer him now this same meager assurance. As I grasped his hair to jerk his head back and expose his pulsing throat, he gave a deep, wrenching shudder. I saw a reflection in his eyes, the disembodied head and shoulders of a man I did not recognize, and I paused for a moment to consider whether this truly was part of the gods' plan.
Antinous held his breath, waiting in agony, as I stared down at him; and then almost against my will, I released my grip on his hair. His head flopped back down onto the crusted snow and I heard him heave a great, convulsive breath. I did not wait to see what he would do next; I felt drained and empty, incapable of even wondering whether he would live or die. I trudged slowly to the hut, without looking back.
The agony of hate, the agony of love. This time there was no separation of the elements.
CHAPTER THREE
THE TROOPS' MORALE had dropped like a stone. Thus far we had spent over a week in these villages, accomplishing nothing but losing huge numbers of our men and animals to the bitter weather, exhausting our able-bodied troops by relentless forays into the mountains to attack local fighters who seemed to melt into the woods. Xenophon made endless rounds among the huts at night, dispensing what cheer he himself was able to muster, rewarding those who themselves took responsibility for furthering the march, and setting a strenuous example by working harder than the lowest battle squire. The man was exhausted, and I worried constantly for his sanity; yet still he pushed on.
The army finally marched, a forced effort beginning in the predawn darkness, in a final race to prevent the enemy from collecting themselves and occupying the narrows north of us. This time, upon our departure Xenophon looked at me with a more confident, or perhaps resigned, expression.
"You're more at peace with your decision to march this time," I noted. He looked at me curiously.
"I'm always at peace with the orders I give. I don't always know the results, and that's what worries me."
"Last time we were turned back by the snow," I said. "What makes you so confident of the outcome this time?"
I need not have asked, however, for the acrid stench of the black smoke, and the surprised shouts of the men outside our hut gave me all the answer I needed.
"I've ordered the villages torched," he said, "both in retribution for Tiribazus' treachery, and to eliminate any temptation we might have to return once more."
That night we reached the heights from which the barbarians had meant to attack us, and were able to pass through without a struggle. In their ignorance, Tiribazus' troops failed to realize that had they occupied the impregnable position instead of us, it would have meant the destruction of the entire Hellenic army in the frozen snows below.
We continued on, six miserable days to the upper Tigris, so different from its warm, placid offspring downstream, and then another six over a wretched, windswept plain, across which a north wind whipped mercilessly, blowing directly into our eyes and burning us as if by the rays of the sun, leaving our exposed skin dry, parched, and cracking. Xenophon's face, as well as those of Chirisophus and the others, had become faces I no longer recognized, all of them melding into one, with fierce, staring eyes, sunken cheeks and ragged, infested beards that erased all traces of personal features that had once been the marks of their humanity, blurring their individual identities and reducing them to a mere species. We forgot everything but the need to keep constantly moving, to take one more step forward, and because each day was so like the day before, each gray night so like each drab day, time no longer mattered. We communicated in grunts or gestures. True speech took too much effort.
The snow had no structure, no bottom. Men sank into it to their waists or their chests, causing us to lose countless animals and supplies and dozens of soldiers, many of whom simply vanished from sight forever, falling on their faces and disappearing in their exhaustion, unable to rise again. Even the most able-bodied were faint with hunger and cold, and Xenophon realized that part of the problem stemmed not from frozen feet but from empty stomachs. He personally made the rounds of the army, scavenging stores and supplies and sending the strongest runners back along the trail and out on either side. He sought those who had fallen and given themselves up to die, forcing them to eat a bit, even stale bread or raw horseflesh unfit for maggots, and urging them, sometimes at the cost of blows to the face, to rise and stagger on. I saw him pull a tattered Rhodian boy from the snow, slapping his face and shaking him like a rag doll until the youth finally shouted in protest and choked down some cold oats soaked in milk which in better times would have been used as fodder for the asses. Xenophon watched him closely until he saw him begin lurching along toward the rest of the wraithlike troops, and then he moved on to the next dark patch he saw lying forlornly in the snow under a thin cloak, to begin the process over again. I didn't have the heart to tell him that as soon as he was out of sight, the Rhodian boy again lay down in the snow while the troops passed silently by. If a man was going to die in any case, this was the easiest and most painless way. He just lay down and waited, doing nothing, patient as the Fates, until sweet death came in the form of a gentle, frozen sleep, and his heart simply slowed down and stopped. To men bearing excruciating pain, hunger, and exhaustion, the notion of such a respite from suffering, such an easy welcome into the gods' embrace, was a seductive siren song impossible to resist.