Chirisophus' Spartans finally arrived and were able, with difficulty, to put a stop to the carnage, but not before terrible damage had been done. Of the several thousand human beings huddled in terror on the boulder just minutes before, hardly a hundred remained. Our troops wandered the smooth, icy surface of the mountaintop in an agony of remorse that they had been the cause of this tragedy. The only sounds were the whimpering of the few children who had escaped the carnage, their mothers' arms being simply too full with their other babies, and the bleating and mewing of hundreds of head of cattle, asses, and sheep that had been left behind. My stricken mind could not even comprehend the emotions of the Taochian defenders watching on the ridge top, those silent men whose families were all dead by a meaningless suicide. We had no way of contacting them. Xenophon ordered all the local prisoners to be released, hoping they would make their way to the defenders in the hills, and tell them that the few children left alive would be taken to the nearest village and deposited with the residents there, with a full store of provisions.
That night, the entire army camped silently in grief for wives and children not even theirs, in the small enclosure of the flat mountain top. When I stole away from my duties to seek out Asteria, I had difficulty finding her. After searching for a time among the Rhodians' camp, I finally asked Nicolaus discreetly if he had an idea as to her whereabouts, and he pointed me in the direction of the cliff face behind the camp.
I soon found her, wedged into a dark gap between two large boulders, overlooking the site where the Taochian women had dashed themselves and their children onto the rocks. The sides and bottom of the cliff were now lit by flickering shadows cast by the enormous funeral pyre built below by the Cretan mountaineers whom Xenophon had assigned to collecting and burning the bodies and arranging for an appropriate marking. Asteria looked drawn, and acted nervous and uncommunicative.
"I brought you something," I said, trying to inject a note of consolation into my voice. I paused, waiting for a reaction that did not come, and unable to think what else to say I unwrapped from an oilcloth rag a bit of stale bread dipped in honey, which had been one of her favorite treats on the march. What simple things now satisfied her, after the rich existence she had once lived.
Asteria winced when she saw the food, and turning suddenly I heard her retch into a small cavity in the rock behind her, gasping for breath when she was done and then slowly turning around again to face me. From the close smell I noticed when I sat beside her, I realized she had been in here for some time.
She looked at me in a way that reflected, if not outright dislike, something only slightly more than indifference and far less than I had expected. She quickly composed her features into an expressionless mask, but the barren glance I had seen in that instant before she did so had said everything. I sat in silence, gazing out into the darkness.
"I'm not well, Theo," she finally murmured. "My belly is churning. Female problems." She cringed involuntarily when my shoulder brushed against hers, as if her skin had become overly sensitive, as after a severe sunburn.
I wrapped the bread and offered to bring her something more soothing. "Soup? The Rhodians have just killed a goat and are boiling it up…"
Asteria blanched and turned her head away. Again I remained silent, wondering what words I should use, then finally decided to simply unburden myself, for with her I had said everything, and had nothing left to hide.
"Asteria, I've accepted your services to the Rhodians. I've acknowledged your skills. I've violated my duty to the army for you, destroyed a fellow Greek for you. Yet still you shrink from me-are you truly so burdened by this betrayal of your father? I need to understand."
She paused for a long time, and I struggled to see her eyes and face in the growing shadows cast by the rocks in which she sat. Her voice came from far away, so softly I had to lean forward to hear, and she spoke almost without moving her dry, cracked lips.
"I'm far beyond concerns of my father. I mortally betrayed him and could never return to him. He knows what I've done, he's cursed me, and he's punished me by proxy, through the deaths of those close to me."
"Who? How do you know these things if he is not here? How can he even know of such a betrayal, or you of his punishment?"
"You cannot see the distant sniper in the dark, yet you feel his silent intent when the arrow buries itself in your throat. You cannot see the plague, yet you witness men swelling and turning black. So it is with my father."
I peered at her again in puzzlement. Still unable to make out her expression, I extended my hand to touch her face, thinking perhaps she herself was suffering from a fever, wondering at the changes I had seen in her recently. She shook my hand off in irritation with a brief wince as if from some deep pain.
"Theo, I don't expect you to understand-but I must be alone right now, rather than in the company of… men. I'll be fine for the march tomorrow."
I nodded. How can anyone know what passes in the hearts of women? They are more fickle even than the gods. Though Zeus is lord of Olympus, who is it that rules his actions, if not Hera and her rivals? As I began picking my way back down the path to the encampment, I turned back once more to look at her. She had already returned to her own thoughts, pushed me far from her mind, as if my feeble attempt at reconciliation had never taken place. I was struck by the fragility of her thin, bare legs extended in front of her without so much as a blanket for warmth, by the vulnerability of her defeated posture, in sharp contrast to the shorn hair and rough tunic of a Rhodian slinger.
In the light of the pyre, I saw in her face an ineffable sadness, even a longing, as she gazed down at the burial party tending to the dead mothers and babies below the cliff, and I watched as with tense and tormented fingers she clutched at her own burning belly.
BOOK ELEVEN
For two urns stand upon the floor of Zeus's palace
Which hold his gifts to us, the one filled with evils, the other blessings.
When Zeus Lord of Thunder mixes his gifts between the two,
A man meets now with good fortune, now with ill.
But when Zeus bestows gifts from the jar of sorrow only,
That man becomes a pariah-cruel famine and madness
Pursue him to the ends of the earth,
And he wanders without aim, damned by gods and men alike.
– HOMER
CHAPTER ONE
BLIND HABIT WAS the only reason we were able to continue moving day after day, the only explanation for being able to endure and even ignore horrors which, in earlier times, would have thrown us into despair. Ignore, yes-but not forget. We forgot nothing. So long as we kept moving, surrendering ourselves to habit, we could push our wretchedness and the constant presence of death and disease to the backs of our minds. Fear can be endured if it is blunted and beaten into the dull form of a habit. But if we ever allow it to emerge, to take the keen edge of its true form, it will kill us as surely as a Scythian blade. The army had fought its way step by step through hostile territory for almost five months since Cyrus' death at Cunaxa, and by now we had settled into a routine, though one of resignation rather than inclination. Morale had stabilized at a sullen, resentful but dutiful level. Each day the men simply trudged in silence, pushing from their mind all thoughts but that of surviving to the end of the day, stepping up their pace and lifting their sight only when necessary to defend themselves against attack, an almost daily occurrence. Finally, however, the weather began to break, with whole hours, then days on end when the weak sun strengthened sufficiently to begin melting the snow, and the icicles glittering on the stunted trees dropped their essence lazily, almost reluctantly, into slushy pools below. The wind, though still biting as it whipped through the narrow defiles and mountain passes, now carried a subtle scent of new vegetation, and of clean moisture rather than of sterile, frozen death. Descending out of the mountains we marched a hundred and fifty miles in a week, contending each step of the way with the Chalybians, a vicious tribe that was prepared, even eager, for hand-to-hand combat against our emaciated forces. The tribesmen wore linen corselets reaching to the groin, as well as greaves and stout helmets, unlike any of the other tribes we had seen. They carried enormous spears, and in their belt long daggers like the Spartans. We lost dozens of men to their lightning-swift raids and attacks before at last we were able to repel them in one of the many battles which have now become too tiresome for me to recount.