I broke ranks without informing a soul, and entered the first miserable inn I encountered, kicking in doors with my feet until I found a room with a vacant cot, where I deposited Asteria's body before turning to arrange settlement with the astonished innkeeper. I had no money, not an obol to my name, so I left my battered and still blood-begrimed shield and helmet as surety, gave instructions that I was not to be disturbed except for a simple meal once a day, and entered the room with Asteria, closing the door behind me on the innkeeper and on the army, on Xenophon and on the man I was up to that day.
I am no physician, certainly no Hippocrates, and I doubt that any but midwives and witches would have been available in that wretched town in any case. To tell the truth, I was more concerned with finding an undertaker than a physician, though often in such places the same august personage would fill one and the same role, conflict of interest notwithstanding. The army surgeons I had seen among our troops and even in Athens invariably had but one remedy for hemorrhage: further bleeding. If the woman survived that, she would survive her illness; if not, then so it was ordained by the gods. The Hippocratians would put on an impressive show, to be sure, taking samples of the patient's vomit, blood, tears, snot, uterine fluid, sweat, urine, runoff from festering wounds, ear wax, and any other bodily emissions they could extract, then analyze them by tasting them, or if the patient were cogent, having her taste them herself. But I would have no such indignities performed on Asteria. I would care for her my way.
During one of the long evenings, as I sat silently on the edge of her cot watching her fitful and feverish sleep, I fetched a bowl of cool water and proceeded to sponge the perspiration off her body, trying despite the filth of our surroundings to keep her in some semblance of cleanliness. I absentmindedly murmured her name, "Asteria," more to myself than in any hope she might answer me. The word passed through the long, vast wilderness of her consciousness, enveloped in darkness and inhabited by shades, meandering through the lonely byways of her mind and lingering for eons, it seemed, before finally reaching its destination; whereupon it slowly elicited a response, which traversed the tortuous path back through the shades to the outside as the mists slowly dissipated and her tongue moved laboriously, her eyes still closed: "Theo." The word was spoken so softly it startled me, and I wasn't even sure I had heard it, for her expression had not changed, nor had her eyelashes even fluttered. I had almost resigned her whisper to a figment of my imagination, perhaps a truer assessment of my existence than I had ever realized, when she spoke again, with an infinite effort: "Forgive me."
I looked up and saw her struggling to speak, gasping silently, her lips and tongue working thickly. Some inner surge of energy had welled up within her, and she would not be put down. Her lids lifted half open, and she looked at me strangely, feverishly, with glassy eyes that alternated from steely gray to pale blue as my flickering light reflected off them, only to become suddenly very dark, the color of the ocean depths or of the grave, if touched by even so much as a hint of shadow.
"Theo," she struggled. "You loved Proxenus as a brother, as you love Xenophon." I nodded silently, my astonishment at hearing her speak tempered by the fear that it was some awful disclosure that was prodding her to do so. I begged her to be silent, to rest.
"I'm sorry, Theo," she gasped again, and then lay panting, her eyes closed, struggling to regain her breath and her calm. I did not interrupt her effort, except to tighten my grasp on her racing pulse, and to pad away the beads of perspiration that had sprung out on her forehead in her feverish striving.
"Asteria," I said finally, "you have nothing to be sorry for. Proxenus was a soldier, he died as a soldier, and he is with the gods."
At this her eyes fluttered wide open, and her expression was absorbed by an inexpressible sadness and torment. "I-I killed him," she said, looking straight into my eyes, and then repeated it over and over, in a voice drained of strength and emotion, fading away from me again. "I killed him."
Oddly, I felt a relief at this, knowing full well that she had done nothing of the sort and that she was merely being taunted by a grotesque dream, some savagery of the gods who were not satisfied with torturing her body, but sought to torment her mind as well.
"Asteria, sleep. You killed no one, it is only a dream." She was still agitated and shaking, still trying to say something, which I knew would be only further hallucination. I sought to dissuade this useless expenditure of her depleted strength by repeating the calming words. "You did not kill Proxenus. Tissaphernes did. You are innocent."
At this she gasped and nearly sat up in her frustration at being unable to make me understand, and her desperation to speak. "You foolish man!" she blurted, in a voice rasping and whispery, her face contoured with pain. "I am Tissaphernes!" Thus having spoken she collapsed back down onto her flat, sodden pillow, panting and wretched. I sat wide-eyed, astonished at the strength of her outburst, but at length I resumed my calming litany of platitudes, and was finally rewarded to see her shallow breathing return to normal, and her tensed limbs begin to relax.
She looked up at me once more, her face bearing an expression of profound sadness. Her lips worked silently, and I thought she might again try to give voice to words better left unsaid and unpondered, but then, slowly closing her lids, she reentered the land of shades and dreams which she had inhabited for so many days. Dreams, those torments, desires, false and true portents-that larval, ghostly world inhabited by an even greater abundance of jeering, irrational beings than may be found in our waking existence. She disintegrated as if descending down an ever darkening well, each level more constricting than the last. I was beyond her now, she was fighting her own battle, entirely alone with her little life and the memories of her meager sins, and even when sleeping she occasionally wept hot tears because both her years and her memories were quickly departing.
Later that night, I carefully rolled her into a fetal position in an attempt to relieve the unremitting fire in her belly. I then gently stroked her neck and back hairline, that soft, magical place on a woman's body where the smooth curve of her nape becomes as downy as a child's and then transforms into the line of soft, feathery wisps along the curved edge of her locks, those tiny hairs that defy all attempts at taming, even when the rest of the woman's hair is subject to the most elaborate binding. Wondrous little cilia they are, which when backlit by a lamp, shine and glow like a sort of aurora, undying remnants from the woman's childhood, as visible and as beautiful and as unmanageable on the richest Persian queen as on the poorest peasant maiden, the first hairs to appear as an infant, guardians of her sweet, female scent her entire life, the last wisps to remain on her head in her feeble dotage, defying time and space. I lingered there with the cool sponge, emptying my mind and thinking of nothing as she sighed and murmured in her sleep.
I had just leaned down to lift her back to the center of the cot when I noticed a small mark or spot, just at her back hairline. I had never noticed it before, for prior to her illness I had never seen Asteria's body in daylight, and before that, when Cyrus was still alive, her neck had never been exposed due to her long hair. Bringing the oil lamp closer and bending down slowly, I could make out the faded outlines of the traditional infant tattoo she had been given after her birth in Sardis, to identify her father and family origins in the event of a disaster. I peered at it carefully, trying to make out the faint lines and distinguish between shadow and ink, when suddenly I caught my breath and sat up as if stung by a scorpion, jostling her roughly and causing her to moan in her sleep.