The symbol on her neck was one I had seen and trembled at many times, one that had haunted my dreams for nights on end, one I thought I had left behind me forever months before-the winged horse of Tissaphernes.
I was horrified, and shuddering, I stood up and backed away from her cot to the far wall, where I stood motionless, staring at the shriveled, miserable creature lying unconscious across from me. Coming to myself, I paced the room for hours, pounding my fist at the stone wall until the knuckles bled, bellowing my rage and defiance of the gods, willing myself, against all better judgment, to ignore what I had just seen, to remain constant toward Asteria as if she had not been so savagely defiled by the tiny mark, more polluted than she could ever have been by foul Antinous in the hut. The effort I made was supreme, perhaps more exhausting than any I had experienced on the entire march, for this was a battle within myself, against the very gods, and one that I fought bitterly in my mind and my soul until finally, utterly depleted, I collapsed on the floor and slept a sleep of death, but the sleep of a victor.
Hours later I awoke, and listened for Asteria's breathing, and was at peace. The trap of the gods had not defeated me, for unlike one that strikes at one's health or that threatens one's safety, this was a strike at the mind, and at my mind alone, one that I had in myself to accede to or to defeat. The gods force men to love those whom they should not, and to disrequite those whom they should. Answerable only to their own devices, which are unknowable to mortals, they let perish those who should live, and spare those who should perish. But this time the gods' comedic timing was off. The annoying satyr that had been dogging my tracks for weeks had made this one further cheap attempt to play the clown, but had flubbed his lines, fatally delaying his entrance until far beyond the point when the maximum impact could be felt. Rather than meriting a standing ovation from his fellow deities at the cleverness of his stage pranks, he elicited nothing more than a bored yawn. My state of mind was now such that I could think of no better vengeance on Tissaphernes than this. The classic elopement scene, the showdown between the enraged father and the grinning and triumphant son-in-law. The nasty, hairy-eared little demon who had been pursuing me made a quick exit from the stage in embarrassment, and did not return.
I buried her in the hills outside the town, in a hole scratched into the earth using my sword and bare hands. No marker or monument did I erect, for Asteria's very presence in this city was unknown to all but myself and the Rhodians, and I had no need of such a token. The only possession of hers I retained was a small, battered feather I withdrew from her matted hair just before winding the sheet about her body.
I lay on the ground beside the grave and slept, a deep, dreamless, exhausting sleep, devoid of vision or meaning. Waking in the middle of the night with my tongue dry and my head aching, I stood and walked numbly to the Greek camp, passing unchallenged past the guards to the hut which I knew Xenophon would be occupying, from the pennant flying above. Stumbling in, I found him at work, writing at a crude table by lamplight. He looked at me without surprise or reproach, his eyes bearing dark circles and his cheeks still gaunt from the harsh journey and the even harsher suffering he had experienced since his arrival. He nodded quietly in greeting and welcome, glanced to the cot in the room that had long lain empty, awaiting my return, and quietly went back to his work. It was many years before we ever spoke of Asteria or the events of those weeks, when I was not myself.
So long in my internal exile, it had never occurred to me that he too might be suffering, for his loss had been double, and I cannot think about it even now without a shudder of regret. Self-preoccupied as I was at the time, I did not realize until much later that this was the first time since Xenophon's birth that he and I had ever been apart.
BOOK TWELVE
Self-born, untaught, motherless, unshakeable,
Giving place to no name, many-named, dwelling in fire…
All-seeing ether…
– INSCRIPTION FROM A TEMPLE WALL IN LYCIA
IT WAS HIS eyes I first noticed: sightless, watery orbs clouded an opaque creamy color from the thick cataracts covering them. He was as blind as a worm, yet his sightless gaze bored through the passersby on the crowded street as he peered straight into my face.
Listening carefully, I could hear his strange song rising above the background din of the street. The lyrics were faint, hardly more than a mumble, a repetitive chanting under the breath, but their effect was immediate and terrible. Trembling, I shouldered my way across the dusty street and seized the tottering old man roughly by the arm.
"Where did you learn that? Who are you?" He stared at me as I hissed at him, his blank expression slowly creasing into a grin, and he began laughing, the laugh of the deranged or the desperate. I thought perhaps he didn't hear me, or couldn't understand, so I brought my face closer. "Who are you?" I pleaded again, slowly and deliberately. My fingers gripped his surprisingly firm bicep in a kind of desperation. Despite my harsh grasp, no wince passed across his face-merely a vague stare, of amusement perhaps, even of triumph, though the strength of any emotion he might have been feeling was not sufficient to halt his mindless chuckling. I despaired of an answer, and stood there trembling in frustration, one old man tormenting another on a noisy street corner in Sparta.
Again he began his rhythmic, mournful chant, swaying slightly in time to his mental chorus, his face turned toward me expectantly.
The words to his song, which had remained latent for decades in my memory, in a misty corner of Mnemosyne's regions to which I rarely traveled, now echoed and rolled through my mind once again, taking on thoughts and shapes and a life of their own. A faceless, black-haired young woman leaning over me as I rested on her lap, singing a song-a lullaby?-in a low voice, an exotic, primitive melody that was more a chant than a tune, and which over the years had lent itself to endless variations in my inner thoughts. The words themselves were unintelligible to me, a language I had never spoken and do not understand. It is not the familiar Doric of Syracuse, nor even the obscure Elymi or Sicani, for I have spoken with many Sicilian merchants and soldiers in my life, and none, during my discreet queries, recognized any of the words I attempted to parrot from the recollections of my infancy. A Phoenician map-maker I once asked told me the sounds were like those of his language, though he recognized none of the words. Is memory such an ephemeral thing that even my earliest and most sacred impression, that of my own mother, has been unrecognizably corrupted?
I loosened my grip on the old man's arm, and dropped a handful of obols into the small clay bowl he was carrying, probably more money than he had ever held at one time in his life. The insane cackling ceased immediately, and he wrenched his arm away from my clench with a strength that was astonishing for one seemingly so frail. It was only with great effort and much coaxing that I was able to soothe him from his mindless babbling and elicit from him anything approaching lucidity.
"My little song?" he asked, and as he bobbed his head and resumed his chuckling, I feared I had lost him completely. He recovered his concentration, however, as quickly as it had eluded him seconds before, and my heart began alternately stopping and racing as his attention ebbed and flowed. "Those words…" he rasped, "Those words mean nothing! Ha! Ha! A nonsense rhyme I learned from my grandfather in Syracuse a century ago, who learned it from his grandfather…" He began losing his focus again as this counting of the generations broke down into more hoarse laughter. I glimpsed in my mind the faint shadows of his forgotten ancestors and mine, ancient Sicilian warriors who had lived when the gods still walked the earth, and I saw them slowly recede back into the mists from which they had just been unexpectedly summoned. Like those very deities, who once could effortlessly cross the line of mortality, assuming human form or godlike essence at will, they were dead.