The Ten Thousand

by Michael Curtis Ford

  The Rhodian looked at him quizzically, then his eyes narrowed in resentment. Like all his countrymen, he was sensitive about his youth and small stature, and resisted every attempt to favor him with lighter duties.

  "Why, Xenophon? I'll take down three Persians with my sling for every one your Spartans trample."

  Xenophon grinned at the boy's spirit. "It's not that-I need someone I trust to wait here for Lycius and explain the situation to him. I don't want him to receive all his news from Chirisophus."

  Nicolaus nodded warily at this, and Xenophon wheeled his horse to gallop off after the troops, who by now had already started their ascent.

  As soon as the Persians on the lower hill noticed the squad circling behind them and aiming for the unoccupied heights, they too detached a squad of several hundred men, who began racing for the same position. A silence fell over both armies. Although neither of the attacking squads could see the other one climbing the opposite side of the hill, both armies down on the plain could see the entire race. A cheer was suddenly loosed from the Greeks down below, followed a second later by an echoing cheer from the Persian camp, as the Greeks lapsed back into silence. Like a race in the Olympic games with every spectator in the stadium urging on his own countrymen, the troops roared their encouragement to their fellows on the hill.

  Xenophon rode back and forth on his struggling horse among the panting Hellenes in the climbing squad, waving his sword and shouting until his voice was raw. "Move, you bastards, move! The Persians are attacking on the other side! This is a race for Greece!"

  The men sweated and panted, pushing themselves to exhaustion, their eyes fixed only on the summit. One strapping fellow, his chest barrel-thick and his thighs as sturdy as stone pillars, began complaining in a voice that could be heard even over the grunting and swearing of his comrades. I looked closely at the soldier-he was clearly an athlete, or a former one, a man who should have been leading the charge rather than tailing behind and moaning. I was certain I had seen him before, but was unable to recognize him, with his face obscured behind the nasal and cheekplates of his battle helmet. I pointed the man out to Xenophon, and as we watched, he pulled up short and straightened his back, panting, his hand groping behind him in a frantic attempt to scratch his shoulder where the straps to his breast and back plates must have been rubbing him raw.

  "Fucking officers!" he burst out in a fury to the men around him. "They ride their stinking horses, while we slog up this mountain in the dirt, lugging our gear like fucking slaves in the salt mines!"

  The man continued to rant, but it was this insult that hit Xenophon like a slap in the face, and he turned beet red in fury-it was a look I had seen many times in the past, but mostly adorning the expressions of Spartan drill sergeants, and I had usually managed to avoid its being directed my way. He leaped off his horse without a word, tossing me the reins, raced over to the laggard and placed his face within inches of the enormous, raving brute.

  "Get your ass back to camp and help out the laundry girls!" he shouted. He then grabbed the dumbfounded man's shield and began racing up the hill with it himself, no mean feat while wearing his stiff cavalry armor and continuing to bellow at the troops to urge them on. The other men whacked the soldier on the head and back with the flats of their swords as they passed, jeering and insulting him as he stood motionless and dumb. Finally, out of sheer shame, he put his head down and again charged up the hill, bellowing the paean to mighty Apollo, which was soon taken up by the rest of the climbers and the army on the plain below. Catching up, he swiped his shield back with a glare, and Xenophon, exhausted, caught the reins of his horse I threw him and struggled to remount in his armor.

  The roaring of both armies below indicated it was a close race. Xenophon was forced back off his horse by the steepness of the pitch, and he struggled to tear off his unwieldy armor to continue the assault on foot. The men were climbing now hand over hand, loose rocks and gravel rolling down on the climbers below as they scrambled furiously upwards, sweating, swearing, struggling to hold onto their shields and swords. The lead climbers were only twenty-five feet from the summit, then ten feet, when I saw to my horror the flat-ridged crest of a bronze Persian helmet appear on the summit from the other side, and then another. The leading Greeks, engrossed in the effort of the climb, did not themselves notice this until the first half dozen of them had flopped in exhaustion on the topmost boulders-and there was a moment of pause as the exhausted climbers from both sides opened their eyes and noticed their mortal enemies facing them not six feet away.

  Greeks and Persians struggled to their feet, uncertain whether to come to blows with each other or to peer down the opposite sides of the peak to see how many more of the enemy might be close at hand. The two Persian climbers had far outstripped their fellows in their race for the summit, while practically the entire body of Greeks, at Xenophon's desperate urging, had remained close together during the climb and were now poised to arrive at the summit as a body. As a result, the lead Greeks and Persians did not come to blows at all; for as soon as the Persians looked down both sides and compared the relative distances of the two attacking squads, they decided their best chance for safety was in yielding the summit to the Greeks. With a shout they leaped off their side onto the heads of their fellows below, who quickly turned and half ran, half slid down the steep incline. The cheers on the Persian side of the plain fell silent, while those on the Greek side rose to a deafening thunder. We took the summit without a single loss, and as Xenophon and the remaining hoplites struggled gasping to the top, we peered down on the Persian troops occupying the neighboring height overlooking the road to the north. They, in turn, had ceased their jeering and shooting at Chirisophus' forces below them, and were now standing still, staring up at us in consternation.

  "Watch this," Xenophon said to the men with a grim smile. "Theo, wave the attack to Chirisophus."

  I tore off my helmet and mounted it on the point of an eight-foot spear I seized from a hoplite standing nearby, and raising it high, pumped it up and down three times in the prearranged signal. A moment later, a tremendous roar lifted up from Chirisophus' troops far below, as they rushed to the foot of the slope and began climbing hand over hand toward the top of the near height; the Persians between our two bodies of men whirled back, startled, to face the onslaught.

  Xenophon then bawled, "Attack!" and our hoplites, their eyes gleaming fiercely through the helmet slits and their teeth flashing wolfishly behind their visors, fairly leaped in their rush to descend upon the outnumbered mob of Persian forces below.

  The Persians did not wait to see a preordained outcome fulfilled. Dropping their weapons and flailing their arms in terror, they practically rolled down the side of their now indefensible stronghold, in a panic to escape the murderously bellowing hoplites storming them from above and below. After a moment, Xenophon unexpectedly raised his hand in the signal to halt, and it was only with great difficulty that he was able to restrain the fired-up men.

  "Let them go!" he shouted, laughing, as the terror-stricken Persians tumbled and fell over each other in the loose gravel of the mountainside in their haste to escape. "Even one broken ankle among us is not worth the sorry booty we might capture from them." The men grudgingly assented and clambered back down to Chirisophus' troops in a jubilant mood.

  From that time on, we had no further engagement with Tissaphernes' main forces, although small Persian raiding parties occasionally cut down Hellenes if they strayed too far from the army in their plundering. The Persians sent outriders ahead to burn the rich Tigris villages and crops along our projected path, which we interpreted as a last-ditch sign of desperation on their part. Although it posed considerable hardship for our troops in finding sufficient provisions, we knew this would be only temporary-a native army cannot continue to burn its own country without soon meeting resistance from the people.

  And of course we were right, for a few days later Tissaphernes gave up the attack completely, limiting his presenc
e merely to a few isolated scouts who continued to dog us from a distance for a few weeks more as we moved beyond the king's sphere of control. When talking with Asteria that night, as I helped her draw water for the camp followers from a nearby stream, a look of shock passed across her face when I mentioned that we were unlikely to see Tissaphernes again. She stared at me questioningly for a moment, silently asking me once more if I would accept the proposition she had put to me earlier, and I slowly, but emphatically, shook my head no. She sighed, hoisted the heavy leather buckets up to her shoulders with the yoke, and trudged silently up to her camp, where I left her to return to my duties with Xenophon.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, just at sunset, as the army's scouts were returning to camp for the evening, I was startled to see Nicolaus emerge from the trees limping painfully, a grimace on his face. His arm was draped over the shoulders of another Rhodian who supported him in his painstaking walk out of the forest, and his right foot was tightly wrapped in a filthy rag torn from his tattered tunic. Despite the swaddling, he left a trail of blood on the earth behind him as he moved.

  "Nicolaus, what happened?" I exclaimed, sprinting up and relieving his exhausted comrade of the burden. The loss of any of the Rhodians, whether to death or injury, would be a considerable blow to the army, but Nicolaus in particular, who was developing into a tactician of no mean skill and a valuable advisor to Xenophon, was to be protected at all costs. "Has there been an attack?"

  Nicolaus grimaced again and rolled his eyes. "Only on me, for my own stupidity. I walked too close to a badger hole, and the fucker must have been waiting for me. He tore into my foot like a slab of raw meat, and locked his jaws on me. I had to club him to death with a stick, and then use another stick to pry his jaws. He took a chunk off my foot." Nicolaus' comrade proudly pulled the dead creature from a cloth bag slung over his shoulder, its head flattened and pulpy. It was the largest I had ever seen, the weight of a kid goat, with a row of evil, pointed teeth on its lower jaw that protruded around the bared lip in a hideous grin, still stained with Nicolaus' blood. "Can you help me into camp?" Nicolaus asked.

  I could not yet tell how serious the injury might be, but any animal bite was notoriously prone to life-threatening fever, and if the badger had been rabid as well-best not to think about the consequences for now.

  After draping his thin body carefully over my shoulders and carrying him to the Rhodians' campsite, I raced off to fetch Asteria, who had accumulated a large stash of medical supplies. I found her outside her tent, on her elbows and knees, her face almost touching the ground. She was struggling with the unaccustomed task of blowing on glowing embers to ignite a clumsily stacked pile of unseasoned branches she had gathered. I squatted beside her and spoke her name, startling her. She jumped and looked up, and then with a sheepish expression pushed herself up to a more dignified kneeling position, wiping stray strands of hair from her perspiring face. As she did so, she left a long, sooty finger-smudge across one cheek.

  "Asteria, I need help with an injured man," I said. "Bring your medical supplies."

  Returning with her to the Rhodians' camp a few minutes later, I pointed out the injured boy, while Nicolaus' comrades stood in awkward and deferential silence, unaccustomed to the presence of a woman in their midst.

  Asteria did not shrink from the blood-soaked wrapping, but quickly and efficiently exposed the foot, calling for more light as she did so. As someone trained the glare from a torch directly on it, she muttered softly under her breath. "This is beyond my experience," she finally said. "Clean arrow wounds, broken bones, fevers I have handled, but this-" and she looked almost sadly down at Nicolaus' foot. I bent down myself to have a closer view, and sucked in my breath in dismay.

  The limb had already swelled to twice its normal size, engulfing the toes, which emerged from the bulbous foot like tiny, newly sprouted buds on a tuber. Much of the skin had been torn off or hung in shreds, as if flayed with a dull knife, and a large piece of the inner heel was missing, just below the ankle, where I guessed the furious creature had clamped down in his final death throes. The foot was riddled with deep puncture marks where the beast had chewed and gnawed, seeking purchase-some had penetrated down to the bone.

  Asteria gently palpated the instep, toes and ankle while Nicolaus writhed and moaned in pain, two of his colleagues pressing his shoulders flat to the ground and muttering reassurance to him.

  "I don't think anything is broken," she said finally. "That is fortunate. The foot is a complicated limb and rarely heals properly after being set. I'm worried about this bite, though, and the punctures. This type of injury is ripe for gangrene. Once that sets in, the whole foot is lost-possibly even more."

  Of this I was only too aware, for the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh which is symptomatic of this disease was a familiar one in the Greek camp.

  Asteria hesitated, staring at the foot, before getting up and strolling impassively over to the nearest campfire, deep in thought. She knelt beside it, poking gently in the embers, pondering her next course of action. After a moment she stood up again, having apparently made a decision, and returned, her eyes avoiding Nicolaus' sweating, inquiring face.

  "Sit on his knee, Theo," she commanded in a low voice, "and hold his shin tight. Don't let his foot move." I jumped to the task, eager for something useful to do, and no sooner had I seized the bony shin and calf than she withdrew from behind her back the knife she was holding, which she had brought to a pulsing, red-hot glow in the coals. Kneeling quickly, she pressed the flat of the glowing blade hard against the enormous bite in the flesh of the foot, eliciting a loud sizzling sound from the steaming wound, as of fat dripping from a roasting flank into the fire. The sharp, acrid stench of burning flesh assaulted my nostrils as fiercely as it had when the flaming naphtha had seared the attacking Persians at Cunaxa.

  For a moment Nicolaus was silent, perhaps in shock, or during that brief, merciful delay between the touch of burning metal to one's skin and the blinding white explosion of pain that bursts in one's head. Then he erupted into a desperate, sustained howl, a cry of rage and pain that shocked and silenced the rest of the camp, as men for hundreds of yards around stopped what they were doing to listen. His scream died down to a gasping choke as his lungs became depleted, but resumed again as Asteria turned the blade over to the other, still red-hot side and again pressed its sizzling flatness into the now crispened wound. The bleeding ceased almost immediately, and was now reduced to a quiet, insignificant oozing. She gazed at her handiwork in satisfaction. "Almost done, now," she whispered to Nicolaus soothingly, though whatever comfort he may have derived from these words was blotted out when he saw her step back to the fire to plunge her blade again into the coals.

  Returning a moment later, she this time gently inserted the red-hot tip into each puncture wound, rotating the searing blade slowly to cauterize all sides of the holes. Nicolaus was passing in and out of consciousness from the excruciating pain, and when lucid, he was reduced to a despairing, breathless whimper.

  The ghastly treatment was over as quickly as it had begun, though not soon enough for those of us watching in horrified fascination. Removing a long needle and a length of gut from her kit, she quickly and efficiently sutured the flaps of skin she found hanging freely from around the ankle and instep, and then rummaging again through her bag, found a small ceramic jar sealed with a piece of oiled fabric tied tightly around the top. Opening this up, she dipped in her fingers and swabbed Nicolaus' entire foot, both inside the wounds and out, with a greasy, foul-smelling balm that appeared to give the ashen-faced boy some relief. She then wrapped the entire limb in clean gauze up to the knee, tied it off tightly, and stood up, wiping her hands dry on her hips.

  "Theo," she said, in a low voice of authority, "find him some uncut wine to help him sleep. I'll check on him in the morning and change the dressing. If we can stave off fever for three days he'll recover without loss."

  I rushed off to take some wine
from Xenophon's private store, which he used for libations during the sacrifices, and returned to find Asteria chatting quietly with several of the Rhodian boys, each of whom was asking her about their own wounds and ailments. Asteria patiently answered their queries as best she could, but I could see from her face that she was drained and exhausted, and I gently led her away from the grateful slingers, and sleeping Nicolaus.

  Walking quietly back to the camp followers' quarters, we paused near a high hedge to rest. I was deeply impressed with her work on Nicolaus, and told her as much, but she wearily waved off my compliments.

  "I learned about treating foot injuries from some notes left at the palace years ago by Democedes of Croton," she said, "but it was your countryman Hippocrates who perfected the cauterizing technique. I never had the courage to try it, until now. The pain is terrible, but short-lived. Thank the gods it was only his foot. It could have been much worse."

  "Worse? His foot was in shreds!"

  "True, but Hippocrates recommends the technique for treating hemorrhoids."

  I recoiled, and she rolled her eyes at my squeamishness. "Theo, please, let us talk of something else. My spirit needs distracting."

  I was not sure what she wished to discuss, but my mind immediately ventured to a question that had been gnawing at me for weeks, afraid to hear the answer from her for fear it might cause her to reconsider her own motives.

  "Asteria, you had hardly even spoken to me before. What possessed you to steal into my tent in Cunaxa?"

  She looked at me in surprise. "Because I am Lydian, of course," she said.

  This response failed to penetrate, which she gathered from my silence.

  "Of course, I was born in Miletus," she explained, which only confused me further. "Miletus has been under Lydian rule for centuries, but my mother traces her lineage directly from King Croesus, so I consider myself Lydian, even though the Persians insisted on calling me 'the Milesian.'"