The Ten Thousand

by Michael Curtis Ford

  She shook my hand off her shoulder roughly, glaring like a Fury.

  "Did I ever ask you to? Have I ever asked you for a single thing, other than salves and medical supplies? Did you think those were all for me?"

  "Asteria, please," I said placatingly, "your tunic. You know what I meant…"

  "I know precisely what you meant, and I reject it absolutely. I refuse to be a comfort for you by night and a burden to these boys by day. The only thing I have to give them in return for their protection is myself, and I alone will be the judge of how I do that. I have chosen to be their physician. But if I had decided otherwise, you would have no right to complain."

  I glared at her as she slowly, deliberately fastened the hook and loop at the neck of her tunic, and threw a tattered blanket over her shoulders for warmth, holding my stare with her own determined gaze. Finally she looked down and sighed loudly in exasperation.

  "Perhaps I should have told you earlier that I was treating their ailments. I distrusted your reaction, and now I see, with good reason. When word spread how I had helped Nicolaus, dozens of the other Rhodians came seeking treatment as well. How am I to turn them away?-I am dependent upon them. They are merely boys, though Xenophon has turned them into killers, and they themselves are now dying like men-but they are still only boys."

  "They're doing their duty," I said coldly, "as Xenophon has led them to do, no more nor less than the rest of us. The only breach of this pact binding us all to each other is you. This is a dangerous thing we have done. You are being smuggled. And if word of this violation were to become known throughout the army, the whole thread could unravel, and…"

  She cut me off dismissively, tossing her shorn head in anger as she flopped back down in the corner among her supplies.

  "So now my existence has been reduced to someone's breach of duty? I have my own betrayal burdening my soul."

  "You bring up your father again, your invisible father? I see no betrayal-he's not here to help you, nor to suffer any disloyalty. Betrayal of a phantom is a phantom betrayal. I am speaking of something real, of my duty and honor to the army…"

  "Men's honor, your precious honor, is the least of my worries. I am more concerned with the Rhodians' infected toes. I trust these boys with my life. There is no love lost between them and the rest of your thugs. The Rhodians have been made to feel like outsiders, like inferiors, for so long that you may rest assured they will not be doing any favors for anyone outside their little group-except perhaps Xenophon, who brought them together. I think they would die for him-or at least smuggle."

  I stood fuming silently at this, at a loss for words, while she rearranged her tinctures and ointments in silence, as if she had forgotten I was even there. Finally, she looked up at me, a cold and impatient expression on her face.

  "Would you please send in the next boy as you leave?"

  The fourth night we spent in our lodgings, three Hellenic scouts who had become separated from the main body of troops after the previous river crossing finally straggled into camp, starving and nearly frozen to death, ill-prepared in their short tunics and oxhide sandals for the bitter conditions they had faced. The army surgeons were forced to remove the men's feet, ears and fingers, which had frozen under the influence of what the locals termed "frostbite." They were showing signs of gangrene, the flesh-rotting disease which, if not immediately cut from the body, would be sure to send its fatal poison throughout the entire organism. Before they died of sheer pain the next day, the hapless soldiers called for Xenophon, who came to their cots immediately, showering them with praise for their valor and promising them ample rewards upon their recovery and return to Greece. This the men shrugged off miserably, knowing perhaps that they were merely empty words of comfort. But the eldest among them, a veteran Cretan named Syphion, gestured to Xenophon to bend closer, to hear his final words.

  "The fires, General," he croaked. Xenophon looked at the man, puzzled. "One day out, no more, for a man with healthy legs-thousands of fires in the hills. The Armenians-they're massing."

  The other two men nodded in silence, and I shuddered. The wretched creatures had been staggering through the snow lame and frozen for days, surrounded by the sight of thousands of comforting campfires built to warm the asses of the enemy troops forming up in the hills, while unable to build their own tiny flame for fear of giving away their position. Xenophon helped the men drink a cup of wine, to warm their hearts and deaden their pain and fear of death, then wandered away thoughtfully.

  "We can't stay here, Theo," he finally said in dismay. "Tiribazus has taken a lesson from Tissaphernes-he's breaking his truce and hoping to kill us in our beds. It's not safe for the army to be dispersed among the villages while the enemy masses on the heights."

  I looked at the snow-covered hills, forage for the animals buried under two yards of white stuff, the troops ill-prepared to travel through the bitter cold. "How can you even think of marching the men under these conditions?" I asked. "Can't you see us, days hence? An army of ten thousand, crawling through the snow like poor Syphion, but without a warm village ahead of us at which we could hope to receive shelter."

  He refused to meet my gaze. "We are divided among five villages, miles apart. We could never defend ourselves under these conditions. Better a chance of escape into the mountains, than certain death here in our beds."

  He ordered the men to pack that very day and the army left the next morning, two hours before dawn, before the Armenians, whose campfires in the hills even our local scouts could now see on their nightly rounds, realized that we were departing. Some of the men, out of sheer malice and disregard for orders, burnt the huts they were leaving behind, and Xenophon ordered the scoundrels to be committed to baggage detail for an entire month as punishment. The skies cleared during the day and the men's hopes rose that the winter cold might lift for a time, and afford us proper traveling weather. This was in vain, however, for during the entire day we were scarcely able to lurch six miles through the deep drifts. That night, as we huddled under our blankets and improvised shelters of branches and wagons, a driving snow fell upon us, a snow that rose to the tops of the cart wheels, dousing our fires, collapsing our tents and covering the weapons and the men lying near them.

  In the freezing, blinding storm, I picked my way carefully through the drifts to the Rhodian camp, or what I could find of it. Through a series of grunted questions and answers, I was able to make out Asteria's lodging-a shallow hollow against a large, rotten stump, not apart from the other troops this time, but rather shared with three or four exhausted, shivering boys. I wordlessly squeezed in beside her, surprised to hear no complaint from the Rhodian next to her about my clumsy jostling, until on a sudden impulse I touched his face and found he was dead. Horrified, I dragged the stiffened body a few feet away and laid it for protection in a deep drift. I then returned and mounded a low wall of snow around us all, as a desperate shelter from the roaring wind, checked the faces of the other Rhodians to be sure they were only sleeping and not expired as well, and nestled Asteria's shivering body against mine under the thin blanket. Though she made no effort to assist me, possibly still angry at my harsh words of several days earlier, neither did she protest. I pulled the blanket tighter, and watched the snow fall around and over us, and set myself to survive the endless night.

  Even with the dim light of morning, the soldiers were too numb to rouse themselves to remove the snow's weight, having only enough energy left to clear out a pocket of air in front of their faces so as not to suffocate. They became somnolent in their cold cocoons. In their bleary-eyed moments of wakefulness they had no idea how much time had passed since they were last awake-whether an hour, a night or the entire past day. The water in their leather canteens was frozen as solid as their minds, and the silence, both without and within, was at the same time comforting and deadly. We began to think that it had always been winter and that we could feel nothing else, just a vague awareness of the passage of time, like a lost childhood phras
e that surfaces occasionally in one's speech, or the indistinct tingling of a limb long removed. The entire universe had collapsed in on itself to this tiny, white, dreary place, asleep, infinitely cold, unspeakably far from home.

  Many of the pack animals, weakened already from lack of food and water, simply lay down and died-they were found later frozen solid as stones, their eyes open and sightless, their hides too hard even to be flayed for the leather. The men found that as long as they remained still beneath their burden of snow and did not try to shake it off, they could retain enough body heat to survive for a time, the entire night if necessary. Xenophon could not give in to this luxury, however, and finally, just after the gray dawn the next morning, he stood up and shook off the snow. I had already crawled out of my own burrow and was waiting for him, shivering in the semi-shelter of the overhanging boughs of a large fir tree. As I stepped forward, he greeted me with a grim, silent nod, and then we walked around camp to view the remains of our army.

  The sight was eerie, and frightening. "This doesn't even look like the same country we saw last night, Xenophon," I whispered in awe. "Have the gods carried us away?"

  He, too, looked about him with eyes wide in amazement, then swallowed and licked his cracked lips. "Don't think such things, Theo," he said. "Or if you do, don't speak them."

  The entire landscape had changed under the effect of the snow, which was still falling heavily, obscuring all but the hundred feet or so we could see around us. Not a sign of life was visible; not the slightest curl of smoke from an untended fire, not a single snuffle from a horse, not a whisper from the usually profanely joking and singing soldiers. Just the smooth flatness of the frozen riverbed on which we were camped, with soft mounds of boulders under the snow scattered randomly about the gravel flats. All was utterly silent and still, save for the soft plopping sound made by an occasional handful of snow sliding off the branches above. The thought occurred to me that the army had left in the night, forgetting to wake us, or that the enemy had attacked after all, killing all but us fortunate or wretched few who had lain unawares beneath the silent blanket of snow. My spirit said that this could not possibly be true, but no other explanation for the deathly silence and stillness presented itself.

  Xenophon, however, shuddering with cold, used his arms to sweep away a mound of snow from the bed of a cart almost invisible under its deep blanket. Then clambering onto it, he took a deep breath, and to my amazement began bellowing into the frozen air, sending a flock of crows frantically flapping and cackling into the sky from the trees where they had been silently observing us. He shouted curses into the stillness, commanding the forest to awaken, ordering the nymphs and the naiads to dress themselves and split him some firewood, calling, as if he had taken leave of his senses, invoking I know not whom-Pan and the satyrs and the other forest gods perhaps-to stand up and praise their Maker for their continued existence, offering a goat for breakfast to anyone who could find one still living under the snow. I watched in wonder as he declaimed to the stillness, exhorting the rocks and the hills, and then I watched in even greater amazement as the rocks and hills answered him in reply.

  The mounds and boulders scattered about the riverbed shivered and quaked, cracks appearing in the layer of snow covering them, and then they slowly rose as if being pushed out of the earth from the depths of hell, emerging unsteadily like enormous mushrooms, the snow sliding off into crumpled mounds on the side. Sharp, piercing eyes appeared from beneath, beastlike men with bushy, unkempt beards stood straight up out of the snow, raising their cloaks over their heads and shoulders and shaking the powder off, stamping their feet to bring feeling back to their frozen members, blowing puffs of vapor on their hands and rubbing their dry, cracked palms together. Xenophon stepped up the pace of his harangue, calling upon the men to seek out their brothers who might be too weak or demoralized to emerge from the snow, pleading with them to build their fires high and warm themselves. He denied the bitter cold and threw off his cloak, stripping himself naked in the biting air as if for his morning exercises, insisting that he felt no discomfort. He seized an axe that had been stuck into a tree for safekeeping and began to noisily hack at a rotten stump, until before my very eyes hundreds, thousands of men and surviving animals emerged from their frozen hell and began reentering the land of the living. Someone took Xenophon's axe from his hands and started to split the wood, someone else kindled a fire, and soon the air was redolent again of the fragrance of smoke and oil and roasted mule, the sounds of men groaning and complaining, belching and bitching and farting and scratching, the sounds of ten thousand men, starving and frozen and aching for women, the sounds of an army that has survived its most difficult battle yet, the sweetest sounds on earth.

  Taking a head count, we discovered we had lost dozens of men that night to death and frostbite, and uncounted head of pack animals and other livestock. The short journey into the mountains had been disastrous. Conferring with each other, Xenophon and Chirisophus decided that despite the approach of Tiribazus' hordes at the rear, it would be foolhardy to continue on into the mountains under these conditions. The decision was made to billet again under shelter, in the same villages we had departed, if the enemy had not already taken over the hearths we had vacated. The men cheered when it was announced we would be returning-and in their enthusiasm to be again under a warm roof, they made the return trip in half the time as the outgoing one, sliding down the hills on frozen hides or their own backs, whooping like small boys and ignoring the freezing of their outer extremities, which was taking a terrible toll. We arrived at the villages before the enemy had taken them over, though our vanguard had not a little trouble ousting the enemy scouts who had arrived just a few hours before and were beginning to settle in. Those of the Hellenes who had burnt their quarters upon their departure now had their come-uppance, and were forced to beg or bribe sleeping space from their comrades, or make do in chicken coops and livestock pens. This, of course, was Asteria's lot in any case.

  That night, Xenophon sent out a squad of scouts to reconnoiter the enemy's position. After searching all night for the fires we had seen earlier, they returned exhausted and empty-handed except for one surprising bit of plunder they had captured: a Persian light-armored regular, the likes of whom we had not seen since leaving Tissaphernes behind weeks before. This sent the captains into a great deal of consternation at first, wondering whether the wily satrap had somehow outwitted us and marched a course parallel to ours this whole time in an effort to entrap us in the wilderness.

  It took us several hours of searching before we were able to find an interpreter, as the few Persian speakers that had previously marched among the Hellenes had been killed or lost in earlier engagements. We finally came across an old man of the village, one who had served in the Persian army decades before in Ionia and spoke broken, rusty versions of the two languages, besides a half dozen others. The old lout was rousted from bed, half drunk or dotty and swearing up such a storm in every language he knew, plus several he was most likely inventing on the spot, as to make our own Spartans blush like virgins. When Chirisophus saw him, he was much put off with the man's spouting and refused to have anything to do with him, accusing him of being mad. Xenophon, however, prevailed on him to use the old fellow, pointing out that there might be some residual wisdom in his madness, and claiming that we are all mad to a greater or lesser extent. Chirisophus stared at him a long time, and then walked away in disgust.

  The prisoner was not difficult to interrogate. He was simply told that if he did not cooperate he would be stripped and left to die in the nearest snow drift, and this was enough to make the loose-lipped Persian sing like a nightingale. As it turned out, our fears regarding Tissaphernes were unfounded. Our prisoner was a mercenary working for Tiribazus, and had been foraging for provisions when surprised by our scouts. Tiribazus, apparently, had a large force of mercenaries, Chalybians and Taochians, so large, in fact, that he could prevent our passage without technically breaking his truce-w
hich was that the Armenian army would not impede us. The mercenaries, said the prisoner, had skirted our position along the back trails of the mountains, picking up local irregulars along the way, and were planning to fall upon us in ambush in the narrow places and canyons along the route, blocking our retreat and annihilating us in the snow.

  Upon hearing this the officers were outraged. "Do we need a fucking lawyer to negotiate a simple truce with these barbarians?" Chirisophus asked in disgust. "Do we need to insert clauses to cover main troops, Chalybian mercenaries, farmers with pitchforks, and housewives throwing dirty dishwater at us?"

  Furiously, Xenophon ordered the army into battle formation, amid much protest, but the measure was nevertheless necessary. Sitting there immobile, we would soon exhaust all our provisions, and would be allowing Tiribazus and his mercenaries time to collect additional forces and fortify their positions. The grumbling main body of the army marched at once with the prisoner as guide, leaving guards at the villages under the command of Sophainetos the Stymphalian.

  The men, in an evil mood, were ready for murder, if not of the enemy then of Xenophon and Chirisophus, but they soon gained satisfaction. The light-armed troops, including Nicolaus' Rhodians, who were plowing through the snow in the lead, surprised a large body of the enemy in their own camp, with their shields down. The Greeks pelted the mercenaries with a withering fire of arrows and sling-stones without even bothering to wait for the heavy troops to arrive, killing dozens at the first volley, then rushing upon them with shouts and further shooting. Asteria, who did her best to make herself useful by distributing spare bullets and offering water, told me that the whole skirmish was like a dream: The attackers ran and floundered through the deep drifts as if flailing through clouds, while the terrified enemy attempted a retreat equally slowly, falling down in the soft snow, slowly rising and again attempting to run through the waist-deep powder. The scene was unreal and nightmarish, with even the combatants' shouts muffled in the silence of the snowy woods. Life only returned to concrete, material reality when the Hellenic troops physically caught up to those of the mercenaries who dared to stay and defend themselves, and the contact of the ghostlike figures suddenly resulted in screams of agony and the spray of blood and limbs across the fluffy, virginal whiteness.