The Lost Army (12 page)

Cyrus seemed content with what he saw, and said nothing.

Xeno noticed Sophos, the warrior who’d appeared out of thin air, riding alone at the end of the column. He would dismount at times and walk along the shore, leading the horse by its reins. There was something unreal about him. Although he’d arrived more or less with the new contingent, he had reported to none of the division commanders. He seemed to know no one but Clearchus.

T
HE ARMY CONTINUED
to march along the coast; they crossed one river and then another whose name I can’t remember, although Xeno took care to write down all the names, until they reached a place called Issus: a little city with a natural port. The fleet that had been expected arrived there. Xeno thought that the place initially designated for disembarking the men must have been Tarsus, but since the ships had been late to arrive, Cyrus must have decided to move on in order to gain time and wait for them at the next port.

The fleet, commanded by an Egyptian admiral, delivered about seven hundred Greek warriors, who brought the total number to thirteen thousand three hundred.

I could never understand why later, when they had become famous, everyone referred to them as the ‘Ten Thousand’. In truth there were never ten thousand of them; perhaps there was a time when there happened to be that many, but no one would have noticed. Probably because ten thousand is a nice round number that sounds impressive. It gives the idea of a substantial, compact group, big but not too big, well proportioned, as all Greek things are.

From there the army continued until they reached an impasse at a place called the Syrian Gates, a fortress that completely blocked the passage between the sea and the steep cliffs that flanked it. It was a towering structure; an army determined to resist could hold out indefinitely behind its double line of walls. Instead the fortress fell without a blow being struck. The Persian general holding the garrison chose to retreat, although he had a powerful and well-equipped army at his disposal.

When Xeno told me this story, I asked him what sense there could be in the general’s bowing out like that: if he had chosen instead to hold the fortress and push back Cyrus’s army, wouldn’t that have given him lustre in the eyes of the King?

Xeno answered that a man who took on such a great responsibility would be staking all his luck and his destiny on a single throw. If by chance he was defeated he would have to kill himself, because his punishment would be unthinkably worse. By retreating from the fortress and joining with the Great King he showed his loyalty but shifted the risk onto the shoulders of the sovereign in person. This must have been the general’s thinking: by uniting his forces with those of his King he could shirk the responsibility of fighting the invaders off alone.

They thus arrived at another beautiful city on the coast, the last before they would cross the pass on Mount Amanus that separated Cilicia from Syria. From that moment on, the Greeks would leave the sea and no one could say how much time would pass before they saw it again.

The sea.

The Egyptians called it the ‘Great Green’, a marvellously poetic expression. When I first met Xeno at the well at Beth Qadà I’d never been there, and I knew no one in any of the five villages of Parysatis who had seen it, although more than one claimed to have heard it described by travelling merchants. Xeno painted a picture of the sea for me when I was finally able to understand his language: a liquid immensity, never resting. She had one thousand voices and infinite reflections which mirrored the sky and its galloping clouds. She was the tomb of many a bold navigator who had challenged her by venturing out in search of a better life, furrowing her illusory surface, chasing an evasive horizon. The sea: home to a multitude of scaly creatures, of monsters so huge they can swallow a whole ship, all subject to a mysterious, infinitely powerful divinity who lived in her deepest depths. A divinity who was herself liquid, green, transparent. Treacherous.

Xeno told me that when you look at the sea you feel fear but also an irresistible attraction, a yearning to know what’s hiding under her endless vast surface, what islands and what foreign peoples are embraced by her waves. To know whether she has a beginning and an end or if she is a gulf of the great river Ocean that surrounds every land, beyond which no one knows what may exist.

The night they camped near the port, two officers of the Greek contingent deserted the army and fled on a ship. Perhaps they had known that soon they’d reach the point of no return. Perhaps they had been thrown into a panic by the only fear that could overwhelm such indomitable soldiers: the terror of the unknown.

Cyrus let everyone know that if he wanted to he could send his fastest ships out after them, or rout them out wherever they had thought they’d found refuge, or annihilate their families held hostage in their coastal towns. No, he would do none of this; let them go, he said. He would force no man to stay on against his will, but he would certainly remember those who remained faithful to him. An able move: this way his soldiers knew that there was a way out for them that wasn’t exceedingly risky if they decided to abandon this adventure, which they worried would become more dangerous with each passing day. They were not fooled by appearances or idle rhetoric: they had no consideration of the Asian troops marching alongside and they trusted no one but themselves. And the idea that they might be marching against the Great King led them inevitably to conclude that it would be the thirteen thousand of them challenging the greatest empire on earth.

Accustomed as I was to the small size of my village, to the modest emotions and ambitions of its inhabitants – expectations for the harvest, fear of drought or late frosts, of diseases that might decimate the flocks, plans for the weddings and births and funerals that punctuated their lives – when I finally joined Xeno and his companions I was fascinated by the idea that those men were forced to look death in the face almost every day. How did they really feel? How could they bear the thought of not seeing the sun the next day or of having to face a long agony?

After they had crossed Mount Amanus and destroyed an enemy settlement, the army reached the little group of villages where I lived, and that is when I met Xeno at the well.

That is when I became part of that way of feeling, when I began to share in their extreme emotions, the midnight anguish and the sudden shocks. The world of the soldiers became my own.

When Cyrus decided to reveal his true plans, everyone had been expecting them for some time and had grown used to the idea, and so the revelation had a very limited effect on them. It was not difficult for the young, charismatic prince finally to convince them. He promised them immediate payment of a stipend equal to the value of five oxen, plus immense riches if they were victorious.

Five oxen. I knew those animals well, with their big moist eyes and heavy tread. For five oxen Clearchus’s men bartered their right to live with their willingness to die. It was their job, their destiny; their life was the only thing they had to put on their side of the scale.

In truth it wasn’t death they were afraid of. They’d seen death too often, they were used to it. They feared other things: the atrocious suffering and hideous torture they would have to withstand if they fell alive into enemy hands, or perpetual slavery, or disfiguring mutilation, or all of these things together.

How did they keep from going mad? I asked myself that question many times. How could they see the bleeding ghosts of their fallen comrades – or those they had slaughtered themselves in battle – in their dreams without losing their minds?

By staying together. One alongside the next. While marching, on the line of combat or next to a campfire. Sometimes, on certain nights, I’d hear them singing. A mournful song, something like a dirge, low and solemn. They’d sing all together, and the song would get louder as more voices joined in. Then they’d stop singing all of a sudden to create the silence from which a solitary voice would rise. The clear voice of one of them alone: the one voice – deep and powerful, vivid and vibrant – that best expressed their anguish, their cruel and hopeless courage, their aching melancholy.

Sometimes that voice sounded to me like Menon of Thessaly.

Menon, blond and fierce.

T
HE
V
ILLAGES OF THE
B
ELT,
also called the Villages of Parysatis. Was there ever an encounter more improbable than ours? In the days and months that followed I asked Xeno again and again what he felt when he met me, what struck him about me, what he thought we would do together, besides make love. The story he told me every time I asked shocked me and fascinated me at the same time. He hadn’t thought, or reflected on, or calculated the possible consequences any more than I had. Maybe because I was a barbarian, and he could have sold me at the nearest slave market as soon as he tired of me, or handed me over to one of his comrades, or just maybe – and this is what I like to think – maybe because his passion and desire left him no other choice. But it was difficult to make him admit it.

I had to read it in his eyes, feel it in his caresses, understand it in the little gifts he gave me.

For me all of this meant love, but the Greeks had an entirely different way of reasoning about these things, complicated and hard to comprehend. In their country they married a woman and slept in her bed only until a male child was born and no longer. For me the fact that we made love so often seemed an unmistakable sign of his attachment to me. He was careful to do it in such a way that a child would not be born, and that was only right. We had a terrible trial ahead of us, a trial that would break men of the strongest temper. And I was sure that his being careful was another sign of his love.

I would often stop and think about my village, about my friends at the well . . . about my mother and her dry, work-toughened hands. My heart told me that I’d never see her again but I told myself, I fooled myself into thinking, that sometimes your heart can be wrong.

The Villages of Parysatis marked the start of Syria, my land, and for the whole time we were crossing it, the sunny colours of the countryside, the aroma of baking bread, the scent of wildflowers and herbs made me feel at home. Then, as time passed and the landscape changed I realized we were entering a different land. We started to see wild animals: gazelles and ostriches that looked at us with curious eyes. The male ostriches had beautiful black feathers and they would carefully guard their flock of grazing females. The Greeks called the ostriches a name that meant ‘camel-bird’. I could see why: their curved backs looked a little like camels’ humps. The soldiers had never seen them before, apart from the few who had been to Egypt, and they pointed them out one by one as they marched, or would even stop to gawk at them.

One thing I hadn’t known about Xeno was that he had a real passion for hunting. As soon as he saw the ostriches, he jumped onto his horse with a bow and arrows and tried to get within shooting range of a large male. But the ostrich burst into such a fast run that Xeno’s horse couldn’t gain on him. Xeno pulled him up short when he saw he’d lost sight of his prey. The Asian guides said that that apparently shy and harmless bird could be very dangerous; a blow of its sharp claws could easily crush a man’s chest.

Xeno didn’t come back from his ride empty-handed: he brought back an ostrich egg as big as ten hen’s eggs. I remembered how once a merchant had come from the coast to our village with some fabric and modest ornaments to sell, marvels that he’d laid out on the ground to attract the attention of the inhabitants. There was also an ostrich egg painted with beautiful colours, but none of us had anything precious enough to barter for that useless but incredibly desirable object.

The egg Xeno collected had been freshly laid and we cooked it over the fire. It was good; with a little salt and some herbs and accompanied by the bread I’d baked on a stone, it made an appetizing meal. Xeno sent a portion as a gift to Cyrus, and was thanked for it.

The next day we met up with a group of onagers, a kind of wild ass. Xeno tried to hunt one down but was once again unsuccessful. The magnificent steed he called Halys was humbled in his race against those shaggy, ungainly animals.

When his comrades teased him about his failure, Xeno replied that he’d already thought up a way to capture one and that he’d put his plan to work the next day. All he needed was two or three volunteers on horseback. Three men came forward, two Achaeans and an Arcadian, and Xeno set about instructing them by drawing lines in the dirt and placing pebbles at a certain distance from one another.

The next day I was to learn what those stones meant: they were the stalking positions of the three horsemen. One began the chase, then, when his horse was worn out, the second stepped in and then the third, driving the exhausted ass towards the point where Xeno would be waiting, in the shade of a cluster of sycamore trees. When the onager arrived Xeno urged on his charger as fast as he could go and let fly. The first arrow fell short because the ass suddenly swerved and changed direction, heading back towards us. The second hit its mark but didn’t bring the animal down. But now it was only a question of time.

Exhausted, wounded, the ass slowed down and finally stopped: his open mouth was sucking in air, his head drooped forward. His legs gave way little by little until he fell to his knees, seemingly waiting for the final blow. Xeno grabbed a javelin and plunged it between his shoulder blades so that it pierced his heart. The onager collapsed onto his side, his legs still kicking for a few moments before he stiffened into death. It was a male.