The Lost Army (2 page)

Netus (Sophaenetus) the Stymphalian –
Greek officer

Nicarchus of Arcadia –
young Greek soldier

Parysatis –
Queen of Persia, mother of Artaxerxes and Cyrus

Phalinus –
messenger in the Great King’s service

Proxenus of Boeotia –
Greek army general, Xeno’s friend

Seuthes –
barbarian king of Thrace

Socrates of Achaea (the Achaean) –
Greek army general

Sophos (Chirisophus) –
only high-ranking regular officer of the Spartan army

Timas (Timasion) the Dardanian –
Greek army general

Tiribazus –
Armenian satrap and ‘eye of the Great King’

Tissaphernes –
Artaxerxes’s brother-in-law and general in his army

Xanthi (Xanthicles) of Achaea –
Greek army general

Xeno (Xenophon) –
young Athenian warrior who enlists in Cyrus’s mercenary army to write the diary of the expedition

T
HE WIND.

That ceaseless wind that blasts like the breath of a dragon through the craggy folds of Mount Amanus and then beats down on our plains, withering the grass and scorching the fields. All summer long.

And for most of the spring, and the autumn.

If it weren’t for the stream that trickles down from the high Taurus peaks, nothing would grow here. Nothing but stubble for herds of hungry goats.

The wind has a voice, but it’s always changing: sometimes a long lament that seems never to find solace, at other times a hissing that penetrates at night into every crack in the walls, into the gap between a door and its frame, letting in a thin haze that envelops everything, reddening your eyes and parching your throat even as you sleep.

Sometimes it’s a roar that carries the echo of the thunder of the mountains and the snapping of the nomads’ tents in the desert. A roar that gets under your skin and makes every fibre of your body tingle. The elders say that when the wind roars that way something extraordinary is about to happen.

Our land is made up of five villages: Naim, Beth Qadà, Ain Ras, Sula Him and Sheeb Mlech, with no more than a few hundred people in all. Each one stands on a little rise made up of the remains of other villages destroyed by time, built and then abandoned and then built up all over again in the same place, using the same sunbaked mud. But the administrators of the Great King call them the ‘Villages of Parysatis’ after the Queen Mother.

They’re also called the ‘Villages of the Belt’, because all of the labours of all the people who live in our villages, everything we produce and manage to sell, except for what we need to survive, is earmarked every year for buying a single precious new belt for the Queen’s gown. At the end of each season there’s a richly garbed Persian who comes escorted by numerous bodyguards to collect everything that our parents have managed to scrape together in a whole year of hard work. We’re left with the risk of starving and the certainty of hardship so that a belt can be bought for a woman who already has dozens and surely doesn’t need one more. But they tell us it’s an honour for us and that we should be proud. Not just anyone can say that they are able to contribute to the wardrobe of such an important member of the royal family.

I’ve tried hard to imagine that family, that home, but I just can’t. You hear so many stories about such a fabled dwelling. Some say it’s in Susa, others in Persepolis, still others in Pasargadae, on the vast high plains. Maybe it’s in all of those places at once, or maybe in none. Or perhaps it stands in a place that is equally distant from all those places.

I live in a house with two rooms, one for sleeping and one for eating our meals. The floor is beaten earth, and maybe that’s why everything we eat tastes of dust. The roof is made of palm trunks and straw. When we go to the well to draw water, my friends and I, we’ll often stop and dawdle. We talk on and on and daydream out loud, at the risk of catching a hiding if we’re not home in time.

What do we dream about? About finding a handsome, noble, lovable young man who will carry us away from this place where every day is like the next, knowing full well that such a thing could never happen. I’m happy, all the same, happy to be alive, to work, to go to the well with the other girls. It doesn’t cost anything to dream, and it’s like living another life: the one we’d all like to have and never ever will.

One day, as we were making our way to the well, the wind hit us full force, making us feel dizzy as we leaned forward to stay on our feet. We knew that wind all right: the wind that roars!

All the objects around us were obscured by a thick fog of dust. The only thing we could see distinctly was the disc of the sun, but it had taken on an unreal pinkish shade. It seemed to be suspended in nothingness, over a wasteland without edges or definable shapes, a land of ghosts.

An indistinct shape appeared in that dim cloud. It was moving, fluttering in the air.

A ghost.

One of those spirits that come out of the ground at dusk so they can slip away in the dark as soon as the sun drops below the horizon.

‘Look,’ I said to my friends.

A body was taking shape but the face remained invisible. Behind us we could hear the usual sounds of the evening: farmers returning from the fields, shepherds urging their flocks towards their pens, mothers calling their children home. Then, all at once, silence. The roaring wind fell quiet, the gloom slowly dissipated. To our left appeared the group of twelve palm trees that encircle the well, to our right the hill of Ain Ras.

Between them, a woman.

We could see her quite well now: her body, her face framed by long dark hair. A young woman, still beautiful.

‘Look,’ I repeated. As though that apparition were not already at the centre of everyone’s attention. The slender figure advanced slowly, as though she felt all those stares upon her, weighing her down, as each step brought her a little closer to the edge of Beth Qadà.

We turned around and could see that many men had gathered at the entrance to the village, lining up as if to shut her out. Then someone shouted something that we couldn’t grasp the meaning of, but the words we understood were terrible ones, laden with a violence we’d never known. Some women started running up as well, and one of them shouted: ‘Get out! Leave now while you can!’

But either she hadn’t heard or chose not to listen. She kept on walking forward. Now she was burdened by the weight of their hate as well and her steps were even slower.

A man picked up a stone from the ground and threw it. He only just missed his target. Others gathered stones as well and hurled them at the woman, who struggled to keep walking. A stone hit her left arm and another her right knee, making her fall. She rose to her feet with difficulty and continued on towards the village. Her eyes scanned the ferocious crowd, seeking a single friendly face.

I shouted out this time, ‘Leave her alone! Don’t hurt her!’

But no one listened. The rain of stones turned into hail. The woman swayed and fell to her knees.

Even though I did not know her, even though I knew nothing about her, I realized that her stubborn approach towards the village was something like a miracle, the kind of event that had never before happened in our forgotten corner of the Great King’s empire.

The stoning went on until the woman showed no signs of life. Then the men turned around and went back into the village. They’ll be sitting down at their tables soon, I thought, breaking bread for their children and eating the food their wives have prepared. Murder with stones, from a distance, doesn’t stain your hands with blood.

My mother must have been among the crowd, because I suddenly heard her voice, calling out to me, ‘Get over here, you stupid thing, move!’

We had all been frozen by what we had seen; none of us could ever have begun to imagine such a thing happening. I was the first to snap out of it, and I started walking towards my mother, towards home. As frightened as I was, I walked as close as I could get to the body of that stranger, close enough to see a trickle of blood coming out from under the stones, sinking into the dust and staining it red. I could see her right hand and both of her feet, which were bloody. I looked away and walked off quickly, swallowing a sob.

My mother greeted me with a couple of slaps, almost making me drop the jug of water I still held. She had no reason to hit me, but I guessed that she needed to vent the tension and anguish she’d felt at seeing a person stoned to death at the gates of our village, a person who hadn’t harmed anyone at all.

‘Who was that woman?’ I asked without acknowledging my own pain.

‘I don’t know,’ replied my mother. ‘And you shut up.’ I knew right away that she was lying and so I asked no further questions, but started to make dinner. My father walked in as I was putting the food on the table. He ate without lifting his eyes from his plate or saying a word. He went into the other room and soon we could hear him snoring. My mother joined him as soon as it was dark enough to warrant lighting a lamp, because we couldn’t afford one, and I asked if I could stay up for a while in the dark. She said nothing.

A long time passed. The last glimmer of dusk faded and night fell, a dark night with a new moon. I was sitting next to the window, which was half open, so I could look for stars. The dogs were barking: maybe they could smell the blood or feel the presence of the stranger’s body lying out there all covered with stones. I wondered whether the villagers would bury her the next day or just leave her there to rot.

The wind was still, now, stunned into silence by the crime, and everyone was sleeping in Beth Qadà. Everyone but me. I knew I would never fall asleep while the troubled spirit of that woman was wandering through the streets of the sleeping village, seeking no doubt to pass her torment and suffering on to someone else. Unable to bear the agony of sitting cooped up in the dark waiting for her to find me, and unable to even think about resting on the mat rolled out in a corner of the kitchen, I went outside, and the sight of the vast vault of the starry sky gave me a sense of peace. I took a deep breath and sat down on the ground, leaning back into the warmth of the wall with my eyes wide open in the darkness, waiting for the beating of my heart to calm.

I soon realized that I wasn’t the only one in the village unable to sleep: a shadow slipped by, quiet as could be, but her gait was unmistakable and I called out to her, ‘Abisag!’

‘Is that you? You nearly scared me to death!’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I can’t sleep.’

‘Me neither.’

‘I’m going to see that woman.’

‘She’s dead.’

‘Why are the dogs still barking, then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Because they can feel that she’s alive and they’re afraid.’

‘Maybe it’s her ghost they’re afraid of !’

‘Dogs are not afraid of dead people. Only men are. I’m going to see.’

‘Wait, I’ll come with you.’

We walked swiftly down the street together, knowing that if we were found out we’d surely get a beating from our parents. The house of our friend Mermah was on our way; we knocked at the window sill and called her name softly. She must have been awake, because she opened the window at once, and as she was leaving the house her sister joined us as well.

We crept along close to the walls until we had cleared the village, then quickly reached the spot where the stranger had been stoned. An animal ran off as we drew near; a jackal, probably, attracted by the smell of blood. We stopped short in front of that jumbled heap of stones.

‘She’s dead,’ I hissed. ‘What did we come here for?’

The words weren’t out of my mouth when a stone shifted and rolled down on the others.

‘She’s alive,’ breathed Abisag.

We bent over her and started taking the stones from her body one by one without making a sound, until she was completely free. It was so dark we couldn’t even make out her face. It was a swollen mess anyway and her hair was clotted with blood and dust. But her jugular vein was pulsing and a low moan was coming from her mouth. She was alive, all right, but it looked as if she might die at any moment.

‘Let’s get her away from here,’ I said.

‘Where can we take her?’ asked Mermah.

‘To the hut by the river,’ Abisag proposed. ‘No one has used it for ages.’

‘How can we get her there?’ asked Mermah again.

I had an idea. ‘Take your clothes off. No one can see us anyway.’

The other girls did as I asked, realizing what I had in mind, stripping off until they were almost naked.

I laid out our clothes and knotted them together to make a kind of sling that we laid on the ground next to the woman. We gingerly eased up her arms and legs and shifted her onto the cloth. She gasped when we pulled her off the ground; her limbs must have been shattered. We lifted the sling as gently as we could. That poor thing was as thin as could be; she wasn’t even heavy for girls like us, and we managed to carry her to the hut without much trouble, stopping every now and then to catch our breath.