The Lost Army (20 page)

One night, around the second guard shift, I heard the sounds of a violent quarrel: it was Menon, who wanted to lead his men on a night raid into the Persian camp. He was sure he could cause a slaughter, and throw the entire army into a panic, after which an all-out assault by the rest of the Greek forces would wipe out the whole bunch.

‘Let me go!’ he was shouting. ‘They’re not expecting it. Can’t you hear the row they’re making? They’re all half-drunk. We’ll butcher them like sheep. They killed two of my men today! Whoever touches Menon’s men is dead. Dead! Understand?’

He was crazed, like an animal who has scented blood. No one could have stopped him except for Clearchus, but I’m convinced that had he been set loose, Menon would have done all that he promised and more. He was so furious that his plan was being thwarted that I was afraid he would draw his sword against his own commander, but Clearchus’s grim resolve stifled his rage and prevented events from getting out of hand. At least for the moment.

I noticed Sophos watching the scene silently from a distance. Lately I’d started seeing him with an officer of Socrates’s battalion, a youngish man who didn’t talk much but had the reputation of being a formidable combatant. He was from a city in the south, Xeno told me. He knew his name, Neon, but nothing else about him. The fact that they both had little to say seemed to be the only thing they had in common.

We crossed another river and sighted another city in the distance where we were able to buy provisions at the market, then we forged on into a barren territory where the only things growing were on the banks of the Tigris. Although it was late autumn it was still hot, and the long marches under a scorching sun put both man and animal to the test. Many days had passed since the day that Clearchus had met Tissaphernes and had signed the truce agreement, but since that time there had been no contact, no meeting, no signal.

Only once did a message arrive from the Persian camp. We were camped in the vicinity of a group of villages that reminded me of the place I was born and that I hadn’t seen in so long. A Persian horseman appeared at dawn and waited, immobile, on his horse, until Clearchus approached him. The man told him, in stilted Greek, that as a sign of his good will, Tissaphernes was granting them permission to take what they needed from those villages.

At first, Xeno and the others thought that it had to be a trap, an invitation to plunder with the intent of scattering our men among the houses and down the alleyways of that small settlement, in order to unleash a surprise attack and finish them off. But Agasias, who had gone ahead to reconnoitre, reported that there were no Persians within a range of two parasangs and that this meant that they had no intention of assaulting us.

At this point, Clearchus posted several groups of scouts at a certain distance from the enemy camp and sent the others to sack the villages. By evening, little was left in those humble communities of farmers and shepherds, and the inhabitants would be exposed to the risk of starvation during the winter months. They’d lost their harvest, their pack and draught animals and their farmyard animals as well. None of the men who were sacking the villages of those poor wretches asked themselves the reason for such indulgence on the part of the enemy, but I did. There had to be a reason, and it wasn’t hard to find. Those villages had the same name as mine: the ‘Villages of Parysatis’. That is, they were named after the Queen Mother, and that authorized pillaging had to be an explicit insult to her majesty.

While our men were exploiting the opportunity they’d been given, I ran into a group of Persian prisoners who had just been captured by one of Socrates’s units and tied to the trunk of a sycamore. There was a girl there who spoke my language, and until recently she had been in the service of Queen Parysatis. I asked Xeno if she could join us, because she might have interesting information to share. In fact, I learned a terrifying story from her, the story of the implacable hate between the two sons of Parysatis and of their mother’s thirst for revenge after she had been so atrociously deprived of the one she loved most. Cyrus.

‘W
HAT
’
S SHE LIKE?
’ was my first question. It didn’t seem real to me that I could be so close to a person who had looked into the face of a woman who seemed as remote to me as the stars in the sky. She’d even touched, possibly combed her hair . . .

‘Who?’

‘The Queen Mother! Tell me what she’s like.’

The girl who spoke my language was called Durgat and she’d been one of Parysatis’s servants until a few days earlier, in the Queen’s summer residence on the high plain west of the central Tigris.

‘She’s tall and slender. Her eyes are deep-set and very dark and when they turn on you, you tremble. Her hair is very long and she wears it gathered at the nape of her neck. Her fingers are long and thin and make you think of claws. Her nose is . . . beaky, sharp. When she smiles it’s even more frightening because everyone knows what gives her most pleasure: seeing people suffer.

‘And yet she can count on the loyalty and even the devotion of all those who serve her. She inspires such terror that if she pays the tiniest bit of attention to you or gives you some small handout, you involuntarily feel immense gratitude, thinking that for this time around, at least, you’ve been spared the pain she’s capable of inflicting.’

‘What was she doing here, at this time of year?’

‘She hadn’t come to take her leisure, not this time. She wanted to be close to the conflict. To the duel to the death between her two sons.’

‘How did you happen to be here, in these villages?’

‘The eunuch in charge of the royal household sent me and some of the other girls, with a number of guards, to buy provisions for the palace. Your soldiers captured us.’

‘I know, and I’m afraid you would have ended up in one of the soldiers’ tents if it weren’t for me. The man I live with is an important person. If you want to continue enjoying our protection, tell me what you know.’

She nodded and seemed relieved. The fact that I spoke her language made her trust me. She told me everything she’d heard or overheard from the Queen’s chambermaids and from the eunuchs who had confided in her. She had a lot to tell, and we went on for days. The necessities of our onward march interrupted us, but we later managed to meet again and continue.

‘In reality, Cyrus thought he had a rightful claim to the throne; he didn’t think of himself as a usurper. He was younger than his brother but he was born when his father had already become King. Artaxerxes, his older brother, had been born when their father was a common man. Cyrus was a royal prince. His brother was nothing. There’s a story I learned at the palace, but you mustn’t repeat it to anyone. The Queen Mother would cut out your tongue, and mine.’

‘What could be so terrible?’

‘It’s about Cyrus. The Queen Mother won’t have him humiliated. So this is what happened. When Artaxerxes entered the Sanctuary of Fire for the royal investiture ceremony, Cyrus was hiding in a side chapel, waiting for his chance to attack. But Artaxerxes’s bodyguards must have been tipped off, because they searched the place beforehand.

‘They found Cyrus armed with a dagger and dragged him to the centre of the coronation hall so they could kill him then and there, before the eyes of the Great King. The Queen Mother screamed and threw herself in front of him just as the scimitar was about to lop off his head. She protected him with her own body and covered him with her cloak, imploring her elder son for mercy. No one dared to harm her.

‘Everyone at court thought that Artaxerxes would find a way to take revenge but, little by little, the kind words and attentions of his mother won him over and instead of doing away with his brother, he was convinced by her to send Cyrus as far away as possible from court, to the furthest western province, Lydia, and make him governor there.’

I was moved by that story. The Emperor of the World, the King of Kings, the most powerful man on earth, was just a little boy to his mother, and he bowed to her will without a whimper. She was the one who fascinated me; what kind of a woman was capable of such conniving? Where I came from, we used to say that women like her had a ‘womb of bronze’.

So, when Artaxerxes’s army and all his generals started to mobilize their forces against Cyrus, she took up her entire retinue, her wardrobe and handmaids, and moved towards the battlefield. She wanted to be the first to know the outcome of their clash. Any mother would be crushed by the thought that she would certainly lose one of her two sons, but not her. She wanted Cyrus to win, knowing that this meant he would slay his own brother.

‘You’re right,’ said Durgat. ‘She deserved to be punished, and she was. It was Cyrus instead who was slain, and she was spared none of the gruesome details. In truth, no one knew who, exactly, had struck him down. Several witnesses declared that the two brothers met face to face and dealt out deep wounds, each one lashing out at the other, but no one could say exactly when and at whose hand the prince had died, whether it was then, at the start of the battle, or later on.’

‘You know,’ I reflected, ‘our men weren’t even on the field when this was happening. They had already routed the enemy’s left wing and were in pursuit of the fleeing Persians; by that time they were far from the heart of the fight.’

‘One thing is certain,’ Durgat continued. ‘King Artaxerxes was wounded in the chest by a spear that pierced his breastplate and penetrated more than two fingers deep into his flesh. The Greek doctor who was later sent to negotiate with you stitched up the wound and treated it, but before doing so he measured the depth of the lesion using a silver stylus.

‘The Great King was informed of the death of his brother by a soldier from Caria, who showed him the blood-soaked caparison from his horse; he swore he had seen the prince’s corpse. When it was all over, the King summoned this man to reward him, but the soldier evidently expected a greater sum, and he protested. He even boasted that he’d killed Cyrus himself, and that such a small prize was not equal to his deed.

‘Artaxerxes was indignant, of course, and ordered the man’s beheading, but the Queen Mother was present and she stopped him. So rapid a death was not a just punishment for one who had been so ungrateful and insolent. “Give him to me,” she said, “and he’ll have the death he deserves. No one will ever again dare to show you disrespect.”

‘Artaxerxes granted her request. Maybe his desire to believe that his mother loved him and truly wanted to punish the man who had been disrespectful to him made him turn over the poor wretch. Instead, she wanted the satisfaction of punishing him all for herself. All she wanted was revenge. A revenge worthy of the evil and cruelty of her soul.’

What Durgat told me then made me sick. There’s nothing more terrible for any human being than to fall completely under the power of another human being who hates him, because there is no limit to the suffering he will endure. At that moment, the delight she took in her revenge was greater than any pain or grief she was feeling for the loss of her beloved son. She had the soldier from Caria strung up in the courtyard of her palace and she called in the torturers. She hand-picked those who most excelled at their skill; those who were capable of inflicting all the torment a body can stand without dying. Those who were capable of stopping a moment before death arrived to claim her due and end the suffering.

Every day she had herself carried out on a palanquin to the courtyard, where she sat in the shade of a tamarisk tree for hours and watched the atrocious agony of that poor creature. Since his screaming and moaning had been keeping her awake at night, she’d had his tongue cut out and his lips sewn up.

For ten days the abominable show went on until the man had been reduced to a shapeless mass of butchered flesh. The Queen let him die then, not because she felt any pity for him but because she was no longer amused; the diversion had begun to bore her.

She had his eyes plucked out and molten copper poured into his ears.

Durgat realized the devastating effect that her story had on me. My expression must have been eloquent, as I couldn’t keep the terror from welling up in my eyes. I’d never heard of such savagery, growing up in my sleepy little village. She stopped for a while and took a look around, as if to reacquaint herself with the reality of the present. Then she went back to the past.

‘There was another man who boasted of having killed Cyrus. His name was Mithridates. He had been given a handsome reward by King Artaxerxes: a silken gown and a scimitar of solid gold because he had actually wounded the prince with a javelin blow to his temple, although it had been the King, everyone said, who dealt the final blow, despite his own wounds. Others claimed that it was Mithridates, not the soldier from Caria, who showed up with Cyrus’s bloody caparison, thus proving himself deserving of the King’s gifts.

‘One evening Mithridates was invited to a banquet secretly organized by the Queen. One of the eunuchs in her service was there as well. The wine flowed abundantly and when the guest seemed good and drunk the eunuch began to taunt him, saying that anyone could bring a bloody caparison to the King, without being a great warrior. That was all it took. Mithridates lifted his hand and shouted: “You can blather all you like, but this is the hand that killed Cyrus.”

‘ “What about the King?” asked the eunuch.

‘ “The King can say whatever he likes. I was the one who killed Cyrus!”