The Lost Army (5 page)

‘Your mother is dead,’ replied Abisag. ‘Of malignant fever. Shortly after you left.’

‘My father?’

‘Your father was alive when you returned.’

‘I know. I thought I saw him throwing stones with the others. Dishonour weighs more heavily on men.’

‘He died on the night of your stoning,’ I said. ‘It was a sudden death.’

Upon hearing those words, Abira stiffened. Her eyes became glassy and unseeing. I’m certain that behind that vacant stare was a vision of the Underworld.

Abisag put a hand on her shoulder, trying to bring her back to the real world. ‘You told us that your adventure – your running off with the soldier, the passage of that great army through the Villages of the Belt, everything that happened later – started with the story of two brothers. Tell us that story, Abira.’

Abira started with a shiver and pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders.

‘Another time,’ she sighed. ‘Another time.’

S
EVERAL DAYS PASSED
before Abira felt like talking with us again. In the meantime we’d found her a little work that she could do in secret, and make a living for herself. We couldn’t keep sneaking food from our homes; someone was bound to notice sooner or later. All the same, any time we were sent out to tend the flocks we tried to take enough lunch with us so that some would be left over for her.

We helped her to fix up her shack so that she could spend the autumn and winter there and we visited every time we brought water back from the well. We learned a lot of things from her. The man she’d fallen in love with had such a complicated name that she always called him Xeno. She stayed by his side for the whole of their grand adventure. It was he who had told her the story of the two brothers who would change the history of our whole world. Other parts of the story she gathered from the many people she met during that endless journey.

She confirmed for us what we’d heard from our parents during long winter nights: that one of those two brothers was a prince of the empire. He was the one leading the army through our villages when Abira met her love. The story that had swept through so many lives and had been on the lips of countless people poured out in the words ofthat fragile, frightened woman whom we had freed from under a heap of stones. We learned the story from her, starting at the end of that autumn. Three fifteen-year-old girls who had never seen anything outside our villages and would never see any more than that in our whole lives.

T
HE
Q
UEEN
M
OTHER,
Parysatis, had two sons. The elder was Artaxerxes, and the younger was called Cyrus, like the founder of the dynasty. When the Great King died, he left the throne to his firstborn as was customary. But the Queen Mother was vexed at this, because Cyrus was her favourite: he was more handsome, more intelligent and more charming than his brother and he greatly resembled her; he had the same fluid grace that she’d had as a young woman, when she was forced to marry a man she detested, the man who was the image of his first son, Artaxerxes. The Queen had procured the governance of a very wealthy province, Lydia, located on the shores of the western sea, for her son Cyrus, but in her heart of hearts she had always hoped that some day she’d be given the chance to raise him up higher.

Powerful women are capable of acting in a way that normal women would never even dream of.

She was well practised at disguising her thoughts and her plans; she used her influence covertly to achieve the objectives she had set for herself. Intrigue was her favourite pastime, in addition to playing chess, a game she had mastered. Belts were her passion.

Every day she wore a different exquisitely woven and embroidered belt. Belts of silk, of byssus, of silver and of gold, adorned with superbly crafted buckles from Egypt and Syria, Anatolia and Greece. It was said that she wanted silver only from distant Iberia because of its matchless milky tone, and lapis lazuli only from remote Bactria because of the great number of golden flecks it contained.

Cyrus arrived in Lydia when he was but a boy of twenty-two, but his innate shrewdness and sharp intelligence led him to grasp at once what moves were required on that complicated chessboard where the two most powerful cities of Greece – Athens and Sparta – had been fighting for over thirty years without either of them gaining the upper hand.

He decided to help the Spartans for a single reason: they were the most formidable warriors existing in the known world, and one day they would take up arms for him. They were the warriors of the red cloaks and bronze mask-like helmets who struck fear into any opponent. Athens, on the other hand, was the Queen of the Seas, and to defeat her it was necessary to commission a mighty fleet and load it up with archers, slingsmen and expert crews led by the best commanders. Eighty years before, those two Greek cities had united against the Great King Xerxes and defeated his fleet, the greatest of all times. Now Cyrus knew he had to set them against each other, goad them into wearing themselves out in an exhausting conflict until the moment came when he could tilt the scales in favour of the Spartans. Beholden to him, Sparta would support him in the venture most dear to his heart: seizing the throne!

Thanks to his support Sparta won the war and Athens had to bow to a humiliating peace agreement. Thousands of men from both sides found themselves in a devastated land where they saw no hope of a livelihood.

That’s how men are: for some mysterious reason they are seized, at regular intervals, by a blood frenzy, a drunken violence that they can’t resist. They deploy themselves on vast open fields, lined up one alongside another, and wait for a signal. When that trumpet sounds, they charge the enemy formation, which is full of other men who have done absolutely no harm to them. They hurl themselves into the attack, yelling with all the breath they have. They’re shouting so loudly to quiet the fear that grips them. In the moment before the attack many of them tremble and break out into a cold sweat, others weep in silence, some lose control of their urine, which flows warm down their legs and wets the ground they stand on.

In that moment they’re waiting for death. Black-cloaked Chera swoops down among their ranks and her empty sockets eye those who will fall first, then those who will die later and finally those who will suffer for days from their wounds before dying. The men feel her eyes upon them and they shudder.

That moment is so unbearable that if it were to last for any length of time it would kill them. No commander prolongs it any more than is strictly necessary: as soon as he can, he unleashes the attack. They cover the ground that separates them from their foes as quickly as they can, running, then crashing against the enemy like the surf on cliffs. The collision is terrifying. In those first moments there is so much blood shed that it soaks the ground beneath them. Iron sinks into flesh, skulls are bludgeoned, spears pierce shields and breastplates, cleaving hearts, lacerating chests and bellies. There is no fending off such a storm of fury.

This horrible butchery can last for only an hour or little more, before one of the two formations breaks down and starts to withdraw. The retreat often becomes a disorderly rout, and that’s when the bloodletting becomes slaughter. Those who flee are massacred without pity for as long as the victors’ strength endures. At dusk representatives of the two sides meet on neutral ground and negotiate a truce, then each side gathers up its dead.

There you have it, the folly of men. Episodes like the one I’ve just described, which I saw myself with my own eyes time and time again, were repeated endlessly during the thirty years of war between Sparta and Athens, mowing down the flower of their youth.

For years and years the young men of both powers – and their fathers too! – did one thing only, fight, and those who survived all those years of war knew no other way of life but combat. Among them was the man I fell in love with as I was drawing water from the well at Beth Qadà: Xeno.

When we met he had already covered over two hundred parasangs with Cyrus’s forces, and by then he knew exactly where the army was heading and what the aim of the expedition was. And yet he was not a soldier, as I had imagined when I saw the weapons he carried. Not then, not at the start, at least.

The night I ran off with him, I knew my people would disown and curse me. I had betrayed the promise of marriage with the boy I was betrothed to, I had broken the pact between our two families. I had dishonoured my mother and father. But I’d never known such happiness. As our horse raced over the plains illuminated by the last glimmer of dusk and then by the rising moon, all I could think about was the man my arms were holding and of how beautiful my life would be alongside my love, who had come back for me. No matter how short a time my bliss might last, I would never regret my decision.

The force and the immensity of the feelings I experienced those first days meant more than years of dull monotony. I wasn’t thinking about any difficulties to come, of what I would do if he left me, where I would go, how I could survive. All I thought about at that moment was being with him, and nothing else mattered. Some say that love is a kind of disease that hits you out of the blue, and maybe that’s true. But after all this time, and everything I’ve been through, I still think that love is the most noble and most powerful feeling that a human being is capable of. I’m also sure that love makes it possible for a person to overcome obstacles unimaginable for anyone who has not felt its power.

We caught up with the army that night after dark, when everyone had finished eating and was preparing for the night. Everything was new for me, and difficult. I wondered how I could hold on to a man I couldn’t even talk to, but I planned to learn his language as soon as possible. I would cook for him and wash his clothing, I would look after his tent and I would never complain. Not if I was tired, not if I was hungry, not if I was thirsty. The fact that he had felt the need to learn even just a few phrases in my language meant that he cared very much and didn’t want to lose me. And I told myself that I was beautiful, much more beautiful than any woman he’d ever met before. Even if it wasn’t true, the thought gave me confidence and courage.

Xeno loved the way I looked. He’d spend hours watching me. He’d ask me to move my body in a certain way and he’d look at me from various points of view, moving around me. Then he’d ask me to move a different way. To stretch out or to sit or to walk in front of him or to let down my hair. At first he’d use gestures, but then little by little, as I learned his language, he’d use words. I realized that the poses he asked me to take corresponded to works of art that he had seen in his city or in his land. Statues and paintings, things I had never seen because there were no such things in our villages. But I’d often seen children moulding mud into little figures and letting them dry in the sun. And we’d make dolls as well, which we’d dress with scraps of fabric. Statues were something like that, only much bigger, as big as a person or even more so. They were made of stone or clay or metal and they were used to adorn cities and sanctuaries. Xeno told me once that if he were an artist – that is, one of those men capable of creating such images – he would have liked to portray me as one of the characters of the ancient stories told in his homeland.

I soon discovered that I wasn’t the only woman following the army. There were many others. A great number were young slaves, most of them owned by Syrian and Anatolian dealers who leased them out to the soldiers. Some of them were very pretty; they got enough to eat and had nice clothing and wore make-up to be attractive. But their life wasn’t easy. They couldn’t refuse their clients’ demands, not even when they were ill. Their only advantage was that they didn’t have to walk; they travelled on covered wagons and they weren’t made to suffer hunger or thirst. That was something in itself.

There were others of the same trade who met with only a few men, or even only one man alone, if he was very important: the commanders of the army divisions, noble Persians, Medes and Syrians, or the officers of the red-cloaked warriors. That type of man doesn’t like to drink from the same cup as everyone else.

The red-cloaked warriors didn’t mix with the rest. They spoke a different language and had their own habits, their own gods and their own food. They didn’t speak much. When they stopped to rest they would always polish their shields and their armour so that they shone, and they would practise fighting. They seemed to do nothing else.

Xeno was not one of them. He came from Athens, the city that had lost the great thirty-year war. When I was able to converse in his language, I understood the reason why he was following the expedition. It was only then, when I learned the Greek of Athens, that his story became mine. The accident of fate that had torn me from my village was woven into a much bigger destiny: the destiny of thousands of individuals and of entire peoples. Xeno became my teacher as well as my lover. He provided everything I needed: my food, my bed, my clothing, in a single word my whole life. I wasn’t just a female for him, I was a person to whom he could teach many things and from whom he could learn many others.

He spoke rarely of his city, although it was clear how curious I was about it. And when I insisted that he tell me why, the unexpected truth came out.

After Athens had fallen into the hands of the enemy, she’d had to accept being ruled by her conquerors: the Spartans, the warriors who wore the red cloaks!

‘If they defeated your city, why are you on their side now?’ I asked him.