The Lost Army (56 page)

My friends and I spoke of nothing but Abira when we brought the flocks out to pasture. Abira, and the people she’d told us about. It almost felt as if we knew them, and would recognize them if they appeared in front of us. Sometimes Abisag, who was the most naive of all of us, imagined that Xeno would return for her. Maybe he would realize that he couldn’t live without her and maybe at that very moment he was tracing Abira’s steps along the route that led to the Cilician Gates and to the Villages of the Belt. She liked to imagine that he would show up one evening at the well, dressed in shining armour, on a horse that pawed at the ground, as he waited for Abira to come to draw water. She could just see them running into each other’s arms and promising never to part again.

Sweet, silly Abisag.

The days passed and the sky was always darker. The days grew shorter and sometimes the storms raging over the peaks of Mount Taurus would push their way to our villages, the wind an angry whistle.

Then one night, after we were already curled up under our covers, thinking of her so sad and alone in that little hut by the river, we heard the wind that roars! The wind that announces an extraordinary event.

Towards morning, a little before dawn, we heard the dogs yelping and then barking furiously. I got up and went on tiptoe to the window. The clustered houses of the other villages stood out against a pearl sky.

What was happening? The atmosphere was just like that day when Abira had been stoned. I could feel a strange, mounting excitement, growing stronger and stronger, out of control, while the dogs howled at invisible presences crossing the steppe.

I went outside dressed as I was, in my nightgown, wrapping a blanket around me, and went to wake up Mermah and Abisag. I met them along the road. They couldn’t sleep either.

Together we left the village and went, arm-in-arm, towards the well. We were guided only by an indefinable sensation, following a kind of premonition that they say can come to young virgins when they first discover the mystery of their lunar period.

The roaring suddenly stopped, giving way to a dry, continuous wind, taut as a bow-string. A dust storm was advancing across the steppe. In no time, the outlines of things were lost. Real shapes became no more than shadows in the swirling dust. We pulled the blankets up to cover our heads and mouths and walked on until we could make out the figure of Abira. It was unmistakably her, standing straight and still outside the hut, her gown glued to her shapely body by the desert wind. She wasn’t facing us, but seemed to be watching something . . . We crouched down in the shelter of a thicket of palm trees so we wouldn’t be seen, and looked in the same direction.

‘Look!’ gasped Mermah.

‘Where?’ asked Abisag.

‘Over there, to the right.’

A nebulous shape was advancing towards us in the direction of Abira’s hut, a ghostly figure that was becoming gradually more distinct as it approached and emerged from the dust. We heard the soft snorting of a horse and the jingle of armour.

He passed so close that we could have touched him: a horseman, wearing a polished suit of armour covered by a white cape, mounted on a powerful stallion, black as a crow’s wing. Abira was coming towards him, her step uncertain as if she were trying to understand what kind of an apparition was materializing before her. Then we saw astonishment fill her eyes as she stood stock-still, watching him dismount from his horse and take off his helmet, freeing a head of blond hair as fine as silk.

Mermah moved and inadvertently snapped a twig. The noise made the warrior spin round and we saw his face. As beautiful as a god, with penetrating, blue-grey eyes. His sword already flashed in his hand.

‘It’s Menon!’ whispered Abisag, her voice full of admiration and wonder. ‘It’s him.’

He was the snowy god who had appeared in the middle of the raging storm and had saved her from a frozen death, he the indistinct apparition that fluttered over mountains and forests, always too far away to see, he who everyone had thought dead together with the other commanders, the only one of them who could have survived: Menon, blond and fierce.

Abira came closer and they stood facing each other for a long time, both enveloped by his huge wind-whipped white cloak. We heard no words, saw no gestures. I had to imagine their deep, intense looks. Then the warrior helped her onto his stallion, leapt up behind her and touched his heels to the horse’s flanks.

We came out of our hiding place with tears in our eyes as we watched them ride away and slowly disappear into the dust.

This story is based on one of the most famous works of Greek literature, the
Anabasis
, written by Xenophon of Athens. It is the diary of the expedition of ten thousand Greek mercenaries hired by the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, who was plotting to overthrow his brother Artaxerxes, the Great King of the Persians, and seize his throne. One hundred thousand Asian soldiers joined them in the endeavour, but the Greeks were considered the spearhead of the entire army, those who would enable Cyrus to fulfil his ambitions.

Cyrus’s army set off in the spring of 401
BC
from Sardis, in Lydia, and reached the village of Cunaxa, at the gates of Babylon, towards the end of the summer. This is where the battle with the army of the Great King – whose forces greatly outnumbered theirs – took place, on a desert plain on the banks of the Euphrates. The Greeks charged the left wing of the enemy and overwhelmed them, then took off after them in close pursuit. But at the end of the day they were greeted by a bitter surprise: Cyrus had been defeated, his body impaled and decapitated.

Thus began the Greeks’ long retreat through the desert, the mountains of Kurdistan and finally the desolate, icy expanse of the Armenian high plain in the middle of winter, all lands defended by savage tribes fiercely attached to their territory. What is most surprising is that an army of heavily armed infantrymen, accustomed to fighting on open ground and in a close formation, managed to survive the attacks of native warriors who would have benefited from all the advantages of guerrilla warfare, moving with extreme agility and speed over a harsh, mountainous land whose every aspect they were completely familiar with.

In the end, after unspeakable suffering and massive losses, due mainly to frost and starvation, the survivors of the Ten Thousand arrived within view of the sea. Their triumphal cry ‘Thalassa! Thalassa!’ (The sea! The sea!’) has become part of our collective imagination as the symbol of an unthinkable triumph over unbeatable odds.

This long march of over six thousand kilometres amidst every kind of danger and natural obstacle filled Xenophon’s contemporaries and later generations alike with wonder and admiration, but has been considered largely insignificant from a historical point of view, if not in view of the fact that it demonstrated the substantial weakness of the greatest power of that time, the Persian empire, and probably inspired the conquests of Alexander the Great. It has in fact been demonstrated that the Macedonian sovereign was greatly influenced by the
Anabasis
and followed Xenophon’s itinerary scrupulously during the early Anatolian and Syrian stages of his own expedition into Persia in 331
BC
.

I have long been fascinated by Xenophon’s account and set out, beginning in the 1980s, to reconstruct the itinerary of the Ten Thousand on the actual terrain, undertaking three separate scientific expeditions on which I was able to map out the route with considerable accuracy and at times with complete certainty. In 1999 I joined British scholar Timothy Mitford for a close inspection of the territory. Mitford had already localized the circular bases of two huge stone cairns on the Pontian mountains south of Trabzon, and identified them as the trophy erected by the Ten Thousand when they came into view of the sea. Our joint reconnaissance fully confirmed Mitford’s thesis and his meticulous topographical survey.

But the novel does not stop here. It narrates the long march in an emotional key and hints at the existence of a huge international plot at the end of the fifth century
BC,
based on several discoveries which emerged during my field work and were later published in a scientific volume. My studies suggest that the Spartan government played a direct – yet covert – role in the expedition, officially organized by Cyrus alone.

First of all, it is likely that the original commander of the Ten Thousand, Clearchus, who was allegedly wanted for murder in Sparta, was actually a Spartan secret agent.

Chirisophus, the only regular Spartan officer to take part in the expedition – who became the commander of the Ten Thousand after Clearchus fell in an ambush along with all his general staff – was most probably poisoned by his own compatriots as a reward for bringing the army all the way back to Byzantium.

Xenophon himself almost certainly cut three months out of his account, precisely at the point in which the army gets lost in northern Armenia, perhaps even ending up in Azerbaijan.

Disturbing hints, these, that the expedition had not gone wholly according to plan. I hypothesize that Sparta – which had earlier won the Peloponnesian war against Athens with the help of Persian gold – learned about Cyrus’s intentions and decided to play two hands at once by allowing the rebellious young prince to enlist the Ten Thousand while keeping the entire operation absolutely secret. If he succeeded in winning the throne, Cyrus would be in debt to Sparta, whereas if he failed, the Spartan government could claim that they had had no part in the scheme and continue to enjoy good relations with Artaxerxes, guaranteeing their hegemony over all of Greece. In other words, the Ten Thousand were truly meant to win or disappear. But the outcome of the venture foiled Spartan expectations. Unimaginably the Ten Thousand succeeded in surviving their long march through a region from which no army had ever returned: two years after Cyrus’s luckless attempt, they were back at the gates of the Greek world.

Although what Xenophon seems to have deliberately left out of his account – the details of these events and their repercussions – can only be surmised, the mystery can be explored through fiction, crafting an imaginary, but quite likely, scenario.

Valerio Massimo Manfredi