The Ten Thousand

CHAPTER THREE

I FIRST SAW the faint moving shadow cast on the wall, even before its source, as the intruder slipped silently into Proxenus' tent and moved cautiously toward my cot.

So many officers' tents had been destroyed in the attack that Proxenus had invited Xenophon and me to move into his own lodgings until better arrangements could be made. Though his tent had been clearly marked by its pennants as an officer's quarters, it had somehow survived the Persians' rampage, and in this way even seemed to the men to be a positive sign from the gods, one of ultimate hope and triumph. As Proxenus passed the night with the other officers at Clearchus' own makeshift quarters, sorting through the day's events and planning their strategy for tomorrow, I lay alone, trying to empty my mind of the myriad thoughts and memories that kept crowding in. It was a weakness of mine, from which I have always suffered. I do not know whether other men experience this as well, for I have always been too ashamed to ask, and if they do, I have no doubt but that they too are unable to mention it for fear of being thought mad. I find that just at those times when I most require a clear head-just as I consciously try to clean away the cobwebs, all those extraneous and unrelated passing notions constantly intruding upon my concentration-it is precisely at those times, as if at a signal set by an impish god, that every possible stray thought, every fear, every memory of childhood shame, every twinge of remorse for friends now dead, every haunting echo of the ancient Syracusan chant that drives me nearly mad, all come rushing back into my skull like wind into a void, shouldering each other aside to come to the fore of my thoughts, jostling and being tripped up and muscled to the back by one another. It is enough to drive one mad, and one can see from the careening and jolting of my syntax that I cannot even logically explain the experience. I had been lying there, my overheated brain at the point of driving me to panic, when I saw through the lashes of my half-closed lids that the tent flap had opened slightly and someone had stealthily entered.

My head instantly cleared. Anyone entering this tent could only have been searching for Proxenus, yet in the soft flickering of the tiny oil lamp perched on my table I could see that it was not Xenophon, as I first thought. Peering more closely, my breath stopped as I recognized the intruder, standing stock-still, profiled in the light in the small space in the center of the tent, her eyes still unaccustomed to the dimness. I pulled back my blanket to sit up, and Asteria, startled, whirled around to face the sound. Her face registered shock as she recognized me, and she stood motionless for a moment, staring at me before stepping silently over to my cot. She was wearing only a light shift and a leather belt, and was barefoot, trembling from the cold, or from the horrors she had seen that day, or from fear as to what would become of her now that her master was dead and she was alone. I could see the dried trails of tears that had streaked through the layer of dust still coating her cheeks as she lay down in my arms, pressing herself to my chest and burying her face in my neck as she emitted a sigh-a long, shuddering, wracking sigh that seemed far too deep for her tiny frame, as if welling up inside her from some secret place, from some time long before.

I held her tightly, pulling the blanket up over us both and feeling her cold, shivering limbs gently relax and respond to my own body's heat. After a time, the spasms of her sobbing gradually subsided, and she lay quietly in my arms, awake and keeping her own thoughts, her long eyelashes softly brushing my neck with her blinking, and the damp, steamy scent of her breath and hair rising up to my face in the silence. She lifted her head, her face inches from mine in the semidarkness, peering into my eyes, searching my thoughts. By the dim lamplight I could see nothing but the dark silhouette of her long hair, a faint halo of light glowing behind it, the odor of charred wood and crushed flowers from her skin and hair oddly comforting. I put my hands on either side of her face, my fingertips in her hair where I could feel the broken shaft of a small feather, like a shattered lance, which she had woven into the strands, painstakingly sifted from the ashes of her burned possessions in an attempt to salvage some last remnant of adornment. I shifted my body slightly and turned her face into the dim light, to discern her expression. As I did so, I looked intently into the flickering shadows passing before her and revealing her, watching as the penumbra lifted from the depths between her brows and cheekbones. I waited for her eyes to appear from the darkness as does a seer fearfully observing the emergence of the moon after an eclipse, and feeling the same tremors and uncertainty as he would in divining the gods' intent. Eyes like hers had never before been seen, at least not in this world, and in the darkness their coloring, whether blue, gray or green, was unknowable. The true color may have been any or all of them, depending upon the quality of the outer light, or of the inner thought they concealed. Later, in the days to come, I would see them turn as black and unfathomable as the ocean depths when one peers over the side of a ship, and in her sleep, under her half-closed lids, the orbits would gleam a brilliant, gelid white, like a sliver of ice on an eave glinting both refreshingly and deadly in the sun.

She seemed to be questioning in her mind, divining the oracle, and she apparently received a positive response from the gods, for suddenly she pressed her warm, sweet mouth to mine, harder than I would have thought possible for one seemingly so fragile; and then I felt her moist, flowerlike lips gliding lightly, but with increasing pressure, over my neck and chest as I slipped off her thin garment, which had been tied with a belt holding an enormous, sheathed dagger, and I wrapped my arms around her, and we gave each other much solace.

I lay awake most of that night, watching as the fear and worry gradually left her tense face and her features relaxed into a blissful dream, or perhaps merely into nothingness, into an empty place where the absence of pain and fear, even of love, is the greatest happiness of all. I drifted off for a few minutes at a time, waking at the slightest noise, the discreet coughing of a sentry pacing outside, and then falling back again into a fitful dream. I was asleep, or so she thought, when she finally arose an hour before the first hint of dawn had lit the eastern sky. I watched as if in a dream, through barely opened eyes, as she pulled her shift back down over her slender body and tightened the leather belt around her waist. To this day, I am unsure whether I continued to watch, or had slipped back into dreaming, when she silently drew her knife, considered it closely for a minute in the semidarkness, and then carefully, noiselessly, not daring to touch me with her hand or sleeve for fear of waking me, brought the razor-sharp tip up to the pulsing, blue vein in my neck just below the jaw. Whether truly awake or merely dreaming, I feigned the deepest sleep, fearing that the slightest gesture or flicker of my eyes, the softest catch of my breath, would cause the dagger to be plunged into my throat. She held the tip there for what seemed like minutes, as motionless as one who has seen a gorgon, staring into my just-closed eyes, daring the slightest response. My soul slipped away from my body and floated through her, behind her, to the ceiling of the tent, and I could see her from above, leaning over my frozen body, the tendons in her wrist tense and quivering from the strain of holding the knife in perfect stillness at my neck.

A small drop of blood appeared on my skin just below the tip of the knife, pure and clean, virginal in comparison to the gushing, grime-filled gore I had witnessed the previous day, and seemed just about to slowly make its streaked path down the side of my neck, when it paused, as if to consider whether this was the best course of action, and began slowly to coalesce and gel. This I could see, by all the gods I swear I could see, as if I were a third person in the room, watching helpless and voiceless from behind her back. The drop quivered and hung, like a bead on a necklace, its increasing inner weight straining against its thickening surface, and my eyes from above were unable to focus on anything other than that tiny, malignant, reddish black globe, reflecting, upside down, the wavering flame of the lamp and the oddly distorted and magnified face of the girl. I could see from the reflection that her eyes, too, were focused on the drop as if in a trance, considering all the implications to her life and to mine that were represented in that silently swelling little mass, that tiny, pregnant bulb, which itself appeared to be endowed with growing life, rather than merely reflective of it, and of death.

Without warning she straightened up, bringing the knife again to her eyes and examining the reddened tip for a moment in the soft lamplight, before shaking her head as one does when waking from a deep sleep, and slipping the knife quickly back into the sheath at her belt. She bent down again, silently licked the tiny red drop from my neck with her hot tongue, and just as silently kissed my dry and trembling lips. She then slipped back out to the cold coals of her campfire, as wraithlike as she had entered, and my soul came rushing back into my body, leaving me gasping for breath and shaking in cold perspiration, sitting up alone in the cot as if waking from a nightmare. We had said nothing to each other the entire night, indeed we had never yet spoken a word to each other, but I felt my fate as entirely in the hands of this woman as of the gods, and I realized what an extraordinary, and damnable thing that can be.