The Ten Thousand

BOOK TWELVE

Self-born, untaught, motherless, unshakeable,

Giving place to no name, many-named, dwelling in fire…

All-seeing ether…

– INSCRIPTION FROM A TEMPLE WALL IN LYCIA

IT WAS HIS eyes I first noticed: sightless, watery orbs clouded an opaque creamy color from the thick cataracts covering them. He was as blind as a worm, yet his sightless gaze bored through the passersby on the crowded street as he peered straight into my face.

Listening carefully, I could hear his strange song rising above the background din of the street. The lyrics were faint, hardly more than a mumble, a repetitive chanting under the breath, but their effect was immediate and terrible. Trembling, I shouldered my way across the dusty street and seized the tottering old man roughly by the arm.

"Where did you learn that? Who are you?" He stared at me as I hissed at him, his blank expression slowly creasing into a grin, and he began laughing, the laugh of the deranged or the desperate. I thought perhaps he didn't hear me, or couldn't understand, so I brought my face closer. "Who are you?" I pleaded again, slowly and deliberately. My fingers gripped his surprisingly firm bicep in a kind of desperation. Despite my harsh grasp, no wince passed across his face-merely a vague stare, of amusement perhaps, even of triumph, though the strength of any emotion he might have been feeling was not sufficient to halt his mindless chuckling. I despaired of an answer, and stood there trembling in frustration, one old man tormenting another on a noisy street corner in Sparta.

Again he began his rhythmic, mournful chant, swaying slightly in time to his mental chorus, his face turned toward me expectantly.

The words to his song, which had remained latent for decades in my memory, in a misty corner of Mnemosyne's regions to which I rarely traveled, now echoed and rolled through my mind once again, taking on thoughts and shapes and a life of their own. A faceless, black-haired young woman leaning over me as I rested on her lap, singing a song-a lullaby?-in a low voice, an exotic, primitive melody that was more a chant than a tune, and which over the years had lent itself to endless variations in my inner thoughts. The words themselves were unintelligible to me, a language I had never spoken and do not understand. It is not the familiar Doric of Syracuse, nor even the obscure Elymi or Sicani, for I have spoken with many Sicilian merchants and soldiers in my life, and none, during my discreet queries, recognized any of the words I attempted to parrot from the recollections of my infancy. A Phoenician map-maker I once asked told me the sounds were like those of his language, though he recognized none of the words. Is memory such an ephemeral thing that even my earliest and most sacred impression, that of my own mother, has been unrecognizably corrupted?

I loosened my grip on the old man's arm, and dropped a handful of obols into the small clay bowl he was carrying, probably more money than he had ever held at one time in his life. The insane cackling ceased immediately, and he wrenched his arm away from my clench with a strength that was astonishing for one seemingly so frail. It was only with great effort and much coaxing that I was able to soothe him from his mindless babbling and elicit from him anything approaching lucidity.

"My little song?" he asked, and as he bobbed his head and resumed his chuckling, I feared I had lost him completely. He recovered his concentration, however, as quickly as it had eluded him seconds before, and my heart began alternately stopping and racing as his attention ebbed and flowed. "Those words…" he rasped, "Those words mean nothing! Ha! Ha! A nonsense rhyme I learned from my grandfather in Syracuse a century ago, who learned it from his grandfather…" He began losing his focus again as this counting of the generations broke down into more hoarse laughter. I glimpsed in my mind the faint shadows of his forgotten ancestors and mine, ancient Sicilian warriors who had lived when the gods still walked the earth, and I saw them slowly recede back into the mists from which they had just been unexpectedly summoned. Like those very deities, who once could effortlessly cross the line of mortality, assuming human form or godlike essence at will, they were dead.

I emptied my purse into his clay pot, again halting his mindless chortling when he felt the suddenly increased weight in his hand. Peering up at me with his rheumy eyes, he blessed me by nodding gravely, and as he clenched my forearm I was startled to note that his gnarly, bent fingers belied a grip forceful and unyielding, like that of a warrior with strength yet remaining for battles to be fought. His gaze locked on mine, and he recited again, in a low, cracking voice, the precise words I remembered my mother chanting from so many years before. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and then my knees weakened and I wept openly in the street, the passersby averting their eyes in embarrassment.

After a moment I stood up shakily and walked away in silence, convinced I had wrung everything from the old man that he was capable of giving. I had returned across the crowded street, my vision still a blur, when it occurred to me how singular it was to have seen a beggar here. Under this city's harsh administration, vagrancy was punishable by, what?-death? imprisonment? No reasonable man would even attempt to beg in Sparta. Panicked at the danger the old fool would face if caught, I whirled and raced back across the street, dodging the carts and mules passing in front of me, to the corner where he had stood a moment before.

It was empty.

My family: two lines of ancient and forgotten song recited by a tramp. I later taught them to Xenophon's sons, in a fruitless effort to keep them among the memory of the living.