Michael Ford - The Ten Thousand

When the entire army had shifted upstream to the new crossing point, we noted that Charon had unloaded his craft on the far side, and with several of the strongest swimmers from the troops had again entered the river and was returning toward the bulk of the army, swearing in his incomprehensible barbarian tongue and pulling into the ferry any soldiers he encountered midstream who were on the verge of going under.

Despite his efforts, a dozen more men were lost, as were two more rafts with their priceless cargo of supplies, while crossing the river.

Men straggled into camp on the other side for the next two days, naked and blue with cold, their feet bleeding from the icy and thorny ground on which they had walked miles from the point they had made landfall, others dragging broken limbs battered from the thrashing they had taken against the river boulders or the rafts themselves. Not a man was without serious bruises, myself included, and we remained in camp for three days nursing our wounds and trying to warm our frozen bodies, while search parties were dispatched downstream on both sides in an effort to find any further survivors who might have lost their way. One of the search parties never returned, and we guessed its fate from the gleeful taunts of the fur-clad tribesmen who mockingly waved their spears at us from across the river on the second night of our stay. In return for Charon's dubious services and inept guidance Chirisophus ordered that his head be removed and sent across by a catapult improvised from a springy young sapling, to his jabbering compatriots on the other side of the river. After they had retrieved the carefully padded bundle from where it had landed on the river bank and examined it, they set up an outraged chorus of lamentations and insults, but in the end, troubled us no more.

That night I slipped off alone under a moon as livid and cold as the eye of a blind man, wrapped in a borrowed wolfskin, spurning or spurned by Asteria, as I had been for weeks. I walked until I came upon a vast, barren plain covered with low plant growth. I had no fear of the darkness, that glowering sky of the Homeric epics, for there was no greater night than the darkness I felt inside me. As I walked, my chest constricted with a long-suppressed shudder, and I breathed deeply, taking in the redolent night air. Of all the scents most capable of eliciting emotion and memory-the smoke of a wood fire, a woman's sleep-warm body under a blanket, chalk on a child's tablet-there is perhaps none so simultaneously comforting and threatening as the scent of the moon. The scent of the moon. I ask the reader to reflect, to turn inward and carefully, slowly, inhale the still night air: one cannot help but notice that the night's scent is different by moonlight. The moon comforts in the light that it sheds on the darkness, yet threatens by emphasizing that very darkness and the mystery that still remains in the shadows beyond the moon's reach. Even a blind man unable to perceive light is confident in noting that the moon is shining, and will feel simultaneously both an inner comfort and a sense of foreboding at this knowledge. It is really only a question of breathing.

I strode through the frigid night for many hours, immersed in my thoughts, my rage at the needless losses of the crossing, and at my own, personal loss of Asteria, for she had remained as cold and distant to me as a flickering star since our encounter on the cliffs weeks before. Finally, in a state of exhaustion of both body and mind, I threw myself face foremost into the fragrant leaves, the asphodel of Xenophon's dream. Lying as if dead, I let my spirit wander through my former life, the hours spent sitting quietly in my mother's lap, Aedon's ethereal singing, the pride I saw reflected in his father's face as he heard Xenophon's praises touted by the other nobles of the city, his fury when informed of his son's departure.

The grandeur, the warmth and gaiety, the exuberance of my past, the exhilaration of life in Athens, the guileless joy of youth, were overwhelming in their contrast to my current state, and it was only with great effort that I forced my mind elsewhere. It is a weakness in a man to let his thoughts slip thus into needless melancholy, yet I did not have the strength to move from my position, nor even to open my eyes. My body was exhausted, it is true, but even under the harshest of circumstances, during times when I have been near death, I have always been able to move my physical being. This, however, was different, something I had never experienced-a complete emotional exhaustion, a draining of my very will to live, a crushing of the spirit so complete that my body, hardened and lean as it was from the months of campaigning, was completely immobilized.

After a long while I found the will to turn onto my back and open my eyes, and I gazed in wonder at the clear and frozen night sky. On the vast, treeless plain on which I lay, with the vault of the heavens stretching from horizon to horizon, the light from the millions of stars was overwhelming. When I moved my head to the side I saw the stars' light reflected again in a billion bedazzling drops of frozen dew that had formed on the blades of grass and flower leaves, eliminating the horizon line that gives people their bearings and balance, their sense of proportion and of their very place on earth, leaving me floating in the ether. I felt as though surrounded by infinite specks of light on all sides, supporting me from below and suffocating me from above, quivering and flashing, throbbing closer and closer in rhythm with the beating of my heart, while the ancient Syracusan chorus from my childhood welled up from the very depths of my bowels, irrepressible, threatening to burst out at any minute and completely stifling my thoughts and my existence. I felt as if I were drugged, or mad, for the lights around and above and below me were spinning and pressing me down, as if into the vortex of Charybdis, while the unintelligible chorus inside swelled to a deafening roar. I would go insane if I did not put a stop to this, and mustering all the strength left in me, or given to me in my desperation by a passing god who took pity on me, I sat up and screamed with all my life, a frantic, throaty, stentorian bellow, which after seconds left me gasping and hoarse.

As my cry died away, the maddening terror of the inner music stopped instantly and the fragrant night air rushed furiously back into my lungs. The stars returned to their normal places, and the sparks of frost fell back into formation, lined up neatly along the horizon and no longer threatening to break rank. I sat as if paralyzed, gazing around at the plain, as if in the Land of Dreams where the burnt-out wraiths of mortals dwell. I listened to the silence in wonder, as intently as I had listened to the impending rush of madness, daring it to return, forcing my will to face it and defy it, even trying unsuccessfully to bring again to mind the hellish harmonies that had filled my being so completely a moment earlier. My soul had returned to me, and was again firmly attached to those murky recesses in a man's body where it lurks, like a bat roosting in the darkness, eyes glittering in watchfulness.

Strangely, sitting there in the vast silence, a soft sound became evident: so soft I thought I had not heard it, and yet so near that the hair bristled at the back of my neck. I froze, and listened more closely: again it came, the same almost imperceptible rubbing sound, the slightest scraping, not inches from where I sat. I lay silently on my side and placed my face close to the ground, at the point from which I thought the sound had come. It stopped for what seemed a lifetime, as if its maker were considering what meaning to ascribe to this large-headed being that had placed its shaggy, sweat-drenched body so close to it. Slowly emerging beneath my eyes, softly reflected in the glittering blackness, I could make out the translucent gleam of an earthworm, carefully, blindly feeling its way out of the tiny hole it had spent its life digging. The minuscule particles of dirt it shoved aside as it slowly moved made the softest of scraping sounds to my overly sensitized ears, and as a comrade worm emerged from its own hole a few inches away, I heard yet another soft scraping sound, made by the tiny cap of dirt being pushed away from the top of its hole.