Michael Ford - The Ten Thousand

There is an old story of the Thessalian King Knopos, who was advised by his priestess Enodia to select the largest and finest bull, and then drug it with her potion. The maddened bull escaped and was captured by the enemy, who accepted it as a good omen, sacrificed it and ate it in a feast. Upon consuming the drugs, they went mad and were slaughtered by Knopos' troops in a brutal attack. Whether the Colchians had poisoned our honey in their retreat in the manner of that ancient king, or whether the starving bellies of our troops were simply unaccustomed to the richness of this dessert, within hours all who ate of it fell violently ill, leaving their senses, puking and retching, an astringent greenish diarrhea running uncontrollably down their legs. Men who merely tasted the honey appeared as if they were drunk. Those who ate a great deal ranted like madmen, raving and feverish, lying about in heaps and sometimes even dying, recalling the days of the plague in Athens. Men rolled on the ground in pain, their bellies distended, their faces contorted and their swollen tongues turning blue as they bit their own flesh in agony. The stickiness on their hands and faces, which they had not even had time to wash off before being stricken, collected dirt and leaves from the ground, as well as the filth being ejected from their bodies. As they lay in agony, their eyes pooled in horror and disbelief at the realization that after months of bravery and hardship, the seemingly invincible Greek warriors could be brought to defeat and collapse by such innocent sweetness.

Not a man, Xenophon and the other officers included, could stand on his feet, and it is a wonder that the Colchians did not return and slaughter us all in our wretchedness. Indeed, many of the troops would have thanked them for putting them out of their misery. The fact that the Colchians did not return is perhaps the truest proof that they had not, in fact, knowingly poisoned the honey, and I should probably be thankful to the gods for that, though I cannot help but think that if I were to praise the deities for such an empty gift, I would only be encouraging them in their puerile games. Had I seen such a scene as this in a play in Athens, I would have scoffed at the playwright's clumsy and heavy-handed treatment of irony, bringing the most valiant and long-suffering fighters on earth to their knees by a pleasure as innocent as a mouthful of honey. No doubt the audience, too, would have been offended at the author's apparent insult of the gods. The fact that this was no mere stage drama made the deities' betrayal all the more damning.

Most of us recovered within a day or two, and stumbling to our feet as if dazed and drugged, we staggered back into formation, burying the dead and attempting to regain our threadbare dignity. Asteria, however, a lover of honey since childhood, had gorged on the substance, and when I was finally able to locate her among the miserably retching groups of Rhodians, I found her lying unconscious, scarcely breathing, her bile-encrusted lips turning blue with cold and her bare legs under the short tunic caked with the filth in which she had been lying untended. Weak and trembling as I was, I struggled to pick her up and was startled to find that her body felt as light and fragile as a bundle of dry twigs, bereft of any muscle or fat after the long march and the purging of the last two days. All remaining softness had disappeared from her limbs and torso, and her feverish face was hollow with huge, darkly circled, watery eyes, which had rolled back into her head with only the whites showing beneath the bluish lids. I carried Asteria's body in my arms along the path down the last range of coastal foothills, and I felt certain that my own life had ended.

THAT DAY, A year after their glorious departure from Sardis, something under ten thousand starving, half-naked, bushily bearded Greek troops, wearing full, battered armor and bearing triumphant expressions, limped in perfect formation out of the foothills before the incredulous townspeople of Trapezus. Grime filled every pore and fold of their skin, and traces of the dried vomit from their most recent misadventure were still visible in the corners of their mouths and under their chins. Their teeth were rotten or missing, and they hawked great phlegmy gobs on the earth which were trampled under the thickly horned, bare feet of the men marching heedlessly behind them. Their dented helmets were slung from their shoulders by the nasals, or simply perched carelessly on the tops of their heads, the empty eye sockets peering blackly at the sky, like masks on their pegs. The men told unbelievable tales of walking a thousand miles overland from Babylon, and they bore only half as many toes and fingers as an army that size should have. The troops around me bellowed out the paean to Apollo in their weary gratitude at having finally arrived among friends and allies, and the townspeople looked on in wonder and awe at the men's matted hair and tattered scarlet cloaks, but I was deaf and blind to all around me. In truth I was hardly in worse shape than when I had started, with the exception of the physical toll I had suffered, which would fade with time. Still, I had had a taste of glory and fullness, I had desired Xenophon's peach, and once having known a hint of such richness, even for an instant, its absence made me feel infinitely poorer.

I broke ranks without informing a soul, and entered the first miserable inn I encountered, kicking in doors with my feet until I found a room with a vacant cot, where I deposited Asteria's body before turning to arrange settlement with the astonished innkeeper. I had no money, not an obol to my name, so I left my battered and still blood-begrimed shield and helmet as surety, gave instructions that I was not to be disturbed except for a simple meal once a day, and entered the room with Asteria, closing the door behind me on the innkeeper and on the army, on Xenophon and on the man I was up to that day.

I am no physician, certainly no Hippocrates, and I doubt that any but midwives and witches would have been available in that wretched town in any case. To tell the truth, I was more concerned with finding an undertaker than a physician, though often in such places the same august personage would fill one and the same role, conflict of interest notwithstanding. The army surgeons I had seen among our troops and even in Athens invariably had but one remedy for hemorrhage: further bleeding. If the woman survived that, she would survive her illness; if not, then so it was ordained by the gods. The Hippocratians would put on an impressive show, to be sure, taking samples of the patient's vomit, blood, tears, snot, uterine fluid, sweat, urine, runoff from festering wounds, ear wax, and any other bodily emissions they could extract, then analyze them by tasting them, or if the patient were cogent, having her taste them herself. But I would have no such indignities performed on Asteria. I would care for her my way.

During one of the long evenings, as I sat silently on the edge of her cot watching her fitful and feverish sleep, I fetched a bowl of cool water and proceeded to sponge the perspiration off her body, trying despite the filth of our surroundings to keep her in some semblance of cleanliness. I absentmindedly murmured her name, "Asteria," more to myself than in any hope she might answer me. The word passed through the long, vast wilderness of her consciousness, enveloped in darkness and inhabited by shades, meandering through the lonely byways of her mind and lingering for eons, it seemed, before finally reaching its destination; whereupon it slowly elicited a response, which traversed the tortuous path back through the shades to the outside as the mists slowly dissipated and her tongue moved laboriously, her eyes still closed: "Theo." The word was spoken so softly it startled me, and I wasn't even sure I had heard it, for her expression had not changed, nor had her eyelashes even fluttered. I had almost resigned her whisper to a figment of my imagination, perhaps a truer assessment of my existence than I had ever realized, when she spoke again, with an infinite effort: "Forgive me."