Michael Ford - The Ten Thousand

I looked up and saw her struggling to speak, gasping silently, her lips and tongue working thickly. Some inner surge of energy had welled up within her, and she would not be put down. Her lids lifted half open, and she looked at me strangely, feverishly, with glassy eyes that alternated from steely gray to pale blue as my flickering light reflected off them, only to become suddenly very dark, the color of the ocean depths or of the grave, if touched by even so much as a hint of shadow.

"Theo," she struggled. "You loved Proxenus as a brother, as you love Xenophon." I nodded silently, my astonishment at hearing her speak tempered by the fear that it was some awful disclosure that was prodding her to do so. I begged her to be silent, to rest.

"I'm sorry, Theo," she gasped again, and then lay panting, her eyes closed, struggling to regain her breath and her calm. I did not interrupt her effort, except to tighten my grasp on her racing pulse, and to pad away the beads of perspiration that had sprung out on her forehead in her feverish striving.

"Asteria," I said finally, "you have nothing to be sorry for. Proxenus was a soldier, he died as a soldier, and he is with the gods."

At this her eyes fluttered wide open, and her expression was absorbed by an inexpressible sadness and torment. "I-I killed him," she said, looking straight into my eyes, and then repeated it over and over, in a voice drained of strength and emotion, fading away from me again. "I killed him."

Oddly, I felt a relief at this, knowing full well that she had done nothing of the sort and that she was merely being taunted by a grotesque dream, some savagery of the gods who were not satisfied with torturing her body, but sought to torment her mind as well.

"Asteria, sleep. You killed no one, it is only a dream." She was still agitated and shaking, still trying to say something, which I knew would be only further hallucination. I sought to dissuade this useless expenditure of her depleted strength by repeating the calming words. "You did not kill Proxenus. Tissaphernes did. You are innocent."

At this she gasped and nearly sat up in her frustration at being unable to make me understand, and her desperation to speak. "You foolish man!" she blurted, in a voice rasping and whispery, her face contoured with pain. " I am Tissaphernes!" Thus having spoken she collapsed back down onto her flat, sodden pillow, panting and wretched. I sat wide-eyed, astonished at the strength of her outburst, but at length I resumed my calming litany of platitudes, and was finally rewarded to see her shallow breathing return to normal, and her tensed limbs begin to relax.

She looked up at me once more, her face bearing an expression of profound sadness. Her lips worked silently, and I thought she might again try to give voice to words better left unsaid and unpondered, but then, slowly closing her lids, she reentered the land of shades and dreams which she had inhabited for so many days. Dreams, those torments, desires, false and true portents-that larval, ghostly world inhabited by an even greater abundance of jeering, irrational beings than may be found in our waking existence. She disintegrated as if descending down an ever darkening well, each level more constricting than the last. I was beyond her now, she was fighting her own battle, entirely alone with her little life and the memories of her meager sins, and even when sleeping she occasionally wept hot tears because both her years and her memories were quickly departing.

Later that night, I carefully rolled her into a fetal position in an attempt to relieve the unremitting fire in her belly. I then gently stroked her neck and back hairline, that soft, magical place on a woman's body where the smooth curve of her nape becomes as downy as a child's and then transforms into the line of soft, feathery wisps along the curved edge of her locks, those tiny hairs that defy all attempts at taming, even when the rest of the woman's hair is subject to the most elaborate binding. Wondrous little cilia they are, which when backlit by a lamp, shine and glow like a sort of aurora, undying remnants from the woman's childhood, as visible and as beautiful and as unmanageable on the richest Persian queen as on the poorest peasant maiden, the first hairs to appear as an infant, guardians of her sweet, female scent her entire life, the last wisps to remain on her head in her feeble dotage, defying time and space. I lingered there with the cool sponge, emptying my mind and thinking of nothing as she sighed and murmured in her sleep.

I had just leaned down to lift her back to the center of the cot when I noticed a small mark or spot, just at her back hairline. I had never noticed it before, for prior to her illness I had never seen Asteria's body in daylight, and before that, when Cyrus was still alive, her neck had never been exposed due to her long hair. Bringing the oil lamp closer and bending down slowly, I could make out the faded outlines of the traditional infant tattoo she had been given after her birth in Sardis, to identify her father and family origins in the event of a disaster. I peered at it carefully, trying to make out the faint lines and distinguish between shadow and ink, when suddenly I caught my breath and sat up as if stung by a scorpion, jostling her roughly and causing her to moan in her sleep.

The symbol on her neck was one I had seen and trembled at many times, one that had haunted my dreams for nights on end, one I thought I had left behind me forever months before-the winged horse of Tissaphernes.

I was horrified, and shuddering, I stood up and backed away from her cot to the far wall, where I stood motionless, staring at the shriveled, miserable creature lying unconscious across from me. Coming to myself, I paced the room for hours, pounding my fist at the stone wall until the knuckles bled, bellowing my rage and defiance of the gods, willing myself, against all better judgment, to ignore what I had just seen, to remain constant toward Asteria as if she had not been so savagely defiled by the tiny mark, more polluted than she could ever have been by foul Antinous in the hut. The effort I made was supreme, perhaps more exhausting than any I had experienced on the entire march, for this was a battle within myself, against the very gods, and one that I fought bitterly in my mind and my soul until finally, utterly depleted, I collapsed on the floor and slept a sleep of death, but the sleep of a victor.

Hours later I awoke, and listened for Asteria's breathing, and was at peace. The trap of the gods had not defeated me, for unlike one that strikes at one's health or that threatens one's safety, this was a strike at the mind, and at my mind alone, one that I had in myself to accede to or to defeat. The gods force men to love those whom they should not, and to disrequite those whom they should. Answerable only to their own devices, which are unknowable to mortals, they let perish those who should live, and spare those who should perish. But this time the gods' comedic timing was off. The annoying satyr that had been dogging my tracks for weeks had made this one further cheap attempt to play the clown, but had flubbed his lines, fatally delaying his entrance until far beyond the point when the maximum impact could be felt. Rather than meriting a standing ovation from his fellow deities at the cleverness of his stage pranks, he elicited nothing more than a bored yawn. My state of mind was now such that I could think of no better vengeance on Tissaphernes than this. The classic elopement scene, the showdown between the enraged father and the grinning and triumphant son-in-law. The nasty, hairy-eared little demon who had been pursuing me made a quick exit from the stage in embarrassment, and did not return.

I buried her in the hills outside the town, in a hole scratched into the earth using my sword and bare hands. No marker or monument did I erect, for Asteria's very presence in this city was unknown to all but myself and the Rhodians, and I had no need of such a token. The only possession of hers I retained was a small, battered feather I withdrew from her matted hair just before winding the sheet about her body.