The Lost Army Read online

  ‘Don’t imagine that this means you’re free to do as you please. Whoever disobeys an order or proves guilty of insubordination or cowardice will be put to death immediately, and I’ll carry out the sentence myself. I promise you that you will soon be more afraid of me than of the enemy. Your commanders will bear full responsibility for any errors made while executing my orders.

  ‘There are no troops anywhere better suited to accomplish this mission. No one can match you for valour, resistance and discipline. If you win you will be rewarded so generously that you’ll be able to leave this work and live well for the rest of your lives. If you are defeated, nothing will remain of you. No one will mourn your passing.’

  The men listened to those words without blinking an eye, and when he finished speaking they did not leave their places. They stood still and silent until their officers ordered them to break ranks.

  Clearchus had no apparent authority for commanding that army, but everyone obeyed him. He was the very image of a commander: gaunt cheeks framed by a short black beard, eyes that were deep and penetrating, armour polished to a high sheen, the black cloak flung over his shoulders.

  Like the men he commanded, he too was out of keeping with the mission: too harsh, too authoritative, too dramatic in appearance and behaviour. In all respects he was a man forged to carry out impossible tasks, certainly not to put down some trifling clash with troublemaking tribes from the interior.

  No one knew whether he had a family. He certainly had no friends. He didn’t even have slaves: just a couple of attendants who served him the meals that he always ate alone in his tent. He seemed incapable of emotion; if he had feelings he hid them well, apart from the occasional burst of anger that sent him into a rage.

  Clearchus was more machine than man, a machine designed and built for killing. During our time together, Xeno would have several close encounters with him and witness his prowess in battle: the man struck down his enemies with unrelenting, unfaltering energy, never missing a blow, never showing signs of flagging. Every life he took from another seemed to feed into his own. It wasn’t that he showed pleasure at killing, just the measured satisfaction of a man doing his job with method and precision. Everything about him inspired fear, but in the thick of battle his impassive ferocity and icy calm instilled a sense of tranquillity in the others, made them certain of victory. Under his direct command, he had all of the red-cloaked warriors. Everyone knew from the start that they were the best; no one could cross them without paying the consequences.

  Xeno knew some of the contingent commanders personally. Proxenus of Boeotia was a friend, the one who had convinced him to join the mission in Asia. Proxenus was an attractive man, and very ambitious: he dreamed of winning wealth, honour and fame, but over the course of the long march he showed that he wasn’t up to his position, and his relationship with Xeno started to deteriorate. It’s one thing to meet up in the city square and stroll under the porticoes or sip a cup of wine at the tavern while making predictions about politics or horses or dog races and exchanging witty remarks. It’s quite another to endure exhausting marches, to suffer hunger and fear, to compete for survival. Few friendships can withstand such trials and theirs soon failed, turning into wary indifference, if not outright dislike.

  Xeno knew the other commanders of the large units, the generals, as well. There was one in particular who fascinated him at first and then ended up disgusting him deeply. I believe Xeno hated him and wanted him dead; he was so intolerant of him that I think he blamed him for things he had never done, vile acts that perhaps he had never committed.

  This man was Menon of Thessaly.

  I met him as well when Xeno and I were following the army and I must say I was impressed. He was a little older than Xeno, thirty, maybe, with straight blond hair that came to his shoulders and often fell across his face so that the only part that you could see were his blue-grey eyes. His look was so intense it felt as if it could cut through you. His body was lean and athletic and he liked to show it off. He had muscular arms, but his hands were more like a musician’s than a soldier’s. Yet when you saw those hands curled around the haft of a sword or a spear you could see what terrible power was in them.

  I’d often notice him, in the evening, roaming our campsite with a spear in one hand and a cup of wine in the other, enjoying the admiration of both women and men. He wore nothing to cover his body; only a short, lightweight cloak, tossed over his shoulder and open on the right side. When he passed he left a trail of oriental perfume. But when the combat began he turned into a ferocious beast. That didn’t happen until many months after the troops had mustered at Sardis.

  I sometimes asked myself why Xeno hated Menon so. I know that the young Thessalian commander had never clashed openly with him; there’d never been a quarrel or a fight between them. In the end I became convinced that I was the unintentional cause.

  One evening, when the soldiers were pitching their tents for the night, I went to draw water from a nearby stream, carrying a jar on my head as I would do back at the well of Beth Qadà. Menon appeared suddenly on the bank just a short distance away from me, and as I dipped the jar into the water he unbuckled the clasp of his cloak and stood there naked. I don’t know if he was watching me because I dropped my head at once, but I felt his gaze on me, somehow. As soon as I filled the jar I started walking back towards camp, but he called me.

  I could hear the water splashing behind me as he entered the river and I stopped without turning. ‘Take off your clothes,’ he said, ‘come in with me.’ I hesitated a moment. It wasn’t that I desired the intimacy he was suggesting, but I was intimidated by his rank, his importance, and I didn’t dare let him think that I wasn’t listening.

  I think that Xeno may have seen us. I wasn’t aware of it; I’m sure that when I stopped to listen to Menon’s words there was no one else around. But afterwards, Xeno seemed unsettled, suspicious. He never said anything – he was much too proud for that – but a lot of little things let me know that a certain tension had crept in between us that wasn’t there before.

  The rest of Cyrus’s troops – the bulk of the army – had pitched their tents not too far from us, in a separate camp. There were many thousands of Asians from the coast and the interior, infantry and cavalrymen. A haphazard, multicoloured host who spoke different languages and obeyed their own chieftains. Cyrus disregarded them completely; the only person he had contact with was their commander, a hairy giant named Ariaeus, who always wore the same leather tunic. He had waist-long hair that he wore in long braids.

  He gave off a horrible stink and he must have realized it, because whenever he talked to Cyrus he always took a few steps back.

  Menon of Thessaly spent a lot of time with him; he was often over at the Asian camp, for reasons I was unaware of. Xeno always said that they had a physical relationship, that Menon was Ariaeus’s lover. ‘He’s having it off with a barbarian!’ he would jeer. ‘Can you believe it?’

  He wasn’t at all scandalized by the fact that Menon was going to bed with another man, it was the barbarian part that got to him. ‘So am I a barbarian,’ I protested. ‘But when you come to bed with me you seem to like it.’

  ‘That’s completely different. You’re a woman.’

  ‘How illogical!’ I thought to myself. I just couldn’t understand, but then with time it became clear to me. For Xeno and those like him it was totally normal that two men could be making love. But both of them had to be Greek; it was degrading to do it with a barbarian. That’s what he was accusing Menon of: of going to bed with a man who stank, who didn’t wash every day, who didn’t use a strigil and a razor. It was a question of civility. But I think that he was insinuating that Menon was playing the woman for that hairy, rank-smelling goat. He wanted to cut down Menon’s virility in my eyes because he thought of him as a rival.

  I was not attracted to Menon, although he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in my whole life, because I was so in love with Xeno that I had eyes for n
o one else. But I was curious about Menon; he fascinated me. I would have liked to talk to him, ask him some questions, perhaps. That world of men built and brought up only for killing gave me the shivers. From a certain point of view, Menon and Ariaeus were very similar to each other, identical, really. Maybe that’s why they made love together. I thought that their shared vows of savagery, the job of inflicting death, made them special somehow, so unique that they couldn’t tolerate someone in their bed who might attempt to stand in the way of their life’s work. A woman, for instance, a woman capable of giving life rather than taking it away.

  But perhaps this was only a fantasy of my own making. Everything was so strange, so new and different for me. And that was only the beginning.

  There were others who commanded the contingents of that great army. One of them was Socrates of Achaea. He was about thirty-five, powerfully built, with brown hair and beard and thick eyebrows. I would see him in formation every time Clearchus reviewed the troops. He was always on the left. Every so often he had supper in our tent and I overheard some snippets of his conversation with Xeno as I brought the food or cleared the table. I thought I heard he had a wife, whose name he mentioned, and some little children. When he spoke about his family his voice would grow quiet and you could see sadness in his eyes. Socrates had feelings then, a family he was fond of. Maybe he was doing this work because he had no choice, or maybe he’d had to obey someone more powerful than he was.

  He had a friend, another of the generals: Agias of Arcadia. I’d often see them together. They had fought on the same fronts, in the same theatres of war. Agias had once saved Socrates’s life by covering him with his shield when he’d fallen with an arrow in his thigh. He’d dragged him to safety under a hail of darts. They were very close to one another; I could tell from the way they talked and joked and exchanged experiences. They both hoped that the mission would be over soon without much damage so they could return to their families. Agias had a wife and children too: a boy and a girl, five and seven years old, who were being cared for by his parents, who were farmers.

  It made me cry to see that even the most relentless warriors were human beings, with the same feelings as other people I’d known in my life. I realized as time went on that many of them were like that. Young men whose breastplate and helmet were hiding a heart and a face like all the boys I’d known in my village, boys who were afraid of what was coming and yet who’d had the courage to join up in the hope of radically changing their existences.

  Be that as it may, Socrates and Agias were simple men, and rather reserved. They got on well with Xeno, but there was no personal friendship because Xeno wasn’t part of the ranks. Xeno answered to no one; he took no orders but gave none either. He was there because there was nowhere else he could be; because his city didn’t want him.

  ‘Do you miss it?’ I asked him once. ‘Your city, I mean?’

  ‘No,’ he answered. But his eyes said the opposite.

  Xeno set about his work scrupulously. Every evening, when the army had encamped, he lit a lamp in our tent and started writing. Not for very long, if the truth be told; by the time I had prepared dinner he had finished. Once I asked him to read me what he’d written and I was disappointed. Terse, brief notes: the distance covered that day, the point of departure and the point of arrival, whether we’d found water and could stock up on food, the cities we’d passed. Not much else.

  ‘But we’ve seen such beautiful things!’ I’d say, and remind him of the fast-running streams, the colours of the mountains and the fields, the clouds inflamed by the setting sun, the monuments of ancient civilizations corroded by time. Not to mention what he must have seen before he met me while crossing the vast Anatolian highlands that I’d heard about from those in my village who had been there.

  ‘Those are my own memories. What I’m writing here will be passed down as the memory of all of us.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘It’s simple. The beauty of a countryside or a monument is in the eyes of the beholder. Something that’s beautiful for me can be insignificant for someone else. The distance between one city and another is a valid, unquestionable fact for everybody.’

  That was certainly true, but sad, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t understand then that he had a particular reason for writing and that emotions didn’t come into it. He meant for the diary that he was writing to be used by anyone who wanted to follow the same path in the future.

  What I was most struck by, however, was the writing itself. No one in our villages could write. Stories were handed down by word of mouth, and everyone retold them however they liked. I was sure that the passage of Cyrus’s army and my flight from Beth Qadà had already been worked up into a good story, or very different stories, told by the village elders, some of whom were well practised in the art – not unusual in such small communities where hardly anything ever happens to satisfy people’s natural curiosity.

  I loved to watch Xeno, although I was always careful to stay out of his way: how he dipped his pen in the small jar of ink, how he moved it rapidly over the white papyrus paper. Those scrolls were precious, more costly than food or wine, than iron or bronze. That’s why Xeno usually wrote on a white stone tablet first, using a charcoal stick. Only when he was perfectly sure of what he wanted to set onto the page did he pick up his pen and recopy. He wrote in a very small, close hand to take up as little space as possible, and his script was extraordinarily precise, so that he formed a sequence of perfectly straight, well-aligned marks. Once those marks were drawn on the page they could become words any time he looked at them. It was marvellous! He could see how interested and fascinated I was by his writing. I knew that in the temples of the gods and the palaces of kings there were people called scribes, but I’d never seen anyone carry out that activity. Many of those warriors, if not most of them, actually, could write and I’d often see them draw marks on the sand or on the barks of trees. Their writing symbols were simple, like the aleph-beth used by the Phoenicians on the coast. I thought it couldn’t be too difficult to learn, and so one day I plucked up my courage and asked Xeno if he’d teach me.

  He smiled. ‘Why do you want to learn to write? What would you do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I like the idea that my thoughts would remain alive even after my voice has disappeared.’

  ‘That’s a good reason, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.’ And that was that.

  But Xeno’s art fascinated me, so that I started drawing marks anyway, on sand or wood or rocks, and I knew that some would be rubbed away by the wind and others by water, while others, perhaps, might still be there years, even centuries, from now.

  After the army left Sardis we travelled up the Meander river until we reached the high plain, stopping in a beautiful place where one of Cyrus’s summer palaces was located. There was a spring inside a cave there where you could see a skin hanging, the flayed hide of some wild animal. Xeno told me a story then that I’d never heard before.

  In that cave had lived a satyr, a creature that was half man and half goat, called Marsyas. He was one of the creatures of the woods who protect the shepherds and their flocks, and he would often sit alongside the stream to play his flute, a simple reed instrument. The melody he coaxed from his flute was sublime, deeper and more tender than a nightingale’s song. A melody that evoked shadowy recesses and moss with a strain that recalled the burbling of a mountain spring, a harmony that blended with the wind rustling the leaves of the poplar trees. He became so enamoured of his own music that he believed no one could play as well as he could, not even Apollo, who was the god of music for the Greeks. Apollo heard his boasting and appeared before him suddenly one afternoon in the late spring, as radiant as the light of the sun.

  ‘You challenge me?’ he demanded in anger.

  The satyr did not back down. ‘That was not my intention, but I’m proud of my music and I’m not afraid to measure myself against anyone. Not even you, O Shining One.�
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  ‘Challenging a god is not something you can do without putting yourself at great risk. If you won, your glory would know no bounds. Your punishment in case of defeat would have to be proportionate.’

  ‘And what would that be?’ asked the satyr.

  ‘You would be flayed alive. I myself would strip you of your skin.’ Thus saying he drew a razor-sharp dagger made of an unfamiliar, blinding metal.

  ‘Pardon me, O Shining One,’ said the satyr then. ‘How may I be certain that your judgement will be impartial? You risk nothing. I risk death, and an atrocious one at that.’

  ‘The contest will be judged by the nine Muses, the supreme divinities of harmony, of music, of dance, of poetry, of all the highest manifestations of human and divine nature. The only beings who can join the world of the mortals with that of the immortals. Nine is an odd number, so their verdict will favour one of us.’

  Marsyas was so intrigued by the idea of vying with a god that he thought of nothing else and accepted the terms of the challenge. Or perhaps the god, jealous of his art, fogged the satyr’s judgement.

  The contest took place the next day, as evening was falling, at the peak of Mount Argeus, still white with snow.

  Marsyas was first. He put his lips to his reed flute and blew into it the sweetest and most intense of melodies. The warbling of the birds ceased, even the wind subsided and a profound calm descended upon the woods and fields. The creatures of the forest listened enchanted to the song of the satyr, the rapturous music that blended all of their voices, all of the sylvan moans and whispers, the silvery tinkling of the waterfalls and the slow trickle of the caves, the trill of the skylark and the screech of the owl, the symphony of April rain on leaves and branches. An echo reflected the sound, magnified it, multiplied it over the crags of the huge, solitary mountain and through her ravines until mother earth vibrated down to her most hidden depths.