"Asteria, I've accepted your services to the Rhodians. I've acknowledged your skills. I've violated my duty to the army for you, destroyed a fellow Greek for you. Yet still you shrink from me-are you truly so burdened by this betrayal of your father? I need to understand."

She paused for a long time, and I struggled to see her eyes and face in the growing shadows cast by the rocks in which she sat. Her voice came from far away, so softly I had to lean forward to hear, and she spoke almost without moving her dry, cracked lips.

"I'm far beyond concerns of my father. I mortally betrayed him and could never return to him. He knows what I've done, he's cursed me, and he's punished me by proxy, through the deaths of those close to me."

"Who? How do you know these things if he is not here? How can he even know of such a betrayal, or you of his punishment?"

"You cannot see the distant sniper in the dark, yet you feel his silent intent when the arrow buries itself in your throat. You cannot see the plague, yet you witness men swelling and turning black. So it is with my father."

I peered at her again in puzzlement. Still unable to make out her expression, I extended my hand to touch her face, thinking perhaps she herself was suffering from a fever, wondering at the changes I had seen in her recently. She shook my hand off in irritation with a brief wince as if from some deep pain.

"Theo, I don't expect you to understand-but I must be alone right now, rather than in the company of… men. I'll be fine for the march tomorrow."

I nodded. How can anyone know what passes in the hearts of women? They are more fickle even than the gods. Though Zeus is lord of Olympus, who is it that rules his actions, if not Hera and her rivals? As I began picking my way back down the path to the encampment, I turned back once more to look at her. She had already returned to her own thoughts, pushed me far from her mind, as if my feeble attempt at reconciliation had never taken place. I was struck by the fragility of her thin, bare legs extended in front of her without so much as a blanket for warmth, by the vulnerability of her defeated posture, in sharp contrast to the shorn hair and rough tunic of a Rhodian slinger.

In the light of the pyre, I saw in her face an ineffable sadness, even a longing, as she gazed down at the burial party tending to the dead mothers and babies below the cliff, and I watched as with tense and tormented fingers she clutched at her own burning belly.

BOOK ELEVEN

For two urns stand upon the floor of Zeus's palace

Which hold his gifts to us, the one filled with evils, the other blessings.

When Zeus Lord of Thunder mixes his gifts between the two,

A man meets now with good fortune, now with ill.

But when Zeus bestows gifts from the jar of sorrow only,

That man becomes a pariah-cruel famine and madness

Pursue him to the ends of the earth,

And he wanders without aim, damned by gods and men alike.

– HOMER

CHAPTER ONE

BLIND HABIT WAS the only reason we were able to continue moving day after day, the only explanation for being able to endure and even ignore horrors which, in earlier times, would have thrown us into despair. Ignore, yes-but not forget. We forgot nothing. So long as we kept moving, surrendering ourselves to habit, we could push our wretchedness and the constant presence of death and disease to the backs of our minds. Fear can be endured if it is blunted and beaten into the dull form of a habit. But if we ever allow it to emerge, to take the keen edge of its true form, it will kill us as surely as a Scythian blade. The army had fought its way step by step through hostile territory for almost five months since Cyrus' death at Cunaxa, and by now we had settled into a routine, though one of resignation rather than inclination. Morale had stabilized at a sullen, resentful but dutiful level. Each day the men simply trudged in silence, pushing from their mind all thoughts but that of surviving to the end of the day, stepping up their pace and lifting their sight only when necessary to defend themselves against attack, an almost daily occurrence. Finally, however, the weather began to break, with whole hours, then days on end when the weak sun strengthened sufficiently to begin melting the snow, and the icicles glittering on the stunted trees dropped their essence lazily, almost reluctantly, into slushy pools below. The wind, though still biting as it whipped through the narrow defiles and mountain passes, now carried a subtle scent of new vegetation, and of clean moisture rather than of sterile, frozen death. Descending out of the mountains we marched a hundred and fifty miles in a week, contending each step of the way with the Chalybians, a vicious tribe that was prepared, even eager, for hand-to-hand combat against our emaciated forces. The tribesmen wore linen corselets reaching to the groin, as well as greaves and stout helmets, unlike any of the other tribes we had seen. They carried enormous spears, and in their belt long daggers like the Spartans. We lost dozens of men to their lightning-swift raids and attacks before at last we were able to repel them in one of the many battles which have now become too tiresome for me to recount.

We were told by our guides that the sea, and safety, was scarcely more than two hundred miles distant, half a month's march, though Xenophon was reluctant to give credit to this information and unnecessarily raise the hopes of the exhausted troops. Word nevertheless spread rapidly that we were approaching our final stage, and the men's pace perceptibly quickened, their limping seemed to recover somewhat, and they carried their shields with slightly more aplomb.

And then we came to the River.

The recent snowmelt had raised the icy waters of the Harpasos to a level far too high for a safe crossing. After all the rivers we had successfully crossed in the past half year, this flow, which was not even shown on the crude maps devised for us by our seers, stopped us dead in our tracks. The silt in the water was so thick it was impossible even to determine the river's depth. Xenophon sent scouts on horseback in both directions to try to identify a passable ford, and by sunset both parties had returned. The team that had scouted south failed to find a crossing, and in fact reported that the river was joined by another tributary several miles downstream, widening it further and rendering it even more dangerous. The squad that had traveled north was slightly more fortunate, having encountered a hunting party of local Chalybian tribesmen, whom they had quickly run down and pressed into service.

Their leader was a morose and surly individual, a hunter with the unlikely name of Charon, who was familiar with the river and agreed under duress to guide us to a point he said would be passable, though not without a certain degree of difficulty. With Charon guiding the main party, the heavy troops slashed their way upstream for two days over rocky ground and through brushy ravines. Xenophon trailed behind with a smaller contingent of light-armed troops to protect our rear and what little provisions remained in the limping wagons and sleds. Finally arriving at Charon's objective, we saw that the water still appeared as fast and as deep as before, though the man swore that here it could be traversed by the army, with proper precautions. Gazing due west in the direction we were to ford, the low sun had turned the sky blood red, reflecting its hellish color into the murky water and the yellowish foam of the rapids, and my stomach knotted. I again felt the massed, unintelligible chanting and dark, minor chords of the Syracusan chorus surging up from my bowels, like magma throbbing underground, threatening to burst.