After this came the real show-the enormous, straggling, jeering and cheering crowd of camp followers-leather tanners, con artists, prostitutes, water sellers, musicians, jugglers, seamstresses, money changers, laundry women, wives and children of the soldiers themselves, and a horde of beggars and tramps trailing behind, a complete representation of the entire lower strata of Persian and Greek society, a veritable city of thousands, half again as many as the soldiers themselves, who made their living serving and fleecing the army by day and entertaining it by night, or perhaps the other way around. They were despised by the officers and army regulars, but ultimately tolerated and even protected, because otherwise the services they provided would have to be rendered by the troops themselves, and trained fighting men were too valuable to be wasted on mundane camp tasks.
I shall not go into excessive detail regarding the daily progress of our march. For the most part the routine was uneventful. Cyrus had arranged for sufficient provisions from the outset, so we were not dependent upon foraging from the countryside as we passed through. Consequently, our arrival in each city and village was not feared by the inhabitants, but was instead an occasion for cautious celebration. The prince traveled with an ever-present chest of copper coins, which he would toss in handfuls to the crowds on either side, with the expansive gestures of a benevolent father. The crowds would mill frantically around the caravan, competing with the native company of beggars from Sardis, and create an uproar as they scrambled in the dust for the tiny coins that became trampled underfoot. Cyrus and his minions rode past, solemn, imperious, only the occasional tight-lipped smile breaking the gravity of their demeanor, watching as their subjects rolled in the filth at the feet of their horses.
Thus we traveled steadily eastward across the length of Asia Minor, in good weather and order, the men challenged every day by Cyrus' insistence on readiness and drilling, and by daily inspections of our equipment and weapons. We tramped straight into the heart of Pisidia-though contrary to our expectations of battle and plunder, we fired not a single arrow nor captured any enemy territory. The prince disdainfully ignored the barbarian warriors lined up warily along the ridge tops, watching our enormous trains of baggage, our servants, and our camp followers in awe. Five weeks into the march, we stopped at one of the Great King's palaces on the River Meander, which we used for a month as a way station to regroup and retrain, and to resettle the baggage. It was here, legend has it, that Apollo punished the leering satyr Marsyas, who had challenged the god to a music match. Apollo played his lyre upside-down and demanded that Marsyas match this feat with his flute, which of course he was unable to do. After flaying the foolish satyr alive, Apollo hung his skin on the wall of a nearby cave, whence comes the source of a small but wild local river fittingly named the Marsyas.
It was here, too, that the long-awaited Clearchus joined us with the remaining core of the army he had raised earlier with Cyrus' darics, a thousand fierce and silent scarlet-cloaked Spartan men-at-arms, each with two or three helot slaves to carry their heavy armor and weapons. He also brought eight hundred broad-shouldered Thracian targeteers who had defected to his forces, and two hundred Cretan bowmen. These were to form the hard-muscled center of Cyrus' Greek army, over which Clearchus himself was general, the counterpart to a Persian named Ariaius who commanded Cyrus' native forces. Clearchus was as terrifying an individual as Proxenus had led us to believe, and worse. His face was so homely and pockmarked as to be almost comical, but he had an evil, jagged scar running halfway down the side of his temple, which he was constantly picking at, keeping it inflamed, perhaps intentionally, for effect. His beard was so ragged and lice-infested as to raise eyebrows even for a Spartan, and he never smiled-in fact, he hardly even talked except to cuss out his men, and could barely chew for the rotten blackness of his teeth. He rode disdainfully among his troops, scarcely deigning to show obeisance to Cyrus, but his new recruits marched in perfect unison, without a single wasted movement or word, showing little concern and even less curiosity at the hundred thousand native troops gathered to watch their arrival. They followed Clearchus' smallest gesture and command as closely as if they were a single machine-a war machine, one begotten in turn by a determined god.
During the army's reorganization here at the Meander, Clearchus, surveying the situation, flew into a fury and demanded that the quantity of baggage and camp followers be drastically reduced-the Spartans refused to fight to protect clothing wagons, flute girls and kitchen staff. Cyrus resisted for a time, although when Clearchus threatened to march away with the troops he had just brought, the prince acquiesced in part, cutting the baggage train and followers by half, and paying the latter in gold to return to their homes. He insisted, however, in the face of much Spartan grumbling, on keeping a small coterie of slave girls and attendants-the prince was Persian, and had appearances to keep up.
In view of what the Fates had in store for me, I cannot say whether the prince's stubbornness in this affair was to my benefit or not, though his decision had as great an impact on my life as any decree from the gods, or from the Spartans, for that matter.
Clearchus be damned.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE RAGGED, BAREFOOT boy sat on a boulder at the side of the trail, staring steadily into the distance as he methodically reached into the leather pouch at his hip, picking out grubs he had collected from beneath logs and roots, and munching them one by one. Not that I had ever been especially fond of the grubs and grasshoppers I myself had eaten as a slave in Athens-they filled the belly, barely, and that was about all one could say in their favor-but the fact that this boy was eating them so systematically indicated that they were a mainstay of his diet, not a supplement as they had been for me, and I sympathized with him.
For an hour Xenophon and I had been riding through the narrow gorge of the Meander, picking our way carefully upriver along a rocky trail ripe for twisting a horse's knee or laming its foot. We were seeking a crossing point that our guides had said was to be found nearby, but had seen nothing but the ruins of two rope-and-log bridges that the locals had recently cut, apparently in an attempt to hinder the army's progress. In fact, the army was not even following that path-Cyrus had no interest in pursuing minor tribes of nomadic herdsmen into the interior mountains. Still, our herds had been harassed lately by Pisidian raiding parties, and Xenophon had volunteered to go out in search of a path by which a more heavily armed band of hoplites might later be sent to frighten them away. Proxenus had consented, and assigned to us an interpreter named Cleon, and two Boeotian scouts.
We had to speak loudly to be heard above the roaring of the water, which rushed in a torrent through the narrow gap it had been cutting for the past several miles. On our right was a steep, gravelly hill, almost a cliff, unclimbable, riddled with the holes of an enormous colony of rodents that had constructed a vast network of tunnels beneath the surface. Small spills of flaking shale and debris occasionally tumbled down in front of or behind us as we passed, startling us into thinking that someone must be above us at the top of the ridge; yet whenever we looked, we saw only the pockmarked gravel and the occasional small furry head peeking stealthily out of a hole.