"Asteria," I said calmly, reaching my hand out to her as I struggled to regain my composure, "for the love of the gods! It was I who asked them to watch over you. You know my situation-I can't be caring for you every minute of the day as we march…"
She shook my hand off her shoulder roughly, glaring like a Fury.
"Did I ever ask you to? Have I ever asked you for a single thing, other than salves and medical supplies? Did you think those were all for me?"
"Asteria, please," I said placatingly, "your tunic. You know what I meant…"
"I know precisely what you meant, and I reject it absolutely. I refuse to be a comfort for you by night and a burden to these boys by day. The only thing I have to give them in return for their protection is myself, and I alone will be the judge of how I do that. I have chosen to be their physician. But if I had decided otherwise, you would have no right to complain."
I glared at her as she slowly, deliberately fastened the hook and loop at the neck of her tunic, and threw a tattered blanket over her shoulders for warmth, holding my stare with her own determined gaze. Finally she looked down and sighed loudly in exasperation.
"Perhaps I should have told you earlier that I was treating their ailments. I distrusted your reaction, and now I see, with good reason. When word spread how I had helped Nicolaus, dozens of the other Rhodians came seeking treatment as well. How am I to turn them away?-I am dependent upon them. They are merely boys, though Xenophon has turned them into killers, and they themselves are now dying like men-but they are still only boys."
"They're doing their duty," I said coldly, "as Xenophon has led them to do, no more nor less than the rest of us. The only breach of this pact binding us all to each other is you. This is a dangerous thing we have done. You are being smuggled. And if word of this violation were to become known throughout the army, the whole thread could unravel, and…"
She cut me off dismissively, tossing her shorn head in anger as she flopped back down in the corner among her supplies.
"So now my existence has been reduced to someone's breach of duty? I have my own betrayal burdening my soul."
"You bring up your father again, your invisible father? I see no betrayal-he's not here to help you, nor to suffer any disloyalty. Betrayal of a phantom is a phantom betrayal. I am speaking of something real, of my duty and honor to the army…"
"Men's honor, your precious honor, is the least of my worries. I am more concerned with the Rhodians' infected toes. I trust these boys with my life. There is no love lost between them and the rest of your thugs. The Rhodians have been made to feel like outsiders, like inferiors, for so long that you may rest assured they will not be doing any favors for anyone outside their little group-except perhaps Xenophon, who brought them together. I think they would die for him-or at least smuggle."
I stood fuming silently at this, at a loss for words, while she rearranged her tinctures and ointments in silence, as if she had forgotten I was even there. Finally, she looked up at me, a cold and impatient expression on her face.
"Would you please send in the next boy as you leave?"
The fourth night we spent in our lodgings, three Hellenic scouts who had become separated from the main body of troops after the previous river crossing finally straggled into camp, starving and nearly frozen to death, ill-prepared in their short tunics and oxhide sandals for the bitter conditions they had faced. The army surgeons were forced to remove the men's feet, ears and fingers, which had frozen under the influence of what the locals termed "frostbite." They were showing signs of gangrene, the flesh-rotting disease which, if not immediately cut from the body, would be sure to send its fatal poison throughout the entire organism. Before they died of sheer pain the next day, the hapless soldiers called for Xenophon, who came to their cots immediately, showering them with praise for their valor and promising them ample rewards upon their recovery and return to Greece. This the men shrugged off miserably, knowing perhaps that they were merely empty words of comfort. But the eldest among them, a veteran Cretan named Syphion, gestured to Xenophon to bend closer, to hear his final words.
"The fires, General," he croaked. Xenophon looked at the man, puzzled. "One day out, no more, for a man with healthy legs-thousands of fires in the hills. The Armenians-they're massing."
The other two men nodded in silence, and I shuddered. The wretched creatures had been staggering through the snow lame and frozen for days, surrounded by the sight of thousands of comforting campfires built to warm the asses of the enemy troops forming up in the hills, while unable to build their own tiny flame for fear of giving away their position. Xenophon helped the men drink a cup of wine, to warm their hearts and deaden their pain and fear of death, then wandered away thoughtfully.
"We can't stay here, Theo," he finally said in dismay. "Tiribazus has taken a lesson from Tissaphernes-he's breaking his truce and hoping to kill us in our beds. It's not safe for the army to be dispersed among the villages while the enemy masses on the heights."
I looked at the snow-covered hills, forage for the animals buried under two yards of white stuff, the troops ill-prepared to travel through the bitter cold. "How can you even think of marching the men under these conditions?" I asked. "Can't you see us, days hence? An army of ten thousand, crawling through the snow like poor Syphion, but without a warm village ahead of us at which we could hope to receive shelter."
He refused to meet my gaze. "We are divided among five villages, miles apart. We could never defend ourselves under these conditions. Better a chance of escape into the mountains, than certain death here in our beds."
He ordered the men to pack that very day and the army left the next morning, two hours before dawn, before the Armenians, whose campfires in the hills even our local scouts could now see on their nightly rounds, realized that we were departing. Some of the men, out of sheer malice and disregard for orders, burnt the huts they were leaving behind, and Xenophon ordered the scoundrels to be committed to baggage detail for an entire month as punishment. The skies cleared during the day and the men's hopes rose that the winter cold might lift for a time, and afford us proper traveling weather. This was in vain, however, for during the entire day we were scarcely able to lurch six miles through the deep drifts. That night, as we huddled under our blankets and improvised shelters of branches and wagons, a driving snow fell upon us, a snow that rose to the tops of the cart wheels, dousing our fires, collapsing our tents and covering the weapons and the men lying near them.
In the freezing, blinding storm, I picked my way carefully through the drifts to the Rhodian camp, or what I could find of it. Through a series of grunted questions and answers, I was able to make out Asteria's lodging-a shallow hollow against a large, rotten stump, not apart from the other troops this time, but rather shared with three or four exhausted, shivering boys. I wordlessly squeezed in beside her, surprised to hear no complaint from the Rhodian next to her about my clumsy jostling, until on a sudden impulse I touched his face and found he was dead. Horrified, I dragged the stiffened body a few feet away and laid it for protection in a deep drift. I then returned and mounded a low wall of snow around us all, as a desperate shelter from the roaring wind, checked the faces of the other Rhodians to be sure they were only sleeping and not expired as well, and nestled Asteria's shivering body against mine under the thin blanket. Though she made no effort to assist me, possibly still angry at my harsh words of several days earlier, neither did she protest. I pulled the blanket tighter, and watched the snow fall around and over us, and set myself to survive the endless night.