Escorts arrived from the interior to take us on. These were youths, spectacular horsemen with foxskin boots and bridles of silver. “What prince do you serve?” Telamon asked, admiring their spirit.
“Prince Alcibiades,” our guide declared.
The lad boasted that his master's fortune, got from raiding the tribes east of the Iron Mountains, exceeded four hundred talents. If this was true, Alcibiades held more wealth than the treasury of Athens, bereft now even of her final emergency reserve. Spartans and Persians paid court to him, the youth bragged, and Prince Seuthes himself stood his sanction. We inquired what type of troops he commanded, expecting peltasts and irregulars, tribesmen who would melt away at the first snowflake.
“Hippotoxotai,” the youth replied in Greek. Mounted archers. We exchanged a glance at this wild tale. Some miles farther our guide reined us in, overstanding a heathland valley. There across an expanse that would have swallowed Athens whole the turf stretched sundered by hoof strikes and littered end-to-end with camp debris, through which women and dogs ranged, scavenging.
Great barrows had been thrown up for sacrifice; we saw stands before which troops had passed in review and dikework ponds where streams had been dammed for the watering of horses in the thousands.
“Hippotoxotai,” the youth repeated.
We rode all day. This part of Thrace is treeless. Rather the ground is swarded with species of low flowering hedges which find the cold hospitable; these heatherlike ivies produce carnelian berries, quite pretty, and provide a carpet over which horses may gallop at speed and upon which one sleeps, wrapped in his pelt mantle, with the bliss of an infant. Peaty rills gush beneath beetling prominences, so cold a draught numbs your teeth and leaves fingers sensation less. Tribal territories are bounded by these courses. To water one's horse on the land of another is a declaration of war, and that in fact is how they do it.
Fleas abound in Thrace, even in winter. They infest every covert from beards to bed-wrappings; nothing short of a plunge into ice may dislodge them. Horses are runty, tough as rawhide; they can pack their own weight all day and fear nothing save the swell of the sea's edge, or perhaps the salt stink of it, which takes them mad with fright.
For myself, I debarked in the country upon as doleful a frame as I had ever known. The place cheered me. It was like dying and going to hell. Nothing could be worse, so you might as well perk up. I believe it exercised a similar tonic on Alcibiades. The people had a vigor. Their gods were refreshingly uncouth. And the women.
In raiding cultures a man packs with him all he wishes not to lose.
These flea-biters ranged with sisters, mothers, daughters, and wives, all itching for trouble. One would think a man of my history would lose appetite for the female. But such is the ungovernable nature of that captain between our thighs that life, or heat at least, does implausibly return. I found myself content to be on campaign again. The soldier's life agreed with me. I was watching a Thracian dame milk a bitch (they mix dog's milk with millet to make a porridge for their babes) when it struck me that I was interested in something. The supreme mystery of existence is this: that, perceiving it for what it is, we yet cling to it. And existence, despite all, discovers measures to reanimate our despoliated hearts.
The words for wind and sky are one in Thrace: aedor, a god's name, which is neither feminine nor masculine but of such antiquity, they say, as to antedate gender. Thracians believe the world upheld not by earth, but sky, elemental and everlasting. They chant this hymn:
Before earth and sea was sky
And sky endures, them past.
In you too, Man, breathes aedor first And takes leave last.
Wind is of profound substance in the protocol of Thrace. The natives are never unaware of its “beat” or “nose,” as they call the quarter from which it blows. No man-at-arms may stand upbeat of his better. The nobler takes the beat at his back; the lesser endures it in his face.
Camps are laid out by wind, and a prince's retinue forms up by beat. With Seuthes this was above a hundred, each stationed about his principal in a hierarchy as elaborate as the court of Persia.
Only one foreigner ever mastered the nuance of the Knights' order of Thrace. Need I name him?
We had bypassed his coastal castle, seeking him inland beyond the Cold Ford, the second tier of mountains, where he had gone, our buck informed us, on a salydonis, a combination hunt and rite by which a lesser lord pledges fealty to a greater and upon which the Spartans, Endius' legation, had accompanied him as a way of assessing the troops Alcibiades and Seuthes proposed to ally with them. For two days we encountered no one, not even herders for the sheep, whose fleeces in that remote province are undyed by their holders, as the code of hospitality permits any to take what he needs. Then at midmorning a solitary rider appeared on the skyline, a thousand feet above us, advancing across our vision with the fearless grace of a young god. The rider descended the slope by traverses as we mounted toward him.
When the prince came closer, however, we realized it was a girl, in hide buskins like a man. One was struck by the gloss and amplitude of her mane, shiny as sable, and which she wore tied in a knot at the crown, while tendrils flew about her face in the wind.
“Stay here,” our guide commanded. “Face into the beat.” He trotted to greet her. The foot-bearers overhauled us. “Who's this sparrow?” Telamon inquired.
“Alexandra,” our cub replied.
This was Seuthes' woman, no mere bed companion but his bride and queen. She did not deign to acknowledge our party's existence but parleyed apart with our guide. I asked if women traveled alone in Thrace.
“Who offends her, sir, makes himself a banquet for crows.” We had been warned never to stare at another man's woman. In this case it was impossible. The princess's hair shone, glossy as a marten pelt, and her eyes mated it like jewels. Her horse, too, complemented her color as if she had selected him, as a city woman a gown, to set off her eyes and skin. The beast seemed to sense this as well, so that the two, animal and woman, constituted one creature of spectacular nobility, and both knew it.
We reached Alcibiades' camp that night. Endius was there, with a party of Peers, colonel or higher. Seuthes had ridden to the interior, raiding. Alcibiades commanded four nations, thirty thousand men, the greatest army west of Persepolis.
We rode out next day to observe the training. The horse troops present were Odrysian and Paeonian, five thousand, with another ten thousand Scythian archers and peltasts. The Greek officers who served as cadre had rigged a mock fort on a strongpoint of the plain, which expanse spread calf-deep in snow, and across which ranged that army of wild dogs which track the Thracian hordes, scavenging their scraps. The exercise called for two wings of cavalry to assault from the south, upbeat, while the third struck from the north, supported by the infantry. In no time it broke down to blood madness. The Thracians could not grasp the concept of practice. They began firing in earnest and must be waved off by frantic Greek officers. The savages possessed one object only: to impress their princes with their individual daring and horsemanship. One espied any number standing atop their mounts at full gallop, slinging lances and axes; others clung side-style, firing arrows beneath their animals' necks. Only a miracle prevented a bloodbath, and now, drill aborted, each bogtrotter wanted his weapons back. Into the fracas these desperadoes descended, brawling merrily over their kit while calling in kin and kind to back them.
The carousal and copulation after dark defied depiction.
Bonfires made boulevards across the plain, ringed with figures capering ecstatically to tom-tom and cymbal. One could not but fall in love with these wild, free fellows. But as one picked his way across the camp, stepping over the forms of sodden fornicating louts, he understood why these, the most numerous and valorous warriors on earth, had never carved a scratch on the waxboard of history. Their dogs possessed more discipline.