"Watch this," Xenophon said to the men with a grim smile. "Theo, wave the attack to Chirisophus."

I tore off my helmet and mounted it on the point of an eight-foot spear I seized from a hoplite standing nearby, and raising it high, pumped it up and down three times in the prearranged signal. A moment later, a tremendous roar lifted up from Chirisophus' troops far below, as they rushed to the foot of the slope and began climbing hand over hand toward the top of the near height; the Persians between our two bodies of men whirled back, startled, to face the onslaught.

Xenophon then bawled, "Attack!" and our hoplites, their eyes gleaming fiercely through the helmet slits and their teeth flashing wolfishly behind their visors, fairly leaped in their rush to descend upon the outnumbered mob of Persian forces below.

The Persians did not wait to see a preordained outcome fulfilled. Dropping their weapons and flailing their arms in terror, they practically rolled down the side of their now indefensible stronghold, in a panic to escape the murderously bellowing hoplites storming them from above and below. After a moment, Xenophon unexpectedly raised his hand in the signal to halt, and it was only with great difficulty that he was able to restrain the fired-up men.

"Let them go!" he shouted, laughing, as the terror-stricken Persians tumbled and fell over each other in the loose gravel of the mountainside in their haste to escape. "Even one broken ankle among us is not worth the sorry booty we might capture from them." The men grudgingly assented and clambered back down to Chirisophus' troops in a jubilant mood.

From that time on, we had no further engagement with Tissaphernes' main forces, although small Persian raiding parties occasionally cut down Hellenes if they strayed too far from the army in their plundering. The Persians sent outriders ahead to burn the rich Tigris villages and crops along our projected path, which we interpreted as a last-ditch sign of desperation on their part. Although it posed considerable hardship for our troops in finding sufficient provisions, we knew this would be only temporary-a native army cannot continue to burn its own country without soon meeting resistance from the people.

And of course we were right, for a few days later Tissaphernes gave up the attack completely, limiting his presence merely to a few isolated scouts who continued to dog us from a distance for a few weeks more as we moved beyond the king's sphere of control. When talking with Asteria that night, as I helped her draw water for the camp followers from a nearby stream, a look of shock passed across her face when I mentioned that we were unlikely to see Tissaphernes again. She stared at me questioningly for a moment, silently asking me once more if I would accept the proposition she had put to me earlier, and I slowly, but emphatically, shook my head no. She sighed, hoisted the heavy leather buckets up to her shoulders with the yoke, and trudged silently up to her camp, where I left her to return to my duties with Xenophon.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, just at sunset, as the army's scouts were returning to camp for the evening, I was startled to see Nicolaus emerge from the trees limping painfully, a grimace on his face. His arm was draped over the shoulders of another Rhodian who supported him in his painstaking walk out of the forest, and his right foot was tightly wrapped in a filthy rag torn from his tattered tunic. Despite the swaddling, he left a trail of blood on the earth behind him as he moved.

"Nicolaus, what happened?" I exclaimed, sprinting up and relieving his exhausted comrade of the burden. The loss of any of the Rhodians, whether to death or injury, would be a considerable blow to the army, but Nicolaus in particular, who was developing into a tactician of no mean skill and a valuable advisor to Xenophon, was to be protected at all costs. "Has there been an attack?"

Nicolaus grimaced again and rolled his eyes. "Only on me, for my own stupidity. I walked too close to a badger hole, and the fucker must have been waiting for me. He tore into my foot like a slab of raw meat, and locked his jaws on me. I had to club him to death with a stick, and then use another stick to pry his jaws. He took a chunk off my foot." Nicolaus' comrade proudly pulled the dead creature from a cloth bag slung over his shoulder, its head flattened and pulpy. It was the largest I had ever seen, the weight of a kid goat, with a row of evil, pointed teeth on its lower jaw that protruded around the bared lip in a hideous grin, still stained with Nicolaus' blood. "Can you help me into camp?" Nicolaus asked.

I could not yet tell how serious the injury might be, but any animal bite was notoriously prone to life-threatening fever, and if the badger had been rabid as well-best not to think about the consequences for now.

After draping his thin body carefully over my shoulders and carrying him to the Rhodians' campsite, I raced off to fetch Asteria, who had accumulated a large stash of medical supplies. I found her outside her tent, on her elbows and knees, her face almost touching the ground. She was struggling with the unaccustomed task of blowing on glowing embers to ignite a clumsily stacked pile of unseasoned branches she had gathered. I squatted beside her and spoke her name, startling her. She jumped and looked up, and then with a sheepish expression pushed herself up to a more dignified kneeling position, wiping stray strands of hair from her perspiring face. As she did so, she left a long, sooty finger-smudge across one cheek.

"Asteria, I need help with an injured man," I said. "Bring your medical supplies."

Returning with her to the Rhodians' camp a few minutes later, I pointed out the injured boy, while Nicolaus' comrades stood in awkward and deferential silence, unaccustomed to the presence of a woman in their midst.

Asteria did not shrink from the blood-soaked wrapping, but quickly and efficiently exposed the foot, calling for more light as she did so. As someone trained the glare from a torch directly on it, she muttered softly under her breath. "This is beyond my experience," she finally said. "Clean arrow wounds, broken bones, fevers I have handled, but this-" and she looked almost sadly down at Nicolaus' foot. I bent down myself to have a closer view, and sucked in my breath in dismay.

The limb had already swelled to twice its normal size, engulfing the toes, which emerged from the bulbous foot like tiny, newly sprouted buds on a tuber. Much of the skin had been torn off or hung in shreds, as if flayed with a dull knife, and a large piece of the inner heel was missing, just below the ankle, where I guessed the furious creature had clamped down in his final death throes. The foot was riddled with deep puncture marks where the beast had chewed and gnawed, seeking purchase-some had penetrated down to the bone.

Asteria gently palpated the instep, toes and ankle while Nicolaus writhed and moaned in pain, two of his colleagues pressing his shoulders flat to the ground and muttering reassurance to him.

"I don't think anything is broken," she said finally. "That is fortunate. The foot is a complicated limb and rarely heals properly after being set. I'm worried about this bite, though, and the punctures. This type of injury is ripe for gangrene. Once that sets in, the whole foot is lost-possibly even more."

Of this I was only too aware, for the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh which is symptomatic of this disease was a familiar one in the Greek camp.

Asteria hesitated, staring at the foot, before getting up and strolling impassively over to the nearest campfire, deep in thought. She knelt beside it, poking gently in the embers, pondering her next course of action. After a moment she stood up again, having apparently made a decision, and returned, her eyes avoiding Nicolaus' sweating, inquiring face.