"Truly you are a wicked man, but not short on brains.

How could you say such a thing, how could you even imagine it?

As heaven and earth are my witness-I swear

I would never plot any harm to you. Trust me when I say

My heart is not iron. I have only compassion."

"You know too much," I muttered. "And it is you who are wicked. I refuse to play dueling quotations with a woman."

"That was Calypso, comforting Odysseus, in case you were unsure," she cooed sweetly, patting my hand, "and I would venture to say that it is not I who know too much, but you who know too little."

"Calypso was a nymph who nearly drove Odysseus mad," I said peevishly, "and I sympathize with him deeply. I asked a simple question. It is a mark of intelligence, not to mention good breeding, to say no more than is necessary but to tell at least what is required. You skirt the issue. Would I have had to kill Cyrus, to prevent you from killing me, my good queen?"

"Perhaps it is fortunate, dear Gyges," she said, "that Cyrus died the way he did, saving you the trouble. After all, I am Lydian."

At this she mashed her lips against mine in a clear sign that our verbal jousting had come to an end, for which I was grateful. As I ran my hands down her sides and waist, however, I was given pause when I again felt the large dagger in its sheath at her belt, which since her first night with me at Cunaxa she had never been without.

The next morning we felt the first frost of winter's approach, and as the pale sun rose we could make out a broad, open plain ahead of us, through the northern mountains to the country of the Kurds, and beyond that Armenia, a large and rich territory bordering the Black Sea where supplies would be plentiful. The Kurds, however, were a force terrifying to the troops. Word had spread among the men that several years earlier a Persian invading force of a hundred and twenty thousand men had entered the mountains to subjugate them, and not single man had returned alive. The only clue as to their fate was a donkey that had been set loose to wander from the Kurdish border back into Persian territory bearing an enormous sack on its back. When the animal was found by Persian scouts and the sack cut open they were horrified to find one hundred and twenty thousand human prepuces, dried and strung from a long wrought chain like those worn by Kurdish slaves. We hoped the story was an exaggeration, but it was impossible to say.

Xenophon offered sacrifice to the gods, for we feared that the mountain passes across the plain might already be occupied by Kurdish forces anticipating our arrival. The gods sent us an eagle, which circled the camp once and slowly drifted away over the northern peaks.

The army left at midnight.

THROUGH THE COLD clear night we marched in silence, each man keeping his own thoughts, each enveloped in his own fears. Terrified of hearing at any moment the thundering hoofbeats of crazed, fur-clad barbarians descending upon us in the darkness with torches and razor lances, we churned across the unprotected plain, and by sunrise we had reached the cover of the mountains. Even this shelter was deceiving, however, as we found in the days after. While traveling through the canyons and steep mountain passes, the army was forced to string out in an exposed line miles long, leaving us open to lightning attacks by small bands of Kurds, who would melt back into the rocks after their murderous raids, to the fury of our frustrated hoplites.

In an effort to reduce our vulnerability, Chirisophus cautiously sent squads of Spartan rangers and other light-armed peltasts ahead to determine the location of any barbarian raiding parties, and to assay the route for ease of passage. More than once, an unfortunate scout would return to camp a day late and half mad, holding his tongue or other body part in his hands, as a warning from a hostile band of Kurds he had stumbled across. The rest of the army fearfully followed behind this vanguard, picking its way up each series of hills, pausing to examine the countryside for potential pockets of danger and to allow the slower trailing units to catch up; then the entire force would seize momentum and roll quickly down the other side. Xenophon, as was customary, brought up the rear, commanding the hoplites and protecting the baggage, camp followers and the increasing numbers of sick and wounded, victims of the journey's hardship and disease, and of the Kurdish raids on stragglers.

When the gods favored us, our scouts were able to eliminate the Kurdish outriders before they could warn the villages of our approach and raise a general alarm. In these cases, the local inhabitants, caught unawares by the sudden presence of a foreign army in their midst, fled their villages into the hills with their wives and children, leaving soup boiling on the fires and goats wandering in the squalid streets, pleading to be milked as their tethers caught in branches and stones behind them. Provisions were available to us in quantity-cisterns of wine, huge brass pots in every household, livestock that far exceeded the numbers available to us in our own stores; but Xenophon gave strict orders against looting, killing or taking prisoners, except in self-defense. We spared the country in the fruitless hope that the Kurds might let us pass safely, if not as allies then at least as enemies of their enemy the king. We took only such provisions as we could eat in a single day, so we would not starve. We sent heralds up into the hills, crying out in eight tongues that we were not invaders and meant no harm; but either for want of fluency in the local barbarian dialect, or because of sheer hardheadedness and suspicion on their part, we could elicit no response from the Kurds, nor gain any assistance from them.

At night, whenever possible we camped within the confines of abandoned villages to take advantage of their fortifications, and we maintained a heavy guard. The displaced Kurds and their allies and relatives from miles around, who were clearly gathering into a larger, more cohesive force, lit hundreds of campfires in the hills above us. These looked like pinpoints of light covering the slopes of the mountains and receding in the distance until they blended seamlessly, but for their yellow tint, with the starry, sparkling skies around us, skies that were the same as those I had worshiped in my days of innocence in Athens. I do not know whether the Kurds were attempting to intimidate us by exaggerating their presence through so many fires, or whether they really did have so many thousands of men surveying us from the mountains, for by the time the sun rose, they had all disappeared, like so many shades summoned back to the underworld at daybreak, leaving nothing behind but faint wisps of smoke.

After spending one of many nights like this, during which not a single man got a wink of sleep except for possibly the most battle-hardened or brain-damaged Spartans, Xenophon summoned all the officers to his quarters. The expression on his face indicated that the news he was about to give would not be easy for him to impart.

"Gentlemen," he said grimly, scratching the lice-ridden beard he had recently grown to avoid the needless difficulty of daily shaving, "the Kurds are building up their forces and readying an attack. The scouts report signs of large bodies of men now moving as a single unit. We are ten thousand, but already a third of our troops are sick or wounded, and another third are occupied driving animals or forcing the supplies through. That leaves only one-third of the army as able-bodied fighters. The animals, baggage and camp followers are slowing us down, occupying men who could be defending our route. For the love of the gods, the camp followers number over five thousand, many of them women! They are dragging us to our deaths."