He inquired of the prisoner again where there might be alternate roads that could take us around or behind the pass, and this time the prisoner merely jeered at him, jabbering rapid-fire words in his barbarian tongue and broken Persian, which our interpreter refused to even render into Greek for fear of offending Xenophon further.

Trembling with rage, Xenophon placed his face directly into that of the prisoner, screaming at him to tell us the route, losing control of his emotions and his body. The troops nearby fell silent, embarrassed at their commander's loss of discretion, pretending to look the other way. The prisoner smiled coolly and tossed off a wisecrack to his compatriot tied to the stake nearby. Xenophon was rabid. Reaching out and seizing a shield from the nearest soldier, he brutally slammed the rolled bronze edge of the disk hard into the side of the man's face, knocking his head back into the post behind him. The man's smirk was instantly replaced by a mass of blood, his nose flattened against one cheek, and he howled in rage and pain, spitting bits of tongue flesh and shattered teeth out of his mouth until he could scarcely breathe, while Xenophon stepped back a pace and coolly watched the gore sheeting the man's face and dripping into a pool of black mud on the ground. Chirisophus stood nearby, gazing impassively and expressionless as the prisoner vented his rage.

After a moment, Xenophon shoved the interpreter away and then thrust his face back into the prisoner's, wordlessly, simply staring at him. I realized then that the man had become stone quiet, staring straight back into Xenophon's eyes, this time with all trace of contempt erased from his expression, his gaze filled only with malice and fear. The rain poured down on us, on those who were bloodied and those who were sound, making no distinction as to whom it might wash clean and whom it might bespatter with filth, and as I looked down at Xenophon's cloak, I saw that he had drawn his short xiphos sword, and that the tip was resting lightly against the man's belly just below his navel. I tried to call out but I was frozen, unable to move, the words sticking immutably to my tongue like a wad of flax to pine-pitch. I felt a thundering in my ears, the deafening chorus of Syracusan chanting I had so often dreaded, drowning out even the roaring of the torrential rain, and the outside world seemed to become silent and to move unutterably slowly.

Xenophon-you asked the prisoner your question one more time, slowly and deliberately, so quietly that only he could hear your words, though your language was unknown to him. To me all was silence, overpowered by the hellish roaring in my ears. I saw the man stare at you in complete understanding, despite the interpreter's absence, for this struggle of wills was no longer slave to the use of mere speech as a medium but had reverted to something much more primitive, more reptilian in nature, something more base and primeval than I had ever thought you capable of. The medium of communication between you and the man was fear and pain and hate, and in that language you understood each other perfectly. For after considering his options and the fate awaiting him, the man gave you another half smile, as best as he could through his split and bleeding lips, and then closing his eyes he slowly, barely perceptibly, shook his head no, and your fiendish knife did the work for which it had been created, for which it had been manufactured years before by the hairy, burn-scarred hands of a helot blacksmith in a sweltering Spartan foundry. The man's face wrenched in pain and he writhed like a live fish on a skewer, and as I watched, his eyes clouded over and he slumped against his ropes, his vacant orbs still staring at your feet.

Did you have any thoughts for Athens when you murdered a helpless, fettered man, Xenophon? Did you give any consideration to all you had been taught, to the ideals you had learned at the knees of Socrates, to the benevolence of the gods upon whose belief you sacrifice daily? Perhaps not, and in hindsight it was for the best, since your actions, both then and in the days to follow, successfully brought the army closer to its final destination. Men are needed in this world who are able to block out the fear and consequences of their immediate actions, to look beyond the sordidness of day-to-day suffering, warfare and squalor, to commit base deeds for a greater good. Men are needed like Gryllus and Clearchus, for it is by such men that civilization is advanced and the inferior is eliminated, or made beholden to the superior. Such brutal, unthinking men are needed; our most sublime institutions could never have been created without them, at least in some misty past that may be best left forgotten. This is one of the world's darkest, most unspoken secrets, for such is the evil-such the beauty-of war. The Spartans are trained their entire lives to close their eyes and their minds to physical fear and suffering and to seek victory at all costs for the common good. But they are Spartan, and you Athenian, or at least you had been until now; and I suddenly remembered the fervent wish I had expressed to the gods the night after Clearchus' head had been thrown into our camp, and I realized that it had been fulfilled in you.

XENOPHON DREW A deep breath, holding the air in his chest for a moment with his eyes half shut, and summoned every depleted reserve of self-control to regain his rigor as an Athenian noble and an officer. He then turned his attention slowly and deliberately to the second prisoner, who had watched the entire proceeding with eyes wide in terror. He was shivering violently, his teeth chattering and his knees barely able to support him, both from having stood cloakless for hours under the freezing rain, and from fear; and Xenophon had barely approached him before he began singing like a bird. The man said he would guide the army to an alternate road along which even the animals could travel, which would lead us behind the heavily guarded pass. A separate detachment must precede the main force, however, because the new route also passed under a height that must be occupied first, or nothing else could get by. He also confessed that the first prisoner had denied knowledge of that other route because his daughter lived there with her husband and family.

Xenophon turned away in exhaustion and nodded to Chirisophus, who called over the senior captains of both the heavy and light infantry to determine whether any of them would volunteer their units to follow the guide and seize the heights. Two Arcadian officers stepped forward to volunteer their two thousand heavy and light troops, and since by now it was late afternoon, they wolfed an early supper and slipped away into the blinding torrents of rain before darkness overwhelmed them completely. The surviving prisoner was bound and gagged and sent with them, while Xenophon and Chirisophus led the heavy infantry of the rear guard forward to the guarded pass we were facing, to draw the enemy's attention away from the Arcadians slipping behind and above them.

The Kurds had placed huge boulders in our path, and whenever a knot of our men gathered to try to lever the stones out of the way, they became targets for missiles and more boulders, some as large as wagons, hurled down on them from above. Xenophon finally ordered us to pitch camp when it became too dark to shoot our arrows, and he forbade all fires, for that would give the enemy too easy a target for their missiles. We spent a miserable night huddled in the cold, pouring rain with the warm campfires of the enemy clearly visible on the heights above us. All night the Kurds rolled their infernal boulders down among us, adding to the hellish atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the detachment with the prisoner tramped through the rain and dark and caught the enemy outposts unawares, destroying them utterly and seizing their camp. In the morning, the Arcadians blew a trumpet as a signal that they had taken the hill, and Chirisophus then charged straight up the main road with the bulk of the army, his scouts climbing the cliffs to attack the enemy defenders above, hoisting each other up the sides of boulders with their spears, to unite with the Arcadians on the heights.