I stood briefly in the snow, amazed at the sight, a growing anger welling within me, as the Rhodian boys looked up briefly and then returned to their own conversations. Shouldering roughly past those standing closest to the doorway, I bent down to a squat to make my way in, and slammed my head painfully against that of a boy attempting to exit at the same time, sending us both sprawling backwards. Seething, I got up and again duck-walked into the hut, this time with my hands extended in front of me to seize the idiot who had run into me. Before I was able to, however, he slipped past me in the darkness and pushed his way out through the low door, and I forgot about him almost immediately as I concentrated on regaining my bearings in the stone structure. Having entered from the snowy glare outside, my eyes took several seconds to adjust to the darkness, and when they did I found Asteria sitting cross-legged in a corner, a Rhodian sprawled on his back in front of her with his foot in her lap, both of them staring at me in surprise.

"In the name of the twelve gods, Asteria," I hissed, unwilling to let my voice resound too loudly. "What are you doing? Do you know how many Rhodians are lined up outside your door?"

Asteria and the boy continued to stare at me in astonishment, and then Asteria, her lips a thin, hard line and her eyes narrowed in anger, bent her head back to the boy's foot in silence, and began applying a salve to the deep, raw grooves where the untanned leather of the sandal thongs had shrunk and cut into the boy's skin. She moved quickly and, I fear, somewhat roughly on account of my having startled her, and the boy winced and grunted several times in pain as she worked her greasy finger deep into the bloody score marks. Finally, she reached behind her and seized a tattered piece of fabric, which I saw with some surprise was the remnant of a gown she had once worn herself in better days and had somehow managed to smuggle this far. She carefully tore a strip along the hem, and wrapped it sparingly around the boy's treated foot in the same pattern as the sandal straps, wasting not an inch of the precious fabric. "Keep your sandal straps over the cloth, not against your skin," she counseled, "and if the cloth slips off or wears through, come to me for more, or use grass or leaves for padding. Whatever you do, don't use untanned hide directly on the skin."

The boy nodded and rose to leave, but as he bent to make his way through the flap, Asteria called him back. "Peleus-ask the next one to wait a moment before coming in." The boy nodded again, silently, and slipped out the door.

As the flap fell back over the entrance and the hut descended again into its semidarkness, Asteria turned on me in a fury.

"By what right do you humiliate me, breaking in on me like this to question what I do?"

"You complain of me?" I said in amazement, no longer even bothering to keep my voice down. "I… we have taken great risks to shield your identity. Do you realize the trouble I endure to steal away at night to see you? And then when I arrive I find a small village camped around your hut, like Penelope's hundred and thirty-six suitors. Truly, you are the army's worst-kept secret."

Asteria stared at me, her eyes wide in astonishment, her mouth working soundlessly as she struggled for words. Finally, she found her voice.

"Are you a prince?" she spat, her words stinging. "Did you inherit me from the Persian royal family? By what law, by whose commandment, do you possess me?!" Her voice was a barely controlled hiss, and in her tense rage I felt as though I were trapped in the close room with a coiled serpent.

"It was these boys who saved me and continued to protect me-" she continued, trembling in her fury, "and for what? What have you done for them? What gold do you have to give them for me? Perhaps I should pay them with this currency?" and she tore open the front of her tunic, exposing her delicate breasts, her slender chest heaving from the exertion of her pent-up fury, her fragile ribs protruding sharply beneath and emphasizing the flat hollow of her stomach. I stared at her in horror.

"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.