The Ten Thousand by Michael Curtis Ford Page B

him before me, and peering through the slats of the window he spied an intruder in the moonlit courtyard, naked but for a loincloth. He was smeared with a dark, greasy substance, and scaling the wall to the dining room he left a faint smudge behind, a dark blotch on the white plaster. Aedon snatched the short sword Gryllus had given him, and slipped silently out the room, determined not only to preserve his family's honor and wealth, but to live up to the trust his father had placed in him. Stealing silently into the dining room, he glimpsed the felon's fleeting silhouette just disappearing into the other wing of the compound, and he recalled even in the tension of the moment wondering how the fellow could be so familiar with the house.
    Feeling his way in darkness through the other door to head off the thief, he rounded the corner and collided with his adversary, who with his blackened, greasy skin and faintly gleaming eyes appeared like a creature from hell. They both yelped, but Aedon reacted first, seizing the other and muscling him to the floor, then rolling with him back into the dining room. During the struggle the slippery intruder escaped his grasp and drew a knife from his belt, which Aedon could see faintly glinting, subtle and lethal, in the near-pitch darkness. He could sense, perhaps from the other's irregular panting and jerky motions, that the fear was rising within. Aedon made a conscious effort to slow his own breathing, to keep his own terror submerged and to think, think hard, of what his father would have wanted him to do. Circling the thief slowly and silently, his eyes straining to see the other's movements in the blackness, Aedon suddenly threw himself at his target with his dagger raised high. He miscalculated the position of a stool on the floor, however, for as he swiped at his enemy's neck, he stumbled, his shoulder smashing heavily into his adversary, and he felt a blinding pain in the ribs. Struggling to regain his balance, he slipped on some residual grease that had rubbed onto the floor, cracked his head against the stone wall, and lost consciousness.
    I arrived just as Aedon fell, and was at first puzzled to hear nothing but the frantic twittering of the birds—hadn't I heard a heavy commotion in the room just seconds before? Feeling my way through the room, however, I tripped over a soft object, someone lying on the floor, and landed heavily on another. I felt the warm stickiness on my palms and bare knees, and realizing what it was an instant later, I raced out in horror, bursting into the cook's room and seizing the small oil lamp the cowering old lady had left burning for comfort. Leaving her shrieking in darkness, I tore back into the dining room, where the dimly lit scene left me aghast.
    With excruciating pain and difficulty, Aedon had pulled himself into a half-sitting position against the wall, and was watching in silence as the bright blood frothed and bubbled from his side, hissing slightly as it mixed with air escaping from his pierced lung. The furniture in the room was upended, and the greasy black culprit lay prone on the floor, his neck half severed by Aedon's single, lucky dagger thrust. His blood pulsed thickly from the artery in ever-weakening spurts, like that of a ram being bled for the ritual sacrifice, conjoining with the sticky pond forming beneath Aedon. As often happens in my moments of stress or shock, the wordless Syracusan chanting of my early memory rose from the dark recesses of my mind where it lurks like a bat in a cave, pushing itself to the fore of my concentration, and it was only with great effort that I was able to force it back and focus on the task at hand. Aedon's mother burst into the room and began wailing in terror, and the elderly cook, her wits now about her, attempted fruitlessly to extract the thief's blade stuck in Aedon's rib, and splashed water on his face from a small bowl to keep him from passing out again. The caged birds had stopped their