This was a beautiful country, the old Persian thought. The many steep hills covered with

olive groves and vines, the rare flat lands planted with orderly fields of wheat, the countryside

studded with estate complexes and farming villages. It painted him to see so much of it go

up in flames. Some of the olive trees were truly ancient, gnarled and elderly, and he

felt a certain kinship with them. They had been here for a long time, had seen much

and survived it all, but they couldn't stand against the wrath of the Great King's

Erksees. The might of Persia had descended on the land of the Greeks, the Yauna, as the

old Persian thought of them, and those who refused to submit would pay the price for

their recalcitrals. Still, it was a beautiful country he had to admit, but was it any more

beautiful than the other lands to which he'd journeyed in his many years of service to

Kambisi's, Therayas and Nau-Zerksees? He remembered the rich black earth around the Nile River

in Egypt, but seemed like a lifetime ago. The harsh beauty of the thunderstorm on the vast

grasslands where the horse-riding socket welved, the lush groves of palm trees along the Euphrates

and Babylonia, the smell of a coming snowstorm on the wind in the northern highlands. He

had spilled blood in all those places, some of it his own, much more of it belonging

to the enemies of the Great Kings he served. These were the reminiscences of an old man,

he thought, and losing track of where he was and what he was doing was a good way to die

in enemy country. He snapped back to the here and now. Some of their Greek allies, Thessalians,

he believed they called themselves, were dragging a group of women out of a farmhouse which

they then set alight. He knew what would happen next. These Yauna seemed to hate each other

with a passion the old Persian had never seen. They would rather kill each other than

fight Xerxes, though perhaps that was just prudence. At any rate, it seemed like a sign

...