Afghan ghosts continue to track the column. Our pace picks up; we close in on Alexander. Messengers arrive who have been with him only six days before.
When will we see action?
Flag answers: “When we least expect it.”
6.
The column reaches Artacoana, principal city of Areia, on the 127th day out of Tripolis. Hell itself could not be uglier than the lower town, along the dry river, but the upper city, the Citadel, is surprisingly smart and civilized. Women are permitted on the streets, though bundled from sole to crown. You can hear them giggling behind their veils. Parks are everywhere. Tamarisk groves provide shade, their branches weeping a kind of sugary stuff the locals call amassa. You can eat it all day and your belly’s as empty as when you started. Cloudbursts drench the town late in the afternoon, draining through the soil in moments, leaving it as parched and sterile as it was before. Persians, installed by Alexander, administer the city. Alexander himself has pushed on north and east with the army, pursuing the pretender Bessus. Our king will invade Afghanistan from the north before winter closes the passes.
Artacoana is famous for its shoe factories. The whole south side smells like a tannery. You can get extraordinary boots, bags, and saddles for next to nothing. Lucas and I get fitted for ankle-toppers the first morning; the bootmaker promises the finished pairs for late the next day. To our joy, he delivers. As the cobbler fits us, a commotion erupts in the lane. Boys and women race past in alarm. On their heels appear two Mack dispatch riders, pounding hard for the upper city. A soldier’s instinct, sensing trouble, is to rally to his unit. We come out into the street, Lucas and I, in time to see, straggling in from the desert, a ragged column of Macedonian infantry. That they have no cavalry escort means something terrible has happened.
We find Flag and Tollo on the track back to camp. Stephanos is with them. A massacre has occurred, we are told, two days south of the city. Rebels led by the traitor Satibarzanes and his cavalry commander Spitamenes (called for his cunning “the Desert Wolf”) have ambushed a company of 90 Macks, including 60 Companions, and 120 mercenaries, slaughtering all except the party we saw straggling in from the desert. Two pursuit columns will be mounted to avenge this. Lucas and I are drafted into the second.
The first party takes off at once. They are the chase column. It’s their job to pick up the foe’s trail and track him. Our chore in the second column is to load up and follow, bringing armor, rations, and the heavy kit. It is something to watch Flag and Tollo, and particularly Stephanos, rack the gear and rig it. God help the foe when these men catch up with him.
Our pursuit column is a quarter-brigade, about four hundred, half Macks and half Achaeans. Its commander is Amyntas Aeropus, called Bullock. The company has never trained or fought together. We have not even drilled. Tollo splits our sixty-four in half, with Flag commanding one section, Stephanos the other. Lucas and I are under the poet. Every man is mounted (my mate and I on asses) and leads one laden mule. We tag the first column’s trail till dusk. Fallback riders meet us and guide us on in the dark. My new boots still haven’t been stitched closed. I stuff my played-out road-beaters into a pannier and ride barefoot.
We overhaul the chase column two hours before dawn. Time for a feed and a couple hours’ rest. Both elements press on all next day. The country south of Artacoana is desert valleys; one range of hills succeeds another. Toward nightfall of the second day scout riders come galloping in. Captains are called to assemble. The column is split into three—one blocking force circling southeast, a second assault force southwest (that’s us), the third to set up a base camp with covering positions and follow when summoned.
We set off on foot into the dark. No one tells Lucas or me anything. No orders are issued and we are too embarrassed to ask. I have nothing but my worn-out clompers; my soles by now are a chewed-up mess.
The last scout trots back an hour before dawn. Finally Tollo calls our sections together. We assemble in a draw beneath a basalt ridge; the moon is just setting. We can make out a desert river, a hundred feet across and an inch deep, shining like a ribbon out beyond the ridge’s shoulder. Apparently it twines past a village that is out of sight around the hill. The enemy has taken refuge in the village. His horses have been spotted. He does not know we are here.
Tollo sketches the village in the dirt. It will be a cordon operation. The columns will ring the site and go in at first light.
I am thinking: Can I do this? Can I stand up to the foe face-to-face? What will I do when he bolts, in rage or terror, straight at me?
“Prisoners?” asks one of the sergeants I don’t know.
Tollo regards him. “What do you think?”
The caucus breaks up. Still no one has given Lucas and me a word. Here comes Stephanos.
“You’ll take the women.”
He indicates a Mack corporal called Barrel. We are to stick with him. In a second Stephanos is gone, arming. Barrel is about forty, with one milky eye and arms like iron bands. Six others form up with him, four Macks and two Achaeans. They are stowing their spears and gathering ropes, which they work skillfully and swiftly into nooses. No one gives us orders or shows us what to do. The others keep their swords, so we keep ours.
Lucas catches up to Barrel as we start out.
“What do we do with the women?”
The corporal stops.
“Well,” he says, “you ain’t gonna propose to ’em.”
7.
The cordon force comes down the hill in great skimming strides, crossing the ground like the shadow of the moon. I have never seen men move so swiftly or so silently.
Afghan villages are laid out in circles like forts. A mud-brick wall rings all. Our men vault this in scores, like water over the lip of a dam. Lucas and I scramble behind, trying to keep Barrel in sight. Our job is not to kill anyone; we are too green to be entrusted with such responsibility. Just corral the women and children and hold them to be sold later as slaves. We top the wall at a dead run. Two dogs sprawl with their throats slashed; our fellows’ work to silence these sentries. Inside are more walls. The place is a hive of kitchen gardens and sheepfolds. We stumble over goats and into wicker cotes for pullets and geese.
Cries have started now, our men’s and the enemies’. Hounds bawl everywhere. You get into an Afghan house through the court. These are wattle and thatch. Our men set the roofs on fire as they burst through. Our mob races into the south quarter of the town. Barrel is shouting, pointing to a row of hovels against the fort wall.
“Take them as they come out!”
Matrons and urchins pour from the blazing huts. Barrel and others herd them into the sheep pens along the wall. In moments our squad has a dozen, all wailing in terror, with more flooding in.
I turn back toward the village. Horses fill every lane. The foe is bolting, barefoot, half naked. Our fellows lance them with the half-pike or tear them from their ponies’ backs with grapnel hooks. It is simultaneously extraordinary and appalling to see how efficiently our Macks work this. They slaughter an entire male household with barely a sound, so swiftly that the wives and infants are cast into dumbstruck shock. It is the kill of wolves or lions, the cold kill of predation. It is work.
Our squad holds the women and children. At our feet bleats a carpet of goats and kids, pressing themselves against the wattle walls of the pen in such terror that the whole thing bows and threatens to topple. I still have no idea what we’re supposed to do. I peer across the pen to Barrel. Suddenly one of the dames pulls something from beneath her garment and thrusts it into his belly.
Barrel does not move, simply looks down with an expression of bland startlement, then lifts his eyes to the face of the matron, who stands motionless before him with a look of equal astonishment. She has stabbed him.
Barrel has his sword in his right hand. Absent all haste, he seizes the dame with his left hand by the fabric of her headdress and, in one short punch, drives the iron butt of his weapon into the center of her forehead. I t
urn to Lucas. We can hear the woman’s skull split all the way across the pen.
At once every Mack and Achaean turns in slaughter upon his captives. In moments, twenty women have become carcasses. Blood spills in quantities as if as many great wine jars had been tipped over at once. There is no struggle, for so swiftly and lethally do the Macedonians perform their labor that the victims have been stripped of life before they can even cry out. By no means is the act impelled by bloodlust, nor is satisfaction taken from it. On the contrary, the Macks evince exasperation, because this lot of females could have been sold for good money.
I am paralyzed with horror. It is one thing to recount such a holocaust from the secure remove of memory and another to behold it before one’s eyes. An Afghan woman clings to my knees, crying out in supplication. Two children bury their faces in her dress.
“Dice her!” a man’s voice bellows at me. It is one of the Macks I don’t know. Knuckles is his name. Lucas has moved beside me. “Obey, Matthias!” I turn to him as if in a dream. What shall I do? I am certainly not going to harm this poor, desperate mother.
A blow spins me round. Knuckles again. “Are you trying to kill me?” he roars. I have no idea what he’s talking about. He wallops me, an elbow to the jaw. As I reel I see him turn his blade upon the matron while her babes shrill in terror.
Lucas hauls me clear. We are outside the pens now. Mack cavalry is everywhere. You can see the foe by dozens, mounted, streaming away across the hills. Our fellows go after them.
I bolt through the streets. I am on my own now, striding between baked-brick hovels. Somehow I have lost my weapon. Macks in twos and threes dash past, trapping Afghans in dead ends and cutting them down. The foe—those butchers, that is, who have massacred our comrades in the desert—have all fled. What’s left is the village, the native yeomen who have given them sanctuary. I stalk through the chaos of downed walls and overturned carts. I understand that I have committed a capital felony by hesitating in the sheep pens. If one wench has a weapon, they all do. Immediate action must be taken. A soldier who cannot be counted on by his mates is more dangerous than an enemy. I grasp this. I keep running. In a lane I see Amyntas the sapper lance an Afghan low in the back. He is aiming between the shoulder blades, but as the man clambers up a wall, trying to escape, Amyntas’s nine-footer plunges into the meat of his buttocks, through the bowl of his hip, and out his belly. The man screams and falls back; Amyntas’s shaft snaps as the impaled Afghan’s weight twists it over. The poor fellow’s entrails spill from the ghastly gash opened by this plunge; they catch on the ladder beneath him, which is not a proper ladder but just a debarked tree with half-branches extending as steps. The man struggles to collect his guts, stuffing them back inside himself, all the while crying in horror. I turn and run. In the street more scenes of slaughter present themselves. I am trying to flee from the sight of them, in fear that their apparition will drive me mad. At the same time I know my mates will notice if I flee, so I seek to make my flight appear purposeful. That I am alone and apart from my unit is a whipping offense; that I have lost my weapon means death. And I have no blood on me. This is even worse. It gives me away. Everyone else is slathered with the stuff. I think frantically: Where can I get some blood to smear on myself?
A fist seizes me from behind. Tollo. He has found me out. Without a word he drives me out of the lane and into a dirt courtyard. Half a dozen Macks fill the space. Tollo propels me through the low entry of a hut, into a cramped dark room. I crack my skull so hard on the lintel it nearly knocks me cold. Tollo shoves me toward something in the center of the room. A man. A striking-looking Afghan, probably fifty, held by two Macks I don’t recognize. The captive’s teeth have been knocked out; his mouth is a mass of blood. He’s on his knees. Tollo seizes my right hand and shoves the hilt of a gut-cutter, the short Spartan-type sword, into it.
No need to issue an order. What I must do is clear.
I cannot.
“Air him out!” Tollo bawls at me. How? I have no idea what type of blow to strike. The Afghan’s eyes fasten onto mine. He says something in his tongue that I can’t understand. I feel Tollo’s blade touch my neck. The old man repeats his curse, shouting now.
I thrust my blade into his gut. But I have not struck hard enough; the man squirms sideways with a cry; I feel my edge glance off the cage of his ribs and squirt free. I have not even drawn blood. Tollo cuffs me hard, appending a sheaf of obscenities. I can hear men laughing behind me. I feel a burning shame. The two Macks who hold the old man wrest him back before me. He is spitting into my face now, screaming that same oath. I seize my hilt with both hands and drive the blade, uppercutting, into his belly. But now I have pushed too far. The swordpoint has run clear through him and shot out the far side. It is jammed between the ribs of his back. The blade is stuck. I can’t get it out. I hear the two Macks behind me, convulsed with hysterics. Tollo pummels me again. I set my heel on the old man’s chest and haul the sword clear. His guts open, but he loses not a jot of animation. He continues to spit and curse me.
I raise the weapon and plunge it, aiming for the big artery of the foe’s thigh, but somehow I cut not him but myself. A gash opens on my right leg, from which blood sheets in quantities unimaginable. I am beside myself with shame, mortification, fear, rage, and grief. Now even Tollo is laughing. Somehow a dog has got into the room. It sets up a dreadful racket. The Afghan keeps spitting on me. A form moves into my vision above me and on my left. I feel, more than see, a fist seize the old man by the hair; the form delivers one powerful backhand slash, then a second and third. The captive’s head comes off. Marrow gushes from the cervical spine, painting the killer’s feet.
It is Flag. He drops the head; it plops onto the floor with the sound of a squashed melon. The Macks release the headless body. It pitches forward onto me, sheeting blood from the void of its neck. I puke up everything I have eaten for the last three days.
Outside, I am aware of the sorry spectacle I present. Unlike my veteran countrymen, whose spear hands and smock fronts are lacquered like skilled workmen of the slaughterhouse, I am soaked from thigh to heel with alien blood and with my own, and with vomit, piss, and dirt. Lucas stanches my wound. I recognize the Mack colonel Bullock as he passes with several officers, eyeing me with bemusement and contempt.
“What’s this then?” he inquires.
Tollo emerges from the hut. “The New Corps.”
Bullock shakes his head. “God help us.”
8.
I am too ashamed to take chow that night. Tollo has to order me. I strip my clothes but can’t wash them. “Burn ’em,” says Flag.
Our outfit is on the trot two hours before dawn, Lucas and I mounted on yaboos, with our pack-asses with the trailers following on. Chase-riders of our outfit have kept up all night with those Afghans who got away. They guide us by stations. The enemy’s numbers are about fifty, half horseback and half on foot; we are above two hundred, all mounted, leaving aside those wounded and others left behind to hold the village and to raze three more settlements down-valley.
We ride four days. The word for that country is tora balan, “black stones.” Waterless badlands creased by serried basalt ridges. It’s like riding down the streets of a city. You proceed by canyons pinched between ridges, whose courses may be blind or dry or both. Ten times a day we backtrack out of dead ends. Our party has Afghan guides, but they’re worthless except to find water and forage, and the only reason they do this is so they themselves don’t starve. Our mounts wear down after the second day. The pursuit looks more like a death march. At night we collapse like corpses.
I haven’t slept since the village. When I close my eyes I hear women screaming and see the old man pitch headless into my lap.
I have resolved to murder no innocents. I can tell this to no one, not even Lucas. I try but he will not hear it.
“Did you kill anyone in the village?” I ask as we settle the first night, apart from the others, into our bedrolls. He did not. I ask what h
e will do.
“What do you mean?”
“Next time. What will you do?”
My friend kicks his groundcloth open.
“What will I do? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Exactly what you’ll do. I’ll do what they tell me to. I’ll do what Flag and Tollo tell me to!”
He hears the anger in his voice and looks away, ashamed.
“Don’t bring this up anymore, Matthias. I don’t want to hear it. Whatever you’re thinking, keep it to yourself!”
And he pulls his ground cover over him and turns his back.
I am thinking that we are like criminals. When a new man is initiated into the confederacy of murderers, his seniors make him commit the same crime they have. Now he is as guilty as they. He cannot turn on them. He is one of them.
I tell this to Flag. “You’re still thinking,” he says.
The sixth noon we top a rise and there they are—a ragged column of shoeless, dismounted fugitives. About two dozen, tracking single-file along the base of a black stone ridge. Afghans look different from Macks at a distance. A column of ours would bristle with spearshafts and lanceheads. The Afghan fights with bow and sling, and with three knives—small, medium, and large—which he carries along with his mooch in a belt-sash called a gitwa.
The Afghans get away. When we rush them, they climb like goats, slinging boulders down behind them and setting off slides, which start out as pea-rollers and build into avalanches by the time they drive us onto our bellies in the scree. A rock the size of an army kettle screams past my ear, hurtling like a sling bullet. Horses can’t climb that shingle; we have to chase on foot. We don’t come within a hundred feet of the foe. He tops the crest and turns into smoke.
We chase him two more days, on foot now, leading our exhausted ponies. Our guides have vanished. We’re lost. Everything turns now on finding water; if we spot a trickle at noon, we don’t dare chase too far, for fear of finding no more and not making it back by night. Making camp beside a mudhole the sixth evening, Flag sends me and all the other rookies searching for a spring. I’m by myself, tramping down a dry canyon. I come round a corner. Ten feet away, an Afghan squats in the dust, taking a shit.