Among the peaks even Ash becomes a good fellow. We come upon abandoned camps of the foe. Nothing could be more primitive. Ash points out signs of different clans, boundaries over which the khels would never trespass in normal times. Now, invaded by great Alexander, the tribes are one.
I ask about Spitamenes. Ash knows him, or knew his father. The old man was a hero who fell in glory fighting Alexander’s squadrons, defending the Persian Gates. The son Spitamenes was not raised to be a soldier, says Ash. He was sickly as a youth, and bookish. His schooling was as an astronomer and Zoroastrian scholar.
“Well, he’s made up ground fast,” says Flag. He tells Ash of the atrocities performed upon our men under orders from the Desert Wolf. Ash shrugs. Flag regards him. “You’d drink our blood too, wouldn’t you, you treacherous old sheep-stealer?”
“With relish,” says Ash, laughing.
He predicts that Spitamenes will be the stubbornest foe Alexander has faced. “For this young man is bolder even than your king, and his gift for war is from God. See how already he has dragged your army across half this country, yet you stand no closer to him than you did when you began.”
Spitamenes has escaped across the mountains, Ash declares; we won’t catch up with him till spring. He will fight us like a wolf in the darkness. “Where you turn, he will be elsewhere. When you tire, he will strike.”
Spitamenes will wear us down, Ash predicts, and use our own aggressiveness and impatience against us. “In the end, your own men will beg to get out of this country. And your king will take any peace he can find.”
Glare is ferocious at this altitude. Instructed by our shikaris, we fashion “pinpointers” of leather and wood and bind them across our eyes. Otherwise we’ll go peak-blind. The light burns through anyway. It blazes through the walls of the goatskin tent or a doubled woolen blanket; we swipe horsehair from the torsion catapults to make blinders that we wrap atop our pinpointers. If you squint you can see. The vistas are spectacular. “How high do you reckon we are?” I ask Flag atop one ridgeline. He indicates a peak two hundred feet below. “Back home that would be Olympus.”
I believe him.
An odd pair have become cronies up here: Ash and Stephanos. Muleteer and poet can be glimpsed, nattering away at all hours. We break camp one dawn; Stephanos splashes our backsides with water—“Godspeed” in Pactyan.
The old man tutors the poet in Afghan proverbs.
God is timid, like a mouse in a hollow wall.
Meaning, says Ash, that one must approach the divinity in silence and with humility. Stephanos admires this. I am repelled.
“What does God say,” I ask the miscreant, “about beating the hell out of a woman?”
“Why don’t you ask Him?” replies Ash.
“I’m asking you.”
“Perhaps, Matthias,” Stephanos says, “you and I might profit, in an alien land, by suspension of judgment.”
Though blind, God sees; though deaf, He hears.
What the hell does that mean?
Pray to God on an empty stomach.
I’m disgusted. What religion do these blackguards follow anyway, that lets them mutilate our men while they’re still alive? What lice-ridden deity do they pray to, who immures them in ignorance and squalor?
“Each precept of wisdom you gain,” says Ash, “bears you farther from God.”
Ash tells us his religion has no name, though Stephanos has pieced together, from this villain and other sources, that the Afghans are descended from the sons of Afghana, son of Saul, son of Jeremiah, who was Solomon of Israel’s commander and who built the temple at Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar bore the multitude off into captivity at Babylon, where they flourished and intermarried with their Assyrian masters, and later with Persians and Medes. The tribes finally settled in the desert of Ghor, around Artacoana, calling themselves the Bani-Afghan or Bani-Israel. They believed in one God, creator of the universe. This fit well with the Persian faith of Zoroaster (himself born in Bactra, northern Afghanistan), whose God of Light, Ahura Mazda, was not far off from the Jehovah of the Jews.
In any event, says Stephanos, the congregations hit it off. A fresh race came into being, interbred with Medes and Tapurians, Daans, Scythians, and Gandhari, but all, in their minds, were Afghans, all following a version of the same Afghan God.
This stuff rings like a tub of humbug to me. Ash’s religion, as best I can divine, amounts to tribal superstition, no better than our highlanders at home, who worship luck, tombs, and ancestors. I ask Stephanos what his religion is.
“Mine?” he laughs. “I worship poetry!”
I would give a month’s wages to hear him expound upon this subject, but he ducks my queries, continuing with the evening feed. I learn one thing: Stephanos is not his real name. The word means “laurel”; he took it for himself, he acknowledges, from a crown he won once at Delphi.
“Then what’s your real name?”
“I can’t remember.”
“What name did you enlist under?”
“I forget.”
He advises me to change my name too.
“Take a war-name, Matthias. It solves a lot of problems.”
Fires at this altitude are made of heather and furze. You rip the stringy stems from the turf; they start hard and give off so little heat you can stick your hand right in them. But they’re all we’ve got to toast our mooch.
I ask Stephanos how he can be a poet and a soldier. Aren’t the vocations in conflict, if not irreconcilable?
Again he evades the question, returning to the subject of war-names. “Consider our friend Flag here. Did you know he was a math-ematicos in his earlier life?”
A teacher of music and geometry?
“He will not confirm this, Matthias,” Stephanos continues, “but I have seen him take up a hand-harp and produce melodies sweet as nectar.”
I ask, “Where do you come from, Flag?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Oh, come on!”
“It’s slipped my mind.”
Ash perches beside me on his sheepskin. “Narik ta?” he says. What difference does it make? (Literally, “So, then?”)
Stephanos approves with a laugh. “Do you grasp, Matthias, the depth and subtlety of the Afghan religion?”
“I do not.”
“When our friend Ash asks, ‘What difference does it make?’—he is not speaking from despair or hopelessness, as you or I might, employing the same phrase. Rather he propounds a pure philosophical query: What difference does it make?”
“All the difference in the world!” I reply. “This is no religion. It offers no hope; it negates free will, action, enterprise. It’s the antithesis of everything this army stands for, for what does Alexander’s achievement mean if not the power of a single man’s will?”
“And what achievement is that?”
“Look around you!”
At this, the litter breaks up.
“So then,” Stephanos asks me, “is conquest your religion?”
“Action is. And virtue. As you and Flag and our king embody it.”
“Do we now?”
The veterans snort into their muffled fleeces. It’s getting too cold to keep up this colloquium.
“You know,” Stephanos says, “I’ve taken to you from the start, Matthias. Shall I tell you why?”
“Because,” says Flag, “he never shuts up.”
“Because he asks questions.”
“That’s his problem.”
“And one day he might get answers.”
Chattering teeth compel the symposium to a close. Stephanos rises, to make his rounds of the sentry posts.
“You ask, my friend, how I can be a soldier and a poet? I answer: How can one be a soldier and not a poet?”
We sleep that night beside a pocket lake. Waking, a mountain ram and his ewes eye us from a cleft above. When we rattle stones around them, the flock scampers up the face as nimbly as you or I would mount a flight of stairs.
That day we make contact with the enemy. It becomes a real fight. In it Lucas kills his first man. The fellow hurls a great stone, then rushes upon him with dagger and sword. Lucas impales him on his half-pike. The enemy takes minutes to die. Lucas squats at the fellow’s shoulder, too stricken to offer aid, bawling like a child.
14.
On the ninth day, we rotate back to column. A parcel is waiting for me—small and heavy—delivered, I am told, by a courier from Headquarters Expeditionary Force. The litter presses round. I undo the tie.
To my astonishment, the packet holds six golden darics—half a year’s pay. Next to the coins nestles a Bronze Lion, the decoration awarded to soldiers wounded in battle. My name is on it. “This must be a mistake.”
Flag reads the citation. The medal is for the night in the cordoned village, when I failed so ingloriously in the hovel with the old Afghan. Only the actions ascribed to me by headquarters are outrageous fiction, painting me a hero.
“Well, I can’t keep this,” I say.
“Why not? You were wounded in action.”
“I stabbed myself!”
“What difference does that make?”
The squad howls. Flag and Tollo stifle laughter. Clearly it is they who put me in for this counterfeit commendation. Tollo divides the gold, setting one daric in my fist and distributing the rest to the litter.
“One month’s pay belongs to you, my boy, and the rest to your mates. That’s only fair. As for the Bronze Lion, the time will come, believe me, when you’ll earn one for real, and the army, rump-stuffed as it is, won’t stand you up for a gob of spit.”
And he pins the medallion to my cloak.
“Take it now, while you’ve got it.”
I USE THE daric to buy freedom for the girl Biscuits. We are back on the trail when Ash again puts the whip to her. I will not bear this a second time. I haul him off, declaring to him (an argument I have rehearsed in my head) that he has no right to render his property unserviceable to the army, which has contracted for it in good faith, and that if he disables the maid by his mistreatment of her, I will see that he loses his hire-pay.
“Then, damn the army,” says Ash. “It must buy this property.”
“It will, you wretched villain!”
I pay him the whole daric. Of course, the army won’t make it good. In the end I am disciplined for exceeding my authority—ludicrous, as the only elements I outrank are mules and slaves—and endure several perfunctory stripes, delivered by Lucas in his capacity as second-from-the-bottom in the litter, much to Ash’s gratification. “Now,” says he, “you own a mouth to feed. May it eat you out of house and home.”
I cut Biscuits loose on the trail, stuffing her kit with kishar, dried goat meat, and lentils; Ash chips in a swift kick to get her started back down the mountain. I watch her booger off and congratulate myself on a deed well turned.
Ten minutes later she’s back in line, packing her same sack of sesame. No threat I can offer will make her wing away.
It turns out to be not so simple, purchasing a woman’s liberty. Strictly speaking, Biscuits is not a slave; she belongs to no one, not Ash, not even herself. In the Afghan lexicon of tor—matters concerning the honor of women—every female must be az hakak, “in the guardianship of” a male—her father before she’s married; then husband; finally brother, uncle, even son if her spouse dies or is killed. The tail of the shirt is I’m now that guardian. “You are her husband,” Ash giggles. “She is your wife.”
My predicament becomes a source of amusement to Flag and Tollo, who warn that I have violated the Afghan code of nangwali. If the girl’s male kin show up, I’ll have to kill them or they’ll kill me. My mates regard this as great sport.
“What you must understand, Meckie” (this is what Ash calls all of us, his version of Mack, for Macedonian), “is that a woman like this”—and he elevates both palms as if warding off a curse—“is nawarzal, unclean, and affir, unacceptable.”
“Then let her work on for pay.”
“I am but a poor man.”
“You are a pirate.”
What can I do? I leave Biscuits with Ash and let him continue collecting her pay from the army. I can’t get him to give her even a tenth. Such an arrangement would set, he declares, “an unwholesome precedent.”
Through the course of this clash I come to appreciate the old gaffer. He begins sharing his table with me, or I should say his rock by the side of the trail. I am not so insensitive as to be unaware of the compliment.
One night I write a letter to my fiancée. Ash looks on. “You tell her everything, Meckie?”
“Everything she needs to know.”
And he cackles gaily.
15.
The army winters at Bagram, a garrison town built centuries past by Cyrus the Great, in the temperate high valley at the foot of the central massif. Two rivers, the Kophen (or Kabul) and the Panjshir, water a broad, peak-rimmed plain.
The place is paradise for the moment. It possesses abundant cantonments for the army, dry fodder for the animals, and flat ground to train on. The northern passes, we are told, lie already under twenty feet of snow. The accumulation will reach sixty by midwinter. Not even Alexander can figure a way across into Bactria. As Ash predicted, we will not get at Bessus and Spitamenes till spring.
Mule and camel trains continue to work up from Kandahar, bringing armor, weapons, grain, and horses for the coming assault. My brother Elias’s woman has come up with one of the columns. Her name is Daria. Her beauty makes her something of a celebrity, at least among the Macks. The Afghans abhor her—and every other native daughter who has taken up with the invader. She and Elias take apartments in the old section of Kapisa, a pleasant lane under winter mulberry trees and wild plums. They establish a salon. I am able to place Biscuits in her service. A weight off my mind.
The army trains and begins construction of another garrison town. This one will be called Alexandria-under-the-Caucasus.
We see the king all the time now. Every day he makes the rounds of the regiments in training, accompanied by only a couple of couriers and a page or two as bodyguards. He dismounts and instructs the men personally. The troops adore him.
We live in sixteen-man tents with packed-straw floors. The women do the cooking and the service work. Even Lucas has a girl now, the long-legged Ghilla. I am the last of our litter to hold myself apart, though, I confess, I have taken on occasion to visiting the day-raters. Am I faithless to my betrothed? I am drinking more than I used to. You have to, for the cold and the boredom.
Ash has stayed on. The army pays for foddering his stock. He will cross the mountains with us in the spring. The women, he has dismissed. Why feed them, he says, when they can find work in the new town or else catch on as “chickens,” the lowest rung of camp wives.
To my wonder, I have become quite close to the old villain. He has mates everywhere. As rookies, Lucas and I are assigned every drudge detail; we never finish before dark. We wind up taking chow more with the Afghans attached to the army than with our own Macks. In normal times, Ash explains, his tribe, the Dadicai, would be feuding fiercely with at least two or three others. Now, under invasion, they are all the best of mates—Pactyans, including the Apyratai and Hygenni; Thyraoi and Thamanai; Maioni, Sattagyadai, a hundred others. I ask Ash how he can accept employment from Alexander if he hates us so much. “In the end we will drive you out, Meckie.”
And he laughs and passes me another chupattie.
Lucas is still suffering terribly over his killing of the foe on the high line. He experiences shame at his inability to finish the fellow off and feels blameworthy, at the same time, that he did not aid him to save his life. The Afghan’s eyes haunt Lucas’s sleep, reproving. Worse, he confesses, is the visceral memory, which will not leave him, of planting his spear in another man’s guts. I try to make him feel less alone, reckoning his anguish from my own gloryless experience of murder: the sense of horrible pleasure in the instant, succeeded at once by an excruc
iating remorse, disgust, and chagrin, with yourself and the whole human race, and the sense that you are changed forever, and far, far for the worst. But nothing I can say helps; I’m his peer, as callow as he is. He needs to hear it from someone senior, someone who knows. It is Tollo, of all people, who eases Lucas’s woe.
“Piercing the melon, that’s the toughest.”
He means killing a man with a thrust through the belly, also known as “spilling the groceries.” We’re at work one day on the new city, breaking midday for a feed. “Every buck trooper balks at it. They wave their pike in both hands, like housemaids batting at a rat with a broom. To bury your blade in a living man’s guts—that takes courage. And the feeling never leaves you.”
This is helping Lucas. Tollo sees it.
“The disciplined trooper,” Tollo says, “strikes with both feet planted, eyes on the foe, shoulders square. Trust your weapon and stand fast. You did it right on the high line, Lucas. I saw you. I was proud of you.”
My friend flushes. Tollo grins.
“Think you’re a soldier now?” And he cuffs Lucas affectionately. “But you’re no longer a boy!”
We drill and continue construction of the garrison town. I have never been in training in a force commanded by Alexander. We get more days off than any corps I have heard of. No curfew, no bed check. The whole army knocks off every day from noon till two hours after. Wine is plentiful and cheap. Troopers are exempted from duty to take part in hunts (in fact, training is often replaced by hunting) and are given time off to train at the gymnasiums, which are the first structures the engineers erect, even before chapels and mess halls. Women are permitted throughout the camp, unlike the Old Corps under Philip and Alexander’s original expeditionary force; they may sleep in cantonments with their officer lovers (and in the tents of us scuffs) and may accompany the column in the field. Such are the perquisites of serving in a corps commanded by Alexander. Now to the hard part.