general Craterus, while he with the cavalry and light troops has crossed 180 miles of desert in three days. The rebel horse has shown its heels at his approach. Alexander has cornered the foot troops, thirteen thousand, atop a natural fortress called the Mother’s Breast. If the insurgents will accept him as sovereign, Alexander has pledged, all may return in peace to their homes. The foe has sent back a gutted dog. It means go to hell.
Our own orders, delivered by the Companion captain, are not to return to Artacoana but to make all speed to the site of the original massacre, secure the place, and protect the corpses of our countrymen from further desecration. We are to remain on-site until Alexander himself can conclude his business with the foe and arrive to tender proper honors to the fallen. Two of the Afghans on yaboos will guide us.
The site, when we reach it three dusks later, is in a narrow throat between granite crags. An understrength company of Arcadian mercenaries mans a perimeter. They are ecstatic to see us, as our numbers will hold at bay the droves of Afghan dames who have already picked the gorge clean of plunder and still loiter on the high-lines, awaiting the chance to dash in and make off with the odd buckle or lancehead, whose bronze and iron are worth fortunes in this desert, not to mention their value as trophies.
The Arcadians tell us what happened to our countrymen. Those who survived the initial ambush were beaten and stripped naked; the enemy staked them out on the earth, spread-eagled on their backs, and drove long knives into their thighs, ripping gashes to the bone. They disemboweled our fellows, put out their eyes, and hacked off their genitals. Then they painted them with terebinth oil-turpentine-and set them on fire. All this while they were still alive.
It is the women and children, we learn from the Afghan guides, who have committed these atrocities upon our countrymen. This, they tell us, is the custom of the country. Captives are turned over to the clan females for their pleasure. The tribes do this not only to us but to each other.
The Arcadians have collected the bodies of our comrades in the center of the camp. This is so the Afghan women can’t skulk in after dark and plunder them further. The corpses are wrapped, and we newcomers make no attempt to peek under.
After dark our female besiegers begin to keen. A bloodcurdling ululation commences on one flank of the gorge, answered by an equally mane-blanching chorus from the other. Soon the whole pass is wailing in some ungodly primordial cacophony.
“Is that jackals or people?” Flea asks.
Lucas glances to me. “Jackals would sound more human.”
The evening is warm but we’re all shivering. In camp it is custom for rookies only to stand sentry; this night the vets take their turn too.
Sometime in the third watch an Afghan vixen is slain by two of Bullock’s grooms; she has crawled in, past the guard, all the way to the picketed horses, one of which she is in the act of hamstringing, just a pebble’s toss from the commander’s tent. Next morning, I and several others are detailed to remove the bodies of our countrymen to an even more secure site in the camp. We grab the first wrapped form to lift it; it plunges free of its shroud, in sections, at our feet. The man has been beheaded and cut off at the knees.
10
Our column returns to Artacoana to find the lower city abandoned and the upper city reduced to rubble. In our absence the natives have risen and been crushed. East in the hills, the siege of the Mother’s Breast is over. Alexander and his elite corps have already started south, into Drangiana, in pursuit of the rebel Barsaentes and the cavalry commander, Spitamenes.
It is Spitamenes’ men, we learn, whom our pursuit party has been chasing. The original massacre was his work. By his orders our luckless countrymen were betrayed; at his command were they turned over for mutilation.
He is clever, too, this villain. While our chase companies have spent themselves on his false trail into the desert, he himself has doubled back with his main force. He has led Artacoana into revolt.
Where is he now? Fled again.
I have never seen a city devastated. The lane where our boot-maker’s shop had stood is now stone and ash. The tannery district lies in ruins; kites and packs of wild dogs colonize the neighborhoods of the wealthy. Only the parks survive unscathed. Tent camps fill them; maids carrying water in earthen jugs shuttle back and forth to the river.
Our column of replacements still hasn’t linked with Alexander. We catch up instead with the heavy divisions under Craterus, which have returned to Artacoana, trailing Alexander. The siege train is just now loading out to move south; it is their artillery that has taken the city down. We inspect their handiwork. Half the city walls have been battered to powder; the timber mantlets remain, shielding the trenches from which our engineers and bucket-men have excavated their undermines. A dozen great stone-throwers, quarter-milers, lie burned and broken, the result apparently of sallies in force by the foe. The entire pine summit of the Mother’s Breast has been scorched to cinder.
Our outfit is given ten days to rest and refit. We are permitted to go up to the citadel and take a look. You can see where lanes have been barricaded by the foe with wagons and wicker hurdles. All are ash now. The successive ramparts, which are not stone but only mud-brick, lie beaten apart like children’s castles. Seared skeletons of the enemy litter rooms as black as the insides of smithies; your tread crunches over brittle bones.
We trek out, sightseers, to the Mother’s Breast. This is a spectacularly defensible outcrop, stronger than the city itself. Dense woods stud its flanks. Bluffs front the west. A dry course marks the eastern slope, which is less precipitous; two bridges span this. We can see where Alexander had these escape routes cut to trap the enemy, and where he massed his own troops along the cliffs. He waited for the wind to come round out of the west, then ordered his sappers to light off the dense, desiccated pines. He left an avenue of egress on the eastern flank, where the ground funneled the foe in flight into a rocky defile; he stationed his javelin men on the high ground close in and his cavalry on the flanks farther down. Their orders were to let no man escape. When the city fell the next day, our fellows put to the sword all males of military age and sold into slavery every woman and child.
Craterus has orders, now, to pay out the wider region for its complicity in the revolt. Our outfit is integrated into his corps. We will serve as blocking forces. Eleven villages line the valley. Our companies’ task is to cut off avenues of escape. Craterus’s men will take care of the villages.
I have never seen warriors as terrifying as these. They are of a whole order beyond Flag, Tollo, and Stephanos. They make no show of their prowess. This is work to them. These are veterans who learned their trade in the Balkan Wars under King Philip; they were old hands when Alexander was a child. Their arms broke Athens and Thebes and humbled mighty Sparta. Persia and her empire have fallen before them. The victories of the Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela stand as their trophies; it is they who sacked Tyre and Gaza, captured Babylon and Susa and Persepolis.
These Afghan villages are scrap meat to them. They cordon two in a morning and scorch them to ashes by noon. The foe falls before them like wheat. It does the enemy no good to hide in garner or grain crib; Craterus’s men drag him forth and gut him where he stands. Village elders confront them in indignation, cursing the invaders in a tongue they can’t understand and care nothing for. The Macks drive them to their knees and butcher them like hogs. It is farmer’s work. Slaughter.
Lucas and I look on in horror from our posts on the perimeter. Most appalling is the outcry of the women, rounded up for the slavers’ train. The dames howl like animals; nothing can make them stop. Prayers to heaven ascend amid swirling dust and columns of black smoke. We herd the fugitives like cattle. Those that get away, we leave for wolves and crows. Mute urchins gape with eyes dark as death, while black-cawled crones lift palms to the Almighty to call down damnation upon us.
The operation takes eleven days. When we return to Artacoana, the engineers have laid out a new city. The metropolis, to be called Alexandria-in-Areia, is a model of our young king’s shrewdness and of his reckoning of the weakness and cupidity of the foe.
All Afghans look alike to us scuffs; we can’t tell one from another. But Alexander calculates more cannily. He sees this country as a devil’s barnyard of contending clans and khels, who have warred with each other for centuries. The tribes of southern Areia have long coveted this valley, which has been held, beneath Persian sway,
