shot through with gray, concealing a scar that can only be from the blow of a saber, descending from beneath his left ear, half of which has been sheared off, traversing his jaw all the way to his chin. Two fingers are missing on his left hand. His right arm is frozen at a permanent angle; when he reaches to the bowl, he has to use his shoulder or he can’t make the stretch. Twice he excuses himself to relieve his bladder. Both times he can rise only with the aid of his mistress, not from intoxication, I reckon, but because the sinews of his back refuse to unseize. He notes me watching and laughs. “You disapprove my bibulations, little brother! But tomorrow at dawn, while you groan in bed with your eyes nailed shut, I’ll be in the saddle, ready for anything.”
I believe him. His kit is threadbare, his skin burnt to leather by the sun. He is a warrior. His mates too. None wear beards. Like Alexander, the Companions of Forward Operations all favor the clean-shaven look.
Elias’s mistress occupies the square of carpet next to mine, but, as with his guide, my brother demurs at introducing her. She is lovely, a Pactyan from the country around Ghazni, though I will not learn this till later. That she and the other wives and ladies are included in the all-male sanctuary of the drinking party is a breach of decorum unthinkable in Macedon and worthy of murder here in the East. No one notices or cares. In lulls in the revels, Elias’s bride teaches me phrases in Dari. Her Greek is studded with soldiers’ profanities, which she offers with a charming ingenuousness. I am falling a little in love with her myself. I cannot get her to tell me how she met my brother or under what circumstances they came to be joined. She volunteers news of our elder brother Philip, though. He has returned safely from India. He rides now with an elite detachment of mountain rangers; they are already over the Hindu Kush and into northern Afghanistan, behind enemy lines, seeking tribal alliances for Alexander. Their packhorses’ bundles are freighted with gold.
Past midnight Costas the chronicler gets into a shoutdown with two of Elias’s comrades. They clash over the recent plot against the king. At Phrada, Alexander has brought his commander of Companion cavalry-Philotas, son of Parmenio-before the army on charges of treason. The corps has convicted the man and put him to death. Philotas’s father Parmenio, seventy years old and the army’s senior general since Philip’s day, has been executed as well, at Alexander’s orders, though no evidence links him to his son’s crime. Many in the army have voiced outrage at this. Alexander, further, has taken action against some twenty other officers who had bonds to the family of Parmenio, executing some, dismissing or imprisoning others. My brother’s mates defend these acts. Such is the law of kings since before Agamemnon, declares a captain named Demetrius. “If a man plots against the throne, not only must he pay with his own life but with those of every male of his family, including infants. Otherwise, those spared will seek revenge, if not immediately, then later. Never is such action more imperative than now, with the army at war, in an enemy land.”
With a smile, Costas applauds the captain’s sentiments. “My friend, you cite the war between ourselves and the Afghans. That’s not the campaign Alexander is waging. His war is within the army, between the Old Corps and the New.”
The Companions will not hear Alexander’s name impeached, even in jest. “Do you dare,” says the captain, “call the king conspirator?”
“I remark only,” replies the correspondent, “on the convenience of these convictions.”
Have you not noticed, says Costas, that half the army is now foreign? The corps, which at campaign’s start had been virtually all-Macedonian, has become more alien than native, more mercenary than free, more Persian and Median, Syrian, Armenian, Lydian, Cappadocian than European. “Look around you, brothers. Two-thirds of our cavalry were fighting against us a year ago. To whom are these foreigners loyal? That man, only, to whose clemency they owe their lives, and upon whose favor their hopes and fortunes depend.”
“What is your point, friend?”
“My point, brave captain, is that this war, which all of us believed had finished half a year ago, is about to become a second war, whose end no man can see. Do you imagine that your regiments will mop up Afghanistan and be home before Frost Festival? Never! Our king fashions for himself a new army, with which he will fight here and eastward forever. Overthrowing the Persian Empire is the least of his conquests. He has vanquished you, and you don’t even know it!”
“Do not condescend to us, thou obituarist.”
It is my brother who speaks. The room turns toward him. “You have told us to look around. We say the same to you.” Elias’s gesture takes in the soused and sprawling company. “Here are men, damn your bones, at whose shoulders stands Death, yet who will ride out with tomorrow’s dawn to face Him. What do we care where our king leads us, or against whom? He is our lord!”
At this the chamber explodes.
“His right arm has vanquished our enemies! His might has lifted us from obscurity to renown! By his will, the wide world is given into our hands! What are we without him? Where would we be, serving another?”
The hall booms with citation after citation.
“Do you know Xenophon’s Cyropaedia?” my brother demands of the correspondent.
With you, we are not afraid, even in the enemy’s land.
Without you, we are afraid, even to go home.
We part, Elias and I, beneath the stars. Tomorrow will take him away into the mountains. He clasps me in a farewell embrace. “Don’t you want to know,” I ask, “about Mother and Eleni?” Our younger sister.
Yes, yes, of course.
But as I tell him, I see his attention wander. The shikari boosts my brother’s consort into the saddle. She waits. I break off.
Elias meets my eyes with an expression at once caring and stern. “Don’t waste your time thinking of home, Matthias. It can’t help and can only hurt.”
13
The army sets off into the Hindu Kush on a brilliant autumn morning. Ash, the Afghan muleteer, has indeed supplied the women we need to make up for the beasts we couldn’t hire. Good bearers, he swears. Strong. No trouble.
I have been in Afghanistan too long.
The plan sounds good.
I like it.
Kandahar City, from which the army departs, has risen entirely new. We have built the place ourselves over twenty days, at Alexander’s orders, erecting walls and palisades, laying out streets, and excavating defensive ditches. It’s a tent city now, but soon settlers and immigrants will make it a real one. A garrison has been put in place, constituted of Greek mercs, disabled vets, and Macks who either wish to stay for their own reasons or whose health renders them no longer fit for service. The new city will command the river and road junctions of the lower Arghandab Valley and hold them open for trade, communication, and supply for the corps.
The city’s official name is Alexandria-in-Arachosia. The natives already call it Iskandahar, “Alexander’s City,” after Iskander, the Persian version of our king’s name.
Iskandahar is full of women, mostly young and all starving. They are peshnarwan, outcasts, dispossessed by war.
The greenbelt of southern Afghanistan is a torment of fleas and horseflies, hornets, blow-bugs, and lice. The track into the mountains winds along irrigation canals, from whose sloughs insects ascend in hissing, steaming clouds. They swarm into your mouth and eyes. They colonize your ass. Horses and mules suffer horribly. You march in full kit, legs plastered with mud (which the bugs bore through anyway) and a mesh cowl over your skull. The trail works along the Arghandab for about fifty miles, climbing steadily, before it commences the all-out ascent into the peaks. At a village called Omir Zadt, “Schoolmaster’s Nose,” the straight path turns to switchbacks. The column strings out over miles. Camps at night hang off the mountainside. Rain descends one minute, hail and snow the next, then all three mixed. Mules bawl all night. They smell winter coming; they want to turn back for the barn, not climb into thinner and more frigid air.
Our section, as I said, has hired female porters-eleven in all, to go with our eight mules-and two more that Ash miraculously discovers when he learns I have half a daric left. Nor is our outfit the only one to make use of this expedient. Every brigade has at least two hundred, all dressed in trousers with vest and pettu, and the rag footgear
