the Afghans call pashin.
The reason contractors take women instead of mules into the mountains is if a woman breaks down or dies, the loss is less. A mule is a serious investment. Still, one would be a liar to say his glance does not roam over these lean, dark-eyed maids. One of them, whose real name is Shinar, has been nicknamed “Biscuits” by the Macks because she makes no shame to lift her pettu and squat by the roadside. She is between the age of my sister and my sweetheart, about seventeen, and the only one, except a long-limbed lass named Ghilla, with the light of intelligence in her eyes. She is slender but strong. I watch her carry a sack of sesame that weighs half as much as she does. She never speaks. The fourth night I approach Ash; I want him to ask her how she has come to this life as a porter. Ash reproves me. “Such questions must never be put.”
I am made to understand that the young woman’s case is unexceptional. All these girls’ villages have been burned, Ash declares; all their fathers and brothers driven off or slain.
“By Macks?”
“Narik ta?” What difference does it make?
The old man’s attitude toward his charges is that they are lucky to be alive. In his eyes, he is their savior. He fills their bellies, gives them work. Who else would do this? Their own gods and ancestors have abandoned them, for crimes committed in this life or another. I ask Ash how he knows this. He elevates his palms to heaven. “If God had not wished it this way, He would not have made it so.”
Ash treats the women like mules. He directs their exertions not by verbal commands, but by “gee” and “haw,” driving them with the lash and halting them by blows and cuffs.
You have never seen a mule laden until you’ve seen an Afghan do it. The poor beasts are so overloaded they can barely totter. For women it’s worse. The females are provided neither pack frames nor straps but simply handed a sack or crate and pointed up the trail. If they falter, they are beaten; if they fall out, their loads are divided among the others and they themselves left for dead.
The girl called Biscuits is the first to talk back. I chance to witness this, at a site where the trail crosses a torrent. She draws up and addresses Ash. The old villain could not have reacted with greater surprise if a mule itself had broken into speech. He seizes his chatta, a double rope with knots twisted into its ends. I have never witnessed such a beating. I stride to stop it. Our sergeant Thatch catches me.
“The girl’s his property; you insult his honor if you break in.”
“To hell with his honor!”
The old man continues to savage the girl. Thatch clamps me hard. By the gods, I cannot endure this. Ash marks my state and lays on a few extra stripes, just to show who rules this caravan. Then he stops. The maid lies motionless. Not one of her sisters makes a move to help her, nor am I permitted to bring her aid.
When the column packs out half an hour later, the girl lies in the same place. Clearly she is dead. But a few miles up the trail, I see her again. Her sisters have divvied her load and hauled it for her. She struggles along, mute as a beast.
The column has entered the mountains now. At night the women sleep in a huddle, wrapped in nothing but their threadbare pettus. One midnight Thatch makes an incursion into their camp, declaring his globes so swollen he will mount a woman or an ass, whichever he can get behind first. “Ough, the smell!” And he scurries back to finish his business on his own.
Up we trek. In other armies, soldiers have servants. In Alexander’s a man shoulders his own kit; pack animals are used only to bear ropes and tents, road-building tools, spare weapons and armor, and their own fodder. One mule in three hauls nothing but hay and grain, with nosebags tied on top and snapping like pennants in the gale. How the night howls at this elevation! The broader the valley, the more bearable the wind; in the gorges it really whistles. At times the trail is overarched, literally carved from the mountainside. Crouch or you’ll crack your skull. The gale blasts uphill in the morning and downhill at night, except in storms, when it comes from everywhere.
I’ll give Ash this: He is right about the women. They are tough. Tougher than we are. Soles bound only in rags, they tread surefootedly across scree falls and ice dumps, uncomplaining as mules. Lucas ogles several as we trek. “I’ve been on this trail too long, Matthias. Some of these girls are starting to look good to me.”
The industry of Afghanistan is banditry. Every vale is home to a different clan, and each extracts a toll from the traveler. It is Alexander’s policy to subdue all wild tribes along any route he traverses. This means sending troops up to high-line the ridges, that is, seizing the high ground to protect a route of march. Lucas and I volunteer. Anything to break the monotony.
We take to the high country like cats to a creamery. There are skirmishes every day. The foe are ragged tribesmen mostly, armed not with bows (the wind blows the hell out of arrows at this altitude) but with slings, with which they can launch a stone the size of a child’s fist a quarter mile downhill. If one of these drills you above the eyeline, you won’t have to worry about next payday. We chase these bandits. They retreat from fort to rockpile fort, launching curses and skull-busters, then show their heels when we close within range. Their sons, nimble as goats, serve as lookouts.
We camp above the clouds now. Terrain is all snowfields. In the bare patches, alpine meadows show carpets of broom and heather. Days blaze with sun-dazzle; nights are ungodly cold. It takes forever to heat a bowl of broth. Boiling an egg is impossible. Breath comes hard. A dash of two hundred feet leaves us heaving. Astonishingly, the bugs are still with us.
On the fifth dawn we run into Flag, Tollo, and Stephanos. Every high-line party is supposed to return to the column for rest after five days. Bung that! We’re not about to get unyoked from our mentors again. We like it up here. No one gives us orders and, if we can keep from getting brained by the enemy’s hand-catapults, the chances of getting minced are remote.
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?”
