“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.
