“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 fiancee. 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 excruciating 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
