camp. Quartermasters log in our 310 ponies (other companies have brought in over 4,000, with another 3,000, we hear, at the Seven Forts). Ten days more and the corps will have made good all its losses in pack and riding stock.
Our share is a slick fortune. The litter is flush. I pay off my debts, with enough left over to refurbish my kit and even address some of Snow’s infirmities. The lads rally for a bust-up along the river. The whores’ camp has caught up with the army; we have flute-girls for those without women, and enough pank and nazz to get properly varnished.
I collect a bouquet of lupines to make peace with Shinar. She won’t have it. She stalks away, down to the river.
Oh hell.
“Am I a beast to you?” She confronts me when I follow her. “I have heard your soldier’s saying, ‘Who sheds his blood for King and Corps…’ Do you think I don’t know what this means?”
I tell her she hasn’t heard me say it.
“It means,” she says, “that we are animals to you. What you do in this foreign land means nothing. Ghilla is nothing to Lucas, and I am nothing to you.”
“Is that why you cut your hair off?”
“Yes.”
“And why you ran away?”
“Yes.”
Would you have preferred it, I ask, if I gave you to that young buck to be passed around to his cronies?
She accuses me of twisting everything.
“Should I have left you with Ash? Should I have trekked on, leaving you beaten by the side of the trail?”
“I am not your wife!”
“What does that mean? Are you relieved or angry?” I catch her by both shoulders. “Shinar. Shinar…”
“You should respect me. I have saved your life!”
Respect? I remind her it was I who bought her freedom.
“I don’t want freedom! What can I do with freedom?”
I don’t get it. “What do you want from me?”
“Nothing. I want nothing from you.”
She starts throwing her kit together. I have watched other Macks in a hundred dust-ups with Afghan women. Now I’m the idiot. I can’t believe it.
“Where are you going?”
“What do you care?”
Again I marvel at her Greek. “Where did you learn to speak so well?”
“From you.”
Exasperation overcomes me. I order her back to camp. She confronts me with arms folded. “Can’t you understand, Matthias? I have lost everything. I have nothing but you.”
And she breaks down. I take her in my arms. For once she doesn’t fight me.
“Shinar,” I tell her, “when I first saw you in the mountains, I was struck to the heart by your beauty. Your eyes, your skin. The way the wind blew your hair across your face…”
I am no lover. I’m no good at this stuff. All I can do is tell her what she makes me feel. It seems to help. Little by little she relents. I make her promise not to run away again.
“Were you unhappy when I was gone?” she asks.
“Yes. I had no one to fight with.”
We climb the hill back to camp with our arms around each other. Nights get cold fast in that country; her woman’s warmth feels good at my side. Already I am looking forward to evening’s end.
But when we reach the bonfire, instead of a blow-out in full blaze, we find Rags and Little Red kicking sand onto dead ashes. Horses are being saddled for action, arms and armor are being trundled up.
“Red, what’s happened?”
Flag appears on horseback, leading my mare. He’s in armor, with his half-pike in his fist and my kit and weapons across my animal’s back.
“Our dear friend Spitamenes,” he says. “He couldn’t let us finish our party.”
The Wolf, Flag reports, has struck again with treachery. Crossing the Jaxartes by night with four thousand, he has attacked and overrun all Seven Forts. He has massacred our garrisons. The whole country has gone up in flames.
Flag slings me my gear.
The war, it appears, is not over. It has just begun.
BOOK FOUR
22
Every man in the Jaxartes camp is ordered to pack seven days’ rations. Advance units are dispatched in darkness to the nearest of the Seven Forts. Their orders are to cordon the sites, permitting no man of the foe to escape to bring warning to the others. Additional divisions are sent at first light to ring the farthermost forts. Alexander sends for the siege train. This and the other heavy baggage still have not reached the Jaxartes. Miraculously the column has escaped Spitamenes’ marauders; otherwise it would have been massacred too. Two squadrons of fast cavalry are dispatched to locate these troops and turn them toward the Seven Forts. Rams, bolt catapults, and stone-throwers are never transported assembled. They’re too heavy. Only the iron fittings are conveyed, with the shafts and ratchet wheels of the windlasses, and the torsion bands made of human hair. Wooden members of the artillery are cut and fabricated on-site of local timber. It is a marvel how quickly the engineers can trim up the pieces and get the engines assembled and ready to fire. These will raze the walls of the Seven Forts. All except the largest, Cyropolis, are of mud-brick. They will crack like candy.
Word is passed as the army marshals to move out from the Jaxartes camp: For the first time Alexander permits the troops to take women and children captives under their own hand and sell them for their own profit.
The king addresses our brigade alongside the stock pens as the sky begins to lighten. A drizzle has got up, making the troops, whose hair and clothing are matted with dust from the night’s packing-out, look like men made of mud. Horses stand hobbled, nosebags on; mules bawl as their stockmen wrangle them into trains.
“My friends, no few of you have comrades and friends in the garrisons of the Seven Forts. Give up all hope of finding them alive. The Desert Wolf has no reason to restrain his own savagery or that of his troops. Now answer me, brothers, and speak the truth. Can you govern your hearts in the attack? Can you fight as soldiers and not as wild beasts? If you can’t, say so now and I will leave you here. Make no mistake, I intend that no man of the enemy shall escape our vengeance. But we will do this as an army, not as a rabble. Can you control yourselves? Can I count on you?”
Adana falls in a morning. Alexander does not direct affairs from afar. He goes up a ladder with the first assault. Inside the city, even lads and old men are put to the sword. By midday the troops have crossed the six miles to the second fort, Gaza, already ringed by Polyperchon’s brigade. Our company under Flag and Stephanos is dismounted; we leave the horses on the cordon and go in to take the place by storm.
Inside the gates the fighting is house-to-house. The defenders punch passageways through the party walls; as our fellows clear one room, the foe skips to the next, loosing a cascade of bricks and rubble behind him. If we press too close, he darts round and strikes from the rear. He has learned to shoot through windows and to sling arrows and darts from heights.
