cause and wrought such feats as no corps-at-arms will ever achieve again.”
“Like cutting unarmed men’s throats?”
“Would you prefer them armed, Lucas?”
“I’m no coward, Flag. I’ll fight anyone, including you. But I won’t butcher you. I won’t tie your hands and kill you like a pig and call it valor. And if you can perform such acts in good conscience, you’re worse than a woman, you’re a beast.”
Flag comes out of his seat. I spring in front of him.
“Leave Lucas alone, Flag. He’s a man and a Greek to think and ask questions, to question what is right.”
In a moment Flag regains his self-command.
“And what is right, Matthias? Or do you take the enemy’s side too?”
“When we were boys,” I say, “we rode from dark to dark, training for the charge and the chase. We dreamed of standing before our king as knights and heroes. I still do.” I turn to Lucas and the others. “There must be some way to be a good soldier in a rotten war.”
Boxer laughs. “When you find it, Matthias, be sure and let us know.”
23
The brigades at Cyropolis are granted three days’ rest. The men need it badly, but the break is even more critical for the horses and mules, who must get green forage or they’ll break down. The siege train has caught up with the army now. With it comes mail. I get twelve letters from Danae, all in one packet. The most recent is seven months old. Flag gives me half an hour to savor this correspondence. “Then get back to camp and be ready to move.”
I find a patch of shade beneath a mud-brick wall. In the square before me, our section and another are roping up women and children prisoners. As I said, Alexander has in this campaign for the first time permitted troopers to take captives and sell them for their own profit. Clearly our king’s object is less to put money in the men’s purses than to fire our zeal in rounding up every last dame and urchin, so that not so much as a runty whelp gets away to bear hope to his compatriots. We have thrown in together, our section and another, agreeing to divvy the proceeds of the day’s take.
I flop in the dust with Danae’s letters. Like every scuff, I arrange them first in order-most recent on top. That way I’ll know early if my darling has sent me a “Sorry, Sweetheart.”
Sure enough, she has.
Another man. Danae fears her youth passing. She loves me but…
Like all soldiers, I have dreaded this hour. I have rehearsed it and braced for it, expecting it to devastate me. Now in the event, I feel no distress. I feel nothing.
Across the square, the slavers are branding their catch. They’re all Arabs, these villains; they know a poor crop when they see one, and these Afghan brats and bitches are certainly that. Insolent, illiterate, in love with freedom, they can be domesticated no more than a pack of jackals. On the trail they will bolt or die.
Danae’s message is seven months old. It occurs to me that she has probably wed by now. Likely she is with child.
Some perverse impulse makes me open and read the other letters, the earlier ones when my betrothed is still mine. It is these that break my heart. The reality is apparent in lines unwritten that Danae has met and is growing attached to that man who now replaces me in her affections. Can I blame her?
I am with Shinar.
I have been for months.
I’m the one who has played false, not Danae.
The slavers appraise their inventory as they would horses or mules. They check teeth and feet. They take care when thrashing their stock (which they do with a cruelty exceeding even that of the Afghans themselves) not to inflict injury that will damage the goods.
I return to camp to find a blow-off going. Soldiers are not grim after massacres. They booze and crack wise. Have they taken prizes? Will there be a bonus or a step? If they have lost a friend, it enlarges their hatred of the foe. They feel no remorse. They have done a good day’s work.
I grab chow with Knuckles and Lucas. I say nothing about Danae’s letter. My mates are toting up the women and children in the day’s bag. Boxer is off making a deal with the Arabs. Knuckles reminds Lucas and me of our first fighting debacle, long months ago, in the village with the sheep pens.
“You’ve come a long way.”
“Rot in hell,” Lucas tells him.
Flag appears with orders. We are to be ready to move two hours before dawn. We’ll be part of the column heading south to pursue Spitamenes. Alexander will press north by forced marches to deal with the tribes beyond the Jaxartes. Knuckles stands and scratches. “How much did Boxer get?” He means for the slaves.
Flag makes no answer.
“What about those boys?” Knuckles cites three healthy youths we took captive in a quarry. Twelve or thirteen years old. Worth real money.
Flag squints away toward the mountains. “In the citadel,” he says, “some of our fellows stumbled onto the site where the Afghans butchered our garrison.”
He means all captives, in reprisal, will be put to the sword. There goes our slave money.
“What a war,” says Knuckles.
24
The Many Blessings is the river of Maracanda. Our relief column tracks along it, hurrying to catch Spitamenes, who’s besieging the city. Where the river emerges from the heights northeast of the walls, it does so as a torrent, thundering down a gap called the Gorge of the Sisters (memorializing two Afghan virgins who, lore declares, leapt to their deaths in a gesture of defiance against some ancient invader); then it levels out and drops underground. When you ride over it, you can hear the waters rushing beneath the earth. Near the village of Zardossa the flow re-emerges, funneling down another defile, this time a sunken one, at a ford called Council Bluffs. By there, the river has spread to half a mile wide and become so shallow it can be waded by a child. Numerous bars and islands, called by the natives “travelers,” stud the channel. From one bank you can barely see the other. The shore and islands stand thick with willow, broom, and cottonwood, the kind of stuff that flourishes near underground water. This day, in fall, the cottony seeds sail on the wind. The air is snowy with them.
Our column is twenty-three hundred, three-quarters infantry, all mercs, under Andromachus, called Whiskers for his great bushy red beard, and Menedemus, a dashing and brilliant cavalry commander, only twenty-seven years old, who at nineteen had taken the crown at Olympia in the pentathlon. Our half squadron under Flag and Stephanos is assigned flank security; we ride on the forward right wing, looking out for ambushes. It’s a four-day chop, moving fast, through semidesert populated by scrub brush, camel thorn, and tamarisk. I trot, all the second day, with the poet.
Stephanos is one of the few Macks who does not carry, as the phrase goes, a camp woman. He has a wife and children back home, though no one has heard him speak of them; we know only that he pouches a letter to them every day. This reveals little, however, since the poet maintains simultaneous correspondence with scores of other colleagues, actors, philosophers, musicians, and heaven knows who else. When the army puts over at a foreign city, it is Stephanos’s habit to take apartments in town, on his own, even if the corps has assigned him to camp or cantonments. He does this to write. It’s easy to forget how famous he is. He is invited constantly to banquets and functions (which the army suffers in the interest of local relations), at which he appears in formal military dress, usually squiring one of the city’s ladies of fashion, often poets themselves, or else patronesses of the arts. My fascination with the fellow has enlarged, if anything, as our acquaintance has grown. No one really knows him. Even drunk, he will not spill his guts. I find myself watching him when he doesn’t know I’m looking. I study how
