he drinks and dines; the most minor detail of his conversation captivates me. Does he speak with approval of some author? I scour the camp for that fellow’s book. Has he voiced distrust of a certain officer? I won’t go near the man.
Since the mountains, the poet has become a champion for our Afghan women. On the march he will make occasion to fall in at their sides, conversing in Farsi or Dari or, with Shinar, in Greek. He takes their cause with the army. I have seen him teaching Shinar to read. He thinks I don’t appreciate her, and he lets me know.
“What you must keep in mind, Matthias, is that this young woman who shares the hazards of your life-and all her sisters who do likewise with our fellows-has traversed seas of the soul such as you and I cannot begin to fathom. In her village, even to be glimpsed by a foreigner would cost her a beating. To speak to one would mean her life. Now here they are, with us. Do you think these women have put such disrepute behind them? It burns in their vitals every hour. Each scrap of pleasure they share with us, they pay for in the currency of secret shame. Yet they love us. This girl loves you. Have you heard her, ever, speak the name of God? She cannot, for in her eyes she and her sisters are heaven’s outcasts, banished to an exile from which they can never return. ‘May you see God’s back’ is the cruelest Afghan curse. Such is your girl’s bitter bread, which she must choke down anew at every sunrise.”
I ask, has he written verses of these girls? He will not answer.
“Soldiers and their women,” declares the poet, “are not as crude as their betters imagine. To watch your brother Elias and his mistress, one could believe he was looking on a lord and lady, so solicitous is each of the other’s weal. Even Flag, who prefers wantons, will not mistreat them. And what, while we’re at it, of this corps of bawds and strumpets that tracks the army beneath all weathers? They have become sisters to us. No dame back home laughs as gaily as they, or so gives herself over to such simple pleasures as a bath in a river, a tussle in the snow. The army packs infants in thousands. Who cares for them? These wenches scorned by all. As whores they may have started; they have become mothers and sisters and wives. How excruciating must the torment be to them, who know that the man they call husband in this country will cast them aside when his discharge comes and return home to his real wife and children, never to speak again of this matron and her brats with whom he has shared the keenest joys and sorrows of his life. Do you remember on the Oxus when the told-off Thessalians were selling their horses? How poignant those partings! Yet next day those same men turned out mothers and children too. How did those abandoned feel? Have they endured less than we? Every league we tramp, they trek with us. They suffer casualties as we do. They perish of fatigue and want, of thirst and disease. They are kicked by mules; they spill down mountainsides; frost takes their limbs. Nor are they immune to enemy action, for the foe knows well how to raid our camps and in fact seeks them out, particularly these marauders of the Wild Lands-Daans and Sacae and Massagetae-for whom pillage and the taking of plunder is second nature. These maids know how to fight too. Every one packs a spike in her hair and reckons all the soft spots to sink it. These jades and doxies are the unhonored champions of our cause. Without them, we couldn’t last a month.”
The column relieves Maracanda without incident. Spitamenes, who has held the city briefly, takes to his heels at our approach. The natives claim that his flight is at their urging; they fear Alexander’s vengeance if the king believes the city has harbored his foe. Or perhaps this is just their story. In any event, as soon as Andromachus and Menedemus learn this (before our fellows have even dismounted), the column puts about in pursuit. As always, no one tells us anything. Our half squadron, which had constituted one wing of the vanguard, receives no orders until a courier sent by Andromachus rides up, noontime of this breezy, cotton-aired day, and instructs us to hold in place while the column countermarches past, back the way it came, then reconfigure ourselves as the rear guard. In other words, no mooch for us or our horses.
“What genius came up with this stroke?”
I am with Rags, Boxer, and Knuckles where the highway turns beneath the city walls. When our mob hears we are not going in, a groan rises from all. The city means grain and sweet water for our animals, bunks for us, or at least a squat behind walls and the chance of half a night’s sleep. Now instead we must make off, unfed, unrested, with night falling in a few hours, into country cut by hundreds of lateral defiles, any one of which could conceal a regiment, along a river which, with its dense brush and cottony air, will set us up blind as a fogbank, so that the foe may appear either from the brush of the desert, driving us into the soup, or from the shallow channel itself.
“Children,” says Stephanos, “I don’t like the look of this.”
Back we trot, along the same route we came. There is a peril to serving under a commander as audacious as Alexander and the peril is this: When the king is not present in person but others command in his stead, those officers feel ashamed to act with less dash or boldness than they imagine he would. This can get you into trouble. Soldiers sense it. They can smell a shitstorm coming.
“Covers off!” bawls Flag, cantering along our front. He means strip the oxhide sleeves off our lanceheads. “Dust ’em up!” He bends for a handful of sand to abrade the shaft for a grip. I feel a brick descend in my bowels. I’d give ten days’ wages to stop for a crap. Enemy hoofprints carve a highway east. The track is so fresh that horse turds are practically steaming. He is a liar, on a trail so hot, who claims his chestnuts have not retracted into his loins.
Our post is both wings, rear guard. We have passed Zardossa village; the river flows on our right, wide and shallow, choked with broom and willow. Left is all creosote and tamarisk. Bush country; you can’t see a hundred feet into it. Each two hundred yards another ravine notches through, like a side road entering a thoroughfare. Dark lacks two hours. The horses snaffle at each tributary; they’re thirsty, they want to get their noses down. Orders are to make speed. We quirt them across.
March discipline dictates that a column in country that so favors an ambusher should proceed with extreme circumspection. Wing cavalry should sweep the brush in fifty-yard relays. Each dry ravine should be secured before the column passes. But daylight works against us. And the brush is so dense, it would take forever to comb even a quarter-mile swath. Wing security should be out on the river side too. We should be two squadrons, not two halves, and they should search all islands, as far as the opposite bank (which we cannot see because of the intervening “travelers,” the dense brush, and the snowing cotton).
An hour till nightfall.
Too far from Maracanda to summon help.
Suddenly riders appear behind us. Their numbers match our half squadron of the rear guard; like us, they advance at the trot, about a furlong back. They show themselves so boldly that at first, we think they must be ours.
Knuckles looses a piercing whistle, alerting Flag, who rides ahead on the wing. Beside him, on the bank road, march two companies of mercenary foot. Flag sends a rider to their captains. Already we can see the infantry deploy. Flag spurs back, signaling to us to form into wedges.
Our numbers are eighty. We break into twenties. My charge is the leftmost ten. I put Knuckles at the point (meaning the rear) and ride, myself, to the wing. Left, the nearest island is about a hundred yards. I’ve got a bad feeling about it.
Lucas spurs past, taking his slot in the wedge. “Are they ours?” he calls, meaning the riders behind us.
Flag laughs. “Ride back and find out!”
Already we can feel the column compressing. Men’s voices are shouting ahead. Something is going on up front. Through the cottony air, we glimpse companies forming fronts left, facing the bush, and right, toward the shallows.
We enter a section of bluffs. High cut-banks ascend on the left. Horsemen appear atop them. Archers. Not ours. We have no archers. The riders behind have widened their front now. The tamarisk flat between river and bluffs is about an eighth mile. They fill it. Behind them more mounted men appear. Riding double-horseman and foot soldier. We have heard of this practice but never seen it. In action, the enemy drops off his second man at the gallop; this fellow joins the attack on foot.
Stephanos reins from his post at the tail. “Sons of whores!” he calls, indicating the foe. “They’ve set this up from the start.”
He means Spitamenes’ flight from Maracanda was fake all along. This ambush has been in place for days. The foe has had time to rehearse. Doubtless he has groomed the ground, carving deadfalls and leg-breakers, blocking escape routes with brush and felled timbers.
I call to Flag to let me check the island. Too late. Without a sound the treeline comes alive. Horse archers emerge in a front. They do not loose their missiles, nor do they charge; they simply advance to the water’s edge
