blocks my escape. I see his mace has lost its head; I go after him with my saber, but as I raise it to strike, something catches my arm and holds it. I have been shot. A bolt as long as a carpenter’s rule and as thick as a thumb has entered my right shoulder from the rear and driven clean through. The arrowhead has broken off but the splintered shaft juts out half a foot before me. It binds my shoulder. My arm goes dead. My saber falls. The limb plunges like a puppet’s whose strings have been cut. I am excruciatingly aware that whoever has shot the arrow is still right behind me, and very close, judging by the power with which the shaft has driven through. He will drill me again if I don’t get clear. I spin Snow toward the river. Directly before me rises another Afghan archer, on foot. He fires. I can see both wings of his bow kick forward. Shaft and warhead hurtle straight at the center of my chest. Over my corselet I wear an ancient iron breastplate that had been my grandfather’s and that I have cursed a thousand times for its weight and ungainliness. I have tried again and again to unload it on unsuspecting scuffs at bargain prices; no one has been dumb enough to take it off my hands. This piece of antique plate now saves my life. The bolt strikes me squarely in the solar plexus. The sound rings off the iron like a bell. But the warhead does not penetrate. The impact bowls me rearward over Snow’s hindquarters.
All sounds ceases. Light goes queer. I can’t move my limbs. Am I dead? Is this hell?
It’s water.
I’m in the river.
Instinct makes me cling to my horse’s reins. But as I go down, cleaving to this lifeline, Snow plants her hooves and rears; the leather snaps. I plunge under. The foe is everywhere. I’m going into the books for sure this time. The enemy is trampling us in the shallows. It’s a tactic; they perform it with skill. A hoof steps on my back. I inhale a mouthful of mud. The weight of my armor is pulling me under. I can’t tell up from down. I open my eyes underwater. Arrow-shafts are ripping through the gray-green silt. The Wolf’s men are right above us, firing point- blank. Those with lances impale us like fish. I am seized by the mad notion that I must save my fellows. I grab hold of a merc I don’t know and haul him surface-ward with my one good arm. I am furious that he makes no effort to help. It occurs to me that he is dead; this elevates the pitch of my rage. I heave to the surface. There, in the current, lurches my mate, Rags. Three arrow-shafts protrude from his belly. His eyes are the color of glass. He plunges in death; a Daan carves his scalp.
I am overcome with terror. I go under. A horse’s knee wallops my skull; I hear as much as feel the bone crack. I vault upward, seeking air. A merc thrashes into the soup before me. A tribesman rides him down, impales him with a lance thrust through the dorsal spine. The savage dismounts into the current and scalps the Greek while he’s still alive, then turns back, whooping, elevating his trophy. Impossibly, the merc emerges, blood sheeting from his torn and naked skull. With his last strength, he drives the severed shaft of his twelve-footer into his murderer’s liver. At this, three more clansmen rush upon him; the merc inverts his weapon, plunging it into his own throat; while he’s still alive the Daans hack off his head.
Scenes of matching horror are enacted all along the column. My last sight before unconsciousness closes over me is of my pretty little mare being led away by a dashing and handsomely accoutered Afghan. The warrior neither vaunts nor displays himself like his savage countrymen, but simply trots off, like a satisfied market-goer who has just made a canny purchase.
25
Night has descended when I come to. Lucas supports me. We hunker in the river, the pair of us, concealed beneath a cut-bank, with only our eyes, noses, and mouths above the surface.
Lucas has been sabered across the forehead. He has lost an eye. The whole left side of his face, bound up, is a mass of matted blood, hair, and flesh. Several ribs are cracked, though I don’t know this yet; his right knee is half-staved, stepped on by a horse. He holds me up from behind, arms round my chest to keep me from going under. My head lolls against his shoulder. Roots and branches screen our hideout. I struggle to speak, to thank him. He hisses me silent.
Out in the current, the enemy are pillaging corpses. They troll for survivors-their own to rescue, ours to murder and loot. They carry torches. When one of them spots movement, he elevates his brand; together he and his mates converge on the site.
I am freezing. A terrible thirst torments me. My skull is pierced with such agony as to nearly make me blind. The arrow shaft has been extracted from my shoulder. Lucas has saved my life. I feel bitter culpability. I plead with him to get away, save himself. He stills me with two fingers.
“You’re out of your head, Matthias.”
I pass out again. When I come to, the moon, which had been high over my left shoulder, now sinks below my right.
“Can you take your own weight?”
I find a root and sag against it. Lucas frees himself. God knows how long he has been holding me up.
The river sprawls thick with bodies. Corpses have piled up against deadfall and downed limbs. The Daans and Massagetae scalp a man, then strip everything of value. They leave the bodies naked. The dead Macks and mercs bump together in the current like a boom of logs. These are our fellows. Flag and Stephanos may be among them. Rags, I know has gone in the books. I saw Knuckles take a ticket. Flea, my last glimpse of him, had a lance through one hip and an arrow wedged through his windpipe.
River rats have found this banquet; they scamper across the boom of flesh, their wet fur glistening in the torchlight.
The foe has built bonfires along both banks. One would have thought of such savages that they would, by now, be given over to riot and licentiousness. But either they are possessed of strong native discipline or their officers are made of keener stuff than we have believed. Sentries have been posted. Mounts are being tended to. Even the parties plundering corpses in the river do so with the formality, even stateliness, of magistrates dividing an inheritance. A protocol governs the despoliation. We can hear the braves. “Did you kill this one? No, I think that one’s yours.” At least that’s what we imagine they’re saying-before the points of their scalping knives inscribe the half-circle ear to ear and then the trophy-taker’s fist, gathering the victim’s hair into one hank, with a swift and practiced twist rips the crown free. The depth of horror one experiences to witness this is impossible to convey by the medium of speech. You’re sick with it; your being, in every viscera, revolts. Most excruciating is to be disabled and weaponless. And of course you fear. You loathe yourself for calling in your heart so shamelessly upon heaven, in whose clemency you not only have never believed but have actively scorned and ridiculed. But you can’t stop yourself. Your breast pounds, setting up such a din, you are certain, that the enemy cannot fail to hear it and be led by its drumbeat to your hiding hole. Yet you can’t curb this, either, any more than you can quell the throttled wheezing that passes for your breath.
Downstream, the foe has strung a barricade across the river. Warriors on horseback and afoot form a picket line, bank to bank. They inspect each drifting log and limb. A Mack who tries to ride the current will fetch up against them.
Lucas shows me, by his mark scratched on a root, that the river is dropping. By sunrise our nest will be exposed. We have to dig.
I said before that shame is mightier than terror. But even shame has a master, and that is fatigue. We are too exhausted, Lucas and I, to feel pride or fear. Numbness is all that’s left. Search parties quarter the island above us. If they find our dugout, they will flay us alive. We burrow into the muck, dumb as toads in a bog.
Spent as I am, I can still appreciate the brilliance of the ambush and the massacre, which the Desert Wolf has orchestrated like a master of war. It was boxes within boxes, wheels within wheels. Each time he showed our captains elements of his design, they responded with the proper, even aggressive, counter. Yet each evolution only drove our fellows deeper into the snare. To participate was like watching a tragedy on stage, where each scene reveals itself in sequence, only the drama is death and we ourselves are its actors.
In Spitamenes, the enemy has found his genius-a commander of cunning, ruthlessness, and audacity, who understands not only Alexander’s tactics but the heart behind them and is, in truth, ahead of our king both in conception and in execution.
The moon continues its descent; the foe winds down his search for survivors. At one point a man passes our hideout on horseback, in the current, at a walk, surrounded by a retinue of Bactrian and Sogdian knights. Can this
