be Spitamenes? The Wolf himself? If it is, he is younger than I imagined, not far over forty, with a hooked nose and hawk eyes, slender as a stalk. His mount is a chestnut Arabian, not big but with perfect conformation, a strong proud neck and a barrel like a racer.
For about the count of five, I get a look at the Wolf’s face. If this is indeed he, and not some subordinate commander, he is, as we have heard, no savage, but a man of learning and cultivation. He looks more like a scholar than a warrior, and more like a priest than either. His dress is in the Bactrian style, except for the Persian tarbousse — the felt cap that covers ears, brow, and chin-with a dun-colored cavalry cloak over trousers and blouse. His boots are ox-hide troopers, not the calfskin skippers of the dandy. His lone emblem of command, if indeed it is one, is an ivory-handled dagger of the Damascene type, slung from a strap about his neck and shoulders. His aspect is grave, and his companions reflect this. Will you account me disloyal if I confess I felt attraction to the man? One could not help it. The fellow possessed that quality, innate to all born commanders, of focused and dominating intention. The champions about him were all of superlative comeliness, all mounted on spectacular stock. Yet I recall no aspect of any of them. My attention was held by this commander alone.
In later stages of the campaign, the myth surrounding Spitamenes evolved and enlarged. One heard again and again of his devout Zoroastrianism; the modesty of his bearing; his piety and austerity; devotion to scripture; that he employed no groom save his fourteen-year-old son, Derdas, but tended his own stock; that he slept on the ground alongside his warriors and would take no refreshment himself until every other’s hunger had been sated. His hatred for the Macedonian invader was legendary, as was his valor in action. Though his tribal origins were of the Anah of Sogdiana, through his mother, he commanded the respect of all nations, even the Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae, for his dedication to the common cause; he was the only commander they would follow outside their own. We heard over and over of his reverence for the shrines of his ancestors, his eloquence in addressing his fellows, and his superiority to avarice. The Wolf was, men said, a yokemate for Alexander. Yet the sense that I took away from this brief glimpse by the river was that, if events had not dictated otherwise, he would have preferred the life of contemplation to that of action, and that he was at heart more of an ascetic than a warrior. In this he differed from our king, who was before all a fighter and a conqueror and who, deprived of the glory and exhilaration of war, would sooner abandon life than fashion some lesser mode of inhabiting it.
The moon sets. Dawn lacks two hours. We can hear servants in the foe’s camp packing up. At sunrise Spitamenes will move out. Perhaps we will survive after all, Lucas and I.
But the lightening sky reveals a finish to our hopes.
Villagers.
Women and boys, a column approaching from Maracanda. They have marched out to pick the bones of the invader. They swarm in hundreds. It is a holiday to them.
Lucas and I have hollowed out an undermine in the bank. Into this we burrow like rats. But the villagers and their dogs are nosing all over. In minutes we are discovered.
Women and boys throng about our hiding place, cursing and hurling stones. We are hauled forth by lancers of Spitamenes’ Sogdian brigades. The dames and youths pelt us with rocks and beat us with sticks. My good arm is nearly wrenched from its socket. We are stabbed with knives, our eyes and hair are clawed at by fingernails. Two words are shouted over and over, utan and qoonan, which later we learn mean shit-eaters and curs. We offer no resistance. If anything, we try to appear more feeble and beaten than we are. It doesn’t work. Abuse redoubles. In the end the extravagance of the villagers’ assault is what saves us, as the lancers, who are at least soldiers bound by discipline, shield us and spirit us apart, prisoners to be interrogated by their superiors.
Spitamenes has already ridden away with the lead elements. The rest of the column mounts up. No one knows what to do with us. A conference is held, of which Lucas and I can make out nothing except that no one wants the burden of our care and custody. It looks like they’re going to dump us with the crones and urchins. The warriors’ fever of trophy-taking has passed; they don’t want our hair, there’s no honor to it, and we have no weapons or armor to loot. “Ransom!” I call in as bold a voice as my bashed-in lungbox will offer, partly for the benefit of the Sogdians, hoping they’ll seize upon the idea, but mostly for Lucas, to rally him and give him hope. For my efforts I am hammered across the crown with a stone mace. When I shield my face, more blows beat upon my back and arms. My skull feels like a spike has been driven through it. To my astonishment, I discover that captivity has reanimated me. A bubble of hate ascends. I welcome it. Men are born liars and so am I. Already I have resolved to give these blackguards nothing, to learn all I can about them and to use every scrap of it to work them harm, as rapidly and pitilessly as I can. No one of the foe savvies “ransom,” of course. But the idea seems to have occurred to them on its own. At least that’s what we imagine the bucks are debating in such lively fashion. Meanwhile, the bitches and brats continue to spit on us through the cordon of our defenders; women even piss into their cupped hands and hurl this at us. The parley breaks up. We are handed over to two raw-looking braves, no older than sixteen, who bind our wrists in front of us and lash the rawhide thongs to the tails of two pack-ponies in the column. The animals are beaten into motion and so are we. Off we go at the hot trot. Stones and clods of dirt chase us half a mile down the road, with the pack of dames and striplings howling for our blood. Throughout all this Lucas and I offer not so much as a peep, nor even raise our eyes from the dirt. Things have gotten bad and they are going to get worse.
26
Spitamenes’ warriors derive from five nations. Bactrians and Sogdians make up his main force. These are legitimate Afghans, clansmen from the land between the Hindu Kush and the Jaxartes; they fight as traditional cavalry, under civilized Persian and Persian-trained officers. The Wolf also has as infantry tribesmen of the south, from the Panjshir, Kabul, and Ghorband Valleys, from Ghazni and Kandahar and from the flatlands as far east as Artacoana. These are his true Afghan units. The remainder of his fighting men are Scyths. These are out-and-out savages. The first nation, the Sacae, are a mountain and desert people who subsist off their flocks and herds and follow the seasonal grass. The second, the Daans (“robbers”) make their living as brigands. The Daans are not as numerous as the Sacae but are far more warlike. Both are nomads of the steppes north of the Jaxartes, the so- called Wild Lands, who for centuries have chased out every imperial monarch who tried to make them knuckle under. Third and most fearsome of the Scythian nations are the Massagetae. These are a true warrior race, who scorn physical labor and who live by raiding and looting alone. The braves of the Massagetae dismount only to sleep. They are the most spectacular riders in the world. To them goes the glory of having slain in battle Cyrus the Great, two hundred years ago, defending their native steppe.
It is to these devils that Lucas and I are handed over. They already hold half a dozen other Mack prisoners. The force splits up. Spitamenes and his Bactrians have spurred off toward Maracanda. The Sacae and Daans scatter for their villages, or more accurately to the migrant bivouacs where their women and children wait with the enclosed wagons that constitute their homes. The Massagetae, our captors, drive north for the Jaxartes. This movement comes by no means in one bunch. Rather the various clans and bands break up, each bolting in its own direction. Lucas and I have been hooded, with the other captives, but in such rags that we can steal a glance between the weave. Even blindfolded, one can estimate numbers of cavalry from their sound, and bearing can be guessed at by the sun. I gauge two thousand in this drove of Massagetae (the nation, we have been told, numbers well over 100,000), which breaks up now into no fewer than a hundred bands. Our group is about forty. A buck has been placed in charge of us, who speaks good Dari and a smattering of Greek. We can communicate. His method of interrogation is straightforward. He shouts questions through the sacks over our heads; if we answer unsatisfactorily or with insufficient promptitude, he bashes our ribs, knees, and kidneys with a cudgel that we haven’t seen but that feels like a field club.
I am suffering terribly with my skull and arm. It is worse for Lucas, whose wound of the face weeps blood and will not stop; with the heat and the infernal Afghan insects, the hood over his head becomes an oven in which he roasts. His ribs and hobbled knee torture him further. And, for both of us, the terror of death. “If I die,” he tells me when we stop the first night, “don’t let the army cook up some phony story. Tell my people what really happened.”
As for my own end, I make no such scruple. “Tell ’em the biggest-balled lie you can think of.”
On the move the Massagetae subsist on curds and blood. The latter they tap from the veins of their stock by means of a sharpened reed; they close the wound with spit and mud. No one makes a fuss over this, least of all the
