Only one maid of the band has refrained from participation in this savaging-a lass of fifteen, with eyes like obsidian and hair black as a raven’s wing. Now, when we prisoners are staked down for the night, she slips to us through shadow, kneeling beside Lucas to swab his eye with the bunched-up weave of her pettu, which she has soaked with cold springwater. I am staked three feet away, beside another captive named Medon; I feel my chest heave with emotion, to witness such an act of mercy in this terrible place.
Suddenly a man appears from the darkness. He wrenches the girl to her feet and begins cuffing her violently. His curses accuse her of some felony we can’t decipher; the maid puts up no defense. In moments, half the war party has assembled. The clansmen are howling; Lucas and I and the other prisoners shout back. The girl did nothing! Let her loose, you sons of whores! The man clutches the child before him by the hair; the tribesmen roar approval. The brute turns toward us captives. A curved khofari knife flashes in his hand. He shows it to us, slowly and deliberately, then draws the blade across the girl’s throat, slicing so hard and so deep he almost severs her spine. I am screaming. We all are. The man dumps the maid into the dirt at his feet. He does not linger, even for the count of twenty it takes for the poor girl’s blood to form a lake on the stone. He simply turns and strides off, surrounded by tribesmen trumpeting their approval. “God Almighty!” cries Medon. “Who is that man? Why did he do that?”
Ham and his mates stare down at the butchered child. “He is her father.”
Women drag the lass’s body into the darkness. She has violated, Ham tells us, the code of A’shaara. The crime is not us Macks’ for being aided, but the girl’s for aiding us. The suddenness and monstrousness of the act have stricken us mute. How can such a thing be possible? Can a father slaughter his own daughter?
Sleep is out of the question. We huddle, shivering in our rags. Our captors kick us to our feet sometime in the second watch. We expect, all of us, to be slaughtered like the raven-haired girl. But our jailers have forgotten her completely. Ham and an older brave haul Lucas and me to a crest with a thirty-mile vantage. The rest of the band has already collected. Ham points to a line of fires in the far distance-as many, it seems, as stars in the heavens.
“Iskander,” he says.
Alexander’s camp on the south bank of the Jaxartes. I glance to Lucas. What do our captors want of us now? To confirm that the watch-blazes are indeed Alexander’s? To speculate on our king’s intentions or direction of march? But no, the Afghans want nothing. Only to show us the massing of our countrymen. It is what these devils want. What they’ve been waiting for.
In minutes Hook’s camp is packed and on the move. All night the band chops at flying speed. Wives and children are shed without ceremony; the dependents melt away, up dry watercourses and into stony vales. Past midnight, twenty new warriors reinforce the band; in the morning two more groups, of sixty and ninety, swell the total still further. My skull is on fire, seeking the significance of Alexander’s presence on the Jaxartes. If the tally of watch fires is genuine and not a ruse to deceive the enemy as to his numbers, then our king has massed the bulk of his army along the river, including even the siege train. This can mean only one thing: that Spitamenes has come north from Maracanda and crossed into the Wild Lands. Otherwise Alexander would have made straight for the city, to avenge the massacre of the Many Blessings, which without doubt will have been reported to him by now.
By the second night the forces trekking with Hook’s band have grown to nearly a thousand, with riders shuttling continually between it and other divisions. Clearly a battle is coming. The foe is massing to face Alexander.
Now more prisoners are brought in-other survivors of the Many Blessings, who have escaped the river only to be taken in the hills and desert. The bands drag them in in ragged lots. They are about thirty in all. They look worse than we do. Senior officer is Aeropus Neoptolemus, a captain of Companion cavalry. I know the man by reputation; he was my brother Elias’s commanding officer at Kandahar. He is young, not yet thirty. He had been one of Alexander’s syntrophoi, schoolmates, tutored by the philosopher Aristotle alongside our king and his other mates when they were boys. The Afghans have put out both of Aeropus’s eyes. He is led about by another prisoner.
We are herded into an impound near the center of the camp. Despite his sightlessness, Aeropus leads. He takes all our names, committing them to memory, and organizes us into a unit with an object-resistance in unity- and a chain of command. To my surprise, the foe permits this.
“They’re going to kill him,” Lucas says.
Night is falling; clansmen in scores and hundreds continue to swell the camp.
“They’ll make a spectacle of him first,” my friend says, “then butcher him before our eyes.” Lucas crosses at once to Aeropus and, with respect, informs him of this fear.
The captain shows no surprise. He remarks only that barbarians traditionally nerve themselves before a fight by abusing the weakest among them. “Tonight,” he says, “that will be me.” He counsels Lucas and me to pray to whatever gods we believe will most capably assist us in containing our bowels. “Personally,” he says, “my favorite is Hate.”
Midnight, Aeropus is hauled before the assembly, whose senior war chief (superseding Hook and the other petty maliks) is named Sadites, in the open beneath basalt bluffs. The night is bright as noon. The conjoined bands number well into the thousands now, with more and more riding in each hour. The camp laps the base of an entire mountain.
Aeropus serves as surrogate for Alexander. His role this night is to be harangued and brutalized. At the base of the bluffs stands Sadites. A commotion beyond our sight distracts his attention. More riders appear. Around Sadites, the front of barbarians swells outward and begins to part. The chief comes forward toward Aeropus, who waits, held by two braves, in the center of the torchlit flat.
“God has spared you this night,” declares Sadites. He indicates the shoulder of the mountain. From there, mounted on his pretty Arabian, surrounded by his honor guard of knights, advances into view our nemesis and now savior, Spitamenes.
27
“Tell me, Macedonians and hirelings, who have crossed deserts and seas to bring war to our impoverished peoples: What harm have we worked to your king? Have our armies set foot within his dominions? Have we made away with his livestock? Outraged his women? Are not even we, who dwell in the wilderness, permitted to be ignorant of his glory?”
The Desert Wolf addresses us prisoners, but his oration is for the ears of his fellows. The mob packs every square foot of the lower mountain. Their clamorous citations break in on Spitamenes’ speech again and again. The throng beats spear-shafts against shields and pounds the earth with the butts of its cudgels and skull-busters.
“Your lord Alexander,” Spitamenes continues to us captives, “has vanquished Lydia and Syria; Egypt and Mesopotamia bow before him; Persia he possesses; the Afghans of Bactria have been taken into his power. Now he stretches his insatiable hands for our flocks and herds. Is the world not wide enough to contain his greed?”
Thunderous acclamation again compels the Wolf to break off. He holds up his arms for silence. Lucas and I can see him clearly. He is indeed the man we glimpsed at the Many Blessings. Up close, he looks older and thinner. But his eyes in the torchlight shoot sparks of fierce intelligence and his voice carries easily with power and command. The hair stands up on my neck. Here is an adversary. Here is an enemy to freeze the blood.
“Macedonians, can your king not see that while he subdues the Bactrians, the Sogdians revolt, and when he turns, seeking to bring these to heel, the Daans and Sacae leap at his throat? All other tyrants grow sated with conquest. For yours only, victory is the spring of further avarice! He cannot go on winning forever. See how our tribes unite to face him? Hatred of him has made brothers of the wolf and the lion and causes raven and eagle to soar as comrades in the sky.”
For days, Spitamenes informs the assembly, Alexander has been massing his army, preparing to cross the Jaxartes. He poises now to invade even the Wild Lands.
“Soon this suppositious bantam will learn how far the races of the Scythians extend, yet he will never overtake them. Our poverty will be swifter than his army, which bears the plunder of so many nations. How can he get to grips with us? When he believes us far off, he will see us in his camp. When his eyes say we stand before him, he will find us at his back. We are the cloud and the ghosts of night. He cannot bear us down with fire nor fix us in place with stone. For we pursue and flee with the same swiftness. I hear that the solitudes of the Scythians
