Alexander’s first wave presses forward, fifty yards from shore. Bolt- and stone-throwers fire point-blank. Where is Spitamenes? The condition of the enemy can only be described as pandemonium. Mack assault waves make for the bank at full speed. Over their heads stream volley after volley of fire and iron. The enemy’s thousand- yard front, which had been carpeted so densely with troops, now scatters and breaks apart like smoke in the wind.
We captives whoop in elation. Ham and his mates hold stricken. And now the oddest thing happens. Though our captors are as numerous as we and are armed, while we stand before them with empty hands, it is they who are gripped by terror and we to whom initiative flows.
First to strike the shore is Alexander. We won’t learn this till later. But we can see the swarms of our countrymen surging from the shallows, while the enemy slings away his shields and weapons and flees in disorder.
On the peak, we rush our captors. Before we’ve taken three strides, Ham and his confederates are in full flight down the mountain.
By nightfall the plain below has emptied entirely, as the foe flies north into the Wild Lands, pursued by the horse and foot brigades of Alexander.
28
Twenty-one days later the army of Macedon returns to the Many Blessings, this time in force and with Alexander in command. Our king has chased Spitamenes a hundred miles into the steppe before bad water poisons him and compels the king to break off pursuit. The Wolf gets away. Autumn approaches. Alexander returns to Jaxartes town. We prisoners have been incorporated there into the hospital camp. Inside of a month we are well enough to travel. The corps returns to the site of the original massacre.
Both margins of the Many Blessings have been secured, days past, by the brigades of Antigenes and White Cleitus and by the Horse Command of Hephaestion. Stewards of Graves Registry have collected what remains they can recover of our fallen comrades. The official number of dead is 1,723. The army is given a day to inspect the site at leisure and to learn from us survivors, who have been held apart under Alexander’s orders for this purpose, what outrages have been visited upon the living flesh of their countrymen, not only by those Afghans and Scyths serving under Spitamenes but by the matrons and brats of Maracanda and the downvalley villages.
A funeral mound is raised. At dawn the army assembles. Full military honors are rendered to the fallen. By regiments the army parades past the barrow, upon whose summit the colors of her entombed battalions flutter on the air.
Alexander conducts the obsequies in person. The rite is performed entirely in silence. In that interval where the Hymn for the Fallen would customarily be given by the corps, a solitary flame is lit, by Alexander’s own hand, again without speech. This mute enactment produces a keen and excruciating grief and a terrible hardening of resolve.
When at last the king speaks, it is to offer only five lines, not from the funerary canon but from Euripides’ Prometheus. In this scene, which closes the tragedy, Odysseus in his wanderings has reached the Rock upon which the titan lies fettered, by judgment of Zeus, in chains of adamant. Odysseus inquires of Prometheus if there is anything he can do to ease his suffering. The captive declines with gratitude so much as a mouthful of water to slake his thirst. Then he offers the wanderer such wisdom as he has gleaned from his revolt against heaven.
Even at earth’s extremity,
Almighty Zeus reigns.
Men fly in vain from his justice, from which no crag stands too distant and no fastness too remote.
This is the sum of Alexander’s oration. He turns and retires.
That night passes like no other. There is no drinking and no gambling. Men wait only for orders. They apprehend what their king means by “justice.” Here at earth’s end, they will exact it. Each time a messenger appears, the soldiers rise, eager to receive their assignments.
Lucas and I are still too infirm to participate. Still we must, or never face our comrades again. Orders are passed next morning. With them comes mail from home. This from my sister Eleni’s husband Agathon, a decorated captain of infantry, who lost his right hand at Issus in Alexander’s earlier, more honorable wars.
Matthias from Agathon, greetings,
I feel I can talk to you, now that you’ve been out there a while and know what it’s like. I sit now, watching my infant son, who is your sister’s child and your nephew, playing in the sunlight of the yard. Do you know, dear brother, that my own disfigurement had impressed itself so powerfully upon my imagination that when this child was born I expected that he, like me, would possess a stump instead of a limb. When I saw him whole and perfect, I wept. Through this babe I feel the whole world has been made new.
Come home, brother! Well I know the seduction of war and of anger and fear! When your term expires, let no folly hold you. Come home to us before it is too late!
Tears drizzle into the brush of my beard as I read these lines. Come home? How can I?
Am I blind to the madness of vengeance? Can I not imagine armies and armies, stretching back across centuries, each crying the same meritless anthem of payback and revenge?
I roll Agathon’s letter into my pack. There it remains, wedged beneath my sack of lentils and parched barley, when the corps moves downvalley, village to village, exacting God’s justice, until nothing remains living in all the region except old women and crows.
BOOK FIVE
29
The army winters at Bactra City.
Alexander has retaken Maracanda; the Desert Wolf has fled north to the Wild Lands. Spitamenes’ purpose is still not served by facing Macedonians straight-up. The foe disperses, waiting for spring.
Afghanistan-once the passes close-becomes six different nations, each isolated from the others. Susia and Artacoana in the west are cut off from Bamian in the center, itself separated by impassable peaks from Phrada (now called Prophthasia, “Anticipation”) and Kandahar in the south, and from Kabul in the central Paropamisus. From the Areian Plateau, a hardy force can take the caravan road south via the Desert of Death and work back up the Helmand and Arghandab Valleys to Ghazni and Kapisa and Bagram, but from there there’s no mounting out via the Panjshir, Khawak, or any other pass north into Bactria. In Bactra City you’re cut off from the south by the Hindu Kush and from the northeast by the Scythian Caucasus. South of the Oxus, the tribal Sogdians scatter to their strongholds. As for the steppe beyond the Jaxartes, the place in winter becomes so inhospitable that the Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae themselves retire to balmier quarters.
Lucas and I are confined to hospital at Bactra City. We hate it. No one who has not been a soldier can understand the imperative to get back to one’s unit. When Flag or Boxer and Little Red visit, our torment redoubles. Our mates joke with us about “tickets home.” Hell itself cannot make us take one. “Are you crazy?” our mate Pollard tells Lucas. “You lost an eye!”
“An eye isn’t enough.”
The hospital is not a tent affair, but the converted estate of some Bactrian grandee. We have rope beds and fountains and black plums in the court. Mail comes, and chow shows up hot and on-time.
We are far from recovered, Lucas and I. “You don’t feel it so much while it’s happening,” my friend observes. “It catches up later.” Lucas watches me sometimes. I watch him too. We laugh when we catch each other. “You all
