right?” he asks. We laugh again, but it’s not funny. The equation has altered between us. Before, Lucas and I shared all secrets; no one came between us. Now he puts Ghilla before me. He tells her things he won’t tell me. This is as it should be; I am happy for him. God knows I can’t do the same with Shinar. But it’s an estrangement. I am closer to Flag now. I worry about Lucas. He was never a brooder; he has always spoken up. He still does, but it’s different. You can’t put a name to it. He’s just…not who he was. Of one thing I’m certain: I will die before I’ll let harm come to him. The shaft that impales him must pass first through my flesh. I feel the same toward the others in my litter, including the new ones fresh from home, whom I haven’t even seen yet. I sound Flag out about this.
“You’re becoming a soldier,” he says.
Lucas and I can’t talk about the Many Blessings. It’s too painful. I speak to Flag instead. I lost my squad there, and my horse and my weapons. Only luck and Lucas’s heroism kept me from losing my life.
I can’t put Macks serving under me in such a position again. I won’t. I will not let officers, however well intentioned, lead me and my men into danger without speaking my mind. I will balk if I have to. I have buried Rags and Flea and Knuckles, and the brothers Torch and Turtle. They were boys, all of them, but they were men too. Good men. Now at a table beneath plum trees, I write letters to their fathers and mothers. It is the hardest thing I have ever done.
“Things change you in war,” Flag says. “Not always the things you expect.”
For Lucas, I can tell, it’s not the loss of an eye or the ordeal of captivity. He takes both remarkably in stride. It’s the buildup, he says. The accumulation. We’ve been gone from Macedon now twenty-five months. It feels like twenty-five years.
“A soldier keeps hold of himself by dreaming of going home,” says Flag. “That’s how Lucas has done it, counting the days. Now he realizes the days go on without end.”
In hospital I appreciate Flag more than ever. Every time I think I’ve caught up with him a little, I realize he’s still leagues beyond me. I tell him what it felt like, being at the mercy of the Massagetae. “I always imagined that hard experience would make you stronger and less afraid. But it’s the opposite. It undermines you because you know how vulnerable you are and how bad things can get.” When I remember being a prisoner now, I wake with my bones rattling. Ten times a day my knees go queer. I have never put much freight in the gods. Now I’m starting to think about it.
A soldier should never think. Flag doesn’t have to say it; I hear his voice in my head. “That’s why God made pank and nazz.”
We drink. I understand thirst now. We get varnished. Numbness is good. It helps you heal.
My right shoulder still will not unseize. I hoist the bumper with my left. The surgeons say my skull has been fractured; I should have joined the majority three months ago. How long till it heals? They don’t know. I know I can feel every tread on the plank floor of our sick ward. When I hang my cloak on a peg, I aim to one side, then slide it over. Otherwise I’ll miss completely. My skull feels like an onion someone dropped on the floor.
Lucas has been awarded a Bronze Lion for his wounds. I get my second. Lucas is decorated with a King’s Garland for gallantry. He is promoted to corporal. Our bonuses are a year’s pay and forgiveness of all debts to the army. This is less of a windfall than it sounds, as we’ll both have to buy new horses and replace our kit from scratch.
Our women have caught up with us. They have trekked from Bactra City to Maracanda and back again. Ghilla is pregnant by Lucas, from before, early summer. You can see it even under her clothes. She tells everyone she and Lucas will marry. Should any of her male kin learn her state, no force beneath heaven will stop them from splitting her belly. She doesn’t care. She has put her tribe and its cruel codes behind her. This is at once a brilliant and a terrifying thing to witness.
The other girls have abandoned Ghilla. Her revolt appalls them. Only Shinar remains her friend. Shinar has found employment in the infirmary. The job suits her. Her Greek has become fluent, and she is squeamish of nothing. “Your girl,” the chief surgeon tells me, “has capacity.” He promotes her from the laundry to the ward, putting her on at an obol a day, one-fourth of an infantryman’s pay-a fortune alongside anything she has known. He outfits her in proper hospital kit and will permit no man, officer or enlisted, to address her except with respect.
Shinar thrives. She is changing too.
Throughout autumn and early winter Alexander dispatches divisions to distant quadrants of the country. He will not give Spitamenes the season to rest. More to the point, Bactra City cannot support the numbers of troops flooding in. Seventeen thousand reinforcements have arrived from Macedon and Greece. Dependents of the army, sutlers, contractors, and the general crowd, make above sixty thousand. The camp has become the fourth-largest city in the world, behind only Babylon, Susia, and Athens.
On the day the army disperses to its winter positions, Alexander calls the force together and addresses it in what may be the most extraordinary oration ever offered by a king of Macedon. He takes the unprecedented step of transcribing the speech and having it distributed to every unit in every post across the country.
Citing the massacre on the Many Blessings, he places responsibility not with his troops or subordinate commanders but himself.
“All fault resides with me, my friends. I have committed the cardinal sin of the commander: underestimation of the foe. The Desert Wolf has not beaten you who rode in that column; he has beaten me. By Zeus, I believed we would thrash these devils in a matter of months. I deemed them ignorant savages, unlettered in modern warfare, and no match for our force, which has vanquished the mightiest empire on earth. I was wrong. Clearly the enemy understands us, while we do not understand him. He has made us dance to his tune. He possesses answers for every tactic we throw at him. He is shrewder than we are. He has outfought us and he has out-generaled me.”
All winter, Alexander declares, the corps will train in new tactics. The Afghan campaign now enters its second phase. Detailed orders will follow, but for now it is enough that all troops understand that operations-as- usual are over.
As part of this new program, officers of Alexander’s intelligence interview all survivors of the Many Blessings. They quiz Lucas and me in the hospital. Everything we can remember of the massacre and afterward is recorded for examination by our king. We write down names and descriptions of our captors, sketch approximations of their routes, attempt to site their springs and supply dumps.
On Solstice Day, my brother Elias arrives at Bactra City. His woman Daria travels with him; they take up cantonments by the river in Anahita town, with two other officers of Forward Operations. I spend evenings with them when Shinar is on duty in the infirmary.
“Have you apprised Mother of this development?” Elias teases me. “She will not stand losing another son to the wiles of foreign wenches!”
And he squeezes his mistress.
Elias, through his role in Forward Operations, participates in briefings at the highest level. He knows everything. His interest regarding me is to keep me out of danger. His influence continues to scuttle all my applications to Reconnaissance. He worries, too, about Lucas. “What’s the matter with your friend?” he asks. And he doesn’t approve of my drinking. “You’ll wind up like me if you’re not careful.” He means this to scare me. I take it as a compliment.
Every evening they’ll let me, I linger with Elias and his comrades. They are the finest fellows I have ever known, equals to Flag and Stephanos in courage, prowess, and soldierly sense, and beyond them in dash and color. It sobers me to see how seriously they take the enemy.
“This place is worse than Persia,” declares Elias’s mate, Demetrius.
“It will test every man,” agrees Arimmas, a captain, “but our king most of all.”
The Companions fear that Alexander still does not appreciate what he’s up against. In their view, we should clear out the entire region. Deport the population, man and boy, like Cyrus did in Ionia and Nebuchadnezzar in Palestine. “Nothing less,” says Demetrius, “will subdue this country.”
The bane of the Afghan war is getting the foe to stand and fight. Only one measure will compel him to do so, believes Alexander, and that is to chase him with one force and block him with another. Thus our king’s second step: reconfiguring the corps into autonomous divisions. To each of his brigade commanders Alexander now cedes an army in miniature, possessed of all combat and support elements-light and heavy cavalry and infantry, artillery and siege train, reconnaissance, intelligence, medical, supply, and logistical organizations. Achieving contact with the foe, Ptolemy or Perdiccas or Coenus will no longer pursue him on his own, hoping to grab all the glory. From now on, one division will drive the enemy toward another. Then both will finish him off.
