These steps are solid innovations. Far more controversial is the third: the integration into the corps of massive numbers of Afghan troops. This, the Companions believe, is rank folly. “We’ve been riding with Afghan shikaris for two years,” declares Arimmas. “There’s not one who wouldn’t eat us raw if he thought he could get away with it.”
But Alexander’s mind is made up. In camp we’re already seeing hillmen of the Panjshir, infantry of Ghazni and Bagram, Sogdian and Bactrian tribal horse as well as newly hired contingents of Daan, Sacae, and Massagetae raiders. Can we trust them? Our king doesn’t care. By hiring these bandits for pay, Alexander reasons, at least he has kept them from going over to Spitamenes.
Our lord intends to make the country over by all means, civil as well as military. His boldest innovation is the oikos (“household”) system. By decree he establishes “site incentives.” What this means is that soldiers of the army, who in the past have received wages only as individuals, will from now on get their pay and allowances as households. In other words, your girlfriend is included. A man makes extra for the woman he is packing.
Further, Alexander directs, the sons of lawful unions between Macks and foreign wives are now considered Macedonian citizens. They may collect their fathers’ pensions and be educated at state expense. This is unprecedented. It is revolutionary. At one stroke it overturns a thousand years of custom and nomos.
The decree outrages the troopers of the Old Corps. One cannot overstate the depth of conservatism among soldiers. Change is abhorrent to them. They revere the old and despise the new. And they refuse to see shades of gray. The issue to them is of right and wrong. What Alexander proposes by the introduction of pay-by-household is a slap in the face to all decent matrons of Macedon, our wives and mothers who have held the nation together by their devotion and fidelity. (Of course, these same Macks have themselves taken every foreign strumpet they can lay two fists on.)
But the soldiers feel threatened for a far more personal reason. They perceive the oikos system as a device to sever them from home emotionally. Clearly it is. Payment by household spurs new men like Lucas and me to take a bride “out here.” And worse, from the Old Corps’ point of view, to conceive of our future out here.
What the old soldiers dread most is this: that Alexander will never go home. Never lead them home. Clearly our lord hates this Afghan war. But not the way the troops do. They want to wrap it up and turn for Macedon; he wants to finish and keep going east.
In the end the veterans cannot stay angry with Alexander. He is sun and moon to them. They are pained by this revolution of their commander, but being the simple fellows they are, they know only to strive harder, fight more bravely, show that they remain indispensable. They crave above all to win back his love. Alexander, of course, is exquisitely attuned to this and knows how to exploit it for all it is worth. Now he adds a further element to set the country on its ear.
Money.
The wealth that has poured into Afghanistan with the army of Macedon has deformed the economy of the entire region. In the city market, a pear costs five times what it used to. The locals can’t pay. Meanwhile, a second economy has sprung up-the camp economy, the economy inside the Macedonian gates, where the pear may still cost five times its original price, but at least a man can afford it. The natives face the choice of starvation or submission to this new economy, either as suppliers or servants, both of which occupations are abhorrent to Afghan pride. Worse still, the oikos system lures their young women. Soldiers reckon every currency of seduction that can nail them dish, fig, cooch. Now they have a new plum to dangle: marriage. The native patriarchs seek to lock up their daughters. But the draw of the Mack camp is irresistible, for money, adventure, novelty, romance, and now even the prospect of acquiring a husband. For by no means are these invaders unappealing. Mack regiments parade, awash with youthful captains and Flag Sergeants, horseback and afoot, made swashbucking by the brass of their tunics and the dazzle of their glittering arms. Maids slip from midnight windows to consummate trysts in the arms of their ardent, hazel-eyed lovers. When delegations of city fathers appeal to Alexander for assistance in curbing this traffic, he makes all the right noises but takes care to do nothing. He wants the girls infiltrating. His object is to weaken, even sever, the bonds of family, clan, and tribe. He prosecutes this deliberately. It is his policy.
As for Lucas and me, even our own women begin acting strange. Ghilla, pregnant, waddles in Lucas’s train like a duckling. If I venture from the hospital, Shinar’s eyes shoot daggers as I go.
This, too, is as Alexander wants it. What iron and gold will not accomplish, he will work by flesh. He will stand this country on its head and shake it till it quits.
The month is Afghan Saur, late winter. Shinar has stopped talking to me. She will not sleep in our tent.
“What is it now?”
“Nothing.”
She remains day and night within the hospital grounds. She wears a veil when she works or, more accurately, binds her headdress up to her eyes. So do Ghilla and the other women. Not one of them will give me a true answer.
I go to Jenin, the girl who supplies our section with pank and nazz. “By Zeus, what is going on?”
The woman indicates the new Afghan troops passing in the camp. “Brothers,” she says, “and cousins.”
I don’t understand.
“Brothers who recognize sisters. Male cousins who recognize female cousins.”
There was a boy in camp, Jenin says, from our women’s native village. He saw them. He spoke to them. “He told us that my own father and Shinar’s brother are here in Bactra City.”
“You mean as part of Alexander’s army?”
“They will slice our throats if they find us.”
So the veils. So the remaining within walls.
“What can we do?”
“Kill them,” says Jenin.
30
By the last month of winter Lucas and I are well enough to ride. We rejoin our company, training with new Afghan units. Coenus’s brigade has been assigned two hundred “volunteers,” Daans mostly, with some tribal Ghazals and Pactyans. Our colonel Bullock’s orders are to render them fit to operate in conjunction with Macedonian forces-solve the language problem, pay, maintenance, feed, quarters, and so forth. And to train them and their ponies to fight like we do.
I like these young Afghan bravos. I make friends. Through them I put out feelers, trying to find Shinar’s brother, whose name I still do not know. Surely he and I can talk. How can he fault his sister for taking up with Macks when he has done the same thing?
But I can’t get these fellows to talk. Do they trust me? Yes. Like me? Indeed. The Afghan tree of tribes, clans, and khels can be traced like a directory to find anyone. But they won’t do it. Two brothers I knew at Bagram have signed up here with Meleager’s brigade-the Panjshiris, Kakuk and Hazar.
The pair volunteer to murder Shinar’s brother for me. Their tribe is at war with his; it will redound to their glory to slash his throat. I thank them but decline.
“What if I pay an indemnity?” I ask. A blood-price, like for murder. “Will the brother take his sister back?”
He will, says Kakuk. “Then he’ll kill her.”
The Afghan mind, I am beginning to understand, has not altered one jot in a thousand years. These clansmen are more lodged in the past than our own Macedonians. Outside Bactra City stand three training grounds, the Crescent, the Widow’s Veil, and the Panhandle. Upon these, Bullock, Stephanos, and our other officers form up our Daan companies, trying to teach them to ride in wedge formation and to charge boot-to-boot. The exercise is sketched out; a walk-through is performed; all hands attest to their understanding of the design. Then the trumpet sounds and the Afghans revert as one man to the swarming tactics they have always used-galloping in circles round the foe while whooping and loosing arrows and darts. Our commanders employ every incentive to make them ride like modern cavalry. We hold their pay. We cut off their chow. I have never seen Stephanos lose self-possession. Yet these fellows drive him to apoplexy. The concept of unit cohesion remains alien to them. They fight as individual braves, each seeking glory in the eyes of his chief. Most infuriating of all is the blandness with which they endure
