our countrymen to boards, painted them with pitch, and set them alight. Further outrages were performed upon them while they still lived. Then they were beheaded. Their remains were dragged behind the foe’s ponies until they broke apart and fell away.
I ask Dice how he knows this.
“The villains made boast of it. In a post to Alexander.”
Our troops, Dice says, found the skulls in the enemy camp immediately after the battle, in captured wagons of the Bactrians, along with our fellows’ weapons and kit, which the foe had taken as trophies.
Night falls. Mack patrols fan across the steppe, seeking Spitamenes, who has become now, in the snow, one set of tracks among thousands. Alexander prepares the brigades to give chase as soon as the Wolf is discovered. Our section under Stephanos has been pulled out of the line. No one tells us why. I do not sleep. I will not eat. Only one object animates my purpose: to return to action as soon as possible and pay these fiends out for the abominations they have visited upon my friend.
44
But Headquarters has quarantined us. Our section has been segregated to a compound on the margins of the camp. Intelligence has set up two tents. That night they bring in our officers and chief sergeants-Stephanos, Flag, the two young lieutenants who were present when Spitamenes’ son was captured. What they’re asking, no one knows. When they’re finished, they direct our commanders to the opposite wing of the compound, so they can’t talk to us who haven’t been called yet.
My turn comes around midnight. A hailstorm has got up; pellets of ice rip through the camp, tearing up tents and windbreaks. The cold and din are indescribable.
The Headquarters lieutenant interviews me. This is in the same tent where he showed me Lucas’s notebook. He congratulates me and our company on our part in this glorious victory. I am to be decorated and promoted sergeant. Bonuses for all. Then he sets a document on the table before me. I am to read and sign it.
“You do read, Corporal?”
I regard him. “Barely.”
The scroll is a report of the action against Spitamenes. It is accurate within reason. Except at the finish, where it recounts the deaths of Lucas, Agathocles, and the journalist Costas. All are given heroic demises, in combat on the field.
“That isn’t how it happened,” I say.
The ice storm booms against the sailcloth of the tent. Coals in the brazier flare with the gale.
The lieutenant dismisses my statement. “All your mates have signed it.”
He shows me Flag’s mark, and Stephanos’s and the two lieutenants, and our officers all the way up to Bullock.
“Lucas and the others were killed,” I say, “days earlier, on the prairie. Run down by Afghan cavalry and butchered.”
“Please,” says the lieutenant. “Make your mark.”
Why, I ask, is it even necessary for me to sign? I’m only a corporal. Who cares what I say?
“Headquarters wants marks from all.”
If it hadn’t been so bitter cold, if I hadn’t been so exhausted, I might have scrawled my sign. Narik ta? What difference does it make? But the lieutenant’s manner puts my back up. With emotion I recount the capture of Spitamenes’ son on the steppe. I describe Agathocles’ insistence on delivering the prisoner to the column at once, and how Costas the correspondent and my friend Lucas volunteered to join the party that set off alone into the void. “The enemy caught them and massacred them. That’s what happened.”
“Will you sign, Corporal?”
“No.”
The lieutenant excuses himself. When he comes back, a captain accompanies him. This time they bring a secretary.
The captain is more affable than the lieutenant. Wine is brought, and bread and salt. We chat. It is discovered that we have friends in common. The captain, it seems, knew my brother Elias; he praises Elias’s valor and expresses grief at his untimely end.
“Look,” he says, “you and I know what happened to your friend Lucas. By Heracles, the brutes who did it deserve crucifixion!”
“Then let’s find them and give it to them.”
The captain’s concern, he says, is for the kin of the bereaved.
“What good will the truth do your friend’s mother and sister? Will it ease their suffering? How will they remember their beloved boy?”
“As he was,” I say.
“No. They’ll see him butchered. Is that what you want?”
He slides the paper across.
“Your friend was a hero, Corporal. Let his loved ones remember him that way.”
Now I’m getting really chapped. I slide the chair back and start to rise.
“Sit down,” commands the captain.
I stand up.
“Put your ass in that chair, damn you!”
I obey.
But I won’t sign.
Two Hyrcanian lancers man the portal. They escort me outside, to an unused supply tent. I am to wait there, speaking to no one. Dice and Boxer are called in to the captain’s tent. They finish and are sent off to the good part of the camp. It’s now the middle of the night. The ice storm lets up, succeeded by hyperborean cold.
At dawn I’m called back. It’s the same captain, alone this time. “All right,” he says. “It’s a cover story.”
He meets my eyes, as if to communicate that I’m special; he’s going to clue me in on the true noise.
“Headquarters believes it vital that no word of these atrocities reach the army’s ears.”
“Why not?”
“Twelve hundred Bactrians and Sogdians surrendered to us yesterday. Alexander wants to integrate them into the corps. These hundreds will bring in hundreds more. But if our fellows learn of what happened…”
I get it.
“This is about peace,” says the captain. “It’s about ending this bung-fucked war!”
I ask him about the post the Bactrians sent to our king. “Don’t the troops know from that?”
“That message was buried the instant it showed up. The only ones who know about it are the officers in this compound and a couple of your mates whom we told when we brought them in.”
On a side table sits a steaming pot of lentils and chicken. There’s wine and barley mooch. The captain asks if I’ve eaten. I’m not hungry, I say.
“What line are you defending, Corporal? By Zeus, why won’t you sign?”
I know I’m being mulish. What difference does one lousy ink-scratch make in the scheme of things?
“Listen to me, son. This order comes straight from Alexander. Don’t you love your king?”
I do.
But I won’t sign.
“Do you understand how important this is? We’re talking about men’s lives! If peace can be made this winter, we save an entire spring campaign.”
I understand.
“Do you imagine,” the captain asks, “that Command will let one pigheaded corporal stand in the way of shortening this war?”
“Are you threatening me, sir?”
“I’m begging you, man.”
