BOOK EIGHT
47
Shinar has conceived.
She is pregnant. This time I won’t let her terminate it. She doesn’t want to, anyway. She’s happy. So am I.
Our division has gone into winter quarters at Nautaca. It’s the best place we’ve been. The city is sited atop an impregnable eminence, so there’s no work fortifying it, and what there is was completed by the engineers before they moved on to finish construction on Alexandria-on-the-Jaxartes.
At Frost Festival all line troopers receive their back wages. Mine is seven months’, with two years’ on top as a king’s premium. My third Bronze Lion has come through. A year’s pay goes with it and, better yet, the option to elect discharge at the end of my next bump. Three Lions equals a skip. Am I stupid? I’ll grab it with both hands! I’m flush. We all are.
The best part of Nautaca is Digger Town, the compound that the Corps of Engineers has put up for its own quarters and that we scuffs have now moved into. No tents for the engineers. They’ve built themselves real stone- and-timber barracks with a bathhouse, wood floors, and enclosed walkways to the latrines. When they move on at winter’s start to the Jaxartes, the compound is converted to a hospital. By midwinter the wounded have either recovered and rejoined their units or been moved back south to Bactra City.
Our fellows take over. Shinar and I get a room to ourselves with a window and a clay khef oven. An armload of kindling keeps the place toasty all night. Ghilla shares the space with us, along with her infant son, whom she has named Lucas. I have never been around a child. I adore the little fellow. We take naps together. He loves to sleep back-to-back. At first I am terrified I will roll over on him, but his squalling soon eases that fear. He has lungs like a flag sergeant. If Shinar’s child is a boy, we will name him Elias. The women have carpeted the floors for warmth and snugged down the roof. Our mates Boxer and Little Red have the next two rooms, with their women; Flag and Stephanos are in the cottages built for officers just down the lane.
We’re almost embarrassed to be so comfortable.
Winter’s chore is to prepare an offensive for spring. I’m a line sergeant now. I command a file of sixteen. I’m included in all platoon-level briefings and some even up to battalion.
I have written to my mother, telling her about Shinar. For once I can speak the truth in a letter.
When the Massagetae campaign ended, three months ago, our section was two hundred miles into the Wild Lands. Not a man was unwounded. The horses were hide-and-bones. Three storms struck in succession. I lost two toes and part of four fingers, including the top of my left thumb. Many suffered far worse. When at last the column staggered back into Nautaca, Shinar was waiting for me. She had come north alone, first to Maracanda, then to Alexandria-on-the-Jaxartes, finally to here.
When I saw her, bundled sole-to-crown among the crowd of wives and lovers at the intake gate, I knew I would look no farther for my life’s companion. No barracks had been built at that time, but the engineers had put up stables, still under construction but at least out of the wind.
There Shinar takes me. I fall into the straw in a stupor. When I awake, as I do for days in fits of terror and dislocation, I see her tending to Snow. She rubs the mare down, dries and wraps her feet, gets good grain and sweet water into her belly. “What about me?” I groan.
“I’ll get to you in good time,” she says.
I sleep for a month, it seems, enveloped by her scent. The warmth of her flesh restores me.
It seems she has become a different person, warmer and kinder and less crippled within. Have I altered too? Or just never known her?
Ghilla is sweet about vacating our chamber. She senses the moment and takes up little Lucas. “Time for a walk, Tiny Bundle.”
Like all army women, Shinar knows the corps’ plans before we soldiers do. The spring offensive will be full- scale. Four Afghan warlords remain-Oxyartes, Chorienes, Catanes, and Austanes-commanding a total of about forty thousand men. They have repaired to various fastnesses in the Scythian Caucasus. In spring we will besiege them. Advance elements have already taken station, investing the foe and cutting off all escape.
I cannot think of Lucas. When his memory enters my thoughts, I banish it. It’s too soon. I will break down otherwise.
His child is a blessing. What would we do without him? Ghilla and I tread gently around each other. Nothing she can ask is too much. And she acts the same toward me. We never speak Lucas’s name. Next year maybe. I will not be first to do it.
Winter stays dark this far north. How these tribes survive, or even wish to, is past my comprehension. Even Alexander must respect this remoteness. He has come to call Jaxartes City “Alexandria Eschate”-Alexandria-the- Furthermost. He renounces all claim to the Wild Lands. Let the Massagetae keep them. Our lord will mark here the northern extremity of his empire and call the free Scyths beyond it his allies and friends.
It’s as good a plan as any.
On a day when the west wind brings the first scent of spring, my brother Philip arrives from Maracanda. He has been south in the mountains, treating with tribal chiefs of Chorienes and Oxyartes. We spend a long, happy night-Shinar and Ghilla and I, with Flag and his woman and Stephanos (who still will have none but his wife back home).
“What’s holding up the peace?” the poet asks my brother.
“Same thing that always holds it up. Pride.”
A way must be found, Philip says, that will let both sides claim victory. For the warlords this is a matter of life and death; they will not survive their own tribesmen’s fury if they are seen as having presided over defeat. Intertribal suspicion further impedes the process. Each chieftain fears that he will lose power in postwar Afghanistan; he will not set his name to any accommodation until he knows where he-and his rivals-stand in its scheme. No one wants to keep fighting. War has devastated the country. Philip reckons we’ve wiped out half the men of military age, in a society where that means every male from twelve to eighty.
“Where is your woman?” Shinar asks him.
He laughs. “Can’t afford one.”
Shinar schemes of putting Philip together with Ghilla. Even one night would do them both good. But when the moment presents itself at evening’s close, Philip with grace declines.
“Stay at least and talk,” says Shinar. “The night is cold and we may not see you again for many months.”
We stay up-my brother, Shinar, and I-into the deep hours.
“Don’t say you heard this from me,” Philip says, “but more bonuses are coming.” Alexander will rain gold this spring upon the troops who have suffered with him through this campaign. It only wants peace for the treasury doors to open. “Will you marry?” he asks Shinar and me.
“If she’ll say yes.”
It makes Philip happy to see us together.
“Whatever you do, don’t stay out here. The army will tempt you with cash incentives and grants of land larger than counties back home. Don’t fall for it. This place will revert to tribal ways as soon as Alexander moves on. Take your pay home, Matthias. You’re rich. You can buy any place you fancy, or farm Mother’s with Agathon and Eleni. They’d like nothing better. It will not be as bad as you think, Shinar. We Macks are not all devils. You’ll be a citizen, and so will your child.”
Shinar absorbs this impassively, like some dream she believes can never come true. Philip regards her with tenderness.
