“May the gods bless you, dear child, and your infant on the way. I know you have suffered more than Matthias and I can imagine. It’s good to see you happy. And I can never thank you enough for the change you have wrought in my brother.”
His voice cracks. Shinar crosses to the carpet beside him. She takes his hand. “What about you, Philip? Will you go home now?”
“The corps is my home, Shinar.”
Lamplight shows the gray in Philip’s hair. Fever, I know, has carried off his wife back home; his son in a few years will be out east with the army. Heaven alone knows how many mates he has lost in action. He smiles at Shinar’s hope for his remarriage.
“What wife could I take, dear child? What woman could I bring happiness to? I have gone to army whores too long. I like them. I don’t have to explain myself to them. Do you understand? Can I really dandle some infant on my knee?” He laughs darkly. “I have been at war now, man and boy, for two-thirds of my life. What other trade do I know? My home resides in hell, if anywhere, where those I love wait for me.” He smiles. “I think I shall not keep them long.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Shinar scolds him. “I’ve done it myself. It serves no purpose.”
She’s right of course, Philip acknowledges.
“Can I return to Macedon?” he asks. “Before Elias died, perhaps. Now never. The only thing that keeps me above the earth is you two and your child on the way. So I say to you both, as I have before: Don’t be like me. Get out of here. Seize your happiness while you still can.”
Dawn lacks an hour when Philip takes his leave. We walk outside under stars bright as embers. Philip’s bad leg locks up in the cold.
“What about Shinar’s brother?” he asks.
He knows of the brother’s obligation under nangwali to efface the shame she brings to her family by being with me-and of her two cousins’, who stand with him, wanting only the chance.
“They’re all bluff,” I say. “In any event, the lot of ’em are three hundred miles south with the mountain brigades.”
“We’ll all be down south in the spring.”
Philip wants the brother’s and cousins’ complete names-given, patronymic, clan, and tribe.
“Look,” I say, “I don’t want you doing anything to them.”
Philip regards me soberly.
“Why not?”
48
Spring comes. Coenus’s brigade deploys south to the mountains. Alexander and the heavy divisions are already there.
For efficiency and mastery of combat arms, the world has seen nothing like this force. The king has been modernizing all winter, upgrading and expanding the corps’ capacities for mountain warfare. Siege gear that formerly needed transport by freight wagons and oxen has been simplified and stripped down so that it can be packed on the backs of mules. We have mountain catapults now that can sling a stone or a pot of flaming naphtha a fifth of a mile. Trains pack thin sheets of bronze to face mantlets of timber, rendering them flame- and fireproof. Tortoise-type carapaces have been fashioned, beneath which men can mount scaling ladders and not fear scalding oil or superheated sand. Carpentry shops have labored all winter producing block and tackle; rope-makers have laid in miles of cable. Ingenious mechanisms have been fashioned, like the mountain windlass that uses torsion bands instead of heavy iron ratchet teeth. Two of these, braced to boulders, can raise a siege tower forty feet high. In the past, mountain warfare has been limited to clashes between skirmishers, who sling missiles and scamper away, while siege warfare has been confined to the plains. No more. To take down these summit citadels, Alexander’s engineers have advanced siege technology to a whole new sphere and scale. The supply corps has half a thousand mules packing nothing but oil of terebinth-turpentine-for making incendiary bombs and as solvent to clean the blades of the axes, hewing mountain pines to be made into cat arms and tower timbers.
Mountain fortresses are assaulted by stages. A base camp is first established on the plain. Now come the provisions. Rations and fodder in hundreds of tons are rafted in by river or trucked overland via caravan or mule train. Now the first forward camp is raised in the foothills. Up come the convoys of supplies and materiel. The foe in this case has retired to four monumental strongholds. Imagine Mount Olympus. That’s what they’re like, mountain systems covering scores of square miles, with hundreds of approaches.
First to be invested, before winter has ended, is that fastness called by the troops the Sogdian Rock. The warlord Oxyartes is up there with eleven thousand troops and all their goods. The defenders are sitting on year- round springs, with enough provisions to hold out for years. When Alexander’s emissaries call for the Afghan’s surrender, Oxyartes taunts them, asking if our men have wings, for by no other means will we scale this stronghold.
Up trails and switchbacks come our supplies, on trains fifteen miles long, to the higher camps. For us scuffs, all hopes hang on negotiations. Oxyartes’ envoys shuttle in supposed secrecy in and out of camp. We know them all. We pave a highway for them. “What is wanting,” says Stephanos, “is for Alexander to pick one horse.”
One warlord to hand Afghanistan over to.
One chieftain to rule all others.
Supplies are in place by late winter. The summit is the size of a small county. Bare piney slopes approach, of loose scree and shingle, too steep even for mules. An assault is possible from the west, where the incline is least severe, but here Oxyartes has fortified the approaches with stone ramparts and great deadfalls of timber. South and north the faces loom impregnable. East is worse-raw stone for the approach march and sheer cliffs for the final four hundred feet.
Alexander calls the youth of the army together. He pledges twelve talents of gold to the first man to mount by this route to the summit and extravagant premiums to every trooper who joins him. Six hundred men set out by night, clawing their way up the face by means of iron tent pegs, which they wedge into fissures in the rock, and from which they belay one another by rope. Thirty-seven valiant souls plummet to their deaths. But three hundred reach the summit. When they show themselves in armor next dawn, the foe, believing Alexander must indeed possess winged warriors-or be, himself, a god-sues for peace.
Oxyartes and a handful of chiefs get away down a back track. But our rangers capture his suite in its entirety-horses, wagons, wife, and three daughters. The youngest, Roxane, is a proud beauty, said to be the darling of her father’s eye.
Will Alexander crucify her? Hold her as hostage? Will he ransom her? Exploit her father’s fears for her safety, to bring him to heel?
Not for nothing is our king acclaimed a genius of politics and war.
He appears before the army with the princess at his side.
He will marry her.
49
Alexander has picked his horse.
By taking to wife the daughter of the warlord Oxyartes, our king transforms his most formidable foe into his father-in-law. War is all in the family now. Envoys shuttle between the Afghan camps and our own, my brother Philip among them. The army buzzes with details of the prospective peace.
If Oxyartes will come in amity to Bactra City and there give his daughter in marriage, Alexander will honor him with such treasures and esteem as to effectively render him lord of all Afghanistan and peer to Amyntas Nicolaus, who will govern Bactria and Sogdiana in Alexander’s name. This can be sold to the tribes as a mighty coup for the sons of Afghana, since, under Darius’ rule, none but Persian nationals had stood so tall. Now, by the blood of
