honoring the outlanders’ dead. But in the event, so many Bactrian and Sogdian camps ring the racetrack, since there’s no place else to sleep, and these fellows are such keen horsemen, that they are invited too. I myself enter, riding Snow. We win one heat and come third in the next, but in the end campaign fatigue has worn my poor mare to tatters. We finish dead last in the next and join the throng of spectators. I am standing in line with Flag outside the wagering tent when I spy a familiar spin gar, “white beard,” the Afghan term for old man.
Ash, our muleteer of Kandahar, who hired out to me the female porters for the crossing of the Hindu Kush.
I cross to the villain and clap him on the back. “By Zeus, I thought the constables had rounded up all criminals!”
He turns with a gap-toothed grin. “Then how,” he says, “can you remain at large?”
We embrace like brothers. The proverb holds true, that even mortal foes find amity with enough passage of time. “What brings you here, Ash?”
“Mules. What else?”
We find a place out of the crush and catch each other up on the news. “No women this time?” I ask. He elevates both palms to heaven.
Flag tells Ash about me and Shinar.
The old man roars at this jest.
“No, it’s true!”
It takes an oath to heaven to make Ash believe. He twists his beard, trying to remember. “Which one was she?”
“The one you beat. The one I bought from you.”
“God preserve us!” Again the palms to heaven. “This country has made you madder than I thought.”
Flag tells him of Lucas and Ghilla, of their child, and of Lucas’s end. Ash goes sober. “He was a good fellow. May his soul find peace.”
Ash shares a tent, he says, about a mile up the river in the great camp of the Panjshiri. “Dine with me, my friends.”
We can’t. We have to rehearse for the military parade that precedes the wedding. We make plans with Ash, though, to meet again the day of the horse races. As he takes his leave, the old brigand catches my arm.
“Her brother is here, you know.”
He means Shinar’s. I have dreaded this. With so many allied Afghans gathered for the wedding, Baz could be anywhere. He could be in our own camp.
“Where?” Flag demands.
“He serves with the Sogdian lancers attached to the brigade of Hephaestion-he and two of his cousins.” Ash describes a bivouac several miles out on the plain. “Brother and kin seek to put right the shame brought on their family by your deliverance of his sister. I have heard him speak of it. I did not know you were his object.”
I ask Ash how seriously he takes this.
“One must fear these violent young bucks,” he says, “and fear their wenches more, for A’shaara binds them as pitilessly as an eagle’s claw holds a dove.”
I know what Flag is thinking. Pay the old man, find the brother. Kill him. Part of me favors this. But our own Mack code of philoxenia, “love for the stranger,” forbids shedding the blood of my bride’s clan-and the kinsmen of my infant son.
Besides, I see a chance sent by heaven.
“Now is the Ten Days of Forgiveness, isn’t it, Ash?”
Indeed, he says, such a time may not come again for years. I turn to Flag. “We met with Shinar’s brother before, remember? He never wanted this feud. His heart isn’t in it. He’d leap at the chance to set it aside.”
I feel hopeful for another reason. My son’s birth date is Artemisius 19. This is Annexation Day back home, the anniversary of Apollonia’s incorporation into Greater Macedonia. In my town on that day, every dwelling will be flying the lion standard; the lanes will be filled with dancing. There, too, debts will be forgiven. A good omen.
I ask Ash what we need to do.
“Leave it to me,” he says.
A tribal council must be convened. The clansmen will embrace this prospect. It will be great entertainment; they’ll jabber about it for years. I must appear in person, Ash says, and beseech forgiveness for my crimes.
“Forgiveness, my scarlet ass!” says Flag.
But Ash knows what he’s talking about. “These dussars, ” he says, using the term for rubes or bumpkins, “will take great joy in debating your appeal, Matthias. You must play the part. It may cost you money.” He means reparations. Blood lucre, like to absolve a murder. “Do you have it?” he asks.
“Enough,” says Flag, “for a villain like you to skim his cut.”
But I am heartened.
“You’re welcome to whatever you can claim, Ash. And so is Baz, the brother.”
What is money for anyway? Only to get what you need-or keep away what you dread.
“How soon,” I ask, “can we set this thing up?”
53
The jurga takes place the night before the wedding. A quorum, it seems, cannot be convened earlier because so many of the tribal participants, who are hired troops serving under Alexander, must rehearse during the daylight hours for their companies’ parts in the military review that will precede the morrow’s nuptials. This is fine with Flag and me. Our outfit has to prepare too.
Stephanos lets me out of final rehearsal, so I can get my papers in to the Corps Quartermaster, permitting Shinar and me to be married with the fourteen hundred in the collective ceremony. This rite will take place at the same sunset hour as Alexander and Roxane’s wedding, but outside the fortress gates in the new Greek-style amphitheater that has been carved into the slope of Bal Teghrib, the site where our king first addressed the corps after its crossing of the Hindu Kush.
Flag and I ride out to the Afghan camp. The time is an hour before sunset. Ash is supposed to meet us, to serve as escort and guarantor. He’s nowhere to be found. We grab one of our shikaris instead, a grizzled mountaineer named Jerezrah, to present our dashar, our request for admittance. Alas, the fellow turns out to be of the Agheila, one of the Panjshiri tribes with whom our hosts, who are Pactyans as well but of another order, are at war. They won’t let him in. Now Ash appears. He has been waiting all along, it seems, wondering what is keeping Flag and me. He takes over. Appealing to the spirit of the Days of Forgiveness, he convinces our hosts to permit entry to Jerezrah. Only now Jerezrah’s chapped at the insult and won’t go in. “I have known these bandits all my life,” he says, turning on his heel. “They are as dirty and disreputable as ever.”
Flag, Ash, and I enter the camp. It seems that every rock-hopper for a hundred miles has got noise of the event, and they have congregated eagerly to attend it. They’re a savage-looking pack, armed to the eyeballs, unbarbered for months. Every man carries an elaborately fringed and feathered quirt, whose whip-end he sets before him on the earth when he sits, holding the butt lightly between his fingers, so that when the whole assembly has taken up positions in a circle, the riding-crops all point to the center and all jiggle rhythmically, tapping on the dirt. The spectacle is colorful and, in its way, quite charming.
The mob has now formed up before the chief’s pavilion, a goatskin structure supported by multiple timber columns and fronted by an enormous tent portico, whose entry is carpeted with rugs laid on the earth. We are shown our place. We sit. The sun slips behind the mountains; at once the night air stings with cold. Ash folds his knees on my right. Chiefs and elders sit directly across from us, with Shinar’s brother and cousins standing behind them. No greetings are exchanged, nor is the least notice taken of our arrival. This is customary, says Ash. It is called the “settling in,” when the parties acquaint themselves in stages, by their mutual presence, without direct speech.
The circle buzzes with social jabber. Everyone chatters except Flag and me. Now great brass bowls of water are brought, not to drink but to wash our right hands in. An excited yipping ascends. At once a mound of rice, mutton, and peas appears, trucked in on a four-handled barrow. Everyone digs in. Flag and I do, too, fearing to offer
