Steven Pressfield (21 page)

BOOK SEVEN

Wolf Country

36.

South of the Jaxartes, where the peaks of the Scythian Caucasus mount back from the plain of the river, stand three impregnable natural fastnesses called Tora Giraya, the Black Beards. Each is a mountain unto itself. All have summits broad as prairies, year-round springs, and unscaleable flanks. Among these strongholds Spitamenes, our spies report, has taken refuge. He has with him seven thousand Bactrian and Sogdian cavalry and all their goods and women.

Alexander names the operation Summer Thunder. He leads in person, calling in from their own deployments the brigades of Ptolemy, Polyperchon, and Coenus, and half the siege train under Craterus's deputy Bias Arimmas. This combined force numbers over twenty-four thousand. Everything, we are instructed, depends on speed. We must get to the Black Beards before the Wolf has time to flee or prepare a trap.

Among the units hastening north from Bactra City are the Silver Shields, the elite heavy infantry of Alexander's Royal Guard. With them, accompanying their cavalry escort, rides my brother Philip.

He finds me in camp along the Little Polytimetus, an alkaline trickle amid creosote and tamarisk, midway between Maracanda and the Black Beards.

I have not seen Philip since I was fifteen. “I must tell you,” he says after our initial emotional embrace, “I am very angry with you.”

Philip is fourteen years my senior. His cloak of Companion cavalry bears the silver eagle of a lieutenant colonel. He is taller, even, than I remember. I am daunted by him. I find myself calling him “sir,” nor is he prompt to tell me to stop.

Philip is upset at my evading his call to escort Elias's ashes home. His anger has nothing to do with Elias. Its object is to protect
me,
to get me out of Afghanistan. When I repeat what I said in my letter, that I can't leave my mates, Philip groans in frustration.

I see that he loves me. My eyes sting.

“Forgive me, Philip. But Elias himself would have dodged that duty.”

For the first time, my brother smiles. His beard, I see, has gone gray. His hair, once raven, is the color of iron. I note from his gait that both knees have gone stony (from wounds perhaps, or falls, as is not uncommon among horsemen). I have brought wine for him as a present, and a duck in a sack. For me, Philip carries Elias's regimental sash, of wool dyed black and tan.

He tells me how Elias died and what happened to Daria.

“In custody, the woman tried to make away with herself, chuffing down some poison she had smuggled past the guards. The surgeons flushed her gut, so she could be properly executed. She was the first Afghan woman to be charged before a military tribunal. She offered no defense and refused to make a statement of any kind. They crucified her.”

My brother has seen Shinar too. “She sought me out at my quarters at Bactra City. I thought she was some shepherdess. When she opened her mouth and good Greek came out, I nearly keeled over. Then she showed me her
oikos
papers with your name on them.” He laughs. “I said to myself, ‘My baby brother is all grown up.'”

It is through Philip's intercession that Shinar (and Ghilla and Lucas's baby) have been documented through to Maracanda. They will arrive with the heavy baggage, probably in ten days. Too late for me; I'll be a hundred miles east, up in the Black Beards, by then.

“How much time,” my brother asks, “do you have left on your enlistment?”

I tell him. “Why?”

“We'll tear it up. I want you out of harm's way.” He's serious. Strings can be pulled. “What makes you stay in this pit of hell?” Philip demands. “Duty? Love of country? Please spare me any oraculations on the subject of Macedonian honor. Money? Let me guess: You owe the army more now than you've earned in your entire enlistment.” He faces me in vexation. “I don't understand you, Matthias. Is your aim to cast your life away?”

I ask why this is so important to him.

“I will not,” he says, “lose another brother.”

We have to get out of the public way. We're making a scene. Along the riverbank stands a slope where the muleteers unkink their new ropes; for hundreds of yards there's nothing but wet lines stretching in the sun. “Philip,” I say when we have walked down, “you know I can't leave my mates. Not when there's still fighting to do.”

My brother regards me with infinite weariness. “Let me tell you something you may not know. This war will soon be over. For all our frustrations, Alexander's scheme is bearing fruit. The new forts have cut Spitamenes off from the north; our devastation of villages has stripped him of supplies; our hiring of native troops has drained his source of recruits. Oxyartes and the other warlords—everyone except the Wolf himself—see the end approaching. They've all sent undertakings in secret to Alexander. Deals are being worked out right now. We could have peace as soon as fall. And let me disabuse you of another fancy that may be fueling your hopes of a future in the army: the riches of India. I've been there. There's nothing in India but monsoon rains, poisonous snakes, and half-naked fakirs.”

Go home, Philip tells me. If you serve out your enlistment, you'll wind up crippled or dead. “I've heard what happened with your sweetheart Danae. You're free. What's stopping you? Take your Afghan girl. Farm Father's land.”

“That's your land, Philip.”

He faces me in exasperation. Two teamsters pass, checking their ropes; we wait till they've moved on out of earshot. My brother draws up.

“Forgive me, Matthias. When I hear your voice, which sounds so much like…”

He cannot say Elias's name.

“…then to see you as a soldier.” Philip's long hair has fallen across his face; he sweeps it back with dark, sunburnt fingers. “You were just a child.”

And he weeps.

We walk by the river. The sun plunges; the sky turns the color of pearl.

“You know,” Philip says, “Elias and I used to talk about you. More than you may realize.” He smiles at some remembrance. “Our own lives meant little to us. But yours always seemed impossibly precious. Perhaps because you were the baby.”

My brother bends and scoops a fistful of flat stones, the kind you skim across a surface of water.

“They say a man becomes old,” he says, “when more of his friends reside beneath the earth than above it.”

“Is that how you feel, Philip?”

He doesn't answer. Only hands me half the stones. We send trails skipping.

“Don't end up like Elias and me.”

My brother turns away, eyes across the dark water.

“To be a soldier,” he says, “is no lofty calling. Who acts as a brute
is
a brute.”

37.

The column moves out the next day, pushing hard to gain the Black Beards. Philip rides ahead with the Silver Shields.

Let me here address the army's state of mind in the aftermath of the Cleitus debacle and make plain, if I can, by the following minor but extremely significant incident, the undiminished love the corps bore for its king.

Dispatching Ptolemy's and Polyperchon's brigades round the western shoulder of the Scythian range, Alexander struck straight across with his own divisions, Coenus's, and that portion of the siege train that had come up from Maracanda. This force made good speed for two days. But mounting a pass called An Ghojar, “the Barber,” on the third morning, the column was brought up in its tracks. A torrent in spate with late-summer snowmelt had washed out half the valley. I chanced to ride up, delivering dispatches, just as all progress ground to a halt.

The gorge down which the cataract thundered stretched, bank to bank, broader than a bowshot. Where the downshoot plunged against boulders in midchannel, each the size of a two-story house, the impact sent geysers of mud-colored spume fifty feet into the air. The din was so deafening that troopers, even hundreds of feet up the slope, could make themselves heard only by shouting directly into their fellows' ears. How to get across? The alternative, backtracking the way we came, would have cost days and wiped out every advantage of speed and surprise Alexander had worked so hard to attain. Any lesser commander would have elected this option. And even our lord, drawn up before the torrent, seemed to consider it. His presence on-site alone, however, drove the divisions into action.

Without waiting for orders, combat engineers began surveying the ascending slope, seeking spots where rockfalls could be started. Rigging teams of mules and setting great timbers as levers, the sappers and bucket-men succeeded in dislodging several critical boulders. Half the mountainside came down, straight into the river. The fall didn't span the flood, but at least it brought the banks closer together. From a perch atop one newly formed promontory, archers launched scores of light lines across, of which the looped ends of two, after infinite pains, were at last coaxed into holds around outcrops on the far bank. Upon these filaments, which looked in the scale of the scene no stouter than threads, two young and athletic volunteers, stripped naked to make themselves as light as possible, worked their way across hand-over-hand. By now the column had massed like spectators at the games at Olympia. The youths swung perilously above the torrent (and even slipped once or twice into it), while their onlooking countrymen's emotions alternated between ecstatic citation and excruciating suspense. Alexander had pledged a talent of gold to the man whose sole first touched the far shore and a talent of silver to the second. When the champion at last found footing and turned back, raising his arms in triumph, the roar could be heard even above the cataract. Heavier lines were warped across. By midafternoon a rope bridge had been rigged. By the following dawn a span of timbers stood in place, stout enough that laden mules—hoodwinked and shielded by side-screens from sight of the plunge below—could be coaxed across.

This was what Alexander's presence alone meant.

The result was that two of our four columns appeared in the enemy's rear days before even the Wolf could have anticipated. Coenus's division assaulted the least-well-defended of the Black Beards, driving its occupants into refuge on the other two. Beard number two was separated by a cavernous rift from the only spot upon which sufficient siege elements could be assembled. Under Alexander's direction, however, the soldiers working in shifts succeeded in dumping into the chasm such tonnage of boulders and cartloads of soil and brush that by the fourth dawn the interval had been built up enough for a crude mole to be laid across its spine. By this time the engineers, assisted by hundreds of carpenters and mechanics drafted from the ranks to assist, had put together a rolling siege tower, seventy feet high, shielded by hide-faced mantlets, and had rigged a system of tackle and cables by which it could be warped across the gap and thrown against the face of the cliff.

That the Wolf got his forces safely away, even his women and wagons, must be accounted a feat of tactical brilliance equal to any in this campaign. He made his escape by back trails unknown to the besiegers, concealing his withdrawal by darkness and by the ruse of hundreds of watch fires, which boys and youths kept blazing nightlong, to simulate the appearance of a camp on customary alert.

Still, the foe had been dealt a tremendous moral defeat. Our chronicler friend, Costas, evaluated it in the following account, which made its way in under three months, I am told, via Sidon and Damascus to Athens:

The enemy's tribal troops cannot appreciate the utility of such a tactical withdrawal, engineered here with such brilliance by their commander Spitamenes. To them it is an
ashan,
or “runaway,” a term of shame. Who is the enemy? His types run in hundreds. He is a Sogdian soldier; he is a sheepherder; he is a savage, a shopkeeper. He has fought under Darius, trained by Persian officers; he is a boy armed with a sling and a stone. The Wolf's rolls contain thugs and bandits, patriots in it for glory and opportunists out only for gold. The foe is someone whose son we have killed, whose village we have burned, whose sister we have outraged. He enrolls with the spring and vanishes in the fall. Sometimes brothers take turns serving, employing by rounds the one pony and one set of arms the family possesses. Is this weakness in an army? Not the way Spitamenes manages it. For what all own in common is hatred of the invader. The native is not going anywhere, but we are—and he knows it.

The Afghan fights neither as we do, nor for what we do. He lives to distinguish himself as an individual champion. By nature he is a raider, restless, avaricious, constantly craving excitement and opportunity for plunder. The Bactrians and Sogdians, and especially their allies of the savage Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae, are not soldiers in the Greek or Macedonian sense, that is, disciplined men possessed of patience, order, and cohesion. They are more like wild children; impatient, hot-blooded, easily bored. Spitamenes, who understands their hearts better than they do themselves, knows he must produce a redeeming strike soon against his nemesis, Alexander, or forfeit a portion of the faith his dashing and piratical cohorts have placed in him.

Summer ends with more Mack victories, no one conclusive but all collectively diminishing the Wolf's freedom of maneuver. Hephaestion's division has constructed and garrisoned no fewer than forty-seven forts and strongpoints, forming a chain south of the Jaxartes. Many of these are no grander than a dozen meres roosting on a stone summit, but all are in communication by courier and by fire and smoke. Wherever Spitamenes sticks his head up, one of these outposts will sound the alarm.

Meanwhile, construction nears completion on a new garrison city—the bastion of Alexandria-on-the-Jaxartes. Palisades and ditches stand ready; the armed force will be in place by fall. Oxyartes and the other Afghan warlords have retired south for the winter to fastnesses in the Scythian Caucasus, unassailable after the first snows. Alexander takes his elite brigades, with Perdiccas's, Ptolemy's, and Polyperchon's, and establishes a ready base at Nautaca. From here he can ride quickly to the aid of Craterus in the south or us in the north. That is his plan.

The initiative has gone over to the Macedonians. Alexander tasks our brigade with flushing Spitamenes from his sanctuaries beyond the Jaxartes. He reinforces Coenus by placing under his command Meleager and his regiment of mobile infantry, stiffened with four hundred Companion cavalry under Alcetas Arridhaeus; all the mounted javelineers of Hyrcania; and the allied Bactrians and Sogdians who had been attached to the brigade of Amyntas Nicolaus (Amyntas himself being named governor of Bactria, the post that would have belonged to Black Cleitus). Alexander's instructions to Coenus are to hunt and harass Spitamenes.

“Drive the Wolf from his lair,” are our king's orders posted throughout the Maracanda camp. “And I will finish him in the open.”