Steven Pressfield (26 page)

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 her patriots and the grace of heaven, the land has been restored to its rightful rulers.

At least that's the story.

Who's quibbling?

Then he, Alexander, will take his army and depart Afghanistan.

In return for these pledges of peace, Oxyartes will use his influence to bring his confederates to the table of peace. Affairs will be so arranged, Alexander warrants, that no chieftain's portion will suffer, and each, secure in his lands and station, will discover no cause for complaint.

“What we must accept about this theater of war,” Philip explains one night to me, Flag, Stephanos, and our fellows, “is that military victory is impossible. So long as even one man or woman of these Afghans draws breath, they will resist us. But what we
have
achieved, by the ungodly suffering we have inflicted upon them, is to drive them to the point where they'll accept an accommodation, an alliance if you will, that they can call victory, or at least not defeat, and that we can live with.

“Then, between paying them off, severing them from their northern allies and sanctuaries, and keeping enough forces in garrison here, we may be able to stabilize the situation sufficiently so that we can move on to India without leaving our lines of supply and communication vulnerable to assault. That's the best we can do. That's enough. It will suffice.

“In the end,” Philip says, “the issue comes down to this: What is the minimum acceptable dispensation? Short of victory, what can we live with? We cannot slaughter every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan, however gratifying such an enterprise might be.”

Peace at last. The corps of Macedon exhales with relief. For me, only one impediment remains:

Shinar will not marry me. She refuses.

To celebrate his wedding to Roxane and the end of the war, Alexander has pledged rich dowries to every Mack who joins him in taking to wife his own Asiatic consort. The couples will take their vows at the same hour as Alexander and his princess and on the same site, the palace of Chorienes in Bactra City.

But Shinar won't do it.

It is the old story of
A'shaara
.

“Don't ask me! If you care for me, you will never mention this again.”

Will I ever understand this woman? My child grows in her belly. I can't let her refusal stand. “What will you do then? Go away?”

I see she will. Her expression is despair. “Will you make me speak of this?”

“Yes! You must explain it to me now, once and for all, and make me understand.”

She has to sit. Her back groans under the weight she carries. “Can I have some water please?”

I get it for her. Cool, with a sliver of apricot, the way she likes it.

“
A'shaara
means shame, this much you know, Matthias. But it means soul as well, and family or tribe. I have forfeited mine by permitting you, an alien and an invader, to rescue me. For this, I stand
ad benghis,
‘outside,' and can never be brought back in.”

I reject this. “You're not ‘outside,' with me. Your god cannot touch me, and when you join with me in marriage, he can't touch you either.”

She smiles darkly. “God cannot, perhaps. But others.” She means her kin. Her brother.

My Afghan bride. She and this country are one and the same. I love and fear her and can grasp her secrets no more than I can these ocher mountains or this storm-riven sky.

In the end it is my brother who wins her over. The peace deal done, Philip's unit is among the first to pack out for Bactra City, to make political preparations for Alexander's wedding. He visits Shinar and me on his last evening, bringing
baghee,
a dish of lamb and lentils roasted in the beast's own intestines, and a jar of plum wine.

Shinar's belly has become taut as a drum. You can thump it with a finger; it rings like a melon. Philip dotes upon her like a bachelor uncle. She makes him set his ear and listen for the child's kick. When it comes, they both giggle like innocents.

Later, Philip addresses Shinar in earnest. She will listen to him when she won't to me. For the sake of the child, he says, she must make me her husband. For love of this infant, she must become my wife.

“You are no longer responsible only for yourself, Shinar. You have another life to consider. Your child cannot grow to adulthood in this land, with only you to protect it, and no Afghan male will accept you in wedlock, when you bring into his household the issue of the invader. But the babe
can
live in Macedon. It can flourish, embraced as the offspring of heroes, growing to man- or womanhood among numerous others just like him or her.”

He reads the woe on Shinar's face.

“I know, dear child, that you believe heaven has turned its back on you. Perhaps that was so, once. But all things turn in their season. Not even as cruel a deity as that of this pitiless land can remain unmoved forever by his people's affliction. The proof grows now in your belly. Your suffering has redeemed you, Shinar. God holds out his hand. Take it, I beg you. Can any act be more impious than to spurn the clemency of heaven?”

50.

The wedding of Alexander and Roxane will be held at Bactra City, atop the great fortress, Bal Teghrib. The rites will be celebrated outdoors, in the Persian fashion. The captains of the corps—and half the princes of Afghanistan, it seems—will assemble in their finery at Koh-i-Waz, the palace of the warlord Chorienes.

Flag will take his discharge from the army. Going home. His salary and bonuses, counting premiums from five Silver Lions and a Gold, come to twenty-two years' wages. He's rich.

I'm filing my papers too. I've got the equivalent of six years' pay coming.

Fourteen hundred couples—Macks and their foreign brides—will take their vows along with our king and his princess on this happy day. Half, we hear, have elected Afghan postings. They'll settle with their brides in the various garrison Alexandrias—Artacoana, Kandahar, Ghazni, Kabul, even Alexandria-the-Furthermost. Every trooper will receive at least a handsome farm; officers will be awarded estates. “They'll never see Macedon again,” says Flag. “The witless bastards.”

No such folly for him or me. We'll take our skip and never look back. Flag himself will not farm at home, he says. “The life of a country huntsman for me. I'll sire a pack of brats and train them up in the hill chase. We'll raise horses. You and Shinar will visit every summer. You'll try to get me to put in a crop but, by Zeus, I won't do it!”

I ask him seriously: Can he really put the army behind him?

“Fuck the army,” says he. “Who needs it?”

51.

Shinar gives birth on the nineteenth of Artemisius. A healthy boy. We name him Elias. He weighs exactly the same as my
pelta
shield (about eight pounds) and fits handily inside its leather-and-bronze bowl. When I bathe him, he bawls like a trooper. He has ten fingers and ten toes and a tiny pink penis, with which, prone on his back, he spouts a stream like a marble fountain. I could not be more delighted. His birth has humbled me. Shinar, too, has changed. The boy has black hair like hers and hazel eyes like mine. A regular amalgam.

With the arrival of this little bundle, our life is altered forever. Vanished is my
Narik ta?
attitude toward death. To stay alive and be of use to this child has overnight become everything to me.

Flag and Stephanos visit to inspect this newest campaigner. He salutes their entrance with a stupendous defecation. My friends acclaim its volume and its manly stink. I could not be prouder if the child had produced a second
Iliad
.

I don't want my boy to be a soldier. Let him teach music or practice the physician's art. May he raise horses and cultivate the earth.

I am changed, yes. But Shinar is transformed. She is a mother now. I'm in awe of her. I fasten upon this aspiration: to see her in feminine converse with my mother. I want to watch them laughing together in our kitchen at Apollonia, or walking with little Elias in the hills above our home.

It occurs to me that my child has two cousins. The son and daughter of my sister Eleni and her husband Agathon. How I long to see these three toddlers at play! The night of our son's birth, while mother and child slumber, I dig out my brother-in-law's letter, which I have preserved among my kit these many months.

I sit now, watching my infant son…playing in the sunlight of the yard. Do you know, dear brother, that my own disfigurement had impressed itself so powerfully upon my imagination that when this child was born I expected that he, like me, would possess a stump instead of a limb. When I saw him whole and perfect, I wept. Through this babe I feel the whole world has been made new….

Six days after the birth, a bridal festival called Mazar Dar, “New Life,” is celebrated throughout the city. Its protagonist is the princess Roxane. The day is in her honor. The rites are for women only.

Something happens to Shinar during these rituals. She will not say what. But she is changed unmistakably on her return. Perhaps the cause is the warmth of being enveloped by scores of her countrywomen, cooing over her new son. Perhaps meeting and speaking with the many Afghan brides, who in days will take husbands of Greece and Macedon. I can't say. But when she settles beside me in our bed that evening, she declares that she has changed her mind.

“Is it too late for us to get our names on the wedding list?”

“You mean get married?”

My sweetheart smiles. “If you will have me.”

52.

I have a friend, Theodorus, in the logistical corps. This wedding, he says, will tax the supply arm like no operation of the entire war. Oxyartes, to honor his daughter, has brought every clan chief and
malik
from between Bactra City and the Oxus and all their retainers from six to eighty. The other warlords, not to be outdone (or left out in the new order) have summoned all their minions. Preceding the wedding will be Antar Greb, the Ten Days of Forgiveness. During this period prisoners will be pardoned, debts forgiven, feuds patched up. Tribal councils will be in session night and day, adjudicating disputes. Where will this multitude sleep? How will it be fed? Tents alone, to house the throngs, will need a thousand camels just for transportation. The tally of mules is past calculation, as are the invoices already being sent in by their wranglers. How will we water all these beasts? The River Bactrus is home to hundreds of sacred otters. “By Heracles, these boogers will be paddling for their furry lives!”

The town cannot support such a host, so unofficial camps spring up. Tent bivouacs carpet the riverbanks, mount the foothills, sprawl across the Plain of Sorrows, which seems, at last, to have overthrown its name. Every tailor and bootmaker east of Artacoana has trekked in for the celebration, hoping to earn ten years' wages in twenty days. Barbers shave men's skulls for luck. Charcoalers hawk fuel in ribbon-cinched bundles from the backs of their two-wheeled carts; swordmakers set up
bichees;
stalls in hundreds squat chockablock with fullers, haberdashers, cloth benders, tin- and iron- and bronzesmiths. Alms-beseeching amputees share shops with tattoo artists; snake-handlers split their quarters with peddlers of jute, nazz, and
bhang.
Boys work the lanes, packing bronze vessels of hot
chai
on their backs, dispensing cupfuls from spouts set about their waists. One thing Afghanistan does not lack is fish. Speckled and brown trout in tons are towed down from mountain streams by
dhuttie
pole-boatmen in ingenious wicker floats, the fish still alive in the water. No accommodations remain in the city, so camel trains set up shop at the edge of the desert. A tent bazaar sprawls over hundreds of acres, offering Median vests and shoes, Damascene daggers, quilted
aghee
caps, and Parthian tunics. Fortune-tellers read the future in cast stones; astrologers scribe it down from the skies. Peddlers of gimcracks and geegaws work in pairs, one bearing before him a great jingling gibbet from which dangle in hundreds finger and toe rings, bracelets, anklets, necklaces, fetishes, amulets, and charms, while his confederate jigs at his side, flogging their common wares. Souvenir images of the bride and groom are painted onto cups and dishes, woven into carpets, lacquered upon trays, and stitched into pennants, prayer bells, and skullcaps; you can buy likenesses of Alexander and Roxane upon beads and coins, cowrie shells, scarves, and undergarments. Troupes of actors and acrobats, jugglers, contortionists, mountebanks, and professional fools put up impromptu shows; poets recite; rhapsodes sing; philosophers edify. I never saw so many amateur orators. One crackpot after another declaims his deranged doctrine atop a stone in the marketplace; within one tented kennel I count half a score, haranguing crowds whose expressions range from zeal to stupefaction. A stroll across the city discovers yogis from India, ascetics from Cos, self-mutilators from Khumar. I watch one
sadhu
pierce both cheeks with a dozen iron kebab sticks, grinning all the while. His basket brims with coppers from the Macks; apricots and black plums from the Afghans. A girl swallows swords, another contorts her body to set her soles atop her skull. Brazier-men sell sheep brains, poached in the skull; swine's hooves; bull's testicles on beds of steaming rice. You can buy eyeballs and knuckles, shrunken skulls, rawhide strings of tusks and teeth, ears and fingers, charms against death and disfigurement, poems to bring love, fortune, happiness; lubricants and asphyxiants, emollients and aphrodisiacs, potion and lotions, emetics and panaceas. I see the same halt fellow chuck his crutches three times in one day. From Babylon have come kite-masters; their paper carp soar aloft on the Afghan gale. Long life, Alexander and Roxane! The union of king and princess will constitute the country's most glorious day since the birth of Zoroaster—Macks jubilant to be getting out, Afghans ecstatic to see them go.

Meanwhile, hundreds of
jurgas
and tribal councils are being held. Clemency is the order of the season. The theme of a fresh start animates all.

The weddings, as I said, will be celebrated in the Persian manner. Preliminary events will take place over five days, culminating with the actual marriage on the fifth. Five is the number of love in Persian numerology. Everything in the ceremony must be divisible by five. Five hundred prisoners will be pardoned, five thousand slaves set free. The same number of kites will soar over the palace on the wedding day, and twice five thousand white doves be released at the nuptials' height.

The ceremony uniting Alexander and the princess Roxane will take place at sunset, the start of the day in the Persian convention. A military tattoo will precede the wedding; it will take place on the plain and be viewed by the dignitaries, Mack and Afghan, who will then mount to the citadel, where the actual ceremony will be performed. When the rites are concluded and the kites and doves have flown, the festivities will begin; they'll last all night, even after the bride and groom retire at dawn, and into the next day, when the various clemency rites will take place. As for our company, we will rehearse one last time at midmorning, then dine and prepare our uniforms, weapons, and armor. We'll bathe and have a final barbering, beards trimmed, teeth waxed.

Several days before this, a memorial column is dedicated to the fallen of Greece and Macedon. The ceremony takes place at dawn. Elias's name and Lucas's and Tollo's, with sixty-nine hundred others, have been carved into the stone. Our own Stephanos has composed the valedictory ode:

IN THE COMPANY OF SOLDIERS

In the company of soldiers

I have no need to explain myself.

In the company of soldiers,

everybody understands.

In the company of soldiers,

I don't have to pretend to be a person I'm not

Or strike that pose, however well-intended, that is expected

by those who have not known me under arms.

In the company of soldiers all my crimes are forgiven

I am safe

I am known

I am home

In the company of soldiers.

Funeral games accompany these rites. Hundreds come out. The mood is solemn but gay. The Corps of Engineers has built a hippodrome, four
stades
down and back, round a turning post. The horse races are meant to be all-Greek and Macedonian, so as not to affront the natives, whose participation might be seen by their fellows as 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?”