Flag has two black fingers and one gone toe. He chops them off himself with a maul and a sawyer’s wedge. Hundreds do likewise throughout the corps, or have mates do it for them. Men would sooner die than enter the medics’ tent.
The army crosses the Stone Desert in an ordeal of heat and thirst. Three hundred more perish, and seven hundred horses. Alexander reaches the Oxus two days behind the foe. The river is twelve hundred yards wide. Bessus and Spitamenes have crossed, burning their boats behind them. The Mack army pitches camp and starts building bridges and rafts.
Our women are still with us. The ordeals of mountain and desert have transformed them. They have earned our respect and their own. They fear now only the halt, when the corps may decide it no longer needs them. Biscuits paints my sore-pocked soles with vinegar and binds them with moleskin. Ghilla sets bones. Another girl, Jenin, sets up as the outfit’s source for nazz and pank. The women have become indispensable. Even Flag defends them.
Our sergeant has changed, too, since the mountains. Tollo’s death has hit him hard. Grief makes Flag more human. I hear him use the word “son,” addressing Lucas. At Drapsaca, he is awarded a Silver Lion, his fourth. The citation comes with half a talent of silver. Flag pays for the burial of the four women lost in the mountains and arranges a clean abortion, in-hospital by an army doctor, for a fifth. He refits all our kit. What’s left he sends home to Tollo’s kin.
I have come to know this man whom, before, I regarded more with awe and fear than respect. I see the whole of him now. He is a soldier in the noblest sense of the word. Tough, selfless, long-suffering. “Here, this is for you.” He tugs me aside at the town of Taloqan, setting Tollo’s boar’s-tusk cap in my fist.
I can’t wear it.
I don’t deserve it.
But at Flag’s insistence I tuck it inside my pack. “Ghosts are good luck,” he says. He calls our half section together. The second litter will have a new Number One: me.
Can he be joking?
“You’re promoted to Corporal, Matthias. Congratulations.”
From that day, I attend all command briefings. It feels ridiculous. I can’t make myself give orders to Rags or Knuckles or Lucas. “Learn how,” Flag commands. He includes me now in his private thoughts and deliberations. Every noise he gets from up the chain, he shares with me. I can walk up to Stephanos now and address him as if he were a friend. Indeed, he becomes short with me if I don’t.
Flag passes Tollo’s boots and cloak to Biscuits, with ten drachmas (a year’s wages for a porter) from our fallen comrade’s purse. She has earned it. “What gift,” he inquires of her in the squad’s name, “would you like from us?” Name it, our fellows agree, and we will grant it if we can.
“I would like you all,” she declares, “to stop calling me Biscuits.”
20.
The European cannot appreciate the wretchedness of station of a lone female in the East. Such a creature is lower than a dog, for the animal at least has a worthy use to guard the camp. An unprotected woman isn’t fit, in the eyes of her Afghan countrymen, even to be raped and murdered. They would sooner stone her. She is an outcast, abandoned by God and her ancestors. Evil fortune attaches to her, and the clansman fears nothing so much as bad luck.
Despite ourselves, we become our women’s guardians. The army’s provisions, which would have been loaded onto the backs of mules, go instead onto our females’. They are overjoyed to take them.
So it is Biscuits no longer. Shinar from now on. A pretty name. It means “sanctuary” in Dari.
“In villages of Ghor where we come from,” says Ghilla, “there is always a small stone house, sometimes only a pile of rocks with a roof, built in the hills above the town. This place belongs to all. Anyone may take shelter there, even the criminal, and no one may take him away against his wishes. This sanctuary is called shinar.”
You wonder, I suppose, what happens at night between me and Shinar. Exactly what you think happens. Does this mean I am faithless to my betrothed? The army has a saying:
Who sheds his blood for King and Corps shall dine for free o’er alien shore.
It means the niceties of home don’t count out here. This is war. Might as well ask a man to fight without liquor or opium as to endure this life without women.
I did not feel this way coming out. I would stay true to Danae, I thought. I would be the first ever.
The Oxus, as I said, is twelve hundred yards wide. While army engineers rig pontoon bridges and the corps prepares rafts and bhoosa bags (tent skins stuffed with straw and sewn watertight) for the crossing, our company is sent with a number of others to search the villages up and down the bank. Our orders are to bring back anything that floats and anything the army can ride or eat. The women stay behind, to do the work of camp and to labor in the manufacture of rope for cable.
I stand watch with Lucas the first night downvalley. “What’s it like,” I ask him, “between you and Ghilla?”
He asks what I mean.
“You know. In bed.”
My friend considers this. “Good,” he says.
This is embarrassing. I stop.
“What?” Lucas asks. “What’s on your mind?”
I hesitate. “Is there affection between you and Ghilla? I mean do you talk…or laugh?”
Of course, says Lucas. He’s not sure what I’m getting at. I’m not either. “With Shinar,” I say, “there’s not a word. Nothing. Not before, during, or after. It’s like it’s not even me she’s sluicing. I could be anybody.”
“You mean she’s cold?”
“No, the opposite. She wears me out. But the whole sense of the thing is…”
“What?”
“…of shame. She hates herself afterward. But the next night she’s back, as hungry as ever.” I meet Lucas’s eyes. “I just wanted to know if all Afghan women are like that.”
Flag approaches, checking the sentries. I clam up. I can only talk to Lucas about this kind of stuff.
Our column advances downvalley. The country along the Oxus is completely different from that around Bactra. There, in the central plains, stand cities you could call jewels. Here, it’s all mud-and-wattle. Raider country. The men are all warriors; every eminence is a fort. If you’re a boy, you clear out at dawn with your goats, heading into the camel thorn. Girls squat and weave. Lunch is khisma, walnuts and parched mulberries. The cheese of the country is naffa, salty as brine and solid as stone. It keeps five years. Men are long gone when we enter a village. When we question the old women, they cup hands to their ears.
“Everyone’s deaf in this country,” observes Knuckles.
“Deaf and stupid,” says Little Red.
We have a guide with the Hebrew name Elihu; he keeps the Passover but follows Zoroaster. An interesting fellow, he is fluent in Farsi, Dari, and Greek. He has lived at Halicarnassus and made a pilgrimage up the Nile. I ask him his opinion: How soon will this war be over?
“Never,” says he with a laugh.
We trek atop a sandstone promontory. You can see fifty miles. “In just this country”—Elihu indicates the barren pan—“rule seven warlords. Each is a petty king, backed by his own army. These men are laws unto themselves. They dispense justice, enforce truces, preside at tribal councils; they defend widows and orphans, shelter the aged and infirm. In battle they lead from the front. They hate each other but hate you Macedonians more.”
Elihu draws a map in the dirt. “Belasaris, Miamenes, and Petenes lord it between the Oxus and Bactra City. Oxyartes rules south and east. Spitamenes’ and Dataphernes’ base was in the west, between Artacoana and the Bamian Pass, but now they have come north and allied with chiefs beyond the frontier. Chorienes, Catanes, Melpanor, Histanes; these are chiefs north and east into Sogdiana. Beneath these ride hundreds, thousands, of subcaptains and commanders. This is not counting the Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae north of the Jaxartes. Their numbers are tens of thousands and they are more ungovernable even than these Afghans.”
From E
lihu I learn the tribal law of A’shaara, which regulates the conduct of women. “A’shaara means ‘covenant.’ It is that which binds the individual to the family, the tribe, and the ancestors. Most important are the ancestors. When they turn their backs on you, God turns his back too.”
I tell him about Shinar and the burden of shame she seems to bear. He affirms this. “You should have killed her,” he says, “instead of protecting her.”
The crime I have committed, Elihu explains, is called in Dari al satwa. The Hebrews have a term for it, too—tol davi. It means to bring shame upon someone by performing an act of responsibility that they have failed to perform themselves.
“If a stranger stops at my father’s gate,” Elihu says, “and my father has no food to offer, this is unfortunate but no crime. If our neighbor, however, then provides a meal to the stranger, he has committed al satwa against my father. Do you understand, Matthias? The neighbor has shamed my father before the stranger. This is a terrible transgression in our country. The crime is even worse in your case, for you have rescued a sister when her brother should have done so. You have shamed him mortally, do you see?”
“Well, where the hell was he,” I ask, “when Shinar needed him? I wouldn’t have had to do anything if he had been there to look out for her!”
“Exactly.”
“He should be grateful to me! Haven’t I defended his sister? Haven’t I saved her life? By the gods, my dearest wish is only to return her safely to him!”
No, says Elihu. “You have shamed this woman’s kin by doing for her what they should have done themselves—and for that, they can never forgive you. As for her, she is the vehicle of this shame. The ancestors have witnessed. This is what she experiences now, being with you. And if you evoke feeling in her, her shame is double.”
“In other words,” I say, “to an Afghan it would be preferable that Ash the muleteer continue to beat and abuse Shinar, even kill her, than that I should help her.”
“Indeed.”
“Or that Tollo or some other scuff should rape and outrage her. That would be better too.”
“Precisely,” says Elihu.
All I can do is shake my head.
“And I will tell you something else,” says our guide. “Every act of kindness you perform toward this woman will only drive her deeper into shame. In her eyes, you must understand, she is unworthy. She has broken the covenant of A’shaara. For this,” says Elihu, “God has turned his back on her.”
“Well, what kind of a god is that?”
“I am not a priest, Matthias.”
“It is no god at all. It’s a devil.”
Elihu turns palms skyward—the same gesture Ash employs, which is equivalent to a Macedonian shrug. “This is the devil’s country,” he says. “And you are fighting the devil’s war.”
Another of our column’s assignments is to take prisoners. Rabbit-hunting, the soldiers call it. We are to snatch any male we can lay hands on, the higher-ranking the better, and deliver him alive and unhurt to Alexander’s officers.
We cordon villages, roust grandmothers and wives. Where is your son? Give us your husband! It is forlorn duty. When you collar a man, he plays deaf and dumb, or enacts outraged innocence. You know he’s with the enemy; they all are. But what can you do?
Our company holds to good capture-discipline, because of Stephanos, who will not permit brutality. But many other litters play rough. It is not our business to stop them. In their view, we’re the ones who are derelict. But the pulverization of the powerless is sickening to watch—and of course it makes the Afghans hate us more—particularly when it is performed in front of the captive’s wife, mother, and children.
“Do you ever think of your own mother?” Lucas asks me one afternoon, when we have shaken down three hamlets since morning.
“All the time. And my sister. And Danae.”
We rough up another village that evening, tear open another string of underground ricks. Here are three families’ stores of rice and lentils. We seize them. The mothers clutch at us, wailing that they will starve. Flag scribbles “C.C.’s,” certificates of compensation. The housedames stare in incomprehension.
“Present this to the quartermaster. The officers will pay you when they come through.”
Elihu translates. The matrons blink, unhearing. “Pay you twice what your stuff is worth.”
The old women don’t get it.
“They’re all deaf and stupid.”
21.
Our litter returns from the rabbit-hunt to find four-fifths of the army across the Oxus. The camp blazes with excitement. The war may soon be over! Spitamenes and Oxyartes have sent messengers to Alexander. They have taken the pretender Bessus into custody. They will turn him over to Macedonian justice if our king will give them peace. Of course he will. The treaty may be signed in days.
A further bonus awaits us: horses.
In our absence downvalley, Alexander has discharged with honor three cavalry squadrons of Thessaly, 660 men. He is sending them home richer than princes. Their mounts go up for sale. We’re all too broke to buy one, of course. The army steps in; it will pick up the tariff. The price is one bump: eighteen months’ extension of enlistment. “Take it or leave it,” says Stephanos. He takes it and so do we. We cross the Oxus as mounted infantry.
Our orders, now, are to scour the region for riding stock to replace that lost in the mountains and the Stone Desert. Alexander wants seven thousand mounts and remounts, fit to ride, by fall. By then Afghanistan will be incorporated into the empire. The army will recross the Hindu Kush, this time for India, before the first snows.
I love my horse. She’s a Nisaean mare—milk-colored, with a brand on her right quarter in the shape of a panther. Her name is Chione, “Snow.” She cost three silver talents when her original rider acquired her in Media. I got her for half. A steal. She’s nine years old and boasts more wounds than Alexander. Her conformation is only ordinary, though she has a strong neck, long legs, and a deep, powerful chest. She has quirks. She likes to be fed from a manger; she won’t touch hay, even oats, spread on the earth. She is spooked by anything white. She nips. She butts. She will not be hobbled. She is terrified of bees. She loves pears and will eat mulberries till she makes herself sick.
She is also a first-rate cavalry mount. Hare-quick from a standing start, she will hold a line like a carpenter’s rule and not balk at any trench, wall, or obstacle. She can gallop boot to boot without skippering—seeking to outpace her wing mounts—and in the wedge she turns like a swallow in a flock. I do not train her; she trains me. She is the finest horse I have ever owned and I love her as dearly as my own mother.
As mounted infantry, we receive the same allowance for feed and care, called a “stunt,” as regular cavalrymen. We use this to hire grooms, namely our women. Ghilla stays with Lucas; Shinar keeps with me. Our stunt of a drachma a day covers expenses with ease, and the best part is, in steppe country where our mounts can graze, we get to stick the overage into our purse.
And we’re making a killing in the horse trade.
The tribesmen know the war is almost over. Every bandit wants to unload his ponies. In half a month our outfit acquires more stock than we can herd and more new friends than we can play host to. Returning from the prairie east of Maracanda, we escort 310 horses and nearly as many men—Bactrians, Sogdians, even a few wild Daans and Massagetae—all eager to sign up for pay with Alexander. Spirits are high. We have all become the best of mates.
One night an incident occurs.
A brave of the Sogdians takes a fancy to Shinar. He offers a fine colt for her. Clearly he expects me to comply. The hour approaches midnight; the settlement is our Macedonian camp, within which several score of these wildhearts have congregated, all cockeyed on khoumiss—fermented mare’s milk—and randy as stallions. The situation calls for no small delicacy. To offend the fellow (who is backed by a number of his equally assholed mates) could precipitate a fracas, even a bloodbath.
&n
bsp; I explain to the Sogdian, with respect, that Shinar is my wife.
This elicits gales of hilarity. In the Afghans’ eyes, the girl is clearly outcasted. The buck intends, it is plain, to pass her round to his mates like a banquet favor.
“What fault do you find with my colt?” he asks, meaning the price he offers.
“None. It is a fine animal.”
He turns palms up, as if to say, Then let’s make a deal.
“The woman,” I repeat, “is my wife.”
The brave now believes I am toying with him. I disrespect him. I have affronted his pride.
Flag appears and defuses the moment. He buys the colt for three times its worth. The buck and his cronies, satisfied, take their party elsewhere.
Except now Shinar is furious. She stalks off in outrage. How have I offended her? I have no idea. Ghilla goes after her. Even she can’t bring her back.
At dawn when the column moves out, Shinar is missing. Someone has found her hair, hacked off and thrown on the ground. What this means, I can’t begin to guess.
Over the next two nights, Ghilla seeks to enlighten me. That the Afghan buck sought to degrade Shinar as a whore was insult enough, reminding her as it did of the terrible vulnerability of her station. But that I would claim her as my wife, when she was not (and, more critically, when her Afghan countrymen knew she was not), is insult on top of insult.
I don’t get it. Didn’t I defend her? Wasn’t I ready to shed blood on her account?
Ghilla sighs. “Can you be so blind as to how she feels about you?”
“Oh please. Don’t tell me that.”
“When you say she is your wife, when she is not and can never be, you rub her nose in her bitter fate.”