Steven Pressfield (28 page)

55.

My whip tears discs of flesh from my poor mare's flanks; my heels pound the cage of her ribs. We have been suckered. Baz has played us false.

Flag and I tear along the riverfront road, racing back for Shinar and our camp. Three bridges span the stream below Bal Teghrib. All are jammed with pilgrims and wedding-goers. Across the river sprawls the great flat of the parade field and beyond it the stone massif of the citadel. Already we see regiments entering in formation. How can we get round? We'll never make it over the bridges, and the river is too deep to ford. Our horses will burst their hearts if we swim them and, besides, the far bank is end-to-end with security barricades; the King's Guards will intercept us in our frenzied state and may even shoot us down. We have no choice but to gallop the mile and a half to the first upstream ford. When our animals finally mount out on the far bank, we can feel their knees coming unstrung.

The road approaching Bactra City from the west forks at a great copse of tamarisk that houses the shantytowns of the city's poorest. The south branch becomes the River Road, yokes to the terminus of the southern highway, and enters the town through the Drapsaca Gate. This bottleneck will be crammed with people. We spur left, up the rising slope toward the fortress. My mare is fatiguing but she's still ten lengths ahead of Flag. I can see the approaches to the western gate; they're backed up a mile. I rein, letting Flag catch up. “Through there!” We leap the wall at a low point.

We enter a maze of city lanes. Every artery is choked with revelers. We swim against a tide of thousands, all decked in their plumage. They are so happy. I hate them all. We pound into their mass like riot troops into a front of rebels. Where is our camp? We're lost. Not even urchins who've lived in this labyrinth all their lives can tell us. We keep pounding. Uphill is all I know. The camp is on high ground.

I know I'm going combat-stupid. When I wipe the sweat from my face, my hand comes away bloody. I have bitten through my lip and don't even know it.

Checkpoints seal off street after street. “Don't stop!” bawls Flag. Can we imagine explaining our haste to some barricade-manning corporal?

In my mind I conjure our camp's captain—Stephanos's friend who swore to shield Shinar and Ghilla. If by screaming I could make him hear, I would bellow such that the city walls would topple. If by desperation alone I could make him know the peril in which our women stand, my skull would explode with the force of my extremity.

I whip Snow uphill with furious violence, then realize I'm beating my own right leg. I have flayed the flesh to hash.

Somehow we find the camp. I see it ahead. Deserted, save a skeleton watch. Everyone has vacated for the nuptials. Blood is coming from my mare's nostrils. She is moments from caving beneath me. Behind, Flag has already loosed his exhausted mount; he trundles on foot.

Into the camp. No one's on guard. They're all gone. Only women remain. My mare stumbles. I leap clear. With my weight off her back, she recovers. I drag her by the reins.

“Flag…”

“I'm all right.” He huffs beside me, chest working like a bellows.

We hear screams ahead. Already I know the worst has happened. We plunge on like the doomed. I recognize the horse pens and the lane of our tent. At its head, women cluster, shrieking in woe. They tear their cheeks; blood sheets down their faces. There's our captain. He cries something but I can't hear. His expression is one of abjection. He holds his hands out before him. I see two corporals, our guards. One clutches a half-pike, dirty with blood. The other gapes at me in a state of consternation.

I tear round the corner into the lane. The bodies of Baz and the two cousins sprawl in the dust. A mob of gawkers surrounds them. The crowd sees us. Their eyes dart toward the tent.

I cling to hope. Maybe the corporals have cut the murderers off. Maybe they intercepted them before they got to Shinar and the baby. I see Ghilla, clutching her own infant. I plunge into the tent with Flag one step behind. Soldiers and grooms pack the interior.

Overturned is the army chest that had served as a dressing table. A woman's body lies where the carpet has been thrown back, as if by a struggle. The earth is painted with blood.

56.

One look at Shinar tells me she no longer breathes. There is nothing I can do for her. The sensation is like combat. I turn at once to the infant Elias. A corporal whose name I don't know holds the child. Everyone backs away. A path opens from me to the baby. I take him. His swaddling wrapper is soaked like a sponge. The corporal has tugged a shade-flap over the child's face. The package is so small. Like a parcel you get in the post. I take my tiny son in both hands.

Men tell me later that I appear to be out of my head. On the contrary. I am vividly, preternaturally lucid. I know with absolute certainty that more enemy are coming. This is how the Afghan fights. He hits you once, and when you think you're safe he hits you again.

I am bawling orders. We have to move, get clear. The grooms stare at me as if I have gone mad.

Outside, a boy holds my mare. The beast is spent. If I make her take my weight, she'll cave underneath me. I start off afoot, carrying my little son in the crook of my left arm, beneath the square of my cavalry shield. I can hear the captain behind me. “Someone stick with him.”

Flag.

My mate overhauls me. His face drips sweat. Dust coats his dress uniform, from our dash from the Afghan camp. The wedding. I realize that I, too, wear formal kit. It seems ridiculous. “Where are we going?” Flag bawls.

He thinks I've gone stupid. He'll stay with me. Protect me. But he thinks I've gone combat-stupid.

I set off up the hill. The camp squats at the base of Bal Teghrib's western shoulder. Above it twines a dry watercourse, drainage for the slope, and beyond that, a shantytown. Lanes twist in a labyrinth whose course is dictated by how floodwater sluices off the hill. Every street is deeply rutted. Deserted. The whole town has emptied for the wedding of Alexander and Roxane.

I labor up the slope. Flag pants at my shoulder. He wants to know where we're going.

“I'll know,” I say, “when I see it.”

What happens when you get combat-stupid is the simplest tasks become excruciatingly difficult. Sense deserts you. Limbs turn to lead. You have to summon all your resources simply to remain in the present. Hearing changes; you go deaf and dumb. Your mate can be shouting from two feet away, but you can't hear him. In action sometimes, a man will become possessed with accomplishing some pointless, even deranged task, like evacuating to safety a mate already dead, instead of continuing to support the mission in progress. Such individuals must be taken in hand by their mates or squad leaders. Flag should punch me now, I know it. But he hasn't the heart.

I know Shinar is dead. I know the child in my arms has been butchered. But I can't stop myself from seeking desperately to protect them. A part of me believes, or wishes to, that if I can only exert myself vigorously enough, beseech heaven fervently enough, offer my own life in place of this infant's, that the gods will hear me and restore animation to this poor bundle in my arms.

I lead Flag up lanes toward the citadel. The way is a warren of wattle-and-daub shanties and mud-brick hovels. Over my left shoulder rides my cavalry
pelta
. Beneath this, I shelter my baby. The Macedonian cavalry plate is not a full shield but a smallish wedge of oak and oxhide, faced with bronze. It's handy. With a rearward toss, you can sling it across your back or, shrugging forward, propel it atop your shoulder and upper arm. In this position, the block protects against lance thrusts and saber blows of right-handed opponents while leaving your left arm free to handle the reins.

Beneath this, defended by this, I bear my lifeless infant.

How long do we labor through the shanty quarter? I don't know. We pass lane after lane, sealed off by security details. We traverse the shoulder of the entire mountain, each forced deflection carrying us farther from the summit. Why do I seek these heights? I have no idea. The instinct for high-lining perhaps.

Suddenly everything drops into shadow. Behind the fortress, the sun plunges. Great cheers ascend. We can hear drums and cymbals, bells and tambours, celebrating the wedding. The five hundred kites have been loosed; I glimpse their soaring shapes in the gaps above the twisting lanes. Flag hangs on at my shoulder, spent from this lunatic chase upon which I have led him.

We collapse against a mud-brick wall. Our knees give out. Flag drops across from me. The lane is so narrow that our splayed legs flop atop one another. We are too exhausted to disentangle them.

I have not lost my senses.

I understand what has happened.

I apprehend the fatal inevitability of this hour. Events, it is clear to me, as it has been all along to Shinar, have unfolded as if preordained, from the Macedonian army's initial invasion of Afghanistan to this moment. We who enacted it—from Baz and Ash and Jenin to me and Flag and Shinar—owned no more freedom of will than planets in their passage or days in a month.

Wedding kites sail above. They soar in sun; we hunker in shadow. I meet Flag's eye. Behind him ascends a ragged slat-fence, screening a tributary alley. A puppy and a naked little boy, no more than twelve months old, squat together in the powdery earth. A young mother steps from a door. She sees Flag and me and snatches up her child; in an instant she has vanished. I hear the sound of beating wings.

Doves.

White doves.

Across a shaft of sunlight the brilliant flock streaks, celebrating the union of Alexander and the princess Roxane.

The war is over.

57.

Among the more dolorous rites any soldier must perform is the inventorying of the unclaimed personal effects of a fallen comrade. When the property is that of a woman and a child, for whom he has come to care more than he imagined possible, the chore becomes even more heartbreaking.

In the end I keep only two tokens of Shinar: her shoes (the ragged
pashin
in which she crossed the Hindu Kush) and the letter she sent me from Bactra City, written out by a scribe in the marketplace, in Greek that was far inferior to her own.

I come to Maracanda. Ghilla's son is born. The soldiers kill Daria for your brother. I bring your pay. If you find a new woman, I make my own way.

I will have other women if I live. Perhaps memory of Shinar will fade with time. But I doubt it. She was braver than I, stronger and wiser. It was my folly that brought about her end, which she foresaw so clearly, while I, blind and unheeding, hauled her forward to our doom.

As for Shinar's brother, I cannot hate him. I can't condemn even the code under whose compulsion he took her life. We were three. The empire holds thirty million. Show me one whose heart has not been riven by the pitiless harrow of war.

When the divisions march out for India in the spring, it chances that our company parades alongside that Afghan contingent of which Shinar's brother and cousins had been part. I see faces from the
jurga
. These men will form, now, one element of the garrison force under Alexander's banner, to hold Afghanistan in his name. What monument shall we erect to this achievement, that these men serve the same warlord they served before, in the same place, to the same profit, only salaried now in Macedonian tender?

I have sold my mare, Snow. She was not lucky for me.

I decided not to take my discharge. I re-upped instead. To the infantry. Signed for two more bumps. The corps gave me a promotion. I hold Flag's old rank now.

He did indeed go home, my mate and mentor. It is I, now, who instruct the raw scuffs who trek in with the latest train of replacements. They are dumb as puppies. I ride them hard. You have to, to keep them alive.

Stephanos and I remain together. We “bumped over” in the same patch. He wants to see India. He's a captain now; princes of Old Macedon are not as rich as he. He sends it all home, keeping only enough to replace weapons and armor. “The soldier,” he says, “needs no more than that.”

We part that final morning, Flag and I, on the Plain of Sorrows. He digs into my pack, comes up with Tollo's boars'-tusk cap. He works it onto my skull.

“There,” he says. “That's better.”

Ghilla stands at my shoulder. I have taken her and her son, little Lucas, under my protection. I will raise the child as my own.

“As a soldier?” asks Flag.

We laugh. The lad will grow into that, no doubt, no matter what I say.

Earlier this morning, as the mule trains were forming in the dark, my brother had cantered along the column on his way to his march post. Philip will ride out to India too. He is all-business still, or pretends to be. He dismounts. Inspects my kit. “You break my heart, Matthias.”

He weeps.

“Finding you here,” he says, “all my worst fears have been realized.”

The column groans into motion up ahead. When the army of Macedon deploys to a new theater of war, it does so by divisions in order of seniority. Mine, the
taxis
of Coenus, is number two behind Alexander's elite brigades.

Philip remounts, stretches down his hand. I take it. “Keep off the high line,” he says.

“Don't outgallop your cover.”

He tugs his reins over; his spurs dig. With a start, his mount bolts away down the line.

The plain over which the camp sprawls is a welter of dismantled field kitchens and struck sixteen-man tents. These will not accompany the marching army. They'll follow with the heavy baggage. On the trek, the troops will bonze under goatskin
bichees
and dine on mooch and hurry bread. The trail will be the same one we descended from the Khawak Pass three springs ago. This time the column will take lower, easier passes. We'll lay over for training in the Kabul Valley until the worst of the summer heat has passed, then descend with autumn to the Punjab.

My mother writes:

Have I lost you, child? Will my arms never hold you again?

It would comfort this dear lady to understand why I can't come home. How can I explain it? What would I become there except another sad old man, a fractured veteran good neither to my family, my country, or myself?

I wished once to become a soldier. I have become that. Just not the way I thought I would.

The motion of the column at last reaches our station. The first day's trek is never far. In case you forget something important, you need to be able to send a man back.

Passing down the camps of the trailing divisions, I spy a familiar white beard.

Ash wrangles a train of two dozen. The mules' loads are roped up and balanced, but sit now on the ground, so their weight won't wear out the beasts prematurely. Ash has taught me that—and how to shave a pack animal's back so the hairs of his coat don't get twisted into burrs that chafe beneath his load.

“I told you, Meckie, that we would drive you out.”

Indeed he did.

I stop and take the old bandit's hand.

“I'm sorry for your girl, Matthias.”

I quote his proverb:

Though blind, God sees; though deaf, He hears.

I rejoin the column. “See you in India.”

“May I starve first!”

The beauty of Afghanistan lies in its distances and its light. The massif of the Hindu Kush, a hundred miles off, looks close enough to touch. But before we get there, hailstones big as sling bullets will ring off our bronze and iron; floods will carry off men and horses we love; the sun will bake us like the bricks of this country's ten thousand villages. We are as overjoyed to be quit of this place as it is to see us go.

I scoffed, once, at Ash's god. But he has beaten us. Mute, pitiless, remote, Afghanistan's deity gives up nothing. One appeals to him in vain. Yet he sustains those who call themselves his children, who wring a living from this stony and sterile land.

I have come to fear this god of the Afghans. And that has made me a fighting man, as they are.