Virtues of War (28 page)

I offer to appoint the farmer my commissioner of agriculture or, if he will not accept this, to draw for him from the treasury such wealth that he need never work again.

“Please, no!” the old man protests with genuine terror. “Leave me nothing, sire, for, by heaven, my neighbors will crack my skull if they smell so much as half a copper, and what they miss, my wife and her kin will beat out of me till nothing remains but brittle bones.”

“Then what shall I leave you, my friend?”

“My misery.” And he laughs.

With Hephaestion I begin to study the system in earnest. “This type of country,” my companion observes, “cannot support small farms and free yeoman, as in Macedon. Everything depends on irrigation, but to dredge the canals and keep them clear—for they silt up so fast and the reeds grow back so quickly—takes mass labor. Forced labor. The land is as fertile for tyranny,” Hephaestion concludes, “as for wheat and barley.”

I set up in the palace and begin to hear petitions. It becomes clear at once that power lies not with the king but with those who control access to him. An industry of corruption flourishes, not only at my threshold but along all roads and highways leading to it. Mazaeus becomes my mentor, along with Boas, the bright young captain, and two eunuchs, Pharnaces and Adramates.

The eunuch chancellors, one soon grasps, are the richest men in the kingdom and the most powerful. They direct not only the daylight affairs of the realm (their legitimate commission) but constitute as well a shadow syndicate, with its own captains and consuls, and a code of secrecy as stern as that of any other enterprise in organized crime. Adramates is the crown chancellor beneath Darius in Babylon; under him, I learn, are four subministers, who oversee a network of several thousand others—tax collectors, magistrates, administrators, and scribes. They are all in league with one another, I am informed, and all as crooked as the highway to hell. The primary functionaries of this underworld are
bagomes
, “soldiers”—that is, the managers appointed by the absentee grandees to oversee their holdings. These syndicate agents are the real power in the country. They serve the king and run circles behind his back. The eunuchs' wealth is not in money (for they are forbidden to own anything beyond their personal effects) but in
arcamas
, “influence.” This, of course, is the same as money. Great generals genuflect before them and mighty captains bow at their feet. The eunuchs can turn any man off his land, seize his wife and children, deprive him of wealth, liberty, life. It is in their power to ruin even the sons and brothers of the king. “How did Darius control them?” I ask Pharnaces.

“No one can rule them, sire, not even you, save by wholesale purge—and this you dare not do, or the empire will fall apart in a day.”

I ask Pharnaces about civil crime—theft, homicide, felonies of the street. It does not exist, he tells me. “For a man who steals a pear forfeits his right hand, and who speaks ill of his master loses his tongue.”

The third night in the city, I instruct the crown chancellor to show me the Mint. Twenty thousand talents lie in store here, a stupefying sum, all in bullion, gold and silver, except four or five thousand in darics and staters. It is not locked up. The only sentinels, beyond the watch Parmenio has set over the precinct, are two scribes, both boys, and a registrar of such antiquity he could not have secured the place against an incursion of gnats. This, one sees, is the East. On the one hand, the produce of the empire is looted routinely by those ministers appointed to watch over it, while on the other, one could park the whole of the king's exchequer in the middle of Procession Street and not a man would help himself to a jot.

When Cyrus the Great conquered Babylonia two hundred years ago, I am instructed, he divided the land into seventeen thousand plots, which he allotted to his victorious officers and soldiers. These tracts were registered either as Bow Land, Horse Land, or Chariot Land. The holder was required to pay taxes in kind each year and turn out for the king's forces one infantryman with shield, armor, and servant from Bow Land; one cavalryman with mount, equipment, and groom from Horse Land; and one charioteer with car, team, and henchman from Chariot Land. Because many of these grant holders were commanded by Cyrus to attend at court, or elected on their own to exploit their holdings either as absentees or nonworking grandees, the day-to-day operations of the land came to be given over to local agents or managers, who contracted to pay the taxes and to remit all profits to the grant holders. These tax farmers formed a
kanesis
, a “syndicate” or “family,” and conspired with one another to subvert the power of the Persian nobility while aggrandizing their own. The eunuchs who served the king were privy to these intrigues and acted in concert with them, as it served their interests to enlarge their own power at the expense of the nobles. The result was you had the official tax collectors, those who served the king, operating in collusion with the gangster tax collectors, who conspired against the king, to extract from the conquering nobility the wealth that they and the king had won—and all on the backs of the peasantry.

Now here I am. I too will divide Babylon into royal grants and cede them to my countrymen as rewards for service. What else can I do? Campaign calls me on. I would seek measures to secure justice and promote the well-being of the people. But how can this be managed? In the end I have no choice but to leave affairs exactly as they are, run by exactly the same officials. I will do as every conqueror has done before me:

I will take the money and run.

And yet to call the workings of the state corrupt would be a mischaracterization. I pass a memorable night in converse with the queen mother, Sisygambis, who has become a sort of mentor to me. “You do not understand, my son. In the East there exists no objective standard of achievement, no impartial measure by which a man may establish or advance his station. He cannot ‘get ahead.' He cannot ‘succeed.' It is not like the egalitarianism of your army, Alexander, which provides an unbiased arena, within which a poor man may make his fortune and a rich man prove worthy of his fame. Here no man exists, save in subordination to another.”

Sisygambis details for me the labyrinthine protocol of power by which one sphere of society imposes its will upon another and is in turn imprisoned by that imposition. “A network of interlocking tyrannies extends from top to bottom and side to side, and in it each man is caught like a fly in a web. Here all a man thinks of is to please his master. He has no concept of what he himself wishes. Ask him. He cannot tell you. The very concept is beyond his imagination.”

This is the East. On the right hand, one beholds opulence beyond imagination; on the left, destitution that beggars description. The long-suffering of the peasantry approaches the holy. Their carriage and bearing possess a dignity unmatched even by kings of the West. But it is the dignity of a stone, weathering centuries, not of a man, descended of heaven.

I tell the queen mother that I wish Darius were here now, with us. “For what purpose?” she asks.

“To learn how he governed such a world. And to hear the secrets of his heart upon it.”

But the lady only turns aside in sorrow. “My lord, the sovereign of the East is the least free of men. His role is to be the Living Embodiment of all that is great and noble. The grandeur of his estate imbues the lives of his subjects with hope and meaning. Yet he himself is enslaved by his office. My son Darius would not wish to tell you of his life, Alexander, but to inquire, with envy, of yours.”

Money. Because all wealth is inducted upward to the king, the people have evolved underground currencies to duck the tax agent. A black economy serves all, which is partly barter, but mostly
achaema,
“trust.” This takes the form sometimes of a local tender, which may be marked shards in one part of the city or bullets of lead in another, good only in the immediate neighborhood; but appears more universally as a promise-to-pay guaranteed by a kind of street-corner banker, who is either a member of one of the syndicates that run the city or operates under its protection. A fuller, shall we say, owns a shop making felt. He pays his taxes in kind, but how does he pay wages? Not in coin, for there is no such thing. He pays in chits, which are secured by the
achaemist
, the street-corner exchequer. Who protects the banker? The syndicate, which is shielded by the royal chancellors. The scheme is as complex as a galaxy and as impenetrable as the mind of God. A conqueror passing through barely fazes it. I am sure that in the broad expanse of Babylon, with its four million souls, three-quarters have never heard my name, let alone that of Darius. But the system is far more pernicious for the commons than the conqueror. Yes, a man beats his taxes. But at this cost: the stultification of all original thought and innovation. For each man is immured within his own quarter. He cannot think beyond the street in which he dwells; he has no hope and no ambition. Here is why so great a city can be carried as if its walls were of tissue.

Then there is sex.

In a society where a man's spirit is crushed from birth; where hope is absent, suffering stupefying; where the diet is despair and every man a slave—in such a culture, the individual takes his pleasure when and where he can. Some joys are simple and wholesome. Most are cruel and corrupt.

The vocabulary of depravity is nowhere as encyclopedic as at Babylon. Every imaginable spirit and intoxicant lies to hand, as does every posture of carnality and every instrument of desire; oils, scents, and lubricants, aphrodisiacs, stimulants, asphyxiants, resuscitants. Women and boys are trained in the arts of passion; shops abound, purveying devices of bondage, dominance, and submission, appliances to imprison and immobilize, to inflict pain and to relieve it. They are great love poets, the Assyrians and Babylonians. I can understand this, for in this realm alone are they free. The greatest buildings of the East are not their temples or even their palaces, but their seraglios.

And yet, despite such woe, the place is a vibrant and colorful cosmos. The women are beautiful, the children dark-eyed and full of mischief. Business booms. Water taxis ply the Euphrates, selling fruit and vegetables and carrying lovers and merchants all over town with wonderful swiftness and ease. The gay colors of the riverfront, the raucous bustle of the mercantile mart, the smells of spitted meats and baking bread are nothing if not intoxicating. The great city, sweltering on the plain, lies asweat with sensation and sensuality. It is impossible not to fall in love with the place.

Here is my quandary: I have discovered affection for these slender, dark-eyed Asiatics; it breaks my heart to behold them so wretched and unfree.

Shortly after we enter Babylon, Bucephalus is stricken with sepsis. A wound from Gaugamela becomes infected; the malady advances from its source to his heart with such rapidity (he is nearly eighteen years old) that the physicians tell me he may not last the night. I rush to his side, informing those in whose care he stands that if he dies, they themselves will follow within the hour. The best men in the army are summoned, not only of veterinary but of general medicine; I put out a call to the city at large, offering his weight in gold to that tender, Greek or barbarian, who can preserve Bucephalus's life.

The equestrian world is a small one. Within hours, a messenger arrives from the Persian Tigranes, hero of Issus and Gaugamela. His home academy lies sixty miles up the Tigris at a village called Baghdad; in his service stands Phradates, the empire's master veterinary surgeon. He is on his way, Tigranes' courier declares. A horse-ambulance and a barge follow, to transport Bucephalus. I am struck dumb by this act of compassion from my enemy.

It takes two days to work upriver. Bucephalus cannot stand; his weight must be taken by a belly sling. Phradates does not leave his side, nor do I. I speak softly to my horse and stroke his ears, as I have since I was a boy and he my greatest friend.

The Persians are nothing if not connoisseurs of horseflesh. The barge barely touches dockside at Tigranes' academy before Bucephalus vanishes amid a press of worshipers—grooms and exercise boys, veterinary students, cavalrymen in training—who have been informed of his approach and now crowd about, ecstatic at the apparition of such a specimen, even in his current desperate state. Bucephalus is like me—he thrives on attention. I look in his eyes and feel my breath return. He will recover.

We stay fifteen days as guests in Tigranes' home. The establishment is a riding academy and military school. The grounds are impeccable, with timbered barns, tracks, and lunging rings, but the spirit of the place has been devastated by war and defeat. Two walls of the stadium are hung with the bridles of comrades fallen in action; other horse warriors, crippled in battle, are housed in cottages on the grounds. All are fearful and demoralized.

At once I pledge to reconstitute the place. I have never seen such splendid-looking fellows as the Persian youths in attendance about Tigranes. I call Hephaestion aside. “Here is the answer to the empire!”

I implore Tigranes to serve with me. I wish him to raise a regiment and campaign at my side. But he will not take the field in pursuit of Darius, his king and kinsman; I can have his life, Tigranes declares, but not his service. This confirms me in my opinion that I have found, at last, a breed of noble who can lift the empire from its state of desolation.

Do you know how Phradates cured Bucephalus? By the heavens. The doctor and all physicians of Persia are magi and expert cosmologists. “Stars, like men, are born and die, my lord. But no star comes into being alone. Each has its twin. When one flares or dims, the other alters with it, simultaneously, though they reside a sky apart. You and your horse are like that. Bucephalus suffers, Alexander, because your heart is sick. He is you, this prodigy, and he will not find rest so long as your soul remains untranquil.”