The Afgan Campaign

9

The distance our column has covered in six nights chasing the foe, it takes nearly twice as long to traverse returning; we are so exhausted and so is our stock. We have to link up with our other patrols. We can’t track as the hawk flies but have to detour from village to village to fill our bellies.

One of the chores of a rookie is to forage for food. In our litter, it’s Lucas and me who draw this duty. Bring back dinner! Get us something to eat! The practice of “living off the land” is indispensable, we see, to a young trooper’s education. It teaches him how to rough up civilians, intimidate farmers and housedames. The youth learns how to tear up a floor, rip open a roof, how to shake people down. It trains him to take nothing at face value, not the weeping grandmother, the pleading wife, the starving urchin. They’re all lying. They’ve all got mooch.

On the ninth noon returning to Artacoana, a messenger gallops up, mounted on the most spectacular piece of horseflesh I have ever seen. He is a full captain of Alexander’s Companions, bringing orders from the king himself. Three Afghan guides accompany him, perched on plug yaboos that look like hounds alongside the captain’s thoroughbred. But these ponies can fly. While the captain confers with Tollo and Stephanos, our mob grills the scrubs.

Alexander is here, they tell us. At Artacoana. Informed by fast couriers of Satibarzanes’ and Spitamenes’ insurrection, the king has broken off his eastward advance. He has turned about, leaving the heavy corps with his general Craterus, while he with the cavalry and light troops has crossed 180 miles of desert in three days. The rebel horse has shown its heels at his approach. Alexander has cornered the foot troops, thirteen thousand, atop a natural fortress called the Mother’s Breast. If the insurgents will accept him as sovereign, Alexander has pledged, all may return in peace to their homes. The foe has sent back a gutted dog. It means go to hell.

Our own orders, delivered by the Companion captain, are not to return to Artacoana but to make all speed to the site of the original massacre, secure the place, and protect the corpses of our countrymen from further desecration. We are to remain on-site until Alexander himself can conclude his business with the foe and arrive to tender proper honors to the fallen. Two of the Afghans on yaboos will guide us.

The site, when we reach it three dusks later, is in a narrow throat between granite crags. An understrength company of Arcadian mercenaries mans a perimeter. They are ecstatic to see us, as our numbers will hold at bay the droves of Afghan dames who have already picked the gorge clean of plunder and still loiter on the high-lines, awaiting the chance to dash in and make off with the odd buckle or lancehead, whose bronze and iron are worth fortunes in this desert, not to mention their value as trophies.

The Arcadians tell us what happened to our countrymen. Those who survived the initial ambush were beaten and stripped naked; the enemy staked them out on the earth, spread-eagled on their backs, and drove long knives into their thighs, ripping gashes to the bone. They disemboweled our fellows, put out their eyes, and hacked off their genitals. Then they painted them with terebinth oil-turpentine-and set them on fire. All this while they were still alive.

It is the women and children, we learn from the Afghan guides, who have committed these atrocities upon our countrymen. This, they tell us, is the custom of the country. Captives are turned over to the clan females for their pleasure. The tribes do this not only to us but to each other.

The Arcadians have collected the bodies of our comrades in the center of the camp. This is so the Afghan women can’t skulk in after dark and plunder them further. The corpses are wrapped, and we newcomers make no attempt to peek under.

After dark our female besiegers begin to keen. A bloodcurdling ululation commences on one flank of the gorge, answered by an equally mane-blanching chorus from the other. Soon the whole pass is wailing in some ungodly primordial cacophony.

“Is that jackals or people?” Flea asks.

Lucas glances to me. “Jackals would sound more human.”

The evening is warm but we’re all shivering. In camp it is custom for rookies only to stand sentry; this night the vets take their turn too.

Sometime in the third watch an Afghan vixen is slain by two of Bullock’s grooms; she has crawled in, past the guard, all the way to the picketed horses, one of which she is in the act of hamstringing, just a pebble’s toss from the commander’s tent. Next morning, I and several others are detailed to remove the bodies of our countrymen to an even more secure site in the camp. We grab the first wrapped form to lift it; it plunges free of its shroud, in sections, at our feet. The man has been beheaded and cut off at the knees.