The Afgan Campaign

24

The Many Blessings is the river of Maracanda. Our relief column tracks along it, hurrying to catch Spitamenes, who’s besieging the city. Where the river emerges from the heights northeast of the walls, it does so as a torrent, thundering down a gap called the Gorge of the Sisters (memorializing two Afghan virgins who, lore declares, leapt to their deaths in a gesture of defiance against some ancient invader); then it levels out and drops underground. When you ride over it, you can hear the waters rushing beneath the earth. Near the village of Zardossa the flow re-emerges, funneling down another defile, this time a sunken one, at a ford called Council Bluffs. By there, the river has spread to half a mile wide and become so shallow it can be waded by a child. Numerous bars and islands, called by the natives “travelers,” stud the channel. From one bank you can barely see the other. The shore and islands stand thick with willow, broom, and cottonwood, the kind of stuff that flourishes near underground water. This day, in fall, the cottony seeds sail on the wind. The air is snowy with them.

Our column is twenty-three hundred, three-quarters infantry, all mercs, under Andromachus, called Whiskers for his great bushy red beard, and Menedemus, a dashing and brilliant cavalry commander, only twenty-seven years old, who at nineteen had taken the crown at Olympia in the pentathlon. Our half squadron under Flag and Stephanos is assigned flank security; we ride on the forward right wing, looking out for ambushes. It’s a four-day chop, moving fast, through semidesert populated by scrub brush, camel thorn, and tamarisk. I trot, all the second day, with the poet.

Stephanos is one of the few Macks who does not carry, as the phrase goes, a camp woman. He has a wife and children back home, though no one has heard him speak of them; we know only that he pouches a letter to them every day. This reveals little, however, since the poet maintains simultaneous correspondence with scores of other colleagues, actors, philosophers, musicians, and heaven knows who else. When the army puts over at a foreign city, it is Stephanos’s habit to take apartments in town, on his own, even if the corps has assigned him to camp or cantonments. He does this to write. It’s easy to forget how famous he is. He is invited constantly to banquets and functions (which the army suffers in the interest of local relations), at which he appears in formal military dress, usually squiring one of the city’s ladies of fashion, often poets themselves, or else patronesses of the arts. My fascination with the fellow has enlarged, if anything, as our acquaintance has grown. No one really knows him. Even drunk, he will not spill his guts. I find myself watching him when he doesn’t know I’m looking. I study how he drinks and dines; the most minor detail of his conversation captivates me. Does he speak with approval of some author? I scour the camp for that fellow’s book. Has he voiced distrust of a certain officer? I won’t go near the man.

Since the mountains, the poet has become a champion for our Afghan women. On the march he will make occasion to fall in at their sides, conversing in Farsi or Dari or, with Shinar, in Greek. He takes their cause with the army. I have seen him teaching Shinar to read. He thinks I don’t appreciate her, and he lets me know.

“What you must keep in mind, Matthias, is that this young woman who shares the hazards of your life-and all her sisters who do likewise with our fellows-has traversed seas of the soul such as you and I cannot begin to fathom. In her village, even to be glimpsed by a foreigner would cost her a beating. To speak to one would mean her life. Now here they are, with us. Do you think these women have put such disrepute behind them? It burns in their vitals every hour. Each scrap of pleasure they share with us, they pay for in the currency of secret shame. Yet they love us. This girl loves you. Have you heard her, ever, speak the name of God? She cannot, for in her eyes she and her sisters are heaven’s outcasts, banished to an exile from which they can never return. ‘May you see God’s back’ is the cruelest Afghan curse. Such is your girl’s bitter bread, which she must choke down anew at every sunrise.”

I ask, has he written verses of these girls? He will not answer.

“Soldiers and their women,” declares the poet, “are not as crude as their betters imagine. To watch your brother Elias and his mistress, one could believe he was looking on a lord and lady, so solicitous is each of the other’s weal. Even Flag, who prefers wantons, will not mistreat them. And what, while we’re at it, of this corps of bawds and strumpets that tracks the army beneath all weathers? They have become sisters to us. No dame back home laughs as gaily as they, or so gives herself over to such simple pleasures as a bath in a river, a tussle in the snow. The army packs infants in thousands. Who cares for them? These wenches scorned by all. As whores they may have started; they have become mothers and sisters and wives. How excruciating must the torment be to them, who know that the man they call husband in this country will cast them aside when his discharge comes and return home to his real wife and children, never to speak again of this matron and her brats with whom he has shared the keenest joys and sorrows of his life. Do you remember on the Oxus when the told-off Thessalians were selling their horses? How poignant those partings! Yet next day those same men turned out mothers and children too. How did those abandoned feel? Have they endured less than we? Every league we tramp, they trek with us. They suffer casualties as we do. They perish of fatigue and want, of thirst and disease. They are kicked by mules; they spill down mountainsides; frost takes their limbs. Nor are they immune to enemy action, for the foe knows well how to raid our camps and in fact seeks them out, particularly these marauders of the Wild Lands-Daans and Sacae and Massagetae-for whom pillage and the taking of plunder is second nature. These maids know how to fight too. Every one packs a spike in her hair and reckons all the soft spots to sink it. These jades and doxies are the unhonored champions of our cause. Without them, we couldn’t last a month.”

The column relieves Maracanda without incident. Spitamenes, who has held the city briefly, takes to his heels at our approach. The natives claim that his flight is at their urging; they fear Alexander’s vengeance if the king believes the city has harbored his foe. Or perhaps this is just their story. In any event, as soon as Andromachus and Menedemus learn this (before our fellows have even dismounted), the column puts about in pursuit. As always, no one tells us anything. Our half squadron, which had constituted one wing of the vanguard, receives no orders until a courier sent by Andromachus rides up, noontime of this breezy, cotton-aired day, and instructs us to hold in place while the column countermarches past, back the way it came, then reconfigure ourselves as the rear guard. In other words, no mooch for us or our horses.

“What genius came up with this stroke?”

I am with Rags, Boxer, and Knuckles where the highway turns beneath the city walls. When our mob hears we are not going in, a groan rises from all. The city means grain and sweet water for our animals, bunks for us, or at least a squat behind walls and the chance of half a night’s sleep. Now instead we must make off, unfed, unrested, with night falling in a few hours, into country cut by hundreds of lateral defiles, any one of which could conceal a regiment, along a river which, with its dense brush and cottony air, will set us up blind as a fogbank, so that the foe may appear either from the brush of the desert, driving us into the soup, or from the shallow channel itself.

“Children,” says Stephanos, “I don’t like the look of this.”

Back we trot, along the same route we came. There is a peril to serving under a commander as audacious as Alexander and the peril is this: When the king is not present in person but others command in his stead, those officers feel ashamed to act with less dash or boldness than they imagine he would. This can get you into trouble. Soldiers sense it. They can smell a shitstorm coming.

“Covers off!” bawls Flag, cantering along our front. He means strip the oxhide sleeves off our lanceheads. “Dust ’em up!” He bends for a handful of sand to abrade the shaft for a grip. I feel a brick descend in my bowels. I’d give ten days’ wages to stop for a crap. Enemy hoofprints carve a highway east. The track is so fresh that horse turds are practically steaming. He is a liar, on a trail so hot, who claims his chestnuts have not retracted into his loins.

Our post is both wings, rear guard. We have passed Zardossa village; the river flows on our right, wide and shallow, choked with broom and willow. Left is all creosote and tamarisk. Bush country; you can’t see a hundred feet into it. Each two hundred yards another ravine notches through, like a side road entering a thoroughfare. Dark lacks two hours. The horses snaffle at each tributary; they’re thirsty, they want to get their noses down. Orders are to make speed. We quirt them across.

March discipline dictates that a column in country that so favors an ambusher should proceed with extreme circumspection. Wing cavalry should sweep the brush in fifty-yard relays. Each dry ravine should be secured before the column passes. But daylight works against us. And the brush is so dense, it would take forever to comb even a quarter-mile swath. Wing security should be out on the river side too. We should be two squadrons, not two halves, and they should search all islands, as far as the opposite bank (which we cannot see because of the intervening “travelers,” the dense brush, and the snowing cotton).

An hour till nightfall.

Too far from Maracanda to summon help.

Suddenly riders appear behind us. Their numbers match our half squadron of the rear guard; like us, they advance at the trot, about a furlong back. They show themselves so boldly that at first, we think they must be ours.

Knuckles looses a piercing whistle, alerting Flag, who rides ahead on the wing. Beside him, on the bank road, march two companies of mercenary foot. Flag sends a rider to their captains. Already we can see the infantry deploy. Flag spurs back, signaling to us to form into wedges.

Our numbers are eighty. We break into twenties. My charge is the leftmost ten. I put Knuckles at the point (meaning the rear) and ride, myself, to the wing. Left, the nearest island is about a hundred yards. I’ve got a bad feeling about it.

Lucas spurs past, taking his slot in the wedge. “Are they ours?” he calls, meaning the riders behind us.

Flag laughs. “Ride back and find out!”

Already we can feel the column compressing. Men’s voices are shouting ahead. Something is going on up front. Through the cottony air, we glimpse companies forming fronts left, facing the bush, and right, toward the shallows.

We enter a section of bluffs. High cut-banks ascend on the left. Horsemen appear atop them. Archers. Not ours. We have no archers. The riders behind have widened their front now. The tamarisk flat between river and bluffs is about an eighth mile. They fill it. Behind them more mounted men appear. Riding double-horseman and foot soldier. We have heard of this practice but never seen it. In action, the enemy drops off his second man at the gallop; this fellow joins the attack on foot.

Stephanos reins from his post at the tail. “Sons of whores!” he calls, indicating the foe. “They’ve set this up from the start.”

He means Spitamenes’ flight from Maracanda was fake all along. This ambush has been in place for days. The foe has had time to rehearse. Doubtless he has groomed the ground, carving deadfalls and leg-breakers, blocking escape routes with brush and felled timbers.

I call to Flag to let me check the island. Too late. Without a sound the treeline comes alive. Horse archers emerge in a front. They do not loose their missiles, nor do they charge; they simply advance to the water’s edge and hold their position. That’s enough. Our whole company is now fixed in place. We can’t attack the riders to our rear or we imperil the foot troops we’re posted to protect, and we can’t charge the island or we leave our own rear exposed. Lucas is cursing our forward wings for not clearing this obvious blind. Perhaps they did, and found it vacant. The foe, concealed behind more distant islands, could easily have spurred forward unseen once our scouts had passed.

What other surprises has the Wolf laid for us? The island holds about two hundred men. When our infantry rushes, how many more will materialize?

Soldiers are drilled to respond without orders to certain situations. Facing an advancing front of horsemen, cavalry attacks in wedges. Ambushed from the flank, infantry assaults straight-on. Ours are crack troops; they can perform such evolutions in their sleep. But no amount of skill or valor can help us now. We are in the trap and the jaws are closing.

All glory to Spitamenes. The Desert Wolf has suckered us like bumpkins. He has used the terrain and the time of day, the length of the march and the dearth of water and fodder; he has used our arrogance and our ignorance. He has made us fight on his ground, by his rules.

Our force is equal in number to the enemy. We are better trained and disciplined, with superior armor and weaponry. But we are strung out like ducks on the water. The Wolf will “swarm” us. He will hurl his wings onto our column’s head and tail, trapping and immobilizing our mates in the center. Then he’ll cut the column into sections. His horse archers will ring each isolated element, galloping round and round, loosing their bolts point-blank upon us, then scampering out of range when we try to get to close quarters. We have no missile troops. If our infantry leave the shelter of the square, armed only with spear and sword, the mounted foe will cut them off and slaughter them in detail. If we on horseback try the same stunt, Spitamenes’ men will back off till we don’t dare pursue farther. Either way, we are finished.

It is clear what our rear guard must do, so obvious that our commanders don’t rein in even to pass the word. They simply advance to their posts, knowing each man will move on the signal. It comes. Flag leads our two wedges straight at the horsemen closing from the rear. Simultaneously our adjacent merc infantry forms up, a hundred across and four deep, and advances into the river, seeking to come to grips with the horse archers of the island. Stephanos holds back our remaining troopers, about 40, while our foot commanders retain their own reserve, 150 or so. We all know that the foe will withdraw before our charge, then hit us from the flank with concealed elements when we’ve run out too far from our base. There is nothing we can do about it. We have to strike first or the Wolf will drive us even deeper into the snare.

Ahead, our column of infantry stretches along the river for more than a mile. From the rear we can see the foe already starting to swarm them. These are tactics ancient as hell itself. But they work. Run rings round the trapped enemy, shooting at him on the run; when he rushes you, pull back; when he wears out, attack again. Against infantry with no defendable flanks, like ours along this shallow river, victory is only a matter of patience and time. We can see Spitamenes’ auxiliaries spurring up from the bluffs and the stream, leading mules and horses laden with additional arrows. The shafts are tied in bunches like sheaves, so the horse archers can grab them at the gallop and return to the fight with their saddle-quivers reloaded.

In the rear, the enemy does not wait to receive the charge of our wedges. His front parts while we’re still two hundred feet off, scattering for the bluffs on one side and the river on the other. We have no tactic to counter this. We cannot break formation to chase these bastards man-on-man. But to maintain the assault past the foe’s original front means being taken in the rear by them when they reform, which they do as swiftly as swallows, and in flank by their fellows waiting in concealment, whom we now see, in hundreds, emerging from behind the shoulders of the washes descending from the cliffs. Our unit has been tasked as reconnaissance; we don’t have the weight to take on such numbers. The Wolf knows this. He has outskulled us again. As Rags and I rein our tens, the foe’s front reunites and gallops behind us, seeking to cut us off from the body of the column. We can do nothing except wheel and spur back as fast as we can.

We’re dead and we know it. The sensation is like a game of Castle against a master, in which each move you make, no matter how right or valiant, only drives you deeper into the bag. Our minds race, seeking some ploy or stratagem that will return us to the initiative. But we are caught like thrushes in birdlime, and the more we struggle, the more furiously we are fixed. Events unravel so fast that our senses can conjure no scheme except to revert to basics: form up, face the foe, prepare to stand and die.

Meanwhile, the Wolf has sprung the same trap on our rearguard infantry assaulting the island. Our fellows advance, up to their calves in the river. Now the foe brings more horsemen from the flank. He cuts our troops off and swarms them. His mounts are massive Parthians, seventeen-handers, whose great hooves throw up spray in the shallows, dazzling in the late light. The sight would be beautiful if its import were not so calamitous. More horsemen swing round on our rear. Flag and Stephanos take their wedges straight at them.

The fight goes exactly as we have dreaded.

The foe falls upon our infantry in two columns-one inland, paralleling the bluffs, the other at the river’s edge and in the river. In other words, he runs down both sides of our axis. At quarter-mile intervals he strikes across and severs the column. In the rear, we can’t see this. But we hear. There is no sound in the world like armored cavalry clashing with heavy infantry. Spitamenes’ Bactrians and Sogdians are disciplined troopers, main-force units recruited and trained under Persian officers. They are drilled to fight in columns and wedges; they can exploit gaps in infantry squares as efficiently as any horsemen in the world. The foe’s Daans and Massagetae are simply savages. They have no tactics but to swarm. This is enough. The Massagetae pad their mounts’ chests with thick felt-and-bronze plates called “bundlers” and armor their own legs, hip to ankle. Let such heavy horse get to close quarters with infantry and the men on the ground don’t stand a chance. That said, our mercenaries under Andromachus are among the stubbornest and best-disciplined troops in the corps. They are Greeks-Arcadians, Achaeans, and Mantineans, with their own and Spartan officers-all veterans, many over fifty years old. They have fought on the side of the throne of Persia, first under the superb commanders Memnon of Rhodes and his son Thymondas, then under Glaucus and Patron, two extraordinary captains of infantry, who served Darius till the last-and have only come over to Alexander, accepting pay to take his service, when the Persian king’s cause is utterly lost. These warriors have fought for five years across three thousand miles and endured every kind of action imaginable, in victory and defeat. Their weapon is the twelve-foot lance, a wicked anticavalry arm, and their prowess with it is without peer. The slaughter in the shallows that day surpasses any action of the Afghan war, outside of fixed battles and massacres, for neither side will yield. The Wolf’s Daan, Sacae, and Massagetae tribesmen fight for plunder and glory, to destroy the hated invader, while the mercenaries struggle simply to survive.

Where our half squadron rides, in the rear, we can see none of this. We know nothing of the other battles playing out along the forward three-quarters of the column. We have been cut off. We are eighty horse and four hundred foot. That any get out alive at all must be credited to Flag and Stephanos, who, in the midst of the melee, divine that the Wolf’s intention, structuring the ambush, is to drive our troops either in the direction of the rear or of the river (which routes seem to offer the only hope of breaking free) and that along these courses he, Spitamenes, has concealed further concentrations of horse and foot to massacre us. Our commanders drive us toward the bluffs instead. Here the enemy waits in place to pound us with javelins and hurled stones. But it’s better than facing line after line in the other directions. If our mounts had been fresher, if we had gotten one rest of even an hour during the day, the main of the company might have broken through and, once up the bluffs, gotten clear.

But the foe is fresh and we are spent. Our limbs, and our horses’, have no strength to mount the face. Hooves lose purchase in the sand; riders spill and tumble. Those who dismount are cut down where they fall; troopers who stay in the saddle wear their mounts out and crash beside them. Only handfuls get through. When our front gives way, the foe pours upon us from both flanks and begins to shove us, infantry and cavalry, in a great mass back into the river.

To fight and win is now out of the question. The only hope is to break away. I turn my ten, or what’s left of them-Lucas, Little Red, Boxer, Rags, Knuckles, and two brothers called Torch and Turtle-to force a break on the river side. Lucas has the point. The foe are all horse archers, armed with powerful compound bows of horn and bone. They shoot for our mounts. I see Lucas’s Intrepid take two shafts simultaneously, one in the chest and the other in the throat. The horse does not even slow but plunges onward; the arrow-shafts snap from the working of his great muscles, while his eyes roll white in terror. Lucas thrusts his lance into the throat of a Daan bowman. I am on his left and see the fellow’s head snap back like a doll’s and tear open at the gorge. Lucas’s lance shivers, broken by the weight of the foe; he nearly spills from the sudden dislocation. My own half-pike has splintered long since; all I have is my saber, useless as a wand against the heavily armored foe. A Daan with great mustaches blocks my escape. I see his mace has lost its head; I go after him with my saber, but as I raise it to strike, something catches my arm and holds it. I have been shot. A bolt as long as a carpenter’s rule and as thick as a thumb has entered my right shoulder from the rear and driven clean through. The arrowhead has broken off but the splintered shaft juts out half a foot before me. It binds my shoulder. My arm goes dead. My saber falls. The limb plunges like a puppet’s whose strings have been cut. I am excruciatingly aware that whoever has shot the arrow is still right behind me, and very close, judging by the power with which the shaft has driven through. He will drill me again if I don’t get clear. I spin Snow toward the river. Directly before me rises another Afghan archer, on foot. He fires. I can see both wings of his bow kick forward. Shaft and warhead hurtle straight at the center of my chest. Over my corselet I wear an ancient iron breastplate that had been my grandfather’s and that I have cursed a thousand times for its weight and ungainliness. I have tried again and again to unload it on unsuspecting scuffs at bargain prices; no one has been dumb enough to take it off my hands. This piece of antique plate now saves my life. The bolt strikes me squarely in the solar plexus. The sound rings off the iron like a bell. But the warhead does not penetrate. The impact bowls me rearward over Snow’s hindquarters.

All sounds ceases. Light goes queer. I can’t move my limbs. Am I dead? Is this hell?

It’s water.

I’m in the river.

Instinct makes me cling to my horse’s reins. But as I go down, cleaving to this lifeline, Snow plants her hooves and rears; the leather snaps. I plunge under. The foe is everywhere. I’m going into the books for sure this time. The enemy is trampling us in the shallows. It’s a tactic; they perform it with skill. A hoof steps on my back. I inhale a mouthful of mud. The weight of my armor is pulling me under. I can’t tell up from down. I open my eyes underwater. Arrow-shafts are ripping through the gray-green silt. The Wolf’s men are right above us, firing point-blank. Those with lances impale us like fish. I am seized by the mad notion that I must save my fellows. I grab hold of a merc I don’t know and haul him surface-ward with my one good arm. I am furious that he makes no effort to help. It occurs to me that he is dead; this elevates the pitch of my rage. I heave to the surface. There, in the current, lurches my mate, Rags. Three arrow-shafts protrude from his belly. His eyes are the color of glass. He plunges in death; a Daan carves his scalp.

I am overcome with terror. I go under. A horse’s knee wallops my skull; I hear as much as feel the bone crack. I vault upward, seeking air. A merc thrashes into the soup before me. A tribesman rides him down, impales him with a lance thrust through the dorsal spine. The savage dismounts into the current and scalps the Greek while he’s still alive, then turns back, whooping, elevating his trophy. Impossibly, the merc emerges, blood sheeting from his torn and naked skull. With his last strength, he drives the severed shaft of his twelve-footer into his murderer’s liver. At this, three more clansmen rush upon him; the merc inverts his weapon, plunging it into his own throat; while he’s still alive the Daans hack off his head.

Scenes of matching horror are enacted all along the column. My last sight before unconsciousness closes over me is of my pretty little mare being led away by a dashing and handsomely accoutered Afghan. The warrior neither vaunts nor displays himself like his savage countrymen, but simply trots off, like a satisfied market-goer who has just made a canny purchase.