The Afgan Campaign

30

By the last month of winter Lucas and I are well enough to ride. We rejoin our company, training with new Afghan units. Coenus’s brigade has been assigned two hundred “volunteers,” Daans mostly, with some tribal Ghazals and Pactyans. Our colonel Bullock’s orders are to render them fit to operate in conjunction with Macedonian forces-solve the language problem, pay, maintenance, feed, quarters, and so forth. And to train them and their ponies to fight like we do.

I like these young Afghan bravos. I make friends. Through them I put out feelers, trying to find Shinar’s brother, whose name I still do not know. Surely he and I can talk. How can he fault his sister for taking up with Macks when he has done the same thing?

But I can’t get these fellows to talk. Do they trust me? Yes. Like me? Indeed. The Afghan tree of tribes, clans, and khels can be traced like a directory to find anyone. But they won’t do it. Two brothers I knew at Bagram have signed up here with Meleager’s brigade-the Panjshiris, Kakuk and Hazar.

The pair volunteer to murder Shinar’s brother for me. Their tribe is at war with his; it will redound to their glory to slash his throat. I thank them but decline.

“What if I pay an indemnity?” I ask. A blood-price, like for murder. “Will the brother take his sister back?”

He will, says Kakuk. “Then he’ll kill her.”

The Afghan mind, I am beginning to understand, has not altered one jot in a thousand years. These clansmen are more lodged in the past than our own Macedonians. Outside Bactra City stand three training grounds, the Crescent, the Widow’s Veil, and the Panhandle. Upon these, Bullock, Stephanos, and our other officers form up our Daan companies, trying to teach them to ride in wedge formation and to charge boot-to-boot. The exercise is sketched out; a walk-through is performed; all hands attest to their understanding of the design. Then the trumpet sounds and the Afghans revert as one man to the swarming tactics they have always used-galloping in circles round the foe while whooping and loosing arrows and darts. Our commanders employ every incentive to make them ride like modern cavalry. We hold their pay. We cut off their chow. I have never seen Stephanos lose self-possession. Yet these fellows drive him to apoplexy. The concept of unit cohesion remains alien to them. They fight as individual braves, each seeking glory in the eyes of his chief. Most infuriating of all is the blandness with which they endure our captains’ tirades. You cannot make them mad. They keep smiling. Those who speak a little Greek play back our orders word-for-word. No matter. The trumpet blares and they spur off again, thundering in circles.

Kakuk and Hazar explain the problem to me. It’s not that the tribesmen don’t want to learn Mack tactics. It’s their horses. Their horses won’t let them.

I am learning the Afghan mind and the tribal manner of expressing a thought. The brothers don’t mean their horses won’t let them. They mean their hearts won’t. Fighting Macedonian-style, as a unit, is unmanly to Afghan eyes. It lacks honor. It is effeminate. For the tribesman of the steppe the object of battle is to count coup, to distinguish himself in the eyes of his fellows. The Daans have a phrase, “to kiss the mouth of death.” This is their warrior ideal. You cannot kiss the mouth of death except as an individual. So they won’t fight in wedges. They won’t charge boot-to-boot.

When I confer with Stephanos over this, he understands. It’s a turning point. We stop trying to change our Afghans. The implications are not lost on the poet or on me. “What are you going to do,” he asks, “about Shinar’s brother?”

My mates, too, volunteer to put the fellow out of the way. There doesn’t have to be bloodshed, says Stephanos. Just find him and get him out of camp. He’s working for the Wolf anyway; they all are.

No, I don’t want it that way. I can work something out.

I have become close with Stephanos over the winter. He is compiling for the king’s intelligence a roster of Daan tribes, clans, and khels. I assist him. I’m the only one who can half-savvy the language.

Daan means “robber” in Persian. To the Afghan of Bactra City or Kabul, who can quote Zoroaster, these northern tribes are the offal of the earth. But Stephanos and I find them brave and decent and honorable. The Massagetae (my former captors under the war chief, Hook) are a pure raiding culture, arrogant and proud, who whip their women and practice torture. The Daans are as savage but not as cruel. Habituated to the direst poverty, they lark on payday like sailors on a spree. Cash flows through their hands. They are incapable of niggardliness. The concept of lending does not exist for them. Ask and they give, with never a thought of payback. The notion of tomorrow lies beyond them. The hour is everything. I never saw anyone get as blind as these fellows. And they are merry drunks. Heat and cold are the same to them, as are pain and pleasure, penury or opulence; they will brag but not complain, take revenge but never hold grudges. On watch, a Daan sentry will man his post till the sky cracks or, dispatched alone across a hundred miles of waste, run himself and his mount to death before giving in. Though they hate us for our incursion upon sacred soil, they will ride at our sides into battle and never betray us. Such is their word. They are loyal and gay and kind and so corrupt that you cannot even get angry at them. To them a bribe is simply good manners, and paying someone off no more than friendship and consideration. One may be terrified of them or appalled by them, but it is impossible not to respect them.

I am well enough to participate fully in winter’s final exercise. The corps in its entirety takes part; Alexander himself commands. The simulation of combat is so real that scores of men and horses are injured and a half dozen wounded mortally. Our own mate Dice gets the neck-guard of his helmet shot clean through by a bolt from a catapult. I have to escort him to Bactra City in a field ambulance.

Shinar is absent from the hospital when I get there. No one will tell me where she has gone. Fearing that her brother has found her, I gallop to our quarters. She’s not there, either. I find her past midnight at Elias’s house, on the floor of Daria’s cooking room. Ghilla and Jenin hunker over her. Shinar lies on her side, shivering in a blanket, with her blood saturating the carpet.

Her brother has not caught up with her.

She has had an abortion.

Jenin is the girl in our section who performs this service.

I understand what has happened.

I am heartbroken. For the unborn child, for Shinar, but most of all for the fact that my woman has acted with stealth to keep this from me, to get it done while I was away, and, now, for the wall of silence and evasion that I know she and her sisters will throw up the instant I try to help.

“Are you all right, Shinar? Why did you do this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Because, she says, she feared I was getting ready to put her aside. She weeps. I kneel beside her. “Shinar,” I hear my voice saying with tenderness that surprises me. “Shinar.”

Ghilla supports her. Jenin presses a linen compress where the blood still seeps.

“Tell me truly. Are you all right?”

“No,” she says.

My mind is racing. What to use for a litter. How to get her to the hospital. I stroke her soaking brow. I recall other absences of hers. “Have you done this before?”

She won’t answer.

I confront Ghilla and Jenin.

They all go mum. Whose worlds can be farther apart than mine and Shinar’s? “I don’t want you to do this ever again.” I glare at both other women, then back to mine. “Do you understand, Shinar? If you do, I will leave you.”

She has lost quantities of blood. We have to get her to help. Why has she let herself get pregnant? Army women all have ways to prevent this. Why carry the child at all? In the teeth of threats from her clan and countrymen and secured by no pledge or surety from me. The opposite in fact; for clearly she believes I am ready to discard her.

Can it be that this woman feels love for me?

I dismiss the possibility out of hand, not because it seems so remote (she has been in my bed, after all, for more than a year), but because it makes so much sense-and every time I think something makes sense with her, her response confounds me.

What of my own heart? I have thought myself in control of my feelings about her. Yet I discover myself holding her with exquisite gentleness. Tears start. I tense, seeking to drive them back. But Shinar feels them.

“Will you leave me now?” she asks.

I hold her closer.

“You will,” she says.

“No.” I surprise myself by the certainty with which I state this. “But you must do something for me.”

“What?”

“You must let me help you.”

The hospital will take her. The chief surgeon is her patron; the other physicians all know and care for her. They can’t put her in the soldiers’ ward but the town wing, which is just as good. The surgeons have seen ten thousand induced miscarriages. I tell her this, which she well knows. I kiss her. All the resistance goes out of her body.

She says, “I don’t think I can walk.”

“I won’t leave you, Shinar. I’m not angry with you. Only concerned for you, and for this poor child”-I cannot make myself say of ours — “that we have lost because others hate us.”

She holds me and tries to stand.

“Help me,” she says.