The Afgan Campaign

35

Maracanda is the principal city of Sogdiana. This is the same place Alexander has chased the Wolf from twice. The same place that he, Spitamenes, has captured as many times. The same place our column of mercs was relieving when the Wolf and his Scyths and Sogdians made hash of us.

It’s a pretty spot just the same. A spur of the Ocher Range juts from the west, not lofty enough to catch clouds and bring rain, but possessed of a rugged, almost sculptural quality that sets the city off like a jewel. Approaching from the south you feel like you’re entering, if not an enchanted realm, then at least a civilized and agreeable oasis. The city incorporates two satellite districts, Ban Agar and Balimiotores, which flank the river half a mile below the upper town. Ban Agar is the horse market. Balimiotores, which the troops call Little Maracanda, is the shantytown.

The upper city is sited on the summit of a jagged scarp, whose approaches have been built up and fortified over centuries. It would be no small chore to storm the place. The district contains a governor’s palace with royal residences, erected by the Persians, within a parklike enclave that remains surprisingly cool even beneath the blistering Afghan sun. Alexander and his entourage occupy this. The army itself spreads out across the plain and along both banks of the meandering, sludge-colored river, whose breadth in summer varies from a hundred yards to a quarter mile. A small dog could cross at the trot and not wet its haunches. It goes without saying, you can’t drink it.

Why are we here, other than to rally midsummer as operational orders prescribe? The place cannot support us. It can’t support a force one-quarter our size. But the corps must get in out of the wind. The men need twenty days to wash the desert off and to get blind, and the mounts must get into their bellies more than bush grass and camel thorn. The heavy baggage can come up now from the Oxus. And our wages.

Mule trains carrying gold make their way up the secure zone that the five columns have cleared by their sweep north. This at least has been accomplished. The frustration is that no element of Alexander’s forces, or all collectively, has been able to force the foe to a main-force showdown. All we’ve done is drive the tribes north.

This is progress as far as it goes. But since Spitamenes has shown that he can slip major formations past us to raid unchecked in our rear the feeling throughout the Maracanda camp is vexation, exasperation, even alarm that the vaunted Big Push has accomplished nothing at all.

Boozing, never moderate among Macks in the field, has escalated here to heroic proportions. The king convenes his council atop the citadel. Every drunken outburst finds its way down to the troops. Alexander rips his officers. Forward Operations is singled out for censure. Where is Spitamenes? How did he get past us? The object of this push north, the king declares, is to deprive the foe of the initiative. Instead, the Wolf has seized it and hurls it back in our face.

It is not our king’s style to blame others. Always he takes the weight himself. The men love him for this. But frustration, now, gnaws at his guts. “This place,” says Flag, “is getting to him too.”

Another stone digs beneath Alexander’s heel. This is the person of Black Cleitus, former commander of the Royal Squadron of Companion cavalry, now sharing with Hephaestion charge of all of Alexander’s elite mounted brigades. Cleitus is fifty-three and Old Corps to the bone. He has come late to the Afghan theater (summoned by Alexander, who will appoint him governor of Bactria), having been hospitalized for a year, eleven hundred miles east at Ecbatana. There, the war still “feels Persian”-meaning conventional, the kind a soldier of the Old Guard can understand. There the army is all Greek and Macedonian. Cleitus is unprepared for the miscegenated cavalcade that comprises the divisions at Kandahar and Bactra City, and now at Maracanda.

He sees Persians and Medes in stations of power. Cavalry formations, once all-Mack scarlet, now glitter with the leopard-skin mantles of Hyrcania and the serpent pennants of Syria and Cappadocia. Alexander has begun to integrate Bactrian and Sogdian cohorts-the very Afghans we’re fighting-and worse, to Cleitus’s eyes, savage Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae, also our enemies, and at rates of pay beyond what our own countrymen earn in garrison in Greece.

In his youth Cleitus served as a page under King Philip. It was his honor to bear the infant Alexander to his naming bath. Cleitus’s right arm saved Alexander’s life at the battle of the Granicus River.

Cleitus will not hold his tongue. He hates what he sees and he lets the army hear it. He lets Alexander hear.

You who are familiar with the history know of the midnight drinking bout in which Cleitus insulted our lord; how the offender’s comrades dragged him, drunken, from the banquet tent; how he returned a second time to slander his sovereign even more viciously, calling him a petty prince and a knave, who would have achieved nothing without commanders like himself and others-Parmenio, Philotas, Antipater, Antigonus One-Eye-whom he, Alexander, has now put out of the way for no cause other than to gratify his vanity.

You have heard how Alexander, driven past endurance by this abuse, seized a pike from one of the attendants and drove it into his antagonist’s belly, then, recoiling in horror at this homicide committed by his own hand, flung himself upon Cleitus’s corpse, first beseeching heaven for its reanimation, then seeking with the same blood-defamed lance to end his own life. You know how Hephaestion, Ptolemy, and the king’s other mates overpowered him and bore him, only with extreme exertions, to his quarters, within which he retired, refusing all food and drink for three days, until his friends and attendants, desperate at the army’s state while deprived of his presence and leadership, succeeded at last in drawing him forth from his retreat.

It is my object here neither to reprieve Alexander’s actions (who can exonerate murder?), nor to extenuate Cleitus’s part in his own drunken demise. I address only the effect on the army.

Let me speak plain. Not a man in the corps gave a damn about Cleitus. He deserved his end. He got what was coming to him.

When Alexander at last emerges from his quarters, he looks like a ghost of himself. He neither addresses the men nor permits a surrogate to do so in his name. He sacrifices. He inters Cleitus’s corpse with honor. He takes exercise.

This is enough. Sergeants, even colonels weep. Men kneel on the earth in thanksgiving.

The king lives!

We are preserved!

At once Maracanda, our garden and oasis, has become hateful to us. We can’t get out soon enough. Where has the Wolf flown? Find him. Kill him. The army must get back to what it was.

But can it?

“This country,” says Flag. “This god-abandoned country.”