The Afgan Campaign

36

South of the Jaxartes, where the peaks of the Scythian Caucasus mount back from the plain of the river, stand three impregnable natural fastnesses called Tora Giraya, the Black Beards. Each is a mountain unto itself. All have summits broad as prairies, year-round springs, and unscaleable flanks. Among these strongholds Spitamenes, our spies report, has taken refuge. He has with him seven thousand Bactrian and Sogdian cavalry and all their goods and women.

Alexander names the operation Summer Thunder. He leads in person, calling in from their own deployments the brigades of Ptolemy, Polyperchon, and Coenus, and half the siege train under Craterus’s deputy Bias Arimmas. This combined force numbers over twenty-four thousand. Everything, we are instructed, depends on speed. We must get to the Black Beards before the Wolf has time to flee or prepare a trap.

Among the units hastening north from Bactra City are the Silver Shields, the elite heavy infantry of Alexander’s Royal Guard. With them, accompanying their cavalry escort, rides my brother Philip.

He finds me in camp along the Little Polytimetus, an alkaline trickle amid creosote and tamarisk, midway between Maracanda and the Black Beards.

I have not seen Philip since I was fifteen. “I must tell you,” he says after our initial emotional embrace, “I am very angry with you.”

Philip is fourteen years my senior. His cloak of Companion cavalry bears the silver eagle of a lieutenant colonel. He is taller, even, than I remember. I am daunted by him. I find myself calling him “sir,” nor is he prompt to tell me to stop.

Philip is upset at my evading his call to escort Elias’s ashes home. His anger has nothing to do with Elias. Its object is to protect me, to get me out of Afghanistan. When I repeat what I said in my letter, that I can’t leave my mates, Philip groans in frustration.

I see that he loves me. My eyes sting.

“Forgive me, Philip. But Elias himself would have dodged that duty.”

For the first time, my brother smiles. His beard, I see, has gone gray. His hair, once raven, is the color of iron. I note from his gait that both knees have gone stony (from wounds perhaps, or falls, as is not uncommon among horsemen). I have brought wine for him as a present, and a duck in a sack. For me, Philip carries Elias’s regimental sash, of wool dyed black and tan.

He tells me how Elias died and what happened to Daria.

“In custody, the woman tried to make away with herself, chuffing down some poison she had smuggled past the guards. The surgeons flushed her gut, so she could be properly executed. She was the first Afghan woman to be charged before a military tribunal. She offered no defense and refused to make a statement of any kind. They crucified her.”

My brother has seen Shinar too. “She sought me out at my quarters at Bactra City. I thought she was some shepherdess. When she opened her mouth and good Greek came out, I nearly keeled over. Then she showed me her oikos papers with your name on them.” He laughs. “I said to myself, ‘My baby brother is all grown up.’”

It is through Philip’s intercession that Shinar (and Ghilla and Lucas’s baby) have been documented through to Maracanda. They will arrive with the heavy baggage, probably in ten days. Too late for me; I’ll be a hundred miles east, up in the Black Beards, by then.

“How much time,” my brother asks, “do you have left on your enlistment?”

I tell him. “Why?”

“We’ll tear it up. I want you out of harm’s way.” He’s serious. Strings can be pulled. “What makes you stay in this pit of hell?” Philip demands. “Duty? Love of country? Please spare me any oraculations on the subject of Macedonian honor. Money? Let me guess: You owe the army more now than you’ve earned in your entire enlistment.” He faces me in vexation. “I don’t understand you, Matthias. Is your aim to cast your life away?”

I ask why this is so important to him.

“I will not,” he says, “lose another brother.”

We have to get out of the public way. We’re making a scene. Along the riverbank stands a slope where the muleteers unkink their new ropes; for hundreds of yards there’s nothing but wet lines stretching in the sun. “Philip,” I say when we have walked down, “you know I can’t leave my mates. Not when there’s still fighting to do.”

My brother regards me with infinite weariness. “Let me tell you something you may not know. This war will soon be over. For all our frustrations, Alexander’s scheme is bearing fruit. The new forts have cut Spitamenes off from the north; our devastation of villages has stripped him of supplies; our hiring of native troops has drained his source of recruits. Oxyartes and the other warlords-everyone except the Wolf himself-see the end approaching. They’ve all sent undertakings in secret to Alexander. Deals are being worked out right now. We could have peace as soon as fall. And let me disabuse you of another fancy that may be fueling your hopes of a future in the army: the riches of India. I’ve been there. There’s nothing in India but monsoon rains, poisonous snakes, and half-naked fakirs.”

Go home, Philip tells me. If you serve out your enlistment, you’ll wind up crippled or dead. “I’ve heard what happened with your sweetheart Danae. You’re free. What’s stopping you? Take your Afghan girl. Farm Father’s land.”

“That’s your land, Philip.”

He faces me in exasperation. Two teamsters pass, checking their ropes; we wait till they’ve moved on out of earshot. My brother draws up.

“Forgive me, Matthias. When I hear your voice, which sounds so much like…”

He cannot say Elias’s name.

“…then to see you as a soldier.” Philip’s long hair has fallen across his face; he sweeps it back with dark, sunburnt fingers. “You were just a child.”

And he weeps.

We walk by the river. The sun plunges; the sky turns the color of pearl.

“You know,” Philip says, “Elias and I used to talk about you. More than you may realize.” He smiles at some remembrance. “Our own lives meant little to us. But yours always seemed impossibly precious. Perhaps because you were the baby.”

My brother bends and scoops a fistful of flat stones, the kind you skim across a surface of water.

“They say a man becomes old,” he says, “when more of his friends reside beneath the earth than above it.”

“Is that how you feel, Philip?”

He doesn’t answer. Only hands me half the stones. We send trails skipping.

“Don’t end up like Elias and me.”

My brother turns away, eyes across the dark water.

“To be a soldier,” he says, “is no lofty calling. Who acts as a brute is a brute.”