The Afgan Campaign

43

In the staff tent stand an iron brazier, three trunks serving as chairs, and a campaign table. The lieutenant sets Lucas’s notebook on top. “Do you recognize this?”

It’s a worn leather roll with two rawhide ties. Into the grain of the flap is carved the device of an elk being slain by a griffin.

“Did you hear me, Corporal? Do you recognize it?”

Soldiers know how to make their hearts go dead. You drop out of yourself. Light changes; sound goes queer. It’s like you’re looking down a tunnel. You see nothing but what’s right in front of you and even that appears as if it’s being observed not by you but by some surrogate, some counterform of yourself that has been denatured and hollowed out, leaving only a shell numb as stone.

I am aware of the lieutenant placing onto the table Lucas’s helmet and dagger. He even produces the overcloak I gave Lucas as he rode off with Agathocles-and the sack of kishar and lentils.

“I’m sorry,” he says. And turning to his aide: “Get him something to drink.”

When the lieutenant leaves, Dice spits out the story.

The party of Agathocles, Lucas, and Costas, escorting Spitamenes’ son, was fallen upon by Bactrian tribesmen only two days after striking out from the capture site. The foe had carried the Macks, bound and blindfolded, to a camp called Chalk Bluffs, where a multitude of their kinsmen had assembled. The clansmen nailed our countrymen to boards, painted them with pitch, and set them alight. Further outrages were performed upon them while they still lived. Then they were beheaded. Their remains were dragged behind the foe’s ponies until they broke apart and fell away.

I ask Dice how he knows this.

“The villains made boast of it. In a post to Alexander.”

Our troops, Dice says, found the skulls in the enemy camp immediately after the battle, in captured wagons of the Bactrians, along with our fellows’ weapons and kit, which the foe had taken as trophies.

Night falls. Mack patrols fan across the steppe, seeking Spitamenes, who has become now, in the snow, one set of tracks among thousands. Alexander prepares the brigades to give chase as soon as the Wolf is discovered. Our section under Stephanos has been pulled out of the line. No one tells us why. I do not sleep. I will not eat. Only one object animates my purpose: to return to action as soon as possible and pay these fiends out for the abominations they have visited upon my friend.