The Afgan Campaign

56

One look at Shinar tells me she no longer breathes. There is nothing I can do for her. The sensation is like combat. I turn at once to the infant Elias. A corporal whose name I don’t know holds the child. Everyone backs away. A path opens from me to the baby. I take him. His swaddling wrapper is soaked like a sponge. The corporal has tugged a shade-flap over the child’s face. The package is so small. Like a parcel you get in the post. I take my tiny son in both hands.

Men tell me later that I appear to be out of my head. On the contrary. I am vividly, preternaturally lucid. I know with absolute certainty that more enemy are coming. This is how the Afghan fights. He hits you once, and when you think you’re safe he hits you again.

I am bawling orders. We have to move, get clear. The grooms stare at me as if I have gone mad.

Outside, a boy holds my mare. The beast is spent. If I make her take my weight, she’ll cave underneath me. I start off afoot, carrying my little son in the crook of my left arm, beneath the square of my cavalry shield. I can hear the captain behind me. “Someone stick with him.”

Flag.

My mate overhauls me. His face drips sweat. Dust coats his dress uniform, from our dash from the Afghan camp. The wedding. I realize that I, too, wear formal kit. It seems ridiculous. “Where are we going?” Flag bawls.

He thinks I’ve gone stupid. He’ll stay with me. Protect me. But he thinks I’ve gone combat-stupid.

I set off up the hill. The camp squats at the base of Bal Teghrib’s western shoulder. Above it twines a dry watercourse, drainage for the slope, and beyond that, a shantytown. Lanes twist in a labyrinth whose course is dictated by how floodwater sluices off the hill. Every street is deeply rutted. Deserted. The whole town has emptied for the wedding of Alexander and Roxane.

I labor up the slope. Flag pants at my shoulder. He wants to know where we’re going.

“I’ll know,” I say, “when I see it.”

What happens when you get combat-stupid is the simplest tasks become excruciatingly difficult. Sense deserts you. Limbs turn to lead. You have to summon all your resources simply to remain in the present. Hearing changes; you go deaf and dumb. Your mate can be shouting from two feet away, but you can’t hear him. In action sometimes, a man will become possessed with accomplishing some pointless, even deranged task, like evacuating to safety a mate already dead, instead of continuing to support the mission in progress. Such individuals must be taken in hand by their mates or squad leaders. Flag should punch me now, I know it. But he hasn’t the heart.

I know Shinar is dead. I know the child in my arms has been butchered. But I can’t stop myself from seeking desperately to protect them. A part of me believes, or wishes to, that if I can only exert myself vigorously enough, beseech heaven fervently enough, offer my own life in place of this infant’s, that the gods will hear me and restore animation to this poor bundle in my arms.

I lead Flag up lanes toward the citadel. The way is a warren of wattle-and-daub shanties and mud-brick hovels. Over my left shoulder rides my cavalry pelta. Beneath this, I shelter my baby. The Macedonian cavalry plate is not a full shield but a smallish wedge of oak and oxhide, faced with bronze. It’s handy. With a rearward toss, you can sling it across your back or, shrugging forward, propel it atop your shoulder and upper arm. In this position, the block protects against lance thrusts and saber blows of right-handed opponents while leaving your left arm free to handle the reins.

Beneath this, defended by this, I bear my lifeless infant.

How long do we labor through the shanty quarter? I don’t know. We pass lane after lane, sealed off by security details. We traverse the shoulder of the entire mountain, each forced deflection carrying us farther from the summit. Why do I seek these heights? I have no idea. The instinct for high-lining perhaps.

Suddenly everything drops into shadow. Behind the fortress, the sun plunges. Great cheers ascend. We can hear drums and cymbals, bells and tambours, celebrating the wedding. The five hundred kites have been loosed; I glimpse their soaring shapes in the gaps above the twisting lanes. Flag hangs on at my shoulder, spent from this lunatic chase upon which I have led him.

We collapse against a mud-brick wall. Our knees give out. Flag drops across from me. The lane is so narrow that our splayed legs flop atop one another. We are too exhausted to disentangle them.

I have not lost my senses.

I understand what has happened.

I apprehend the fatal inevitability of this hour. Events, it is clear to me, as it has been all along to Shinar, have unfolded as if preordained, from the Macedonian army’s initial invasion of Afghanistan to this moment. We who enacted it-from Baz and Ash and Jenin to me and Flag and Shinar-owned no more freedom of will than planets in their passage or days in a month.

Wedding kites sail above. They soar in sun; we hunker in shadow. I meet Flag’s eye. Behind him ascends a ragged slat-fence, screening a tributary alley. A puppy and a naked little boy, no more than twelve months old, squat together in the powdery earth. A young mother steps from a door. She sees Flag and me and snatches up her child; in an instant she has vanished. I hear the sound of beating wings.

Doves.

White doves.

Across a shaft of sunlight the brilliant flock streaks, celebrating the union of Alexander and the princess Roxane.

The war is over.