On the tramp I hold the image of Shinar before me. This gives me strength. What would she think if she knew? Would it gratify her? Has word of the massacre reached her? Does she fear for my life?
Resolutions present themselves. I make deals with heaven. If I get out of this alive, I vow to…what? Take better care of Shinar? Discover some means to bridge the gulf between us?
For six days the band presses north. At intervals, other war parties intersect our course; parleys are held, news exchanged. Clearly something is afoot to the north and east. The tribesmen confer with eager animation. Then the bands go their ways.
The Afghan wasteland, which appears barren and featureless to European eyes, holds to these tribesmen trunk roads and thoroughfares as unmistakable as the Athens-Corinth highway or the Persian Royal Road. The desert contains for them inns and serais, places of worship, public squares, and marketplaces. They know every twist of it, where the sweet springs are, and green grazing, and every overnight out of the wind. The band beats from one buried cache to the next. Night descends; the company dismounts and digs. Our chief (whom Lucas and I, between ourselves, call “Hook” for his nose) oversees. Up from a bunker come bichees and jerked gazelle, ghalla (dried bean curd), weapons, clothing, and wine. Packing out next dawn, the clan buries all spare gear and grub- kishar, ground cloths, an extra bridle-for whatever group comes along next. “To dal Iskandera chounessi,” says our guard. “Alexander doesn’t have this.”
Interrogations have evolved beyond the routine nightly wallopings. We have picked up a few words, Lucas and I. And our guardian, Ham, has revealed himself to know a good deal more Greek than he originally let on. We are propped against boulders in groups of four with our hands free but our ankles staked to the dirt. The chieftain Hook grills us now. He wants to know why we follow Alexander. Are we of the same tribe? Related by blood or marriage? When we answer no, his mystification deepens. Why have we come here? What do we seek? He gestures to the wasteland. “Have you trekked a thousand leagues to rob us of our poverty?”
Hook’s name is Baropamisiates, Man of the Hills.
He wants to know of our country, Macedon. Can horses be raised there? How many wives may a man own? West of our borders, do the heavens truly plunge to the sea?
Beyond all, Hook is curious about Alexander. That our lord is of less-than-average height confounds and infuriates the Afghan.
“If the gods had willed that your king’s bodily stature should be equal to his greed, the earth itself could not contain him, but with one hand he would touch the rising sun, and with the other the setting. What kind of man desires that which he can never attain? From Europe he passes to Asia, and from Asia to Europe. Mountains and deserts cannot stop him, nor mighty seas check his advance.”
Hook lectures us on the folly of monarchs past, who brought war to the free peoples of the plains-Semiramis, doughty Sargon, Cyrus the Great.
“This prideful tyrant, styling himself Chosen of God, whose servants carried before him an image in gold of the sun…his bones lie mingled now with our dust and his entrails have been scattered, a feast for dogs and crows.”
The Afghans, Hook declares, possess two invincible confederates: the scale of their land and its desolation. “Your king may defeat us, but he can never overcome such allies.”
It is a misconception to think of the desert as level plain, flat as a tabletop, over which travel is simply a matter of direction and speed. On the contrary, the waste is a maze of natural snares and pitfalls, bluffs and blind canyons. Rivers of quicksand appear amid rocky scarp; salt marshes materialize in the midst of sand barrens. Rifts a quarter mile deep pop up out of nowhere and cannot be gotten round. An enemy who knows his way through such country possesses an insurmountable advantage. In flight he can lure his pursuers onto spurs or dead-end promontories, from which the only way out is back the way you came, or bait you into labyrinths of gorges and ravines, from which he can escape but you can’t. He can get you lost, run you in circles. And always there is water, or the lack of it. Navigating such wilderness without precise knowledge of its springs and wells is suicidal. A unit can work no more than two days in any direction; men and horses simply can’t carry enough water to get out and back. Native guides are useless. They all work for the enemy. An Afghan who aids the invader returns to his village to find his wife and children butchered, or waiting themselves to butcher him. The foe bested in a fight makes his getaway with ease while you in the chase must negotiate a tangle of defiles and dry courses, knowing always that the enemy is a master of the feigned flight and the double-back ambush.
In all this, our captors take pains to instruct us. Hoods and blindfolds have been dispensed with now. Our jailers want us to see what we and our king are up against. By the time the band crosses the Jaxartes (at night on bhoosa bags with the horses swimming alongside), we are no longer even guarded. Where can we run?
North of the river, a succession of jagged spurs intersects the plain. We are in the Wild Lands now. The band mounts into the hills, working up a track so precarious that even these peerless riders must dismount and walk. I am thinking, not even scorpions can live in this hell. Then we round a shoulder and there appears the prettiest little camp one could imagine. Lasses and dames of striking comeliness dash into the arms of fathers and husbands; proud-looking youths relieve the warriors of their horses and of those captured at the river massacre. Lucas and I are shoved, arms pinioned, into a dead end between high rocks. Savage matrons and urchins surround us.
Will we be dismembered now?
Our interrogator leaves us. All the bucks do. The women and boys begin probing at us. They pull our hair and stick their fingers into our ears. Some poke our bellies with sticks, others pinch our skin. Our eyelids are prized open. One crone thrusts her claw into my mouth; when I recoil, she picks up a stone and bashes me between the eyes. Another squaw gropes for my testicles. I scream. Our interrogator’s name, as I said, is Ham. I bawl this in terror.
In moments the youth appears, trailed by half a dozen of his countrymen. They convulse with laughter. Ham makes us understand that the dames and brats have been told that all Macks are not men but devils; they are just checking to see.
All next day the matrons troop at our shoulders. They batter us with flung stones and bash our backs and legs with clubs. Our wrists have been bound behind us. Descending rocky defiles, the women kick our feet out from under; they hoot with glee when we crack our skulls in the falls. Lucas suffers terribly with his eye and ribs; the dames discover this and torment him without letup. They don’t hate us, that’s not the impetus behind their cruelty. We are indeed devils to them. Our straw-colored hair and hazel eyes are the signs to these tribeswomen, not of a race of fellow humans, but of the spawn of hell. When Lucas’s eye begins to weep dark fluid, the females poke at it and lick the discharge from their fingertips, confounded to discover that we Macedonians bleed blood just like them. Finally around dusk they get bored and leave us. “By Zeus,” croaks Lucas, “I could not have survived another hour.”
Only one maid of the band has refrained from participation in this savaging-a lass of fifteen, with eyes like obsidian and hair black as a raven’s wing. Now, when we prisoners are staked down for the night, she slips to us through shadow, kneeling beside Lucas to swab his eye with the bunched-up weave of her pettu, which she has soaked with cold springwater. I am staked three feet away, beside another captive named Medon; I feel my chest heave with emotion, to witness such an act of mercy in this terrible place.