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.”
BOOK SEVEN
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.”