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.”
37
The column moves out the next day, pushing hard to gain the Black Beards. Philip rides ahead with the Silver Shields.
Let me here address the army’s state of mind in the aftermath of the Cleitus debacle and make plain, if I can, by the following minor but extremely significant incident, the undiminished love the corps bore for its king.
Dispatching Ptolemy’s and Polyperchon’s brigades round the western shoulder of the Scythian range, Alexander struck straight across with his own divisions, Coenus’s, and that portion of the siege train that had come up from Maracanda. This force made good speed for two days. But mounting a pass called An Ghojar, “the Barber,” on the third morning, the column was brought up in its tracks. A torrent in spate with late-summer snowmelt had washed out half the valley. I chanced to ride up, delivering dispatches, just as all progress ground to a halt.
The gorge down which the cataract thundered stretched, bank to bank, broader than a bowshot. Where the downshoot plunged against boulders in midchannel, each the size of a two-story house, the impact sent geysers of mud-colored spume fifty feet into the air. The din was so deafening that troopers, even hundreds of feet up the slope, could make themselves heard only by shouting directly into their fellows’ ears. How to get across? The alternative, backtracking the way we came, would have cost days and wiped out every advantage of speed and surprise Alexander had worked so hard to attain. Any lesser commander would have elected this option. And even our lord, drawn up before the torrent, seemed to consider it. His presence on-site alone, however, drove the divisions into action.
Without waiting for orders, combat engineers began surveying the ascending slope, seeking spots where rockfalls could be started. Rigging teams of mules and setting great timbers as levers, the sappers and bucket-men succeeded in dislodging several critical boulders. Half the mountainside came down, straight into the river. The fall didn’t span the flood, but at least it brought the banks closer together. From a perch atop one newly formed promontory, archers launched scores of light lines across, of which the looped ends of two, after infinite pains, were at last coaxed into holds around outcrops on the far bank. Upon these filaments, which looked in the scale of the scene no stouter than threads, two young and athletic volunteers, stripped naked to make themselves as light as possible, worked their way across hand-over-hand. By now the column had massed like spectators at the games at Olympia. The youths swung perilously above the torrent (and even slipped once or twice into it), while their onlooking countrymen’s emotions alternated between ecstatic citation and excruciating suspense. Alexander had pledged a talent of gold to the man whose sole first touched the far shore and a talent of silver to the second. When the champion at last found footing and turned back, raising his arms in triumph, the roar could be heard even above the cataract. Heavier lines were warped across. By midafternoon a rope bridge had been rigged. By the following dawn a span of timbers stood in place, stout enough that laden mules-hoodwinked and shielded by side-screens from sight of the plunge below-could be coaxed across.
This was what Alexander’s presence alone meant.
The result was that two of our four columns appeared in the enemy’s rear days before even the Wolf could have anticipated. Coenus’s division assaulted the least-well-defended of the Black Beards, driving its occupants into refuge on the other two. Beard number two was separated by a cavernous rift from the only spot upon which sufficient siege elements could be assembled. Under Alexander’s direction, however, the soldiers working in shifts succeeded in dumping into the chasm such tonnage of boulders and cartloads of soil and brush that by the fourth dawn the interval had been built up enough for a crude mole to be laid across its spine. By this time the engineers, assisted by hundreds of carpenters and mechanics drafted from the ranks to assist, had put together a rolling siege tower, seventy feet high, shielded by hide-faced mantlets, and had rigged a system of tackle and cables by which it could be warped across the gap and thrown against the face of the cliff.
That the Wolf got his forces safely away, even his women and wagons, must be accounted a feat of tactical brilliance equal to any in this campaign. He made his escape by back trails unknown to the besiegers, concealing his withdrawal by darkness and by the ruse of hundreds of watch fires, which boys and youths kept blazing nightlong, to simulate the appearance of a camp on customary alert.
Still, the foe had been dealt a tremendous moral defeat. Our chronicler friend, Costas, evaluated it in the following account, which made its way in under three months, I am told, via Sidon and Damascus to Athens:
The enemy’s tribal troops cannot appreciate the utility of such a tactical withdrawal, engineered here with such brilliance by their commander Spitamenes. To them it is an ashan, or “runaway,” a term of shame. Who is the enemy? His types run in hundreds. He is a Sogdian soldier; he is a sheepherder; he is a savage, a shopkeeper. He has fought under Darius, trained by Persian officers; he is a boy armed with a sling and a stone. The Wolf’s rolls contain thugs and bandits, patriots in it for glory and opportunists out only for gold. The foe is someone whose son we have killed, whose village we have burned, whose sister we have outraged. He enrolls with the spring and vanishes in the fall. Sometimes brothers take turns serving, employing by rounds the one pony and one set of arms the family possesses. Is this weakness in an army? Not the way Spitamenes manages it. For what all own in common is hatred of the invader. The native is not going anywhere, but we are-and he knows it.