Steven Pressfield

by The Afghan Campaign

  I sleep for a month, it seems, enveloped by her scent. The warmth of her flesh restores me.

  It seems she has become a different person, warmer and kinder and less crippled within. Have I altered too? Or just never known her?

  Ghilla is sweet about vacating our chamber. She senses the moment and takes up little Lucas. “Time for a walk, Tiny Bundle.”

  Like all army women, Shinar knows the corps’ plans before we soldiers do. The spring offensive will be full-scale. Four Afghan warlords remain—Oxyartes, Chorienes, Catanes, and Austanes—commanding a total of about forty thousand men. They have repaired to various fastnesses in the Scythian Caucasus. In spring we will besiege them. Advance elements have already taken station, investing the foe and cutting off all escape.

  I cannot think of Lucas. When his memory enters my thoughts, I banish it. It’s too soon. I will break down otherwise.

  His child is a blessing. What would we do without him? Ghilla and I tread gently around each other. Nothing she can ask is too much. And she acts the same toward me. We never speak Lucas’s name. Next year maybe. I will not be first to do it.

  Winter stays dark this far north. How these tribes survive, or even wish to, is past my comprehension. Even Alexander must respect this remoteness. He has come to call Jaxartes City “Alexandria Eschate”—Alexandria-the-Furthermost. He renounces all claim to the Wild Lands. Let the Massagetae keep them. Our lord will mark here the northern extremity of his empire and call the free Scyths beyond it his allies and friends.

  It’s as good a plan as any.

  On a day when the west wind brings the first scent of spring, my brother Philip arrives from Maracanda. He has been south in the mountains, treating with tribal chiefs of Chorienes and Oxyartes. We spend a long, happy night—Shinar and Ghilla and I, with Flag and his woman and Stephanos (who still will have none but his wife back home).

  “What’s holding up the peace?” the poet asks my brother.

  “Same thing that always holds it up. Pride.”

  A way must be found, Philip says, that will let both sides claim victory. For the warlords this is a matter of life and death; they will not survive their own tribesmen’s fury if they are seen as having presided over defeat. Intertribal suspicion further impedes the process. Each chieftain fears that he will lose power in postwar Afghanistan; he will not set his name to any accommodation until he knows where he—and his rivals—stand in its scheme. No one wants to keep fighting. War has devastated the country. Philip reckons we’ve wiped out half the men of military age, in a society where that means every male from twelve to eighty.

  “Where is your woman?” Shinar asks him.

  He laughs. “Can’t afford one.”

  Shinar schemes of putting Philip together with Ghilla. Even one night would do them both good. But when the moment presents itself at evening’s close, Philip with grace declines.

  “Stay at least and talk,” says Shinar. “The night is cold and we may not see you again for many months.”

  We stay up—my brother, Shinar, and I—into the deep hours.

  “Don’t say you heard this from me,” Philip says, “but more bonuses are coming.” Alexander will rain gold this spring upon the troops who have suffered with him through this campaign. It only wants peace for the treasury doors to open. “Will you marry?” he asks Shinar and me.

  “If she’ll say yes.”

  It makes Philip happy to see us together.

  “Whatever you do, don’t stay out here. The army will tempt you with cash incentives and grants of land larger than counties back home. Don’t fall for it. This place will revert to tribal ways as soon as Alexander moves on. Take your pay home, Matthias. You’re rich. You can buy any place you fancy, or farm Mother’s with Agathon and Eleni. They’d like nothing better. It will not be as bad as you think, Shinar. We Macks are not all devils. You’ll be a citizen, and so will your child.”

  Shinar absorbs this impassively, like some dream she believes can never come true. Philip regards her with tenderness.

  “May the gods bless you, dear child, and your infant on the way. I know you have suffered more than Matthias and I can imagine. It’s good to see you happy. And I can never thank you enough for the change you have wrought in my brother.”

  His voice cracks. Shinar crosses to the carpet beside him. She takes his hand. “What about you, Philip? Will you go home now?”

  “The corps is my home, Shinar.”

  Lamplight shows the gray in Philip’s hair. Fever, I know, has carried off his wife back home; his son in a few years will be out east with the army. Heaven alone knows how many mates he has lost in action. He smiles at Shinar’s hope for his remarriage.

  “What wife could I take, dear child? What woman could I bring happiness to? I have gone to army whores too long. I like them. I don’t have to explain myself to them. Do you understand? Can I really dandle some infant on my knee?” He laughs darkly. “I have been at war now, man and boy, for two-thirds of my life. What other trade do I know? My home resides in hell, if anywhere, where those I love wait for me.” He smiles. “I think I shall not keep them long.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Shinar scolds him. “I’ve done it myself. It serves no purpose.”

  She’s right of course, Philip acknowledges.

  “Can I return to Macedon?” he asks. “Before Elias died, perhaps. Now never. The only thing that keeps me above the earth is you two and your child on the way. So I say to you both, as I have before: Don’t be like me. Get out of here. Seize your happiness while you still can.”

  Dawn lacks an hour when Philip takes his leave. We walk outside under stars bright as embers. Philip’s bad leg locks up in the cold.

  “What about Shinar’s brother?” he asks.

  He knows of the brother’s obligation under nangwali to efface the shame she brings to her family by being with me—and of her two cousins’, who stand with him, wanting only the chance.

  “They’re all bluff,” I say. “In any event, the lot of ’em are three hundred miles south with the mountain brigades.”

  “We’ll all be down south in the spring.”

  Philip wants the brother’s and cousins’ complete names—given, patronymic, clan, and tribe.

  “Look,” I say, “I don’t want you doing anything to them.”

  Philip regards me soberly.

  “Why not?”

  48.

  Spring comes. Coenus’s brigade deploys south to the mountains. Alexander and the heavy divisions are already there.

  For efficiency and mastery of combat arms, the world has seen nothing like this force. The king has been modernizing all winter, upgrading and expanding the corps’ capacities for mountain warfare. Siege gear that formerly needed transport by freight wagons and oxen has been simplified and stripped down so that it can be packed on the backs of mules. We have mountain catapults now that can sling a stone or a pot of flaming naphtha a fifth of a mile. Trains pack thin sheets of bronze to face mantlets of timber, rendering them flame- and fireproof. Tortoise-type carapaces have been fashioned, beneath which men can mount scaling ladders and not fear scalding oil or superheated sand. Carpentry shops have labored all winter producing block and tackle; rope-makers have laid in miles of cable. Ingenious mechanisms have been fashioned, like the mountain windlass that uses torsion bands instead of heavy iron ratchet teeth. Two of these, braced to boulders, can raise a siege tower forty feet high. In the past, mountain warfare has been limited to clashes between skirmishers, who sling missiles and scamper away, while siege warfare has been confined to the plains. No more. To take down these summit citadels, Alexander’s engineers have advanced siege technology to a whole new sphere and scale. The supply corps has half a thousand mules packing nothing but oil of terebinth—turpentine—for making incendiary bombs and as solvent to clean the blades of the axes, hewing mountain pines to be made into cat arms and tower timbers.

  Mountain fortresses are assaulted by stages. A base camp is firs
t established on the plain. Now come the provisions. Rations and fodder in hundreds of tons are rafted in by river or trucked overland via caravan or mule train. Now the first forward camp is raised in the foothills. Up come the convoys of supplies and matériel. The foe in this case has retired to four monumental strongholds. Imagine Mount Olympus. That’s what they’re like, mountain systems covering scores of square miles, with hundreds of approaches.

  First to be invested, before winter has ended, is that fastness called by the troops the Sogdian Rock. The warlord Oxyartes is up there with eleven thousand troops and all their goods. The defenders are sitting on year-round springs, with enough provisions to hold out for years. When Alexander’s emissaries call for the Afghan’s surrender, Oxyartes taunts them, asking if our men have wings, for by no other means will we scale this stronghold.

  Up trails and switchbacks come our supplies, on trains fifteen miles long, to the higher camps. For us scuffs, all hopes hang on negotiations. Oxyartes’ envoys shuttle in supposed secrecy in and out of camp. We know them all. We pave a highway for them. “What is wanting,” says Stephanos, “is for Alexander to pick one horse.”

  One warlord to hand Afghanistan over to.

  One chieftain to rule all others.

  Supplies are in place by late winter. The summit is the size of a small county. Bare piney slopes approach, of loose scree and shingle, too steep even for mules. An assault is possible from the west, where the incline is least severe, but here Oxyartes has fortified the approaches with stone ramparts and great deadfalls of timber. South and north the faces loom impregnable. East is worse—raw stone for the approach march and sheer cliffs for the final four hundred feet.

  Alexander calls the youth of the army together. He pledges twelve talents of gold to the first man to mount by this route to the summit and extravagant premiums to every trooper who joins him. Six hundred men set out by night, clawing their way up the face by means of iron tent pegs, which they wedge into fissures in the rock, and from which they belay one another by rope. Thirty-seven valiant souls plummet to their deaths. But three hundred reach the summit. When they show themselves in armor next dawn, the foe, believing Alexander must indeed possess winged warriors—or be, himself, a god—sues for peace.

  Oxyartes and a handful of chiefs get away down a back track. But our rangers capture his suite in its entirety—horses, wagons, wife, and three daughters. The youngest, Roxane, is a proud beauty, said to be the darling of her father’s eye.

  Will Alexander crucify her? Hold her as hostage? Will he ransom her? Exploit her father’s fears for her safety, to bring him to heel?

  Not for nothing is our king acclaimed a genius of politics and war.

  He appears before the army with the princess at his side.

  He will marry her.

  49.

  Alexander has picked his horse.

  By taking to wife the daughter of the warlord Oxyartes, our king transforms his most formidable foe into his father-in-law. War is all in the family now. Envoys shuttle between the Afghan camps and our own, my brother Philip among them. The army buzzes with details of the prospective peace.

  If Oxyartes will come in amity to Bactra City and there give his daughter in marriage, Alexander will honor him with such treasures and esteem as to effectively render him lord of all Afghanistan and peer to Amyntas Nicolaus, who will govern Bactria and Sogdiana in Alexander’s name. This can be sold to the tribes as a mighty coup for the sons of Afghana, since, under Darius’ rule, none but Persian nationals had stood so tall. Now, by the blood of her patriots and the grace of heaven, the land has been restored to its rightful rulers.

  At least that’s the story.

  Who’s quibbling?

  Then he, Alexander, will take his army and depart Afghanistan.

  In return for these pledges of peace, Oxyartes will use his influence to bring his confederates to the table of peace. Affairs will be so arranged, Alexander warrants, that no chieftain’s portion will suffer, and each, secure in his lands and station, will discover no cause for complaint.

  “What we must accept about this theater of war,” Philip explains one night to me, Flag, Stephanos, and our fellows, “is that military victory is impossible. So long as even one man or woman of these Afghans draws breath, they will resist us. But what we have achieved, by the ungodly suffering we have inflicted upon them, is to drive them to the point where they’ll accept an accommodation, an alliance if you will, that they can call victory, or at least not defeat, and that we can live with.

  “Then, between paying them off, severing them from their northern allies and sanctuaries, and keeping enough forces in garrison here, we may be able to stabilize the situation sufficiently so that we can move on to India without leaving our lines of supply and communication vulnerable to assault. That’s the best we can do. That’s enough. It will suffice.

  “In the end,” Philip says, “the issue comes down to this: What is the minimum acceptable dispensation? Short of victory, what can we live with? We cannot slaughter every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan, however gratifying such an enterprise might be.”

  Peace at last. The corps of Macedon exhales with relief. For me, only one impediment remains:

  Shinar will not marry me. She refuses.

  To celebrate his wedding to Roxane and the end of the war, Alexander has pledged rich dowries to every Mack who joins him in taking to wife his own Asiatic consort. The couples will take their vows at the same hour as Alexander and his princess and on the same site, the palace of Chorienes in Bactra City.

  But Shinar won’t do it.

  It is the old story of A’shaara.

  “Don’t ask me! If you care for me, you will never mention this again.”

  Will I ever understand this woman? My child grows in her belly. I can’t let her refusal stand. “What will you do then? Go away?”

  I see she will. Her expression is despair. “Will you make me speak of this?”

  “Yes! You must explain it to me now, once and for all, and make me understand.”

  She has to sit. Her back groans under the weight she carries. “Can I have some water please?”

  I get it for her. Cool, with a sliver of apricot, the way she likes it.

  “A’shaara means shame, this much you know, Matthias. But it means soul as well, and family or tribe. I have forfeited mine by permitting you, an alien and an invader, to rescue me. For this, I stand ad benghis, ‘outside,’ and can never be brought back in.”

  I reject this. “You’re not ‘outside,’ with me. Your god cannot touch me, and when you join with me in marriage, he can’t touch you either.”

  She smiles darkly. “God cannot, perhaps. But others.” She means her kin. Her brother.

  My Afghan bride. She and this country are one and the same. I love and fear her and can grasp her secrets no more than I can these ocher mountains or this storm-riven sky.

  In the end it is my brother who wins her over. The peace deal done, Philip’s unit is among the first to pack out for Bactra City, to make political preparations for Alexander’s wedding. He visits Shinar and me on his last evening, bringing baghee, a dish of lamb and lentils roasted in the beast’s own intestines, and a jar of plum wine.

  Shinar’s belly has become taut as a drum. You can thump it with a finger; it rings like a melon. Philip dotes upon her like a bachelor uncle. She makes him set his ear and listen for the child’s kick. When it comes, they both giggle like innocents.

  Later, Philip addresses Shinar in earnest. She will listen to him when she won’t to me. For the sake of the child, he says, she must make me her husband. For love of this infant, she must become my wife.

  “You are no longer responsible only for yourself, Shinar. You have another life to consider. Your child cannot grow to adulthood in this land, with only you to protect it, and no Afghan male will accept you in wedlock, when you bring into his household the issue of the invader. But the babe can live in Macedon. It can flourish, embraced a
s the offspring of heroes, growing to man- or womanhood among numerous others just like him or her.”

  He reads the woe on Shinar’s face.

  “I know, dear child, that you believe heaven has turned its back on you. Perhaps that was so, once. But all things turn in their season. Not even as cruel a deity as that of this pitiless land can remain unmoved forever by his people’s affliction. The proof grows now in your belly. Your suffering has redeemed you, Shinar. God holds out his hand. Take it, I beg you. Can any act be more impious than to spurn the clemency of heaven?”

  50.

  The wedding of Alexander and Roxane will be held at Bactra City, atop the great fortress, Bal Teghrib. The rites will be celebrated outdoors, in the Persian fashion. The captains of the corps—and half the princes of Afghanistan, it seems—will assemble in their finery at Koh-i-Waz, the palace of the warlord Chorienes.

  Flag will take his discharge from the army. Going home. His salary and bonuses, counting premiums from five Silver Lions and a Gold, come to twenty-two years’ wages. He’s rich.

  I’m filing my papers too. I’ve got the equivalent of six years’ pay coming.

  Fourteen hundred couples—Macks and their foreign brides—will take their vows along with our king and his princess on this happy day. Half, we hear, have elected Afghan postings. They’ll settle with their brides in the various garrison Alexandrias—Artacoana, Kandahar, Ghazni, Kabul, even Alexandria-the-Furthermost. Every trooper will receive at least a handsome farm; officers will be awarded estates. “They’ll never see Macedon again,” says Flag. “The witless bastards.”

  No such folly for him or me. We’ll take our skip and never look back. Flag himself will not farm at home, he says. “The life of a country huntsman for me. I’ll sire a pack of brats and train them up in the hill chase. We’ll raise horses. You and Shinar will visit every summer. You’ll try to get me to put in a crop but, by Zeus, I won’t do it!”

  I ask him seriously: Can he really put the army behind him?