The Afghan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  “Fuck the army,” says he. “Who needs it?”

  51.

  Shinar gives birth on the nineteenth of Artemisius. A healthy boy. We name him Elias. He weighs exactly the same as my pelta shield (about eight pounds) and fits handily inside its leather-and-bronze bowl. When I bathe him, he bawls like a trooper. He has ten fingers and ten toes and a tiny pink penis, with which, prone on his back, he spouts a stream like a marble fountain. I could not be more delighted. His birth has humbled me. Shinar, too, has changed. The boy has black hair like hers and hazel eyes like mine. A regular amalgam.

  With the arrival of this little bundle, our life is altered forever. Vanished is my Narik ta? attitude toward death. To stay alive and be of use to this child has overnight become everything to me.

  Flag and Stephanos visit to inspect this newest campaigner. He salutes their entrance with a stupendous defecation. My friends acclaim its volume and its manly stink. I could not be prouder if the child had produced a second Iliad.

  I don’t want my boy to be a soldier. Let him teach music or practice the physician’s art. May he raise horses and cultivate the earth.

  I am changed, yes. But Shinar is transformed. She is a mother now. I’m in awe of her. I fasten upon this aspiration: to see her in feminine converse with my mother. I want to watch them laughing together in our kitchen at Apollonia, or walking with little Elias in the hills above our home.

  It occurs to me that my child has two cousins. The son and daughter of my sister Eleni and her husband Agathon. How I long to see these three toddlers at play! The night of our son’s birth, while mother and child slumber, I dig out my brother-in-law’s letter, which I have preserved among my kit these many months.

  I sit now, watching my infant son…playing in the sunlight of the yard. Do you know, dear brother, that my own disfigurement had impressed itself so powerfully upon my imagination that when this child was born I expected that he, like me, would possess a stump instead of a limb. When I saw him whole and perfect, I wept. Through this babe I feel the whole world has been made new….

  Six days after the birth, a bridal festival called Mazar Dar, “New Life,” is celebrated throughout the city. Its protagonist is the princess Roxane. The day is in her honor. The rites are for women only.

  Something happens to Shinar during these rituals. She will not say what. But she is changed unmistakably on her return. Perhaps the cause is the warmth of being enveloped by scores of her countrywomen, cooing over her new son. Perhaps meeting and speaking with the many Afghan brides, who in days will take husbands of Greece and Macedon. I can’t say. But when she settles beside me in our bed that evening, she declares that she has changed her mind.

  “Is it too late for us to get our names on the wedding list?”

  “You mean get married?”

  My sweetheart smiles. “If you will have me.”

  52.

  I have a friend, Theodorus, in the logistical corps. This wedding, he says, will tax the supply arm like no operation of the entire war. Oxyartes, to honor his daughter, has brought every clan chief and malik from between Bactra City and the Oxus and all their retainers from six to eighty. The other warlords, not to be outdone (or left out in the new order) have summoned all their minions. Preceding the wedding will be Antar Greb, the Ten Days of Forgiveness. During this period prisoners will be pardoned, debts forgiven, feuds patched up. Tribal councils will be in session night and day, adjudicating disputes. Where will this multitude sleep? How will it be fed? Tents alone, to house the throngs, will need a thousand camels just for transportation. The tally of mules is past calculation, as are the invoices already being sent in by their wranglers. How will we water all these beasts? The River Bactrus is home to hundreds of sacred otters. “By Heracles, these boogers will be paddling for their furry lives!”

  The town cannot support such a host, so unofficial camps spring up. Tent bivouacs carpet the riverbanks, mount the foothills, sprawl across the Plain of Sorrows, which seems, at last, to have overthrown its name. Every tailor and bootmaker east of Artacoana has trekked in for the celebration, hoping to earn ten years’ wages in twenty days. Barbers shave men’s skulls for luck. Charcoalers hawk fuel in ribbon-cinched bundles from the backs of their two-wheeled carts; swordmakers set up bichees; stalls in hundreds squat chockablock with fullers, haberdashers, cloth benders, tin- and iron- and bronzesmiths. Alms-beseeching amputees share shops with tattoo artists; snake-handlers split their quarters with peddlers of jute, nazz, and bhang. Boys work the lanes, packing bronze vessels of hot chai on their backs, dispensing cupfuls from spouts set about their waists. One thing Afghanistan does not lack is fish. Speckled and brown trout in tons are towed down from mountain streams by dhuttie pole-boatmen in ingenious wicker floats, the fish still alive in the water. No accommodations remain in the city, so camel trains set up shop at the edge of the desert. A tent bazaar sprawls over hundreds of acres, offering Median vests and shoes, Damascene daggers, quilted aghee caps, and Parthian tunics. Fortune-tellers read the future in cast stones; astrologers scribe it down from the skies. Peddlers of gimcracks and geegaws work in pairs, one bearing before him a great jingling gibbet from which dangle in hundreds finger and toe rings, bracelets, anklets, necklaces, fetishes, amulets, and charms, while his confederate jigs at his side, flogging their common wares. Souvenir images of the bride and groom are painted onto cups and dishes, woven into carpets, lacquered upon trays, and stitched into pennants, prayer bells, and skullcaps; you can buy likenesses of Alexander and Roxane upon beads and coins, cowrie shells, scarves, and undergarments. Troupes of actors and acrobats, jugglers, contortionists, mountebanks, and professional fools put up impromptu shows; poets recite; rhapsodes sing; philosophers edify. I never saw so many amateur orators. One crackpot after another declaims his deranged doctrine atop a stone in the marketplace; within one tented kennel I count half a score, haranguing crowds whose expressions range from zeal to stupefaction. A stroll across the city discovers yogis from India, ascetics from Cos, self-mutilators from Khumar. I watch one sadhu pierce both cheeks with a dozen iron kebab sticks, grinning all the while. His basket brims with coppers from the Macks; apricots and black plums from the Afghans. A girl swallows swords, another contorts her body to set her soles atop her skull. Brazier-men sell sheep brains, poached in the skull; swine’s hooves; bull’s testicles on beds of steaming rice. You can buy eyeballs and knuckles, shrunken skulls, rawhide strings of tusks and teeth, ears and fingers, charms against death and disfigurement, poems to bring love, fortune, happiness; lubricants and asphyxiants, emollients and aphrodisiacs, potion and lotions, emetics and panaceas. I see the same halt fellow chuck his crutches three times in one day. From Babylon have come kite-masters; their paper carp soar aloft on the Afghan gale. Long life, Alexander and Roxane! The union of king and princess will constitute the country’s most glorious day since the birth of Zoroaster—Macks jubilant to be getting out, Afghans ecstatic to see them go.

  Meanwhile, hundreds of jurgas and tribal councils are being held. Clemency is the order of the season. The theme of a fresh start animates all.

  The weddings, as I said, will be celebrated in the Persian manner. Preliminary events will take place over five days, culminating with the actual marriage on the fifth. Five is the number of love in Persian numerology. Everything in the ceremony must be divisible by five. Five hundred prisoners will be pardoned, five thousand slaves set free. The same number of kites will soar over the palace on the wedding day, and twice five thousand white doves be released at the nuptials’ height.

  The ceremony uniting Alexander and the princess Roxane will take place at sunset, the start of the day in the Persian convention. A military tattoo will precede the wedding; it will take place on the plain and be viewed by the dignitaries, Mack and Afghan, who will then mount to the citadel, where the actual ceremony will be performed. When the rites are concluded and the kites and doves have flown, the festivities will begin; they’ll last all night, even after the bride
and groom retire at dawn, and into the next day, when the various clemency rites will take place. As for our company, we will rehearse one last time at midmorning, then dine and prepare our uniforms, weapons, and armor. We’ll bathe and have a final barbering, beards trimmed, teeth waxed.

  Several days before this, a memorial column is dedicated to the fallen of Greece and Macedon. The ceremony takes place at dawn. Elias’s name and Lucas’s and Tollo’s, with sixty-nine hundred others, have been carved into the stone. Our own Stephanos has composed the valedictory ode:

  IN THE COMPANY OF SOLDIERS

  In the company of soldiers

  I have no need to explain myself.

  In the company of soldiers,

  everybody understands.

  In the company of soldiers,

  I don’t have to pretend to be a person I’m not

  Or strike that pose, however well-intended, that is expected

  by those who have not known me under arms.

  In the company of soldiers all my crimes are forgiven

  I am safe

  I am known

  I am home

  In the company of soldiers.

  Funeral games accompany these rites. Hundreds come out. The mood is solemn but gay. The Corps of Engineers has built a hippodrome, four stades down and back, round a turning post. The horse races are meant to be all-Greek and Macedonian, so as not to affront the natives, whose participation might be seen by their fellows as honoring the outlanders’ dead. But in the event, so many Bactrian and Sogdian camps ring the racetrack, since there’s no place else to sleep, and these fellows are such keen horsemen, that they are invited too. I myself enter, riding Snow. We win one heat and come third in the next, but in the end campaign fatigue has worn my poor mare to tatters. We finish dead last in the next and join the throng of spectators. I am standing in line with Flag outside the wagering tent when I spy a familiar spin gar, “white beard,” the Afghan term for old man.

  Ash, our muleteer of Kandahar, who hired out to me the female porters for the crossing of the Hindu Kush.

  I cross to the villain and clap him on the back. “By Zeus, I thought the constables had rounded up all criminals!”

  He turns with a gap-toothed grin. “Then how,” he says, “can you remain at large?”

  We embrace like brothers. The proverb holds true, that even mortal foes find amity with enough passage of time. “What brings you here, Ash?”

  “Mules. What else?”

  We find a place out of the crush and catch each other up on the news. “No women this time?” I ask. He elevates both palms to heaven.

  Flag tells Ash about me and Shinar.

  The old man roars at this jest.

  “No, it’s true!”

  It takes an oath to heaven to make Ash believe. He twists his beard, trying to remember. “Which one was she?”

  “The one you beat. The one I bought from you.”

  “God preserve us!” Again the palms to heaven. “This country has made you madder than I thought.”

  Flag tells him of Lucas and Ghilla, of their child, and of Lucas’s end. Ash goes sober. “He was a good fellow. May his soul find peace.”

  Ash shares a tent, he says, about a mile up the river in the great camp of the Panjshiri. “Dine with me, my friends.”

  We can’t. We have to rehearse for the military parade that precedes the wedding. We make plans with Ash, though, to meet again the day of the horse races. As he takes his leave, the old brigand catches my arm.

  “Her brother is here, you know.”

  He means Shinar’s. I have dreaded this. With so many allied Afghans gathered for the wedding, Baz could be anywhere. He could be in our own camp.

  “Where?” Flag demands.

  “He serves with the Sogdian lancers attached to the brigade of Hephaestion—he and two of his cousins.” Ash describes a bivouac several miles out on the plain. “Brother and kin seek to put right the shame brought on their family by your deliverance of his sister. I have heard him speak of it. I did not know you were his object.”

  I ask Ash how seriously he takes this.

  “One must fear these violent young bucks,” he says, “and fear their wenches more, for A’shaara binds them as pitilessly as an eagle’s claw holds a dove.”

  I know what Flag is thinking. Pay the old man, find the brother. Kill him. Part of me favors this. But our own Mack code of philoxenia, “love for the stranger,” forbids shedding the blood of my bride’s clan—and the kinsmen of my infant son.

  Besides, I see a chance sent by heaven.

  “Now is the Ten Days of Forgiveness, isn’t it, Ash?”

  Indeed, he says, such a time may not come again for years. I turn to Flag. “We met with Shinar’s brother before, remember? He never wanted this feud. His heart isn’t in it. He’d leap at the chance to set it aside.”

  I feel hopeful for another reason. My son’s birth date is Artemisius 19. This is Annexation Day back home, the anniversary of Apollonia’s incorporation into Greater Macedonia. In my town on that day, every dwelling will be flying the lion standard; the lanes will be filled with dancing. There, too, debts will be forgiven. A good omen.

  I ask Ash what we need to do.

  “Leave it to me,” he says.

  A tribal council must be convened. The clansmen will embrace this prospect. It will be great entertainment; they’ll jabber about it for years. I must appear in person, Ash says, and beseech forgiveness for my crimes.

  “Forgiveness, my scarlet ass!” says Flag.

  But Ash knows what he’s talking about. “These dussars,” he says, using the term for rubes or bumpkins, “will take great joy in debating your appeal, Matthias. You must play the part. It may cost you money.” He means reparations. Blood lucre, like to absolve a murder. “Do you have it?” he asks.

  “Enough,” says Flag, “for a villain like you to skim his cut.”

  But I am heartened.

  “You’re welcome to whatever you can claim, Ash. And so is Baz, the brother.”

  What is money for anyway? Only to get what you need—or keep away what you dread.

  “How soon,” I ask, “can we set this thing up?”

  53.

  The jurga takes place the night before the wedding. A quorum, it seems, cannot be convened earlier because so many of the tribal participants, who are hired troops serving under Alexander, must rehearse during the daylight hours for their companies’ parts in the military review that will precede the morrow’s nuptials. This is fine with Flag and me. Our outfit has to prepare too.

  Stephanos lets me out of final rehearsal, so I can get my papers in to the Corps Quartermaster, permitting Shinar and me to be married with the fourteen hundred in the collective ceremony. This rite will take place at the same sunset hour as Alexander and Roxane’s wedding, but outside the fortress gates in the new Greek-style amphitheater that has been carved into the slope of Bal Teghrib, the site where our king first addressed the corps after its crossing of the Hindu Kush.

  Flag and I ride out to the Afghan camp. The time is an hour before sunset. Ash is supposed to meet us, to serve as escort and guarantor. He’s nowhere to be found. We grab one of our shikaris instead, a grizzled mountaineer named Jerezrah, to present our dashar, our request for admittance. Alas, the fellow turns out to be of the Agheila, one of the Panjshiri tribes with whom our hosts, who are Pactyans as well but of another order, are at war. They won’t let him in. Now Ash appears. He has been waiting all along, it seems, wondering what is keeping Flag and me. He takes over. Appealing to the spirit of the Days of Forgiveness, he convinces our hosts to permit entry to Jerezrah. Only now Jerezrah’s chapped at the insult and won’t go in. “I have known these bandits all my life,” he says, turning on his heel. “They are as dirty and disreputable as ever.”

  Flag, Ash, and I enter the camp. It seems that every rock-hopper for a hundred miles has got noise of the event, and they have congregated eagerly to attend it. They’re a savage-looking
pack, armed to the eyeballs, unbarbered for months. Every man carries an elaborately fringed and feathered quirt, whose whip-end he sets before him on the earth when he sits, holding the butt lightly between his fingers, so that when the whole assembly has taken up positions in a circle, the riding-crops all point to the center and all jiggle rhythmically, tapping on the dirt. The spectacle is colorful and, in its way, quite charming.

  The mob has now formed up before the chief’s pavilion, a goatskin structure supported by multiple timber columns and fronted by an enormous tent portico, whose entry is carpeted with rugs laid on the earth. We are shown our place. We sit. The sun slips behind the mountains; at once the night air stings with cold. Ash folds his knees on my right. Chiefs and elders sit directly across from us, with Shinar’s brother and cousins standing behind them. No greetings are exchanged, nor is the least notice taken of our arrival. This is customary, says Ash. It is called the “settling in,” when the parties acquaint themselves in stages, by their mutual presence, without direct speech.

  The circle buzzes with social jabber. Everyone chatters except Flag and me. Now great brass bowls of water are brought, not to drink but to wash our right hands in. An excited yipping ascends. At once a mound of rice, mutton, and peas appears, trucked in on a four-handled barrow. Everyone digs in. Flag and I do, too, fearing to offer offense if we demur, even though we’ve just bolted a gutbusting supper back at camp. The brother and cousins do not sit. They don’t eat. They maintain their posts immediately behind the headman. I have no idea what this means. Their demeanor is sullen and combative; they stand with arms folded. When the mountain of rice has been devoured, which takes no more than ten minutes, the men begin debating, in Pactyan, the issue of Shinar and her violation of the code of A’shaara. No one invites me or Flag to speak, nor even glances in our direction. The chief and elders keep up a dialogue of their own of abundant mirth, apparently having nothing to do with our case. Passion animates the debate; at one point several clansmen have to be separated, nearly coming to blows. All hands are having a wonderful time.