Steven Pressfield - The Afgan Campaign

The brother is not at all what I expected. He’s young, only a few years older than Shinar, but with eyes stony as an ancient. He is dressed entirely in black. Though his khetal cloak is threadbare, his belt and sling are studded with silver spits-trophies of enemy slain. I tell him my name and hold out my hand. Afghans do not share our European admiration for a firm grip. They touch your palm as if they think you are carrying something contagious. Nor does the Asiatic believe in looking you in the eye and speaking plain and strong. They mutter and look away. They don’t introduce themselves. The brother does not tell me his name.

I feel Flag stiffen at my shoulder. He hates these bastards. Lucas, on my other side, takes everything in with a ready, open receptivity.

The interview is over as soon as it begins. The brother plainly wants no part of it. He keeps glancing to the caucus of elders looking on, whose presence, it is clear, compels him against his will to this appointment.

I tell him that Shinar is well and that I hope to return her to him and her family. He grimaces as if I have just plunged a spike into his guts.

“Can you understand,” he says in perfect Dari, “that I have no wish for this obligation?”

I don’t get it. “You mean to take her back?”

“You should have killed her.”

He means it. I think of our former guide Elihu. My crime in Afghan eyes, I understand, is not that I have slept with Shinar, or impregnated her, or taken her away among foreigners. What I can never be forgiven for is that I have taken that action-preserving her life on the trail in the mountains-that by the code of nangwali should have been taken only by her own kin.

The cousins hate me. Their eyes speak plain.

The brother is different. His expression looks…condemned.

“Do you imagine, Macedonian,” he says, “that I wish to bring grief to my sister? I am twenty-two years old and responsible for forty-one people, most of whom are women and children.” He means, apparently, his immediate family, whose protection must have fallen to him by reason of elders’ deaths or other misfortunes. “I have had to take service in the cause of my enemy, only to fill the bellies of those for whom I must provide.”

To my surprise, I find myself respecting the fellow. I study his intelligent, fine-featured face.

“The blood that will be shed over this matter,” he says, “is your doing, not mine. For though you and your countrymen call us barbarians, it is you who are brutish and meanly bred-and blind to all concept of pride and honor. You should have killed her,” the brother repeats, turning on his heel. In a moment he has stalked away across the brown clover.

Flag turns to me and Lucas. “What was that all about?”

The cousins remain. Hate radiates from their postures.

“What,” I ask, “is your cousin’s name?”

The elder faces me.

“Baz.”

Coenus’s division crosses the Jaxartes on the morning setting of the Pleiades, the first day of winter. It’s cold. A dusting of snow howls across the frozen steppe. Our orders, as I said, are to hunt Spitamenes. The sense is of climax approaching.

The Wolf has been sighted eighty miles east on the frontier, near a village called Gabae. This is a trading outpost frequented by tribesmen of the Massagetae. They rally there in spring before raiding to the south. Will Spitamenes bring them forth in winter?

Indeed, something must be up: Costas the correspondent rides with us. So does Agathocles, the intelligence captain. “By Hades,” says Flag, “the mice have all come out of their burrows.”

Patrols push north and east into the wasteland. Our company is split into three to make the broadest possible sweep. Scores of penetrations are being run by other outfits. Day on day we discover sign of the passage of great numbers of horses, not fanned wide as tribesmen customarily ride but in column to conceal their numbers. Winter has come down hard. We have just made camp along some iced-over creek when a courier gallops in from Coenus with orders to break off our patrol and follow him at speed.

West of the region we’ve been searching lies a gale-scoured grassland called Tol Nelan, “the Nothing.” There, a probe of one of our sister companies has stumbled onto a camp of several hundred of the foe, on the move without wagons and women. The patrol has gotten under cover without being spotted and sent back to the column for help. Our section is among the units called in to reinforce.

We ride for a night and day, linking with another recalled patrol and two companies of mounted infantry dispatched from Coenus. Scouts from the original patrol pick us up ten miles out and lead us in by a wide circuit. We take up concealed positions.

Our force consists of three patrols, about sixty men, and the two companies sent from column. Coenus has stiffened it with artillery, two furlongers-stone-throwers-and a half battery of light bolt catapults, the kind that can be broken down and carried, one on two mules. Our commander is Leander Arimmas, a Companion captain sent with the two companies. Costas the chronicler has come with him. So has Agathocles. Apparently they’re expecting a show. Leander orders a base camp set up in a frozen watercourse two miles from the enemy camp, then divides our force into strike elements and a blocking force.

For once a scheme actually works. Two hours before dawn, our companies get two wings of thirty horses each into position on the steppe side of the enemy camp. Lucas and I ride with the southern arm. The troop shows itself at first light, striking out of the pale sun. At the same time a company of infantry, which had got into position that night on the adjacent heights, rushes down on the foe.

The enemy flees into the iced-over courses. Their horses carry two, even three fugitives. When the foe strikes the riverbed, Mack artillery opens up. A furlonger can sling a ten-pound stone two hundred yards, downhill three hundred. As these missiles crash among the rocks and the ice-shards of the frozen river, panic undoes the enemy. Our captain Leander falls, struck by one of our own stones. The fight is sharp and violent. When it’s over, the bag is sixty ponies and forty men. And an unexpected bonus:

Derdas, the fourteen-year-old son of Spitamenes.

A melee erupts over this prize. Our Daans scrap with each other like barn cats (they recognize the lad from their days fighting on his father’s side), believing the boy’s head will bring a bucket of gold. Stephanos and other Mack officers order the lad impounded apart. Meanwhile, despite desperate efforts to save him, our captain Leander bleeds to death. Three other Macks have received fatal wounds; a dozen more have been cut up badly by the fiercely defending foe. The boy looks on with cool, intelligent eyes.

Spitamenes’ son is dressed Massagetae style, in boots and bloused trousers, long khetal cloak, and earflap cap. Nothing distinguishes him from his less illustrious companions, save an onyx-handled dagger, which two of our Daans have produced from the youth’s undervest when he and the others are disarmed. A fracas breaks out over ownership of this trophy. In the confusion a handful of the foe make getaways, on horseback, before our fellows can throw a cordon around the capture scene.

These runaways will fly on wings to Spitamenes, whose forces may be as close as beyond the next range of hills. Wherever he is, the Wolf will not spare the whip, racing to pay us out-and rescue his boy.

Stephanos and two lieutenants struggle to establish order. A council is called. As corporals, Lucas and I take part. Stephanos declares that the mixed composition of the enemy party-Daans and Massagetae with main-force Bactrians and Sogdians-can mean only that the foe is assembling. “When these bastards scatter, they break up into tribal bands. They only ride in one pack when they’re massing.”