Steven Pressfield: The Afgan Campaign

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?”

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.