The campaign was the lengthiest of Alexander’s career and the most difficult he ever fought. His adversaries were not main-force armies, but free tribesmen of what is today Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, and horse warriors who inhabited the steppes and mountains that would become Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Measures of barbarity were employed by both sides, unprecedented in prior campaigns, and the boundaries of warfare were stretched. Despite numerous victories, Alexander did not subdue the region until well into the third year, when he concluded an alliance with the warlord Oxyartes by taking to wife Oxyartes’ daughter Roxane.

The stubbornness of the opposition may be gauged from the fact that when Alexander moved on to India in 327, he left in Afghanistan no fewer than ten thousand infantry and three thousand, five hundred cavalry—fully a fifth of his army—to keep the country from reverting to insurgency.

Across the Plain of Sorrows, so named for the multitude of its burial grounds, the camps of the Macedonians sprawl flank-by-flank alongside those of the enemy. There must be half a thousand of the latter, those bivouacs the Afghans call tafiran (“circles”), each housing between fifty and five hundred men. Every tribe and clan from Artacoana to the Jaxartes has trekked in for the celebration, along with vendors and whores in thousands, tailors, seamstresses, acrobats, musicians, fortune-tellers. The whole Mack expeditionary force is here, including foreign units, horse and foot. Every captain and corporal parades in his finery, eager for the festivities. Except me and my mates Flag, Boxer, and Little Red. We’ve still got work to do.

Give Alexander credit. By marrying the Afghan princess, he turns his most formidable foe, the warlord Oxyartes, into his father-in-law. No other stunt could have produced victory in this war—or that state of affairs that can plausibly be passed off as victory.

So we shall have peace. I doubt that any cessation of hostilities has been longed for more ardently than this. A campaign that was supposed to take three months has dragged on with unbroken terror and brutality for almost three years. Those of us who came out from home as boys have become first men and then something closer to beasts or devils. The Afghans have suffered worse. Two hundred thousand dead, that’s the figure you hear. I believe it. Hardly a village remains in this country that our troops haven’t levelled, or a city that we haven’t taken apart stone by stone.

So this wedding is much looked forward to. The deal between Alexander and Oxyartes is this: the warlord gives away his daughter and accepts our king as his sovereign. In return, Alexander anoints him First Kinsman and his own Royal Companion. This makes Oxyartes premier among all Bactrian barons and the biggest fish east of the Euphrates. Then we Macedonians pack up and leave. I don’t know who’s happier—us to get out or the Afghans to see us go.

I’m getting married tonight myself. Fourteen hundred Macks will be linking with Afghan girls in one collective ceremony. My bride’s name is Shinar. It’s a long story; I’ll tell it as we go along.

My mate Flag dismounts now outside the tent as I finish arming. He’s about forty and the hardest knot I know. He has taught me everything. I would march into hell at his side.

He enters dressed in formal military kit, for the wedding. I indicate his cloak. “You’ll be roasting in that thing.”

Flag tugs back one wing. Beneath his left arm, a xiphos sword is strapped to his ribs. He’s got an Afghan long-knife lashed along one thigh and throwing-daggers inside both boots. He carries two more weapons in plain view, a ceremonial sword on a baldric and a nine-foot half-pike. These are for show. To give Baz (the name we Macedonians apply to any Afghan) something to fix his eyes on.

Boxer and Little Red have reined outside. In a few moments we’ll make our way across the plain to the camp of the Aletai Pactyans. There, I will meet the brother of my bride and pay him off, an indemnity of honour, so he won’t murder me and his sister. The price is four years’ wages and my best horse.

Such is Afghanistan. Only out here do you have to bribe a brother not to slaughter his own sister. Her crime: being with me.

Of course I suspect treachery. That’s what the weapons are for. In a way I’m hoping for it. Otherwise, our own Mack code of philoxenia (“love for the stranger”) forbids me to take the life of one of the family I marry into. I’m an idiot for still buying it, but there it is.

Atop the citadel, the crier calls. Two hours past noon. The Persian day starts at sunset. That’s when the wedding will take place. Lesser ceremonies have been going on all day. Late afternoon will be the military tattoo. The whole Mack army and all the Afghan clans and tribes will pass in review before Alexander, Roxane, and the dignitaries. The big wedding, the royal one, will take place in Chorienes’ palace atop the fortress of Bal Teghrib, “Stone Mountain”. The mass ceremony, the one where Shinar and I will get tied, takes place outdoors in the new stadium at the foot of the hill. When the weddings are over, the celebrations begin.

“All right,” says Flag. “Let’s go over this one more time.”

Flag is by far our senior. His rank is Flag Sergeant. He has a personal name but I’ve never heard anyone use it. We just call him by his rank.

He rehearses us in blocking moves. What’s critical is that Shinar’s brother and his two cousins not escape. They can’t be allowed to break away or survive with wounds. Our blows must be fatal. These three are Shinar’s last male kin. No others stand under the obligation of nangwali, the Afghan code of honour, to see that “justice” is done. Brother and cousins slain, we can buy our way out of the crime. Money will patch it up. But these three must go down.

I am grateful to my comrades. This is serious peril that they undergo for my sake. I’d do the same for them, and they know it. They’ll be embarrassed if I express gratitude overtly. When it’s over, if we’re all alive, I’ll get each of them a woman or a horse.

“All I can say,” says Little Red as we finish our preparations, “is this is a hell of a way to warm up for a wedding.”

As my mates and I gear up, my bride appears in the portal. She will bathe now and, assisted by her bridesmaids, perform the karahal, the Pactyan purification rite. No male may witness this. She meets my eye. “When will you go, Matthias?”

“Now.”

A groom brings my horse. My mates have already mounted.

The Afghan farewell is tel badir, “with God’s care”. Shinar signs this to me. I sign back. Flag’s heels tap his pony. “Now or never.”

We’re off. To perform, if we must, one final murder; then get the hell out of this country.

The distinction between horse and foot is not so great in Afghanistan as it was in Alexander’s earlier campaigns in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Out east, an infantryman is expected to leap on to the back of any creature that will bear his weight—horse, mule, ass, or yaboo (the Afghan pony)—and ride to the site of action, there to dismount and fight, or even fight from the beast’s back if necessary. Likewise horse troopers, even the King’s Companions, think nothing of hitting the ground and slugging it out on foot alongside the dirt-eaters.

My father was killed in Afghanistan, or more precisely he expired of sepsis in a military hospital in Susia, in the province of Areia, which lies on the western border of the country. My father was not a mounted warrior or a foot soldier but a combat engineer of the siege train—what the troops call a “bucket man” because miners and sappers dig their trenches and raise their earthworks with wicker baskets. His name was the same as mine, Matthias.

My father fought at the Granicus River, at Tyre, Gaza, and at Issus. He was an authentic hero. My brothers are too. Once, when I was sixteen, my father sent home an army warrant worth a quarter-talent of gold. We bought a second farm with it, with two barns and a year-round creek, and had enough left over to fence the place in stone.

It was my father’s keenest wish that I, the youngest brother, not come out to war. My mother, further, was violently opposed to any step that would take me away from the land. “You may call it your misfortune, Matthias,” she declared, “to have been whelped last of the litter. But, like it or not, you are my bulwark and the bulwark of this farm. Your father is gone. We shall never see your brothers again. Lust for glory will be their finish; they will leave great names and nothing more.”

My mother feared that I, gone overseas, would tread into the snare of some foreign wench and, taking her to wife, never return to Macedon.

I was eighteen, however, and as mad for glory as every other overheated young blood in a kingdom whose twenty-five-year-old sovereign, Alexander son of Philip, had in only four years sacked earth’s mightiest empire and turned our homeland delirious with conquest, fame, and treasure.

In the Macedonian Army, enlistments are measured not by years but by cycles, or “bumps”. A bump is eighteen months. Minimum enlistment is two bumps, one to be trained and one to serve, but a man must commit for a third cycle, a total of four and a half years, if and when he is called overseas. It worked this way: a recruit entered service with a regiment of the Occupation Army. This was the force left behind by Alexander to hold down Greece and the tribal north. All these contingents were territorial; you had to come from the district or you couldn’t get in. As Alexander’s needs in Asia necessitated, he sent home for replacements. Sometimes entire regiments were called up; other times individuals, either those in specific military specialties such as intelligence or siege engineering, or simply infantrymen with seniority whose lucky number came up.

All this was moot for a youth of my district, Apollonia. Apollonia has no infantry regiment. The region is cavalry country. The most famous squadron of Alexander’s Companions, the ile of Socrates Sathon, comes from Apollonia. This squadron, in which both my brothers served, led the charge at the battle of the Granicus River; it fought at Alexander’s right hand in the great victories of Issus and Gaugamela. It has more hero statues at Dium than any other squadron, including the Royal. My best friend Lucas and I, and every other war-crazed youth in the territory, had trained year-round since before we could walk, on fire for the day we would enter the trials and with heaven’s aid become, like Apollonia’s heroes before us, King’s Companions.

We were too late, Lucas and I. By the time our hour came, Alexander’s army had pushed so deep into Asia and had assimilated troops from so many vanquished nations that our king no longer sent home for Companion cavalry, except to replace men killed, wounded, or retired. The horse troops he employed now were all hired squadrons—Persians mostly, with Syrians, Lydians, Cappadocians, and riders of other kingdoms of the conquered East. No Mack could join these, even if he could get overseas, which he couldn’t, or could speak the barbarian tongue, which he wouldn’t.

There was only one way for Lucas and me to get out to Asia. As hired infantry. As mercenaries.

At that time, scores of private contractors—called pilophoroi for the felt caps they wore—travelled the cities of Greece and Asia Minor, signing up troops. It was a business. Candidates paid a fee, called a “pony” because it was so steep a man could buy a fine colt with it. The felt-caps got them in.

Turning eighteen, Lucas and I trekked three days to the port of Methone, the hiring depot for mercenary infantry. The taverns were crawling with grizzled professionals—Arcadians and Syracusans, Cretans and Rhodians, even officers of the Achaeans and Spartans. They all knew each other from prior hitches; they had mates and commanders who could get them aboard. Lucas and I were the youngest by years. We knew nobody. No pilophoros would touch us, no matter how convincingly we lied about our age or our service histories (of which we had none).

We stayed ten days, with our pay-off cash dwindling rapidly, trying to talk or buy our way in anywhere. At the last hour we went seeking the recruiting general himself. Of course we couldn’t get near him. A line sergeant from Pella kicked us out. “Wait a minute,” he said, hearing our accents. “Are you boys from Apollonia?”

He wanted to know if we could ride.

We were centaurs!

The sergeant drew up our papers on the spot and wouldn’t take any money either. He put us down as Mounted Infantry. That was what Alexander needed most. Lucas and I could not believe our luck. We asked what outfit we’d be with and when we’d get our horses.

“No outfits,” the sergeant said. “And no horses neither.” He had put us on the rolls because we were Macedonians, amid all these foreigners. “No overseas captain ever turned down a lad from home.”

We thanked him with all our hearts. He brushed it off. “Don’t worry about what outfit you ship out with, or if you never see an hour of drill. Out east,” he said, “the king’ll draft you wherever he needs you.”

Our detachment of replacements was sixty-one hundred in forty-seven ships. The harbour at Tripolis couldn’t hold that many, and, as the vessels had neither berths nor provisions to lie-to overnight in the roads, a conference was held of the captains, who were just merchant skippers hired for pay, at which it was decided that our ferry (which is what it was) and about ten others would be rowed to shallow water, where we scuffs were told to grab our kit, hop over the side, and swim for it. Which we did. It was a grand lark, except that I ruined a fine pair of boots in the saltwater, growing too weary to hold them over my head. This is how I landed in Asia, soaked as a drowned cat, and barefoot.

Replacements are not an army. Our mob had been formed not into regiments but into “SCs”, shipboard contingents, and did not, when we landed, even have our arms. The cavalry didn’t have its horses. The animals were following in other transports. There was a tent city waiting, and an escort of six hundred Syrian mercenaries, and fourteen hundred hired infantry of Lycia, with Macedonian officers, who were to take us up to Marathus and from there by way of Larissa to Thapsacus, where we would cross the Euphrates into Mesopotamian Syria and Kurdistan. The march to catch up with Alexander would take between three and four months.

As always in a new camp, the troops plunged at once into their favoured pastimes—touring the site looking up friends, and poaching every item of kit they could lay hands on. You couldn’t set down a heel of bread without somebody snatching it, and a decent hat or a pair of road-slappers were sure goners. A man hung his purse next to his testicles and, after shaking hands with a stranger, checked to make sure both sacks were still where he had left them.

In Alexander’s fighting army, every trooper knew the mark he was to stand on. But here, a thousand miles to the rear, the show was all orphan stew. You ate when the cooks opened the tents and bunked where you could find a patch of dirt wide enough to hold your bones. You kept with your mates to keep the scroungers from picking you blind. My bunch was Lucas; Terres, called “Rags” for his dandy’s love of clothes; and Peithon, undersized, called “Flea”. We were all from Apollonia, all eighteen, and had known each other all our lives.

Lucas was our leader. He was a born operator and set out to keep our heads above the general ruck. We were supposed to get paid on landing at Tripolis (it’d been a month, marshalling and crossing), but if there was any shine with this mob, I never saw it. In fact we had to pay, ourselves. The slugs at the cook-tent wanted cash to get in. You had to pay to take a crap.

“We’ve got to find ourselves a bull,” pronounced Lucas. Meaning someone with rank to attach ourselves to.

We found him in a colour sergeant named Tolmides. Tollo for short. He was a stubby fellow with great moustaches and a boar’s-tusk cap, a mate of Lucas’s father, and in charge here of a company of Lycian infantry. Lucas spotted him in the latrine line. “Hey, Tollo! Where’s a scuff take a free shit around here?”

Tollo came over, laughing. “By Hades’ balls, you little off-scourings got all growed up, did you?” His rank was no joke though. He was a big onion. He got us out of camp. We chowed down with his Lycians out on the plain.

What, we asked, were the chances of getting paid?

About the same as crapping ivory.

When do we get assigned to regiments?

When you pay off the officers escorting you.

What about kit?

We would not be issued arms till Thapsacus or later, Tollo told us, and when we did we’d have to cough up for those too. “Don’t worry, the Quartermaster’ll put it against your roll.” Meaning our pay records. We’d tick it down out of time served.

Lucas looked glum. “They didn’t tell us this back home.”

“If they did, you wouldn’t have come out,” said Tollo. And he laughed.

We glued ourselves to him. He and his Mack comrades had served as scouts in Forward Operations, running reconnaissance for Alexander in Areia and Afghanistan. They had been sent back to train us replacements on the march. They got double pay for this, and double that for escort duty.

“Don’t take to gloom, little brothers.” Tollo pointed east, into the Asiatic night. “Men drop like flies out there, from heat, sickness, or they just run queer.” And he tapped his skull. “You’ll make the grade fast if you show strong stuff. Keep your sheet clean and do what you’re told. You’ll work fine.”

There were six other Macks in Tollo’s cadre, including Stephanos of Aegae, the celebrated war poet. He was a decorated hero and a genuine celebrity. Stephanos was thirty-five; he should have been a captain or at least a full lieutenant, but he stayed a line sergeant. He liked it that way. Here is one of the poems that had made him famous back home and a favourite, even, of the women.

“You two, learn something.”

We dropped our brush and scurried to him like schoolboys. Flag summoned one of his Lycians and had the fellow face about. He thrust the shaft of his half-pike (the shorter version of the sarissa used then in Asia) into my fist.

“Kill him,” he commanded.

I turned bright plum. Could he be serious?

“How do you finish a man who’s running from you?”

I didn’t know.

Flag tugged the Lycian around. “What if he turns about and faces you?”

I didn’t know.

“Take his place.”

“What?”

Suddenly I found myself in the Lycian’s spot. “Run,” Flag commanded. Before I could take one step, I was face-down in the dirt with the wind hammered out of me. I didn’t even know where Flag had hit me. I felt the butt of his half-pike upend me in one instant, then smash my skull in the next. I couldn’t move or breathe; I was helpless.

“Like this.” I could hear him instruct Lucas. “Sideways, so the blade doesn’t jam between the ribs.” And he stabbed me. Not a pinprick, but in so far I could feel the edge scrape the bone. I howled in pain.

Flag yanked me to my feet. Lucas’s face was white. “If the enemy faces you, lance him here. One push. Pull it straight out so it doesn’t jam.”

Then, to me: “When you hit a man, how hard do you do it?”

Before I could speak, Flag had swatted Lucas across the chest with the shaft of his half-pike. I have never heard such a blow. My mate crashed as if dead.

“Do that to the Afghan,” Flag said. “Before he does it to you.”

The enlisted commander of each platoon is a flag sergeant, so named for the pennant he mounts on the peak of his two-handed pike, his sarissa. His post is up front. Second in rank to him is a lance sergeant, or file-closer. He is called a “back”. He takes the rear. In many ways his job is more important than the Flag’s (also called a “First” or a “Top”) because his will drives the file forward, and any man who thinks of dropping back has to face him.

Third in rank in each file is the ninth man, a sergeant or lance corporal. Why the ninth? Because when the command is given to “double front”, the file of sixteen divides into two half-files of eight, called litters, and the rear eight hastens up alongside the front eight. The ninth man becomes the first in the new file. By this evolution, the brigade has gone from roughly a hundred-man front, sixteen deep, to a two-hundred-man front, eight deep. Across the entire phalanx the front has expanded from six hundred to twelve hundred yards.

This configuration is how the Occupation Army trained at home, and how Alexander’s expeditionary force fought in the first three years of the Persian war, in its great conventional battles at the Granicus River, Issus, and Gaugamela.

In Afghanistan, we are now told, things will not be so simple. The place is all mountain and desert. You can’t use the phalanx there. The foe will not face it in pitched battle. Why should he? We would annihilate him if he did.

In the training at home with the eighteen-foot sarissa, a file had to be perfectly aligned front-to-back. Otherwise the formation would be tripping over its own feet. This was called advancing “on the axis”. The warrior virtue of being “on the axis” meant being sharp, obedient, never deviating. A good soldier was on the axis in everything he did.

Out east, we begin to see, there is no axis. The eighteen-foot sarissa has become the nine-foot half-pike; the phalanx exists on the parade ground only. Only two precepts remain: one, sacrifice everything in the cause of the main effort, and, two, never leave another Mack behind.

“Warfare out east,” our poet-sergeant Stephanos instructs us, “is of three types. In the plains, cavalry action. Against strongholds, siege warfare. In the mountains, mobile infantry.”

The fourth type of action was against villages. Our instructors didn’t tell us about that.

Elias has been wounded but is well; he is in hospital now at Phrada in southern Afghanistan. Philip (Elias is nine years older than me, Philip fourteen) has been promoted to Major. He is in India now, as an envoy with Forward Operations, negotiating alliances with the native potentates in advance of Alexander’s army’s push over the Hindu Kush into the Punjab. Such place names sound impossibly romantic to me. My brothers! What illustrious fellows! How will I live up to their achievements? Will I even recognize them when I see them?

The Companion cavalry, in which both my brothers serve, is the élite arm of Alexander’s fighting corps. To be accepted into a squadron is to be made for life. A man becomes in fact the king’s companion. He may dine with him, carouse with him, address him as “Alexander” (though, it is true, few dare). The phalanx brigades share the name Companions (petzhetairoi, “foot companions”). But it’s not the same thing, as the king is a cavalryman and his closest mates are horsemen too.

In theory, each squadron of Companions is composed only of riders from its home district—Apollonia, Bottiaea, Torone, Methone, Olynthus, Amphipolis, and Anthemos being the squadrons taken by Alexander to Asia. (There are eight other squadrons, from other parts of Macedonia, but these remained home to garrison Greece and the tribal north.) But in practice, outstanding riders come from all over the kingdom seeking a berth. I have known men to marry or get themselves adopted into a local family, just to have a shot in the try-outs.

The trials take place over four days. The first two are compulsory exercises; the third is cross-country; the fourth is combat. A rider must show up with a string of seven horses. He is required to use no fewer than four during the ring work (to show he is not cheating by riding a smart animal), and one of those four must serve as his mount in either the steeplechase or the fighting tests. A good cavalry mount takes ten years to train and costs as much as a small farm. Only a rich man’s son can try, unless he is sponsored, as my brothers were, by another rich man, or if he has a father who has been decorated by the king.

Both my brothers were grooms as lads and rode as jockeys in the hippodrome. I cannot tell you how many nights they came home with cracked skulls and busted shins. Nothing could stop them. In the trials at Apollonia, when Elias was only ten, he slipped into the paddock while the horses were being saddled and leapt aboard not one but two champions, placing a foot on each bare back while clasping the reins of one horse in his left hand and the other in his right; he not only rode off at top speed without so much as a watch-my-kit, but jumped the horses over both walls, in and out, all the while standing on the horses’ backs as if he were nailed to them. The thrashing he received as punishment nearly carried him off, but it was worth it; he had made his name. He and Philip, five years older, could touch down off a horse’s back at the all-out and spring back aboard, yoked only by a wrist through the animal’s mane; they could “wrap around” (swing under a horse’s belly and back up the other side). It was nothing to either of them to dice a pear with the long lance one-handed at the stretching run, and their knowledge of veterinary medicine and what we call horsemastership (everything inside the barn) was the equal of any physician in the kingdom. Yet both failed to qualify, not once but four times—that’s how many superlative riders the realm held—before finally getting sent out in the expedition’s second year with four thousand reinforcements under Amyntas Andromenes. They crossed by sea to Gaza in Palestine and joined the king’s army in Egypt.

Our own belated contingent moves out from Tripolis, now, on the twenty-third day. The season is high summer. Every surface of armour must have a woven cover; otherwise the sun will turn it into a skillet. At home we have trained to march thirty miles a day with full kit and rations. Trekking now across Syria, fifteen miles feels like forty, and twenty like a hundred. The sun squats on our shoulders; we breathe dust instead of air. Our tongues are lolling like dogs’ on the tramp to Marathus.

I fall in beside Flag. He can see I’m suffering. “The Afghan,” he says, “will make fifty miles a day afoot and a hundred on horseback. He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t eat. Hack off his head and he’ll take two more swipes at you before he goes down.”

Reveille is three hours before dawn; march-out beats the sun by two. Lead elements of the column are in camp by mid-afternoon, with the stragglers and baggage train catching up by dark. An hour before noon a halt is called and the asses and mules are off-loaded; the beasts can go six to eight hours, but they have to get the weight off for two, otherwise they break down. No such luck for us. We get twenty minutes, then pack ’em up! At one stop on the third day, Lucas moves off to pee. Flag looks on, disapproving. “You shouldn’t have a drop in you.” If you can still draw piss, he says, you’re not trekking hard enough.

We have our weapons now. When we make camp early, we train. Cordon operations. Block and search. We have never heard of such things. High-lining. Sweep by flying columns. These are all new to us.

On treks over great distances, the day’s march is planned to take us from one inhabited area to another—a city or town that has been tasked to supply bread and fodder, or at least provide a market for the army. Now on selected days, for training, the column begins bypassing these. We chop from nowhere to nowhere, throw up a “hasty camp”, a circular ditch-and-berm, spiked with palisade stakes. No wheat-bread in these. We dine on “mooch”—barley gruel, whipped up out of our meal bags, which every man packs (holding ten days’ grain ration) and seasoned with whatever cresses we can scrounge and the odd pullet or goose liberated from a farmyard. Breakfast is wine, olive oil, and “hurry bread” (groats soaked overnight and half baked on flat stones from the watch fire or directly over the flame on “paddles”, the iron flat-plates of the catapults). The feed we all dread is “scratch”, millet porridge, but even this is preferable to “cicada’s lunch”, meaning no grub at all. Tollo and Stephanos build in one starve-day in seven, to lean out our guts and get us used to what’s coming.

Flag has adopted me, after his fashion, or I should say I have fastened on to him like a barnacle. At Thapsacus an incident occurs. We have been paid finally. To celebrate, my mates and I hunt up a local shop for a barbering; when we get back to camp, we can’t find our purse. Lucas keeps this with him at all times; it holds our pooled stash. Now it’s gone. This is serious. No pay is coming until next month, and we can’t stand another siege of starvation. I go to Flag, tell him the last place we’d had our wallet is at the barber’s.

“Show me,” he says.

He enlists Tollo and a Mack corporal called Little Red. The barber’s dwelling and shop are the same, a mud-brick hut with a shade canopy out front and a cooking kitchen on the side. It’s suppertime; the wife won’t open the gate. She’s a snippy bitch and dishes out a smart dose of sauce.

Flag kicks the slats in. The shops in town all lie in the market district, a choleric rat-run called the Terik, “pigeon”. In moments every stall-keeper in the lane has collected, all gibbering in their tongue and ordering us to screw off. The barber’s shack is thick with urchins and grandfolks, with three or four brothers or cousins, young men, all armed and on their feet in a state of outrage. Flag is packing his hook, a wicked weapon used for unhorsing cavalry, with a short-sword on a shoulder sling; Tollo and Red wear their blades; Lucas and I do too but, God help us, we have no intention of using them. Flag makes straight for the barber. By signs and pidgin, he lets him know we want our money.

Get out! the fellow shouts back. Leave my home! I have taken nothing!

Flag seizes him by the gullet and jams him against the wall. Tollo and Little Red begin overturning furniture, what few sticks there are; they bowl over the cooking kettle, kicking the flat loaves across the floor. By now half the street is pressing tight about us, all bawling in indignation, and all proclaiming innocence. Lucas and I are certain we have made a mistake. We must’ve lost the money somewhere else! Leave these poor people alone!

The barber’s face has gone purple. He is gagging and calling on the gods to witness his blamelessness.

“Flag! They’re innocent! Let’s go!”

Flag ignores me, dumps the barber, and snatches up a small boy who is clinging in terror to the old man’s breeches.

“Whose brat is this?”

The haircutter makes no reply. No one does. But clearly the child is his.

Flag turns to Tollo. “Cut his foot off.”

Tollo and Little Red spreadeagle the boy. The child is screaming blue murder. Tollo unsheathes his edge. The mob begin brandishing their own daggers. Lucas and I beg Flag to stop. Flag looks to the barber. “Where’s the money?” No response. To the mother. Nothing. He signs to Tollo. Up goes the sword.

At the last instant a girl-child wails, indicating a corner of the dirt floor. Her mother wallops her across the face. Chaos redoubles. Flag probes where the girl has pointed. Up comes our wallet.

Outside on the street, Lucas and I can’t stop shaking.

“Liars and thieves,” Tollo is muttering. “Every one of ’em.”

We try to give Flag part of our recovered cash. He won’t take it. “Mark one thing,” he says, directing our attention back to the barber’s hut. “If Little Sis hadn’t squealed, Mum and Dad would’ve let us take their son’s foot.”

He is right.

“And would you have taken it?”

Flag doesn’t answer. “They’ll beat the hell out of that little girl now. Thrash her within an inch of her life.”

Three days later we’re humping up the pass out of the Reghez Valley. I have a sixty-pound pannier across my back and a counterpack, half that again, in front; the rope straps are gouging my shoulders raw. Flag falls into step alongside. “You’re thinking again, aren’t you?”

And he smiles and treks on.

To watch Flag march is like watching water flow. His skull is the colour of parchment; the sun might as well be beating on stone. He can feel my gaze tracking him. “You’re wondering what a soldier is, aren’t you?”

I tell him I am.

He indicates a laden beast, mounting the track before us.

“We’re mules, lad. Mules that kill.”

When you march long distances in column, you pass the time by landmarks. Say you come over a rise into a desert valley, a pan twenty or fifty miles across. You’ll set your object as the hills on the far side and march to that, marking your progress as you approach. That will be your day. Or you’ll pick out intermediate landmarks, little hills, washes, dry riverbeds—wadis or nullahs, as they call them out east.

You can see weather for miles, crossing Media and Hyrcania. Squalls play across the pans at midday. Rain falls on one section of the column but not another. You’ll see precipitation sheet from the bellies of the clouds, never to reach the ground but burning away high in the heat of the air. Great shadows play across the plains, making the earth dark in one spot, bright in another, in shifting patterns as the clouds transit the sky. Thunderheads collect over the mountains; you get downpours late in the day.

Alexander’s commanders will not stand for a body of men straggling in one long column; it’s unsightly and unmilitary; you can’t fight from such a formation. So when terrain permits, the troops are fanned out ten or fifteen columns across. This is good because when you reach camp, the whole body can catch up in an hour instead of four. The column packs up everything at night, so it’s ready to go in the dark before dawn. Cavalry other than reconnaissance ride their horses sparingly on the march; they tramp on foot alongside, to conserve the animals’ strength. Grooms lead a remount in each hand. Horses are never permitted to herd on their own, even at rivers where they water. Otherwise they’ll revert to equine hierarchies and be worthless as cavalry.

Crossing Media, we see game in abundance. Gazelle and wild asses; the column spots them from miles, trailing their dust in the clear air. Hunting parties are organized like military operations: divisions send mounted companies to envelop the game, circling as widely as twenty miles sometimes to cut off the herds’ flight, drive them into rope pens if they have time to rig them, or simply run them to exhaustion on the open plain. Riders return with meat for the army’s pots. This is great sport; everyone wants to go. It breaks the monotony.

An army passing through a territory attracts commerce and curiosity of every kind. Actors have come out from Ephesus and Smyrna; we have dancers and acrobats, harpers and reciters, poets, rhapsodes; even sophists offering lectures, which to my astonishment are actually attended. I took in a fascinating one on solid geometry in the middle of a thunderstorm on the High Line in Armenia. Between camps the caravan traders, or just natives loading up asses with anything they can sell, trek alongside the column, peddling dates and sheep, pistachio beer, eggs, meat, cheese. What do the lads crave most? Fresh onions. Back home onions go to flavour a stew. Out here you eat ’em raw. They taste sweet as apples. A man’ll give half a day’s pay for a good onion. They keep your teeth from falling out.

I have a fiancée at home. Her name is Danae. On the march I write letters to her in my head. I talk about money, not love. When we get married, Danae and I will need the equivalent of six years’ pay to make an offer on a farm, since neither of us wish to be beholden to our families. I will volunteer for Forward Operations, first chance I get. Double pay. I cannot tell Danae this. She will worry.

There are many things a fellow cannot tell his sweetheart. Women for one. An army travels accompanied by a second army of whores and trollops, not to mention the camp wives, who constitute a more permanent auxiliary, and when these melt away in “wolf country”, enemy territory, their numbers are made up by locals. We have heard much about the Asiatic’s sequestration of his women, and no doubt this is true in normal times. But when an army as laden with plunder as Alexander’s passes through, even the most hawk-eyed patriarch can’t keep watch over his daughters for ever. The maids dog the column, seeking novelty, freedom, romance, and even the lamest scuff can gin them down to nothing for a quick roll-me-over. The girls’ll even stay to mend kit and do the laundry. Half the young cooches are blinkered—with child, that is—made so by our fellows passing through with Alexander months before. This doesn’t stop us from stropping them. Not me of course, or Lucas. We hold true to our girls back home, much to the amusement of our comrades.

Tollo is the primary fig-hound. He’s sluicing the natives two at a time. “One on each hip,” he says, “just to keep warm.” Tollo’s colour-sergeant pay, counting bonuses, is four drachmas a day (four times my packet). You can buy a house for that here, or hire half a village to do any labour you want.

The army has its own language. “Steam” is soldiers’ slang for women. Dish. Fig. Cooch. Hank or bert (from the native tallabert, “mother”) for an Afghan. The locals have their slang for us too. Mack. Scuff. Bullah (from their word for “stupid”). Sex is qum-qum. The enemy himself our lads call “Baz”, the most common name for an Afghan male—as in “Baz is out there tonight.”

Women are of two types in Areia and Afghanistan. Those beneath the protection of fathers and brothers are called tir bazal, “the jewel”. If you so much as glance at them, their people will slit your throat. The other type has lost the protection of the clan. Maybe their male kin have been killed in feuds or war, or the females have committed some transgression and been cast out. These are the girls we Macks take up with. They’re not tramps though. They have dignity. You have to marry them.

Marriage here is not like back home. One of my littermates, Philotas, met a girl in a village west of Susia. By night they were married. No ceremony; you just declare it and that’s it. My mates make fun of me because I take wedlock seriously. That’s how I feel. I can’t accept these riteless, walk-away hitch-ups. They seem wrong to me.

We get mail on the column. The post from home catches up every ten days; the troops even get letters from the army out east. This from my mother:

All letters report the same news: