Chapter 22
That was in the autumn of my twenty-eighth year. The following spring—after we gave Black Cleitus a fitting burial and settled Bactria and Sogdiana with proper governorship—the gods bestowed on me a blessing I did not deserve and could not have foreseen: I fell in love.
I had first encountered Roxane, daughter of the Bactrian nobleman Oxyartes, a year earlier among the captives from the Rock of Sogdiana campaign. The Sogdians there thought we could not scale the fortress, which soared eighteen thousand feet above us. But two hundred and seventy of my men proved them wrong, even though thirty fell to their deaths trying. I can still see those who succeeded, waving their white linen flags as if they were so many manifestations of Nike, the goddess of victory herself, beating her
