Chapter 21
As usual, I found war, however arduous, easier than peace, for even the most willful of minds cannot contain two mutually exclusive ideas any more than a peace can be made between adversaries determined to remain antagonists. It was a bitter lesson that would haunt me in love and war. And it would prove fatal at Maracanda, that accursed place, where my men were ambushed, betrayed as much by the poor leadership of the commanders I had set over them as by the two-faced Sogdian warlord Spitamenes and his Scythian cohorts.
Maracanda was a fitting backdrop for tragedy—onstage and off.
It began when Lykon of Skarphia—an actor who once had the cheek to insert into a comic performance a request for ten talents, a temerity I confounded by awarding him the handsome sum—offered to prese
