‘Except Alexander wasn’t about to let that beat him so easily. He supplemented his dwindling forces with mercenary troops from Greece and Macedonia, holed up in his fort at Alexandria Eschate and got ready for a long war. The fighting got more and more brutal. But it wasn’t the kind of fighting that his armies had ever been used to before. Just like the British, Russian and American invaders of the future this style of war of attrition threw them off balance and soon made their position desperate.’

‘Which is when it starts to get really nasty,’ Ben said.

‘No kidding. As the warlords went on playing their hit-and-run games Alexander went on a full-on rampage, razing towns and cities to the ground everywhere he went, killing everyone in them, sparing nobody. While in the past he’d always treated the subjects of other parts of his empire with at least some respect for their ways and traditions, his feelings against the Afghans turned to hate and he vowed to wipe them out completely, like an act of genocide. Not all of it was about open battle – he also made full use of spies and traitors in the enemy camp. According to one ancient account, the wife of a Bactrian warlord called Spitamenes cut off her husband’s head while he slept and brought it to Alexander as a peace offering.’

‘Remind me never to get married after all,’ Wolf said.

‘Nobody would do that to you, babe,’ Madison replied with a sweet smile. ‘You’re a pussycat next to these guys.’

‘Want a bet?’ Wolf said, stung by the accusation.

‘Anyhow, Alexander wasn’t interested in peace. He became even more cruel and obsessive, hunting down his enemies, burning and slaughtering indiscriminately. It was total war, beyond anything anyone had ever seen before. It didn’t matter if the tribes were hostile or not, he massacred them anyway. Like the “friendly fire” incidents’ – Madison made rabbit ears with her fingers – ‘in modern times when US troops killed groups of Afghan children, and before that the campaigns of bombing villages and destroying farms and crops that the Soviets carried out in the 1980s. Russian soldiers were even ordered to slaughter horses, dogs and cats. The Soviet press labelled the Afghans as bandits, outlaws, insurgents and terrorists, just like Alexander had done, just like we did later on with our so-called war on terror.’

‘This is a really depressing story,’ Wolf said. ‘I thought we were getting a history lesson.’

‘There is no history,’ Madison said. ‘Not in the way people tend to understand it, as something that’s gone and behind us. The record of the past is only there to help us understand what’s happening now, and will go on happening in the future. The end result is always the same.’

‘And the end result for Alexander?’ Ben asked.