The second night they sought out a village, walked in the late afternoon up the stamped earth path towards the tight corral of houses with the dogs raucous around them and snapping at their legs and running from the kicks of the mules. The men who watched their approach were armed. Barney saw the Kalashnikovs and the Lee Enfields and one rifle that he recognized from pictures he had seen as the SVD Dragunov, the standard Soviet sniper weapon. Men with cold faces.
He felt the nervousness of the boy. 'These are not the people of Peshawar…'
'We have to eat, we have to sleep. I know these are the fighting men.'
The boy went forward. Barney and Schumack stood back, holding the bridles of the mules. Fifty metres in front of them the boy spoke to a man who wore a close bound turban of blue upon his head, with a night-dark beard uncut and hanging against his chest, and a Soviet assault rifle loose in his hand. No smile, no welcome. The boy talking fast and the man listening.
'It's all down to the boy,' Schumack said from the side of his mouth.
'Yes.'
'If he says the wrong thing they could chop us and take the mules.'
'Just shut up, Maxie.'
'So as you know.'
'I know,' Barney said tightly. His finger was on the Safety of his Kalashnikov, his eyes never left Gul Bahdur's back.
The man shrugged, assumed indifference, gestured back over his shoulder into the village.
The boy turned to Barney, his face alive with relief. Barney felt the tremble in his knees. They walked into the village. There were rocket craters, there were shrapnel scars, there were the pattern lines on the walls of machine gun fire, and there were roof beams rising jagged and charred from the buildings.
They went up the steps of a once white washed concrete-faced building with a flat roof.
'They are going into the mountains tomorrow,' Gul Bahdur said. 'They are of the Hizbi-i-Islami group. Their leader is one day and a half's walk away. It is what you wanted, Barney?'
'It is.'
After dark they sat on the floor of the house that had once been a school. A dozen men and Barney and Schumack, under a paraffin lamp hanging from a ceiling hook.
While they sat, while they drank tea, the loads from the mules were carried in and placed under the supervision of Gul Bahdur against the far wall. At the sight of the uncovered missile tubes Schumack screwed his face up to stare at Barney, and Barney looked through him. Later they were given goat bones to chew. There was bread. There was a gummy rice that stuck behind Barney's teeth. By the door were heaped the weapons of the mujahidin. He was amongst the world's most feared guerrilla force. He felt a desperate elation.
A girl stood in the doorway.
Barney shook his head, unbelieving.
"I am Mia Fiori…'
He heard the words, the soft-accented English of the Mediterranean. He rose to make her welcome. Schumack didn't move.
'I am a nurse with Aide Medicale Internationale…'
He saw the dark ringlets of her hair, and the buttoned blouse, and the long skirt that was gathered at her waist and fell free to her ankles.
'They say you are going north in the morning. Will you take me with you, take me to where I can be of use…?'
He watched the shimmer of the skin of her cheeks, and the way she held her hands and clasped and unclasped her fingers. To Barney she was beautiful, a mirage in this place. He shook his head.
'These people won't take me. To them I am only a woman.'
All the room watched Barney.
'My name is Crispin. I'm a collector of strays.'
Gul Bahdur flashed him a look of pure hatred and Schumack waved once to her with his iron claw, grinning.
'I'll take you, but it will be early that we leave.'
Chapter 11
The valley was slightly more than thirty miles long, gouged as a deep ditch, running north to south. In places it was as narrow as five hundred metres, at its widest point little more than two thousand. The sides of the valley alternated between cliff precipices and more gradual slopes, but from any place on the floor of the valley the flanking walls seemed to rise high and intimidating. A water course ran the length of the valley, but it was dry, waiting for the rains and the first snow fall. Winding amongst the boulders and stones of the river bed was a track that would be suitable only for a four-wheel-drive lorry or jeep, or for a tank.
Where the valley was widest there had lived until quite recently whole village communities. Now they were gone. They had herded together their sheep and their goats and their mules, and they had trekked over the mountains to Pakistan. The villages they had left abandoned had been bombed, rocketed, devastated. The fields were now caked in stringy dried yellow grass. The valley was a place of ghosts. Into the side walls ran small valleys, fissures in the granite rock, water drains for the change of season that would bring the melted snow down from the high peaks. These small valleys, these fissures, gave access from the valley floor to the upland pastures where the herds were grazed in summer. But the herds had gone, and the shepherds. The flowers remained, growing as weeds in the field squares, sprouting ochre and red and blue where once there had been vetch and lentil and pumpkin plants.
The valley had formerly been prosperous. It lies across a nomads' and caravanners' trail from Pakistan's northern mountains towards the Panjshir of Afghanistan. The trail comes down into the middle of the valley, crosses between three villages and then climbs again westwards. If the valley is not open to the traveller then he must resign himself to the minimum of another week's walking at altitude to skirt this trusted route.
It is a trail trodden with history. The great Alexander brought his army from Europe along this path, through this valley, perhaps the first of the bands of fighting men to find this bypass of the mountain peaks. In this area the people carry the stamp of those former armies, now they are called Nuristanis, before that they were the Kafiristanis — the strangers, known for their pale skins and their fair hair and their blue eyes and their old ways of animism worship. They are a world set apart from the tribespeople of the Pathans and the Uzbeks and the Tajiks and the Hazaras, and they live now in the refugee camps in Pakistan.
The war has fallen with its full ferocity on these villages under the high cliff walls.
Along this trail the mujahidin carry their munitions and weapons before the winter halts the resupply of the mountain fighters, and in the valley's villages they rest and take shelter. The bombers and the helicopter gunships stampeded the people of these villages into exile.
The morning after they had arrived at the southern entrance to the valley, Schumack had gone.
They had shaken hands with a certain formality that was a part of neither of them, and the American had muttered something about joining up with a group further into the mountains to the west. He had gone early and blended away with half a dozen men who were laden down by the weight of mortar bombs and ammunition belts for a DShK 12.7mm machine gun.
The girl went with Schumack because he was going in the direction of the Panjshir. Perhaps he would reach the Panjshir, perhaps not. He would take her towards Panjshir. The girl had thanked Barney as if he was responsible for her moving towards her goal, and she had headed off walking easily at Schumack's side.
Barney felt a sort of loneliness when they had gone, winding away along the river bed and then becoming ant creatures as they started to climb into a side valley. The girl had been with him for two days, the American for five. He thought of them as friends, and they had gone as casually as if they would surely meet before the day's end and, or as if, for their part, they had nothing to share with him or his life.