In the next valley, Will terrified a man walking with a few goats by riding at him, even as he tried to get out of the way, stopping and shouting the tribal leader’s name into his face. Eventually the man understood. He took his stick from across his shoulder blades and pointed with it, adding words Will couldn’t understand. Will nodded and gave him a cigarette then drove off, his motorcycle sliding under him as it struggled for purchase in the dust.
Will found a huddle of tents surrounded by animals and children who ran up to him to examine the motorcycle and take hold of his hands and laugh and try to grab the pistol in his belt. Will repeated the elder’s name at them. A man approached, very stately in a long swathe of cloth, and bowed with his right palm over his heart. He beckoned Will to come in, delaying him at the low entrance to remove his boots. Inside, Will felt underfoot the luxury of thick carpets. Seated on cushions were several men smoking and drinking tea. Will assumed the eldest of them to be the man he had come to see and he bowed deeply, his hand over his heart. The man smiled and gestured for him to sit. Will lowered himself into a cross-legged position on a cushion and looked around, carefully smiling at everyone in turn. The soft, rich carpets, the luminous low walls of the tent, the scent of tea and smoke, made a cosiness as piquant, Will thought, as that of an English cottage with a lively fire and rain beating on small panes of leaded glass. In his classical Arabic, he said that he thanked Allah for bringing him to this place and for the honour of being their guest. Some tension seemed to be induced by this greeting. Polite smiles stiffened and betrayed incomprehension. Of course, Will’s accent might not be too accurate. He was a reader of Arabic first and a speaker second. The faces arranged around him in the tent were similar enough for Will to think he saw signs of interbreeding. Recurring round the circle were the same sharp, deeply cleft chins and large watery green eyes. A young lad offered fresh glasses of tea on a brass plate. Will took one and held it by the burning rim. The head man immediately sucked at his glass and growled quietly. Behind him, in Will’s line of sight, an open panel in the tent showed the world outside with browsing goats shaking off flies, low sunlight clinging to the stones and plants and goat fur, and blue smoke rolling across from a fire out of sight.
The old man said something to Will. Will listened but could not understand. The man repeated himself. This time Will managed to hear the breaks between the words and understood that what he’d been asked, a little surprisingly, was whether he was a German.
‘No. I’m British. The Germans are our enemy.’
‘Ah.’ The man reached into his glass with long fingers and pulled out a sprig of mint, chewed it. ‘Tell me, my brother, who will Allah give victory to in this war?’
‘To us.’
‘Ah. Are there many of you?’
‘Yes. Very many. Many thousands. We have many cannons, aeroplanes, bombs and ships. The enemy, the Germans, cannot resist.’
‘Ah. This is what I thought.’ The old man turned to his fellows. He said, ‘They will win.’
Through the bright gap in the tent wall, Will saw a goat suddenly start to piss, a thick jet of liquid, while it lifted its tail and a few turds extruded and dropped softly in a pile. Will had the urge to comment, to make a little joke perhaps, in the English way, but stopped himself. He felt the flat heat of embarrassment pressing under his skin at the thought of the misstep he might have just made. It would have been gauche and he arraigned himself for his superficial civilisation, degenerate, that was scandalised by natural processes. These tribal men in their tent, mixing regal postures, ceremony and unaffected natural squalor, were truly aristocratic, like figures from epic or Arabic hunting poetry. But he hadn’t said anything. All was well. The moment passed. He sipped his tea and imagined in his own eyes, narrowed at the steam, the same farseeing, blue-green clarity of the eyes around him. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘We will win.’
A thoughtful silence. Outside the tent, the dry ripping sounds of a wood fire, the voices of those tending to it.
‘I can offer you,’ the old man said, slapping his palm on the carpet beside him, ‘one hundred horsemen to help you win the war.’
‘Thank you. I will tell the general of your offer. He will be very pleased and honoured.’ Will had no idea whether the man could raise a hundred horsemen. It sounded suspiciously like a symbolic figure but it hardly mattered. Even if they existed, there was no need for them. No, what this exchange meant was that Will had created an alliance, a pact between warriors.
‘Good. Then that is settled. Come outside now.’
The men all stood up and Will followed them in his socks out into the light and air. He thought for a moment of retrieving his shoes but decided he couldn’t double back. He absorbed, with slight tremors, the discomfort of the ground beneath him. Several men lit new cigarettes and Will did also, offering his around. A couple of the men already smoking took one of Will’s for later. That smelclass="underline" across the fire lay the scorched carcase of a goat, blackened, cracking, its posture rigid as though still resisting giving up its life. Evidently Will was being treated to full tribal hospitality.
More tea was brought by a woman whose similar eyes looked out, downcast, from the gap in her veil. One of the men patted Will on the shoulder and led him over to squat down by the fire and start picking shreds of meat to eat. The other men joined them, sinking onto their heels and laughing. A hawk called overhead, keen, austere, poignant. Evening moisture had started giving body to the air. After this successful mission, Will would get back on his motorcycle and ride down from the mountains to the coast. At the villa, he would lie on his bed and read more classical philosophy. Here he was sitting among newly made allies, tribesmen. At home in Warwickshire was a famous river by which he’d grown up. He was the son of a war hero. Overhead an eagle (probably) was flying. He was eating roasted goat. He was where he’d always wanted to be, in the middle of his life’s adventure and standing at its prow, pushing forwards.
Before he left, they told Will that they wanted to present him with a gift. Two men left and Will filled the silence with expressions of his gratitude and how unnecessary a gift was for him, it was he who should have brought them a gift and so on. They returned accompanied by a young girl and Will, smiling, looked at them each in turn and waited for them to present the gift. ‘Please,’ one of the men said and gestured at the girl. ‘No,’ Will said. ‘No, you can’t mean …’ She was about fourteen years old, short with strong bare feet and thin gold rings in her ears. The expressions of the men seemed to confirm that they were serious, that she was a gift. Will didn’t know what to say. The living presence of the girl, staring down, waiting, her toes contracting to grip the carpet, disabled thought. Will didn’t want to offend the men and forfeit his achievement with them. Still not knowing what he would do, he thanked them with his right hand over his heart. He took the girl to his motorbike, followed by the tribesmen, thanked them again and sat down, arranging her behind him with her arms around his waist. He had to pull her arms around him; they were knotted with fear or shame or some terrible emotion. He waved and they drove off down the valley, Will’s heart pounding, the girl’s breath on the back of his neck.