Our Game (42 page)

Our safe house was two houses inside a white-walled courtyard. There were two gateways—one to the road, one to open pasture. Beyond the pasture, foothills patched with shadow by the moon lifted into a star-filled sky. Above the hills rose mountains and more mountains. The lights of distant villages twinkled among the foothills.

We were in a living room with mattresses on the floor and a plastic-topped table at the centre. Two women in head scarves were setting out food, I guessed a mother and her daughter. Our host was a stocky man in his sixties, who spoke gravely while he grasped my hand.

"He says you are welcome," said Checheyev without his customary cynicism. "He says he's greatly honoured by your presence here and that you should sit beside him. We can fight our wars for ourselves, he says. We don't need outside help. But when the English lend us their support, we are grateful and we thank God. He means every word, so smile and look like an English king. He's a Sufi, so we don't question his authority."

I sat beside him. The older men took their places at the table, while the young remained standing and the women served pita loaves, fried beef in garlic, tea. A photograph of Bashir Haji hung on the wall. It was the photograph from Cambridge Street, except that it had no inked inscription across the corner.

"The village was attacked at night," Checheyev said, translating our host's words while the young men listened in respectful silence. "The village has been deserted for years, ever since the Russians knocked down the houses and drove the inhabitants into the valley. In the old days we could always take refuge in the mountains, but today they have technology. They fired rockets, then they landed helicopters. Russians or Ossetians, probably both." He added his own aside: "Ossetians are bastards, but they're our bastards. We'll deal with them in our own way." He resumed his translation. "People in nearby villages say they heard sounds like thunder and saw flashes in the sky. Silent helicopters, he says. That's just peasant talk. Anyone who could invent a silent helicopter would own the world." Hardly a change to his voice, or to the pace of his delivery, but the words became an aside of his own: "The Sufis are the only outfit round here that're capable of taking up the Russian challenge. They're the keepers of the local conscience. But when it comes to guns and training, they're turtles on their backs. That's why they need Issa, and me and Larry." He resumed his taste of translation: "A woman was attending the funeral of her mother ten kilometres away. When she got home she found everybody dead, so she turned round and walked back to the village where she'd buried her mother. Next day a group of men set out. They washed whatever they could find of the bodies, said the words over them, and buried them, which is our custom. Bashir had been tortured with knives, but they recognised him. Our host says we were betrayed."

"Who by?"

"He says a traitor. An Ossetian spy. That's all he knows.”

“What do you think?"

"With satellites? Spook cameras? Spook listeners? I think the whole trash of modern technology has betrayed us." I had opened my mouth to ask him but he anticipated my question. "No other identifications have been made. It's not polite to grill him."

"But surely ... a European man ..."

But as I said this I remembered Larry's wayward black forelock, no different from the forelocks round me, and his skin that went brown in the sun where mine went pink.

Magomed was saying a prayer to take to bed. " 'We shall kill every one of them,' " Checheyev translated, while our host led a soft chorus of approval. " 'We shall find out the names of the helicopter pilots, and of the men who planned the operation, and of the man who commanded it, and of the men who took part in it, and with God's help we shall kill them all. We shall go on killing Russians till they do what Yeltsin said they would do: take their tanks and guns and helicopters and rockets and soldiers and officials and spies to the other side of the Terek River and leave us to settle our differences and govern ourselves in peace. That is God's will.' You know something?"

"Nothing."

"I believe him. I was an idiot. I took a holiday from who I was. It lasted twenty years. Now I've come home and I wish I'd never been away."

Our guest room was the House sick bay in a measles epidemic at Winchester: beds pushed against the walls, mattresses on the floor, and a bucket to pee in. A Murid stood at the window, watching the road while his comrade slept. One by one my companions dropped off to sleep around me. Sometimes Larry spoke to me, but I preferred not to hear his words because I knew them too well. Just you stay alive for me, I warned my agent. Just damn well stay alive, that's an order. You're alive for as long as I don't know you're dead. You've survived death once. Now do it again, and keep your big mouth shut.

Hours passed, I heard cockerels and the bleating of sheep as a faltering muezzin sang over a loudspeaker. I heard the shuffle of cattle. I got up and, standing beside the Murid at the window, saw the mountains again, and the mountains above the mountains, and I remembered how Larry in a letter to Emma had sworn to throw down his bourka and fight his ground here on the road to Vladikavkaz. I watched women driving buffaloes through the courtyard in the darkness before dawn. We breakfasted quickly, and on Checheyev's insistence I gave ten dollars to each child, remembering the black boy who had followed me in Cambridge Street.

"If you're proposing to fulfil the English prophecy, you'd better leave a good impression," Checheyev said drily.

It was still dark. We drove first on the main road, then up a widening valley until the road became a field strewn with boulders. The jeep in front stopped, and we stopped beside it.

By our headlights I saw a footbridge over a river and at the side of it a steeply rising grass track. And on the riverbank, eight horses already saddled, and one old man in a high fur hat and boots and breeches, and one slender mountain boy with eyes that heard us coming. I remembered Larry's letter to Emma and, like Negley Farson, begged to be allowed to take the Caucasus into my protection.

The boy set out first, accompanied by one of the Murids. We waited for the sounds of their hoofs to disappear into the darkness. Our guide went next, then Checheyev, then myself. Issa, Magomed, and the second Murid made up the tail. To the pistol that Magomed had given me he now added a holster and an ammunition belt with metal loops on it for grenades. I wanted to refuse the grenades, but Checheyev angrily commanded me: "Take the damn things and wear them. We're close to the Ossetian border, close to the military highway, close to the Russian camps. This isn't Somerset, right?" He swung back to our old guide, who was murmuring in his ear. "He says talk quiet and don't talk unless you have to. Don't shoot unless you have to, don't stop unless you have to, don't light a flame, don't swear. Can you ride a horse?"

"I could when I was about ten."

"Don't mind the mud or the steep places. The horse knows the way; the horse will do the work. Don't lean. If you're scared, don't look down. If we're attacked, nobody surrenders. That's the tradition, so kindly observe it. We don't play cricket here."

"Thanks."

Whispering from the guide, then grim laughter from both of them.

"And if you want to piss, save it till we've killed some Russians."

We rode for four hours, and if I hadn't been so fearful of what awaited me, I would have been more fearful of the journey. Within minutes of our departure we were looking down on the lights of villages thousands of feet below us, while the black mountain wall brushed past our faces. But in the broken bodies that I saw ahead of me I was witnessing an extinction of my life more absolute than anything that might happen to me on my way to them. The sky lightened, black peaks appeared among the clouds, snowcaps rose above them, and my heart lifted in mystical response. Rounding a bend, we came on herds of black, thick-coated sheep perched precariously on the slopes below us. Two shepherds huddled under a crude shelter, warming themselves before a fire. Their shadowed eyes took the measure of our guns and horses. We entered a forest of trees veiled in lianas, but the forest was to one side of us and on the other lay the chasm of the valley, full of swirling dawn mist and the sigh of wind and the scream of birds below. And since I have little head for heights, I should have swooned with each new sight of the precipice between my horse's slithering feet, and of the tiny, winding valley floor, and of the crumbling ridge of stone, inches broad and sometimes less, that was my only hold upon the mountain face, and at the unearthly and mysteriously graceful sounds of waterfalls that were as much to breathe and drink as hear. But the survival I craved was Larry's, not mine, and the lucid, unencompassable majesty of the mountains drew me upward.

The weather changed as wildly as the landscape; giant insects hummed around my face, nudged my cheeks, and danced away. One moment friendly white clouds drifted sweetly across the blue alpine sky, the next I was cringing in the lee of enormous eucalyptus trees in a vain effort to escape onslaughts of torrential rain. Then it was a sweltering June day in Somerset, with scents of cowslip and mown grass, and warm cattle from the valley.

Yet these unheralded changes acted on me like the moods of a loved and volatile friend, and sometimes the friend was Larry, and sometimes Emma. I will be your champion, your friend, your ally. I will be the facilitator of your dreams, I whispered in my heart to the passing crags and forests. Just let Larry be alive for me when I come over the brow of the last hill, and whatever I have been I will never be again.

We were in a clearing, and the old guide had ordered us to halt and bunch together under an overhanging cliff. Stinging sunlight burned our faces; birds screamed and wheeled in delight. Magomed had dismounted and was busying himself with his saddlebag while he kept watch up the track. Issa sat with his back to him, his gun held across his chest as he covered the route we had ascended. The horses stood with hung heads. Out of the trees ahead of us rode the mountain boy. He murmured to the old guide, who touched the brow of his tall fur hat as if he were placing a mark on it.

"We can ride on," Checheyev said.

"What was holding us up?"

"Russians."

At first I didn't realise we had entered the village. I saw a wide plateau like a sawn-off mountain, but it was covered in smashed stones that reminded me of the view of the Beacon from my priesthole at Honeybrook. I saw four crumbling towers with blue cloud rolling over them, and in my unfamiliarity I supposed them to be ancient furnaces—a notion that was given force by the sight of scorch marks, which I took to be evidence of charcoal burning, or whatever else might have been burned a hundred or so years ago in stone furnaces on godforsaken mountaintops eight thousand feet above sea level. Then I remembered reading somewhere that the region was famous for its ancient stone watchtowers; and I remembered Emma's drawing of herself and Larry gazing from the upper windows.

I saw dark figures dotted across the landscape, but I dismissed them first as shepherds with their flocks, then as gleaners of some kind, for as we drew nearer I noticed that the figures had a tendency to stoop and rise and stoop again, and I imagined them using one arm to pick whatever they were picking, and the other to keep it safe.

Then I heard above the wind—for the wind in this open wilderness was coming on fiercely—an insistent, high-pitched nasal whine, rising and falling, which I attempted to ascribe to whatever mountain animals might be at home here, some wild breed of sheep or goat; jackals, perhaps wolves. I glanced behind me and saw a black knight in broad armour, but it was only the silhouette of Magomed's great bearded bulk, for the horse they had given him was taller than mine by several hands, and Magomed was wearing a sheepskin hat of the region, wider at the top than at the bottom, and to my astonishment he had donned a traditional wide-shouldered cherkesska with loops for ammunition across the chest. And his Kalashnikov protruded like a great bow from his shoulders.

The wailing grew louder. A chill passed over me as I recognised it for what it had been all along: the keening of women mourning the dead, each for herself and each in strident discord with the others. I smelled wood smoke and saw two fires burning halfway up the slope ahead of me, and women tending them, and small children playing round them. And wherever I looked, I hoped desperately for a familiar pose or gesture: Larry's unmistakably English stance, one leg struck forward, hands thrust behind his back; or Larry punching away his forelock while he gave an order or scored a debating point. I looked in vain.

I saw smoke plumes rise until the wind bent them back down the hill at me. I saw a dead sheep hanging head downward from a tree. And after the wood smoke, I smelled death and knew we had arrived: the sweet, sticky smell of blood and scorched earth opened to the sky. The wind blew stronger with each step that we advanced, and the keening grew louder, as if wind and women were in league with each other, and the harder the wind blew, the more sound it drew from the women. We were riding in single file, Checheyev leading and Magomed close behind me, granting me the solace of his proximity. And behind Magomed rode Issa. And , Issa the great secularist and swindler and mafioso had put on his ceremonial clothing for the occasion, for he was wearing, as well as a tall hat, a heavy cloak that made a pyramid of his upper body but did not quite conceal the gold buttons of his green blazer. Like Magomed's, his fierce eyes were darkened by the browline of his hat, and by his beard of mourning.

I began to identify the functions of the figures among the rubble. Not all wore black, but every head was covered. At the edge of the plateau, at a spot equidistant from the two furthest watchtowers, I made out crude, elongated piles of stones in the form of coffins raised from the ground and tapering towards the top. And I saw that as the women moved among them, they stooped to each in turn and, while crouching, placed their hands on the stones and talked to whoever lay inside. But with discretion, as if they must not wake them. The children kept their distance.