Our Game (43 page)

Other women pared vegetables, fetched water for the cauldrons, cut bread and set it on makeshift tables. And I realised that those who had arrived before us had brought offerings of sheep and other food. But the largest group of women was segregated and tightly packed together inside what seemed to be a ruined barn, and it was they who, with the arrival of each new delegation of mourners, wailed in misery and outrage. At a distance of perhaps fifty yards from the barn, and down the slope from it, stood the remains of a courtyard surrounded by charred fencing. A finger of roof hung over it, a form of doorway led to it, though there was neither door nor lintel and the walls around were so pierced with high-velocity shell holes that they were defined as much by what wasn't there as by what was.

Nonetheless with each new arrival men entered by this doorway, and once inside, they greeted other men, shook hands, embraced and faced each other and prayed, then sat and talked and came and left with the gravity of centuries, and like Magomed and Issa, they had dressed themselves for ceremony: men in tall sheepskin hats and 1920s breeches, men in broad Caucasian belts and knee boots and gold watchchains, men in skullcaps with white or green bands, men with their kinjals at their sides, holy men with beards, and one old man resplendent in his bourka—the great felt cape more like a tent than a coat, where by tradition his children can hide themselves from storms or danger. But look as

I might, I saw no tall Englishman with an errant forelock and an easy grace and a taste for other people's hats.

Checheyev had dismounted. Behind me, Magomed and Issa leapt lightly to the ground, but Cramer after too many years on foot was welded to his saddle. I tried to wrestle free, but my feet were locked in the stirrups—until Magomed, once more coming to my aid, first lifted me in the air, then tipped me into his arms and set me on my feet, then righted me again before I fell. Young boys took our horses.

We entered the courtyard, Checheyev leading and Issa at my side, and as we entered I heard them offer a salaam in Arabic and saw the men who were sitting before us rise, and those who were already standing brace themselves as if called to order, until all stood before us in a half circle, the oldest to the right of us; and of those before us, it was the man on our left, a giant of a man in a tunic jacket and knee breeches, who took upon himself the responsibility of all of them. And I knew he was the chief mourner and the most afflicted, though his face was set in a grim rejection of grief that reminded me of Zorin with his dying mistress. And I knew that just as there were no greetings here, so there were to be no demonstrations of unmanliness, or unseemly grief, and that it was a time for stoicism and bearing and mystical communion and vengeance, not women's tears.

Checheyev had spoken again, and this time I knew that he had called a prayer, for though no prayer was spoken, all the men around me cupped their hands together in a begging bowl and raised them in oblation and for a minute or so lowered their eyes and moved their lips and muttered occasional and simultaneous amens. After they had prayed they made the washing gesture that I was by now familiar with, as if rubbing the prayer into their faces and at the same time cleansing them in preparation for the next one. As I watched them, I realised I was suiting my own hands to their gestures, partly out of a kind of spiritual courtesy and partly because, just as the landscape had assumed me, so had these people, and I could no longer distinguish between gestures that were familiar to me and others that were not.

From my right an old man said something in Arabic, which was taken up by each man separately, not as words but as a patter of lips endorsed by amens. I heard Issa from close beside me, speaking clear English in his usual voice:

"They are blessing his martyrdom," he said.

"Whose?" I whispered—yet why did I speak so quietly when no one else was lowering his voice?

"Bashir Haji's," he replied. "They are asking God to forgive him and be merciful to him and bless his gazavat. They are swearing vengeance. Vengeance is our job, not God's."

Is Larry a martyr too? I was asking. But not aloud.

Checheyev was speaking to the giant, and through the giant to all of them.

"He is saying it is in God's hands that we live and die," Issa translated firmly in English.

There was another moment of muttered quiet, and another washing of the faces. Who lives? I begged. Who dies? But once more not aloud.

"What else is he saying?" I asked, for by then the word Larry had passed through me like a knife, spoken by Checheyev and taken up by everybody in the line, from the giant on the left to the oldest and most venerable on the right. And some were nodding at me and others were shaking their heads and tut-tutting and the giant was staring at me with pursed lips.

"He is telling them you are a friend of Larry the Englishman," said Issa.

"What else?" I implored him, for the giant had spoken some words to Checheyev, and I had heard more amens along the line.

"They are saying that God takes the dearest and the best," Issa replied. "Men and women equally."

"So has God taken Larry?" I shouted, though I was only speaking at their level.

Checheyev had swung round and was addressing me, and I saw both anger and a warning in his wracked face. And I knew that if I had not done Larry the favour of killing him before, I had done it here, in a place further from the earth than Priddy, and closer to the sky.

Checheyev's voice had acquired an operational urgency.

"They expect you to be a man, so speak like a man. Say it in English. To all of them. Let them hear your courage," he said.

So I said it in English to the giant, very loudly, which was completely against my character and training; and to all of those around him, while Checheyev belted out the translation and Magomed and Issa stood behind me. I said that Larry was an Englishman who had loved freedom above everything. He had loved the courage of the Ingush and shared their hatred of the bully. And that Larry would live because he had cared, and that it was those who cared too little who died the death. And that since courage went hand in hand with honour, and both with loyalty, it was necessary also to record that, in a world where loyalty was increasingly difficult to define, Larry had contrived to remain a man of honour even if the necessary consequence of this was to go out and find his death like a warrior.

For it occurred to me as I spoke—though I was careful not to say it in so many words—that if Larry had led the wrong life, he had at least found the right death.

Whether Checheyev translated my words faithfully I never knew. Nor, if he did, how they were received by my audience, for another delegation was arriving and the ritual was already being repeated.

A gaggle of small children came with us up the hill, plucking at Magomed's hands as he walked, gazing up in adoration at the great hero and in puzzlement at me. Reaching the barn, Checheyev went ahead while the rest of us stood in the, sweeping wind. Here among the women, it seemed, a certain show of emotion was permitted, because as Checheyev returned to us with a white-faced woman and her three small children and declared them to be Bashir's, I saw that his eyes had filled with tears for which the wind was not responsible.

"Tell her that her husband died a martyr's death," he ordered me roughly.

So pretty much I said this, and he translated it. Then he must have told her that I was Larry's friend, because I heard the word Larry again. And at the mention of him she seized me in a chaste sideways embrace and wept so much that I had to hold her up. She was still weeping as he took her back to the barn.

A young man was leading the way. Magomed had found him in the courtyard and brought him to us. Straggling after him, we picked our way through smashed masonry and furniture, past a heap of burned mattresses and a tin bathtub with bullet holes in it. And I remembered a pebble beach in Cornwall called St. Loy, where Uncle Bob sometimes took me on holiday and I collected driftwood while he read the newspaper.

A group of men were slaughtering a sheep, while children watched. They had bound its legs front and back, and now it lay on its side, pointed, I supposed, towards Mecca, because there was fuss about getting its head in the right direction. Then, with a quick prayer and a deft plunge of the dagger, the sheep was killed and its blood was left to pour over the rocks and mingle with whatever blood was there already. We passed a cooking fire and saw bubbling water in a great iron cauldron. We came to the watchtower at the furthest corner of the plateau, and I remembered Larry's passion for rejected places.

The young man who led us wore a long raincoat, but it wasn't green or Austrian, and as we approached the entrance to the watchtower he stopped and, in the manner of a tour guide, raised an arm to the ruined building above us and announced through Checheyev his regret that, as a result of the attack, the watchtower was unfortunately only half its original height. Then he gave a lurid account of the battle, which Checheyev translated but I didn't listen to very much, about how everyone had fought to the last bullet and the last thrust of the kinjal, and how God would look mercifully on the heroes and martyrs who had died here and how one day this place would become a holy shrine. And I wondered how that would grab Larry: to be a named ghost in a holy shrine.

Finally we stepped inside, but as so often with great monuments, there really was very little to see, except what had fallen from the upper floors. For the ground floor, being reserved for cattle and horses, was by tradition bare, although Emma's drawing, I remembered, had put a cow in it. A few kitchen saucepans lay about, an oil stove, a bed, a few shreds of clothing. No books, but -one would hardly have expected any. Not even, so far as I could see, a radio. So probably after the attackers had shelled the place and shot it up, and made sure by whatever means that everyone including Larry was dead, they looted it. Or perhaps there had been nothing much to loot. I looked for something small for myself as a memento, but really there wasn't anything at all for a man in search of connection to slip into his pocket for a future lonely hour. Finally I hit on a singed fragment of plaited straw, about an inch by two inches and rounded on one side. It was lacquered, and yellowed, and probably it was just a leftover piece of wickerwork—a fruit basket or something of that kind. But I kept it anyway, on the off chance that it was a true fragment of Larry's Winchester strat.

And there was a pile of stones, perhaps to represent a headstone, set apart from the others, respectfully, on its own small mound. The wind lashed over it, hard pebbles of snow had joined the wind, and the pile seemed to get smaller as I stared at it. Cranmer was the box that Pettifer came in, I rehearsed: but that was because I kept thinking that the grave was my own. Checheyev had found me a couple of bits of stick, Magomed produced a twist of useful string. With a certain embarrassment, since I had listened to so much of Larry, the parson's son, inveighing against his Maker, I made an inexpert cross and attempted to plant it in the mound. couldn't, of course, because the ground was iron hard. So Magomed hacked a hole for me with his kinjal.

A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you.

You can't alter what you love or owe.

And it's too late to ask him for his absolution.

He has you beaten all ways up.

Then I remembered something Dee had said to me in Paris and I had deliberately chosen not to hear: maybe you don't want to find your friend, but to become him.

In a clear place near the courtyard, a ring of men had started to dance while they extolled the name of God. Young boys joined them, the crowd pressed round. Old men, women, and children chanted, prayed and washed their faces in their hands. The dance grew faster and wilder and seemed to transcend into a different time and space.

"What will you do now?" I asked Checheyev.

But I must have been addressing the question to myself, because Checheyev had no doubt what he was doing. He had dismissed our guide and was leading us at a stiff trot down a narrow path that went straight over the edge of the plateau and into an abyss. I realised that we were traversing an overhang more precipitous and alarming than anything we had negotiated on horseback. Below us, but so far below as to be another level of the earth and perhaps not attached to it at all, ran a tiny silver river amid pastoral green fields where cattle grazed. But here on the mountain face, where the wind howled and the rock leaned out at us and every foothold was smaller than our feet, we were in a celestial Hades, with Paradise below us.

We rounded a crag, and another awaited us. We were walking, I was sure, deliberately and mutely to our deaths. We were taking our place among the martyrs and heroic infidels. I looked again and saw that we were standing on a sheltered grass ledge so protected that it was like a huge chamber of rock with a picture window giving onto the Apocalypse. And in the grass were the burn marks I had noticed on the plateau; and traces of boots and the imprint of heavy pieces of equipment. And the still air inside the chamber smelled once more of burning and exploding.

We passed deeper into the mountain and saw the wreckage of a great arsenal: antitank guns, blown apart and lying on their sides, machine guns with barrels cut in two by clever charges, rocket launchers, smashed. And leading to the abyss, a trail of muddy footprints that reminded me of Aitken May's farm, where the most portable of his carpets had been dragged to the edge and hurled over it for fun.

On the plateau, the wind had gone, leaving behind it a cutting alpine cold. Somebody had given me a coat, I supposed Magomed. The three of us stood on the hillside: Magomed, Cranmer, and Checheyev. A bonfire burned in the courtyard below us as men of all ages sat round it and conferred, Issa and our Murids among them. Sometimes a young man sprang to his feet, and Checheyev said he was talking about vengeance. Sometimes an old man waxed impassioned, and Checheyev said he was talking about the deportations and how nothing, nothing had changed.