Our Game

"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."