Our Game

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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.

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.