Our Game

"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.