Our Game

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.

"Will you tell her?" I asked.

"Who?"