And he prefers to kill them slowly. There is such a cruel violence in him that it frightens his friends no less than his enemies. So he must be watched, while he is with us."

"I'll watch over him," Khaled Ansari declared firmly, and we all turned to look at our Palestinian friend. His face was set in an expression of suffering and anger and determination. The skin was tight across his eyes from brow to brow, and his mouth was drawn into a wide, flat line of tenacious resolve.

"Very well..." Khader began, and he would've said more, but with those two words of consent Khaled left us and walked toward the slumped, forlorn figure of Habib Abdur Rahman.

Watching him leave, I was struck with a sudden, clutching instinct to cry out and stop him. It was a foolish thing-an irrational stabbing dread that I was losing him, losing another friend. And it was so ridiculous, so petty in its jealousy, that I bit down on it and said nothing. Then I watched him sit down opposite Habib. I watched him reach out to lift the gaping, murderous face of the madman until their eyes met and held, and I knew, without understanding it, that Khaled was lost to us.

I dragged my eyes from the sight of them, as boatmen drag a lake with starry hooks. My mouth was dry. My heart was a prisoner pounding on the walls inside my head. My legs felt leaden, fixed to the earth with roots of shame and dread. And as I looked up at the sheer, impassable mountains, I felt the future shudder through me like thunder trembling through the limbs and wearied vines of a storming willow.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The main road from Chaman, in those years, crossed a tributary of the Dhari River on the way to Spin Baldak, Dabrai, and Melkaarez on the highway route to Kandahar. The whole journey was less than two hundred kilometres. By car, it took a few hours. We didn't take the highway route, of course, and we didn't have cars. We rode on horseback over a hundred mountain passes, and the same journey took us more than a month.

We spent that first day camped beneath the trees. The baggage- the goods we were smuggling into Afghanistan, and our personal supplies-was scattered in a nearby pasture, covered by sheepskins and goatskins to give the appearance, if seen from the air, of a herd of livestock. There were even a few real goats tethered among the woolly bundles. When dusk finally smothered the sunset, a whisper of excitement went through the camp. We soon heard the muffled tread of hooves as our horses approached.

There were twenty riding horses and fifteen pack animals. The horses were a little smaller than those I'd learned to ride on, and my heart lifted with hope that I might find them easier to control. Most of the men moved off at once to hoist and secure the baggage onto the pack animals. I started off to join them, but Nazeer and Ahmed Zadeh intercepted me, leading two horses.

"This one is mine," Ahmed announced. "And that one is yours."

Nazeer handed the reins to me, and checked the straps on the short, thin Afghan saddle. Satisfying himself that all was as it should be, he nodded his approval.

"Horse good," he said, in his grunting, gravel-throated version of good humour.

"All horse good," I replied, quoting him. "All man not good."

"The horse is superb," Ahmed concurred, casting an admiring eye over my horse. She was a chestnut mare, with a deep chest and strong, thick, relatively short legs. Her eyes were alert and unafraid.

"Nazeer picked her for you from all that we have. He was the first to reach her, and there are some disappointed men back there. He is a good judge."

"We've got thirty men, by my count, but there's less than thirty riding horses here, for sure," I remarked, patting at the neck of my horse, and trying to establish first contact with the beast.

"Yes, some ride and some walk," Ahmed replied. He put his left foot in his stirrup and swung into the saddle with an effortless spring. "We take turns. There are goats, ten goats with us, and men will herd them. And we will lose some men on our way, also.

The horses are really a gift for Khader's people near Kandahar.

We would be better on this trip with camels. Donkeys would be the best, in my opinion, in the narrow passes. But the horses are animals of great status. I think Khader insisted on using horses because it is important how we look when we make contact with the wild clans-the men who will want to kill us, and take our guns and our medicines. The horses will make us important in their eyes. And they will be a gift of much prestige for Khader Khan's people. He plans to give them away on the way back from Kandahar.

We will ride some of the way to Kandahar, but we will walk all the way home!"

"Did you say we're going to _lose some men?" I asked, frowning up at him.

"Yes!" he laughed. "Some men will leave us on the way, to return to their villages. But yes, also, it might be that some will die on this journey. But we will live, you and I, Inshallah. We have good horses. It is a good beginning!"

He wheeled the horse expertly and cantered over to a mounted group who'd assembled around Khaderbhai some fifty metres away. I glanced at Nazeer. He nodded for me to mount the horse, offering me an encouraging little grimace and a muttered prayer. We both fully expected that I would be thrown, and his eyes began to close in cringing anticipation. I put my foot in the stirrup and sprang off with my right foot. I hit the saddle with a harder jolt than I'd planned, but the horse responded well to the mount and dipped her head twice, anxious to move off. Nazeer opened one eye to see me sitting comfortably on the new horse. Delighted and flushed with unselfconscious pride, he beamed one of his rare smiles at me. I tugged at the reins to turn the horse's head, and kicked backward. The horse responded calmly, but with a smart, stylish, almost prancing elegance in its movement. Snapping at once into a graceful canter, she took me toward Khaderbhai's group with no further prompting.

Nazeer ran along with us, a little behind and to the left of my horse. I glanced over my shoulder and exchanged equally wide eyed, bewildered looks with him. The horse was making me look good. It's gonna be okay, I whispered to myself, knowing, as the words trotted through the thick fog of vain hope in my mind, that I'd uttered the certain jinx formula. The saying, pride goeth... before a fall... is condensed from the second collection of the Book of Proverbs, 16:18-Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. It's attributed to Solomon. If he did say it, Solomon was a man who knew horses intimately well; much better than I did as I clicked up to Khader's group and reined the horse in as though I knew-as though I would ever know - what I was doing in a saddle.

Khader was speaking in Pashto and Urdu and Farsi, giving the men last-minute instructions. I leaned across to whisper to Ahmed Zadeh.

"Where's the pass? I can't see it in the dark."

"What pass?" he whispered back.

"The pass through the mountains."

"You mean Chaman?" he asked, mystified by the question. "It's back there, thirty kilometres behind us."

"No, I mean how do we get through those mountains into Afghanistan?" I asked, nodding toward the sheer rock walls that began to rise less than a kilometre away from us, and peaked in the black night sky above.

"We don't go through the mountains," Ahmed replied, gesturing a little jab with the reins in his hands. "We go over them."

"Over... them..."

"Oui."

"Tonight."

"Oui."

"In the dark."

"Oui," he repeated seriously. "But no problem. Habib, the fou, the crazy one, he knows the way. He will lead us."

"I'm glad you told me that. I was worried, I admit, but I feel a lot better about it now." His white teeth flashed a laugh at me and then, with a signal from Khaled, we moved off, churning slowly into a single column that stretched to almost a hundred metres. There were ten men walking, twenty men riding, fifteen packhorses, and a herd of ten goats. I noticed with deep chagrin that Nazeer was one of the men walking. It was absurd and unnatural, somehow, that such a fine horseman was walking while I rode. I watched him, ahead of me in the darkness, watched the rhythmic roll of his thick, slightly bowed legs, and I swore to myself that I would convince him, at the first rest break, to take turns with me in riding my horse. I did eventually succeed in that resolve, but Nazeer was so reluctantly persuaded that he glowered miserably at me from the saddle, and only ever brightened when our positions reversed and he looked up at me from the rocky path.