After Mahmoud finished translating the last of my words there was a lengthy silence while they considered the tale. I was just convincing myself that they were as moved by the life of my little friend as I was myself when the first questions began.

"So, how many goats did they have in that village?" Suleiman asked gravely.

"He wants to know how many goats-" Mahmoud began translating.

"I got it, I got it," I smiled. "Well, near as I can tell, about eighty, maybe as many as a hundred. Each household had about two or three goats, but some had as many as six or eight."

That information inspired a little gesticulating buzz of discussion that was more animated and partisan than any of the political or religious debates that had occasionally stirred among the men.

"What... colour... were these goats?" Jalalaad asked.

"The colours," Mahmoud explained solemnly. "He wants to know the colors of those goats."

"Well, gee, they were brown, I guess, and white, and a few black ones."

"Were they big goats, like the ones in Iran?" Mahmoud translated for Suleiman. "Or were they skinny, like the ones in Pakistan?"

"Well, about _so big..." I suggested, gesturing with my hands.

"How much milk," Nazeer asked, caught up in the discussion in spite of himself, "did they get from those goats, every day?"

"I'm... not really an expert on goats..."

"Try," Nazeer insisted. "Try to remember."

"Oh, shit. I... it's just a wild stab in the dark, mind you, but I'd say, maybe, a couple of litres a day..." I offered, raising the palms of my hands helplessly.

"This friend of yours, how much did he earn as a taxi driver?"

Suleiman asked.

"Did this friend go out with a woman, alone, before his marriage?" Jalalaad wanted to know, causing all the men to laugh and some of them to throw small stones at him.

In that way the session moved through all the themes that concerned them, until at last I excused myself and found a relatively sheltered spot where I could stare at the misty nothing of the frozen, shrouded sky. I was trying to fight down the fear that prowled in my empty belly, and leapt up with sharp claws at my heart in its cage of ribs.

Tomorrow. We were going to fight our way out. No-one had said it, but I knew that all the others were thinking we would die. They were too cheerful, too relaxed. All the tension and dread of the last weeks had drained from them once we'd made the decision to fight. It wasn't the joyful relief of men who know they're saved.

It was something else-something I'd seen in the mirror, in my cell, on the night before my desperate escape from prison, and something I'd seen in the eyes of the man who'd escaped with me. It was the exhilaration of men who were risking everything, risking life and death, on one throw of the dice. Some time on the next day we would be free, or we would be dead. The same resolution that had sent me over the front wall of a prison was sending us over the ridge, and into the enemy guns: it's better to die fighting than to die like a rat in a trap. I'd escaped from prison, and crossed the world, and crossed the years, to find myself in the company of men who felt exactly as I did about freedom and death.

And still I was afraid: afraid of being wounded, afraid of being shot in the spine and paralysed, afraid of being captured alive and tortured in another prison by yet another prison guard. It occurred to me that Karla and Khaderbhai would've had something clever to say to me about fear. And in thinking that, I realised how remote they were from the moment, and the mountain, and me. I realised that I didn't need their brilliance any more: it couldn't help me. All the cleverness in all the world couldn't stop my stomach from knotting around its prowling fear. When you know you're going to die, there's no comfort in cleverness.

Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom. For me, on that last night before the battle, it was the sound of my mother's voice, and it was the life and death of my friend Prabaker... God give you rest, Prabaker. I still love you, and the grieving, when I think of you, is pinned to my heart and my eyes with bright and burning stars... My comfort, on that freezing ridge, was the memory of Prabaker's smiling face, and the sound of my mother's voice: Whatever you do in life, do it with courage, and you won't go far wrong...

"Here, take one," Khaled said, sliding down beside me to squat on his heels, and offering me one of two half-cigarettes that he held in his bare hand.

"Jesus!" I gawked. "Where'd you get those? I thought we all ran out last week."

"We did," he said, lighting the cigarettes with a small gas lighter. "Except for these. I kept them for a special occasion. I think this is it. I got a bad feeling, Lin. A real bad feeling.

It's inside me, and I can't shake it tonight."

It was the first time that we'd spoken more than the essential word or two since the night that Khader had left. We'd worked and slept side by side, every day and night, but I almost never met his eye, and I'd avoided conversation with him so coldly that he, too, had been silent with me.

"Look... Khaled... about Khader, and Karla... don't feel... I mean, I'm not-"

"No," he interrupted. "You had plenty of reason to be mad. I can see it from your side. I always could. You got a raw deal, and I told Khader that, too, on the night he left. He should've trusted you. It's a funny thing-the guy he trusted most, the only guy in the whole world he really trusted all the way, turned out to be a crazy killer, and the one who sold us all out."

The New York accent, with its Arabic swell, rolled over me like a warm, frothy wave, and I almost reached out to hug him. I'd missed the assurances I'd always found in the sound of that voice, and the honest suffering I saw in the scarred face. I was so glad to have his friendship again that I confused what he'd said about Khaderbhai. I thought, without really thinking at all, that he was talking about Abdullah. He wasn't, and that, too, like a hundred other chances to know all the truth in the one conversation, was lost.

"How well did you know Abdullah?" I asked him.

"Pretty well," he answered, his little smile becoming an asking frown: Where is this going?

"Did you like him?"

"Not really."

"Why not?"

"Abdullah didn't believe in anything. He was a rebel without a cause, in a world that doesn't have enough rebels for the real causes. I don't like-and I don't really trust-people who don't believe in anything."

"Does that include me?"

"No," he laughed. "You believe in a lot of things. That's why I like you. That's why Khader loved you. He did love you, you know.

He told me so, a couple different times."

"What do I believe in?" I scoffed.

"You believe in people," he replied quickly. "That stuff with the slum clinic and all. The story you told the guys tonight, that about the village. You'd forget that shit if you didn't believe in people. That work in the slum, when the cholera went through the place-Khader loved that, what you did then, and so did I.

Shit, for a while there, I think you even had Karla believing, too. You gotta understand, Lin. If Khader had a choice, if there was a better way to do what he had to do, he would've taken it. It all played out the way it had to. Nobody wanted to fuck you over."

"Not even Karla?" I smiled, savouring the last puff of the cigarette and then stubbing it out on the ground.

"Well, maybe Karla," he conceded, laughing the small, sad laugh.

"But that's Karla. I think the only guy she never fucked over was Abdullah."

"Were they together?" I asked, so surprised that I couldn't help the pinch of jealousy that pulled my brows together in a hard, little frown.