two men stood outside a tent, posed beside a car, larked in the ruins, knelt and helped the archaeologists: one was tall and wore an open shirt, and a wide-brimmed hat, ludicrous baggy shorts and battered sandals; the other was shorter and seemed heavier in the folds of the long-tailed tribal shirt and the shapeless trousers, with curled unruly hair under a cloth wound as a turban. And the same quiet, the same stars and moon had blessed that friendship, at Nineveh.
‘There were stories and books and pictures, but it was too far away to be real. There were letters sent to my grandfather, by your grandfather, but they had no value, no context in anything I knew. Then I came with him to the border. We found his friend, and we found you. You never cried. All around you was screaming and weeping, despair.
You had just buried your brothers. You hung back, somehow apart from the misery around you. I had never seen before, have never seen again, a young face of such determination. You were not more than a child, you never spoke, but I saw your face.
Whatever else in my life goes on past me, that face is always with me… I may not be good with words, but I am blessed for having known you, given me from old men’s friendship. Do you think we are close now to the old men, near to Nineveh?’
‘I think we are.’
‘I came because that face, without tears, enabled me to dream and to dare.’
He sat on the ground. He pulled her down beside him. A shell whined high over them and exploded in the distance on the road. He felt the light wind, medium strength but coming on to fresh, on his face, and she shuddered. He hesitated, then slipped his arm over her shoulder. Gus knew it was not the cold that made the shudder in her body.
Together, his arm around her shoulder, they could dream, dare. He pulled her harder against him, her shoulder under his, her hair against his cheek, her hips against his, her thigh… She cried out in pain. She was so strong, so proud, so bloody obstinate, and he had forgotten. He took the torch from his pocket. He did not speak. He pushed her back onto the dirt, and his hand went to her belt. He unfastened it and dragged down her trouser zip. He heaved the trousers down and shone the torch onto her thigh. The dressing was gone, and the edge of the wound was reddened and angry. Maggots moved in the centre of it, between the weals that marked its limits. He saw the wriggling life of the maggots. He crouched over her thigh, smelt the dankness of her, and very carefully began to pick each of the maggots from the wound. She did not cry out again. He poured water from his bottle over the wound and washed away the newest of the flies’ eggs. He did not criticize her for not having had the wound dressed, for not having stolen the time of the aid-worker at Tarjil while she’d worked to save the worst of the casualties. He loved her because, under the bombast of her conceit, she would never put herself first, and never complain for fear that her strength was diminished. He made the wound clean. He switched off the torch, lifted her buttocks, drew up her trousers and zipped them, then fastened her belt.
He did not think it was necessary to fumble for words to explain why he had stayed.
He saw the great flame burning and beyond it were the roofs, minarets and the high buildings of Kirkuk. He could dream and he could dare, because of her. He kissed her. It was a slow, awkward kiss, lip to lip, mouth to mouth, the kiss of teenage children in wonderment.
They walked back into the camp, away from Nineveh.
She called briskly for a briefing meeting in fifteen minutes, and the shyness was gone from her.
There was a jeep parked near to one of the fires and Gus saw Haquim beside it.
Haquim said, ‘As you could not leave her, neither could I, though it was the act of a fool to come back.’
‘Why?’
‘To be with her, and to tell you about helicopters…’
‘You didn’t have to come back – I know about helicopters.’
‘And to shield her, to keep her safe from herself.’
Gus settled comfortably against the jeep’s wheel. The boy brought them coffee. Only when he drank it did he lose the taste of her mouth in his, but still he did not forget.
Chapter Thirteen
Away to the west, the flame burned, an isolated beacon beyond the myriad lights in Kirkuk.
They went fast over flat, open ground. If they looked for cover, went forward at a crawl, they would not make their schedule. If he had not believed in her, he would have turned.
The route, Omar leading and Gus a pace behind, would take them in a great arcing circuit around the city’s lights. Going hard, Gus could not avoid kicking loose stones and sometimes stumbling into small ditches. He took on trust, too, the boy’s skills and the sharpness of his hearing. He had known at home, as a child, out with Billings, the night flight of the hunting barn owl and learned its skills, the sharpness of its hearing as it phantom-glided in the new plantations, listening for the movements of tiny voles and shrews. He thought the boy had the skills and hearing of the owl. The schedule allowed no slack. His own stride was heavy, scuffing the ground, but the boy was as silent as the owl when the old poacher had showed it him.
It was two hours since they had left what remained of the main column. There were isolated lights to their left, lamps over a fence, a roving searchlight from a silhouetted watchtower, and a dull glow from the tightly packed homes. Omar’s route would bring them between the fortified village and the more distant spread of Kirkuk’s brightness.
He heard a shrill cry.
Omar never wavered from the route, as if it carried no threat to them.
The crying was pain, that of a rabbit in a snare.
A track crossed the dark ground ahead and linked a Victory City to Kirkuk. The sound of the crying grew, but the boy did not slow.
They came to the track, crossed it, stepped down into the ditch on the far side of it and Gus straddled the source of the crying. The woman was a black shadow shape. The thin moonlight fell on the beads of her necklace and caught the irregular shape of her teeth, the lines on her face, made jewelled rivers of her tears.
The men were dumped in grotesque postures in the pit of the ditch. Omar, ahead of Gus, shuddered – as if ghosts crossed his soul – and the woman’s cries turned to a ranted anguish. The smaller body wore a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, but the motif was stained in black blood. The moonlight caught the lustreless eyes of the heavier man. She shouted at them as they went by, and after them as they hurried away. Her shouts seemed to hang in the night air like a thinning mist. They went on until they no longer heard the sound.
‘What did she say?’
‘I do not think you wish to know, Mr Gus.’
‘Tell me.’
In his mind were the bodies, perhaps her husband and son. The face he had seen was aged with suffering. He told himself that it was right to go on, not give sympathy and help. He heard Omar draw in a great gulp of breath, then the whisper of his voice.
‘She went into the fields the day before yesterday and she found wild flowers. She brought the flowers home. She is a widow and she lives with her son, her son’s wife and her grandson. She put the flowers in a jar that had been used for storing jam. She set the jar and the flowers outside the door of her house. She told the people who lived near to her that, yesterday, they should collect flowers as a celebration because the woman, Meda, was coming to bring them freedom. The soldiers did nothing because they, also, Mr Gus, believed that Meda was coming. Then they heard that the peshmerga had turned, had gone back to the mountains. They are survivors, Mr Gus. They denounced her, her son and her grandson as followers of the witch. She said the whole village walked with them, abusing them, when the soldiers took them out of the village and shot them. She curses Meda. She says that if Meda had stayed in her own village, in the mountains, then she would have her son and her grandson. She wanted us to bury her son and grandson…
Are you better for knowing that?’
His heel hurt worse, his body ached with tiredness, there was the growing pain in his eyes from peering into the darkness and, ceaselessly, his stomach growled for food. He, too, had put his trust in her. They walked on. The
