“They’re heading for Pakistan by a route known as the Butter Trail.”
“If we know their route we can find them.”
“I don’t think so. There is one route, but it has variations.”
“We’ll overfly them all.”
“You can’t follow these paths from the air. You can hardly follow them from the
“We can use maps—”
“What maps?” said Jean-Pierre. “I’ve seen your maps, and they’re no better than my American ones, which are the best available—and they do not show these trails and passes. Don’t you know there are regions of the world that have never been properly charted? You’re in one of them now!”
“I know—I’m in Intelligence, remember?” Anatoly lowered his voice. “You’re too easily discouraged, my friend. Think. If Ellis can find a native guide to show him the route, then I can do the same.”
Was it possible? Jean-Pierre wondered. “But there is more than one way to go.”
“Suppose there are ten variations. We need ten native guides to lead ten search parties.”
Jean-Pierre’s enthusiasm rose rapidly as he realized that he might yet get Jane and Chantal back and see Ellis captured. “It might not be that bad,” he said enthusiastically. “We can simply inquire along the way. Once we are out of this godforsaken Valley, people may be less tight-lipped. The Nuristanis aren’t as involved in the war as these people.”
“Good,” said Anatoly abruptly. “It is getting dark. We’ve got a lot to do tonight. We start early in the morning. Let’s go!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jane woke up frightened. She did not know where she was or who she was with or whether the Russians had caught her. For a second she stared up at the exposed underside of a wattle roof, thinking, Is this a prison? Then she sat up abruptly, her heart hammering, and saw Ellis in his sleeping bag, slumbering with his mouth open, and she remembered, We’re out of the Valley. We escaped. The Russians don’t know where we are and they can’t find us.
She lay down again and waited for her heartbeat to return to normal.
They were not following the route Ellis had originally planned. Instead of going north to Comar and then east along the Comar Valley into Nuristan, they had turned back south from Saniz and gone east along the Aryu Valley. Mohammed had suggested this because it got them out of the Five Lions Valley much more quickly, and Ellis had agreed.
They had left before dawn and walked uphill all day, Ellis and Jane taking turns carrying Chantal, Mohammed leading Maggie. At midday they had stopped in the mud-hut village of Aryu and bought bread from a suspicious old man with a snapping dog. Aryu village had been the limit of civilization: after that, there had been nothing for miles but the boulder-strewn river and the great bare ivory-colored mountains on either side, until they had reached this place at the weary end of the afternoon.
Jane sat up again. Chantal lay beside her, breathing evenly and radiating heat like a hot-water bottle. Ellis was in his own sleeping bag: they could have zipped the two bags together to make one, but Jane had been afraid that Ellis might roll onto Chantal in the night, so they had slept separately and contented themselves with lying close together and reaching out to touch one another now and again. Mohammed was in the adjoining room.
Jane got up carefully, trying not to disturb Chantal. As she put on her shirt and stepped into her trousers, she felt twinges of pain in her back and her legs: she was hardened to walking, but not all day, climbing without respite, on such rough terrain.
She put on her boots without tying the laces and went outside. She blinked against the bright cold light of the mountains. She was in an upland meadow, a vast green field with a stream winding through it. To one side of the meadow the mountain rose steeply, and sheltered here at the foot of the slope was a handful of stone houses and some cattle pens. The houses were empty and the cattle had gone: this was a summer pasture, and the cowherds had left for their winter quarters. It was still summer in the Five Lions Valley, but at this altitude autumn came in September.
Jane walked over to the stream. It was sufficiently far from the stone houses for her to slip out of her clothes without fear of offending Mohammed. She ran into the stream and quickly immersed herself in the water. It was searingly cold. She got out again immediately, her teeth chattering uncontrollably. “To hell with
She put her clothes back on—there was only one towel, and that was reserved for Chantal—and ran back to the house, picking up a few sticks on the way. She laid the sticks over the remains of last night’s fire and blew on the embers until the wood caught. She held her frozen hands to the flames until they felt normal again.
She put a pan of water on the fire for washing Chantal. While she was waiting for it to warm up, the others woke, one by one: first Mohammed, who went outside to wash; then Ellis, who complained that he ached all over; and finally Chantal, who demanded to be fed and was satisfied.
Jane felt oddly euphoric. She should have been anxious, she thought, about taking her two-month-old baby into one of the world’s wild places; but somehow that anxiety was swamped by her happiness. Why am I happy? she asked herself, and the answer came out of the back of her mind: because I’m with Ellis.
Chantal also seemed happy, as if she were imbibing contentment with her mother’s milk. They had been unable to buy food last night, because the cowherds had left and there was nobody else from whom to buy it. However, they had some rice and salt, which they had boiled—not without difficulty because it took forever to boil water at this altitude. Now for breakfast there was cold leftover rice. That brought Jane’s spirits down a little.
She ate while Chantal fed, then washed and changed her. The spare diaper, washed in the stream yesterday, had dried by the fire overnight. Jane put it on Chantal and took the dirty diaper to the stream. She would attach it to the baggage and hope that the wind and the heat of the horse’s body would dry it. What would Mummy say about her granddaughter wearing one diaper all day? She would be horrified. Never mind. . . .
Ellis and Mohammed loaded the horse and got her pointed in the right direction. Today would be harder than yesterday. They had to cross the mountain range that for centuries had kept Nuristan more or less isolated from the rest of the world. They would climb the Aryu Pass, fourteen thousand feet high. Much of the way they would have to struggle through snow and ice. They hoped to reach the Nuristan village of Linar: it was only ten miles away as the crow flies, but they would be doing well to get there by late afternoon.
The sunlight was bright when they set off, but the air was cold. Jane was wearing heavy socks and mittens and an oiled sweater under her fur-lined coat. She carried Chantal in the sling between her sweater and her coat, with the top buttons of the coat undone to let air in.
They left the meadow, following the Aryu River upstream, and immediately the landscape became harsh and hostile again. The cold cliffs were bare of vegetation. Once Jane saw, far in the distance, a huddle of nomads’ tents on a bleak slope: she did not know whether to be glad there were other humans around or frightened of them. The only other living thing she saw was a bearded vulture floating in the bitter wind.
There was no visible pathway. Jane was immeasurably glad that Mohammed was with them. At first he followed the river, but when it narrowed and petered out, he carried on with undiminished confidence. Jane asked him how he knew the way, and he told her that the route was marked by piles of stones at intervals. She had not noticed them until he pointed them out.
Soon there was a thin layer of snow on the ground, and Jane’s feet got cold despite her heavy socks and her boots.
Amazingly, Chantal slept much of the time. Every couple of hours they stopped for a few minutes’ rest, and Jane took the opportunity to feed her, wincing as she exposed her tender breasts to the freezing air. She told Ellis that she thought Chantal was being remarkably good, and he said: “Unbelievably. Unbelievably.”
At midday they stopped within sight of the Aryu Pass for a welcome half-hour rest. Jane was already tired, and her back hurt. She was also starvingly hungry—she wolfed the mulberry-and-walnut cake they had for lunch.
The approach to the pass was terribly daunting. Looking at that steep climb, Jane lost heart. I think I’ll sit
