"No, it's the middle of the night."
"What time?"
"One-thirty."
"Fuck." She felt angry with him for disturbing her sleep. "Why have you woken me?" she said irritably.
"Halam has gone."
"Gone?" She was still sleepy and confused. "Where? Why? Is he corning back?"
"He didn't tell me. I woke up to find he had gone."
"You think he's abandoned us?"
"Yes."
"Oh, God. How will we find our way without a guide?'' Jane had a nightmare dread of getting lost in the snow with Chantal in her arms.
"I'm afraid it could be worse than that," said Ellis.
"What do you mean?"
"You said he would make us suffer for humiliating him in front of that mullah. Perhaps abandoning us is sufficient revenge. I hope so. But I assume he's headed back the way we came. He may run into the Russians. I don't think it will take them long to persuade him to tell them exactly where he left us."
"It's too much," said Jane, and a feeling almost like grief gripped her. It seemed as if some malign deity were conspiring against them. "I'm too tired," she said. "I'm going to lie here and sleep until the Russians come and take me prisoner."
Chantal had been stirring quietly, moving her head from side to side and making sucking noises, and now she started to cry. Jane sat up and picked her up.
"If we leave now we can still escape," Ellis said. "I'll load the horse while you feed her.''
"All right," said Jane. She put Chantal to her breast. Ellis watched her for a second, smiling faintly, then went out into the night. Jane thought they could easily escape if they did not have Chantal. She wondered how Ellis felt about that. She was, after all, another man's child. But he did not seem to mind. He regarded Chantal as a part of Jane. Or was he hiding some resentment?
Would he like to be a father to Chantal? she asked herself. She looked at the tiny face, and wide blue eyes looked back at her. Who could fail to cherish this helpless little girl?
Suddenly she was completely uncertain about everything. She was not sure how much she loved Ellis; she did not know what she felt about Jean-Pierre, the husband who was hunting her; she could not figure out what her duty to her child was. She was frightened of the snow and the mountains and the Russians, and she had been tired and tense and cold for too long.
Automatically she changed Chantal, using the dry diaper from the fireside. She could not remember changing her last night. It seemed to her that she had fallen asleep after feeding her. She frowned, doubting her memory, then it came back to her that Ellis had roused her momentarily to zip her into the sleeping bag. He must have taken the soiled diaper down to the stream and washed it and wrung it out and hung it on a stick beside the fire to dry. Jane started to cry.
She felt very foolish, but she could not stop, so she carried on dressing Chantal with tears streaming down her face. Ellis came back in as she was making the baby comfortable in the carrying sling.
"Goddam horse didn't want to wake up either," he said, then he saw her face and said: "What is it?"
"I don't know why I ever left you," she said. "You're the best man I've ever known, and I never stopped loving you. Please forgive me."
He put his arms around her and Chantal. "Just don't do it again, that's all," he said.
They stood like that for a while.
Eventually Jane said: "I'm ready."
"Good. Let's go."
They went outside and set off uphill through the thinning woodland. Halam had taken the lantern, but the moon was out and they could see clearly. The air was so cold it hurt to breathe. Jane worried about Chantal. The baby was once again inside Jane's fur-lined coat, and she hoped that her body warmed the air Chantal was breathing. Could a baby come to harm by breathing coid air? Jane had no idea.
Ahead of them was the Kantiwar Pass, at fifteen thousand feet a good deal higher than the last pass, the Aryu. Jane knew she was going to be colder and more tired than she had ever been in her life, and perhaps more frightened, too, but her spirits were high. She felt she had resolved something deep inside herself. If I live, she thought, I want to live with Ellis. One of these days I'll tell him it was because he washed out a dirty diaper.
They soon left the trees behind and started across a plateau like a moonscape, with boulders and craters and odd patches of snow. They followed a line of huge flat stones like a giant's footpath. They were still climbing, although less steeply for the moment, and the temperature dropped steadily, the white patches increasing until the ground was a crazy chessboard.
Nervous energy kept Jane going for the first hour or so, but then, as she settled into the endless march, weariness overcame her again. She wanted to say How far is it now? and Will we be there soon? as she had when a child in the back of her father's car.
At some point on that sloping upland they crossed the ice line. Jane became aware of the new danger when the horse skidded, snorted with fear, almost fell and regained its balance. Then she noticed that the moonlight was reflecting off the boulders as if they were glazed: the rocks were like diamonds, cold and hard and glittering. Her boots gripped better than Maggie's hooves, but nevertheless, a little while later, Jane slipped and almost fell. From then on she was terrified she would fall and crush Chantal, and she trod ultracarefully, her; nerves so taut she felt she might snap.
After a little more than two hours they reached the far side of the plateau and found themselves facing a steep path up a snow-covered mountainside. Ellis went first, pulling Maggie behind him. Jane followed at a safe distance in case the horse should slip backward. They went up the mountain in a zigzag.
The path was not clearly marked. They presumed it lay wherever the ground was lower than in neighboring areas. Jane longed for a more definite sign that this was the route: the remains of a fire, a clean-picked chicken carcass, even a discarded matchbox—anything that would indicate that other human beings had once passed this way. She began obsessively to imagine that they were completely lost, far from the path, wandering aimlessly through endless snows; and that they would continue to meander for days, until they ran out of food and energy and willpower, and lay down in the snow, all three of them, to freeze to death together.
Her back ached insupportably. With much reluctance she gave Chantal to Ellis and took the horse's reins from him, to transfer the strain to a different set of muscles. The wretched horse stumbled constantly now. At one point it slipped on an icy boulder and went down. Jane had to haul mercilessly on the bridle to get the animal to its feet. When the horse stood up finally Jane saw a dark stain on the snow where it had fallen: blood. Looking more closely, she saw a cut on its left knee. The injury did not appear serious: she made Maggie walk on.
Now that she was in the lead, she had to decide where the path lay, and the nightmare of getting irretrievably lost haunted every hesitation. At times the way seemed to fork and she had to guess, left or right? Often the ground was more or less uniformly level, so she just followed her nose until some kind of pathway reappeared. Once she found herself floundering in a snowdrift, and had to be pulled out by Ellis and the horse.
Eventually the path led her onto a ledge which wound far up the side of the mountain. They were very high: looking back across the plateau so far below made her a little dizzy. Surely they could not be far from the pass?
The ledge was steep and icy and only a few feet wide, and beyond the edge was a precipitous drop. Jane trod extra carefully, but all the same she stumbled several times, and once fell to her knees, bruising them. She ached so much all over that she hardly noticed the new pains. Maggie slipped constantly, until Jane no longer bothered to turn around when she heard her hooves skid, but simply pulled harder on the reins. She would have liked to readjust the horse's load so that the heavy bags were farther forward, which would have helped the animal's stability on the uphill climb; but there was no room on the ledge, and she was afraid that if she stopped she would not be able to start again.
The ledge narrowed and wound around an outcrop of cliffs. Jane took gingerly steps across the most slender section, but despite her caution—or perhaps because she was so nervous—she slipped. For a heart-stopping moment she thought she was going to fall over the edge; but she landed on her knees and steadied herself with both hands. From the corner of her eye she could see the snowy slopes hundreds of feet below. She started to
