‘Keep low,’ I shouted as she straightened to untangle it.
‘What?’ she mouthed, turning.
A dark hole opened in her throat and she gasped. A look of intense surprise flickered across her face. A second hole opened in her cheek. She spun around as if she had been slapped violently and fell to the earth. For one moment I watched as her fingers scrabbled in the dirt.
‘Zena…’
I lurched forward. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement in the dark shadow of one of the huts.
‘Zena,’ I called again.
My body lay across hers, protecting her. I grasped her tight, felt her body buck beneath my own. Her eyes did not shut. I closed my hand around the wound in her neck, my palm slipping on the soft wet flesh. The blood pumped hotly between my fingers. She gazed up, a look of astonishment on her face.
‘Zena,’ I whispered into her ear.
She moved, but it was her muscles twitching. Her skin paled. The blood pooled in the dirt. The weight of my body, as I shifted, pressed the air from her lungs so that she gasped and spat bloodily, her unblinking eyes staring fixedly into eternity.
From the shadows I heard the shuffle of footsteps and the click of a magazine being slotted into place. I looked up into the shadowed doorway of one of the huts. An elderly man gazed out, Kalashnikov raised. Rising from the earth, blood dripping from my hands, my shirt dark and wet, clinging to my chest, I faced him. He shouted something in Pashtu and waved the gun. I stepped towards him. He shouted louder, pointing the gun at me threateningly. From my belt I took my knife. The old man tottered out into the sunlight. He pointed at the girl and shouted. He pointed at the two men and shouted again. He waved the gun at me and shouted some more. His pale, old eyes were wild with fear.
Knocking the gun from his hands, I grabbed the front of his tunic. He fell to his knees, gabbling, pointing at his hut, at the three bodies strewn across the centre of his little village. I wound the dirty white cloth of his turban in my fist and jerked his head back. He looked up into my eyes, his lips moving continually, words pouring forth incomprehensibly, his arms jerking back and forth between his hut and the bodies. I took the knife and, with one hand holding his head back, slit his throat. He gargled, his lips moving silently, working still as the blood fountained out across the front of my shirt.
Kneeling beside me, Kolya stroked my back. I pressed my forehead against the sharp gravel of the path. I smelt the earth beneath me, felt the small stones biting into my flesh. I dug my fingers into the soil, turning it, clawing at it.
‘It’s over,’ Kolya murmured. ‘It’s all over now. It’s finished.’
He placed the metal box on the path beside me, and attempted to pull me up from the ground.
‘Let’s get a move on,’ he encouraged. ‘We have the bracelet. It was for this that Kirov sold her. He betrayed us all. We lost half the battalion in that ambush.’
When the old man was dead, I stood for some moments in the centre of the square. Below the village, in the hollow where the road forded the stream, the battle was still raging. Rocket fire shook the ground, automatic gunfire chattered among the trees. I knelt beside Zena and gently lowered her eyelids. I kissed her forehead. Her skin was cool and clammy.
Birds had begun to gather on the roofs of the houses. Insects swirled in dark clouds, settling already on the bloody pools, on the stained earth, on the warm flesh of the bodies. I picked Zena up and moved her to the side of the square, laid my jacket over her face and shoulders.
I worked quickly, moving from hut to hut, gathering wood. Tables, chairs, wardrobes, roofing, doors. I fashioned a pyre in the centre of the square, stuffing dry grass into the gaps between the wood. I worked with care, as if building a bonfire at home, making sure that when I lit it, it would go up. When the clumsy pyre was finished I took a can of fuel I had come across in one of the huts and poured it liberally over the wood. For some moments I stood back, surveying my work. It gave me grim satisfaction to see the sturdiness of the table on which I would lay her.
Her body rested on the ground, by the hut, her limbs carefully arranged, my jacket covering her, keeping away the flies. I knelt by her, pulling back the khaki shroud. She could have been sleeping. She did not look so different from those times when I had awoken in the morning to see her face by my side in her room in the hostel in Jalalabad. A little paler perhaps. There was a smudge of dirt on her forehead. I took the corner of my jacket, dampened it with my saliva and wiped the soot from her skin, cleaned the neat wound in her cheek, washed away the blood from her throat.
Looping my arms beneath her, I lifted her from the dust. Her body was strangely stiff, resistant to my touch. She was heavy and I struggled slightly under her weight.
Carefully I laid her on the pile of wood. She looked fragile in death. I pressed my lips to the scar running down the side of her face. A breeze had picked up, blowing from the east, from Pakistan. It rustled the dry grass in the pyre and whistled across the roofs of the huts.
I knelt before the pyre. There should have been something fitting for me to say, but I had no prayer◦– no prayer any god would find decent, would consider bending an ear to listen to. A poem, a couple of lines, would have done, something to sanctify the moment, but my mind was dark, a blank fury. I knelt in silence, my head bowed, my hands trembling.
When I rose I took the can of fuel and went quickly to the farthest hut. There, without pausing, I sloshed the fuel around the dark interior. There was little in the hut, just a table and a rug. In the corner was a Koran, and I took that and ripped a page from it. Taking from my pocket the Chinese lighter Vassily had once given me, I lit the crinkled yellow pa per and tossed it to the floor. A small flame rose from the packed earth. It ran quickly along the rug, and as I turned the fuel exploded with a dull thud, knocking me forwards with a warm burst of heat. Without turning back, I hurried to the next hut and doused that with fuel, taking care not to use too much. Tearing another page from the Koran, tucked beneath my arm, I tossed the flaming, crinkled ball into the hut and watched it explode in flames.
When all the huts were burning I stood once more before the roughly fashioned pyre and drank in her form. She seemed shrunken in death. Reduced. Childlike and vulnerable. The dry grass and wooden beams crackled as they burnt around me. Dark smoke billowed up into the clear air, then, caught on a draught of suffocating wind, bent back down and swirled around the village. Ships of flame sailed the currents of air, descending beside me lightly, smouldering in the dust.
Slowly and with care I tore each remaining page from the Koran. I clothed her with the sheets, spread them over her, weighted down with dust. As I worked, the fire descended softly upon us, settling on the dusty pages, on the grass that stuck out like unruly whiskers from between the planks of wood. The pages darkened, wrinkled and curled along their edges. Blue flames rushed along them, joining, spreading. The grass withered, pulled itself into the cracks, smoking, charred. A gust of wind blew low across the hilltop. There was a gasp, like a sudden intake of breath, a moment’s silence, and then a belch of flame jumped from the wooden mound. The pages lifted into the air, sailing on the updraught, into the smoke-darkened air, as if God Himself were drawing His Word up into His hands.
The heat knocked me back and I staggered and fell into the dust. I felt the flesh on my face blister. The air tore at my lungs; my throat burnt. I crawled beneath the billowing clouds of smoke, my hands and knees shredding themselves on the sharp stones. At the edge of the village the path descended a sharp incline. In my hurry I stumbled from the path and, blinded by the smoke and my tears, I fell.