‘Marut?’ The other man seemed surprised. ‘Oh, you mean my name. I am called Murad Shah. These are my Nuristani lads, from the north-eastern mountains, you know. That’s the way they pronounce “Murad”. I don’t suppose they have ever heard of Marut … Marut, me …’ He started to laugh. ‘I’ve been called some things, but never Marut. Who are you?’
‘I am called Teeo pang by your men,’ said Adam, ‘but I am The Eagle.’
‘Kara Kush – The Eagle?’ Murad was on his feet. ‘I had no idea. I’m very sorry.’ He held out his hand and Adam took it.
‘Teeo pang,’ said Murad, ‘only means “You’re a foreigner”, in Nuristani. You are foreign – we all are – to these men.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Adam wanted to know.
‘We’re fighting the Russians, like you.’
‘Where is this place?’
‘Three kilometres north-west of Baghabad, “Land of Gardens”, in the foothills.’
Adam wanted to know where Murad was from. ‘And where did you collect these goons? They’re a long way from home.’
‘We are all from Sayed Khel.’ Murad sighed. ‘We are the only survivors of the battle last January. If it hadn’t been for these men, my bodyguard, I’d be dead.’
Six months before, The Eagle knew, the Russians had attacked one of the strongholds of the Resistance at Sayed Khel, the place named after the Sayed family. The defenders had fought for eleven days, with light arms, against the most powerful weapons of the invading army. Even the outside world’s newspapers had heard of the battle. It had been a disaster for the Muhjahidin. Sayed Khel no longer existed.
‘There were nearly four thousand of us, not counting women and children,’ said Murad; ‘and they had tanks and aircraft. Our rifles had no more effect on them than peashooters, and we were short of ammunition. We fortified every house and dug tank traps in the road. At night we burned the fields and the orchards where they were bivouacked with kerosene, roasting many, but destroying our own land. We made bows and arrows when the ammunition ran out. We made holes in the ground and lay in them until they overran us. Then we rose out of the holes with sharpened sticks and stabbed them. But they still kept coming.’
‘What were your casualties?’ Adam asked.
‘Over one thousand killed, though we estimate that we killed or wounded twice as many of the enemy. Two thousand six hundred of our men were captured.’
‘What happened to them?’ Adam could guess, but he wanted to know just the same.
Murad shrugged. ‘Four hundred or so were lined up and shot. About two thousand, many of them wounded, were taken away in trucks. Kabul radio said these had been put into camps for “re-education”. They will, I think, try to force them into the Army, because men are so short and the Russians are always pressing the Afghan Army to do more fighting. Of course they’ll only desert to the Muhjahidin.’
‘How did you get away?’
‘I had been hit two or three times and fainted, I suppose through loss of blood and so on – shock, pain, I don’t know. These fellows you see here, “the goons”, are what’s left of my halqa, my bodyguard. They had originally fled to Sayed Khel over the high eastern mountains, when their villages were destroyed by air attacks. They carried me here and looked after me. They are great experts in survival, and they know how to look after wounds.’
A mountaineer brought two mugs of tea and kishmish, dried fruit.
‘And you have set up a miniature village in this cave?’
‘That’s right. As you see, they know all kinds of arts and crafts. Herbs, cookery, hunting, making things. Their fur coats would fetch a fortune in Western Europe, I expect. Not to mention those handmade harps slung on their backs.’
‘I think,’ said Adam, grinning at the simple faces of the cavemen, ‘the time has come that you came to us and taught us a few things.’
‘I was hoping you would say that, Commander,’ said Murad.
Captain Azambai, in charge of the caravan, had sent some men to scout, others to collect forage and rations, and had set the rest to carrying out exercises, weapon cleaning and the other boring tasks which had to be done.
Adam had been missing for five hours. Azambai knew there was no real prospect of finding him if he had got lost or been captured by bandits, for the hills were riddled with caves and in places covered with thick brush. Small valleys filled with cedars, mulberries, mountain garlic and a dozen different kinds of flowering shrubs gave perfect cover, both to men and to the wildlife. It was said that the mountain tigers had their haunts there, too, though they only attacked people in the winter when hunger forced them to prowl around the villages.
In spite of Noor asking him to send out more patrols, Azambai decided that they must wait. Just as she was about to go off on her own to look for him, Adam appeared, surrounded by a ferocious flock of Nuristanis, carrying gifts of oil, honey, and snow-leopard skins.
Murad was introduced to the captain.
‘This isn’t good enough, you know,’ Azambai said, after welcoming him briefly. ‘Your men ought to be better disciplined than they evidently are.’
Murad gave him a mock salute. ‘I’ll try to fix them up with uniforms, general.’
‘Captain. No, there aren’t any uniforms. We’ll get local clothes from the villagers. And I’ll try to find one or two of our own people who speak your men’s language. We’ll never be able to talk to them if you get shot, and they might do anything. This really is not very satisfactory.’ Azambai the soldier couldn’t say how delighted he was that Adam was safe, after all. But his emotions had to come out somehow.
Murad saw the point. ‘Sorry, captain. Yes, I’ll co-operate in any way you wish. We’ll even go back to The Eagle’s Nest, if you think that we’d be more useful there.’
Azambai softened. ‘That would be the best thing, of course. But I quite like the look of these people. We’ll just have to try to turn them into askars, soldiers, as I’m trying to with the other Muhjahidin. It will be difficult for them, but discipline will see us through, you know that.’
‘I know that.’
The following day, as the caravan continued towards the high Hindu Kush, the climb became more and more precipitous. At the first halt there was a small inn where the plodding Nuristanis, who had been taking turns at riding and walking, were able to hire small, powerful Kataghan ponies with the money which Murad, usefully and surprising everyone, produced from a leather bag. Gold sovereigns, with the head of King George V on them. Murad explained that they had come from a hoard, buried since the 1919 war with Britain, and donated by the man who had captured them from an Indian Army war chest sixty years before. He had been an ancient, wizened fruit farmer, who only had enough cherry trees to keep body and soul together, but he had never thought of using the gold for himself. ‘I thought, “It’ll come in handy,’” he said. Murad had come across him quite casually and had said that he was a Muhjahid: nothing else; and was presented with the sovereigns.
Louis Palmer, unexpectedly, was found to have a working knowledge of the Nuristani language. It had interested him for years, and he had had several men from the secret land working for him from time to time. He soon became the chief of one dasta, and Murad’s second-in-command. He sang their songs to their own harp music, and even seemed to enjoy the dried meat which they cooked, mixed with herbs and water, and served with melted butter and sprigs of fresh rosemary at each midday halt.
He even taught them long strings of words in Dari-Persian and Pashtu; something that they had not wanted to attempt before.
3 Land of the Living Prince
Beyond High Serai
JULY 11
Upwards into the Paghman Mountains, the narrow road led, at two thousand feet, through flint-strewn defiles and across gorges spanned only by rope bridges, often with a drop of several hundred feet. Hardy wheat actually grew at these heights, in fertile patches, and villages, built of stone, clustered against the towering mountain walls. Some peaks
were snowcapped in midsummer, soaring as high as twenty-five thousand feet. The camels, now unable to stand the conditions, had to be sent back. The caravan, both animals and people gasping for breath in the rarefied air, at times could move only at a snail’s pace.
‘Bala, bala! Upwards, upwards …’
The melting snow on the lower ranges was the worst cause of landslides at this time of year. Often the fallen boulders were piled so high on the rock-hewn ledges that it took hours to manhandle them out of the way. Meeting another file of animals, coming in the opposite direction meant, again and again, one or other backing along the ledge until it came to a place where the path was wide enough for two horses to pass at once.
It was six days into the journey, and everyone was blistered with sunburn from the ultraviolet light, in spite of the mixture of grease and charcoal which they smeared on their hands and faces. A day beyond High Serai, where the villagers had treated the people of the caravan well, with meat and drink and even applause as they left, the mules moved more and more reluctantly. Hired, with their muleteers, from the Serai, they were not accustomed to the northwards journey, and the increasing altitude now troubled them.
‘Bala, bala!’
Viciously, one of the mules kicked at its owner, who was trying to urge it around an especially difficult curve in the path, studded with slippery, cobble-like stones. The man lashed at the mule, losing his temper, just as they reached a spot where the path widened. In a second, the animal had turned and snapped at the man, its eyes rolling and its lungs gasping for breath.
Its teeth sank into his shoulder, going right through the thickly padded mountain coat, into the flesh, and held on fast. The mountaineer, screaming with agony, flailed about, while the mules in front and behind started to buck and kick.
Before anyone could see exactly how it happened, the mule and the muleteer were over the edge, bumping and rolling to their deaths in the valley floor, five hundred feet below.
Adam edged his way past the remaining animals to see if anything could be done. Nothing could. The man and the mule lay, some distance apart now, with no possibility of rescue or of climbing up. As Adam and the others watched through their binoculars, the badly injured man, knowing what his fate would be, rolled over slightly, and drew his gun. At the first shot, the mule jerked and lay still. The watchers turned away before the second report echoed from the rocks.
Azambai had joined Adam now. His face was taut. ‘Which mule was that?’
‘Mule number five, sir. Akram Abbasi’s,’ said one of the mountaineers.
‘Adam,’ whispered Azambai in The Eagle’s ear, ‘we have lost not only a man and a mule – we’ve lost all our money.’
‘What, both the gold and the reserve?’
‘That’s right. I wanted it to be secure, so I put it in the panniers of the best mule, and placed the most reliable men front and back. I should have dispersed it, I see that now.’
Adam was not pleased. ‘You are in charge of loading, and we must not fall out, whatever happens. But I don’t like the idea of being completely penniless.’
‘We’ll just have to manage,’ said the captain.
They could not buy any more food or weapons now. They would not be able to pay for the lost mule and the hire of the ones they still had left. They would not be able to bribe their way out of trouble, or reward anyone for services. There would be no way to buy information …
That day they had covered seven parsangs, each parsang the distance a horse could travel in an hour. ‘Let’s call a midday halt when we get to a cultivated spot,’ said The Eagle. Azambai agreed, feeling his way along the rock face towards his place at the head of the convoy.
‘Bala, bala!’
Always upwards, the caravan inched forward, the air getting thinner by the minute. The travellers began to feel mountain sickness, which made them want to lie down and sleep; some with hallucinations and a constant drumming in their heads, the ‘torture of the mountain-demons’ which even acclimatization does not overcome. At one point the muleteers refused to go any further, and had to be threatened with guns.
As the sun was declining, mercifully, the road began to descend, passing through surprisingly lush but uncultivated land. Wild pomegranate, pear trees and cedars, lower-growing vegetation, replaced the eternal pines. The animals sensed the improvement first, and started to quicken their pace, in spite of the treacherous, gravelly stones underfoot.
Then, as if to dash their hopes, nature produced another trick. A wide, rushing torrent, fed by the melting snows of Yellow Mountain, crashed straight across the mountain ledge along which the travellers were picking their way, completely blocking it. It was nothing less than a huge waterfall, and to the less experienced seemed an impossible barrier. Noor, towards the middle of the caravan, saw the captain arguing with the guide sitting on a black horse behind him, and the file of animals stopped. Surely they would not be able to get past this?
Then she saw one man after another turn and pass a message to the one behind. Soon, the Nuristani in front of her said, in broken Dari, ‘Back up, we have to rush it. Pass it on – haraka, get moving!’
Slowly, painfully, the whole string, some sixty animals, retreated along the treacherous ledge, until Azambai’s horse, in the lead, had a space of about twenty feet between it and the foaming water gushing from above and disappearing into the valley to the right.
Azambai, as the others watched, kneed his horse and urged him forward, gaining enough impetus to plunge into the broad fall and to carry him through without being swept away. But supposing beyond the waterfall the road narrowed, or turned in a hairpin bend? Noor covered her eyes. When she looked again, the Turkestani, and his horse, had disappeared.
Now it was the turn of the second man, the Turkoman guide, who had been this way before and had obviously advised Azambai what to do. Without a moment’s hesitation he patted his horse’s head, pulled on the reins and then pushed them forward, the signal to leap. Instantly, the beautiful Kataghan pony, long golden mane flying, launched himself towards the foam. As Noor watched, he vanished, as in a scene from a folktale.
Slowly, one by one, the people of the caravan passed through the water curtain, emerging on the other side soaked through, but safe and sound. Even the mules were prepared to make the leap, sensing, perhaps, that there was no other way. As each rider passed through this unprecedented baptism, the sensation, the shock of the icy water and of going into the unknown seemed to last for an age, though it could only have taken a fraction of a second.
Beyond the waterfall, and hidden by its stark white sheets of water, plunging like an eternal veil, lay a small, neat, valley, with black tents pitched, sheep quietly grazing, children playing, and a group of women preparing a meal for the herders of the tableland. Steam rose from men, women and horses as they plodded, almost automatically, towards this community, human beings drawn irresistibly towards other humans, without reason or plan, feeling both misery and relief.
An old man, limping from some injury or disease, came towards them, and spoke in the rough Dari of the mountain.
‘Welcome! May you never be tired!’
‘May you be strong!’ Azambai said.
‘May you live forever. You came well through the falling waters.’
‘May you find salvation! We did not know any other way to do it!’ The captain grinned, recovering his good humour. ‘Where are we, friend?’
‘This is Tutabad: Place of Mulberries – look,’ he indicated thousands of mulberry trees, some very large, which covered the hills around his valley. ‘We are the people of Zinda-Mir, the Living Prince, and those are our tents.’
They had meat, but it was for sale. They could not afford to give any of it away; everything was measured, accounted for, in a frugal way which astonished the other Afghans, generally given to hopeless extravagance. But they soon realized that anything less than the most careful husbandry in this part of the mountains could lead to starvation, at least of protein.
r /> Qasim and the Nuristanis, however, having dried their clothes, went into the trees beyond the sheep meadows and came back, an hour later, with the carcasses of two fine white deer. There was food for both Muhjahidin and nomads. The herdspeople brought out green tea, salt, beans, barley and dried apricots.
They had no guns themselves and – unusually for mountain folk – did no hunting.
They had obviously organized their lives around mutton and wild fruit and vegetables, bartering meat and wool for other things which they needed. Hunting did not appeal to them. ‘Most of the animals here are foxes, lynx, wild cat,’ they said, in answer to Adam’s questions. He felt that it would not be polite to point out that they had seen herds of mountain goats, grouse, partridges and plenty of the white, as well as brown, deer. ‘We all have our own ways and customs,’ he said, and the twenty or so shepherds gravely agreed, rubbing the mutton fat into their beards as they sat around a fire, made from brightly burning cedar-wood.
There were no Russians in these parts, nor did the writ of the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan run here, either. The people were not nomads, for they had villages lower down the mountain. This was their summer pasture-land; where they camped for months at a time, since it was too far from their houses to bring the sheep up every day. They had heard something about a change of regime, but only that it was not popular. Yes, caravans did sometimes come through from the north or south, but people did not stop to spend time or to talk with them. Caravan people always seemed in a hurry to be on their way.
The shepherds showed little interest in The Eagle’s plans: to them, a caravan was a caravan, a body of people carrying on their own way of life, like the sheep people had theirs. They would take nothing for allowing the animals to graze on their ground, but bartered their delicious cake made of pounded walnuts and hazelnuts with honey for a few boxes of matches: a real luxury for them. Ordinarily, they explained, they kept a fire or two burning all the time to provide such heat and light as they needed. Adam fell asleep that night, thinking how idyllic a life it would be, to become a sheep farmer in the high mountains, to build his own house, to hunt and fish and live on hazelnut bread and yoghurt, forgetting the disaster of the lost money, and the not very good prospects of a small band like his trying to attack the might of the Russian Army at its great base of Qizil Qala.