The sun had cleared the rock face and was bright overhead when Peter and his group woke up lazily from their short nap. A small boy brought breakfast consisting of some blackish tea and
khista
bread, prepared from dough that had been kneaded with milk instead of water. It was softer and far more palatable than what they had been eating so far. The sun warmed the campsite which was carpeted in soft grass and sheltered from the wind by a towering mountain, the summit of which was crowned by a fresh powdering of snow, probably from the previous night. They were eating their breakfast in a leisurely manner, slowly savouring the taste of the food, when their guide approached Peter and murmured something to him. The old man appeared diffident as he waited for a response. Peter rose to his feet immediately and clapped him on the shoulder. Then he turned to Ashton.
‘We need to strike a deal with the
padaban
, Colonel,’ he announced.
Ashton got up and the three men approached the
padaban
, a wiry old man with leathery skin and dirty, stained teeth. He was saddling a yak and shouting at the women in his group who were busy packing up. The
padaban
grinned in response to what the guide from Zhawar had to say to him and, after a moment or two, picked up an old .22 rifle from his gear that lay next to the yak. He pointed to it and said, ‘
Mushmush
,’ adding many more words and accompanying gestures that clearly expressed his unhappiness over his firearm. He then pointed to the AK-47 in Peter’s hands – a parting gift from Suleiman.
The guide translated the man’s words for Peter who, in turn, interpreted the guide’s version for his team members.
‘It’s going to be five hundred dollars for the trip – or the AK, which he wants, so he can replace his
mushmush
– his mouse killer.’
‘Tell him we’re fine giving him the money,’ Ashton said, taking the cash from his jacket pocket, his expression clearly indicating that he wasn’t keen on being a part of any effort that went into arming the Wakhan with assault rifles.
This was relayed to the
padaban
who accepted the money with a philosophical shrug. He would probably get two of the same rifles for that money in Feyzabad, even though it would involve a trip to purchase them.
Happy with the deal, the
padaban
generously offered the team the option of continuing the journey on the back of yaks, an offer Susan and Peter accepted with alacrity. The women brought the animals and helped their guests up on the worn blankets that served as saddles. Peter and Susan discovered that the ungainly shaggy-coated beasts had a peculiar pungent smell of their own, the rancid odour more overpowering than any they had already become used to.
The team set off on their journey and as the trail opened up, Susan noticed that Peter was riding alongside.
‘There goes my bath,’ she complained.
‘Well, it wasn’t going to last long, anyway,’ Peter said, remembering how she had clambered onto the back of her mount.
She grimaced as she held onto the animal by grasping clumps of its bristly hair.
‘Susan,’ Peter asked, ‘are you sure about where we’re headed?’
‘According to the
paiza
, we’re meant to go to the “She Blood Mountain” or Rakhel-e-Shaitan. So if that’s where the
padaban
is guiding us, we’re on the right track.’
‘And from there?’
‘From there, we go to,’ she said, fishing her notebook out of her pocket, ‘a
wu
. That’s a shaman or what you would call a practitioner of black magic, like a witch doctor.’
‘Wow!’ Peter exclaimed, his features contorted in an exaggerated expression of awe. ‘That’s going to be
something
! I’ve seen some of
those
guys; they’re really bad news!’
‘Where did you see them?’ she asked, intrigued.
‘In Colombia; in the rain forest.’
‘Well, at least you don’t have any trouble believing they exist.’
‘No, ma’am, I don’t. It’s just that I wouldn’t like to meet them – if I could help it. Okay, so where does this doc-boy guide us to?’
‘To the Xi Wangmu or “Queen Mother of the West” – the goddess of immortality according to Chinese mythology. The author of the
paiza
could just as easily have inscribed “Western Gate”, instead, which would have been Xi Wang Guan.’
‘And you think there’s a reason for that?’
She shrugged. ‘These inscriptions on the
paiza
were intended for Marco Polo who would have been familiar with the mythology. The author may just have had a quirky sense of humour, because before the goddess became a follower of Daoism, which made her benign, she used to be a ferocious demon who would tear her victims limb from limb and devour them.’
Peter made a face as he caught Susan grinning.
They travelled in a roughly north-easterly direction, following one of the many trails in the Hindu Kush, climbing gradually along a path that ran almost parallel to the Amu Darya which lay to their left. They were in that strange panhandle of land created as a result of the ‘great game’ between the Russian Czar and the British Raj in the 1900s. The Wakhan Corridor had been a part of the Buddhist Kushan Empire in the first century
CE
and had probably been visited in 1271 by Marco Polo who described it in his
Road to Cathay
as ‘continuous tracts of wilderness, where you must carry with you what you require’. It had not changed much since those days and remained one of the world’s least explored regions, with the present war contributing, in some measure, to its relatively virgin state.
Peter and his team were passing through country which reminded them somewhat of geologically similar Leh, but here, with few people in sight, the place looked more desolate. It was now autumn, with winter still three weeks away, but they knew that as they continued to climb higher, temperatures would drop sharply. They passed large colonies of furry orange marmots which popped their heads out of their burrows to look at them. The
padaban
also pointed out a spot high up on the mountainside, where some Marco Polo sheep stood looking down at them, their huge, ungainly horns spiralling out from either side of their heads.
At their halting place for the night, Ashton came forward to help Susan off her yak.
‘So what is the significance of the equinox?’ he asked her as she thanked him.
Without answering the question, Susan quickly jumped to one side to avoid being struck by the yak’s horns which it had playfully swung in her direction with a great bellow.
‘I’m sorry, but what did you say?’ she asked Ashton, a little rattled by the experience, but recollected his words a moment later. ‘Oh yes, the equinox. Peter might understand; it’s the time of Halloween. The Bon used to think it had special significance in terms of celestial balance and it was considered an auspicious time. From the scientific point of view, it’s a time when there’s an apparent depletion in the earth’s magnetic field, making for calmer seas and fewer avalanches in the mountains.’ She paused, pulled out a water bottle from her gear, took a swig and continued, ‘I really don’t know what the underlying reason is, but the
paiza
says that the gateway is to be crossed at the time of the Chu Fen, which is the Chinese term for the autumnal equinox.’
It was on the second day since they had started on their journey with the
padaban
that they reached Qila Panja, the confluence of two rivers: the Pamir to the north and the Wakhan in the south. They followed the course of the latter, noticing how steeply the trail rose from there, with the terrain becoming more rugged than they could have imagined. During the day, they would sight more game; at night, they heard wolves howling close to their camp.
Susan discovered that camp life offered a kind of freedom that was exhilarating. Every morning, you woke up on a different verdant stretch, the cold, invigorating winds of the Pamirs sweeping away the sleep from your eyes as you bundled up your things and rode off on the trail. Each member of the
padaban’s
brood, from the oldest to the youngest, had a job which he or she would perform with hardly any need for supervision. The old herdsman had three wives and at least a dozen children whose biological mothers would have been impossible to identify, should anyone have cared to do so; in their scheme of things, it didn’t seem to matter. The women did most of the work, with the
padaban
strutting around on horseback, a benevolent smile on his lips and a clay pipe between his teeth, as he shouted at and cajoled his family in turn. At night, he would smoke cannabis, sitting around a fire and singing and dancing clumsily to the beat of a small drum called a
daf
, much to the amusement of the women, who would laugh heartily, even if they did make a half-hearted stab at decorum by muffling their expressions of mirth with the shawls which covered their heads and most of their faces.
It was around the fire one night, when the embers were dying and Peter had taken a deep drag from the chillum, a clay pipe filled with cannabis that the
padaban
had offered him as a gesture of hospitality, that he broached the subject that had been on his mind. Handing the chillum back to their host, Peter asked the old man about the Rakhel-e-Shaitan. The others had left for the warmth of their yurts when the wind picked up, blowing out the fire, but the two men had remained outdoors, huddled in their shawls, not wanting to sleep just yet.
‘It is a high valley in the shadow of the great mountain of that name which reaches into the sky, uninhabited but for a tribe of kafirs,’ he said. ‘These people are very fierce and shun contact with all others, few of them ever venturing out, except to trade in pelts with the Kyrgyz. Cursed by Allah, they can never spend a second night at the same campsite and roam the valley incessantly. They are skilled hunters who trap and kill their prey through magic, invoking djinns for assistance.’ Here, his voice dropped theatrically. ‘They are also
aadam khor
, Peter Khan,’ the
padaban
whispered.
Peter recognized the Pashtun expression for cannibals.
‘Really! Why are they so accursed?’ he asked the old man, feigning a casual interest.
‘The story belongs to a more ancient time, much before the Prophet, when there used to be a route through these mountains connecting rich and powerful kingdoms from the East. Many people would travel on this route, driven by commerce and the quest for knowledge.’
The
padaban
’s eyes strayed from the dying fire into which he had been gazing all the while. Peter remained silent. The old man would tell his story; this was just good cannabis having its say.
‘On that route,’ the old man continued, ‘there were many caravanserais, perhaps bigger and more hospitable than the one you just left, where large groups of travellers could rest and spend many days before resuming their arduous journey. Overlooking one such caravanserai stood a mountain – now known as the Rakhel-e-Shaitan. There lived on this mountain a group of evil magicians who practised their dark arts and would prey on the souls of unsuspecting travellers camping at the caravanserai below.’
The old man cleared his throat noisily and spat out a gob of phlegm, missing Peter by inches.
‘The day arrived,’ he continued, ‘when these magicians felt they could wrest for themselves the secret of immortality and began practising unspeakable rituals to this end. This angered Allah, whose patience and mercy had been tested to the limit. He sent down a
jaljala
, an earthquake, which destroyed, in one fell swoop, the magicians’ citadel, the caravanserai and the route itself. While this earthquake was taking place, a group of these magicians, terrified by Allah’s fury, beseeched Him for mercy. Their lives were spared, as a result, but the curse on them was irreversible and they are doomed to wander in the wilderness forever.’
‘And is that why this mountain is considered an evil place?’
‘Yes,’ the
padaban
replied with a nod, ‘and they say the spirits of the magicians still haunt the area.’
‘You believe all this, old man?’ Peter asked, his wry smile hidden by the darkness.
‘When you have reached my age, you have seen much of life and do not know what to believe,’ the man replied gravely, staring into the fire. Then he added softly, ‘But it makes a good story to tell at this time, does it not, Peter Khan?’
A chuckle escaped his lips and bubbled into a laugh. He was still sitting by the fire, shaking with mirth, when Peter entered his yurt.
* * *
While Peter and his team were nearly as far from civilization as one could get in their mission to reach the Rakhel-e-Shaitan, the technician on duty at the Second Space Wing of the Falcon Air Force Station, Colorado Springs, which provided command of and control over Department of Defense QuickBird satellites, was busy making a call to a number in Texas. Claire answered the call, unperturbed by the fact that the caller did not identify himself, but merely proceeded to read out a series of numbers instead. These were ten-figure map coordinates. He had not plotted them on a map; nor would he want to. In the twenty years he had been working in the field, he had learnt that it was always a good idea to know only what you were supposed to. It was the best way to retain your sanity.
Claire noted down the numbers passed on by the technician and plotted them on a map.
‘That’s where they are just now,’ she informed Josh some time later.
‘How did you get these?’ he asked curiously.
‘Friends of mine,’ she answered laconically.
He decided not to pursue the issue.
It doesn’t really matter
,
does it
? he told himself.
‘I think we should launch,’ he said, looking at the map.
The woman looked back at him impassively.
* * *
It was on the fourth day since they had started on their journey from the
padaban
’s yurt that Peter and his team reached the old man’s
geshlaq
, a village consisting of no more than fifty families. The old man dropped off his women and his luggage and, after a quick cup of tea, they set off again on the trail. They were heading for the Kyrgyz village of Kotal further east, where the
padaban
would arrange for a Kyrgyz guide for Peter and his team. For the first time since they had known him, they saw the
padaban
anxious; the long-standing feud between the Wakhis and the Kyrgyz had settled into an uneasy truce between the two peoples who sought to confine themselves to their respective portions of the Wakhan Corridor. The
padaban’s
grip on his
mushmush
was tight as he rode on.