‘What?’ Susan asked.
‘You really don’t want to know.’
‘That’s stupid. You might as well tell us.’
‘Well, we know now that there are no rocks along that path.’
‘But you’re scared, aren’t you, that there just might be and we might veer off and take another path where there might be rocks?’ Susan asked pointedly.
Peter nodded, looking unhappy that he had brought the subject up at all.
They decided Ashton would go first, followed by Susan. Peter would bring up the rear so that he could try and rescue either if they got stuck in a sand drift.
Ashton went down confidently. When he had reached the bottom of the slope, he got up and waved at them to tell them he was fine. They had tied their rucksacks together in a bundle and allowed it to drag behind him as he descended. They were relieved to find it hadn’t got snagged on a rock or any other protuberance on the way and Ashton was able to retrieve it without difficulty.
Susan was next. Peter came up to her and put his arms around her. He kissed her softly on the mouth. Then, without a word, he turned her around and gave her a little push. She started off smoothly enough. Then suddenly, she began gathering momentum. The sand blinded and choked her, cutting her face and hands. She found herself losing her balance and sliding along awkwardly, careening about, until she was going down, face first. She willed herself to keep going and finally found herself at the bottom, the breath knocked out of her, choking on the sand which had got into her eyes, mouth, nostrils and ears.
Ashton came running forward to help her up. By the time she was on her feet and had, with his help, begun walking towards the spot where the mules were waiting, Peter had also come down the slope and was approaching her, looking quite unruffled.
‘That is the very last time I go to a beach!’ Susan now swore, spitting sand.
‘Good girl!’ Peter said with a smile.
Susan slid a quick sideways glance at Ashton and saw that he too had a smile on his face.
The ground on which they now stood could have passed for a Hollywood visual of an extraterrestrial landscape; rough, undulating, barren terrain stretched for miles on end, with huge boulders randomly scattered across it like marbles. In the far distance, further to the east, stood the line of mountains they had seen from the crest line; only, they looked much further away now. They found a small mound atop which stood a boulder that would shelter them from the onslaught of the wind. Here, they dropped their rucksacks and tethered their mules.
At their makeshift campsite, they took stock of their loads; they now had only a third of what they had set out with in the morning. Also, water was going to be a problem. They were on a flat tabletop and the river they had seen from the crest line was flowing, as far as they could make out, through a steep gorge at least a mile to their south. There hadn’t been any snow on the ground; they would have to look behind the rocks for ice patches. The only positive was that on the side of the mountain they had just passed through, the sky was clear and they were bathed in golden sunshine.
‘So what do we do now?’ Peter asked.
‘Well, we can wait here for the Jhagun to find us,’ Susan suggested ‘just as the letter had asked us to.’
‘That’s something we could do,’ Ashton agreed quietly. ‘Going further ahead isn’t going to make it better. If we are able to light a fire, it will be seen for miles. I’ll go and see if there’s any ice we can scrape off the rocks and melt for water.’
‘There’s a lot of dung lying around, probably from local herds of kiang – a kind of Tibetan wild ass. I’ll gather as much as I can for the fire,’ Peter volunteered, picking a plastic sheet in which to gather up the droppings.
‘What do they eat?’ Susan asked curiously. ‘I can’t see anything growing here.’
‘Oh, there’s always grass on the steppe; you just have to look for it.’
Peter found enough dung to start a fire and he cooked what had become their staple fare – the usual baked beans and meat – over the flames. They ate the stuff directly from the tins with their fingers, their backs resting against the boulder, their eyes gazing into the flames.
‘It’s good, but not – ’ Susan started to say, licking her fingers clean, and stopped abruptly. Her voice choked as she mumbled, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then a shudder passed through her and she burst into sobs.
Neither man said a word, their expressions wooden as they stared into the fire. Then Ashton looked up and motioned to Peter who went up to Susan and put his arms around her.
‘It’s okay, sweetie, you can tell me,’ he soothed. ‘I know I’m not half the cook Duggy used to be, but…’
She looked up and began laughing and crying at the same time, pushing him away, pummelling his face with punches. ‘Can’t you ever be serious?’ she said with a laugh that could have been a sob. But gradually, she settled down in his arms, the occasional sniffle escaping her.
As night descended, they felt the wind pick up and saw a blanket of clouds sweep across the sky and obscure the stars. Ashton quietly picked up his sleeping bag and started moving away from the fire and around the rock so that the boulder would stand between them. Susan started to say something to him, but Peter stopped her with a gesture.
When Ashton was out of sight, she whispered, ‘Why is he doing that?’
‘It’s all right,’ Peter murmured softly, ‘he probably just wants to be alone.’
They lay together and Susan was soon fast asleep on his arm. For Peter, it was an awkward position and beginning to hurt, but he didn’t want to move his arm just yet for fear of waking her. When she began snoring softly, he carefully disengaged his arm and got up. Then he went to where his rucksack lay and picked out the old battered hip flask he had filled with whisky at the hotel in Peshawar. He had known that it would be a long time before he could get another drink in Afghanistan and had rationed himself accordingly and taken no more than one pull after Zhawar.
There would still be enough for the night
, he thought, taking a swallow and letting the alcohol work its magic
Peter made his way to the other side of the boulder to check on Ashton and found him asleep, sitting up against the boulder. He nudged the older man awake and got him to lie down. Then he came back to his side of the boulder where Susan slept. The sky was now completely overcast and the last embers of the fire were dying out. He got into his sleeping bag as quietly as he could and snuggled up close to Susan.
‘Peter,’ he heard her say. Her voice sounded wide awake.
‘Yeah?’
‘Where did you go – to Henry?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I thought so.’
‘I thought you were asleep,’ he said, pulling himself upright, his back resting against the rock.
‘Couldn’t,’ she confessed. ‘Is he all right?’
‘Yeah, he’ll be fine,’ he said as casually as he could.
‘And how about you?’
‘Me? I’m okay. Really.’
‘You could talk about it – if you wanted to.’
‘Sure,’ he said lamely.
Only, there was nothing to talk about. They were all there – the ones you killed and the ones that died with you. They all came and sat by your bed at night, not uttering a word; just sitting around you, all of them – even the ones you had never known.
‘Hey,’ he said after some time.
‘Uh, uh?’
‘I was really spooked out today.’
‘About Duggy?’
‘No. Okay, yeah, that too. But what I meant was the way Henry found that “gate” we went through.’
‘What about it?’
‘You believe in this dream thing, don’t you? I mean, till now, it was okay. We had some kind of map, we had broken some kind of code and we were getting to this Shambhala place. But this morning, Henry suddenly wakes up after two days of dreaming about this mythical gate; and the best part is,
it’s actually there
!’
Susan pulled herself upright and sat up against the rock beside him.
‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said. ‘No, a joint, if you have one.’
‘Sure,’ he said, sounding mildly surprised. ‘Didn’t know you did that stuff.’
‘All academics do. Helps you concentrate, especially on the abstract.’
Peter leaned back, slid his hand into his jacket pocket and took out a small paper packet. From its folds, he extracted the two small cigarettes he had rolled when they were spending time at the
padaban
’s campsite. He handed Susan one and lit the other for himself from a glowing piece of dung that he pulled out of the fire. She took a deep pull. Peter noticed that it didn’t make her cough. Her eyes just widened once before she closed them. He held out his hip flask, but she shook her head.
‘You know,’ she said contemplatively, returning to the subject of Henry’s dream, ‘to most people who live in this part of the world, that wouldn’t seem strange at all. We were supposed to meet the shaman who would guide us to the Gate; only, he visited Henry in a dream. Henry was the “chosen one”, the
avatari
who would be allowed access through the Gate.’
‘Do you know how weird you’re sounding?’ Peter remarked. ‘And believe me, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things, but nothing like this!’
‘Okay, so which part is bothering you?’ Susan asked. ‘We got here, didn’t we?’
Peter thought about it for a moment, taking a pull on the joint he was holding between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Yeah, I guess you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘But if Henry was fated to be “guided”, we could, by the same argument, claim that we were all fated to meet, break the code with your help and win at Zhawar. And Duggy was fated to die.’
His voice had risen and he stopped abruptly, embarrassed, stealing a quick glance at her.
She was looking at him, a half smile playing on her lips.
‘Wow. So Peter, you’re actually contemplating the paradox of free will.’
‘Look, you don’t have to treat me like some redneck,’ he began, half irritated, pulling away from her.
She pulled him back closer. ‘Loosen up, silly! It’s a great question, one of the most primal. And it’s never been answered. That’s why it’s a paradox.’
‘Go on,’ he said, mollified, leaning back against her shoulder. ‘You know, I think it’s the joint doing its thing, but I actually understand what you’re saying.’
‘Good. That means it’s good cannabis. Anyway, the paradox is, if everything is fated, then do our deeds, based on free will, influence the outcome of events in any way? The flip side is, if there is a god, a supreme being with omnipotent powers, or whatever, does he not know and, therefore, direct the outcome of the future?’
They remained silent for some time, before Peter spoke again.
‘What’s the general consensus?’
‘As I said, it’s not a question that can be answered. Both statements are true and they contradict each other. Therefore, it’s a paradox.’
‘You know a lot about all of this, don’t you?’
‘Have to. As a mathematician, you have to deal a lot with paradoxes. They are an elegant way of saying, we don’t know.’
‘And what do you
believe
?’ he asked, turning and clasping her face between his hands.
‘I believe, Peter Radigan, that we wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t kicked butt at Zhawar. And I want you.’
‘Just now?’ he asked, surprised.
‘It’ll help me sleep.’
‘Sure,’ he said, tossing his joint into the fire. ‘Never thought about it that way, though.’
In the morning, there was frost on the ground. The sky was full of woolly cotton clouds, except in the west, where welcome sunlight streamed in from a patch of open sky. They sat having tea after a breakfast of oatmeal and powdered milk.
‘So now what?’ Susan asked. ‘Do we wait here or go ahead?’
Ashton was about to reply, but Peter silenced him with a gesture. The younger man had his head cocked, alert to a sound the other two could not hear.
‘What is it?’ Ashton asked in an undertone.
Then they all heard the sound Peter had been listening to – a low, steady drone. Without a word, he pointed to the helicopters as they cleared the crest line, one after another, and dipped into the valley. The helicopters were facing away from them when they swooped into the valley, but within moments, the pilot of the lead one had spotted Peter and his group. They would have been difficult to miss, anyway, in that flat, featureless terrain, with the mid-morning light on them and the pack animals by their side. The helicopters now changed direction and made for them.
‘Our friends,’ Ashton said dully. ‘It’s got to be them. The people Ru San Ko had warned us about.’
They were looking at the helicopters now – four in all – their faces betraying the shock and frustration that gripped them.
We were so close
, Ashton thought.
‘I would really like to know how they got here, that too, bang on time,’ Peter said wonderingly. Then he asked, his head cocked towards Susan, a sardonic half-smile playing on his face, ‘I don’t suppose you had anything to do with it, did you?’
She spun around to look at him. Their eyes locked and he saw she was furious.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, her voice filled with incredulity and indignation.
‘Okay, so it’s not you,’ he concluded, raising his hands in a gesture of concession, before trying to lay a placating hand on her shoulder.
‘Get away from me!’ she snapped, slapping his hand off and pushing him away.
‘Look,’ he said, trying to appease her, ‘wasn’t thinking clearly. It was just a bad joke. Forget it. Please!’
The sound of the approaching helicopters drowned out his voice. They watched them land, their rotors running, and saw men and animals being offloaded from the clamshell doors in the rear, along with what looked to Ashton like three-wheeled vehicles.
‘It’s the “Hip” the Russian Mi-8,’ Peter said, almost to himself. ‘Now who in god’s name are we up against?’
They watched in fascination as the men organized themselves, quickly stacking the loads and pulling them clear of the helicopters which took off one after another, swaying in an ungainly manner as they struggled to gain power at that altitude, before slowly ascending and disappearing from view. The men who had emerged from them were all in combat fatigues, complete with jackets, AK-47 rifles slung on their shoulders. To Ashton, it seemed that the men were oblivious of their presence, but then, they had plenty of time to deal with them; the three of them were not about to go anywhere.