Ahead on the road he already sees the original toll booth he had been trying to avoid, the pile of wood burning across the road, a Pajero parked outside it. Without slowing down he tears through the flames, brilliant cinders spraying into the night. He hears a gunshot or perhaps it is something in the fire, a knot exploding in a log. Not knowing when he took it out of the waistband, he is holding his gun in his hand. The leopard is clamped between his thighs and the jangle and clatter of chains comes from the back of the pickup and the road winds through the night and it isn’t long before he sees a trail of dust raised by the vehicle that is following him, perhaps a mile and a half behind him, the dust glowing faintly in the moonlight the way mist marks the path of a river, and he sees the funnels of two headlights and cannot believe the speed at which they are gaining. He hears the flat reports that long-barrelled guns give over open ground, one bullet shattering the mirror on the passenger’s side. And in his own mirror he sees another set of headlights moving across the open desert floor in a pale hovering of raw dust, coming at him at a diagonal. Somewhere ahead is the Wolf River. After crossing the bridge he would be only twenty minutes away from Megiddo.
Sweat is soaking through his clothes. Rounding the corner of the second-to-last hill, he brings the pickup to a sideways halt in the middle of the road. Ahead of him the bridge over the river is burning with flames as tall as electricity poles. He gets out and stands looking at it, pieces of wood falling into the water twenty feet below. The ground seems to shake with the force of the fire, as though the dead are making room for him down there – a vision of Allah’s left side on the Day of Judgement.
He takes the tarpaulin off the frame, undoing the straps that fasten it to the metal. The American, exposed, looks at the fire in astonishment. Mikal drags the tarpaulin towards where the ground slopes towards a gravel bar at the edge of the river, and walks into the river with the heavy cloth until he is up to his waist in the moving water, pushing the folds of the tarpaulin under with both his hands. He looks up towards the bridge – calculating how many of its wooden planks are gone. The burning pieces fall and hiss as they meet the red-lit water. By sitting down and dipping his head below the surface he drenches himself completely, and then walks out of the river dragging the soaked tarpaulin behind him, twice as heavy as before.
He comes up the slope and the American begins to struggle wildly against the chains when he sees him appear with the waterlogged cloth, fully comprehending what Mikal has in mind. The man twists with his teeth gritted and then screams the English word Mikal does understand, ‘No! No! No! No! No!’ feet scrabbling against the metal bed, running sideways. Mikal hurls the tarpaulin onto him like a fisherman’s net, dripping golden drops, losing his balance from the swing for a moment, and then climbing up after it, making sure that the man is entirely covered. He leaps off the bed and gets in behind the steering wheel, putting the cub under his wet shirt. Working the steering wheel as fast as he can he aims the pickup into the mouth of the fire.
I thought of your beauty and this arrow made of a wild thought is in my marrow.
The words Naheed had quoted.
He enters the blind lethal power of a hundred suns and the American hasn’t stopped shouting or struggling under the tarpaulin and the tyres judder as they go over the burning planks, the thickets of flame pressed against the vehicle, twisting in their own hot wind and the fire has a sound too, the roar of a primordial beast, the sound of the river fading within it, but as he progresses across the bridge it returns, the flame suddenly silent, and the phenomenon repeats itself as he moves forward, the blunt needles of the cub’s paws digging into his skin, the heat becoming unbearable and soon he realises that he is saying Naheed’s name, calling out to her in desperation, because he has to get across, because the bridge is the bridge between the innermost part of him and the American’s, something that can’t be consumed or rendered meaningless even by fire, a bridge to his parents and Basie, to a world where Jeo is still alive and where Tara never went to prison, to the white-hot core of the fire, the flash that took away Rohan’s sight. He won’t let them catch the American soldier, and at that moment he loves the American soldier, and he loves the two he killed, and he loves the dead girl who wore jasmine, so much so that he feels his heart will not bear the weight of it and will kill him before the fire kills him. The pickup lurches from side to side as the planks break under it. The flames reach in when the windshield blackens before his eyes and then cracks with a shear of light, and he no longer knows if he is moving in a horizontal line or falling through the air vertically with the vehicle covered in flames. But then suddenly he is on the other side. He stops and opens the door and, dropping the cub onto the ground, struggles back onto the bed of the pickup, feeling as though he is doing it with extreme slowness. He coughs the smoke out of his lungs. Catches a glimpse of the burning tyres as he goes, the blistered paintwork.
The tarpaulin is on fire here and there in coin-sized patches and he rips it off the American, revealing him and his chains. Long fronds of steam are attached to them, taking fresh shapes with each new second, the sling and plaster cast smouldering a fevered red in one place.
The man gasping for breath. Mikal smothers the fire on the plaster and touches the chains to see if they are hot and then wipes the sweat and condensation from the American’s eyes with both hands. When he climbs down he sees the group of men ten feet away from the pickup, the hostile spirits of unfamiliar places, lit by the burning bridge. More than a dozen guns are pointed at him and at the American, and one of the men is holding the cub. He is as large and strong as the American. Mikal stands watching them with his hands placed on top of his head, all the exhaustions of his life catching up with him.
*
The room they are put into has the odour of dust. A hood has been placed over the American’s head, his chains removed. Mikal gave them the keys and several of the men climbed onto the pickup’s bed. Instead of freeing the American completely from the chains they unlocked the strands that bound him to the pickup and carried him down like a metal effigy, a chainmailed knight.
He doesn’t know where they are – Waziristan or Afghanistan. The wrists of both of them are tied behind their backs.
They travelled through the darkness until the modest birds of the desert had appeared in the young air, and the sun climbed in long lengths of gold, scarlet and silver, and begun to burn without diminishing, and it was midmorning by the time they arrived at a small village and drove through its central street full of rolling dust, past the mosque, the few shops, a dozen children and almost as many dogs running behind their truck. The truck stopped at the gate of the largest house on the other side of the village and one of the men from the back leapt out and opened the gate and the truck drove through into a large courtyard filled with towering she-date palms in flower.
They left them here in the room and went away. Mikal had refused to answer their questions concerning the American and had watched them puzzle over the situation. Should they release Mikal? He had after all captured the American and put him in chains. But what lay behind Mikal’s ambivalence, almost tenderness, towards the soldier?
Mikal looks at him in the semidarkness. The cloth bag over the head. The singed cast on the arm. The fabric of the shalwar kameez that is minutely wrinkled from where Mikal had wound the chains about him.
It is an underground room and the floor is of large unglazed clay tiles, badly out of line, like the walls. There is a high glassless window from which a shaft of light barely reaches the floor, most of it dissolving in the darkness above their heads. He sleeps in dreamless exhaustion and wakes some time later when the door at the top of the stairs opens. An old man is climbing down very slowly. He comes and stands looking at Mikal and the American. It is obvious that he doesn’t see very well. The silhouettes of several children have appeared at the door at the top of the stairs and the man walks to the lowest step and raises his antler-like hands, shouts at them and they scatter. He is small and dark and Mikal suddenly has a feeling that the smell of dust and soil is coming from him. As though in old age he has decided to slowly revert back to what humans are made of.
‘Do you want something to eat?’ he asks Mikal quietly.
Mikal nods. ‘What about the white man?’
The man’s black eyes look at the cloaked head. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He takes a step closer to Mikal.
‘Did you catch him deliberately? To claim the bounty offered by that Arab guerrilla?’
‘No.’
‘Who are you?’ the man says.
It is hot in the room and he can see the drops of sweat on the man’s abraded brow.
Mikal shakes his head.
They remain silent.
‘I am looking for some people,’ Mikal says. ‘I think they have been taken away by’ – he nods towards the American – ‘his people.’
‘Westerners.’
‘Yes.’
‘Westerners,’ the old man says in his raspy voice.
‘Yes.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Mikal.’
The old man says the name in silence to himself. ‘Who are your people?’
‘You wouldn’t know. I am not from Waziristan.’
The man thinks. ‘You caught him yesterday? It was a day with three suns.’
‘There was a sun and two sundogs, one on either side, yes.’
‘It’s mentioned in great and ancient books.’
Mikal nods. He’d read about sundogs in his astronomy books.
The man looks at the American. ‘I fought against Westerners when they were here in the 1930s.’ He closes his eyes and opens them again. In the weak light the eyes betray nothing. He seems to be studying the shadows in the room.
‘I myself was held captive by the Americans,’ Mikal says. ‘I didn’t really know what they wanted from me. I am afraid of what they might be doing to the people they have picked up.’
‘We can’t know what the Westerners want,’ the old man says. ‘To know what they want you have to eat what they eat, wear what they wear, breathe the air they breathe. You have to be born where they are born.’
‘I am not sure. You mentioned books. We can learn things from books.’
‘No one from here can know what the Westerners know,’ the man says. ‘The Westerners are unknowable to us. The divide is too great, too final. It’s like asking what the dead or the unborn know.’
The man reaches out a trembling hand in the partial light and wipes the sweat off Mikal’s brow. He is shocked to find it cold. Hard and bloodless.
‘Is this your place?’ Mikal asks. ‘What will happen to us, me and him?’
‘I am just a servant. They will decide tonight. They have sent for all the leaders of the surrounding tribes.’
The man turns to go.
‘I need to make a phone call,’ Mikal says, realising how absurd it sounds as he says it. ‘I need to tell someone that I am coming back, need to tell her not to lose heart.’
‘Is she your love?’
‘Yes, but she might have to marry someone else.’
The man’s nod is a reminder that certain things will persist in the world. He nods and then continues towards the stairs.
The sunlight from the high window has become dark yellow when the old man returns and reaches behind Mikal and slowly unbinds his hands. ‘I have been told to bring you out. They want to talk to you.’
Mikal follows the old man up the stairs and they go out into the large courtyard. Somewhere nearby a cow has just been slaughtered. Several men cross their path with tubs full of glistening meat – one is holding a set of bloody knives, another is dragging an enormous rear leg, the hoof scoring a line on the packed earth of the courtyard. The singed pickup has been brought here from the riverbank and sits propped on stacks of bricks in one corner, its charred tyres taken off. Two boys appear – they must be children of servants because their clothes are dirty and their hair matted, the teeth already yellow – and they walk at a distance behind Mikal and the old man, their words coming to Mikal. ‘He single-handedly caught the American, who killed fifty dear Muslims and cut out their hearts …’ ‘The American will be released into the hills tomorrow and hunted with dogs …’ ‘The American stole his uncle’s pickup and he gave chase and caught him …’ The old man turns around and his mere glance is enough to make the boys vanish, and then Mikal and the old man go along a veranda that is being washed and wiped with a rag by three small children.
They enter a room. It is the house of a very rich family, the doors tall with great brass hinges, the ceilings four times as high as the doors. Sitting in the room on a large overstuffed sofa is the hale-looking man with the eagle’s profile Mikal remembers from the burning bridge. He had made to shoot off the American’s chains until Mikal gave him the keys. He is in his early thirties, a bandolier full of rifle bullets crossing his torso at a diagonal, a pistol in a holster of tooled black leather under the armpit. He is holding the dagger. On the table in front of him there is a halfeaten meal, a newspaper and a plastic vase full of plastic flowers. He glances briefly at Mikal and then goes back to contemplating the dagger.
‘What is your name?’ he asks without looking up. The floor at his feet is glistening in wet arcs, some small, others wide, depending on the length of the children’s arms.
‘I think I’ve told you that already,’ Mikal says.
The man raises his head and stares at him. Then he puts the dagger on the newspaper. Even his small gestures are expansive, referring to and taking in his entire mansion.
‘Tell me about the American.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. I found him in the desert.’
‘Why didn’t you kill him the moment you saw him? Don’t you know they are at war with us?’
‘Where’s the leopard cub?’
‘Tell me,’ the man leans forward and says, ‘have you heard of a lady called Madeleine? No? In 1996, this lady named Albright Madeleine, the US ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on television how she felt about the fact that five hundred thousand Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. Do you know what she said? She said that it was “a very hard choice” but “we think the price is worth it”. These are her exact words. How do you feel about that?’