Authors: Amber Green
"Whoa, whoa, whoa! With all due respect, sir—Mike—I can eat all by myself. I don't need to be led like some brat on a pony ride at the county fair. Why did you teach me how to steer with my legs if it wasn't to free up my hands?"
Oscar rooted through a pack and unwrapped what looked like a fat Pop-Tart to hand him. “Eat with your left."
Echo giggled. “For two months you've been saying ‘Don't use your left hand for anything outside a bathroom. Sit on your left hand if you have to. Stick it in your pocket or under your belt if you have to. Don't use your leyeft, your leyeft! Your unsanitary left! And now you're saying—"
"Don't get caught."
Echo blew a raspberry.
Mike gave me a worried look.
I was wondering myself. Either Echo was taking something I didn't know about, or he was one of those rare people who get completely giddy on a normal dose of codeine. The pills could be tainted, but that was only a remote chance. Especially compared to the chances of voluntary intoxication. Pot, while haraam and shameful to indulge in, was one of the most common summer weeds here. The world's most potent poppy fields were here too. I understood they were kept out of sight now, but I'd bet they were still around.
Breakfast was premade and premashed peanut butter sandwiches, washed down with water from the sippy tubes in our backpack bladders. Chewing got to be a chore, and eating took the first hour of our ride. Echo announced his second sandwich tasted just exactly like shit.
I asked him how he knew the exact taste of shit.
He flushed and said that wasn't an honest question.
When he finished eating, I retied his shemagh. He rolled his eyes and made kissy noises at me.
"Behave,” I said and tapped his nose with my forefinger, expecting to embarrass him.
He laughed and tried to bite me.
Oscar climbed to the ridge, though his helmet didn't break the line of the crest until he'd dropped to his belly to shimmy up the last few feet. He looked over the ridge, back the way we'd come, and in every direction. He shimmied down with the same caution, not standing until he was far enough down that when he stood, I still saw rocks behind his helmet, rather than sky.
"That's a man who knows what he's doing,” Echo said and sighed.
I grinned behind my shemagh. “You sound like a man who's been chewed up and spit out for doing it wrong."
"Once. By the walking stereotype there. A'course, I was lucky to survive the once. And the once before, and the once before that."
I shook my head. He was so young. “You never know when your count is up."
"Roger that."
I considered his heartfelt tone and changed the subject. “How old were you when you learned to ride?"
"Everything I did before I came here was sitting on ponies. I thought I was riding, though. I thought I was hot shit."
Behind us, Mike grunted. “You still think you are."
"Nope. Now I know I am."
"Oo rah,” I said, mockingly.
He saluted. “How old were you when you learned?"
I lifted one shoulder, a half shrug. “Riding was how we got around. I rode behind my older brother until I was seven. He put me on a horse of my own then so I could help with the herding."
He was staring at me. “You have an
older
brother?"
What could be remarkable about having an older brother
? “Why do you ask?"
He glanced back, as if for help.
Mike spoke from behind. “Your records say you're the oldest, Zulu. The one most likely to have a useful grasp of the language and culture. Was someone holding out on us?"
"No.” My mare tossed her head, and I laid a hand on her neck. “Hamid died. The Russians shot him."
Echo adjusted his sunglasses. “Soviets, you mean?"
He was such a child. “Same thing, when they're here instead of on the other side of the mountains where they belong. I don't care if they're Russians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukranians, Uzbeks, Khazak, Kirgiz, or any of the others. As a group they held half the fucking continent when I was a kid, and they wanted the rest of it."
Mike snorted. “They didn't want the whole continent. They wanted a secure pipeline from the Central Asian oilfields to a warm-water port and decided the best route was through Afghanistan. It was simple economics. They tried to take only what they felt they had to have."
Did Mike think I was as much a child as Echo? That I, the son of Rund the Schoolmaster, didn't know the history of my own people?
"Back when the Brits were strutting around like the baddest bullies on the planet, long before anyone drilled oilfields in Asia, the Russians were throwing their weight around, letting everyone know they were going to move in here as soon as they got around to it. The Brits drew our borders, including that ridiculous panhandle over the north of what's now Pakistan, so they could use the mountains and the Pakhtuns to shield them from the Russians. Meanwhile, the people on the ground, my people, found a national boundary drawn between one brother's house and the next, between a home and the nearest well, between a family's field and its pasture. The Durand Line wasn't designed to divide the Pakhtun, but that's what it did."
"Like the Texas border divided my people,” Oscar said quietly, remounting.
"You were warriors and troublesome.” Mike admonished. “Even if they didn't draw the line in order to divide you, they had to have been happy with the effect. Divide and conquer. It's quite possible one reason for the line's placement was proclaimed on the world stage, while in private the territorial governors and their military staff rubbed their hands over the real victory."
I didn't know if he was talking to me or to Oscar. Or both of us. Probably me, since he and Oscar both seemed to be trying to change the subject. While I could see the senior team members discussing who should be brought in for the job at hand, having even Echo in on the decision made me feel like an item in a catalog. Trying to distract me from that conclusion was surprisingly considerate of them, but again, the fact every one of them was making an attempt raised questions of its own.
I glanced at Oscar's shape against the rocks ahead. He rode fluidly. I pictured the muscles that would take, the muscles it would build, and had to readjust my jock. Warriors and troublesome, huh? I made a note to Google his tribe, if I could drag the name of it out of my brain.
He'd told me. I remembered the smell of the soap, the welcome hot water, and scraping the hangover nastiness from the surface of my tongue, but I don't remember what he said. Something about the Desert People, but not Navajo.
Echo rode more stiffly and tended to turn his head more than his body when he spoke. “So I guess this Hamid was a lot older than you?"
I blinked. It was summer, so he'd had his birthday. Birthdays...an American notion my mother had brought to the khel. “He'd just turned twelve the week before he was killed."
Echo pointed his masked face at me, centering my reflection in his sunglasses. “It isn't a Russian thing to go around shooting kids."
How many Russians have you polled on the subject
? I thought about his bright blue eyes and white-blond hair. “What flavor of Russian are you?"
"The Miami flavor. My dad was born in a Siberian relocation center. My mom's parents came from Kiev; they defected together during a swimming competition. How'd you know?"
I gave my mare a little heel pressure. She lengthened her stride to come abreast of Oscar.
My mother was long dead, but still her honor was mine to cherish. That boy had no need to know how much he looked like my brother Mohammed.
Oscar slanted me what might be the same look Echo had, though it felt different from him. “Need to talk?"
"No."
He nodded, and we rode on.
I'd been nine, not quite ten, the last time Hamid and I rode out with the men. It wasn't my first
lascar
, but the others had amounted to no more than sniping at a caravan of troops or supplies. This was a
daarha
, a true raid on a supply depot just over a day's ride from the khel. And this time, instead of being left behind a ridge or wall to hold the horses, I rode at my brother's side, an ancient bolt-action rifle in my hands and three bullets to shoot. I felt like a man among the men.
We blew up some trucks, stole a quantity of heavy steel boxes along with whatever was in them, and set fire to what must have been fuel and ammunition. It was all noise—overwhelming noise that beat on my skin—and dust and fire and acrid smoke and thrilling terror. None of the Shuravi bullets or shrapnel touched us. We rode away laughing wildly.
We stopped at moonset, only a few hours from home but unwilling to risk the horses in complete darkness. We shoved the boxes into a deep cave, agreeing to check the situation at home first, and return for the booty if no one was watching.
At dawn, while we all faced the southwest and cupped our hands to pray, I saw a mist of a shadow and turned. A pair of helicopters swung out from behind a ridge.
I cried out and jammed myself into a cleft in the rocks. I, the one who climbed to greet the dawn a man's height above my kin, had nevertheless at my uncles’ order kept below the ridgeline. That order, and the rocks about me, saved my life as the first helicopter swooped in.
Again, the overwhelming noise battered me, but no thrill zinged through in response. Just numbing terror, the sickening stench of blood and worse, and the noise: hammering bullets, shattering stone, the choppers’ motors, and the screams of dying horses, dying men, dying boys.
Then soldiers came. I waited silently, looking down from my dark cleft as they abused the bodies of my kinsmen. By the time the last echoing scream died, I was glad I could no longer tell which was my brother and which was merely a cousin. When the soldiers left, the wild dogs came.
I hid all through that scorching, thirsty day until the kindness of night came to conceal my movement. Then I went home, drank a cup of my grandfather's green tea, and told him how fully one-third of his sons and nephews—and four of his grandsons—had died.
I admitted I had been a coward. I had not called out a true warning. And I had done nothing at all to track those men to their base and spend the final hour of my life wreaking
badal
, blood-vengeance.
He held me close against his thumping heart. He told me a warrior's life is the forging of a perfect blade, that the perfect steel must be quenched as well as heated, folded as well as beaten flat. Sooner or later, inshallah, this badal would come within my daring grasp.
He also told me that while my brother Omar was ready to set aside his childhood, I was now the eldest. Mine now was the burden and privilege to safeguard my
mor
, my mother's honor. Mine now was the duty to forge my brothers’ souls, to be as their father and to teach them Pakhtunwali. He would help, but I must set the example.
I swore to him I would.
Then he went to tell his aged father. Kam Ali, my favorite cousin, was sent to tell the women. I sipped more tea and listened to the men speak of redistributing the land and the herds, of who would take on the support of each of the widows and the orphans, while shrieks rose from behind the walls.
"Zulu? Are we going to have problems, you and me?"
I weighed Echo's troubled voice. He didn't sound buzzed any more. I couldn't look at him, not that it would do any good with his face all covered.
If he dropped those sunglasses, I would see my brother's brilliant eyes. I might taste the halwah and apricots my grandfather distributed when Mohammed took his first waddling steps in the courtyard.
Mashallah! A fine boy with my mother's blue eyes!
What could I say to Echo?
You're fine until you decide to raid a girls’ school or mutilate the wounded
? Surely I couldn't be rude enough to even imply he'd do such things. I took a breath and let it out, glad my shemagh covered my face. “No, man. We're good."
At lunch, I dismounted like an old man. Half a day in the saddle, and I felt crippled. Oscar didn't insult me with an offer of help, but he hung close. When I wobbled, he just happened to be in the right position to block my butt with his hip and pinch me vertically between himself and his mare. I clung to his saddle for a moment, waiting for the burn in my face to die down.
Echo wanted his bandage off. I let the skin air several minutes, then rewrapped him with just splints and gauze on the promise he'd keep his hand elevated in a sling. He asked for more of the pain pills.
I put three ibuprofen and the last of the Decadron into his mouth. “Swallow."
"I don't get any of the good pills you sign for?"
You weren't supposed to notice that
. “Too many doses of that stuff will give you terminal constipation."
Oscar swung back up into his saddle. “Heaven forbid the pretty boy should get his shit chute blocked."
After more than fifteen years at sea, I don't usually react to casual rudeness. Why then did my face feel all stretched and tight?
Mike's voice lashed out. “Shut up, Oscar."
Echo stared wide-eyed at Mike, then Oscar. Then he put his shades back on. At least he kept his trap shut.
Oscar's mare fidgeted. “Point or drag?"
"You've been point all day. Take drag a while."
Mike took point. Echo followed, and I trailed him closely, at his side where possible.
Echo didn't get silly on ibu. At least, no sillier than seemed natural for him. I watched him as carefully as the increasingly narrow, steep trails allowed. He wasn't putting anything else in his mouth unless I saw what it was.
An adverse reaction to a medication wouldn't be a black mark on his record. Whether a tainted batch of painkiller or a marine tripping through a mission on some kind of illicit euphoric, though, I didn't want to have to report any other kind of problem.
I took a couple of ibu myself at the midafternoon stop. Too many years had passed since I'd last spent hours in the saddle. Oscar's jockstrap might be saving my balls from a bruising, but my ass and thighs ached like nothing I could remember. My calves and lower back weren't far behind on the pain scale. Obviously, the exercise machines I'd worked out on didn't cover the same movements as keeping my balance in a saddle.