He ran off at a crouch, stopping here and there along the column behind me. My horse was breathing hard, whimpering with every third or fourth chugging breath. The flow of blood was slow but steady. The wound in her belly was oozing a dark fluid that was darker than blood. I tried to soothe her, stroking her neck, and then I realised that I hadn't given her a name. It seemed grievously cruel, somehow, for her to die without a name. I searched my mind, and when I pulled the net of thought up from the blue-black deep there was a name, glittering and true.
"I'm going to call you Claire," I whispered into the mare's ear.
"She was a beautiful girl. She always made me look good, wherever we went. When I was with her I always looked like I knew what I was doing. And I didn't start to love her, really, until she walked away from me for the last time. She said I was interested in everything and committed to nothing. She said that to me once.
And she was right. She was right."
I was babbling, raving, in shock. I know the symptoms now. I've seen other men under fire for the first time. A rare few know exactly what to do: their weapons are returning fire before their bodies have finished an instinctive crouch and roll. Others laugh, and can't stop laughing. Some cry, and call for their mama, or their wife, or their God. Some get so quiet, shrinking down inside themselves, that even their friends get spooked by it. And some talk, just like I talked to my dying horse.
Habib scrambled up to me in a slithering, zigzag run, and saw me talking into the mare's ear. He checked her over thoroughly, running his hands over the wounds and probing under the thickly veined hide to feel for the bullets. He pulled his knife out of its scabbard. It was a long knife, with a dog's tooth point. He positioned it over the horse's throat and then paused. His mad eyes met mine. There was a sunburst of gold around the pupils of his eyes that seemed to pulse and whirl. They were big eyes, but the madness in them was bigger, straining and bulging at them as if it wanted to burst outward from his very brain. And yet he was sane enough to sense my helpless grief, and to offer me the knife.
It may be that I should've taken the knife and killed the horse, my horse, myself. Maybe that's what a good man, a committed man, would've done. I couldn't. I looked at the knife and the trembling throat of the horse, and I couldn't do it. I shook my head. Habib pushed the knife into the horse's neck and gave it a subtle, almost elegant twist of his wrist. The mare shuddered, but allowed herself to be calmed. When the knife left her throat, the blood gushed in heart-thrusted bursts onto her chest and the sodden ground. Slowly, the straining jaw relaxed, and the eyes glazed over, and then the great heart was still.
I looked from the gentle, dead, unfearing eyes of the horse into the sickness that careered in Habib's eyes, and the moment that we shared was so charged with emotion, so surreally alien to the worlds I knew, that my hand slid involuntarily along my body to the gun in my holster. Habib grinned at me, a toothy baboon grin that was impossible to read, and scrambled away along the line to the next wounded horse.
"Are you okay?"
"Are you okay?"
"Are you okay?"
"What?"
"I said, are you okay?" Khaled asked, shaking a handful of clothing at my chest until I looked him in the eye.
"Yeah. Sure." I focused on his face, wondering how long I'd been staring at my dead horse, with my hand resting on her punctured throat. I looked around me at the sky. The night was close, only minutes away. "How bad... how bad was it?"
"We lost one man. Madjid. A local guy."
"I saw it. He was right in front of me. The bullets cut him open like a can opener. Fuck, man, it was so quick. He was alive, and then his back opened up, and he dropped over like a cut puppet.
I'm sure he was dead before his knees hit the ground. It was that fast!"
"Are you sure you're okay?" Khaled asked when I paused for breath.
"Of course I'm fuckun okay!" I snapped, a purely Australian accent punching into the expletive. The gleam in his eyes goaded me for another heartbeat of vexation and I almost shouted at him, but then I saw the warmth in his expression, and the concern. I laughed instead. Relieved, he laughed with me. "Of course I'm okay. And I'd be a lot better if you'd stop asking me. I'm just a bit... talkative... that's all. Gimme some slack. Jesus! A man just got killed on one side of me, and my horse got killed on the other side. I don't know whether I'm lucky or jinxed."
"You're lucky," Khaled answered quickly. His tone was more serious than his laughing eyes. "It's a mess, but it could've been worse."
"Worse?"
"They didn't use anything heavy-no mortars, no heavy machine guns. They would've used them if they had them, and it would've been a lot worse. That means it was a small patrol, probably Afghans, not Russians, just testing us out or trying their luck.
As it is, we've got three wounded, and we lost four horses."
