"Where are the wounded guys?"
"Up ahead, in the pass. You wanna take a look at them with me?"
"Sure. Sure. Gimme a hand with my gear."
We wrenched the saddle and bridle from my dead horse, and trotted up the line of men and horses to the mouth of the narrow pass.
The wounded men were lying within the cover of a shoulder of rock. Khader stood nearby, frowning watchfully at the plain behind me. Ahmed Zadeh was gently but hurriedly removing the clothing from one of the wounded men. I glanced at the darkening sky.
One man had a broken arm. His horse had fallen on him when it was shot. The break was a bad one, a compound fracture of the forearm, near the wrist. One bone protruded at a sickeningly unnatural angle, but it remained within the envelope of flesh, and nowhere pierced the skin. It had to be set. When Ahmed Zadeh removed the second man's shirt, we saw that he'd been shot twice. Both bullets were still in his body, and they were too deep to reach without major surgery. One, in the upper chest, had shattered the collarbone, and the other had lodged in his stomach, tearing a wide and undoubtedly fatal wound from hip to hip. The third man, a farmer named Siddiqi, had a bad head-wound. His horse had thrown him against the rocks, and he'd struck a boulder with the top of his head, near the crown.
It was bleeding, and there was a clear fracture of the cranium.
My fingers slid along the ridge of broken bone, greasy-wet with his blood. The broken scalp had split into three chunks. One of them was so loose that I knew it would come away in my hand if I tugged at it. His matted hair was all that held his skull together. There was also a thick swelling at the base of the skull, where his head met his neck. He was unconscious, and I doubted that he would ever open his eyes again.
I glanced at the sky once more. There was so little daylight left, so little time. I had to make a decision, a choice, and help one man to live, maybe, while I let other men die. I wasn't a doctor, and I had no experience under fire. The work had fallen to me, it seemed, because I knew a little more than the next man, and I was willing to do it. It was cold. I was cold. I was kneeling in a sticky smear of blood, and I could feel it soaking through the knees of my pants. When I looked up at Khader he nodded, as if he was reading my thoughts. Feeling sick with guilt and fear, I pulled a blanket over Siddiqi, to keep him warm, and then I abandoned him to work on the man with the broken arm.
Khaled pulled open the comprehensive first-aid kit beside me. I threw a plastic bottle of antibiotic powder, antiseptic wash, bandages, and scissors on the ground at Ahmed Zadeh's feet, beside the man who'd been shot. I snapped out brief instructions for cleaning and dressing the wounds, and as Ahmed went to work, covering the bullet wounds, I turned my attention to the broken arm. The man spoke to me urgently. I knew his face well. He had a special talent for herding the unruly goats, and I'd often seen the temperamental creatures following him, unbidden, as he wandered around our camp.
"What did he say? I didn't get it."
"He asked you if it's going to hurt," Khaled muttered, trying to keep his voice and his expression reassuringly neutral.
"I had this happen to me once," I said in reply. "Something just like this. I know exactly how much it hurts. It hurts so much, brother, that I think you should take his gun away."
"Right," Khaled replied. "Fuck."
He smiled broadly, and brushed at the ground beside the wounded man, gradually easing the Kalashnikov out of the man's hand and out of reach. Then, as darkness closed over us, and five of the man's friends held him down, I wrenched and twisted his shattered arm until it resembled the straight, healthy limb that it once had been and never would be again.
"Ee-Allah! Ee-Allah!" he shouted, over and over through clenched teeth.
When the break was wrapped and set with hard plastic splints, and we'd patched over the wounds on the man who'd been shot, I hastily wrapped a dressing around unconscious Siddiqi's head. At once we set off into the narrow pass. The cargo was distributed among all the remaining horses. The man with the bullet wounds rode a horse, supported on both sides by his friends. Siddiqi was strapped across one of the packhorses, as was the body of Madjid, the Afghan who'd been killed in the attack. The rest of us walked.
