When Khaled Ansari shook my shoulder, I came to the moment as if from a dream, although I knew that I'd been awake for the whole of the time since the sentries had first given us the alarm. I was kneeling in the snow, against Khader's body, and cradling the handsome head in my arms, against my chest, but I had no recollection of doing it. Ahmed Zadeh was gone. Men had dragged him back to the camp. Khaled, Mahmoud, and I dragged and half carried Khader's body back with us and into the big cave.
I joined a group of three men who were working on Ahmed Zadeh.
The Algerian's clothes were stiff with frozen blood around the middle, below the chest. Piece by piece we cut them away, and just as we reached the torn, minced, bloody wounds on his raw skin, he opened his eyes to look at us.
"I'm wounded..." he said in French, then Arabic, then English.
"Yes, mate," I answered him, meeting his eyes. I tried a little smile, but it felt numb and awkward, and I'm sure he drew little comfort from it.
There were at least three wounds, but it was difficult to be sure. His abdomen had been ripped open with a vicious, gouging tear that might've been caused by shrapnel from a mortar shell.
For all that I could tell, the piece of metal could've been inside him, nudging up against his spine. There were other gaping wounds in his thigh and groin. He'd lost so much blood that his flesh was curled and grey around the wounds. I couldn't begin to guess what damage had been done to his stomach and other internal organs. There was a strong smell of urine and other wastes and fluids. That he'd survived so long was a miracle. It seemed that the cold alone had kept him alive. But the clock was ticking on him: he had hours or only minutes to live, and there was nothing I could do for him.
"It is very bad?"
"Yes, mate," I answered him, and I couldn't help it-my voice broke as I said it. "There's nothing I can do."
I wish now that I didn't say it. Of the hundred things that I wish I'd never said or done in my wicked life, that little quirk of honesty is right up there, near the top of the list. I hadn't realised how much the hope of being rescued had held him up. And then, with those words of mine, I watched him fall backward into the black lake. The colour left his skin, and the small tension of will that had kept his skin taut collapsed, with little twitches of quivering surrender, from his jaw to his knees. I wanted to prepare an injection of morphine for him, but I knew that I was watching him die, and I couldn't bring myself to take my hand from his.
His eyes cleared, and he looked around him at the cave walls as if seeing them for the first time. Mahmoud and Khaled were on one side of him. I knelt on the other. He looked into our faces. His eyes were starting from their sockets with fear. It was the desolate terror of a man who knows that fate has abandoned him, and death's already inside, stretching and swelling and filling up the life-space that used to be his. It was a look I came to know too well in the weeks that followed, and in the years beyond. But there, on that day, it was new to me, and I felt my scalp tighten with a fear that mimed his. "It should have been donkeys," he rasped.
"What?"
"Khader should have used donkeys. I told him that from the beginning. You heard me. You all heard me."
"Yes, mate."
"Donkeys... on this kind of job. I grew up in the mountains. I know the mountains."
"Yes, mate."
"It should have been donkeys."
"Yes," I said again, not knowing how to respond.
"But he was too proud, Khader Khan. He wanted to feel... the moment... the returning hero... for his people. He wanted to bring horses to them... so many fine horses."
He stopped talking, choked by a little series of grunting gasps that began in his wounded stomach, and thumped upwards into his stuttering chest. A trickle of dark fluid, blood and bile, dribbled from his nose and the corner of his mouth. He seemed not to notice.
"For that, only, we went back to Pakistan in the wrong direction.
For that, to deliver those horses to his people, we went to die."
He closed his eyes, moaning in pain, but then just as quickly opened them again.
"If not for those horses... we would have gone east, toward the border, direct toward the border. It was... it was his pride, do you see?"
I looked up, exchanging a glance with Khaled and Mahmoud. Khaled met my eye, but then shifted his gaze quickly to concentrate on his dying friend. Mahmoud held my stare until we both nodded. It was a gesture so subtle that it would've been imperceptible to an observer, but we both knew what we'd acknowledged and what we'd agreed upon with that little nod. It was true. It was pride that had brought the great man to his end. And strange as it may seem to someone else, it was only then, understanding the pride in his fall, that I began to truly accept that Khaderbhai was gone, and to feel the gaping, hollow sense of his death.
