But he had brought them safely to their first rest stop. “Five minutes,” he had said, eyeing the sky. The snow had started to fall almost as he spoke, and a layer of powder was already settling on the ground, being blown into little ridges under rocks and against stones.
Arash had set a hard pace, and his knee must be bothering him. She knew he had been hoping to reach their destination before the first sign of snow, and he did not hide his anxiety to get going again.
“In that direction,” he replied now, pointing in a direction she guessed was south, “not far from the Barakat border. Maybe twenty miles.”
“And in the direction we’re heading?”
There was warm soup left over from lunch, in the thermos flask. It had been filled this morning by a woman in Seebi-Kuchek, the village where they had spent the night, and although of course Lana had thanked her, she was a lot more grateful for it than she had imagined being.
They had only the flask lid as cup. Arash lifted the cup to his lips once for every time she did, but he could barely have warmed his lips for the amount he drank.
“We are heading towards a river valley. There we will find shelter.”
She didn’t bother to ask how much longer they had to go. They would either make it before the storm broke or they wouldn’t. She nodded, finishing the last bite of her bread, and dusted the crumbs from her knees. Arash held up the cup of soup to her.
“Finish this off.”
She was hungry. A long time ago, in a past of plenty which she could now hardly recognize, she might have drunk the soup without a thought. Lana had always been an exhuberant eater. She had never worried about her weight, or whether people—other women, mostly—had thought her fat. She loved food and she indulged herself.
But she never took food for granted now. Too often she had seen poor villagers produce their last morsel of food for their visitors…the generosity of the people here was the deepest she had ever met.
So she stood, looking down to where Arash sat on a rock, his right leg extended. He too was much thinner now, though every gesture still carried the promise of power. “Thanks, Arash, I’ve had plenty.”
She saw his pupils expand, all at once, like a cat’s. Then his eyes fell to the cup between his hands. After a moment, he lifted it to his mouth and drank deeply.
He held it out to her again. “The last mouthful is for you.”
He had drunk less than half, but she could not argue the point further. She took the cup with a nod and gratefully drained it, while Arash with quick efficiency cleaned up the remains of their meagre meal.
He stood, drawing his right foot under him in the awkward way she was used to, and Lana unconsciously tightened her lips and shook her head. She knew something could be done, if not to restore full function to the knee, at least to relieve the constant pain she was sure he suffered. She had asked a couple of surgeons about his case, and the prognosis was pretty clear. Why wouldn’t he let her father finance the operation?
They shouldered their backpacks in silence. “Ready?” Arash asked briefly, and at her nod stepped into the wind and started off. Lana followed as the rope that joined them lost its slack.
Her hands were cold. She had only two thin pairs of gloves, and other than drawing her hands up inside her sleeves there wasn’t much she could do to warm them. Pockets were out of the question most of the way—she needed her arms free for balance.
The wind was horrible; she had never experienced such cold, strong winds in her life. Thank God now, except for gusts, it mostly came from behind. Whenever it blew into her face and her nose, terrifyingly, it seemed to suck the breath from her lungs.
They had been heading downhill for some time. More than once she was blown against Arash’s back. On each occasion he stopped, firm as a rock, till she got her balance, then with a brief word set off again.
“I suppose that’s a knack you get when you’re raised in the mountains,” she called once, but if he answered her, the wind snatched away his words.
It was funny—she didn’t like him, but she trusted him. There was no one she would rather have been in this trouble with, no one she would have trusted more to get her through this.
She searched for her reasons. Because he was not a man who lied to himself. Arash never disguised his perception of reality in order to bolster his ego.
How rare that was among men.
She knew there was no one Kavi trusted more. “Arash is my right hand,” she had heard him say to Alinor once. “If I only think about a thing, it is done, as if my own hand had done it.”
He was as fine a warrior as any of his famous ancestors: the Parvanis were a nation of storytellers and she had heard plenty of stories about Arash’s war exploits, from everyone but him.
She had nothing but respect for him as a man. She had never seen him perform an ungenerous act.
Except one.
It was a pity they couldn’t like each other. But chemistry was like that, sometimes. Something primitive operating in spite of all rational process.
And she, of course, had other reasons.
They came to ground that sloped sharply upwards, and here, the vegetation having got a little thicker, the path was visible. Arash turned up a defile, and the wind simultaneously changed direction and blasted fiercely at them. The snow it carried was cold and hard, stinging her face with sudden ferocity.
Losing her balance, Lana stumbled and cried out, but though the wind seemed to steal the cry right from her throat, Arash turned and stepped quickly down to her, his hand outstretched.
She grasped it and recovered her balance, her heart beating so hard and fast that she was lightheaded for a moment. She clasped her other hand to her chest and blew out a relieved breath.
“Thanks!”
Her pack was heavy enough to have made a fall nasty. She might have broken a bone. His grip was firm, and he held her for an extra second to be sure she was safe. Her heart was still going like a drumroll.
“All right?” Arash asked. “It will be easier very soon now.”
She nodded, and he let her hand go, turned and went on.
For a moment she stood frowning down at her hand. Just with that brief touch his hand had warmed her freezing fingers.
After a long struggle, half-blinded by the snow, they crested the ridge, and the world was transformed. Lana, breathing heavily from exertion, gasped at her first glimpse of what lay below.
Behind was the familiar white and grey of rock and mountain and snow, but at their feet the ground opened, as if a giant knife had cut a gash in the fabric of the earth and the two sides had been pulled apart to reveal the earth’s deepest beauty in a vast, rich valley.
“But it’s magic!” she exclaimed breathlessly. “Oh, Arash, how beautiful! It’s like—it’s like Shangri-La!”
It was green with spring growth and the early buds on numerous trees. There were neatly planted orchards in a dozen directions, as well as the wild growth of natural forests.
There were villages, and farms with the neat, centuries-old terracing she had come to expect in Parvan. There were sheep and goats freckling the fields, and their bells jangled on the wild wind as shepherds hastily drove them home.
As everywhere in Parvan, there was evidence of the Kaljuks’ destructive bombs. Terraced fields were smashed, a roofless house gaped helplessly at the coming storm, sad skeletons of a burnt orchard clawed emptily at the sky.
But there were also signs everywhere that the inhabitants were rebuilding their lives. A half-finished new roof, the fresh bricks of a rebuilt muezzin tower, freshly plowed land.