‘Toby, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.’
‘You, Simon, are in no condition to introduce anyone.’
The silhouette of a man on horseback advanced towards them. Ashe jumped from the Humvee. Gracefully, the man dismounted. In the headlights’ glow, Ashe could just make out a long-haired man with a long, thin face. Above high cheekbones shone large, dark eyes. He wore the baggy trousers common among Kurdish men and women, but sported what looked like English hunting boots. Over an American special forces combat jacket hung a silk cape, embroidered in gold and silver. Beneath the jacket he wore a white shirt, loose at the front, with a wide collar, and fastened at the back. He had a shaven chin and a young man’s thin moustache lining his upper lip.
The man smiled warmly at Richmond, leaning over the Humvee’s side panel.
‘I am deeply honoured, Major Richmond. How may I serve you?’
‘Done enough for one night, Captain. Permit me to introduce my friend, Toby Ashe.’
‘Tobbiash! A friend of the Major Richmond is a friend of my heart and my people. I am at your service.’
Ashe clasped the man’s hot, smooth hand.
‘Toby, this is Jolo. Jolo Kheyri. I call him the Lord of the Mountain.’
‘No, no, no! Please, Major Richmond! This honour belongs to my kinsman, who is in Paradise. Hamo Shero. He is Chief of the Mountain!’
‘The mountain being the Jebel Sinjar, Toby.’
‘Hamo Shero fought with the British against the Turks in your first war with Germany. What your Lawrence of Arabia is to you, Hamo Shero is to us.’
‘Jolo lives in Shero’s image. We are blessed in… Agh!’
‘What’s the matter?’
Richmond clutched his shoulder: bleeding again.
‘Major Richmond, you need the field hospital in Mosul. Hasil! Hasil!’
Jolo’s deputy rode up to the Humvee. ‘Hasil! Call special forces in Kursi! Medical helicopter for Major Richmond. Inform them of this action.’
‘It is done, Captain.’
Jolo studied Ashe’s eyes. ‘I am from Kursi, Tobbiash, yes. Yesterday, as the sun rose, Kursi was a fine village. It sits on slopes of Sinjar mountains. We grew good tobacco on the terraces. Then, Ansar al-Sunna. Grenade launchers, guns, knives. They come to find me. I am not there. So the men defend women and children, you understand?’
‘That’s the attack on the village I told you about, Toby. Damn it! Pinsker’s morphine’s wearing off. OK, Jolo Kheyri is a relative of Sheykh el-Wezîr, the grandson of Hamo Shero, Chief of the Mountain.’
Jolo beamed. ‘A great man, Tobbiash! Pious and brave!’
‘A great man. We’ve been doing a bit of work round here setting up an irregular auxiliary force. In the past, we made the mistake of trying to fit Jolo’s people into our ways of fighting.’
‘Not good, Major.’
‘Now we complement one another. Jolo plays on his strengths; we support him. They’re very good at night, as you’ve seen. They’ve been doing great tidying up and reconnaissance work, and they know what’s going on. They know who’s new in the district.’
Jolo interjected. ‘It is sinful, Tobbiash. Under Americans, safe haven very, very good for our people. British and Americans fight evil people. Saddam cannot kill more of us. Muslims cannot kill us. Then are coming all these foreigners – from Iran, from Syria. And Turks, these are spying on us.
‘None of these outsiders care for Iraq or people of Iraq. They do not care for Kurds! And they do not care for us! They hate us and call us Devil worshippers! We do not worship Devil! They claim God is their master, but they do not understand things about God. They are given evil teaching. They kill women and children and will not fight face to face. They are like criminals. They use human beings as bombs and hide their face in black mask. They love guns and death and beg for money even when they are not poor. They have lost sight of God. They blame everyone but themselves. Their Devil lives inside their own hearts, for they are blind.
‘We, not they, are the Defenders of the Tradition!’
Ashe was transfixed. Beneath the starry canopy of a northern Iraqi sky, not far from the ruined Assyrian cities and lost palaces of Nineveh and Khorsabad, Ashe was listening to an ancient voice. This was a voice whose strange, majestic, poetic beauty seemed to come if not from another world, then from the pages of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom or the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
It was not what Jolo was saying, so much as the hidden music and mind within and between his words. But why, Ashe wondered, did this Iraqi man refer to the Muslims as though referring to something almost alien? Was he a Christian? There were many Christians in Iraq, and their churches were as old as any in the world, though their voices were seldom heard.
Could he be a Mandaean, one of those who claimed John the Baptist as the last prophet and who lived in the marshlands south of Baghdad? At least, that is, until Saddam wrecked the ecology of the marshes and persecuted the people there.
‘Tell me, Jolo—’
Ashe suddenly stopped himself. Behind Jolo, the horsemen were rounding up the surviving Arabs, tying their hands behind their backs, treating their wounds. What with the horses, the men, the heightened atmosphere, the burning fire of the wrecked oil derricks in the distance – it was as if he was standing in the midst of some vast epic. Then he realised: he was.
Ashe had strayed into history, the kind of history that makes legends. To meet a man like Jolo – a man living in extremis, beyond natural limits – was to encounter a life in which something other is generated: something pertaining to the soul. Ashe could see how, when this quality collides with memory, legend is produced: naturally and poetically coalescing in the ancient forms of myth.
Hamo Shero was as real and present to Jolo as Major Richmond and himself.
‘Tell me about the horses, Jolo.’
‘Very good for night-time work. Very good for all work. Ezidis are great horsemen. We have fought on horse for hundreds of years, against Egyptians, Turks, Iranians, Arabs. We have fought in Russian cavalry! When Berlin falls and Adolf Hitler kills himself, two Ezidis there also – the first in Berlin since a hundred years. Before Jesus and Moses, we were there.’
Ashe enjoyed the heroic exaggerations but wished to get the conversations back down to earth. ‘Where did the horses come from?’
‘From Khuda.’
Richmond butted in. ‘He’s saying the horses are a gift of God. But in reality they were brought from the hills of the Transcaucasus – from Georgian Armenia – at very great risk to his people.’
‘We are used to risk, Major Richmond.’
That word was ringing in Ashe’s ears… Ezidi. Did he mean Yezidi? Ashe had read about these people before – an ancient tribe with mysterious customs and traditions.
‘Is Jolo a… Yezidi, Simon?’
‘Didn’t I make that clear?’