Khyber Run by Amber Green Read Free Book Online

cachet, the people here would be distressed to provoke continual displays of rudeness. So they wore caps instead.
    I looked for a familiar wrap anyway. If I could find someone wearing his turban wrapped the way we wrapped it, or in any familiar way, I might be looking at someone who might know where my kin could be found.
    Around the corner the wind shifted; the stench of live goat stung my eyes and nose. We paused to get our bearings outside a stall crowded with well-fed donkeys, but even donkey farts couldn't override the pungent aroma of the goats up the street.
    I saw a little girl with a huge scabby sore on her top lip—so swollen it pushed her nose aside—crouching between piles of rubble, surreptitiously reaching through a rusty wire fence to milk a goat into a dented canteen cup. She moved like a thief, so I slid my eyes right past her. The infection distorting her face was bad enough. I'd treated hundreds of cases of leishmaniasis, but it takes a course of antibiotics she wasn't likely to get. If she was also hungry enough to steal milk from a goat smelling that bad, she had all my sympathy.
    Zarr , my father would have murmured. A pity.
    I remembered a distant cousin her age, orphaned by some feud or other. As a kindness, Grandfather had bought her to raise as a bride for my youngest uncle.
    She kept stealing food, hiding it in her bedding. Scoldings and beatings didn't stop her, but after a while my mother got the idea to hand her a piece of naan every night, to hold in her hands as she went to sleep. That was when she stopped stealing. She turned into quite the chipper little bird then. She used to sing as she milked goats in the evening—outside, where anyone could hear.
    I wished I could remember her name.
    A few goats would be a welcome present if by chance I happened to find my folks. “Out of curiosity, what's my spending limit, Mike?"
    He handed me a wallet. “We chipped in to give you a couple of hundred overall. Just remember you don't speak the lingo until we're well out of here."
    I tucked my “ID” into the wallet. “Why not?"
    "Security. Basic precaution."
    Basic bullshit . I hated being a mushroom. But at least they were trying to make me like the dark. A couple of hundred in dollars or euros would buy several goats, a few sheep, and a boy to tend them for a year. Which left, of course, the problem of finding the folks.
    It didn't take long to find a lightweight shemagh that was long enough to wrap properly, thin enough to knot easily, but thick enough to keep my ears and neck warm if I went out at night. The first price asked was fifteen dollars. I used my Bangkok-honed dickering skill to wrangle the seller down to eight dollars, which was great fun with me pretending to speak only English and him pretending he didn't speak a word of English.
    The eight bucks was a good enough price to lend sincerity to his parting wish that I might grow wealthy and that my sons would be enlightened. I thanked him, remembering to do it in English, tied the shemagh loosely about my neck, and offered the old familiar wish that he be safe, prosperous, and happy.
    When I looked up, his face had gone still, the eyes chilling above his grin. He knew those words, despite my use of English. He judged and condemned me in that instant: Spy. Apostate. Traitor.
    I smiled vacantly into his cold black eyes and pretended I didn't see death.
    Maybe basic security precautions weren't bullshit after all.
    Oscar appeared at my elbow. “Decent knives over there."
    Oscar had good taste in knives. Four booths in a row had chooras and sword-length salwar yatagans , both of them the traditional Khyber knife with the straight back-edge. They looked hand forged and lethally primitive next to sensuously curved machete swords straight out of some Indiana Jones movie, and one shop's gaudy kukris for the tourists who didn't know a Pakhtun from a Sikh.
    The shopkeeper with the better chooras wanted Pakistani rupees for them. Three to four