‘Fine shot,’ Wolf commented. Ben swore and quickly plucked a second arrow from his quiver. The frightened goat had gone ploughing deep into another, denser, thicket of bushes, while the rest had scattered in four directions and were rapidly disappearing out of effective range. He’d worry about them later. He moved towards the bushes, drawing the bow again, this time determined not to miss.

Something rustled. He stepped closer, searching for his target, ready to let the arrow fly. The goat was in there, just a few feet away. He could see its brown hide through the foliage, moving slightly. He took a breath and drew the bowstring until the ball of his thumb touched his cheekbone. This was it. The killing shot. And food for the hungry.

But then, with a shock, Ben lowered the bow and released the tension from the string.

Because his target, cowering terrified inside the bushes and looking up at him with huge eyes, wasn’t a goat. It was a young child.

Chapter 41

The girl was about eleven or twelve years old, and she knew exactly how close she’d just come to being skewered with an arrow. Her shocked face was streaked with tears and dirt, and her long jet-black hair was all awry. She was wrapped in a dusty robe the same shade of brown as the goat, which now burst out from the far side of the clump of bushes, fixed its hunters with a slit-pupilled look of indignation and ran off to join its companions.

Ben laid down the bow, Wolf dropped his spear and carbine, and they hurried over to the young girl before she could scramble to her feet and escape from them. But as Ben waded into the bushes he saw that she couldn’t run off in any case, because her slender little left ankle was all swollen and obviously quite badly sprained. She shrank away from him with a whimper of fear and pain.

‘It’s all right,’ he said to her, speaking Pashto in a soft, reassuring tone. ‘We’re your friends. We won’t hurt you. My name’s Ben. What’s yours?’

It was hard to overcome the child’s fear of these two towering strangers, but as she began to understand they weren’t going to kill her, she began to open up a little. Her name was Safiya, and she said she’d come down to the village before dawn to gather some water. She pointed down the slope towards the river, where the pole and two buckets she’d been carrying were lying by the bank. Clutching her sore ankle, she explained how she’d slipped on a wet rock and hurt herself. Then, seeing two men with guns descending the hill towards the village, she’d been afraid and managed to crawl up the river bank as far as the bushes, to hide from them.