He heard the abuse of the soldiers, the pleading of the village men, the screams of the women, and the single shots. He did not know the language of the soldiers, or of the village men, but he understood the sounds of the women’s screams and the message the shots sent.

The soldiers would have come from the garrison town of Amadiyah to the west or from the camp at Rawandiz to the south. The information would have been given, for reward, that he was in the village. He would be a prize capture. He would be portrayed as a spy, not as a harmless, innocent guest of the mountain people. He understood, lying on his stomach on their old firearms and against their ammunition boxes, that the soldiers shouted at and abused the village men to make them reveal his hiding place. The men would be pleading that they did not know, had not seen a foreigner, a spy, and they were beaten, taken from the main corralled cowering group, while the women screamed for their lives as they were shot.

There was the smell of fire and the crackle of it from other huts in the close-set village that perched above a patchwork of fields and below the steep orchards. A few huts, chosen at random, were burned but it was a still, cool night and the flames did not spread from those to the adjacent ones.

The soldiers were in the hut, moving below him. He heard them rummage in the bedding and there was the crack of plates breaking as a cupboard was emptied. He stifled his breath. As a spy he might be hanged or shot, he might be tortured, and his protestations of a simple friendship would be ignored. When the soldiers left the hut in which he hid, the sound of the chaos they brought continued. Any of the village men who were condemned, or their women, might have saved themselves by denouncing him and showing the soldiers the camouflaged trap-door. He was in their hands, they held his life.