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way to the American city of Tucson.
    These mountains were perfect, a wilderness of bucking scrub foothills shot with oaks and bitter, brittle little plants poking through the stony ground; until, reaching the altitude of 5,000 feet, they exploded suddenly into stone, a cap, a head of pure rock, bare and raw and forbidding. The saying went, “Each mountain is a fortress,” and he felt the security of a fortress up here.
    Let them come. He’d learned his skills in a hundred hard places and tested them in a hundred more and would set his against anybody’s in mountains. But he doubtedAmericans would try him. They were said to be a people of pleasure, not bravery. Still, suppose they had a Jardi to send against him?
    The Kurd paused on a ledge, staring at the peaks about him, dun-colored in the bright sun. Everywhere he looked it was still and silent, except for a push of wind against his face.
    What if it were written above that a Jardi would be sent against him? What if that were God’s will?
    Who knew the will of God? What point was there in worrying about it? Yet, still …
    But there was another advantage, beyond security, to the solitude in the higher altitudes. And that was privacy: he could still think like a Kurd, move like a Kurd,
be
a Kurd. There wasn’t the press of maintaining a fictitious identity, which was as hard as anything he’d ever done.
    “You must be one of them,” he had been instructed. “But it won’t be hard,” they assured him. “Americans think only of themselves. They have no eyes for the man next to them. But of course, certain small adjustments must be made in your natural ways. Do you agree?”
    “Yes,” he said. “Teach me. I will make any sacrifice, pay any cost. My life is nothing. It has no meaning other than as the instrument of my vengeance.”
    “Excellent,” they complimented him. “Your hate is very pure, and to be nourished. It will sustain you through many difficulties. Some men must be taught to hate. You come to it with a gift. You are holy. You make a holy war.”
    “This is not holy,” he had said, glaring, and watched them show their discomfort at the force of his glare. “It is a blasphemy. I must defile myself. But it is no matter.”
    He moved northward through the mountains slowly, enjoying his journey. He crossed a dirt road late in the night in a low place. He skirted campsites, places whereAmericans came to play. The sky was fiercely blue, angrily blue, and in it a sun of almost pure whiteness, a radiance, beat down. The clouds were thin and scattered. At the top of one mountain he could see nothing but other mountains. One spine of crests gave way to another. There was dust everywhere, carried by the wind, and even patches of snow, scaly and weak, that gave when he put his American boots through them. At twilight the mountains were at their richest and in the shadows and the soft air they seemed almost
kesk o sheen
, a certain blue-green shade close to the Kurdish heart which spoke of spring and, more deeply, of freedom to travel the passes, to move through what they held to be theirs by right of two thousand years of occupation: Kurdistan.
    At one point he saw a vehicle. He ducked back, for just a second, terrified. The thing lurched up a gravel track, an ungainly beast. Something in the way it moved: sluggish yet determined. He felt his body tensing, and a feeling of nakedness—the nakedness of the prey—overwhelmed him.
    The vehicle pulled to a level stretch. He saw it was almost a bus, gaudily painted, an expensive thing. Bicycles were lashed to its rear and the top was bulky with camping gear. He sat back, watching the thing move. It was obviously some kind of vacation truck for rich or fancy Americans, so that they could tour the wilderness in high style, never far from showers and hot water.
    He watched it poke along beneath him, pulling a trail of dust, glinting absurdly, its bright colors flashing in the sunlight. It was almost a comical