“I have come to see you at great risk to myself,” he said, still with that sour face.

Was she supposed to be grateful?

She thought of Suleiman again, and the gratitude she felt toward him when he took care of Jumanah. Why could he not have looked after Jumanah and Kiran? Why did men always expect gratitude for the smallest gesture, when their largest, most catastrophic mistakes were irreversible? Why did women always bestow it?

“Bukhara, Tashkent, Samarkand, Fergana,” he continued, impetuously. “The people there are proud, Maryam. They are nomads like us, with centuries of power. They defeated the Chinese. They built the Mughal Empire that conquered India. They defeated the Russians. They did not let themselves become enslaved by fines, or by troops.”

By loss? She wanted to ask. Did they let themselves become enslaved by loss?

“Why are the convoys here?” he kept on. “To find a killer? There is no killer! They want us. Our way of life. Our horses. Our children. Our freedom. They want to own us. It is happening to the east, in Kashmir and in Turkestan. To the south, in Waziristan. To the west, in Afghanistan. If not the Russians, it is the Chinese. If not the Chinese, Indians. If not Indians, Americans. And Pakistanis? Traitors who send people to their prisons! If they do not send us there, look what they do to us here, killing our sheep, fencing the land, looting our forests, insulting our women. They know nothing of us, the way we work the land. The way you do, Maryam. They cannot see your hands. Look at your hands!” He took a sudden step forward and before she knew to stop him, he had grabbed her hand. “Look how cut and bruised they are! They will not leave us alone!”

Maryam quickly pulled her hand away and took two steps back, into the wall. She had never seen him like this. He always liked to toss words at her, it was true, long, foreign words, flaunting his travels, his worldliness. But it was done to impress. Now she was unsure what the purpose was. Before, even when he swaggered, he retained a certain poise, one that was different from her husband’s. Suleiman’s poise stemmed from years of enduring pain and humility; Ghafoor’s, from rejecting pain and humility. But now she did not know what he was rejecting, or enduring.

He was glaring at her, as if to gauge whether or not to continue.

If she had to guess, she might say his swagger was filled with fear.

Still glaring.

Yes, he was afraid. Like her.

Something he had said made the upper lid of her right eye flicker. It made her want to say, with a scorn wrapped in the play their previous encounters had always known, You care more for jewels and money. You do not work the land anymore, so what do you care? But she held her peace, burying the thought in her chest, where so many others were locked, including this one she might also have shared in the past: she preferred his stories of gypsy women with pinched waists, and of rare cloth made of the hearts of flowers, to tales of conquests and prisons.

Perhaps she could steer him back there again. First, she ought to calm him.

She cleared her throat. “Will you stay for lunch?”

He frowned. “I am leaving soon.”

“You just arrived.”

“I have been waiting nearly a week to speak with you.”

She nodded, a little embarrassed.

“There is something I need to know before I go.”

She looked up.

“Which one killed her?”

The question startled her. She took another step back but there was nowhere left to go.

“Which one, Maryam?”

“They all did.” The sickness rose in her again. He was like Namasha, pulling her down into the whirlpool of her grief, when she had hoped he would save her from it.

“Are you going to do something or are you going to be just like the rest — throw your hands up to God and say it was His will?”

“What would you have me do?”

“When you see them, what do you want to do?”

“I do not see them,” she whispered. It was a lie. She had seen him, not too long ago, at the graves. That friend of Irfan’s, the one who was always looking sideways. She had noticed him on the road, when she went to the market to look for her son. And she had wanted to do something, anything, to rid herself of the anger he planted in her breast.

Ghafoor waited. Now he was more composed than she. Inadvertently, she had calmed him with her sorrow.

“It was not all of them,” she said at last. “One of them, the smallest one, he speaks to us. He is kind. And one is American.”

“We cannot touch him.”

“And one is a woman.”

“We cannot touch her.”

There it was again, she could feel it rise, a taste so foul she had to spit, there on the floor of her hut. “It was her idea!” There were tears in her eyes, hot, furious tears.

“What about the fourth?”

“Did you not hear what I said? It was her idea.”

He shook his head. “We cannot touch her. She is with the American.”

“Then why ask me, if you already know about them? I thought you came for me!”

“I did. What about the fourth?”

The one who followed me, she was about to say, but hesitated. The one who gazed upon Kiran when the lake gave her back. The one who killed and blasphemed. What was he doing at the graves? She had heard that he was rummaging around for a secret shrine. Her shrine. Did he want to sink deeper and deeper into hell? Well, it could never be a hell as deep as hers, and anyway, he would never find it! She had ended up following him to the graves; it was the only thing she could think to do. And as she stood there, watching him, something about the way he crouched, gazing at the stones with the horses and the ducks, something about it was too familiar. She had seen him before. Before he had come to the lake. How could it be? The back of that head, the width of those shoulders, the length of the spine, even the shirt — she had seen it! She could not say when. But as she stood watching him, it seemed to her that he was trapped. And she had always known he would be. And he was very afraid. Everyone around her was afraid.

Ghafoor snapped his fingers, the way he would do when she was younger, trying to pull her back to himself. “What about the fourth?” he said a third time.

“I do not know,” she formulated her thoughts slowly into words. “He is — strange.”

“Strange — how?”

“She is the one who feels no remorse.”

“The small one, he has been in touch with your husband.”

She nodded. “He wants to pay. My husband does not want payment.”

“But your brother feels differently.”

“So he does.”

He nodded. “They have struck a bargain. God is all merciful, and with His help, we will find the just rate.” He looked away from her then.

“What are you going to do?”

“They are heading north.”

“I do not care where they go, if they fall off the edge of all worlds.”

As soon as the words were spoken, before Maryam unfolded a picture so clear it was as though a window had opened, a lake had stilled. Though Maryam could not see him, she could see the peak on which he lay trapped. The one who had followed her. The one she had followed. The one she had seen before. She could not see him, but she knew it was him, surrounded not by small headstones in a graveyard but by vast knife-edged stones on a precipice she had never seen before. The precipice was shaped like a glistening fang, in a place where snow was born and ice never melted. He was trapped. He was very afraid.

Ghafoor was smiling, honey in his eyes, finally. “At last I see her, the Maryam I used to know.”

She looked down. The picture of the man on the mountain vanished.

And now Ghafoor’s voice was low and sweet, as on the morning he had brought her the yellow flower. “Live up to your name, Maryam Zamani. Do not try to walk around this stone, or walk across it. You will only hurt more. It is an obstacle. It has to be removed.” She looked up. “You will not worry.”

As he continued, she thought, his words are a silken thread. A thread the color of fire. And fire will warm the pieces of me. But remember: more than warmth, I want justice.

“There are those who are walking toward a wall,” he kept on. “All we have to do is drive them forward. All we have to do is escort them. And you, Maryam, all you have to do is will it. Your mother would have done no less. And you are your mother’s child. As Kiran is yours. I am the legs, but you are the will.”

Aside from his finger, she had never touched him. Nor had she pulled the flesh around his knuckles with her tongue and teeth for the garlic tint of honey even once since her marriage. Nor would she.

She walked him to the curtain.

While stepping outside, he turned back to face her, and she saw that both the fear and the honey were gone. “They ride under the open skies, Maryam, these men and women of the steppe. Just as we do. And, like us, they are not foolish enough to point at the sun or the moon or the stars. They do not point at what gives them life. They only point at what takes it away.”

She held his gaze. If he took her hand now she might not pull away.

“This morning I looked at loi tara with your eyes, Maryam. I also looked up at girgiti. You are not waking up early, your husband tells me. You are in too much pain. So I looked at those six stars in your place, and in Kiran’s place. Six stars, for her six years. What did they want with her, those people who know nothing of our stars?”