Free Spider Shepherd 10 - True Colours by Stephen Leather Page A

of their plumage was considered too distracting for those whose lives should be devoted to the serious study of the Quran. The flying of kites, which had always drawn watching crowds as they swooped and soared against the backdrop of the azure sky and the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush, was also outlawed, as were films, magazines containing pictures, and music, singing and dancing.
    Little Lailuna didn’t know that as she sang for her classmates. She was only five years old, and she loved to sing. She didn’t know that Taliban patrols attacked and beat women and even girls as young as nine years old for not wearing the chadri – the Afghan burqa. Nor did she know that high-heeled shoes were also forbidden as ‘no man should hear a woman’s footsteps lest it excite him’. Or that women were forbidden to speak loudly ‘lest a strange man should hear their voice’, and they were banned from leaving their houses unless accompanied by a male blood relative.
    She was so lost in her song that Lailuna didn’t hear the Taliban militants pull up outside the school building in a Toyota Landcruiser. Lailuna was singing to her classmates, her back to the dusty street. She saw their smiles fade and she faltered and stopped as she saw them back away from her. She turned around and her eyes widened as she saw the four tall, bearded men in the black robes and turbans of the Taliban glowering at her. They were carrying canes. She shot a glance at her teacher, who was now ghost white and visibly trembling. Still Lailuna did not understand. ‘Shall I finish my song?’ she asked, hesitantly.
    One of the Taliban swung back his bamboo cane and began lashing out at her, striking her on the legs and back. She fell to the floor crying, but still the cane whistled down, again and again. She curled up into a ball, still sobbing, and through her tears saw her teacher kicked, punched, dragged away and thrown into the back of the Toyota.
    The men returned to herd Lailuna and her classmates out of the building with more kicks and blows. Then they took a can of petrol, splashed it around the classroom and set fire to it, and as the building burned, they told Lailuna and the other girls to go home and never return, that the school was finished. Then the Taliban jumped into the Toyota and drove off with Lailuna’s teacher in the back. The teacher was never seen again. Lailuna ran home and hid in the dark corner beneath the stairs. She was still there when her father, Ahmad Khan, returned several hours later, and it was some time before he was able to persuade her to tell him what had happened. He sat with her throughout the night as she tossed and turned in the grip of nightmares.
    Ahmad Khan had been born the son of a poor farmer from Nangahar province in the far east of Afghanistan. The remote and lawless lands straddling the border were ruled by warlords and tribal headmen, and neither the Afghani nor the Pakistani governments had more than minimal control or influence over them. Khan’s father grew opium poppies in the arid, stony soil, the only cash crop that would produce enough income to feed his family. Khan’s father was a devout Muslim, a haji who had scraped and saved for over twenty years to raise the money for his pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of his faith that was required of all Muslims at some point in their lives.
    Khan had suffered an eye infection as a child which went untreated because there was no doctor in the village and richer men than his father could not afford the cost of the doctor in Jalalabad, fifty miles away. For a while it looked as if he would lose his sight, but in time he recovered, though his left eye, while still functioning, was left with a strange milky-white pupil instead of its previous hazel colour. When they saw him, some of their more superstitious neighbours muttered about ‘the evil eye’, and ushered their children away from him. From then on Khan was something of an outsider