Free Lie Down With Lions by Ken Follett Page A

table. Before attending to the child he stripped off his bleached-khaki shirt and gave it to Jane. She put it on.
    She felt a little light-headed. She thought she would sit down and rest in the cool rear of the cave, but after taking a couple of steps in that direction, she changed her mind and sat down immediately. Jean-Pierre said: “Get me some swabs.” She ignored him. Mousa’s mother, Halima, came running into the cave and began screaming when she saw her son. I should calm her, Jane thought, so that she can comfort the child; why can’t I get up? I think I’ll close my eyes. Just for a minute.
     
     
     
    By nightfall Jane knew her baby was coming.
    When she came around after fainting in the cave, she had what she thought was a backache—caused, she assumed, by carrying Mousa. Jean-Pierre agreed with her diagnosis, gave her an aspirin and told her to lie still. Rabia, the midwife, came into the cave to see Mousa, and gave Jane a hard look, but at the time Jane did not understand its significance. Jean-Pierre cleaned and dressed Mousa’s stump, gave him penicillin and injected him against tetanus. The child would not die of infection, as almost certainly he would have without Western medicine; but all the same Jane wondered whether his life would be worth living—survival here was hard even for the fittest, and crippled children generally died young.
    Late in the afternoon Jean-Pierre prepared to leave. He was scheduled to hold a clinic tomorrow in a village several miles away, and—for some reason Jane had never quite understood—he never missed such appointments, even though he knew that no Afghan would have been surprised if he had been a day or even a week late.
    By the time he kissed Jane good-bye she was beginning to wonder whether her backache might be the beginning of labor, brought on early by her ordeal with Mousa, but as she had never had a baby before, she could not tell, and it seemed unlikely. She asked Jean-Pierre. “Don’t worry,” he said briskly. “You’ve got another six weeks to wait.” She asked him whether he ought perhaps to stay, just in case, but he thought it was quite unnecessary, and she began to feel foolish; so she let him go, with his medical supplies loaded on a scrawny horse, to reach his destination before dark so that he could begin work first thing in the morning.
    When the sun began to set behind the western cliff wall, and the valley was brimful of shadow, Jane walked with the women and children down the mountainside to the darkening village, and the men headed for their fields, to reap their crops while the bombers slept.
    The house in which Jane and Jean-Pierre lived actually belonged to the village shopkeeper, who had given up hope of making money in wartime— there was almost nothing to sell—and had decamped, with his family, to Pakistan. The front room, formerly the shop, had been Jean-Pierre’s clinic until the intensity of the summer bombing had driven the villagers to the caves during the day. The house had two back rooms, one would have been for the men and their guests, the other for women and children. Jane and Jean-Pierre used them as bedroom and living room. At the side of the house was a mud-walled courtyard containing the cooking fire and a small pool for washing clothes, dishes and children. The shopkeeper had left behind some homemade wooden furniture, and the villagers had loaned Jane several beautiful rugs for the floors. Jane and Jean-Pierre slept on a mattress, like the Afghans, but they had a down sleeping bag instead of blankets. Like the Afghans, they rolled up the mattress during the day or put it on the flat roof to air in fine weather. In the summer everyone slept on the roofs.
    Walking from the cave to the house had a peculiar effect on Jane. Her backache got much worse, and when she reached home she was ready to collapse with pain and exhaustion. She had a desperate urge to pee, but she was too tired to go outside to the latrine, so