Companions of Paradise (27 page)

The sirdar, his beautiful eyes on the Envoy's, did not reply. The tribesmen edged closer.

“It is a trap, sir!” Lawrence reached for his sword.

Understanding, Macnaghten scrambled to his feet.

His horse waited at the edge of the crowd. He started toward it, but Akbar Khan came up behind him and caught him by both arms.

“I cannot allow you to return to your cantonment,” he said politely.

“Trevor, Lawrence, Mackenzie!” The Envoy's frightened voice barely carried as far as the trio of officers behind him, but it was too late.

Akbar's face had changed.
“Begeer! Begeer!
Seize them!” he cried, his features distorted, his voice tight and shrill.

In an instant the crowd of tattered onlookers shed its silence.

With a high triumphant yell, the mob closed in on the four Englishmen. Many hands gripped Sir William Macnaghten, and held him motionless. Jostling tribesmen snatched away the British officers’ weapons, and pinned their arms behind their backs.

Caught in the storm, all but one of Macnaghten's native escort pushed their way through the struggling crowd and bolted, headlong, from the scene. The remaining man, a mustachioed Rajput sepoy, lunged toward Macnaghten, but before he had reached the Envoy's side, a sword sliced through the back of his neck. He dropped, gurgling, to his knees, his half-severed head lolling to one side, but a single dreadful wound was not enough to satisfy the Sirdar's warriors. Knives raised, they fell on him. While he still breathed, they hacked his limbs, one by one, from his body.

Macnaghten sagged against his captors, his face gray with shock, his spectacles askew. His top hat lay on its side at his feet. He opened his mouth to speak, but whatever he said was lost in the din around him.

Someone shouted orders. The three British captains were frogmarched to a group of waiting horses, and forced to mount pillion behind three of the chiefs.

Thwarted by the loss of their quarry, the mob surged toward the horses, swords and knives in hand. “Do not spare the accursed!” they screamed, slicing with their knives at the three captains, who now clung to the chiefs for protection. “Kill the infidels! Shed their blood! Do not let them escape!”

As they worked to free themselves and their captives from the crowd, the three chiefs turned upon their own people. “Leave them,” they shouted, laying about them with heavy swords, causing several men to stagger backward, spurting blood. “Leave our hostages to us!”

The three horses surged to a gallop. A moment later, Captain Trevor lost his grip on his captor and fell, shoulder-first, onto the icy ground. In an instant, a dozen members of the pursuing mob stood over his prone body, long knives rising and falling.

Behind them, Akbar Khan and a stocky, richly dressed man manhandled Macnaghten down the slope toward the river, so forcefully that the Envoy's feet dragged behind him like those of a condemned man.

He was indeed condemned. As Akbar's chiefs galloped away with the two surviving captains, Macnaghten's last, helpless cry followed them across the snow.

“Az barae Khuda!
For God's sake!” he screamed hoarsely, as the yelling crowd closed in.

“SOMETHING IS wrong,” Nur Rahman said sharply. He turned and stared nervously behind him. “Something has happened there,” he added, pointing north, along the road. “I can feel it.”

Mariana frowned. The last of the stream of tribesmen had passed them only a moment earlier, thin shawls billowing in the icy breeze. Beyond the river and its brick bridge, the busy city beckoned.

In no time, the three of them would be in the labyrinthine alleys of Kabul, with its cobbled streets and tempting markets, on their way to Haji Khan's house.

“What do you mean?” she said irritably, turning to look. “Why must you always—”

Nur Rahman gasped aloud. “They are coming back,” he cried, pointing. “Look! The fighters are returning!”

A hand to her eyes, Mariana peered into the distance, but all she saw was a thick, advancing crowd of men, whose raised voices proclaimed important, unintelligible news.

They seemed to take up the whole road. Their shouting echoed across the flat valley.

Other travelers had also seen them. An old man on a mule paused uncertainly, as if waiting for instructions. A pair of Uighur tribesmen with goatee beards were already coaxing their horses into the knee-deep snow at the side of the road.

“I see them coming,” Mariana agreed, “but what have they to do with us?”

Yar Mohammad, too, had stopped. He, too, looked back, a hand on the donkey's neck.

Nur Rahman looked rapidly from side to side, as if he were seeking an escape route. “We must not enter the city,” he said decisively. “There is no telling what will happen there once the crowd returns. And we must not turn back to the cantonment, for they have blocked the way.”

“No!” Mariana protested. “We must go on. The city is right here, in front of us, and Haji Khan's house is not far from the gate. We'll be there long before the crowd arrives. I need a chicken for my aunt's soup,” she added plaintively, “and you yourself said that Munshi Sahib needs your company.”

She sighed impatiently. What was the matter with the boy? Did he have some mad reason to prevent her from seeing her munshi?

Aunt Claire had especially wished for grapes

“Hurry,” Nur Rahman shouted. “There is no time!”

Ignoring the stares of their fellow travelers, he lifted the skirts of his chaderi and sprinted forward, toward Yar Mohammad and the donkey. The animal's reins in one hand, and Yar Mohammad's sleeve in the other, he tugged them both into the snow, gesturing for Mariana to follow.

The man on the mule, the Uighurs, and a family whose half-dozen women and children had been stuffed onto four camels, had also left the road. All of them waited, their eyes on the advancing crowd.

“Turn away,” Nur Rahman ordered sharply. “Do not look.”

Snow had packed itself into the tops of Mariana's boots and drenched her thin cotton trousers and the hem of her chaderi. Fearful of the real terror in Nur Rahman's voice, she turned from the road, her hands to her ears.

The crowd was upon them. Its collective voice resembled the din made by the river of men that had passed Haji Khan's door on the morning of Alexander Burnes's death.

Was this new mob as murderous as that one? Unable to stop herself, Mariana turned to look.

Packed shoulder to shoulder, a column of several thousand men advanced toward them, filling the roadway, shouting unintelligibly and firing weapons into the air.

She glanced at Nur Rahman, and saw that his chaderi was trembling, as if his whole body were shaking. The old man steered his mule farther off the road. Only Yar Mohammad showed no sign of worry. He stood straight, his bony face impassive, the donkey's reins dangling from his fingers, as the mob flowed toward them, faces contorted with a kind of joy, light gleaming on the blades of their long knives.

Mariana searched about her, but there was nowhere to hide, only an expanse of dirty snow, and leafless trees full of whistling wind.

What was that, impaled on a long stick above the heads of the mob? Was it really a top hat, its brim half torn off? And what was that that followed the hat, also on a stick? It looked like a cannon-ball, only—

By the time Mariana understood what it was, there was no time to turn away, or even to lift the face-covering flap of her chaderi. There was only time to bend over and vomit helplessly into the unclean snow at her feet.

B
ut,” Adrian Lamb argued later that afternoon, “General Elphinstone is telling everyone that Sir William and his companions have been removed to the city for further negotiations.”

The ashen-faced subaltern who stood before Mariana's uncle was no more than a boy. He shook his head. “No, sir,” he said mournfully, “Akbar and Aminullah Khan have murdered Sir William and Captain Trevor, and have taken Lawrence and Mackenzie away. They have already paraded Sir William's head and limbs in the city. His torso is now hanging from a meat hook in the Char Chatta Bazaar. I heard this from an irregular native cavalryman whose brother-in-law saw it all.

“They are massing at the Pul-e-Khishti now, waiting for our counterattack,” he added.

Adrian Lamb exchanged a glance with his assistant, and then got to his feet. “Thank you, Harris,” he said grimly, “I am glad you came to me at once. And now, if anyone needs me, I shall be conferring with General Elphinstone and Brigadier Shelton.”

Twenty minutes later he and Brigadier Shelton stood over the bed where General Elphinstone lay bundled and shivering. Faint shouts and thudding of musket fire floated in through the closed bedroom shutters.

“Are you telling me,” Adrian Lamb inquired tightly, shifting his gaze from the general to his second-in-command, “that there is to be
no
retaliatory attack upon the city, even now, after Sir William's revolting, disgraceful murder?”

“We are,” barked Shelton.

“And we are to sit on our heels and do nothing, even with our troops sufficiently enraged to storm and carry the city of Kabul and arrest Akbar and Aminullah?”

“We are hopelessly outnumbered,” the general wheezed from his bed. “It is only by sheerest luck that we have so far managed to escape a devastating attack by thousands of yelling tribesmen.

“Surely,” he added, pointing a trembling finger toward the window, “you can hear the horrible din they are raising even now outside the city walls. I understand they are massed near the Pul-e-Khishti, screaming and firing into the air. They may storm our gates at any moment.”

Mariana's uncle let out a bitter sigh. “I have it on good authority,” he said evenly, “that the noise we are hearing is in preparation for an expected attack by
us
on
them.
”

The general coughed weakly.

The brigadier hunched his bony shoulders. “May I ask, Lamb, who gave
you
, a mere intelligence man, the right to come into this room and criticize the chief military officers of this cantonment?”

“No one
gave
me the right, Brigadier,” Adrian Lamb said grimly. “It was there for the taking.”

IT WAS Christmas.

Mariana tried not to fidget as she sat beside her aunt's bed. “Of course you are getting better, Aunt Claire,” she insisted, for the third time that afternoon.

“I do not know, my dear,” her aunt replied faintly. “Sometimes I wonder if I shall ever see England again.”

Unable to argue, Mariana could only reach out and pat her wrinkled hand.

Since her frightening but safe return to the cantonment, she had paid three condolence visits to Lady Sale's house, but had not yet seen the newly widowed Lady Macnaghten, who was still secluded in her bedroom. That morning, while sounds of painful grief emanated from the far end of the house, Mariana had sat in the icy drawing room with Lady Sale and a few other officers’ wives, helpless to offer comfort, wondering about her own future.

Swathed in shawls and straight of back, Lady Sale had talked of the weather, her voice raised over Lady Macnaghten's muffled sobbing, as if she could drive the shock and sorrow from the house by simple force of personality.

With Sir William dead, Eldred Pottinger, the most sensible of the civil officers, had been made temporary Envoy, but as everyone remarked, his appointment would do no good as long as the senior army officers were unable to act.

If only General Sale were here with his 1st Brigade, and not ninety miles away in Jalalabad, everything would be different. Mariana ran a hand over her face. Against her pillows, Aunt Claire yawned and closed her eyes.

Their own household was also suffering. Besides Aunt Claire, who seemed to have collapsed from cold and anxiety, several of the servants, including Uncle Adrian's old Adil, had ugly-sounding coughs. They had enough food in the house, thanks to Nur Rahman's forays to the city bazaars, but there was barely any water, and it was difficult, even with a roaring fire, to bring the temperature more than eight degrees above freezing in any of the rooms.

None of Mariana's clothes had been washed for weeks. She could not remember when she had last bathed.

While Aunt Claire snored gently, Mariana stared into space, her thoughts racing.

If Hassan had come to Kabul instead of divorcing or abandoning her, she and her family would be in Lahore by now. If Harry Fitzgerald were not exhausted from doing his duty while wounded, he would at least try to save them. He had said as much himself.

But the harsh truth was that no help was on the way, and time was running out.

If they were to escape from here, they must rely upon themselves.

Excluding Uncle Adrian, who would certainly insist upon remaining at his post, the household with all its servants numbered twenty-two souls. How could such a large group of foreigners slip past the Ghilzai tribesmen who now dominated the roads, the hills, and all the surrounding forts?

Except for the sweepers who hastily threw the picked bones of the dead animals outside, no one dared venture beyond the cantonment gates. Anyone in uniform who stepped more than a few yards from the gate was brought down instantly by a well-aimed musket shot.

Even the unarmed and scarecrow-thin camp followers who wandered unwisely outside the walls were robbed, beaten, and left to die.

Akbar Khan's sharp-shooting allies, it seemed, were watching them day and night.

Besides Charles Mott's mad proposal that she ask an enemy chief for asylum, she could think of only one plan. Undisturbed by the fighting around the cantonment, the kafilas of the nomadic Pashtoon tribes were still passing by on their way to Butkhak and the passes to India, bringing their trading goods, their herds, and their camels.

According to Nur Rahman, many were traveling by the Lataband Pass, where people made wishes and tied rags to the bushes for luck.

Not all of those nomads would be Ghilzais.

If Mariana could manage disguises for everyone in the household, including the toothless sweeperess and the cross-eyed woman who polished Aunt Claire's silver, it might be possible to persuade a family of nomads to carry them to the Punjab.

But could she really wave down a moving caravan in full view of passing travelers, then bargain with its leader through the hole in her chaderi, revealing her identity as she did so? And even if she did persuade a kafila of non-Ghilzais to take them, how could she buy a safe passage for so many people, with all her money spent on Nur Rahman's forays to the city?

Uncle Adrian kept no hoard of gold coins. Aunt Claire's pearls would scarcely be enough.

Mariana bent and laid her forehead on the edge of her aunt's bed. Perhaps Charles's plan was not as mad as she had thought. After all, she herself had given asylum to Nur Rahman. But to throw her family on the mercy of an enemy seemed far too desperate a gamble.

Every morning for weeks she had awoken with the same tightening in her middle, the same heavy feeling in her temples. Fear and loss surrounded her, draining her strength. She could not remember feeling so tired.

Three years ago, she had relished danger. She had embarked on one adventure after another, full of hope—that she was doing the right thing, that she would be seen as a hero. Each of her actions— her rescue of Saboor from the neglectful old Maharajah, her mistaken marriage to Hassan, even that mad mission to fetch Hassan home, wounded, from the house with the yellow door—had all begun in the hope of recognition and a bright future.

But even her most daring and successful adventures had been marred by complications and bad results—pursuit by soldiers, courtiers, and child thieves; ostracism by her own people; fear and mistrust; and, in the end, her loss of Hassan.

Now, after so many failures, how could she face this new, elemental danger? Exhausted, dirty, and cold, with a houseful of unhealthy people, how could she trust herself? How could she even imagine success?

All she wanted was rest, and someone to tell her what to do.

There was no space in her whirling head for the question that had tugged at her in Haji Khan's house. All that now remained of those visits to the city were a little roll of paper and a single lovely vision of an unknown desert and a full, beckoning moon.

She pushed herself to her feet, and bent down to kiss Aunt Claire's wrinkled cheek. It was nearly time for dinner, but there was something she must do first.

She had not seen Fitzgerald since her visit to the hospital. In the five days since his release, he had used every ounce of his energy to shore up the cantonment defenses. There had been no time for social calls.

Of course she had sent him a regular share of Nur Rahman's bounty, but all the same, she felt she had neglected him.

Now it was Christmas Day.

There was just enough time before dinner to deliver a few nuts and raisins to his quarters. If she dropped them off herself, that might pass for attentiveness

A short while later she made her way through the snowy darkness to the long building that housed the surviving junior officers, then stood waiting, her breath white in the moonlight, for Fitzgerald's orderly to answer her knock.

Instead, his own voice came from within.

“It is Mariana Givens,” she said through the door.

The bolt moved.

“Come in, Miss Givens.” Fitzgerald bowed a little stiffly, and stood aside to let her in, as an Indian manservant slipped past her and out of the room.

For a lady to enter an officer's private quarters without another lady's chaperoning presence would be a grave breach of proper behavior, and an unnecessary encouragement to the officer in question.

Mariana stepped inside. “I have brought you something,” she began, then stopped short inside the doorway.

Well aware that her own unwashed appearance left much to be desired, she still had not expected what she saw.

Fitzgerald had become a shadow in the days since she had last seen him, a shuffling caricature of himself. His handsome gunner's uniform now hung in loose folds on his frame. His hair fell, ragged and uncut, below his ears. The bones stood out in his face.

His left arm had been strapped to his chest with a filthy bandage. A pair of woolen shawls lay on his shoulders.

But most of all, it was his eyes, hollow and intense, that caught her attention.

“A Christmas visit.” He smiled and waved his good hand toward a cane chair near the fire. “How good of you to come.

“We have moved all the guns for the fourth time,” he volunteered, as she handed him her gift and sat down. “The Afghans had become too used to our artillery positions. We mean to surprise them tomorrow morning.”

Mariana nodded, not trusting her voice.

He looked like a man on the verge of madness or death.

An open book lay upside down on a small table next to her. As he dragged a second chair toward the little fire, she picked it up, and found it open to “Hohenlinden” by Robert Campbell. She glanced at the last stanza.

Hungry, cold, and in pain, alone in his quarters, Fitzgerald had been trying to entertain himself, and this was what he had been reading.

Tears flooded her eyes.

What would happen to them all?

The long, black-clad funeral procession that she had seen at Butkhak so many months before rose again in her mind's eye—the vision that Munshi Sahib, the great interpreter of dreams, had never explained.

When she begged him to tell her its meaning, he had only quoted the Qur'an.

She closed the book, and tried to smile at Fitzgerald.

As if he read her thoughts, Fitzgerald cleared his throat and bent forward in his chair. “Miss Givens,” he said hoarsely, wincing a little as he tried to reach toward her, “I know you cannot stay long, but since you are here, I have something to ask you.”

She knew what was coming. She waited for it, her hands clasped around the book in her lap.

“I wonder if you recall a promise you made to me before the battle of Bibi Mahro.”

His hollow gaze was candid, but it held something else she could hardly bear to see: hope.

“I believe,” he added, offering her a ghost of his old crooked, knowing smile, “that the battle ended some weeks ago.”

He leaned forward and peered attentively into her face.

He knew she did not love him.

She dropped her eyes. What good would a refusal do either of them? Except for a bag of nuts and raisins, she had nothing to offer this good man.