The Weeping Ash

by Joan Aiken

  Tess came flying over the grass as soon as the carriage appeared.

  “Oh, ma’am! We was about to send a messenger for you! Oh, the most dreadful thing—!”

  Mrs. Strudwick followed her, arriving just as Fanny stepped out of the carriage.

  “Ma’am, thank God you are come—though I hardly know how to tell ye—”

  Behind Mrs. Strudwick came Jemima, the nurse girl, her face all streaked with tears.

  “I only left him for two minutes!” she sobbed. “As God’s my witness, ’twas not longer man that!”

  “What has happened, Mrs. Strudwick?”

  Fanny spoke as quietly as she could, but with a knifelike feeling in her heart.

  “’Tis Master Thomas, ma’am! Oh, ma’am, he’ve tumbled down the well!”

  Twelve

  After spending three days in the castle of the Bai Mir Murad Beg, Scylla became decidedly restless and impatient. She longed to resume their journey and said as much to Cal, in one of the rare chances she found to catch a word alone with him.

  The male guests were being lavishly entertained—hunting parties in pursuit of musk deer and a beast called rero, hawking parties, shooting matches—and, at night, much feasting, from which the females judged it prudent to absent themselves.

  “It is very fine for you,” Scylla said to her brother. “But all that is thought suitable for us is endless gossip with the Bai’s ladies and being taught how to weave blankets and ferment goat’s milk.”

  “I wouldn’t object,” said Cal. “All this target practice is a dead bore! I haven’t had a moment to work on my poem since we arrived here. I would be happy to sit at home with the Bai’s wives—one of them is uncommonly pretty.”

  Scylla glanced at him a trifle anxiously. There had been a note of sincerity in his voice; and it had not escaped her notice that during the last feast his gaze had been frequently attracted to the Bai’s youngest wife, a beautiful kittenish laughing creature called Sripana, hardly more than fourteen, the pet of the whole establishment. Once or twice Cal had achieved a short conversation with her, mostly conducted in dumb show, since she spoke only a Kafir dialect; Scylla had been rather horrified to see him teaching her the game of cat’s cradle, which she learned with much laughter and teasing. Theoretically the ladies of the castle were not debarred from converse with men, but Scylla had caught a look of what she thought was decided disapproval on the Bai’s countenance as he observed this interchange. She said now:

  “I wish Colonel Cameron could collect his debt from the Bai so that we might be off. I have had enough of washing wool and pounding up barley for porridge!”

  The ladies of the household lived, indeed, an extremely active and hardworking life. Although the Bai was a rich man and a landowner, a noble and local administrator, there was no idling in his establishment, which was like that of a wealthy farmer. Hens in the great courtyard were tended and their eggs collected; sheep and goat wool was sheared or carefully collected from the low-growing shrubs on the mountainsides, washed, carded, spun, and woven; the Bai’s wives, it was true, did not engage in the rougher work, but they spent their days in spinning, weaving, embroidery, and the more complicated forms of cookery, shaking milk into cheese, cream into butter, pounding dried mulberries, apricots, and honey into tremendously sweet confections. Two or three days of participating in this life was interesting enough, and Miss Musson, enjoying the spell of leisure, occupied herself by learning about the dyes the Kafirs used for the brilliant colors in their rugs and tunics; but Scylla, after the adventures of the journey and living on an equality with her male companions, found such an exclusively female existence heartily tedious.

  “You must see that Cameron cannot just turn up here and ask for his money!” Cal objected. “I am sure that wouldn’t be etiquette. The matter has to be treated with proper formality. I daresay in two or three days’ time he will come around to it.”

  “I don’t think the Bai intends to pay him,” said Scylla. “I don’t like the look in his eye.”

  Here she did the Bai an injustice. Mir Murad was a highly honorable man who would not have dreamed of defaulting on a debt, but at present he was rather short of cash, having recently been obliged to find a dowry for the daughter of his middle wife. He therefore cunningly suggested to Cameron that the latter should accompany him on a raid against a neighboring and rival chieftain whom he suspected of having purloined some of his cattle.

  “From that rogue’s stolen goods, Arb Shah, you may collect half your debt, and I can provide the other half; thus, honor will be satisfied.”

  Cameron demurred; his party had no time to waste in raiding; the Angrezi ladies were anxious to resume their journey and press on toward their far-distant destination.

  The Bai was greatly disappointed. “The Yagistani chieftain has lost his delight in battle?” he remarked with a slight touch of scorn in his voice. “I had hoped to ride into a fight again with my old comrade at my side.”

  Cameron was not to be drawn. “We are older now, Mir Murad, and I have women under my care; suppose I should be killed in battle. How would they ever win through to Europe?”

  The Bai looked sideways at Cameron under his bushy gray brows.

  “If you, their protector, were killed, I would offer them honorable asylum here to the end of their days; or,” he added reluctantly, “an escort as far as Baghdad if they wished it.”

  Cameron considered him with care. He could see plainly that the Bai was still suffering from some slight disappointment over the misapprehension regarding Scylla; it was most unfortunate that he had taken her for a beautiful slave from the Kirghiz obligingly brought for him as a present by his friend Arb Shah; apparently he had always wanted a Kirghiz woman for his collection and now found it difficult to put the mistake out of his mind. Several times he had said to Cameron wistfully, “You are sure, Arb Shah, that she is an Angrezi and that young boy’s sister? They seem so different!” eyeing Scylla in a manner that made Cameron a trifle fidgety; Mir Murad was the soul of honor, he knew, within his own code, but within that code many things were possible; if Scylla had but known it, Cameron was as eager as she to quit the Bai’s hospitable precincts. Moreover he, as well as Scylla, had observed that Cal was dangerously prepossessed by Mir Murad’s youngest wife; to be sure, it was only a fit of calf love, the boy meant no harm in the world, was perhaps hardly aware of his own state, but his eyes followed Sripana continually, he seized every chance to approach her, and this had not escaped the keen attention of her husband. The whole situation, in fact, was fraught with awkward possibilities, and Cameron was blaming himself for having brought the party to the castle in the first place.

  Now the Bai, still thinking yearningly of exotic additions to his female entourage, had another and even better idea for raising the rest of the money owing to Cameron.

  “I have heard,” he observed, “that the chief wife of the Amir in Kandahar, Shuja’ ul-Mulk, greatly desires an heir. I have it on good authority that on the first day of the Afghan New Year the Shahzada, together with all the ladies of the harem, set forth on a pilgrimage to the great shrine at Hazrat Imam, with an escort of fifty sowars and a great treasure in gold and rubies, to pray for an heir. And God He knows they need one! Since the Amir Thaimur died, leaving none of his twenty-three sons designated as his successor, there has been nothing but civil war among the princes and the cities of this land.—I stay in my castle, on my own hills, I take no part in it.—But for your sake, Arb Shah, my old friend and comrade, I will ride out, as in the bygone days, and raid that queen’s procession. What are fifty sowars to such as you and me and my brave sons? We can dispatch them in one morning. And then you may take your pick of the queen’s treasure. And we could ransom her,” he went on, his eyes brightening, “for three thousand gold tillals, I daresay!”

  “What!” said Cameron, scandalized. “Raid a procession of pilgrims on their way to
a holy shrine? And queens, into the bargain? No, no, Mir Murad Beg, I am a fighting man, but I do not engage in battle with pilgrims or women—nor do I recall your doing so, in the bygone days! Furthermore the lady is the wife of your own Amir!”

  “Persian dogs!” The Bai spat disgustedly. “What are the Persians to us? We Kafirs are from Scythia. It would be no more than shearing a flock of sheep, Arb Shah. At this very time, probably, they are traveling through the Kundera Pass; we could fall on them like a thunderbolt.”

  But Cameron said it was not to be thought of.

  At this negative reception of his good idea, the Bai became very silent and morose.

  “I beg you, my dear friend,” said Cameron, “forget the debt! What is such a trifle between brothers? I will come back to you when I have escorted the Angrezi ladies to Baghdad—or maybe Damascus or Acre—when I can be certain they are assured of a passage on a boat to their own lands—then I will return to your castle and we shall have great feasting and hunting and maybe, if God wills it, a battle or two against your enemies, and much talk about the happy days of long ago. And then, if Providence has smiled upon you, you may let me have such few monies as are still owing.”

  “But it is now that you need the money,” said Mir Murad, glumly pulling on his gray mustaches. Then he brightened again. “After all, it is the New Year! I will send out messengers to inform my people that they must pay their spring taxes before the wild rose trees are in flower. I will dispatch my killadar immediately.”

  Cameron was greatly relieved. He could see that the Bai considered this a poor-spirited way of raising money, in comparison with a foray against enemies, but it seemed a satisfactory compromise. Even Miss Musson’s delicate conscience need not scruple to make use of money received as proceeds from a tax (she would certainly have been appalled had she heard the Bai’s plans to abduct the Amir’s ladies and hold them up for ransom); and Mir Murad was, by the standards of his country, an excellent overlord, who protected his people from bandits and did not tax them unduly.

  Eased in his mind, therefore, Cameron accepted an invitation from two of the Bai’s sons to go out after a mountain leopard which had recently been troubling their father’s flocks. He hoped very much that, by the end of the day, sufficient rents and taxes would have been collected to remit the larger part of the debt and satisfy the Bai’s sensitive conscience; then they could take their departure on the morrow, or perhaps the day following, without loss of face to anybody concerned.

  * * *

  Scylla and Miss Musson, meanwhile, had been making the acquaintance of an old lady named Khalzada who, by virtue of her years and wisdom, had acquired a very important status in the Bai’s household. She came from north of the Kirghiz—possibly, Miss Musson thought, from Samarkand or Tashkent; she had been a slave belonging to the Bai’s grandfather, had won a position of respect owing to her knowledge of herbs, oracles, and omens, graduated from slave to wife, and had managed to survive into a gnarled and revered old age.

  Except in high summer, Khalzada remained mostly in her own chamber, reached by a narrow flight of stone stairs. Here they found her, seated in state on layers and layers of differently colored felts and supported by a bolster. Khalzada spoke neither Urdu nor Punjabi, but Habiba, the Bai’s second wife, who came from Kabul and had respectfully led them into the old lady’s presence, remained to act as an interpreter.

  The room was fustily warm: a dung fire burned in a brazier, and a couple of girls stood behind Khalzada wielding dyed yaks’ tails to keep off the flies. The guests were offered tea in small copper pots and a dish of maing, made from curds and butter, also pinches of snuff and wizened little black objects, which, Miss Musson murmured to Scylla, were probably dried snow mushrooms. Miss Musson valiantly accepted both the snuff and the mushrooms; Scylla politely declined them, which at once brought the old lady’s sharp scrutiny on her, and Khalzada asked some question.

  “She says,” translated Habiba, “does the Angrezi lady refuse snuff because she is bearing a child?”

  “No, no,” said Scylla. “Tell her that I am not yet a married lady.”

  “Not married, and yet you travel abroad with two men? This is very singular!”

  “One of them is my brother, sahiba,” replied Scylla. “And this lady”—she laid her hand on that of Miss Musson—“is my adopted mother.”

  “The younger man is your brother? The other, Arb Shah, I know from many years already.”

  Evidently the old lady bad been observing the visitors from some point of vantage.

  “The young man—what is his name?”

  “Cal Bahadur,” said Miss Musson.

  “There is something very strange about him—I think he is afflicted by a djinn.”

  “What makes you think that, sahiba?” asked Scylla, startled.

  “I have seen others thus afflicted. There is a look about the eyes, the skin, the hands, the whole bearing—do not his eyes, on occasion, go red? Does he not cry out in a strange tongue?”

  “Yes, this has been known to happen, certainly, sahiba—or something like it,” agreed Miss Musson. It was true that after one of his epileptic spasms Cat’s eyes were often very bloodshot.

  “I knew it. He has a djinn,” repeated the old lady, nodding. “It is a bad one or a good one?”

  “Oh, a good one,” asserted Miss Musson. “It inspires him to write wonderful charms on paper.”

  “I thought so,” said Khalzada. “My grandson the Bai is not easy in his mind about that young man, because he gazes too often at the lady Sripana, but I told Mir Murad that it would be wrong, even dangerous, to harm somebody who is possessed of such a powerful spirit.”

  “Yes, indeed it would,” exclaimed Miss Musson, startled and anxious.

  “Also,” pursued the old lady, “I do not think any harm will come to our household from the young man. I have looked into the salt bowl and I see no danger from him. And yet I do feel danger—I feel trouble. It seems to come from among your party. Give me your hand, Angrezi lady.”

  Miss Musson stretched out her hand; Khalzada scrutinized it intently.

  “No, there is no harm there; only great wisdom and goodness.” She peered closer, seemed about to speak, checked herself, and looked sharply into Miss Musson’s eyes. The American lady sustained her regard calmly but sighed a little, as if, Scylla thought, the two women had exchanged some unspoken message, as if Khalzada had told her something she knew already, something, indeed, that she had been told a wearisome number of times.

  “Imra, Moni, and Gish watch over you. We shall be friends and shall exchange many secrets,” Khalzada said to Miss Musson. “Now child,” to Scylla, “give me your hand.”

  Over Scylla’s palm she pored for many minutes as if perplexed, screwing up her eyes, muttering to herself. “These lines are so faint, I can make nothing of them.—Bring me the salt bowl, girl,” she said to one of the slaves, who fetched a flattish black curved pottery dish with a handle at each end and a very small handful of rather dirty salt in the bottom.

  “Stir that with your finger,” said Khalzada. Scylla accordingly stirred it, then the old lady carefully shook the dish and inspected the pattern thus formed. “It is very singular,” she murmured to herself. “I see much trouble here—a dead man, a dead child—”

  “Oh no!” Scylla was horrified, her thoughts flying to little Chet, happily playing at this moment with a teething toy made from markhor tusk which had been presented to him by another of the Bai’s wives.

  “Do not interrupt, Angrezi! I see trouble for my grandson, too—grief—he is hurt, and suffers. I think you do not mean to hurt him, lady, but still the thing happens, and by your agency.”

  Rather uneasily, Scylla wondered if this hurt referred to the Bai’s undisguised wish to add her to his zenana; she tried to withdraw her hand, but the old lady still clutched it in her muscular claw, peering at the salt in
the black dish. “I think you had best not stay too long in my grandson’s fortress, Angrezi girl; I think it may be you who bring trouble among us.”

  “I am sorry for that, sahiba,” Scylla said simply.

  “Now, here is a strange thing!” Khalzada shook the dish, peered again. “I shake it away, but still it re-forms! I see a great tree, a great twisted tree—it is not like a tree of our country. It is a sacred tree but far away, far in the north; it is a tree of great anger and power; there is a man woven in among its coils, like a beast in the embrace of a snake. You have a dark, troubled road ahead of you, Angrezi girl! Hai mai! I cannot read it all, and it is giving me a headache!” She peered up into Scylla’s face and said, “Yet I can see no harm there. It is a fate laid on you by the gods. Truly, you are young and delicate to travel such a dark distance. Wait, and I will give you two things that will be of use to you.—Or no, come with me.”

  Raising herself with surprising agility, she hobbled, still keeping hold of Scylla’s fingers, into a windowless inner closet, where she rummaged under dusty gauze hangings to open a massive wooden chest. Inside it, Scylla was amazed to see a shimmer of blazing color: the chest was packed to the lid with silky glowing materials in brilliant scarlets, blues, greens, jeweled and tinseled and tasseled; in startling contrast to the old lady’s well-worn, thick dun-colored apparel. Khalzada probed down, but with a careful and gentle hand, among this unexpected gorgeousness and pulled out two things. “Habiba!” she screeched, and Habiba, who had lingered in the other room, not certain if the old lady wished her to follow, came hurrying in with a propitiating smile.

  “Explain to the Angrezi girl what these two gifts are for, Habiba!” And the old lady broke into a rapid string of directions.

  “This,” said Habiba, putting it on Scylla’s finger, “is a gold ring, looped with camel’s hair. My grandmother-in-law wishes you to have it, so that you will not injure her grandson, whom she loves; it is the signet ring of the tribe that she came from, far to the north; for she was once a queen in the great plains where the Kafir Niham River runs into the Kunduz; this ring can render any action right or wrong, can give or take away, make or unmake laws—”