by Joan Aiken
Remembering Dizane’s intrepid horsemanship when pursued by her wooers, Scylla could hardly doubt it. She still hoped with fervor that the girl would escape—though a more rational assessment of the case warned that this was scarcely possible. Dizane must be well known in the region—it would be no use taking shelter with her father—who could protect her?
The Therbah reappeared to say that he had packed the men’s gear. He and Cameron picked up Cal and carried him out.
“Are you strong enough to return to our room, child?” Miss Musson asked anxiously.
“Yes, yes—” In truth, Scylla felt dreadfully weak, as if she were recovering from a long illness, and was appalled at the prospect of being called upon to bestride a camel, but she saw that there was no help for it. The whole situation was her responsibility, and the least she could do was give as little trouble as possible. Trembling, she hurried after Miss Musson back to their original chamber, where little Chet slept placidly and her bundle of belongings lay open, as when Dizane had snatched up the gun. What an eternity ago that seemed! Hastily she tied up her things, took off the finery that had been lent her for the feast, and put on her own clothes.
“I am ready,” she said to Miss Musson, who, holding the baby, was glancing around for any mislaid articles.
“Good. Let us go.”
It was fortunate that the castle was in such a state of ferment. Women were rushing to and fro exchanging questions and exclamations on the Bai’s narrow escape; incense was being burned and prayers said before statues of Moni and Imra; out in the courtyard more men were saddling up to go after the Bai. In all this tumult it was not difficult to slip through unremarked; and as soon as they entered the courtyard Cameron came quickly and quietly up to Miss Musson, laid a hand on her arm, and jerked his head in the direction of a shadowed corner where there was a kind of postern gate, seldom opened.
Scylla saw that near it two camels, already saddled, were kneeling on the ground. On either side of the wooden, padded saddles dangled saddlebags, attached to the frame. They were quite large, and in one of them, on the bigger camel, Cal had already been placed in a huddled position, curled over, with his head on his knees. He was still deeply asleep or unconscious.
“Get in there,” Cameron said curtly to Scylla, gesturing to the left-hand bag on the smaller camel. The right-hand one was piled with the men’s baggage. Half relieved, half ashamed that she was not expected to ride the camel, she climbed into the saddlebag, which was made of plaited osiers.
“It is lucky that we are none of us very heavy,” Miss Musson said softly. Each camel would be carrying three persons—several hundred pounds’ weight. The Therbah quickly loaded the women’s bundles in along with the men’s, then hopped onto the smaller camel’s saddle.
“Harh, harh!” he said, jerking on the headrope, which was attached to a chain around the camel’s muzzle.
Cameron had already mounted the larger camel, having helped Miss Musson, with the baby, into his vacant saddlebag. Both beasts rose to their feet, swaying backward and forward, grunting and snarling.
“Where are we going?” Miss Musson softly asked Cameron as they passed through the postern gate.
“To take refuge with the Holy Pir at Chaghlar.”
* * *
It was a long and miserable journey. At first Scylla worried about the possibility of their encountering the Bai and his retinue of warriors—either still in pursuit of Dizane or returning with her as captive, which would be worse, or returning in frustration without her, which might be worst of all. However, this did not happen; presumably Cameron, when he chose their route, had done so with reference to the direction in which the manhunt had set off.
The night was bitterly cold and windy. Clouds scurried over the sky, concealing a moon which gleamed fitfully, giving enough light to show that they were crossing a stony upland plateau with high bare peaks all around. Indeed, they might have been traveling across the moon itself. The camels loped along at a brisk pace, despite their heavy load. How many hours they traveled Scylla could not judge; it seemed endless; she soon became almost numb in her cramped position; her feet lost all sensation; her hands, from gripping the wicker sides of the receptacle, became almost equally stiff.
The motion of the camels—a sideways sway and lurch—was particularly uncomfortable when riding in the saddlebag. By degrees her back began to ache from bracing herself against the forward jerk—then her whole body ached—then it was torture merely to keep in an upright position. She felt guilty when she thought that Miss Musson had the additional burden of little Chet; but the older woman had firmly refused to let Scylla take him, saying simply:
“You are not well enough, child.”
It was true that Scylla felt very unwell; before they reached their destination, indeed, she felt ready to die, and thought that death would be infinitely preferable to this cold, this misery, this agonizing motion.
Toward the end of the trip Scylla was overcome by a kind of stupor in which, as if it were happening to another person, she felt cold, pain, wretchedness, and nausea. Only vaguely and dimly, when they arrived, was she aware of the fact that the camel had sunk down onto its knees and hocks; then that she was being half lifted, half dragged out of the basket. The exquisite relief of being able to stretch out her limbs was followed, in a moment, by excruciating cramps, but even these could not keep her awake for long; she drifted into a state of unawareness that was half swoon, half sleep.
* * *
When Scylla next woke, it took her a long time to make any sense of her surroundings. She still felt utterly weak; a hand or foot, even a finger, when she tried to lift it, seemed heavy as stone; but the racking cramps and the dreadful sickness were gone. Where could she be? The light was so dim that at first she began to wonder if she were back in the Bai’s castle; in a dungeon, perhaps; but the air was fresh and cool, with a scent of water and rock, as if she were lying out on the mountainside; there was no hint, here, of the all-pervading stench: moldy straw, burning dung, rancid butter, and old sheepskins, that had been such a notable feature of the Bai’s residence.
Were they out on the mountain? With extreme difficulty Scylla at last raised herself on one elbow and looked about her.
“Aha; you are feeling better at last; that is capital!” came Miss Musson’s tranquil voice. “Would you care for a little tea, my dear? Keep still, and I will fetch you some.”
“Thank you, ma’am…” Feebly, Scylla sank back; she seemed to be lying on a great mound of feathers, piled deep; they were covered by a camel-hair blanket, but she could feel, here and there, the points of the feathers pricking through the rough weave. Another hairy blanket was thrown over her. Looking upward with sharpened vision, she could now see, high above her, a brownish-gray vault, irregularly shaped. When she turned her eyes sideways she gasped, for the rock wall nearest her was smothered by brilliant paintings in reds and greens and blues: they depicted gods and devils, smiling goddesses, men being chopped up and mutilated in various ways, men praying, worshipping, and dancing; dragons, serpents, and great birds; and yet more gods, beast-headed, bird-headed, six-armed, smiling, contemplative, or cross-legged.
“Where in the world are we, ma’am?” asked Scylla when Miss Musson reappeared with the tea in a small copper pot.
“We are in the cave of the Holy Pir at Chaghlar.”
“Oh yes, I remember now. This is a cave, then?”
“An enormous cave, containing I know not how many chambers. It goes far back into the mountain; for aught I know, right to the other side,” said Miss Musson, cheerfully drinking some tea herself. “So—which is an excellent feature of the situation—we may remain here as long as Rob thinks it necessary, without feeling ourselves any encumbrance on our excellent host the Pir.”
“Have you met him, ma’am?”
“Yes indeed; a most delightful man. How I wish my dear brother Winthrop
could have met him too!”
“Shall I see him?”
“Most certainly you shall; when you feel well enough. He is at his prayers just now. In fact he is at his prayers for most of the time. And I daresay the world would go on a great deal better if everybody followed his example,” Miss Musson added roundly.
“What about Cal, ma’am? Is he better?” The tea had roused Scylla. Now she recalled her two sources of trouble: Cal’s alarming indisposition and the fact that Cameron was furiously angry with her.
“Yes, my dear, Cal is coming on as well as can be expected.” The older lady’s voice here held a shade of reserve; anxiously Scylla scanned her guardian’s wrinkled, hawklike features for some clue as to her doubt.
“Has he woken, ma’am? Is he sensible?”
“Oh yes. Perfectly sensible. Indeed he and Rob have gone out to gather a handful of wild sage and rosemary (Rob shot a mountain goat this morning, and I prefer the flavor of goat mitigated).”
“But you are troubled about Cal, Miss Musson?”
“Yes, my child, a little. He will recover in time, I don’t doubt. But I am afraid his feelings for that charming but empty-headed little Sripana had gone deeper than, in the circumstances, was at all wise. He is very miserable.”
“Oh, poor Cal.” Cal’s sister felt a deep throb of sympathy—exacerbated by a slight jealous pang. This was the first time her brother had felt at all strongly about any woman—and what a hopeless situation!
“It is a mercy that we left the Bai’s castle when we did,” was the outcome of Scylla’s reflections. “Or he might have done something really foolish—tried to elope with her, involved her in something that was bound to be discovered—”
Miss Musson agreed. “Yes—for Cal’s sake, we left none too soon. Though I do not think that she in the least reciprocated Cal’s feelings—which was just as well. He would not have wanted to leave her with a broken heart.”
“No…poor Cal. So he was really in love with a mirage.”
“As most people are when they are in love.” Miss Musson’s features remained calmly thoughtful, but there was a smile in her voice.
“Is he very downhearted?”
“Very. Rob reports that he has been constantly calling out in his sleep—even walking. Rob has encountered him once or twice, wandering in a trancelike state, quite unaware of his surroundings.”
“Oh, poor Cal! He did that for months after our mother died. It is fortunate that we are here, and not in the Bai’s castle! His sleepwalking there might have been disastrous!”
“He will be glad to have your company again, my dear,” Miss Musson said. “And Rob is good for him—Rob is an excellently bracing influence upon anybody finding himself inclined to fall into a melancholy through unrequited love!”
I daresay, thought Scylla bitterly, and she asked:
“Ma’am, is the colonel still very angry with me?”
“Well, I am afraid he is, my child, there is no denying it. And, though I have done my possible to reason with him, I can see that, in a way, he cannot be blamed for his feelings. He seems to have set considerable store on his relations with the Bai—which must now be greatly impaired, if not wrecked for good. The Kafir rules of conduct are such that, even if the Bai were aware that Rob himself had no hand in supplying that girl with her pistol, because a member of his party had done the deed he must necessarily be involved in the resulting feud. And of course he has old ties which bind him to this countryside, so the severance of them must be painful to him.”
“Yes, I see,” said Scylla mournfully. “Did you know about his wife and child, ma’am?”
“Not before we came here, no. But since our arrival we have talked about it. We have had ample leisure—” The smile was back in Miss Musson’s voice again.
“How long have we been here, then?”
“Nearly three days now. You have slept the clock around twice—helped by a draught containing, I think, opium, which the Holy Pir advised when you woke up the first time.”
Scylla could remember nothing of that. She asked with difficulty:
“Can you tell me about Colonel Cameron’s wife, ma’am? I—I feel very bad because once—many weeks ago—I said something—something unkind to him regarding little Chet, which, if I had known he once had a child of his own, I would not for the world—I—I am so anxious to avoid making such a mistake again, giving him needless pain.”
Miss Musson looked at her thoughtfully and said, “Well, my dear, it is a short, sad tale. When Rob was here before, as commandant of the Bai’s troop of picked horsemen—this was before he took service with the Amir Thaimur—I understand that Rob had won some notable battle for the Bai, against an encroaching neighbor chieftain, and the Bai offered him a large monetary reward. But Rob said—like the prince in the fairy tale, you know—that he would rather have the hand of his daughter in marriage. Except that she was not the Bai’s daughter but some cousin or niece, daughter of one of the Bai’s male kin, who was taking refuge in his castle at the time, because her own father had been killed and his lands ravaged. So the Bai gave his consent, and they were married.”
“What was her name?” asked Scylla, after a pause.
“Jindan. And presently she had a little daughter; I do not know what the child was called… Well, then Rob, it seems, collected Jindan’s scattered liegemen and followers; aided by some of the Bai’s warriors, they recaptured her father’s castle and she returned there; but while Rob was off with his troop fighting a final battle with the almost defeated enemy Jindan’s own uncle arrived at the castle—not the Bai, another uncle. She, thinking no harm, welcomed him in; but he, on the pretext that she had married an outlander, had her and the child cut up, limb by limb, in the presence of her women; their bones were scattered over the mountainside; and then he took her castle and lands for himself.”
Scylla felt deathly cold; she wished she had not asked for the story. But after a while she said hoarsely:
“What did Cameron do when he found out?”
“He fought yet another battle, against the uncle; killed him and razed the castle to the ground. He felt there was a curse on the place; no one should live there. The lands he gave or sold to Mir Murad Beg; I believe that was the origin of the Bai’s debt which was not yet fully paid.”
“I see…”
“Poor Rob. It was a terrible thing to happen. And yet,” Miss Musson went on thoughtfully, “I cannot help feeling that his union with Jindan must have presented him with innumerable difficulties as the years went by. Although they are not precisely savages, the Kafir ways are so different from what we regard as civilized; even Rob, accustomed as he is to the wilds, might in time have had cause to find fault; for he is not a patient man; or he might have wished to return to America, felt a longing for his own country, and then what could he have done? He must have taken Jindan with him, for he would never dare leave her and her territories unguarded; and I do not think a Kafir woman would transplant well; she must have been miserably homesick on the shores of Lake Superior! No, all things taken into consideration, I believe matters are best as they are.”
Scylla reflected, without irony, that Miss Musson almost always came to this conclusion.
“How can I put matters right with Colonel Cameron?” she inquired humbly after a while.
“I think you had better simply ask his pardon, my child. Do not try to enter into any explanations or give an account of why you acted as you did; that is always fatal. I can understand very well why you let poor Dizane have the pistol—indeed I do not undertake to swear that I might not have acted likewise—but there is no arguing with a man over such an issue! Repentance is the only answer, if we are all to be comfortable together again.”
“Is there any news of—is it known what happened at the Bai’s castle after we left?”
“No, child. Not a soul has come this way since we a
rrived.”
Then at least the Bai must have recovered, Scylla thought, remembering Habiba saying that the Bai would send offerings to the Holy Pir to avert the wrath of the gods. Presumably this had not been thought needful.
“How long must we remain here?” she asked.
“Well,” said Miss Musson, “of course in the first place we have been waiting until Cal was quite recovered from his seizure and you from your fainting fit—”
“What a cursed nuisance he must find us,” burst out Scylla.
“Don’t swear, child,” said Miss Musson equably. “In any case we would not have proceeded any farther until Rob was assured that all danger of pursuit had died down.”
“And then how will we go on?”
“Oh, pilgrim caravans pass by here, on their way to and from the great shrine at Hazrat Imam, north of us; many people consider the Holy Pir of Chaghlar quite as important a point of pilgrimage. The season for pilgrims has hardly begun yet; but it is odds that, sooner or later, we shall be able to attach ourselves to some party traveling to Kabul.”
“I see. How simple it sounds.”
Despite her two-day rest, Scylla felt tired to her bones at the thought of the many months’ travel ahead, the great distances to be covered, over the mountains to Kabul, across the desert to Baghdad and on again to the Mediterranean. She said wearily, “I wonder Colonel Cameron does not simply entrust us to some caravan and then return to put matters right with the Bai.”
“No, he would not do that.”
“Ma’am,” said Scylla after a considerable pause, voicing a worry that had visited her, on and off, since her awakening. “Do you think that I, too, share Cal’s affliction? Was my fainting fit a seizure like his?”
“No, it was not, child,” Miss Musson replied instantly and with certainty. “I wondered if you had been suspecting that! And indeed such a fear would not be surprising. But you showed none of the true epileptic symptoms. I think, indeed, what happened was that your terrible state of anxiety communicated itself to Cal—for there is no doubt that a strong sympathetic telepathy runs between you—do you not remember that occasion when he, playing truant in Umballa, got himself shut up in a palanquin and you nearly went mad with distress?—and I can remember many other such occurrences—so your state of agitation brought on his seizure, poor boy—and no wonder, for he was already in a fair degree of ferment over Sripana—and that, in its turn, rebounded on you.”