Companions of Paradise

by Thalassa Ali

  “Miss Givens,” he whispered. “How good of you to come.”

  His lips, she noticed, were cracked and bloody.

  Lady Sale appeared at her side. “A ball from an Afghan jezail smashed his shoulder at close range,” she said in an undertone. “Dr. Brydon says the bones have been so badly broken that he will never move his left arm properly again. But he has also been shot through the lung. That is the more dangerous wound. Do not let him see that you are worried.”

  Mariana smiled down at him as warmly as she could manage.

  “He is young and strong enough to survive,” Lady Sale went on quietly, “but if his fever does not abate within the next few days, we must be prepared for the worst.”

  Mariana bent over Fitzgerald, her hands at her sides. “Are you in great pain?” she asked, and instantly feared she had said the wrong thing.

  “No.” He gasped, then grimaced as he tried unsuccessfully to move his bad shoulder. “There are others here far worse off than I.”

  She reached down and laid a hand on his uninjured shoulder. “I am certain you will be much better soon,” she offered brightly, forcing herself to look into his eyes, “but I will not tire you now.”

  As she turned to rejoin the other ladies, Fitzgerald's brave front slipped. For an instant, Mariana glimpsed raw longing on his face.

  As she arrived at Lady Sale's side, the snoring by the door reached a crescendo, and then stopped abruptly, leaving an empty echo of itself among the sighs of the wounded.

  She glanced at the doctor in time to see him signal to one of the servants. In a flash, the man dragged the sleeping patient's quilts away, revealing a pair of bloody, bandaged legs, cut off above the knee. A moment later, he spread the quilts over someone else.

  “What is he doing?” Mariana whispered. “Why has he taken away the poor man's—”

  “That officer is dead,” Lady Sale replied harshly. “Did you not hear him stop breathing?

  “I shall return in a moment,” she added over her shoulder, as she started away to greet a tall officer with two bandaged arms.

  A rustling thud came from behind Mariana. Lady Macnaghten had fallen, unconscious, to the floor.

  SIR WILLIAM'S meeting had begun soon after the ladies had left the house.

  “What?” he now exclaimed from his seat at the head of Lady Sale's dining table. “Are you telling me that the fighters who drove us from the field at Bibi Mahro were no more than tradesmen and artisans from the city!”

  “I fear,” Mariana's uncle replied gently, “that is exactly who they were.”

  “So our brave army ran from the citizens of Kabul?”

  “They did. The only good news is that Abdullah Khan has since died of his wounds.”

  Macnaghten mopped his face. “And the Afghans who are now offering us terms are those same ordinary men?”

  “No, Sir William. They are the tribal chiefs who still owe their allegiance to Dost Mohammad. They are acting on the orders of Akbar Khan.”

  “Dost Mohammad's son? But I thought he had vanished into the north over a year ago.”

  “He has returned, sir, and sworn to avenge his father's humiliation.”

  “I wish our enemies had identified themselves from the beginning,” Macnaghten said irritably. “When we came, everyone behaved as if we were rescuing them from a tyrant.”

  Lamb cleared his throat. “Not all of them, Sir William. Akbar Khan never accepted us.

  “Aminullah Khan and Abdullah Khan never accepted Shah Shuja, either,” he added gently. “Of course Afghans do not always tell the truth, especially to people they do not know or trust.”

  Macnaghten sighed. “And now they have joined forces with Akbar?”

  Lamb nodded to his assistant. “Will you explain Akbar Khan's terms to the Envoy, Charles?”

  Lady Macnaghten's nephew cleared his throat. “As I understand it, sir,” he said, “Akbar has asked us to leave Kabul, and return to India. He will not harm us, he says, but we must go, and we must leave some of our people here as hostages, to be released when his father has been returned to the throne.”

  Macnaghten frowned. “And what of Shah Shuja?”

  “He is to remain here.”

  “But we brought him all the way from India! We cannot simply leave him behind, to be blinded, or murdered, or both, and all this in order to save our own skins!”

  Mariana's uncle shrugged. “That is what Akbar is asking for, sir.”

  “Think of British honor, man!”

  A bony-looking subaltern put his head around the door. “A number of the enemy have come from the city, Sir William,” he announced. “They are a hundred yards away, demolishing our bridge across the river.”

  “And what has been our response?”

  The subaltern stood straight, his cheeks flushing. “We have not responded, sir. Our officers are only watching them, from behind our parapet.”

  “Not responded?” Macnaghten shouted. “Go at once, Andrews, and tell them they must respond. Tell them that if they do not, I shall have a court of inquiry set up in this dining room tomorrow morning.”

  After the subaltern had bowed and left, Macnaghten turned wearily to Mariana's uncle. “How has this happened, Lamb? How is it that I find myself responsible for every decision we make? Why are the senior military officers so hopelessly incapable?

  “We have an army four thousand strong and not a single decent senior officer,” he added. “Shelton made a perfect hash of the battle at Bibi Mahro. Monteith allowed gunmen to enter his camp at night and slaughter his men. All of them failed to save the commissariat fort, or even poor Burnes, for that matter. Even now, they do not lift a hand to defend us. The list goes on and on. I tell you, Lamb, I am living in a nightmare.”

  Mariana's uncle nodded silent agreement.

  “I still think we ought to move to the Bala Hisar,” Charles Mott put in from his end of the table.

  Macnaghten nodded. “It offers our best chance to defend ourselves and survive the winter. With luck Elphinstone will be persuaded to agree with the rest of us. Sturt has gone to him this afternoon. If the old boy does agree, then we can ignore that fool Shelton and all his croaking, and make arrangements to leave here.”

  He sighed. “Until Sturt returns, all we can do is wait.”

  Without another word, he turned away from his visitors and stared fixedly out the window.

  FORTY YARDS away, in his own house, General Elphinstone regarded Captain Sturt distractedly from beneath the knitted nightcap that he had pulled down almost to his eyes.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, his jowls wobbling as he shook his head, “I am far too ill to have the slightest idea what we should do.”

  At the foot of the bed, Captain Sturt shifted his weight. “I understand your difficulty, sir,” he said carefully, “but I must ask you to reconsider your—”

  “But one thing I do believe,” interrupted the general, “is that we must not leave here and move into the Bala Hisar.”

  He wore a heavy woolen dressing gown with a tasseled waist cord. A fur-lined robe lay on his knees. He peered into Sturt's scarred face like an old dog that hopes he is still loved.

  “Sir,” Sturt attempted, “the men will all starve if we—”

  Elphinstone raised a trembling hand. “Our honor will be forever forfeit if we abandon our cantonment,” he intoned. “Can you not see that, my dear Sturt? Besides, we shall never arrive there without dreadful losses. You have already seen what these Afghans are capable of. Think of your wife and mother-in-law, Sturt!”

  “Sir,” the younger man protested through clenched teeth, “we are less than two miles from the Bala Hisar. That is no distance at—”

  “I am far too exhausted to speak about it anymore.” The general reached, wincing, into the pocket of his dressing gown. “Here you are, my dear fellow,” he said, holding out a folded paper. “Take this letter to Sir William. It contains all my thoughts on our present situation.”

  The three men
in Lady Sale's dining room looked up when Captain Sturt entered.

  “It is no use,” he said bitterly, handing the letter to Macnaghten. “General Elphinstone would not let me finish a single sentence.”

  “ ‘Winter is advancing,’ ” Macnaghten read aloud. “ ‘We find ourselves in a state of siege, with every man in Afghanistan arming against us. We have little food and no forage left, and our water and communications have been cut off. Our animals are starving, and great numbers of our troops are sick or wounded. We have no strength left to attack even armed civilians, and none to defend ourselves. Worse, we have no hope of relief from any quarter.’ ”

  He raised his head. “All this is true,” he said sourly, “but it is largely his fault.”

  “ ‘As no further military action can be taken,’ ” he continued, his eyes on the letter, “ ‘you must come to an agreement with the enemy for our withdrawal to India. Honorable terms are better for our government than our being destroyed here.’

  “Honorable terms? Withdraw to India!” Macnaghten refolded the letter and threw it onto the table. “That is exactly what Elphinstone and Shelton have both wanted all along.”

  He raised his head and looked cheerlessly at his three companions. “Gentlemen,” he said, “our army, even our most senior officers, have given in to fear. I have done all I can to encourage this flaccid force to do its duty, but I can no longer hope for a single successful military action on our part. I must now follow a course that will bring utter ruin and disgrace upon us. Tomorrow morning I shall ask for an audience with Akbar Khan.

  “I can tell you this, Lamb,” he added sorrowfully, “all our reputations are forfeit now. History will not treat us kindly.”

  The front door banged open. Voices cried out for assistance. Sir William arrived in the passage in time to see his deathly pale wife being carried into the house.

  THAT NIGHT as she prepared for bed, Mariana did not wish to recite the durood. All she wanted was to draw the covers over her head and shut out Fitzgerald's begging eyes and the horrors she had seen, but Munshi Sahib had told her that self-discipline was the key to proper living.

  “Weakness,” he had said mildly, “comes from lack of attention. A man who rushes here and there, ignoring his duty and his promises, forgetting the needs of others and obeying the selfish demands of his own heart, will never find peace.”

  Munshi Sahib had found peace. She saw it in every gesture he made, every word he uttered. In the teeth of this murderous time, in the cold, with almost no water and little to eat, he had never failed to maintain his usual, unruffled calm.

  Had he or Haji Khan, she wondered, ever given in to passion or panic? Had Shaikh Waliullah or Safiya Sultana? Had Hassan?

  She knew the durood by heart, so there was no need to keep her lamp burning. She blew it out, and lay down.

  “You must always recite a durood while sitting,” Munshi Sahib had told her. “Otherwise, you may fall asleep before you have finished.”

  But she was too cold and tired to sit up. She tucked her quilts around her, and began to recite.

  Her eyes began to close at the seventh repetition. At the ninth, she felt her breathing deepen.

  Only two more …

  As she began the eleventh repetition, a picture unfolded in her mind's eye of a desert landscape. It lay, wide open, before her, its rolling surface as white as snow. Ahead of her, a full moon hung in the eastern sky, its silver light falling upon the ground, illuminating the path she was to take.

  She must go forward, toward the beckoning moon, for joy lay somewhere ahead.

  She was not alone. Camel bells chinked beside and behind her, revealing the presence of invisible others, but in her waking dream she did not turn her head to look at them.

  Following the moon's path, she walked straight ahead, her feet sinking into the sand. Joy filled her heart, and lightened her steps.

  Yes, she thought drowsily as she drifted into sleep, that was the message of Haji Khan's durood: for those who practiced these recitations, even the worst of times could not entirely erase hope, or the beauty of dreams.

  What a pity that Munshi Sahib, the great interpreter of visions, had been taken away to the city….

  December 23, 1841

  As he followed Yar Mohammad and the borrowed donkey along the frozen Kohistan Road, Nur Rahman glanced nervously through his peephole at the crowd of horsemen and foot travelers around him.

  On previous occasions, he had hummed to himself as he hurried toward the city to rejoin his dear old Munshi Sahib, whose health was improving a little each day. But on this morning, the atmosphere on the road had changed. His plan to fetch chickens, turnips, and round red pumpkins faded, engulfed by a steady stream of men who poured out of the city and over the Pul-e-Khishti bridge, all of them traveling north.

  What news had sent them from their homes on this cold day, their faces hard and intent, speaking little as they moved, alone or in groups, in the direction of the British cantonment?

  Nur Rahman wished he were already at Haji Khan's house, boiling water in the samovar for Munshi Sahib's tea, instead of on the open highway.

  “I do not like your boots,” he said tensely to his shrouded companion. “People will see that they are foreign.”

  “Never mind them,” the English lady replied sharply. “Tell Yar Mohammad not to walk so quickly. I can hardly see out of this chaderi as it is. I am certain to fall on this slippery road.”

  For the past four days, every time he had seen the Englishwoman, she had pestered him to take her to visit Munshi Sahib and Haji Khan. For four days he had fended her off, using every excuse he could find, but she had won in the end. Now, forced to bring her to the city, he sweated beneath his disguise.

  The air was clear. A bitter wind rattled the branches of the trees along the road. Travelers of all nationalities were, of course, to be seen, but the people Nur Rahman feared were his fellow Pashtuns, who streamed past him by the hundreds.

  For months, Nur Rahman had been afraid of discovery by Painda Gul's Pashtun relatives, but in the presence of these warriors, he felt a shiver of real terror. Who knew what horrors their long knives might inflict on him if they discovered he had been buying food and carrying it to their enemies?

  A tall man with a skullcap and a long beard turned to his companions as they strode by. “Why has Sirdar Akbar Khan waited so long to make his move?” he asked in Pushto.

  A second man shrugged. “He wished to test the infidel Englishman's honor one final time.”

  A third spat onto the ice at his feet. “What need is there for tests? These English are all liars. I say Macnaghten should have been killed months ago.”

  Nur Rahman turned to the Englishwoman. She, who spoke only Farsi, could not have understood those words. “Hurry,” he whispered urgently, reaching out a damp hand. “We must hurry.”

  NO ONE had even glanced at them, but still Mariana bent her head and pulled her chaderi closer over her chest. There was no point in adding to Nur Rahman's agitation.

  She had lengthened her steps when he urged her to walk faster, but for all his anxiety, and in spite of the armed men who strode past them or clattered by on horses, she felt safer on the Kohistan Road than she did within the ramparts of the British garrison.

  Here, only a thousand yards from the cantonment, with its frightened population and starving animals, the landscape looked calm and prosperous, and the people robust and healthy. Judging from the bounty that Nur Rahman brought from the city on his borrowed donkey, the markets must be full of lovely, fresh food.

  Cold rose through the thin soles of her boots, causing her feet to ache, but no amount of discomfort could reduce her excitement.

  She had wanted for so long to make this short, thrilling journey….

  After breakfast, claiming a headache, she had pretended to go and lie down, and then had escaped the house. Poor Aunt Claire, who was none too well herself, was unlikely to investigate that story, and in any case, Mariana wou
ld return well before lunch. Then she would need only to tiptoe silently past Aunt Claire's bedroom, hide her chaderi, and climb into bed.

  Her heart lifted. Soon she would buy fresh food for her family. Even better, she would meet her long-absent Munshi Sahib and Haji Khan at the same time.

  She had never realized that the two men were such good friends.

  She breathed in the clean air, grateful for Nur Rahman's regular visits to the beleaguered cantonment, for the two wise men who would soon offer her their guidance, and for her beautiful, saving dream. That otherworldly vision had offered her something she badly needed in this time of deprivation and suffering: hope of a future far from the bleak cantonment, a road to take, and peace at the end of the journey.

  Haji Khan, it seemed, had chosen the correct roll of paper, after all.

  Each night, before she slept, she relived her dream, imagining rolling desert, silence broken only by the chink of camel bells, and a lamplike moon hanging in the eastern sky.

  It seemed impossible that she had not yet described it to Munshi Sahib. What a great moment it would be, when she presented her vision to him and Haji Khan together!

  Of course Nur Rahman had already told her that the old man might still be too unwell to speak to her. “His breathing is not good,” he had said, as they set off from the cantonment, Yar Mohammad leading the donkey, Mariana and Nur Rahman following behind. “He needs me at his side every moment, to give him hot drinks and put heated bricks by his feet.”

  Haji Khan, too, was a powerful man. Given the choice, even if her munshi were not there, Mariana would be a daily visitor to that dark, perfumed chamber near the Char Chatta Bazaar. Everything about the room—the respectful silence of Haji Khan's followers, his caged songbird, even the intricate embroidery of his wall hangings— suggested secrets to be uncovered, languages to be studied, and a way of living to be tried.