by Jane Feather
“We seem to be drifting from the point,” he said stiffly.
“Are we? I don’t think so.” She got off his knee and began pacing around the room. “Anyway, when Akbar Khan arrived at Madella, I was taken to him … a filthy, emaciated scrap in the tattered remnants of the clothes I’d been wearing when I was abducted. But by that time I understood and spoke a fair amount of Pushtu. So that when the Ghazi tossed me down in front of this man, who was dressed in helmet and chain mail, and said I was a gift to his sirdar, I understood—” She bit her lip. “I understood that I was in a hell, and there was no way out except death. I called the Ghazi a ‘son of swine,’ and several other of the worst epithets one can use to a Muslim. He knocked me to the ground, but before he could do anything else, Akbar Khan ordered him from the room.”
She took an apricot from the basket on the table and bit deeply into the golden flesh. “So that is how I came to Akbar Khan’s zenana. I taught him English, and he taught me Persian. I asked for books, and he provided them, both in English and in Persian.”
“And he taught you other things,” Kit said, as dry as the summer plain, shrugging into the chapan he had worn that afternoon.
She made no pretense of misunderstanding him. “Yes, he did. But not until I was fifteen. He is connected by marriage to several of the chief tribes among the Ghilzais, but he keeps me apart from his wives, for which I am thankful. And I have a great deal of freedom for an Afghan woman.”
“God Almighty! You are not an Afghan woman!” Kit exploded, outraged at this calm statement. “You are Annabel Spencer.”
“I am Ayesha,” she said calmly. “And content to be so.”
“When I leave here, you are coming with me,” he declared. “I do not know how it is to be achieved, but I will restore you to your own.”
Her laughter chimed through the room. “If you could hear yourself,” she said. “Such grandiose words! The Englishman will restore the captive to her own people … You would play Knight of the Round Table, would you? Take the blinkers from your eyes, feringhee, and look at the situation clearly.”
“Goddamn it! I told you not to say that!” He sprang across the room toward her. Where had this anger come from, banishing the wondrous passion of a bare half hour ago? Banishing the surge of tenderness he had felt; his need to hold and protect her. Now he wanted to shake her until she acknowledged the truth of who and what she was, denying whatever identification she seemed to feel with the Afghan.
She stood her ground, simply drawing the blanket more tightly around her. “There is no possible way I could leave here, even if I wanted to,” she said, slowly and carefully. “You will not leave this fortress if Akbar Khan decides that you may not. And I do not believe that any one of you will leave Afghanistan alive.”
He stood, shivered into stillness by her words and the utter conviction they held. “What do you mean, you do not wish to leave here?” he asked. “You cannot possibly wish to remain a prisoner in some zenana.”
“Why not?” She shrugged. “I am not sure that it differs too much from being a prisoner of the social and moral laws of an army cantonment in India. I grew up in such a society, remember? At least here I have horses and hawks, the mountains, and the company of those who are not hypocrites, however strict their laws. My life is far from dull, Christopher Ralston. I travel with Akbar Khan across the length and breadth of this country, and he denies me only what Koranic law forbids.”
Kit felt the world as he knew it tip on its axis. How could she be saying these nonsensical, heretical things? And not just saying them … she meant every word of it. The truth shone from those jade-green eyes. To her, he was simply a blind, arrogant feringhee, and the world he would offer her, a stale and drear place of stuffy etiquette and hypocritical rules. And, if he were honest, that was the way he saw it himself. He played with that world, despising it, finding it shallow and unsatisfying. Why else did he fall into a drunken stupor night after night? Lose a small fortune regularly at the tables? Why else had he provoked those ridiculous duels that had earned him banishment into the outer darkness of the East India Company’s Cavalry?
“You must have family in England,” he said lamely.
She shook her head. “What if I have? They mean nothing to me. I have never been there. My life here has meaning. Even if I wished to, can you imagine how such a one as I would fit into that society? No, Christopher Ralston, go back to your own, and leave me with mine.”
“You called me Kit before,” he said, still struggling to make some impact on this wall of conviction off which his words just seemed to slide, flat-surfaced, without the grip of his own belief.
“An error,” she said, dropping the blanket. “A slip of the tongue in a moment of passion. I no longer use the intimate language of the feringhee.”
He wrung his hands. He wanted so much to use them to break through this barrier that denied everything he had been brought up to believe in; to make some impact on the wall of superiority she had erected between them. “Was that all it was? How can you say that was all it was?”
She turned from him, bent to pick up her clothes. “Do you have need of me again tonight, Ralston, huzoor?”
If she would play that game, then he would play it too. “Yes, Ayesha,” he said. “I do. You are Akbar Khan’s to bestow on whom he chooses. He has given you to me tonight. And the night is but half over.”
The clothes dropped from her hands, a soft silken pile of cream and turquoise. Slowly she straightened, keeping her back averted. “What would you have of me?”
He looked at her, the long, clean sweep of her back, the shoulder blades sharp-pointed, the indentation of her waist, the flare or her backside, the seemingly limitless length of leg. And he was lost in a welter of bewildering emotion. He desired her, wanted her body, wanted the skill with which she used her body to pleasure his own. But there was more … much more. There had been a moment when she had given him her self, but now she had withdrawn it, and he wanted that back.
He caught the thick mass of her hair, twisting it into a heavy rope, lifting it away from her as he bent to kiss her neck. Her skin danced, supremely responsive, beneath his lips. The tip of his tongue slipped warmly up the groove of her neck, found the soft spot behind her ear … the spot on his neck where she had held the tip of her stiletto, he remembered with a low chuckle that sent warm breath tickling into her ear.
Ayesha wriggled. He held her shoulders and she became still, poised.
“Did I not hear you say that we had enough time to take our time, my Anna?”
Her head bent in mute acknowledgment and she made no demur at the soft, loving intimacy of the name. He drew her backward to the divan, pressed her into the cushions. Her body gleamed white, fingered by gold as she moved in the lamp-glow. There was a moment when she tried to hide the light in her eyes, veiling them with heavy red-gold lashes, but he nibbled her earlobe and the lashes swept up, revealing laughter and the deep, smoky glow of resurgent passion. And once again, she gave him her self, without restraint.
Chapter Four
Ayesha left his side in the translucent, pearl-pink light of early dawn. “Must you go?” Kit smiled sleepily, hitching himself on one elbow, propping his head on his hand. “There are so many things I still want to do with you.”
Her eyes scrunched up at the corners, giving her an air of mischievous speculation. Then, disappointingly, she shook her head. “The night is finished, Christopher Ralston. I was given to you for a strictly defined period.”
“Don’t talk in that fashion!” He sat up, reaching for his chapan. “How are we to get out of this place?”
She said nothing for a minute, watching as he stood up. He had the lean, muscular body of a horseman and athlete, slim-waisted, narrow-hipped … and all the ardor and energy of youth. They had enjoyed each other during the long hours allotted them, enjoyed each other with the vigorous, uninhibited pleasure of lovers who had found a perfect fit of body, imagination, and spirit. But Annabel S
pencer was as much a realist as Ayesha. She had grown into adulthood in an environment where the stuff of dreams was unknown, where hopes were based strictly upon the planks of reality, where pleasure could yield to suffering without warning.
“You will leave after the buzkashi,” she said. “I do not think Akbar Khan will wish to detain you after that demonstration. He will have made his point.”
“But you are coming with me.” He tried to infuse calm determination into the statement, to make it sound as if there was no question, but she laughed, and it was that mocking sound that so dismayed him.
“No, Ralston, huzoor. As I have said, even if it were possible, and it is quite impossible, I would not come with you.”
“But how can you say that, after the night we have just passed?” He was uncomfortably aware that his voice resembled that of a bewildered child, a relatively accurate reflection of how he felt.
Ayesha struggled for patience. “Kit, I would not denigrate what has passed between us. It gave me pleasure beyond description … beyond any I have known. But you must see things clearly, distinguish between serendipity and the hard facts. I will never forget last night, and—” She paused, reached up to his forehead where a lock of fair hair flopped untidily. She twisted the lock around one finger, smiling gently. “And I will live in the belief that you will never forget, either … not even when you are married and the proud father of a tribe of children. You will remember our loving. Even when it has become only a dream-memory, it will warm you in the coldnesses of the spirit that touch us all from time to time.”
“I will not leave you here.”
She stood on tiptoe and lightly brushed his mouth with hers, trying to mellow the hard set of his lips with her own softness. “I may not see you again. Women do not attend a buzkashi. Kiss me in farewell, Christopher Ralston, and be thankful for what we have had. Do not let me go from you remembering anger at the last.”
In the past forty-eight hours Kit had learned the wisdom of apparent compliance. He said no more, but held her to him, running his hands down the smooth, warm skin of her back, savoring the curve of her bottom and the firm thighs, imprinting her shape on his hands’ memory, her scent in his nostrils, the taste of her lips on his own.
With one last lingering touch of her mouth on his, she slid from his embrace, slipped into her clothes, and glided to the door. She drew the bolt and was gone from him.
The guards outside the door glanced at her with the incurious eyes of men who saw no need for interest in the activities of a woman, since those activities were male-dictated. She moved with the leisured, graceful step she had learned over the years. Akbar Khan did not care for an impetuous pace, an overhasty remark, a thoughtless gesture. This most passionate and unpredictable of men insisted on the most peaceful and orderly behavior in those who peopled his leisure time and ministered to those of his needs not directly related to warfare.
Ayesha reached the zenana and was immediately enclosed in the familiar seclusion, lapped by the established rituals of this feminine sanctuary. The mysterious telegraphy of the palace had operated throughout the night, and the women all knew where she had spent the hours of darkness, and at whose command. The knowledge was not declared, but very little was openly declared in this place of secret understandings.
She had no wish to talk, and no one attempted to intrude upon her reserve as they undressed her, bathed her in hot, scented water, gave her green tea out of a delicate porcelain cup. She drank gratefully and retired to her divan in the private chamber off the main living area. There was a little hovering, straightening of sheet and quilt, closing of shutters, then the tapestry over the door swung back into place, the door closed gently, and she was left to sleep.
But sleep eluded her, despite her bodily fatigue. She was filled with a curious yearning, mingling with the deep elation that comes from having been, for however short and temporary a period, transported by ecstasy, out of mind and body. The appetite for loving was definitely one that grew whereon it fed, she thought, tossing restlessly, her mind filled with images of the night, her body hungering for more. She knew, of course, that if there were a certainty of more, the hunger would die down, permitting the peace of satiation. But there could be no repetition of those glorious hours. It was high time she reassumed the mantle of acceptance that she had worn without apparent difficulty for the last few years. On which bracing instruction, she fell asleep.
She awoke several hours later to the instant awareness that she was not alone. She opened her eyes onto the steady regard of Akbar Khan, sitting in complete, meditative stillness on the divan beside her. He reached out and touched the corner of her mouth.
“So, Ayesha, you passed a pleasant night, I trust.”
“Was I intended to?” she countered boldly.
There was a moment of tense silence, then Akbar Khan laughed. “I confess that was not my chief motive. But I have no objection if you took some pleasure from the lesson. The lesson itself still stands.”
She stretched languidly, yawned deeply. “I should not, then, have brought Christopher Ralston to you?”
The blue eyes narrowed. “You should not have attempted to hide from me that you found the feringhee intriguing. You must think me a fool, if you believed I would not know. It is only natural that you should react in such a manner.” He stood up. “But now you have had the opportunity to satisfy your curiosity, you may put it behind you.” He walked to the door. “The buzkashi will begin at noon. Your presence will add further spice to the demonstration.”
Ayesha sat up, staring at the tapestry, still swinging slightly in the aftermath of Akbar’s departure. She nibbled her lip. His intention had been even more complex than she had thought. Had she not enjoyed the night, then he would have been satisfied that the reminder of the absolute nature of his dominion had been well given. If she had enjoyed it, then he had shown her most effectively his power to give with one hand and take away with the other. Having teased her, whetted her appetite so to speak, he would deny any extension of that experience.
She shrugged in resignation. He was an imponderable man on occasion, but she had accepted that a long time ago and had long ceased to resent his whims. There was no such thing as perfection in this world. In general, he gave her the life she wanted, and if he pulled on her chain once in a while, then she could live with it. She was much more interested in the prospect of attending the buzkashi. It was a rare treat that she should be permitted to watch this quintessentially masculine spectacle. Was the permission offered as an olive branch? Or did Akbar Khan have an ulterior motive for her presence, as he had done last night? Impossible to tell! And it didn’t matter, anyway. She would have the pleasure of Christopher Ralston’s company for a short while longer. It would be tantalizing, but half a loaf was better than none at all.
The cliché reminded her that she was ravenous. She rang the little silver bell on the table beside the divan and swung her legs to the floor with a renewal of energy.
“You wish for something, Ayesha?” An elderly woman appeared in answer to the summons.
“Nan-i-roughani,” she said, her mouth watering at the thought of the thin, flat wheat bread crisply fried in clarified butter. “And eggs, please, Soraya.”
The attendant nodded, pursing her lips slightly. “I’ll have them prepared for you while you dress. You must wear the chadri for the buzkashi, otherwise you will offend.” She did not add that Ayesha’s very presence at the masculine rite would offend, but her disapproval was evident in the pursed mouth.
“I merely obey our master,” Ayesha said demurely.
Soraya sniffed. She was all too well aware of the scandalous license Akbar Khan permitted this unusual member of his zenana, but not a word of criticism of the sirdar would pass her lips.
Ayesha dressed in the chalvar and tunic and for one minute had the strangest sensation. She remembered vividly what it was like to wear the boned bodice, the petticoats, stockings and garters, the voluminous skirts of her own
people. It was almost as if she could feel both the slight pinch of the whalebone that she had worn since her eleventh birthday, and the dragging weight of her skirts in the heat of an Indian summer. How could she ever have endured such restriction? Just the thought of such clothes made the enveloping chadri seem like the most liberating garment. And it had one great advantage. It concealed not only her body. Her expressions were as securely hidden from observation, and she need fear no inadvertent betrayal of her emotions … something for which she would be grateful, when in the company of Christopher Ralston, under the eyes of Akbar Khan.
A wide shoulder above the mountain pass supported a broad, sandy, upland arena. Lieutenant Ralston and his patrol were escorted from the fortress by a silent party of turbanned, warrior hillmen mounted on magnificent Badakshani chargers, huge, sleek, arrogantly majestic beasts with wild eyes and flaring nostrils. Kit, gazing at them with unconcealed envy, was aware that Abdul Ali’s expression mirrored his own.
“What could a man not do on such an animal?” the havildar murmured. “Mount the British cavalry on those, and we’d be invincible.”
“I thought we were,” Kit said sardonically. “At least, that’s what I have been led to believe. We wouldn’t be here otherwise, would we?”
Abdul Ali cleared his throat but made no other response, since he could neither agree nor disagree with any propriety.
“What is this buzkashi, sir?” he asked after a minute.
“It means goat-grabbing,” Kit said, having asked Ayesha the same question. “It’s a trial of strength, I gather. They have to pick up the carcass of a goat or calf while on horseback, and carry it free and clear of all the others trying to do the same.” He frowned. Ayesha had told him that this bald description could not begin to convey the flavor of the contest, and looking at their escort on their splendid mounts, he could believe her.