by Jane Feather
“And you chose to forsake the true believer for the infidel, Ayesha,” he pointed out. “You would not say that you did not understand the system of laws and the punishment attendant upon their infraction.”
“No, I understood. But who am I?” she asked, as quietly as ever but with an underlying throb of intensity. “Can you tell me truly, Akbar Khan, who I am? Am I not in essence also an unbeliever?”
“Ah.” His eyes narrowed. “It has come to that, has it? Stand up.”
She rose to her feet with the same fluid grace. Her body was vibrating with tension, every nerve stretched as she fenced with Destiny in the shape of Akbar Khan.
“Do you know the answer to that question?” he asked. “Have you discovered it during your sojourn with the feringhee?” He thought he knew the answer and now waited to see if she would dissemble.
But Ayesha was too skilled in the ways of Akbar Khan to attempt anything but the truth. “Sometimes I think I know, and at other times I do not.”
Surprise flickered for a second in the blue eyes. “Do you hunger for the body of Christopher Ralston or for his soul?”
That question brought her head up, and she showed him the surprise in her own eyes. “Both.”
“Ah.” Abruptly, he stood and clapped his hands. The guards appeared instantly. “Return Ayesha to her room.”
They took her away and he went to the window, staring into the snow-flecked night. He had thought that if simple lustful passion had informed her defection, he would be able to excuse it, but he would not be able to excuse a treacherous alignment with the feringhee. Now it did not seem so straightforward.
With sudden impatience he swung away from the window. What did it matter in the end? She was only a woman and the man was a dog of an unbeliever! Why should motives concern him? They had both betrayed him. Now he had to continue the struggle for his land. He had to march to Jalalabad, still held by General Sale and his force. Jalalabad must pass into Afghan hands, as must Kandahar, before victory could be complete. He would have the feringhee Ralston hanged in the morning. Ayesha would remain a prisoner for the moment. He could not bring himself to order her death. Later, when he had less on his mind, he would decide what was to be done with her.
The decision, once made, should have ended the matter. But for some reason it didn’t bring the expected peace of mind. Why did it trouble him so much, that declaration that she felt more than simple lust for Christopher Ralston? Love was not an emotion Akbar Khan permitted himself, so why should it concern him that Ayesha felt it for another man? The puzzle niggled, disturbing his firm dismissal of further interest in the affair, his resolution to deal summarily with the feringhee and leave Ayesha’s fate for future determination.
What were they like together? How did the intensity of love affect the ordinary process of passion? Why should he not satisfy his curiosity? The idea took a pleasing shape. He would reenact a little play. It would be a fitting close to a business that had begun four months ago, and when all was said and done, a condemned man was entitled to one last night of pleasure. A capricious smile touched his mouth as he went to give the necessary orders.
Ayesha regained her cell, and as the door closed on her she began to shake violently, every muscle now aching as if she had been holding herself tightly clenched for hours. She wanted to weep … to scream … to collapse in an exhausted, beaten heap on the floor and yield the struggle. Why had this happened? Why had it happened to her? The monstrous injustice engulfed her and she sank into the morass of self-pity, letting the tears flow as they would as she screamed in silent rebellion at an unjust fate that had propelled her into this abyss of loss and fear. Every vestige of the careful control she’d built inch by inch in the last eight years was demolished under an outburst worthy of the Annabel Spencer she had once been. And then, when the storm subsided, and she thought of those others, in their own imprisonment somewhere in the fortress, some who had seen their children snatched screaming from their arms or cut down before their eyes, her own plight settled into perspective. It had happened.
One thing is certain, that life flies; one thing is certain, and the rest lies; the flower that once has blown for ever dies. The words of Omar Khayyam brought the comfort they had always done. Maybe to some they would not be comforting words, but to Ayesha, who had absorbed their philosophy for so many years, they brought the peace of acceptance. She washed her face in the cold water in the chipped basin in the corner of the room, soothing her swollen eyes. She let down her hair and brushed it with strong, rhythmic strokes that lulled her into a meditative calm, then she knocked imperatively at the locked door.
It was opened by a shambling black-clad woman with gnarled hands and a back bent with years of carrying burdens. She looked blank-eyed at the young woman, her toothless mouth slightly open. She was probably no more than thirty, Ayesha thought.
“Bring me food and tea,” Ayesha commanded, the imperiousness of Akbar Khan’s favorite not a whit diminished by imprisonment. “And the fire needs more fuel.”
The woman mumbled an assent before locking the door again. Ayesha could hear her slippered feet shuffling down the corridor. She sat down in front of the fire again and gave herself up to dreams, weaving her own destiny, playing at planning a future.
In the hostages’ quarters, candles flickered and fires smoked, but it was the first night in an eon, it seemed, that they had spent within walls and under a roof. The children were quiet; invalids slept or lay in relative peace close to the fires. They had been given a huge pot of broth and thick rounds of wheat bread. Shiny dollops of fat from the fat-tailed sheep glistened on the surface of the broth, and Kit remembered Annabel’s telling him that the nomads prized the tails of the sheep because they provided for many of them the only source of meat during the long winters. No one had grimaced openly as they swallowed the thin, greasy brew—memories of near-starvation were still too vivid—but later they discussed preparing their own food, as much for hygienic considerations as gastronomic.
The discussion was in full swing when the door was opened and three armed Ghilzais stood, turbans over ringlets, staring at the group. “Ralston, huzoor.“ There was no expansion. They simply waited.
Kit rose slowly to his feet. The eyes of his friends were upon him, and he knew they were telling him that if he chose to fight whatever this was, then they were beside him. Except that they had no weapons, not even a stick or a stone with which to resist the scimitars, rifles, and daggers of their captors.
“I am Ralston,” he said. “What do you want with me?”
Wordlessly, they stepped aside and gestured to the door.
“A reckoning?” Colin murmured.
“Perhaps.” Kit smiled grimly. “But it’s a trifle dark for a buzkashi. I wonder what else he has in mind.” He flung his cloak around his shoulders. “I can but discover.” He offered a mock salute to the room at large and stalked to the door, his escort falling in behind him as he stepped into the bitter night.
They ushered him across the courtyard, through a door in the north wall. Instantly, he was aware of something rarefied in the atmosphere … something hushed, secret. They saw no one, but once or twice Kit could have sworn he heard a rustle of material, caught a glimpse of black cloth fluttering into a doorway at the sound of their booted feet. He glanced at his escort. They were staring straight ahead with a rigid determination, as if to look to right or left were forbidden. When deliberately he slowed at a half-open doorway and made a movement toward it, he was grabbed roughly by the shoulder, hard brown eyes glared savagely, and involuntarily he took a step backward before a violent stream of Pushtu invective. As he had guessed, they were walking through the women’s apartments. He bowed his head in a gesture of conciliation and apology, and was spun around hard, a knuckled fist pressing into his back, pushing him ahead. He bit his lip on his anger at the manhandling, and continued on the designated way.
Evil-smelling torches stuck into sconces against the wall cast a yellow flicker
of light. The freezing air stank of grease and unwashed bodies and mildewed clothing. They stopped outside a door set into the stone wall where beads of moisture had frozen into pearly ice-drops. Kit wondered if he were afraid and decided numbly that he wasn’t. He seemed to have gone beyond fear.
The heavy latch was lifted. The door swung on its hinges. The knuckled fist in the small of his back propelled him forward with unnecessary violence so that he stumbled, catching onto the doorframe to save himself.
He was in a small room, as primitive as any he had seen, except that the fire was brighter, the candles, although equally smelly, were more numerous, and the stone floor was covered with a goatskin. The door clanged shut behind him.
“Salaam, Ralston, huzoor,” she said.
“Greetings, Ayesha.” He stepped toward her, arms reaching to enfold her, for the moment not troubling to question this amazing turn of events, accepting it as he had done in the past as a wondrous, miraculous gift of the gods of love and passion … of Destiny.
She came into his arms, every warm throbbing inch of her, and he caught his breath at the familiar enchantment of her body under his hands. They had not made love, it seemed, for an eternity, and here, in this dim prison chamber, with horror behind them, a conundrum in their present, and an unknown fate ahead of them, passion blossomed, wildly urgent, consuming all thought.
A week ago he had believed he would never see her again, yet he was holding her, inhaling her scent, feeling the rich silky burnished copper of her hair against his cheek, the soft mounds of her breasts against his chest, the firm curve of her backside beneath his palms as she pressed against him; her hands, on their own voyage of reexploration, moved over his frame and the words of hungry desire whispered between her lips as she stood on tiptoe and nuzzled his mouth, trailed her tongue over the line of his jaw, nipped his bottom lip with fiery little bites.
“Wait, sweetheart, just one minute,” he said, his breathing ragged as the buttons of his tunic flew apart under her peremptory fingers.
“No,” she said. “I want you now.”
He groaned, but caught her hands in one of his and reached sideways to the cot, grabbing up a pile of the furs. He threw them to the floor before the fire and she sank onto them, her hands reaching up for him as he yanked off his boots, pushed off his britches, and dropped down beside her.
With a moan of need, she took his hardness in her hands, reacquainting herself with the feel of him, her body trembling with anticipation at the thought of taking him within herself again. He stripped the chalvar from her and her hips lifted, her thighs parting as he came over her. Then he was giving her what she craved, driving deep to become that indissoluble part of her, filling her loins as she closed around him and they left the squalid prison far beneath them, soaring on their own ecstatic flight.
“Dear Lord!” Kit whispered on an exhausted exhalation, falling heavily upon her. “How is it that that can happen? How can one be consumed with such a desperate hunger, engulfed in such wondrous satisfaction?” He rolled off her with a groan of effort and turned sideways, propping himself on an elbow to run his hand over the long length of her exposed thighs. “How is it that one person can love another as much as I love you, my Anna?”
“It just is,” she said, smiling, lost in the radiance of her own love, shifting languidly on the furs as his fingers played idly in the curly tangle at the apex of her thighs.
“Why have we been given this?” His playing did not cease, but there was gravity now in the quiet voice.
She knew he referred to the moment, not to the miracle of shared love. “I am not sure. I’d rather not question.” A shiver prickled her skin, and a mist of apprehension encroached on the warm enclave of desire, clouded the peace of fulfillment.
“What do you mean?” He moved his hand upward so that it lay warm and flat on her belly, simply a presence, no longer an instrument of pleasure.
Her head moved in negation on the furs, as if she did not wish to speak of it.
“What do you mean, Anna?” he insisted, sitting up, reaching for a candle and bringing it closer, so that her face was illuminated and she could no longer take refuge in the shadows.
“Let it alone, love,” she said, turning her head to look into the sullen fire. “Don’t let us waste what we have. Why should it matter why we have it?”
“Oh, no,” he said, catching her chin. “That will not do, sweetheart. You will tell me what you suspect … know … and you will do it now. This is not something we bear separately.”
A ruddy glow from the fire bloomed on her cheek, caught the deep luster of her hair massed on the dark fur, but the jade eyes looked up at him with a frightening emptiness. “You know of the condemned cell,” she said. “Of the last wish of the condemned prisoner.”
“Sweet Jesus!” Kit stared for a moment, dumbstruck. “He would plan such a callous, savage … ?”
A humorless smile touched her lips. “Need you ask? After what you saw in the passes?”
There was a moment of silence, then Kit, with an expression of quiet concentration, lifted her against him, sliding the tunic up and over her head so that she was naked, the smooth, clean-limbed whiteness of her body gleaming, diminishing the mean reality of their surroundings.
He eased her onto the furs and with the same concentration ran his hands over her breasts, touched each sharply delineated rib, stroked the jutting hipbones with his thumb, a thoughtful frown drawing his eyebrows together. “You have become extremely thin,” he remarked casually.
“As have we all,” she responded, waiting to see where this conversational turn would take them. Kit was behaving as if the words had never been spoken to throw a shroud over loving.
He nodded. “Turn over.”
“Turn over?” She looked askance.
He nodded again. “On your belly.”
With a tiny shrug, she rolled onto her front.
“Now, let me see if I have learned anything from you, Ayesha, in the last months,” he whispered, kneeling astride her prone form, pushing aside her hair, his fingers moving strongly on the column of her neck, down to her shoulder blades, trying for the clever, deft identification and release of knotted, muscular tension that she had so often offered him.
He felt her gradual relaxation, as if it had crept up on her, and he smiled, knowing that he had succeeded because her reaction was exactly as his had been under her own ministrations. She stretched, arched, catlike, and he bent to kiss her ear, sliding backward to kneel astride her ankles so that he had room to move downward, pressing hard massaging thumbs into her spine, into the indentation of her pelvis, moving his flat palms in a circular sweep over her buttocks, kneading her thighs, softly stroking in the vulnerable spot behind her knees, moving strongly over her calves, finally lifting her feet, feeling for the spots on the soles that he knew from his own experience would communicate the reflex sensations of pleasure and relaxation to other seemingly unconnected parts of her body.
“Such joy,” she whispered in wonderment. “No one has ever given me that before.”
“I am glad,” he answered, sliding his hands beneath her loins, drawing her onto her hands and knees. “Glad that no one has eased you in that way before.” Holding her hips, he slipped in gentle delight within her opened body. Her head and shoulders dropped, her cheek resting on the slightly scratchy furs, touched by the minimal, fingering warmth of the fire, as she surrendered herself to this loving, giving her body to his direction, receiving the gut of love as she offered her passivity.
Outside, Akbar Khan softly closed the shutter over the small window in the door. The lovers had been too enmeshed to notice the tiny aperture that gave access to the voyeur’s eye and ear. The game he had intended to play had somehow misfired, he reflected, drawing his cloak tight against the freezing air in the corridor. He had thought to satisfy his curiosity by observing the conduct of Ayesha and the man she claimed to love. He had thought to derive some satisfaction from knowing that they performed f
or him, unknowing of the fate he had decreed.
He had received satisfaction in neither instance. Ayesha had guessed his plan, had communicated it to her British captain, who had received the knowledge and proceeded to behave as if it were of no significance. And Ayesha had yielded her fears to her lover’s direction.
He had derived no satisfaction either from observing their lovemaking. He had certainly satisfied his curiosity about the difference loving made to the gratification of lust, but it was not a knowledge that pleased him in the least. Indeed, for one who had believed sexual gratification to be the only dimension worth considering, it left him feeling bereft.
He returned to his own quarters, deeply thoughtful.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was not a night to be spent in sleep. It was a night to be spent in lingering enchantments, wandering in the fields of passion where ugly thoughts of the morrow had no soil in which to grow, and fears withered beside the strong, flourishing flowers of joy.
When the sound of booted feet in the corridor, the grating scrape of the unoiled lock, penetrated the lovers’ dreamland in the freezing dawn, they drew apart with no words, just the barest delaying instant when their bodies touched, hands loitered, drifted, then parted.
The door was pushed ajar, but the escort remained in the corridor, issuing a harsh command that Kit, although he could not understand the words, had no difficulty interpreting. He dressed rapidly and turned to look down at her where she lay in the furs, copper and white and deep jade. She smiled and he smiled back. Then he walked to the door.