by Jane Feather
She climbed off the cot and began to pace the small room, trepidation now her companion. He would have plans for the hostages. Would he have plans for Ayesha, or was she to be left languishing here? Death by stoning would be better.
She sensed the approach of a visitor before she heard the clack of booted feet. During the weeks of imprisonment, she had become adept at hearing beyond the immediate sounds of her environment, listening on some deeper level. In a sudden panic, she realized that her cheeks were tearstained from her afternoon’s weeping, her eyes red and swollen, her hair disordered. Feverishly, she splashed cold water on her face just as the door opened and Zobayeda came in.
“You are to be taken to Akbar Khan,” she said in the tremulous tones of one who had pronounced the name of a divinity. “I will help you prepare.”
Annabel accepted her help willingly enough. In any other place and any other circumstance, when Akbar Khan returned and asked for her, her preparations were lingering and meticulous; hot scented baths, warm oils, the softest silks to clothe her body, her hair brushed and braided and threaded with flowers for the moment when he would remove her veil. Here, there was only cold water, crude soap, and the well-worn clothes that had formed her small traveling wardrobe on the retreat from Kabul. But they did the best they could and at least she felt relatively clean as she was escorted by her usual guard to the presence chamber.
Akbar Khan was sitting at the table, arms folded in front of him, eyes fixed on some spot in the middle distance. As she came in and the door closed behind her escort, the bright blue gaze focused and he looked at her in silence for a minute.
“You look tired,” she said involuntarily, before she had been given permission to speak.
A slight smile touched his lips. “A not inaccurate observation, Ayesha.”
She stepped toward him, saying with sudden compassion, “May I ease you?”
He shook his head. “No … no, not yet.” Propping his elbows on the table, he rested his chin on his clasped hands, regarding her somewhat quizzically. “Remove your veil.”
She unfastened the pin, letting the soft gauze fall aside.
“Take it off.”
She drew it away from her head, and the candlelight fell on the swinging copper braid, caught the luminous jade glow in her eyes, dark-shadowed yet startling against the extreme pallor of her complexion.
“You do not look as if you have derived much pleasure yourself in the last weeks,” he observed.
“I do not care to be a prisoner,” she replied.
That smile touched his lips again. “No, neither would I. But your seclusion gave you ample time to reflect upon the question to which you were unsure of the answer when last we spoke.”
Who am I? she had asked. Am I not in essence also on unbeliever? She had not known the answer to the question. She stood quietly, waiting.
“Do you know the answer now?”
Slowly she nodded, aware that the truth would condemn her if he chose to see betrayal, yet knowing that she had no choice but to tell it. “I am not truly of the feringhee anymore, and never could be again after the years I have spent with you, but in essence I belong with them.”
“In essence,” he repeated pensively, stroking his beard. “It does not sound a very comfortable position, Ayesha, to belong in essence yet not to be of them.”
“But it is a position you put me in,” she said boldly. “If you had not played your game at the very beginning, I would never have rediscovered my essence in the feringhee. I would have been content with the life I had. I felt I was Ayesha.”
“But you are not,” he stated, making no attempt to deny her accusation.
“It seems not,” she agreed simply. “But I am not what I understand Annabel Spencer ought to be, either.”
There was a moment’s silence, then he commanded abruptly, “Veil yourself.” When she had done so, he clapped his hands and the guards reappeared. “Take her away,” he said, pushing back his chair and walking to the begrimed window, turning his back on her as she stood for a moment irresolute, wondering if there was anything she could say to recapture the strange ease, the sense of their old companionship, of a few minutes before. But a hand jerked her roughly to the door, and a voice ordered her out in accents no one would have used to her in Akbar Khan’s presence in the past.
The favorite had certainly fallen from grace, she reflected, casting one backward glance at the stocky figure gazing out into the night, before she was shoved from the room and returned without ceremony to her prison.
Now what? She looked down at her wrists, still encircled by the silver bracelets. Spiritual essence or no, in essence she still belonged to Akbar Khan.
Zobayeda brought her a bowl of chicken stew and rice. Chickens were luxurious fare during the winter months, so Annabel could only assume this delicacy was in honor of the khan’s return. She ate without appetite, then went to bed to lie sleepless throughout the night, wondering about Kit’s wound, about what Akbar intended to do with the hostages who must now be of even greater importance to him as bargaining counters. She found to her surprise that she could no longer summon up the least interest in her own destiny. What would happen would happen.
Across the courtyard, Kit sat in the open doorway of the outer room. The night air was chilly, but the vicious snow-laden bite of winter was absent, and the freshness was a welcome change from the frowsty interior, where too many none-too-clean bodies cohabitated with the fleas. His hand throbbed, but he had been lucky not to have lost a finger in that savage slashing. He thought of the daggerlike splinter Annabel had removed with such skill from his hand in a time when the despair of hopelessness had not tightened its jaws.
“I wonder what she said to prevent our being cut down to a man.”
Kit looked over his shoulder, not surprised that his friend had been following some part of his train of thought. “Lord knows, Colin. But she and I should have known better. It was a bloody stupid thing to do.”
“I don’t know how you can bear it,” Colin said frankly, squatting down beside him. “It’s difficult enough for the rest of us, but—” He shrugged expressively. “At least we’re all in it together. Husbands have their wives, women their children. Even in hardship, there’s comfort in sharing.”
“In knowing!” Kit said with sudden savagery. “It’s not knowing what’s happening to her, or what’s going to happen that I cannot endure, Colin. Sometimes I think I will go mad … that I am going mad.” He pointed across the courtyard. “I am almost positive that that window, second from the left, is hers. But I cannot be certain …” His hands opened in a gesture of futility. “Why can we do nothing?”
Colin made no response. It was the hardest thing for them all to bear, brought up as they had been in the absolute conviction that they ruled wherever they walked. They imbibed the conviction with their mother’s milk, were taught it as they were waited upon hand and foot, deferred to from toddlerhood by adult men and women whose only function as far as the child was concerned was to gratify his whims and ensure his comfort. In school, superiority was beaten into them, the hierarchy of the privileged established forever. When one’s turn came, one did unto others what had been done unto one, confident that one was inculcating through established means the values and standards of the ruling class. And a British gentleman never expected to find himself helpless, in bondage to the whims of a lesser being. But short of mass suicide, Akbar Khan’s hostages had no choice except to surrender to reality.
“I’m for bed,” Colin said finally. “Why don’t you turn in too? Brooding won’t help.”
“True enough, but someone in my room snores most powerfully.” Kit did what was expected of him and banished the moment of weakness. He grinned up at Colin. “I very much fear that it is Mrs. Johnson, so I daren’t mention it. It’s a most unladylike sound.”
Colin chuckled. “No, best preserve a chivalrous silence on the subject.” Then he said soberly, “I wish someone could do something about littl
e Betsy Graham. She has the most dreadful nightmares night after night. Her mother does what she can to keep her quiet, but a man can’t sleep, listening to that terror.”
“I wonder if they’ll ever get over it,” Kit said.
“Annabel did.”
“Did she? I am not convinced of that, my friend.”
Akbar Khan spent the night in contemplation … in contemplation of defeat. His battle with the feringhee invader was not over, for all that he had suffered a major reversal, but he needed to formulate new strategies. The hostages were vital to his plans and must be moved farther from Jalalabad, where the enemy was now in control. No, it was too early to cry defeat in that area … but in the other matter?
He had lost. Only one question remained: what should he do about it? He could take whatever vengeful action he chose. They were all pawns on his board. But the prospect of simple vengeance held no appeal. Once, in the first flush of anger it had, but now it seemed an empty gesture … one conferring neither honor nor satisfaction.
He could simply send Ayesha under escort to Madella, where they could resume the previous pattern of their congress once this war was finished. And if he did not wish to resume in the old way, then she could lead a pleasant enough existence in the zenana. He would not deny her her horses and hawks, or her books. She would have the companionship of other women. His wives were perfectly satisfied with less freedom than he would permit Ayesha.
Or he could … But he could not be seen to yield to the feringhee … not in this, or in anything.
He paced his presence chamber, stroking his beard, and contemplating a means by which defeat could take on the appearance of victory: a solution which would require quick thinking and ingenuity on the part of Ayesha and her lover if they were to win their freedom, and one that would show no weakness on his own part.
When dawn broke, he thought he had the answer.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Ayesha! Ayesha, quickly, you must wake up. They have come for you.” Zobayeda’s frightened voice, her hand roughly shaking, brought Annabel wide awake.
“What time is it?”
“Past dawn,” the woman said. “You must dress. They have come for you.”
Annabel sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the cot. She reached for her tunic and chalvar, but Zobayeda said in the same frightened voice, “No, you are to wear these.”
Annabel stared blankly at the coarse black homespun trousers and tunic. “But those are not mine.”
“It is ordered,” Zobayeda said.
There could be only one interpretation. The day of judgment had arrived. For a moment, Annabel was terror-struck, the peace of a philosophical belief in Destiny vanquished under the rioting images of possible fates awaiting her. She put on the clothes, her skin shrinking with distaste. She had never worn such garments before and the rough material scratched. She wondered to whom they belonged. Such garments of the peasant kind were not to be found spare when people lived so close to the edge of subsistence. She shuddered, recoiling at the thought of the unwashed body they must have clothed a few short hours ago, even as she realized how foolish such a fastidious discomfort now was in the scheme of things.
“You are to be veiled but no chadri,” Zobayeda said. “And barefoot. It is ordered.”
Veiled, so there would be men at the sentencing, but no chadri so she would have no way of concealing her reactions to whatever humiliation and disgrace awaited her, and barefoot in the manner of the condemned. Only now did she realize that in her heart she had not believed Akbar Khan would exact the full penalty from her. How wrong could one be? And if he would not spare Ayesha, he would not spare Kit.
The veil was black also: the color of the brutalized slave-wives of the hillmen; the color of the disgraced women of the khans. Dressed in these clothes, she noticed almost abstractedly how her entire demeanor seemed to change. Keeping her head bowed, her eyes on the floor, her shoulders drooping was suddenly second nature. She felt drab and despised, and the contempt in the eyes of the guards as she emerged from her prison struck her as only reasonable.
She walked behind them, the entrenched cold of the oozing stone floor striking through her feet, upward through her body.
When the troop of guards burst into the hostages’ quarters just after dawn, the first impression of all those awake enough to think was that the massacre averted yesterday was about to take place. Children began to cry at the sight of the armed warriors with their pronged helmets and drawn knives. Women hustled the wailing youngsters aside as if to hide them in the shadows or behind their skirts. Those men who slept in the outer room, as conscious as ever of their defenselessness, gathered themselves together, ranging themselves in front of the women and children.
“What do you want at this hour?” Major Pottinger spoke in his halting Pushtu. “Are we to leave this place?”
“That is for Akbar Khan to decide,” one of the tribesmen replied. “We have come for Ralston, huzoor.”
Kit stepped forward from an inner room where he had his own bed space. “I am here.”
“What do you want with Captain Ralston?” demanded the major. “He is an officer in Her Imperial Majesty’s cavalry.”
“Not a very impressive status at present, Pottinger,” Kit said dryly. “But my thanks for trying.” He straightened his tunic, shabby and well-worn now, and did up the button on a threadbare shirt cuff. For some reason, it seemed to matter that he should face his fate in as good an order as could be achieved with such unpromising material. He could not get used to the absence of the sword at his belt, however. It made them all feel naked, both mentally and physically.
“Gentlemen?” He gestured to the ferociously glaring guards. “I am ready.”
“Kit … ?”
“Thanks, but no, Colin,” he said, swiftly forestalling his friend who had stepped forward, his face dark with anger and determination. “Nothing will be achieved by your death, and the sooner I get these savages out of here, the sooner the children will stop crying.” He strode to the door, his escort falling in behind him.
As they crossed the courtyard, he looked up at the great bowl of the sky contained within the jagged, ice-tipped peaks of the Hindu Kush. Small clouds scudded across the pellucid blue of an early spring morning. The air held a tang of snow from the mountains, softened with the pasture-scents of the breeze ruffling his hair. It was a beautiful day for a buzkashi. Everything seemed etched clear on his senses; he was conscious of every part of his body; of the way he walked, each muscle group moving in that miraculous automatic fashion; of the blood flowing in his veins; of the steady thump of his heart.
They reached a door on the far side of the courtyard. The rank, cold, damp odor of ancient stone imbued with poverty and misery wafted from the doorway, sullying the fresh promise of the morning. He stopped before stepping into the gloom and looked around him, as if imprinting the scene forever on his memory. Did one carry a memory into death? Better not, he thought distantly. Memories would only make the reality of “never again” so much harder to accept.
One of his escort made a threatening move, and he stepped inside before they could touch him. He knew he could not bear with restraint any physical contact … not until it was forced upon him, by which time he would be beyond caring.
They entered Akbar Khan’s presence chamber while Kit’s eyes were still accustoming themselves to the dank dimness after the bright outdoors. There were men lining the walls, turbanned or wearing steel-pronged helmets, knives thrust into studded belts, one or two holding lances or broadswords. They were a fighting force, not horsemen dressed for sport. Akbar Khan was standing on the small raised dais at the far end of the room; the table had been pushed against the wall behind him. The sirdar was dressed in chain mail, a turban on his head, a sword in his hand.
“Good morning, Ralston, huzoor,” he said in English.
“Good morning, Akbar Khan,” Kit heard himself reply as if this were a perfectly ordinary morning.
/> Akbar Khan gestured to one side below the dais, and Kit’s guard ushered him to the designated spot. The sirdar maintained his commanding position over the room and its occupants.
Kit stood very still, wishing he had Annabel’s skill at immobility. He did not think anything was expected of him at this point, and he could expect of himself only that he appear calm and unafraid. If only he knew what had happened to Annabel.
The door opened and six more Ghilzai tribesmen entered. Behind them walked Akbar Khan’s Ayesha. For a moment, Kit did not recognize the drab, bowed figure. Then he could feel the pulse in his temple throbbing as he wondered what they could have done to her to bring her to this attitude of complete subjection. It was only with the greatest difficulty that he maintained his outward calm, sensing that a violent expression of his outrage would play right into their hands.
Akbar Khan gave an order in Pushtu, his voice harsh and resounding. The men with Ayesha suddenly seized her. The room swam before Kit’s eyes. He knew he took a step forward, an oath on his lips, and then he felt the sirdar’s bright blue gaze fixed upon him. He could not read the message in the gaze, but it was sufficiently powerful to bring him to a standstill.
Ayesha was pushed brutally across the room to stumble to her knees at Kit’s feet. He stared down at her, dumbfounded, as her guards, having disposed of her, moved back against the wall with the air of men who had performed a duty well.
Akbar Khan began to speak, or rather orate, in Pushtu. Kit could not understand a word that was being said. Around him, the Ghilzais’ faces grew grimmer if it were possible. Then suddenly he became aware of a whisper, swift and fluent. Annabel was speaking to him in urgent English, still on her knees, her head still bowed, the words rustling from beneath the black veil.
“He is giving me to you … it is an insult, not a gift. He finds me unworthy and has no further use for me, so he would cast me to the feringhee, who deserves no better than the discarded worthless possessions of the Afghan. You are obliged by the laws of hospitality to accept this gift, and by the laws of the land to assume responsibility for my existence … to assume Akbar Khan’s responsibilities for something he has discarded. However, by those same laws, you may use me as you please. I am nothing.”