by Jane Feather
Kit listened, incredulous. Akbar Khan’s words continued to ring through the room, dripping with contempt and loathing, occasionally taunting, producing rumbles of amused mockery from the audience, relishing the insults. Then he became aware that the whispering rustle at his feet had begun again. Without looking down at her, he strained his ears to catch the vehement instructions.
“You must be angry at the insults, or there will be no satisfaction for them. Say you will reject such a gift … that the pride of your race will not permit you to receive something that your host considers worthless … Think like an Afghan!”
Urgency pulsed in the last instruction. Think like an Afghan. Dear God Almighty, how did an Afghan think? What code of honor and insults was operating here? A man could not refuse the gift of hospitality, he remembered that from the first occasion, when Akbar Khan had given him Ayesha for the night. He could not have refused that gift without having his throat cut. While he had understood the underlying insult embodied in that gift, it had been offered within the code of compliments—a man shares his most precious possession with a favored guest. Then he realized: for some incomprehensible reason, this exhibition was not for Akbar Khan; it was for the Ghilzai tribesmen. They would believe what they heard. They must see him forced into accepting the insult that would redeem Akbar Khan’s pride and legitimize the khan’s merciful action in not passing the death sentence. For these men, death was preferable to humiliation, particularly over something as intrinsically expendable as a woman.
Think like an Afghan. Well, he’d always had a talent for the dramatic.
He raised his head, the gray eyes blazing. “You would insult me, Akbar Khan,” he said in slow, careful Persian. “You would give me this …” He touched the kneeling figure contemptuously with the toe of his boot. “This that you find worthless.”
A rustle ran around the room, a murmur of satisfaction, even as the men laid hands upon their weapons. Even for those who did not speak Persian, his meaning was clear.
“You would refuse the gift of hospitality?” Akbar Khan demanded in Persian, swiftly repeating himself in Pushtu. The audience became more watchful, and Kit had the unmistakable impression that they were waiting for the order to fall upon him.
“A gift that is given in insult,” Kit snapped, nudging again at the bowed figure. A quiver shivered through her, whether of fear or tension or indignation at the gesture, he could not tell. Never could he have imagined a situation more appalling, more barbaric, more volatile. Akbar Khan might be offering them a way out, but if Kit made a mistake, the sirdar would have no hesitation in abandoning them to the blood-lusting Ghilzais. “You would oblige me to accept in the name of hospitality a woman you have discarded? To assume responsibilities you have cast off?”
“You accept the insult or death, Ralston, huzoor,” Akbar Khan declared. His hand lifted, tossed something toward him. A sliver of silver arced through the dimness, fell with a metallic tinkle at his feet. It was a key.
Kit stared down at it, for the moment bewildered, then Ayesha at his feet moved an arm and he caught the glimmer of the bracelet at her wrist. It was the key to the bracelets. If he picked it up, he indicated that he had swallowed the insult. He would leave here humiliated in the eyes of these men, a defeated enemy not worth further consideration; and Akbar Khan would emerge from the situation the victor, his own honor intact.
He was really becoming quite adept at thinking like an Afghan, Kit reflected, bending to pick up the key.
A sigh whispered around the encircling men. Kit pocketed the key, glanced down at the kneeling figure, commanded curtly, “Come.” Then he spun on his heel and walked to the door, his spine crawling at the expectation, of a dagger in his back. But he heard only the soft pad of Ayesha’s bare feet as she followed him, her eyes resolutely on the ground.
They walked unescorted, unmolested, through the stone passageway and out into the courtyard. The sun shone. A sparrow hopped across the stones and offered them a beady-eyed, cocky glance before taking off over the wall.
Kit stopped. Annabel stopped behind him. “Did what I think just happened, happen?” he asked in a strangely flat tone, not turning to look at her.
“Yes,” she replied. “Do you understand why—”
“I think so,” he interrupted. “He could not simply give you back to your own people. It would be an admission of defeat.”
“Exactly. Not so much for himself, but for the others who follow him. A khan cannot show weakness.”
“Is there anywhere we can go in this place without being observed?” They were still standing apart, Kit in front, the veiled, black-clad Afghan woman the correct number of paces behind.
Annabel thought, remembering when she had been here last, not as a prisoner. “Behind the stables, perhaps,” she said tentatively. “To the left of the far outhouse.”
“Will we be prevented? I do not think I could endure patiently another confrontation at this point.”
“I don’t think so. Wound-licking is considered appropriate and permissible after such a beating.”
Kit grimaced. In that respect at least the Afghan code was not dissimilar from his own. He wondered why he felt as if he had died and had not yet been reborn. He followed her soft directions as she walked behind him, maintaining the charade for any knowing eyes, and they found themselves at the rear of the low stable building. They had encountered a few curious glances, had been aware that there were those who watched them, but no one attempted to interfere with their progress.
It was cold and shadowy between the wall of the fortress and the stable wall, the ground hard-ridged mud, the air insalubrious.
Ayesha unfastened the black veil, and Annabel sighed with relief as her mouth and nose were freed from the stale-smelling cloth. “I was so afraid that you would not be able to manage it,” she said, leaning against the wall of the stable. “I did not know whether you would understand properly what was going on.”
“Ye of little faith,” he said sourly. “I have never participated in a more disgusting affair.”
“Oh, feringhee,” she taunted. “Was it too subtle for you? Or was it too painful to play the Afghan game? Did it hurt your pride so very much? Surely it was better than being the prize in a buzkashi?”
Kit closed his eyes on his anger. He knew what it was, why it had erupted between them. The dreadful fear of the last months should have gone, but it was like an amputated limb: one still felt its pain. They had somehow to establish a communication that would permit the newness between them, the knowledge that they now had each other and only each other. And he must make the effort to understand that for Annabel, the final, irrevocable loss of Ayesha could not be accomplished with indifference.
He pulled the still-draped veil from her hair and took her in his arms. “Sweetheart, we mustn’t quarrel … not now. I can imagine the fear you endured in the last hours simply by remembering my own.” He brushed a coppery tendril of hair from her forehead. “But it is over and we must build anew. You belong with us now.”
“Do I?” Her voice sounded strangely flat, lacking in her usual confidence. “I do not know what is to happen now. I do not know what I am to do. How can I live in such close quarters with the others? I am not really of them. I do not belong with them or with the Afghan. Everything that has happened since Khoord Kabul has served to accentuate that. And they know I do not belong.”
“You could trust me,” he said with a quizzical smile. “I will look after you.”
Her chin lifted and that mocking gleam appeared in the jade eyes. “You agreed to do so, of course, Ralston, huzoor. To take responsibility for my existence according to your own lights, as Akbar Khan has done these last eight years. I belong to you. You have the key.” She lifted her hands, turning them so that the bracelets caught a finger of sunlight poking into the shadows.
Abruptly, Kit decided that maybe anger had a purpose. Annabel seemed bent on provoking him, for some reason of her own—a not unusual occurrence, as
he well knew—and in the aftermath of the last hour he had little energy to resist provocation. Indeed, on one level, he would welcome the cleansing fire.
He took the key from his pocket, opened her hand, and slapped, the little object onto her palm. “The key is yours. The bracelets are yours. You wear them or not as you choose.” He closed her fingers hard over the key. “I give you fair warning—I have had as much as I can take of this Afghan mockery, swallowed enough insults in one morning to last a lifetime, so if you want a fight, Miss Spencer, you may have one with the greatest of pleasure.”
The gray eyes glared at her as she stood in her rusty black peasant’s garb, her hair shockingly bright, her eyes overly large in her pale face. “I ask your pardon,” she said. “I don’t wish to have a fight.”
Kit took a deep breath. “Good. Because I have to say, sweetheart, this really does seem both an inappropriate time and place to choose for one.” Catching her chin, he tilted her face and very gently kissed her. Her lack of response alarmed him. “What is it, love?” He smiled, touched her cheek.
“Nothing,” she said without expression. “I just do not know what I am to do now.”
Since when had Ayesha-Annabel been at a loss for either words or actions? Then Kit realized with a shock that she suddenly seemed to have lost some inner spring, as if she had wound down, her last reserves used up in that desperate battle to bring them both out or the presence chamber alive. Without her interpretation and instruction he would have failed to understand what was required of him, would have made the wrong move, and they would both have been lost.
It was time he took over. She was in his world now, more so than she had been in the cantonment when her presence was something she had chosen, her wholehearted involvement withheld, and it was his turn to bear the brunt of the responsibility for making and implementing the necessary plans that would make sense of their new situation.
“Right,” he said briskly, taking her hand. “You may not know what to do, but I do. I have endured enough of your adoptive rituals, my Anna. And I am sick to death of being conducted through them like a bewildered recruit at an induction ceremony. You are now going to participate in some of my ceremonies—one in particular.”
Pulling her behind him, he set off at a fast lope, back across the courtyard toward the hostages’ billet.
“What do you mean one of my rituals?” Annabel demanded, hanging back. “I do not wish to go in there just yet, Kit.”
“How would you describe that barbaric ceremony, if not one of your rituals?” Kit said, jerking her up beside him. “Now you are going to experience one tradition amongst the people of your birth, Miss Spencer.”
“Kit, thank God, man, we never expected to see you again.” Colin, with the brigadier and two others, came running out of the building as Kit and his seemingly reluctant, black-clad companion approached. “Who the hell—” Then Colin gaped. “Annabel?”
“Yes,” Kit said shortly. “And don’t ask me to describe what happened, Colin, because I don’t think I could do so without committing murder. Where’s the padre?”
“I wish you would talk in plain English,” Annabel declared, digging her bare heels into the cobbles, her voice sounding considerably stronger than before. “All this half-witted muttering about rituals.”
“Weddings,” Kit said, turning to face her. “That’s what we do where I come from, miss, when a man agrees to take responsibility for the welfare of a woman. And that’s what we are going to have now.”
“A wedding?” exclaimed Lady Sale, appearing in the doorway. “Goodness gracious, Kit, whatever would your poor mother say?”
“I rather imagine she would view the prospect with some relief, ma’am.” Kit’s voice was as dry as the desert wind.
Lady Sale looked uncertain. “I fail to imagine how you could find this a laughing matter, Captain Mackenzie,” she said in stern rebuke.
“I do beg your pardon, ma’am.” Colin was doubled over with laughter. “But you must admit the opportunities for amusement are few and far between these days.”
Lady Sale’s lips twitched. “Perhaps so … perhaps so. But if there is to be a wedding, then it must be done properly. There’s to be no hole-in-the-corner affair under my jurisdiction. What’s the poor gal to be married in, for heaven’s sake?”
“What does it matter what she wears?” Kit exploded, forgetting the courtesies for once in the face of this absurdity after everything that had gone before.
Lady Sale drew herself up to her most dignified amplitude. “Christopher, if you are intending to make an honest woman of Miss Spencer, then I can only applaud your belated sense of responsibility. But you will not deprive the members of this group of the opportunity for a celebration by behaving in a rash and haphazard fashion.”
Annabel slipped slowly to the cobbles, utterly defeated. Here she was, having narrowly escaped the stoning pit, dressed in the garb of the meanest hillwoman, insignia of a condemned adulteress, released from the zenana yet still Akbar Khan’s prisoner, thrown without preparation or resources amongst a close-knit group of people with whom she wanted to identify but couldn’t, and they were arguing wedding clothes as if it were the most important subject under the sun.
“Damnation!” Kit dropped to his knees beside her. “Sweetheart, how could I have been so thoughtless? Are you ill?”
Lady Sale, who had not flinched at his language, evidence of the erosion that captivity had had upon the conventions, pushed him aside. “The poor girl’s quite exhausted, I shouldn’t wonder. I don’t know how we would have managed without her these last months … and it must have been so lonely for her.”
“I am quite all right, Lady Sale,” Annabel said. “Just a little bemused.” She held out a hand imperatively to Kit, who took it and pulled her upright. “I have to take off these clothes,” she said abruptly. “My skin’s crawling. I wonder if I went back to the zenana, Zobayeda would find me my own garments.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. You cannot go back in there,” Kit said forcefully. “You do not belong there anymore, Annabel. Was that not made sufficiently clear to you?”
She bit her lip. It was true. She would enter an Afghan zenana as an interloper now. There was no possibility of keeping a foot in the old life; Akbar Khan had ensured that. Why, in her confusion, was she not grateful? She had prayed for release, begged Destiny and the gods for just the chance to be united with Kit. So why did she simply wish to weep and flee to the seclusion of her prison cell? How could she live with these people with whom she had nothing in common, in these cramped conditions with no privacy, when she was accustomed to the solitude and peace of her own company? Then she remembered her loneliness as she had watched them playing with the children; as she had heard them conducting Sunday service; whenever she had left them after her daily visits, entertaining each other, conversing, disputing maybe, but a sharing community. Wasn’t this what she wanted?
She turned away with a whispered apology and went to sit in the sun a short distance from the doorway. Kit, stricken, took a step toward her, but there was something forbidding … or did he mean forbidden … about her posture. He knew with absolute certainty that he could not intrude upon her privacy.
“Come, Kit, we will discuss the wedding with the padre,” Lady Sale said, briskly encouraging. “There must be something we can do to make a special occasion of this. We have little enough, to be sure, but if we all contribute something …” Chattering in this bracing fashion, she went inside.
Kit followed her because for the moment he could think of nothing else to do. Colin and the brigadier stood for a minute, looking at the still, black-clad figure who seemed so out of place in their little enclave, then they too left her and went inside.
“Ayesha?”
At the sound of her name, Ayesha came out of her reverie. “Why, Zobayeda, what are you doing here?”
The enwrapped servant, her eyes darting fearfully around as if she expected some demon in feringhee form to jump out at
her, put a bundle on the ground beside Ayesha. “Your clothes … but I’m to take back the ones you’re wearing. They belong to the goatherd’s mother.”
That answered that question. “Just a minute.” Picking up the bundle, Annabel went to the outhouse that served the hostages. She stripped off the loathsome garments of disgrace and dressed in her own worn but comfortable linen chalvar and tunic, slipped her shoes upon her feet. The effect was instantaneous. She felt herself again. Whoever herself was. Suddenly the question seemed to embody excitement, the prospect of discovering the answer quite intoxicating. She stepped out into the April sunshine, handing the waiting Zobayeda the hillwoman’s clothing.
But as she walked into the dim outer room of the hostages’ quarters, that flash of confidence faded. The people grouped in the cramped space were deep in a discussion and form of communication that was alien to her. Men and women huddled together in consultation over common cause, the ability to understand each other as essential as the air they breathed. Conversation ceased at her appearance, in a manner that indicated she had been the subject of discussion. “I do beg your pardon, I didn’t mean to intrude,” she said, turning back to the door.
“Miss Spencer … ?” Brigadier Shelton spoke hesitantly. “There’s no need for you to leave.”
Annabel gestured in vague, what she hoped was polite, dismissal and took her confusion toward the door.
“Annabel.” It was Colin’s voice, quietly arresting. When she continued with her retreat, he repeated her name imperatively. “Annabel.”
Kit said nothing, simply kept his seat on the broad stone windowsill. Annabel must come into this group of her own accord, believing that she was welcomed. His assurances would prove nothing.