by Tamim Ansary
“I’m not here to kill Shah Shuja.”
“Good, because the cur still has teeth. I warn people, poke him if you like, but it’ll be like poking a mad dog. Two went up there already and never came back.”
“Are you sure you don’t remember me? I’m the one who came looking for the Malang of Char Bagh.”
“Ah, poor malang! Yes, I remember you now. Not your face, but your story. The malang was a strange man, a great man. I saw him once. He made me weep.”
Was a strange man? The word sent a shudder through Ibrahim. “I’m here to get him out. Who do I see about it?”
“You’re too late.”
“What? No! If it’s about money, I can pay. Isn’t this still a prison? I can pay! Is someone still in charge ? Direct me to someone in charge!”
The gatekeeper poked between his teeth with a straw.
“What do you mean, ‘too late?’” Ibrahim asked finally.
“The Engrayzee took him along. There was talk of putting him on trial in India. Him and the other ringleaders.”
“Ringleaders of what?”
“Of all these troubles, all this fighting. They vowed not to let all this bloodshed go unavenged. This is what I heard They’ll hang them all, I heard. Don’t blame me, I’m just the gatekeeper. Anyway, there’s no one left in this prison except Shah Shuja’s personal enemies, and he didn’t give a dot of dirt about your Malang of Char Bagh. Anyway, he’ll be dead soon, if that’s any consolation. Sooner or later, one of these assassins will succeed. Don’t tell anyone I said so—not that it matters, the whole world is crumbling. I only stay because they still serve dinner here. Come inside if you wish, have some tea before you go, tell me the news from below. I can’t leave my post, and it does get lonely up here.”
Ibrahim turned away. The gatekeeper snatched idly at his sleeve. “What’s the hurry, chief? Well, if you’re going, go, but how about a bit of that money?”
It was only the enervated effort of a man enfeebled by a useless existence. Ibrahim rode back down and across the city to reach the Engrayzee garrison. Bric-a-brac lay strewn across the courtyard—bits of clothing, spoons, broken dolls…. “Malang-sahib!” Ibrahim yelled, running from building to building.
Beggars came trickling out of various buildings to stare, but seeing what they took to be just another crazed beggar, they returned to their commandeered shelters. Ibrahim galloped to Shamsuddin’s compound. “They took the malang,” he panted. “The malang is with the Engrayzee. They could be halfway to Jalalabad by now. I must catch up with them, plead with them, offer money. Thank you for your kindness, Shamsuddin-sahib, and forgive my rude haste, but I must leave you now.”
The hat merchant begged him to wait until morning, and his family added their pleas, but Ibrahim shook them all off. At last, Shamsuddin’s wife said, “Well, if you must go, we’ll have to let you go, but not without provisions and equipment.”
Out of their own meager stores, the family dug up warm clothes, a padded overcoat, and knee-high riding boots. They put a blanket under his saddle to keep his horse warm. They gave him a bag full of bread and a skinful of water. They made him pass under the Quran three times, even though Ibrahim was almost too frantic to go through that indispensable ritual. They gave him directions as far as Jagdalak and watched him gallop away on his black horse.
At first, Ibrahim kept his eyes trained for the landmarks his friends had mentioned. He wanted to make sure he was following the right road. It struck him that Ghulam Dastagir must have followed this same road to his unknown fate. A few miles from the city, the road brought Ibrahim to a makeshift bridge the Engrayzee had built across the river. It was broken in the middle and the jagged shards of it, cased in ice, dangled in the water. Down there, Ibrahim saw a cannon on wheels still harnessed to a dead horse. His fingertips tingled. He needed no more landmarks. This was the trail, all right.
Since the bridge was broken, he guided his horse down to the water’s edge and cantered along the bank, looking for a ford. He found the same one the Engrayzees had used: he knew because two of them lay face down in the shallow water with ragged bullet holes in their backs. Both were clad in those red uniforms. The river had washed away their blood, and the skin, where it showed at their neck and hands, seemed to shine because a second skin of fresh ice had formed around their limbs.
The moon was rising. He entered the Khurd Kabul Pass and the trail began to slope upward. Soon, cliffs rose up steeply from one side of the road and the land dropped down steeply to the river on the other. The Engrayzee must have marched this way, the wreckage of their wagon train lay scattered as far as the eye could see. Some carts had fallen off the road and broken up on the rocks below where the river thundered. Other carts had overturned on the road itself for no obvious reason. Goods lay spilled and abandoned. Perhaps the wagons had come under attack from the cliffs above and the people had dropped their bundles and started running. But running where? With the river on one side and cliffs on the other, there were only two directions to go, forward or back, and neither way led to any shelter from the Ghilzai sharpshooters on the cliffs. And yet they must have escaped because Ibrahim saw no people. He saw dead horses, mules, donkeys, and even a few camels frozen into twisted shapes, their agony obscured by snow, but no people. Had the survivors piled their dead into wagons and hauled them along?
Yes, that was what they had done. He knew when he came upon an overturned wagon out of which eight bodies had spilled. They too lay where they had spilled, like the goods further back. Whoever had brought them this far could do nothing more for them.
A short distance up the path, he saw a woman about the same age as Khadija. Her hair was yellow. Her face, even her lips, were pale. Her eyes had frozen open, and he could see the moon reflected in each of those glassy green windows. She had died sitting up against a rock, her face, shockingly naked, turned toward the sky. Sprawled in front of her was a man he recognized. Okusley. He was hard to recognize, because his face was covered with blood and distorted by death. Engrayzees looked similar to begin with, and death blended them further, but this was Okusley all right, and he held a sword in his left hand. He had gone down fighting.
Ibrahim squatted in front of the woman and touched her square jaw. He could see a faint moustache on her upper lip. “W’Allah…” he whispered in wonder and disgust. How had it come to this? “What are you doing here,” he whispered. Then he spoke louder. “Why did you come here?” Then he lost control and screamed at the dead woman, screamed at her. “Why? Why did you come here? This is not your country! Why did you come here to die?” The sound of his voice cracked against the cliffs on either side of him and came echoing back and died away. The woman had a hole in her neck, and the front of her dress was stained with blood. The wet, cold air felt heavy in Ibrahim’s chest, a sensation almost indistinguishable from grief. He touched the woman’s cheek, and though he shuddered, he forced himself to graze a finger lightly over her head, a gesture of caressing comfort. Corpses are unclean, but he felt he had to do at least this much for her: touch her. “Allah forgive you,” he whispered. He should bury her, he thought: he should do at least that much. But he had no shovel, and the ground was covered with snow, and even without snow, this soil was probably too rocky to dig. And even without rocks, it was too frozen. The foreigners had done nothing for their dead except to carry them along for a while and then drop them, and he could do no more than they.
Walking back to his horse, he stepped on something that crunched under foot: a pair of spectacles. They belonged to Okusley. Without these on his head, he remembered, the man could not see. So Okusley had fought his final battle as a blind man, swinging his sword in the dark. Ibrahim pushed the spectacles carefully back onto Okusley’s head and positioned the shattered glass in front of his eyes. He could do that much, even for an enemy. Then he mounted his horse and rode on.
Barely one k’roh further on, he saw another corpse, an Engrayzee soldier, his black moustache powdered with snow. He lay un
der a wagon that had rammed into the side of the cliff. Someone firing from above with one of those long-barreled rifles must have put a bullet through him. His horse had torn loose and his wagon had rolled on until it crashed.
Then Ibrahim saw another corpse. And then another. And another and another and another. And after that the landscape seemed littered with them. Some had been shot, some hacked up with knives, but many more had simply frozen, as if they had grown too tired to keep marching and had paused to rest, and had died where they paused.
He started to count the dead, but his count soon ran into the hundreds and he stopped, because the trail of corpses just went on, into the thousands, into the many thousands, and what was the point of merely counting them? In one place, where the road crested, he could see corpses behind him and in front of him as far as his gaze could reach, dotting the slice of landscape bisected by that road. The sight of children among the dead made him shut his eyes. Someplace nearby, water roared on its journey through rocky gorges, and all around him, he could hear wind whispering among the rocks, but there was no human voice—certainly no human voice.
45
He couldn’t stop to look for the malang among the dead. If any Engrayzee still lived, they might have the living malang in their custody and he might still be saved. If he lay among the dead, Ibrahim would have all the time in the world to search for his body on the way back. He kept his cotton-padded robe belted tightly around himself, and the hat merchant’s blanket wrapped over the robe, and yet he shivered. When fatigue overtook him, he tied himself to his horse’s neck and slumped against the warm flesh to doze. From time to time, jerked awake by some sound, he stared about wildly, fearful that his horse had strayed, but there was nowhere to stray on that ribbon of road through the fifty-mile crack in the mountains.
Every so often, Ibrahim had to stop and let his horse rest. He fed it handfuls of hay from the larger of his two bags and from the other bag took bits of bread to keep himself nourished. While the horse rested, however, Ibrahim had to flap his arms and beat his hands against his thighs to stay warm, for the temperature was cold enough to freeze moving water. Indeed, wherever the road curved close to the gorge he could peek over the edge and see frozen waterfalls. Sometimes, if he listened hard, he could hear the water gurgling deep within the ice. Time passed unmeasured, some of it daylight, some of it night, and his dozing dreams mingled with fragmentary impressions of a landscape permeated by death.
Then he heard voices. Real ones. No dream could have yanked him out of slumber with such force. When he jerked upright, the rope binding him to his horse cut against his neck, so he loosened the cord to look around. The moon had set, but dawn had worn a patch of night sky thin. Against that glow, he could make out the silhouettes of mountains all around him, the taller peaks poking into the very clouds. Ahead of him the canyon widened into a valley and there, somewhere, he saw twinkles of light. A horse whinnied,. A gun sounded. A horse screamed and then—a hubbub of men’s voices.
Ibrahim peered into the inky air. His horse still trudged along, careless of the danger posed by men with guns, stepping daintily over a frozen Engrayzee child, then picking its way up a rocky slope. From the crest, Ibrahim looked down and saw the skirmish. A group of thirty or forty Afghans had surrounded a handful of Engrayzee soldiers. The foreigners in turn had formed up around a sort of giant birdcage. The Afghans were circling the group and their cage on foot, hooting in Pushto, inexorably moving in.
Ibrahim rode toward the action. “People!”
A man separated from the circle of Afghans and ran toward him, calling out his name. His face was swaddled in a turban for warmth, but by his gait and voice, and by the size of him , Ibrahim recognized Ghulam Dastagir. “Dearest friend,” he exulted. “Dear brother, I thought I would never see you again!”
“Ibrahim! Come quick—they have the malang!”
Ibrahim leaned out of his saddle to embrace Ghulam Dastagir but he snapped upright quickly and rode toward the fighting. Now he saw why the Afghans were only yelling, only brandishing knives, keeping their distance. In that big cage, the Engrayzee had a hostage: the malang, in fact. A dozen Engrayzees made a ring around the cage with their backs to it, facing outward, their bayonets swaying like scorpions’ stingers, but two stood inside that circle with their bayonets poking through the bars and pressing against the malang’s shirt. A single thrust from either would push steel between his ribs. The whole group looked like cornered cats, aroused to reckless ferocity by danger. They were fighting for their lives, and the hostage was their only card.
“Do they know who he is?” Ibrahim panted.
“The Pushtoons do. I told them,” said Ghulam Dastagir. “They had heard of him already. These men are of the Safi tribe. They took me in. But the Engrayzees only know that we value this man, so they’re threatening to kill him.”
The Afghans were chattering in Pushto, breaking off occasionally to curse the Engrayzees. “Let him go. Let him go,” one of them screamed, “or I’ll kill every last donkey-fucker among you.”
“We’ll kill them anyway,” murmured Ibrahim.
“That we will,” vowed Ghulam Dastagir. “As soon as they release the malang.”
“But they’ll never release him if they think we’ll kill them anyway. This way ends badly. Tell your friends, Ghulam Dastagir. We have to give them a way to live.”
“It’s too late,” said Ghulam Dastagir. “Didn’t you see the corpses strewn from here to Kabul? These ones will never believe we’ll let them live, no matter what we do. They’ll try to kill us first if we give them any opening. So we can’t let up on them, Malik-sahib. It’s them or us now, and we have all the power. They have only the malang.”
“So they have everything, and we have nothing. I must talk to them.”
“You can’t talk to them. Are you crazy? You don’t speak their tongue. They don’t speak ours.”
The sun had come up somewhere, diluting the blackness just a little. The Afghans looked weary but greedy. The Engrayzee soldiers looked haggard but deadly. If the standoff went on long enough, they might collapse, but they’d kill the malang before they went down. If they were down to one last deed, that would be the deed.
“Listen to me, men.” Ibrahim’s Pushto was rough and the tribesmen looked at him distrustfully.
“He’s with me,” Ghulam Dastagir assured them. “He’s the headman of my village, the malang’s first disciple.” The tribesmen studied Ibrahim with tentative respect. “He’s Wazir Akbar Khan’s scribe,” Ghulam Dastagir went on to boast, but the tribesmen burst out laughing at this one. Akbar Khan! Oh, those Kandahar Pushtoons! That lot plowed no soil in these parts. This was Ghilzai country!
“I’ve left Akbar’s service,” Ibrahim announced quickly. “He let the Engrayzees take away my malang. I put no faith in princes anymore. That’s why I came myself.”
“And what can you do?” one of the tribesmen scoffed. “We have them cornered and it’s not enough. They can still kill the poor malang before we even get close to them. We’ve been puzzling over this for hours—how to break the stalemate. But perhaps,” he added sarcastically, “you know a way that we haven’t thought of!”
“I do. I have a plan. With all respect to your courage, let me talk to them.”
“They speak gibberish. You can’t talk to them.”
In his clumsy Pushto, Ibrahim replied, “They only want to get out of here alive. For that, they need a hostage, but it doesn’t have to be Malang-sahib. It could be me. I’ll offer myself in his place. They’ll accept the offer if they think I’m worth something to you men. So grant me one indulgence. Give me a show of respect. Make them think I have great value to you. Then, if they release the malang, let them depart in peace.”
“But they’ll have you,” Ghulam Dastagir exclaimed in horror. “What will I tell everyone in Char Bagh? What will I tell your wife?”
“They’ll have me, yes, yes, but Allah is compassionate, Ghulam Dastagir. He’ll set me free in hi
s own way. At worst, he’ll admit me to the ranks of martyrs. If they let Malang-sahib go, you take my horse, it’s a fine one I got from Wazir Akbar Khan. It will carry you both as far as Kabul. Take this bag of money, too. I don’t know how much is in there but share it with these good tribesmen and keep enough to get yourself and Malang-sahib home. Take him home to Khadija. Tell her … I send my greetings and will return as soon as God permits. But tell her I discharged my vow, I kept my promise—make her see that I did. I got her husband back to her. Tell her all this if God permits.”
“Oh, sweet Ibrahim! Sweet Allah! Ibrahim, my good friend.” Ghulam Dastagir dropped to one knee and began to kiss Ibrahim’s hand. “If ever I doubted your greatness, forgive me. You are truly my commander, Hajji Ibrahim. You are loved by God, we put our faith and trust only in Him, I long to be as close to Allah one day as you are now, as you have always been. I see it now. I see that you are my sheikh. I know you at last and how can I bear to lose you now? Now that I know, how can I bear it? Oh my God!”
Ibrahim pulled his hand away from Ghulam Dastagir, glancing around embarrassed. The Safi men studied this interaction between the warrior they knew and the newcomer they had just met, and they were impressed. The Engrayzee looked on silently too, weighing what they were seeing. One by one, the Safi men stepped forward. Each one put a hand to his heart and bowed to Ibrahim, kissed his hand, and retired to the slopes. It was a spontaneous show of sincere respect, and it convinced the foreigners. They all fixed on Ibrahim now as he moved toward them with his hands in the air. The malang looked peaceful inside the cage, his head slumped to one side, his eyes half shut, his lips moving.
Ibrahim gestured toward the malang, then toward himself, and beckoned to the foreigners. “Let me be your prisoner.” They only stared at him. Ibrahim moved closer, but they lifted their rifle barrels sharply and he stopped moving. “Be calm,” he crooned. “Take me as your prisoner.” These men looked beaten. Their uniforms were torn and their faces bled from assorted cuts. Their hair, once wet with sweat, had frozen. The closest one stared ferociously at Ibrahim and said something in a wild voice. He took a jerky step toward the headman, but his companions restrained him.