She scrambled up—or tried to, as pain felled her into frosted grass. Her clothing was tangled around her, and she was weak, so weak. Everything from yesterday slammed into her and the pain was a sickness she could not withstand. She wanted to curl up and cry.
Michael Bellis had done this. Another sound and she huddled, seeking the strength of her anger. His hands had dishonored her again—no matter his gentleness and skill.
She glanced at the petu she’d thrown off.
And now he’d left her here—wherever here was.
Another crack of rock and she realized her problem was more immediate. She could not be found with her clothes half-off. She pulled her blood-caked trousers over her injured leg, fought to haul herself to her knees. All hells take Michael Bellis.
He had absconded like a thief in the night. Abandoning her like the world had abandoned Afghanistan when the Russians came. Fear and anger battled in her as the scent of horse brought her head up.
The steady pace of the hooves over rock told her it was not horses alone. Loose horses walked a few paces and stopped to graze, a few more paces, then more grass.
Using the fence as support, she sat up, her injured leg stretched before her. She was surprised the jalabiyya was buttoned to her chin. Hurriedly she covered her hair with her scarf. The chador she hauled over everything and sighed in relief as she pulled it tightly around her.
Inshallah, she would stand. Her fingers scrabbled and caught on the stone and she hauled herself up. Her breath caught at the pain, but finally she peered over the top of the wall.
The morning sun over the mountains placed long shadows on the glittering dewed grass. The glare half-blinded her, but through the haze of steam off the river, a ghost rider approached, leading a second horse.
She swallowed back a quaver of fear. He must be the herd’s owner come to check them. Inshallah, he would help her.
“Help! Please help me!” She took an unsteady step away from the wall. “Please. I must get to Feyzabad. My father needs my help. Help me return to his house.”
Her injured leg threatened to give, but she tottered forward. The rider stopped, silhouetted by sun.
“As good a story as any, I suppose.”
Michael Bellis swung easily off his horse and Khadija’s legs gave as she backpedaled. Not Michael Bellis. Not Michael Bellis of the gentle hands.
All the pain, and fear and confusion coalesced in her chest. She shouldn’t think of this man in that way after what his kind had done. He was supposed to have left her. She wanted to go home. She wanted her father.
A sob rose unbidden and there he was at the head of the horses with that taunting grin on his face.
He laughed at her. By all the hells, he was laughing!
Laughing when she was furious and in pain and lost in the countryside with a man she dared not trust. She buried her face in her hands, thankful the chador covered the worst of her weeping.
Then he was kneeling in front of her.
“Khadija? What is it? Your leg?”
His voice was too soft, carried none of the sarcasm she expected from that damnable grin. He almost touched her, then stopped himself. The helplessness of his expression could have made her smile if she wasn’t so—so—she didn’t know what she was anymore.
Damn Michael Bellis and the way he confused her.
“I thought you left me to go home.” She managed to keep the words steady. “But it was you.”
Emotion ballooned to fill her chest again and she dug her fingernails into her palms. She tried to get up, but her damnable leg wouldn’t work. Ignoring his offer of assistance, she scrambled to stand, but each time her injured leg gave out.
Finally, he caught her elbow and she could have screamed her frustration as he lifted her up and tugged her chador into place while his lips wore that smirk she despised. Then he helped her back to the dead fire, leading the slow clop of the horses.
“Did you check your leg?”
“Did you check your wounds?” she retorted and knew she was being pissy.
“Actually, no. I was busy. I thought I’d ask you to take a look.”
She turned to him, and the dammed grin was still there. Her hands closed to fists as she half-fell against the stone fence. She should refuse to be his doctor, but she recalled the touch of those gentle galamjam hands.
This morning he looked different. From somewhere he had found a finely felted wool vest and a petu he wore over his salwar kameez. A length of brown cloth had been wrapped around his head in a loose, Tajik-style turban. Over his shoulder hung an ancient-looking rifle, so he looked like any other Afghan she had seen in the north.
Except for the expectant blue eyes that were so unusual amongst her people.
“Been out stealing, have you?”
His steady gaze met hers.
“Actually, I paid rather more than I should have. Had to when I showed up looking like I did.”
She hated herself for the way she remembered the muscles of his chest, as he left the horses grazing, stripped off the vest and shirt, then settled himself near the ashes of the fire.
Damn him for just assuming she’d help. But in the new sunlight his skin gleamed ruddy. The smooth expanse of chest read more like a roadmap of Afghanistan. The burn marks were weeping bomb craters rimmed in red. The blood-caked bandage on his side was like all the Afghan blood that had been spilled.
She sank down in front of him, and was forced to push her chador back from her face. She fought back awareness of his hungry gaze and focused on his injuries.
The livid color of his wounds was not normal—as if everything was going septic. Who knew what injury had been done to his ribcage and the chest cavity?
“You need a hospital.”
Michael Bellis just glanced at the sky.
“Just check the wound and we’ll leave.”
“Then lift your arm.”
She kept her voice professional and jerked the bandage loose, taking satisfaction in the quick intake of his breath. She would pay him back for her humiliation, but first there was the wound.
Its lips were bright pink, swollen, the skin around them red with broken capillaries. Red marks still ran down his side, though perhaps not so pronounced as before, but his skin was still hot and gave off the stench of rot. She grimaced.
“Not good?”
“There’s infection. I think it should drain, but we’ve no equipment to do it properly and we don’t dare leave it open in these conditions.”
“Then just bandage it. We’ve been here too long.”
She nodded, using one of the precious dressings to cover the wound, but her gaze kept slipping to his chest and abdomen. Michael started to pull on his shirt but she stopped him with a touch on his arm and motioned to the burns.
“You need those wounds cleaned and some of the chloramphenicol.”
She was too forward. She was brazen. She was everything she’d come to hate in London.
He waited patiently as she cleaned his chest with river water and wiped the ancient antiseptic on the burns. When she retrieved the antibiotic, a slight question formed in his eyes.
“I stole it, all right? From the hospital.”
“For me?”
There was that damned grin again. She stabbed the needle into his arm and was happy when he flinched. When she finished, he rubbed his bicep.
“I’ve had bullets hurt less going in.”
Ignoring him, she went to discard the syringe, but he stopped her.
“Where we’re going, that sort of thing is irreplaceable. We may need to reuse it.”
She considered the syringe. All her training said you didn’t reuse such a thing.
Just where was Michael Bellis taking her?
Chapter 23
Darkness no longer frightened Mohammed Siddiqui, but the question of his daughter’s whereabouts did.
He had grown used to the darkness that had eaten all but a small, glowing porthole of his vision since the blindness was
gifted upon him. He had found ways to cope through the use of his smell, his hearing, his sense of touch, and through his logic and the eyes of his son and daughter. Then Yaqub had been taken from him and still he had prevailed.
But with Khadija missing, the darkness suddenly seemed to smother whatever light he still had.
Hamidah, Ahmad Mali Kahn’s eldest daughter, sat beside Mohammed in the Feyzabad police station, holding his hand as if she was Khadija. It had been three days since she went missing. Three days since Aisha came home with lies on her breath, telling her stories of Khadija.
Lies Ahmad Mali Khan had listened to.
Even the other women of the house had seemed to believe—Zahra almost too much, as if the disappearance of Mohammed’s daughter was a battle cry of women’s freedom. Only Hamidah had stayed silent. She had been there to help him through the three frightening days, though no one could quell the fears that kept him awake in the night.
Khadija, where are you? His fingers squeezed Hamidah’s, seeking strength.
“Tell me again what you have found of my daughter?” He leaned forward in the chair Hamidah had pulled before the police commander’s desk and heard the scrape of chair legs on rough floorboards.
The commander smelled of goat grease and naan and unwashed clothing—all overpowering the stench of Turkish tobacco that filled the police station. The man’s wife should be disciplined for not caring properly for his things—but then, men did as they would, regardless of the woman’s wants. Perhaps he preferred to live in filth.
“There’s nothing to tell. The administrator’s wife said she took your daughter for a walk. A man came to them and your daughter threw off her veil and went with him. These city women—they are not proper daughters of Islam. Allah forgive them, they do not know their place.”
“My daughter is devout. She wears the burka.” Mohammed tried to quiet the anger clenching his chest.
“Aacha. And we found such a thing on the road. It is evidence of her actions, I think. She rests in the arms of her latest lover. Who knows how many she has had?” The man clucked his tongue in false pity like a gossipy old woman.
“You have the burka? Is this true?” Mohammed spoke more to Hamidah than to the police officer. If he could hold the burka he would prove the lie. He knew the feel of the fabric from their long time together. He could even show the smooth place where his hand rested as she guided him. Hamidah’s gloved hand squeezed his in answer.
“Then show it to me.”
The scrape of the chair said the man shifted his position.
Mohammed had been shocked when Khadija arrived in Kaabul—not that she would wear a burka during the dangerous journey from Peshawar and over the Khyber Pass from Pakistan to Kaabul. The burka gave a slight advantage of safety. But then she had continued to wear the garment. It was one she had purchased in London, she said, made of finer cloth than most made in the factories of Pakistan or the sewing shops of Kaabul.
Hamidah lifted Mohammed’s hand and placed it on soft cloth. He ran them down the fabric and a weight stole breath from his chest.
He pulled back the folds and ran his palm across the weave until his fingers found an almost smooth patch.
There was no breath, no air in the room. He jerked his hand away, spilling the fabric onto the floor.
“My daughter would not run off with a man. Someone has taken her. Someone has done this.”
“There is no proof.”
“Don’t you listen? I know my daughter.”
“Spoken like a father. But didn’t you say she lived among the kofr farangay—the foreigners—for a time? How can a father know what is truly in his daughter’s heart? A woman is like a piece of fruit, gleaming and good on the surface, but may be filled with rot in the core.”
“My daughter is not.”
“And you are a loving father who cannot believe the black truth.”
Mohammed pushed himself up from his chair. “My daughter would not! Khadija would not!”
He felt himself sway under the weight of the smothering darkness. If she was lost to him….
But was she not already lost to him since she returned to Kaabul? The way they had argued about his old friend, Michael. She had seemed to hate the man, though they had barely met, and that was not the Khadija he had sent to England to study. That girl had been full of the questions that made a good scientist and doctor. That girl had been one who rejected dogma.
“Friend Siddiqui. I know you love your daughter. Every father does. But how can a father ever truly know his daughter’s heart?”
All his doubts fell on his shoulders. Who knew the truth? This man had already made up his mind.
“Come, Hamidah. He will not help.”
She caught his hand, placed it on her arm, just as Khadija had, but she was too short, her flesh too soft under the cloth. Allah, what have you done with my daughter? Please, keep her safe for me.
The cool air of the morning found his face when they stepped outside, but it did nothing to lift his sense of breathlessness. His legs wobbled under him and suddenly he was overcome with a sense of age and loss. Without Khadija he would be alone.
There would be no hope of his son-in-law going against tradition and moving into his home. There would be no grandchildren’s laughter. None of Khadija’s singing that had brought a smile to his face all the years of his life. There would be only silence to go along with the smothering darkness of his country.
Something had happened to his daughter in England.
What had happened to her now?
Chapter 24
Crack!
The recoil of the ancient rifle slammed into Michael’s shoulder and sent shocks through his side so he almost dropped the weapon. He coolly set the pain aside and lowered the rifle.
On the sere hillside a cloud of partridge feathers shuddered on the breeze and then subsided. He grabbed his horse’s reins and led it down to collect the carcass. The shells of the old Lee Enfield rifle were enough to almost blast the bird apart, but there was still enough flesh that he and Khadija would have meat to supplement the lentils and rice he had bought from the farmer who had sold him the horses.
He’d almost left her that night, but she’d been so vulnerable after he’d finished suturing her leg. Who was he kidding? No matter the fury in her green-brown gaze, there was something about her—when he’d lain bound to that bench in the cave delirium had convinced him there was something larger at work here.
Like when Rumi finally met the teacher he’d prayed for, Shams of Tabriz.
No, that had been a mystical union of spirits, of minds meeting at a glance in their love for Allah. There was no damned way he had prayed for feelings for this woman. Still, he’d worried about her the whole time he’d been gone.
And he’d paid top dollar for two horses and then the old man had been willing to part with the rifle—something that made Michael a damn sight happier, even if the weapon harkened back to the Second World War.
Even if it meant he was killing again. In these parts, even an ancient weapon made a man, a man. An unarmed man was only a victim-in-waiting. He swung up onto horseback and turned his brown gelding upslope, to the place Khadija waited.
Her chestnut mare cropped grass down-slope from her, while she rested in a hollow near the ridge of the mountain. She startled when his shadow fell on her, and her face didn’t exactly light up at his presence, but at least she managed to hide her hate. An uneasy truce had developed between them over their week of travel. Or perhaps she was just worn down by her pain. In any event, she’d stopped wearing the chador pulled down tightly around her when they were alone.
“How is it?” he asked as he sank down beside her and began to pluck masses of feathers from the bird.
Not even the harsh light off the rocks could destroy the fine grain of her skin, but it also revealed the pain lines around her eyes. And the fear. It was a constant in her face and he wondered how she lived with it—how it had come to fill her. He hoped
it wasn’t solely his doing.
“I told you, I’m fine.”
She looked at the sun and struggled to her feet where the wind off the peaks loosed strands of her hair from her kerchief. It softened the hard angle of her jaw in a most provocative way.
“Did you see the flowers?” He pointed to a small group of pink blooms struggling in the dust. He’d not seen their kind before.
Khadija gave him a considering look, her fear finally hidden, but it was as if she was blind to the flower’s small beauty.
“We should keep moving. I know I slow you down.”
“You need to rest.”
“You said the old shepherd was a danger and that we’re only south of Yskan, not to Ghowrayd Gharam like you wanted.”
He closed his eyes. It was true, all of it. She’d not been able to travel the distances he knew they needed. They’d traveled less than forty miles, and in Yskan their luck had run out. Until then they had traveled the narrow road along the river, nary seeing another soul. It was nearing harvest and most people were busy with those labors, while the shepherds were still in the hills with the flocks.
But at Yskan an old shepherd had found them as they made camp east of the straggle of houses that made up the town. First they had smelled the scent of sheep, and then the weathered face had appeared at the edge of their firelight, wearing a tattered, flat-topped Tajik cap and mutton-scented clothing.
Khadija had hurriedly pulled on her chador before offering tea, but it was too late. The fact she sat without her covering, the fact that Michael’s eyes were such an unusual color—that was enough to give the old man information to sell if he was so inclined.
They’d left the road after that, traveling the deep valleys the other side of the jutting mountain that edged the Kowkcheh River. It made water difficult, and they and the horses suffered, but it also made them harder to find.
Michael collected the horses and brought Khadija’s to her. Walking still pained her, though her leg improved each day. The antibiotics seemed to deal with that infection, at least.
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