Then a more frightening thought seized her: she herself had killed an Afghan child; could these men be from his clan? Were they taking her and her children to some tribal stronghold to exact a terrible vengeance for his death? Common sense returned in time to prevent the panic taking control of her, and she asked herself how any of the boy’s family could know who had killed him, or even that he had been killed, unless they had witnessed the scene, in which case they would have taken their vengeance there and then.
They rode on for four hours of increasing fear and discomfort. Perdita’s eyes burned with tiredness, and all her joints seemed to ache with cold and exhaustion. Her icy clothes stuck to her body, and she felt degraded with the dirt and blood that soiled her.
Then, as the ponies climbed the last few yards towards a squalid-looking mud village on a small plateau high in the mountains, she deliberately looked around her to try to find some peace of mind before facing what was to come. To her surprise she found that she could see a certain beauty in the landscape. The little village might be poor and mean, but the mud of its walls had dried to a calm beige that echoed the snowless slopes of the bald mountains above it. The snow on the plateau and dusting the higher slopes was dazzlingly white, and the bright sun picked out silver lights on the bare, fastigiate trees within the village walls. A frozen river was stilled by its ice imprisonment and a bird sang somewhere. There was peace there, and a strange loveliness.
Perdita turned to face the village and said to James Thurleigh:
‘Now we shall know. That must be the headman.’ They both looked towards the turbaned man who was waiting for them. As they came nearer, Perdita could make out his dress and features. His greyish-white turban was wound above a broad brow, creased and burnt brown. His eyes, hazel as an Englishman’s, were narrowed against the glare, and seemed to her to express the loathing of her race that she had come to recognize in Caubul, and his mouth looked as full and sensually cruel as the Dost’s. She kept her eyes on his as her captor helped her to dismount, and she waited for the khan to speak.
Without moving, he said in slow carefully enunciated Pushtu:
‘Welcome. We have food for you. Come.’
Warily she translated what he had said for James Thurleigh and leaving him to help Marcus, turned to the children. They were happily standing by their escort, carefully repeating a series of words he was teaching them. Mystified and extremely frightened, Perdita led them behind the headman into one of the bigger houses.
They walked into a grimy littered compound, in one corner of which an old woman tended a large, steaming iron pot on a primitive mud stove. The man gestured towards a low doorway on the left and said, again very slowly:
‘We have little room. Go in. Food will be brought to you.’
They went in obediently and found a bare windowless room, dimly lit by an oil lamp. There was a small ragged carpet on the floor but nothing else in the room at all. Perdita turned back to the door to ask for the poshteens from their ponies. One of the brigands who had brought them to the place nodded and ducked down through the compound door.
While they waited, Perdita looked questioningly at Captain Thurleigh.
He shrugged, and said:
‘God knows. They don’t appear to be hostile; but these tribesmen are treacherous bastards.’ He paused, then went on: ‘I beg your pardon, Lady Beaminster. What I meant was that it is impossible to trust any of them. We all know that Akbar Khan has betrayed every promise he made. Still, if they feed us that will be something. Perhaps they have taken us for ransom after all; if so they must keep us alive for that. Who can tell?’
Only moments later, a man arrived with the bundles of sheepskin coats, to be followed almost immediately by the old woman carrying her iron pot. She dumped it unceremoniously on the floor and departed without a word. A savoury scent issued from it in wreaths of steam. Perdita felt the saliva spurt into her dry mouth. Her clenched stomach ached for the hot food. The children darted towards the pot, but she stopped them.
‘Captain Thurleigh, do you think it is safe to eat?’
He looked at her and, having settled Marcus by the wall, walked to the tantalizing pot, bent down to smell its contents, and then dipped in his hand. He ate a little and then smiled:
‘As far as I can tell it is only mutton and rice. Very greasy but wholesome enough.’
She released the children, who dug their hands into the mess and crammed their mouths with the first warm food they had had since leaving the cantonments. Perdita then filled her hands with the sticky rice and went over to squat on the mud floor beside Marcus. She tried to make him take the food, but he was so weak and dispirited that he could not make the effort, and so she fed him, rolling the rice into small glutinous balls and picking out bits of meat and pushing them into his mouth. Only when he said, ‘No more now,’ did she herself eat.
Never had she imagined that there could be such pleasure in swallowing something so unpalatable as the congealing rice and mutton fat from the bottom of the pot.
Later, when the children slept and Marcus had lapsed into a kind of half-consciousness in his corner, Perdita looked at James Thurleigh, worried by his physical proximity as she had never been while they camped out in the open, sharing the dangers of the last few days. Now that they were under a roof of sorts she found herself deeply embarrassed by him. She longed to ease her stays, which felt as though they were biting into her, to strip off her sodden clothes and somehow try to dry and warm her body, and she needed desperately to relieve herself.
He was in much the same case, but lacked most of her shame. Making an unspecific apology, he went to the furthest corner of their room and turned his back on her. She could be in no doubt about his purpose and closed her eyes and tried to stop her ears. Nevertheless, in spite of his example, she made herself wait until he was asleep before following it.
Chapter Twenty
They had all been awake, hungry and stiff from lying on the hard floor, for what felt like hours, before they heard someone at the simple lock on the outside of the door. The room was pitch black, for the lamp had long since run out of oil. Perdita held the children’s hands firmly.
The door opened outwards, and they could see a square of brilliant light for a moment, before most of it was blocked by the stooping figure of a burly tribesman carrying another dim lantern. He said in the slow, clear Pushtu the headman had used:
‘Come now. Outside.’ His voice seemed to hold no belligerence. Nevertheless, Perdita felt her pulse pounding, and the backs of her knees were clammy with the sweat of fear. She tried to reassure the children, but her voice croaked and would not shape the right words. She managed only:
‘He wants us outside.’
It was Thurleigh who said:
‘Well, let us go. We have to know some time. Let it be now. Come, Marcus.’ He put his hands under his friend’s arms and hauled him up. Then putting Marcus’s left arm across his own shoulders, helped him to limp out into the daylight. Perdita followed with the children, her mind now mercifully blank.
The light hurt her eyes, and she whispered to Charlie and Annie:
‘It is too bright. Keep your eyes closed and it will not hurt so much.’
They stood in a row, one truly blinded, the others unable to see for the moment. Perdita was trying to focus through the glare and fizzing in her eyes, when a voice said:
‘Lady-sahib, do not fear. There are no Ghilzais here and my father will protect you.’
All she could see silhouetted against the sun was the outline of a man in shaggy trousers, loose tunic, poshteen and huge turban, but something in his voice broke through her bruised mind. She said quietly:
‘Aktur?’
‘Yes, lady-sahib.’
‘What? I mean, why? What has happened?’
He started to move towards her, and she felt the children shrink nearer to her legs. She also sensed Thurleigh tensing on her right. She said quickly to them in English:
‘Do not be afra
id. It is Aktur; my old groom. I do not know what is happening, but we should not be afraid.’
He came to her and took the children’s free hands, squatting down to their level, and repeated in English:
‘Not afraid; not afraid,’ through his gapped and chipped teeth.
They recognized him at last, and their tense, white faces relaxed infinitesimally. Aktur looked up and went on slowly and clearly in his own language:
‘My father’s village is poor, but we shall give you what we have and keep you here until the snow is gone and it is safe to send you over the mountains to the English at Jellalabad. At night we must keep you locked in that room, and you must not leave the compound.’ Perdita found her voice again:
‘Aktur, why are you doing this when your people hate us and all your country wishes to drive us out?’ He straightened up, and said:
‘We owe you our honour. Without you the man would still live, and our family’s izzat would be gone. And you are beloved of God. After what I saw at the grave of Baba Shah, I could not let you die.’ She was silent, and after a while, he said:
‘My mother will bring you food.’ He gestured to the old woman by the mud stove and turned away.
James Thurleigh said in an agony of frustration:
‘What did he say? What is going to happen?’
‘Nothing. They are going to protect us.’ She saw his expression of scornful disbelief and tried to explain:
‘He once saw me having an epileptic fit and because of that he thinks that I am favoured by his god. My uncle once told me that many primitive people have such ideas.’
‘But that cannot be all. What else did he say?’
‘That his father’s village has very little, but they will share it with us and protect us until spring when they will take us over the mountains to safety. We must promise not to leave the compound or they cannot guarantee our safety; and they will lock us in at night.’
She could not bring herself to tell him the rest: that months ago she had bought their lives with that of Lieutenant Flecker, who had died in the dust at Gandamack because of what she had told these people. That was her guilt. She would have to carry it alone.
Gradually, their clothes and sheepskins dried out, and they began to learn to live in the village. It was very hard at first for any of them to accept the dirt and smells that surrounded them, and to believe that they could survive on a diet that consisted mainly of flat, unleavened bread and water, supplemented occasionally by preserved vegetables and once or twice by rice greasy with fragments of mutton. They learned to live with the sun, and eventually to sleep soundly on the hard mud floor almost as soon as the light went.
In the beginning, their astonished gratitude for life and disgust at its condition monopolized their minds, but once they became used to security again, their lack of occupation began to fret the adults. They could not ride or hunt; they could not even walk outside the mud walls that surrounded the headman’s house and court-yard. Marcus alone was too ill to feel the want of activity, succumbing to a recurring fever that left him weak and drowsy. It was clear to his wife and to James Thurleigh that he suffered continual and excruciating pain from both his knee and his punctured eyes.
The children spent most of their first week in the village clinging to Perdita’s skirts, as though afraid to leave her for a moment, but in time they came to trust their uncomfortable safety and began to stand on the edge of games played by the Afghan children, and eventually to join in. As the weeks wore on, Perdita became used to the sight of them playing some kind of tag, or rushing about with an irregularly shaped leather ball in the snow, their cheeks reddening with exercise and the sharply cold air, or squatting in a corner of the courtyard learning a game of skill that looked rather like spillikins.
Watching them, she could not banish the memory of the child who had mutilated her husband, whom she herself had held pinned between her thighs and stabbed until he was dead. He had looked so like these other boys, these children who were initiating her son into their games, that sometimes she could scarcely contain her hatred.
Often she would turn away from the exuberant shouts of the children to try to make Marcus less uncomfortable, wishing desperately that there was more she could do for him. Her desire to palliate his pain was such that she could look with equanimity on the sight of James Thurleigh cradling her husband’s head in his lap, stroking his brow and talking softly to him, and would move out of the room to give them some privacy.
Aktur, who sometimes disappeared for days at a time, brought her news now and then, and all of it added to the weight of fear and hatred that she carried. It seemed that almost the entire British army had been massacred about thirty miles from Jellalabad in the Jagdallack pass in front of a barricade of thorn trees and bushes built across the narrow pass. Perdita passed the intelligence on to Marcus and James, but she suppressed the rest of Aktur’s story, believing that it was given to him in malice by his informants, for it could not be true. He had told her that when the sepoys had made a gap in the painful structure with their bare hands, groups of mounted officers had ridden over them to reach the gap and fled, leaving their men to suffer death and dismemberment. Some of the men had even shot at their departing officers, but several got away.
But whatever the truth of their escape, it had done them no good, for they were all butchered. Aktur said that he had heard a rumour that one man had reached Jellalabad but both he and Perdita considered it unlikely. She said:
‘But we cannot be the only ones left alive. That cannot be possible.’
He answered:
‘No. I told you of the prisoners of Akbar Khan. They are said to be safe and in good health.’
‘Did you tell me? Who are they?’
‘Married ladies and their families and some officers. And there may be others like you in villages in the hills.’
‘Aktur, have you paper and pens I could have?’
‘Paper? No, lady-sahib. We have no need of paper here. What do you want with paper?’
She turned back to Marcus and James without speaking. She had wanted to write down everything she remembered, not only to absorb some of the time that seemed to trail onwards like the ravelled wool of some vast celestial spindle, but also to try to understand what had happened. The more she thought about the events of the past two years the more unbelievable they seemed. Yet they had happened.
An army of one of the two most powerful nations on earth had been defeated and massacred by groups of undisciplined, uneducated tribesmen. Nearly seventeen thousand men, women and children had been killed, and she could not understand why it had been allowed to happen. The cruelty and waste of it defied analysis, and yet she needed to understand it. And she needed to blame someone. She recognized the uselessness, even wickedness of that, but she sometimes thought that if she could work out whose fault it had been, she could rest more easily or look at Marcus’s scarred face without such tingling horror and guilt.
The sight of his pain, which she could do so little to alleviate, was almost unbearable. She wanted to ask him continually how he felt, and if he were any better, but she understood that the impulse was rooted in her own selfish wish for comfort, and so she rationed herself. But there were times when she thought something in her must snap if they had no relief: the prospect of months more of this powerlessness, this frustration would be unendurable. Yet it must be endured. There was nothing else to do. Once or twice she caught herself thinking that their life must be easier for Marcus than for herself. He at least had the tangibleness of pain to deal with. After a time she could recognize the thought beginning to form in the uncontrollable mists of her mind and would shut it off from the rest of her, knowing that nothing could be worse than the pain he suffered or the unbearable knowledge that he would never see again.
She tried to discipline herself to sit by him while James Thurleigh slept, talking gently of what they would do when they reached India once more, but she could see that even that sometimes dis
tressed him, and she would search for other things to say. It seemed terribly important to talk of something other than their present situation or the horrible past, or the question of what the villagers really meant to do with them. Often she wanted to say, ‘It will be all right in the end. I know that we shall get back. And I am sure the doctors will be able to do something about your eyes.’ But that would have been an insult to the way he was enduring his pain. She might nurse her own absurd hopes, but she would not commit the cruelty of adding them to the load he carried.
Instead, she invented wishes and interests for herself and talked of those; of places in India she pretended she wanted to see in order to try to force him to talk to her. She hoped that if he became used to answering her questions about Agra and the Taj Mahal or Delhi and its Red Fort, she might one day get from him a truthful answer to the questions she could not ask: ‘Tell me what it feels like to be you, wounded like that, deprived of so much. Do you think you will die? Are you afraid to die – or to live? Tell me what it feels like.’
It seemed to her that some days she went on and on talking, her voice prattling like a machine, until she wondered that neither Marcus nor Captain Thurleigh cried out in anger for her to stop. Then she would stop herself, only to listen to the silence and watch Marcus suffering.
Her husband was dimly grateful to her for keeping his mind away from the pit of despair. He knew that he was not responding adequately to her efforts, but he thought she must know how thankful he felt because it was so obvious to him. In the same way, he never said anything to James to thank him for the solace of his physical comforting. To feel James’s hands holding his head was as sure a way of keeping back from the brink of the pit as having to answer Perdita’s questions. But for much of the time he was too ill to know anything of what they both did for him.
The Distant Kingdom Page 29