A Beggar at the Gate

by Thalassa Ali

  The tall one stopped and turned back to her. “You should go home, Bibi,” he said.

  “I am home.” Breathless from fright, Mariana struggled to marshal her thoughts. “I need to get into this house,” she said quickly. “Would you please beat on the door for me? They cannot hear me from the inside.”

  “We do not serve women,” sneered the small soldier. He made a swaggering gesture with his shoulders. “Knock on the door yourself.”

  “My uncle is very ill.” She addressed herself to the taller, politer man.

  “It is too late for your uncle.” The tall soldier shook his head. “Prince Sher Singh has taken over this city. We are shooting his enemies like dogs. Can't you hear the firing in the Kashmiri Bazaar? This is no place for a woman. The fight will move into the square any second.”

  “They should have told us they were going to the Kashmiri Bazaar first,” the second soldier complained, as the pair continued down the alley, no longer interested in her. “Why should we miss all the fun?”

  “There will be plenty more looting to do,” the first soldier assured him. “You will see. In a few hours, only the beggars will be safe.”

  The second soldier giggled as he hitched up the belt of his tulwar. “They'll be safe as long as we are killing only Sher Singh's enemies. Beggars will make perfect targets when we kill for sport.”

  Once they were out of sight, Mariana rushed to the front of the haveli and hammered hopelessly on its tall doors until she could beat on them no longer. She stood beneath the shuttered balconies and called until her voice was gone.

  Exhausted, she pressed her forehead against the brick wall. She must think of a way to save herself. The Prince's troops were now loose in the city without order or discipline. All those too poor to barricade themselves behind stout haveli doors were in as much danger as she was. Even the people inside Qamar Haveli itself might suffer, if Sher Singh's men thought of putting it and other large houses to the torch.

  The soldiers would arrive in the square at any moment, armed and intent on looting and death. She could not hide in the narrow alley, for she'd surely be trapped there. She must find somewhere in the square to wait out the coming horror.

  Looking as inconsequential as she did, she might live through the first hours of Sher Singh's invasion, at least until the soldiers began to kill for enjoyment….

  She crept along the front of the haveli and looked for a place to hide. All the wooden doors and shutters that would ordinarily have been propped open to let in the air were now closed and locked. Forced to settle for what she could find, she chose an indented place where Qamar Haveli's wall joined that of another house. With luck, if she squeezed herself into that poor bit of cover and stood still, no one would notice her.

  The distant boom of howitzers came from the direction of the Citadel.

  Prince Sher Singh had begun his attack from the Hazuri Bagh.

  As she imagined the noise and smoke of the guns and the crash of the Citadel Gate as it collapsed inward, a gang of heavily armed soldiers erupted from a side street, brandishing unsheathed tulwars and bayonets. Ten abreast, sweating, their faces contorted with excitement, they charged past her, their weapons stained with blood.

  What had happened to Maharajah Ranjit Singh's disciplined army, with its intricate drills, its almost-European uniforms, and its foreign mercenary advisors? Were its officers so corrupted by politics and gold that they stood idly by and watched their men run wild? As Mariana stood panting and paralyzed at her post, she imagined herself lying dead outside her husband's house, unknown, unrecognized, her chador soaked in blood….

  As yelling soldiers rushed into Wazir Khan's Mosque, a score of others splintered the frail shutters of the shops at its base—shops that sold items no looter would want: illuminated Qur'ans, books, and perfumes. Disappointed, they hurled the books into the square, scattering papers and smashing vials of precious oils. The scents of musk, sandalwood, and attar of jasmine filled the square.

  A man leaned from a rooftop opposite Mariana's hiding place, a musket in his hand. He aimed carefully, then fired into the crowd of soldiers below. Mariana flinched as the ball struck home and a burly Sikh fell to his knees. Run, run, she begged silently, but the man on the roof lingered too long, waiting to see the effect of his shot.

  Half a dozen soldiers raced to their wounded companion, who pointed weakly upward. In no time they had smashed their way into the sniper's house, found their way to the rooftop, and dragged the sniper and three other men from the house and flung them onto the street. Her chador over her eyes, Mariana sank to the ground and tried fruitlessly to stop her ears.

  When she looked up, sickened at what she had heard, four decapitated bodies lay in front of the mosque.

  Hiding would not help her now. Screaming in high-pitched voices, a dozen soldiers ran toward her along the front of the haveli, their steel bayonets and curved swords at the ready. Before that unstoppable force, she would have no chance. Unable to breathe, she pushed herself backward against the wall, her arms raised in a hopeless effort to protect her face.

  Ten feet from her, they swerved as one man, and charged toward the center of the square.

  How had she escaped death? Mariana looked after the soldiers, her pulse racing. Was it her amulet? She reached up and felt for the silver box with Safiya's Qur'anic verses folded inside. Perhaps it was working. Perhaps, after all, she would survive this horror….

  Only the beggars will be safe. Seeing the wisdom in that cruel statement, Mariana did not stand up again. Instead, she began to transform herself. She rubbed against the dust-stained wall, adding stripes of grit to her already filthy chador. Gagging at the smell, she pushed her hands into the foul, urine-smelling dirt at the bottom of the wall, forcing it under her fingernails and into the skin on the backs of her hands, rubbing it onto her face. She unlaced her English boots, hid them, then rubbed more dirt onto her feet and their bandages, wincing at the icy cold of the cobblestones under her bare toes. At last, filthy and terrified, she crawled to the haveli's front door. Making herself as small as possible inside the folds of her chador, she reached out a dirty hand, palm up. “Alms,” she croaked, “alms for the love of Allah.”

  By the time Mariana's bearers abandoned her in the city, Hassan, Yusuf Bhatti, and the two Afghan traders had already spent long, cold hours inside the Hazuri Bagh.

  They had arrived after midnight to find the ground outside the torchlit garden swarming with soldiers and pack animals and the side gate heavily guarded, but Yusuf and his companions had found no difficulty in entering. It had taken only a few rupees from Hassan to persuade the pickets to look the other way, allowing the four men to slip inside, pistols, jezails, muskets, and all.

  Hassan had gone straight to the center pavilion, identified himself, and asked to speak to Prince Sher Singh, but to no avail.

  “He is not here,” a bearded officer had said abruptly, turning him away at gunpoint from the marble steps.

  “It is our fate, then,” Zulmai observed, “to deal with these assassins alone.”

  As they crouched, waiting for morning, against the garden's boundary wall, Yusuf pointed toward the side gate where they had entered. “That will be the last of the Prince's guns,” he said, as a team of horses dragged a nine-pound cannon inside by the light of a dozen torches. “Fourteen artillery pieces. Sher Singh is taking no chances.”

  Habibullah grinned as the horses hauled the piece into position before the massive Alamgiri Gate leading to the Citadel, encouraged by shouts and blows from a swarm of gunners. “It will be a fine thing to see those huge doors blown off their hinges.”

  “Let us see how much resistance the Rani offers,” cautioned Zulmai, glancing over his shoulder to where Sher Singh's infantry waited in groups while their officers rode to and fro among them, shouting orders.

  “Or who wins in the end,” Yusuf had agreed, nodding toward Hassan.

  Now, by the morning light, shivering inside his heavy shawl, Yusuf
glanced to where Hassan sat, his own shawl over his head, his breath visible in the raw air. Since midnight, he had spoken little. The man had much to worry about.

  “There is the Prince,” Hassan now said sharply, pointing toward the pavilion. “On the verandah—the heavyset one in the shawl turban.”

  The other three men followed his gaze in time to see a group of men disappear from sight down an invisible flight of stairs.

  Habibullah laughed. “Your Prince is a confident man, to be showing himself so early.”

  Zulmai rose to his feet in one swift motion and adjusted his ever-present jezails. “We have seen the target,” he said quietly. “Now we must find his assassins.”

  HALF AN hour later, Yusuf sat tensely against a gnarled, strategically placed tree. He liked Zulmai's plan—that Yusuf and Hassan would search for the assassins on one side of the marble pavilion while Zulmai and Habibullah covered the other, but how was Yusuf to find and kill Sher Singh's assassins in this crowded garden, while at the same time protecting his inexperienced friend?

  A wall similar to the Citadel's surrounded the garden. With a wide, flagstone walk along its top and its defensive stone battlements, it ought to have been the perfect hiding place for snipers. Even accounting for the trees, four marksmen would have had no trouble shooting any man in the garden or the pavilion from that height, but such a prize position was bound to be contested by the Rani's own troops, leaving no room for anyone else.

  The assassins must, then, perform their deadly work from ground level in this busy garden.

  “Stay here,” Yusuf told Hassan. He rose stiffly, brushed dust and leaves from his clothing, then marched purposefully across the garden, leaving his musket behind him, in Hassan's care.

  Yusuf picked his way clumsily along the edge of a ruined walkway, his eyes traveling from the ground to the branches of the mango trees near the path and down again. Ahead of him, a mangy donkey loaded with ammunition let out a squealing bray. Dust blew in all directions.

  Seventy-five yards from the pavilion, hard by the boundary wall, he found what he sought: a man crouched behind a pile of broken stones, his back to Sher Singh's cannon, nearly invisible in his ragged, dust-covered clothing, a long-barreled jezail across his knees.

  Yusuf did not stop walking. Instead, careful not to attract the man's attention, he continued following the wall, searching for the other assassin. For all he knew, these men, like themselves, had chosen to work in pairs. If they had, the other was watching him

  But for all his searching he found no second sniper.

  “I have seen one of them,” he told Hassan a little while later. “Stay here. I am going back to kill him.”

  “What can I do? How can I help?” Hassan was on his feet in an instant, his musket in his hand.

  Yusuf smiled grimly. “You can stay under this tree and protect the weapons. Shoot anyone who tries to take them. I will cut the first man's throat, for the garden is quiet where he is sitting and I do not want another assassin to hear my shot, but after this, without a gun, I'll be as useless as if I had stayed at home in bed.”

  A short while later, his tulwar at his side, and his heavy, triangular-bladed dagger tucked into his sash, he studied the sniper from his hiding place behind a simbal tree.

  The man had not moved. He still squatted close to the boundary wall, his back to Yusuf, his pile of stones protecting him against retaliatory fire from the pavilion. Beneath his coarsely tied turban, greasy hair hung to his shoulders.

  Broken stones littered the ground between the two men, complicating a running charge. Careful not to create unease in the assassin, Yusuf kept his eyes averted as he moved quietly closer, and sheltered himself behind a thornbush, thirty feet away. Yusuf fingered the curved tulwar at his side, gauging the blow that would sever the head from those hunched shoulders, then loosened his grip on the sword and reached for his dagger instead. With so much obstruction at the man's neck, the sword might fail to do its work. It would be safer to seize the sniper by his beard and slit his throat.

  Like his enemy, Yusuf waited. His head ached and his eyes burned from lack of sleep but he made no move until a great, thudding roar came from the direction of the Citadel gate, blotting out all the other sounds around him. Without waiting to confirm the cause of the din, he launched himself at the crouching man.

  He had not counted upon the assassin's curiosity. Too late to stop, he saw the man turn toward the sound of the guns, then start with surprise as he caught sight of Yusuf running at him full tilt, his dagger ready in his fist.

  The assassin reached rapidly into his clothes and withdrew his own wicked blade, but the jezail across his knees stopped him from turning his body to meet Yusuf straight on.

  Yusuf struck the assassin on the shoulder, sending them sprawling together on the stony ground. Before the assassin could scramble away, Yusuf caught his arm, raised it, and plunged his dagger deep into the man's side.

  The assassin's body jerked. A high, whistling sound came from him as he tried to breathe, but he did not drop his long Khyber knife. He made a fearful effort to rise, his fingers tightening on the knife's haft.

  Yusuf was no butcher, but he did what he had to do. Setting his knee on the arm holding the man's knife, he pulled back the turbaned head and drew his dagger blade across the man's throat.

  As he did so, a second shattering roar came from the entrance to the Citadel. This time he looked up, and saw that the gate had indeed been blown open, and that the Rani's generals had been prepared. As the Prince's storming party poured into the opening, they had been caught in a barrage of cannon fire at point-blank range. When the smoke cleared, more than a hundred of Sher Singh's soldiers lay dead and dying in the gateway, among broken carts and shattered pieces of the great wooden doors.

  “We may lose this battle,” Hassan announced when Yusuf reappeared and flung down the sniper's weapons. “Is the assassin dead?”

  “He is dead. Have you seen Zulmai?”

  “No.”

  Yusuf ran tense fingers over his face. “I am certain there is another sniper on this side of the garden.” He glanced toward the Citadel. “Look,” he added, “they're going make a second—”

  Another cannonade arose from the gate. Again, once the smoke lifted, a hundred more dead and dying bodies clogged the entrance.

  Yusuf made up his mind. “Come. Bring your musket,” he barked, dragging Hassan to his feet. “With the battle going so poorly, the Prince will want to see the damage for himself. Any moment now he will come out onto the verandah and make a target of himself. There is no time to lose. We must find our second sniper.”

  As they started off, a crackling sound came from the high walls on either side of the Alamgiri Gate. The Rani's troops were now pouring deadly musket fire down upon the Prince's infantry who were massed along the wall, desperately seeking cover from the cannons inside the gate. In a panic, the Prince's men broke ranks. Bloody, shouting, tripping over their dead and wounded, they surged past their own silent guns and made for the side gate where they had entered the garden.

  “Look there.” Hassan caught Yusuf by the sleeve as half a dozen soldiers flew past them.

  Between the trees, oblivious to the panic surrounding him, a beardless man crept toward the center pavilion. Like the first assassin, he wore a coarsely tied turban, and carried several weapons.

  He came to a stop no more than twenty yards from Yusuf and Hassan, and squatted on the far side of an old mango tree, a corner of his shawl just visible to the two men.

  “He looks even younger than Habibullah,” Yusuf muttered.

  Soldiers hurried by, obstructing Yusuf's line of sight.

  “Come,” Yusuf ordered. With Hassan following, he made his way through the mob of escaping soldiers.

  “We cannot shoot him now, with all this commotion,” he whispered, as he and Hassan paused in the shelter of another tree, “but when we are near enough, I'll let you take the first shot. Aim carefully, and do not shoot until I
say so. We must not alarm him, and we must not miss.”

  When Hassan nodded, Yusuf patted him on the shoulder. “You can do it, my friend,” he murmured.

  They were ten yards from the sniper when Prince Sher Singh appeared with his armed guard, framed in a scalloped archway on the pavilion's verandah, his bearded face puckered with worry.

  The sniper raised his jezail.

  “Now,” Yusuf ordered quietly. “Shoot him now.” He closed one eye and controlled his breathing as he raised his own musket and took aim at the boy assassin's head.

  Hassan did not fire.

  “Now,” Yusuf ordered again, knowing even as he did so that Hassan would not fire, that he could never shoot a child, even to save the future of the Punjab.

  Yusuf pulled the trigger.

  The boy's jezail leapt in his hands an instant before Yusuf's shot struck home, but he must have sensed some impending danger, for his own shot went wild. He missed his mark, but as he rolled, bleeding, into the dust under the mango tree, confusion erupted in the pavilion.

  Someone had been wounded.

  “Get down!” Yusuf shouted, reaching for his friend, but he was too late. Before he could get them to safety, a dozen musket barrels lifted, aimed at them, and fired.

  It was well past noon. The sun had dropped behind the high, decorated gate of Wazir Khan's Mosque an hour before, robbing the little square of its warmth.

  Throughout the day, as the sun moved and the shadows in the square changed their shapes, Mariana had crouched, waiting for death, outside Shaikh Waliullah's door.

  Only once had she moved from her post. Late in the morning, during a lull in the violence, she had crept around the corner of the house, past the small, boarded shop built into the corner, and into the lightless alley leading to the haveli's back door. There, she had relieved herself into the fetid channel running along one side of the alley, then crawled back and folded herself down once again, becoming as small and invisible as she could.

  The day had been a nightmare of slaughter and misery, with gangs of soldiers smashing their way into the dwellings along the sides of the mosque, all of them easy to plunder, for the city had not seen this kind of violence for forty years. Time and again, while the torn pages of illuminated manuscripts blew about their feet, the soldiers dragged men out of their houses and beat them until they agreed to turn over their small treasures. Her face pressed against her upraised knees, Mariana had stopped her ears while the poor souls who pleaded that they had no riches and no gold were executed on the spot, and their headless bodies left on the bloody cobblestones where they had fallen.