Companions of Paradise

by Thalassa Ali

  They would kill any armed man they encountered inside the city gates: the quiet stranger who strode ahead of Mariana, his jezail slung across his back, and Yar Mohammad, too, whose long knife was visible among his clothes. She and Nur Rahman would not be safe, either. Mariana had seen the indiscriminate violence of soldiers before.

  The rescue force, with its destructive guns and eager, red-coated soldiers, would exact bloody retribution from anyone they found near Burnes's house, and would also do terrible damage to the whole surrounding neighborhood, whose houses would be full of frightened women and children.

  God forbid they should harm Haji Khan's house or injure him….

  It was clear that the mob would not be stopped in time. Mariana had seen that truth on Haji Khan's blind face, and in the impassive demeanor of the man who now led her to safety. She had seen it in the triumphant smiles on the men who had passed them in the city, on their way to join the attack.

  At this very moment, Burnes was either dead or dying.

  What would happen next?

  When an Afghan is insulted, or even imagines an insult, he will kill to preserve his honor, Munshi Sahib had told her. The British, for their own reasons, had looked the other way over the recent affronts they had suffered, but now they must act.

  When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

  May God save me, her munshi had quoted, from the vengeance of the Afghan. May God now save the innocent of this city from the punishment of the British and their army.

  What did the silent man in front of her think of the British? Perhaps he believed them inferior to himself and his kind. Perhaps he saw their refusal to punish without proof of guilt as indecision, their efforts at diplomacy as lack of self-respect. If he himself were a Ghilzai, he might have reason to believe the British lacked honor. After all, Macnaghten had broken his word over their payments.

  And the British, too, had their stubborn pride.

  Mere children, Macnaghten had called the Afghans.

  Cowards, the military officers had sneered, who run from our guns.

  I called him a dog and threatened to crop his ears, Burnes had crowed.

  Now, roused to anger, the British would retaliate against the city with horrible force.

  Remembering the satisfaction on Lady Sale's face at the thought of Afghan men roasting alive on the burning timbers at Ghazni, Mariana ducked her head and forced her blistered feet onward.

  AT NINE-THIRTY A.M., two hours after Burnes's desperate note had arrived at the Envoy's house, Sir William Macnaghten sat, bristling with irritation, at one end of his dining table. Senior officers had taken the remaining dining chairs. Lesser officers stood against the walls.

  “To send a regiment into the city, and then to arrest Abdullah Khan and the other ringleaders,” Macnaghten said briskly, “would be pure insanity and utterly unfeasible. I suggest we tell Brigadier Shelton to break his camp at Sia Sang, take half his men to Shah Shuja at the Bala Hisar, and send the rest here, to the cantonment.”

  “But how will that help Burnes?” asked a mustachioed colonel.

  Harry Fitzgerald and several other officers nodded their agreement. “Surely,” Fitzgerald put in, “something ought to be done about the leaders of—”

  “I don't care where Shelton goes, as long as he does not come here.” General Elphinstone grimaced as he lifted his swollen leg onto an empty chair. “I cannot bear the man. Has anyone,” he added, “told Shah Shuja of this?”

  Macnaghten shrugged. “The Shah already knows of it. He says he warned us this would happen if we did not listen to his advice. Hardly a useful remark at this juncture.”

  “But what can be done for Burnes?” General Sale's son-in-law asked urgently.

  “Do not ask me, Sturt.” General Elphinstone let out a heavy sigh. “I am sure I have no idea.”

  Several young officers exchanged glances. “But we cannot simply abandon him,” Sturt insisted.

  “Unlike your father-in-law, Sturt,” Macnaghten snapped, “we do not take unnecessary risks with our men. When Burnes chose to live in the city, he understood the danger. He knew how difficult it would be to control a mob of Afghans in a confined space.”

  “May I,” General Elphinstone asked plaintively, “trouble someone for a cup of coffee?”

  At the table's far end, Mariana's uncle conferred briefly with his assistant, then cleared his throat. “Sir William,” he said carefully, “I believe we must act decisively.”

  Officers nodded around the table.

  “To allow any attack on Burnes's house to go unchallenged would be extremely dangerous. We have powerful enemies in this country. I have been told several times that the tribes in the south, the Kohistanis in the north, and the Ghilzais in the east are all in league against us. They are beginning to see us as weak. If we do not put down a mob attack on one of our senior officers, they will think we are incapable of defending ourselves.”

  “Incapable?” Macnaghten gaped at him.

  “We have put up with too much already.” Mariana's uncle raised his voice over the murmuring. “We have done nothing to avenge the spitting at our officers in the bazaar,” he added, while beside him Charles Mott looked from face to face, collecting nods of agreement. “We have ignored the stabbings of Lieutenant Hale and Captain Jennings, and the shooting of our sepoys on the road. Any Afghan would have taken murderous revenge at such insults, yet we have let them all pass without so much as a whiff of grapeshot.”

  Macnaghten's face reddened. “But we do not know who did these things. Are you suggesting we punish men without evidence of their guilt?”

  “There was also the surprise nighttime raid on my encampment at Butkhak,” the mustachioed colonel put in. “Shah Shuja's personal guard, seconded to my force, let four hundred Ghilzais into my camp. We lost thirty-five of our men. Apparently everyone saw Abdullah Khan's henchmen ride out of the city late that afternoon, and head in our direction. The same men,” he added bitterly, “were seen afterward, riding back to town through Brigadier Shelton's camp at Sia Sang. Nothing was done then, either.”

  “Then what of you, Monteith,” Macnaghten snapped. “If you knew who let in the attackers, why did you not shoot them on the spot? Do not blame us for your failures.”

  Charles Mott leaned forward. “Pride and revenge are two facts of Afghan life,” he said, his long face earnest beneath its fashionable mop of hair. “We have not taken—”

  Macnaghten brought his open hand down hard on the dining table, setting off a series of winces around the room. “Are you suggesting that the riot is our fault? I am tired of this croaking, this litany of—”

  “I thought I asked for coffee,” General Elphinstone put in irritably.

  An aide left the room, banging the door shut behind him.

  Adrian Lamb's bare head shone with perspiration. “We must act immediately to punish the city mob, Sir William. If we fail to do so, we will be seen as cowards. I fear that within days, we ourselves will be attacked in force.”

  “Cowards?” Macnaghten stabbed his pen into a bottle of ink and began to write noisily, the nib of his pen scratching the paper. “Brigadier Shelton,” he read aloud as he wrote, “will leave his encampment at Sia Sang and take half his men to the Bala Hisar. He will send the rest of them here, to the cantonment. Then, if possible, he will send a rescue party into the city.”

  “If possible?” Captain Sturt stared. “But surely—”

  “If possible.” Macnaghten jerked himself abruptly to his feet. “Shelton goes to the Bala Hisar. That is all.”

  AN HOUR later, a sobbing Mariana stood before her uncle on bloody, bare feet, still wearing her Afghan disguise. “But why?” she shouted. “Why did they send no rescue force to the city! Why did they do nothing to save Sir Alexander from that murderous mob? And now that he must be dead, why do they not avenge him?”

  “I am too angry to speak about it,” Uncle Adrian replied stonily. “You have flagrantly disobeyed me, and I shall not easily forgive y
ou. Your aunt has been in bed ever since she discovered you had vanished without a word. She thought you had been kidnapped by Afghans.

  “You are not to tell anyone what you know of Sir Alexander's fate,” he added fiercely. “It is rumored that he is still alive, and you are not to dash that hope. Do you hear me?”

  He turned on his heel and left her, but not before she had seen the anguish on his face.

  Moments later, Aunt Claire reached from her bed, flung her arms about Mariana, kissed her damply, then collapsed onto her pillows.

  “You must never vanish like that again,” she wheezed, punctuating her words with rhythmic yanks on Mariana's tangled hair. “Look at you in your horrible native clothes. You are a cruel girl. I could kill you, I really could!”

  Mariana withdrew to her room as quickly as she was able, and sent for Dittoo.

  “Such a commotion in the house,” he confided, as he emptied a kettle of hot water into a basin at Mariana's feet, “such shouting and tearing of clothes! Memsahib even called your Munshi Sahib to come,” he added, as he shook salt into the water, “and tell her what had happened to you.”

  “She called Munshi Sahib? What did he say?” Mariana winced as she lowered a bloody foot into the water.

  “He said he believed you had gone to speak to someone in the city, and that he was certain you would return before long. He also said that it was very unlikely that you had been kidnapped.”

  The lunch gong sounded. Mariana changed wearily into an afternoon gown and brushed out her hair, gritting her teeth at the pain in her scalp.

  Her aunt did not appear at the table. Mariana could not touch the boiled mutton or the milk pudding, even though gentle old Adil offered them many times. Neither she nor her uncle spoke.

  They were all in peril now. A goat, Fitzgerald had observed, could climb the Residence compound wall…

  “AT TWO o'clock this afternoon,” Fitzgerald confided to Mariana's uncle, after ousting Mariana and her munshi politely but urgently from the dining room, “Shah Shuja sent a party of his guard into the city to rescue Burnes. A detachment of his infantry entered the Shor Bazaar from the Bala Hisar with two of our guns.”

  Her ear to the closed door, Mariana heard the hope in her uncle's voice. “And what happened then?”

  “A large mob was waiting for them. Every rooftop and balcony along the way was crowded with gunmen, as were many of the upper windows. The force held out for some thirty minutes before they broke and retreated, with two hundred killed or wounded.”

  “Ah.” Uncle Adrian's voice sobered.

  “Of course,” Fitzgerald added, “half the Shah's infantry were unreliable Afghans, and the rest were only half-trained and shockingly officered. His gunners had no experience at all. We had not taken nearly enough trouble to train his army.”

  “Were they able to reach Burnes's house?”

  “I am afraid they were not.” Fitzgerald's voice, level and calm, seemed at odds with the severity of his news. “From the moment they entered the city, they were hemmed in on all sides, perfect targets for the marksmen on the rooftops.

  “Of course they were closely formed into infantry squares,” he added without emotion.

  Infantry squares? Mariana frowned. Why had they used the square formation during street firing? A solid block of soldiers had served Lord Wellington well enough against the French cavalry at Waterloo, but surely this had been a very different sort of battle.

  “And the six-pounders,” Fitzgerald went on, “were no use at all in that cramped space. Even properly trained gunners could not have aimed them at the rooftops at such short range. They were fired only once, into some houses in front, where the road turned, but that was all. Worse, both guns were abandoned, with only one of them spiked and disabled. The other one is in enemy hands—”

  His voice trailed away.

  “Has Brigadier Shelton gone to the Bala Hisar yet?” Uncle Adrian asked.

  “Yes.” When Fitzgerald dropped his voice, Mariana pressed closer to the door. “When I met him on the road with his troops, I found him in a terrible state. He seemed almost beside himself, not knowing how to act when he got there. He asked me what to do.”

  “He asked you? But he is our second-in-command.”

  Fitzgerald sighed audibly. “When I said that if it were up to me, I would enter the city at once, and rescue Burnes, he replied quite sharply that his force was inadequate, and that I did not seem to understand street firing.”

  “What is the matter with everyone?” Uncle Adrian murmured.

  “At least General Elphinstone is reinforcing the garrison at the commissariat fort.”

  Mariana had almost forgotten that foolhardy lack of planning— storing all the food supplies and much of the army's ammunition outside the cantonment walls, in an unoccupied fort across the road from a walled garden that would make a perfect staging ground for a siege.

  “Sir William has called for General Sale to return with his brigade and the rest of our guns,” Fitzgerald added. “With his help we will easily defeat the insurgents.”

  “I am glad to hear that.”

  A chair scraped back. “I must beg your leave to return to my duties,” the lieutenant said heavily, “as I have been charged with seeing to our defenses. But I want to extend the younger officers’ thanks to you and Mott for stating our case so eloquently this morning. Although I am certain we shall hold out until General Sale returns,” he went on quietly, as a second chair creaked, “I cannot help feeling concern for you, Mrs. Lamb, and Miss Givens. I wish there were a way to spirit you and your family back to India before things become worse.”

  “You are very kind, Fitzgerald,” Uncle Adrian replied grimly, “but I have my duty to perform. As for my wife and Miss Givens, as much as I would like to do so, I cannot imagine a safe way to send two British ladies anywhere.”

  Fitzgerald's footfall was perilously near the door. “I understand your feelings, sir,” he said, as Mariana poised, ready for flight. “If I think of a way to remove the ladies, I shall tell you immediately.”

  THAT NIGHT she sat on her bed, a lamp burning on a table beside her, Haji Khan's little roll of paper open on her knees.

  You have more to decide than who is to be your husband, he had declared, as if the whole business of her marriage were only a minor footnote or a punctuation mark in the story of her life. But what could be more important than whom she married? Did not that decision carry with it whole worlds to gain or to lose?

  Perhaps it did, but at this moment she also wondered if she, Uncle Adrian, and Aunt Claire would survive the insurgency.

  Haji Khan had told her that if she recited the durood, she would receive the answers to all her questions. She tried to recapture his face, to read his expression in retrospect, but could conjure up only the irritation in his voice.

  “Heavenly Father, please forgive me if this is wrong,” she whispered. “But I do not know what else to do.”

  She closed her eyes and began.

  “In number as many as the numerous things created,” she concluded a moment later.

  “As deep as the fulfillment of the soul's longing,

  As glorious as the embellishment of the high heavens,

  And as powerful as the Affirmation of Faith.”

  Nothing happened. No answer appeared. No picture rose in her mind's eye, not even a quickly vanishing image. But, she wondered, had she detected a lessening of her fears, a subtle hint of new confidence in the face of peril?

  She must recite the durood for ten more days. Who knew what would have occurred by the time she finished, but if Haji Khan had meant what he said, she would know more than she did now. Whether this new information would concern her future marriage or something more serious, only time would tell.

  LATE THAT night, a group of shrouded male figures crept along the alley behind Burnes's still smoldering house, torches flickering in their hands. When they reached the vicinity of its low back door, Burnes's Afghan friend Naib Shar
if spread a cloth on the packed earth of the lane. Retching as they worked, he and his men found the remains of Burnes's poor, dismembered body, and gathered them one by one, onto the cloth.

  “I will see to your burial, my dear, foolish Eskandar,” Sharif vowed in a whisper as he and his men carried their reeking burden away into the darkness.

  November 6, 1841

  We must pack at once.” By the light of her candle, Aunt Claire's face was gray with fright. “A messenger has come from the cantonment with orders to evacuate the Residence compound.”

  Mariana sat up, blinking. “What time is it?” she asked.

  “It's nearly five-thirty in the morning. We are to leave the Residence compound by nine o'clock. They are saying we are not safe here.”

  Two braids hung down beneath Aunt Claire's lace nightcap. Mariana had not realized how thin her aunt's hair had become.

  “The Macnaghtens are to stay with Lady Sale,” Aunt Claire added over her shoulder as she shuffled away, the lamp swaying in her hand. “We are to occupy officers’ quarters.”

  Half an hour later, Dittoo backed through Mariana's door with her coffee tray. He was close to tears. “What has happened, Bibi?” he cried, the coffee things clattering as he put the tray down with trembling hands. “Why must we leave our house?”

  “I don't know, Dittoo,” she replied. “I can only say that we must do it.”

  “But they are saying that your Munshi Sahib and the rest of us must live in tents.” His voice broke. “I want to go home to India, Bibi. It is so cold here—”

  “I will see that you all have warm quilts,” she interrupted hastily, fearing her own feelings might show. “And now, go downstairs and help with the kitchen things. And do not forget to pack the sheets and towels,” she called after him.

  When he was gone, she sat on the edge of her bed and dropped her head into her hands.

  What had become of her people, the bravest, most sensible people on earth? How had they failed to recognize the terrible danger of interfering with people they did not understand? Now, faced with the violent consequences of their actions, why were they so weak-kneed?