by Tamim Ansary
She flinched from it: could he be trying to tempt her with wine? She had no way to know, she had never seen or tasted wine. She decided to let him edge closer just so she could get a better look. When he came within an arm’s length, he took a sip from his bottle and wiped his lips, then offered it to her, uttering a sound like “Gud.”
She took the bottle then, and sniffed at the mouth. It smelled a little like pomegranate juice. There was no rule against pomegranate juice. She put the bottle to her lips and let a small swallow enter her mouth.
It was not like the pomegranate juice they had here in Char Bagh, it stung the back of her throat when she swallowed, but it tasted rather good. It wasn’t wine, though. Wine would be sweet, she assumed. This wasn’t sweet.
She looked back at the man and laughed. What should she be ashamed of? With the tablecloth held to her face, she was mostly covered up. Only her feet, her hands, and her eyes were naked to his gaze. Not that her mother would agree that she was covered up. Not that any woman in the village would forgive her for staying here. Every single one of them would consider it scandalous, those frightened rabbits, but Shahnaz was made of different stuff. She had a curiosity about the world that none of the others felt. None of them could ever understand her longing to step outside the lines laid down for her, her hunger to see, to breathe. This was not so wrong—taking a drink from the Engrayzee’s bottle. It was merely pomegranate juice, and quite tasty. Even if he was a man, he probably wasn’t looking when she pulled her blouse to one side. Her face, okay: that he’d seen, but if he was like a monkey, he’d probably forgotten it already.
She glanced at him again, never intending to let the look signal flirtation, but something took hold of her—a desire to see if the look she had practiced so many times in private on her girl-cousins would work on a living male, even if it wasn’t exactly a human male but a sort of large, hairless, clothes-wearing monkey-male. She cocked one shoulder, bowed her head, and looked up at him with just her eyes.
To her astonishment, when she looked, he was holding up a coin. It looked like a gold coin. Gold! She remembered what everybody was saying: the Engrayzees were rich. Many people in the village were getting rich, doing things for the Engrayzees. If he would give her a coin, just for one coquettish look, what harm would it do to throw him a look? Who would even have to know? She would stop at that. She reached for his bottle and he let her have it.
“Baksheesh,” he said invitingly, waving the coin back and forth.
* * *
Shahnaz pushed open the compound door. Lights burned in the second-story veranda of the compound, shining through panes of thin, greased lambskin stretched over tiny window frames. Had anyone opened those shutters, they could have looked upon the courtyard and seen her creeping in, but no one looked, no one saw. Disheveled and confused, Shahnaz stumbled into the stable and pushed her way amongst the animals to curl up on the warm straw. Shame flowed through her veins like sewage. She could barely stretch, her body just wanted to coil into a ball. A hot discomfort burned between her legs at the heart of her womanhood. She dared not guess at the cause. It was not pain, but it disturbed her more than any pain she knew of. It blanked her thoughts and spread from her feminine center to her belly, up into her chest, and out to all her extremities.
Her life was ruined.
Her fingers were digging into her palms. She forced herself to unclench them and realized she held a fistful of metal disks. She remembered what she had been thinking earlier, that these coins—if they were coins—would turn into mascara and eyelid blackener and perhaps a pair of silver earrings the next time the nomads came by to trade. As if she could purchase such things, she realized now. As if she could just walk out to the nomads and offer them money in exchange for goods. Everyone would ask where she got the money, and what would she say? What had she been thinking?
And then the Engrayzees would laugh and say she came to them willingly. And she did, she remembered. She made a choice. Dread bubbled in her throat, and she wanted to throw up, but couldn’t. Her stomach was dry, her mouth arid. That drink they kept giving her must have done something. It wasn’t pomegranate juice after all. She scarcely dared to let herself admit she must have let wine into her body. And by doing so had forfeited God’s mercy. Oh, Allah, what what had she been thinking? How could she have let herself do it? What had she been thinking?
The stable door opened. A pad of footsteps. The rustle of straw. Her mother’s face between the legs of two cows. On her hands and knees, peering in at her daughter, hidden in the stable. “Shahnaz? What are you doing? Where have you been? Everybody’s been looking for you!”
“I was here,” stammered Shahnaz.
“No you weren’t!” her mother growled. “Your father saw you come in! You were outside. What happened to the laundry? Where did you go all day?”
Shahnaz shook her head. Her lips moved but no sounds came out. Children bunched up in the doorway and in the courtyard outside, watching and listening fearfully. Shahnaz’s hair poked out from under her head scarf, a scarf now pitifully filthy and torn.
Her father came out of the house and into the yard. “She won’t answer,” said her mother. “I think she’s ill.”
“Come on,” said her father. “Come, my child. Let’s go to the malang. He will know what to do. Come on.”
They didn’t have to wake the malang. He was already awake, standing outside the gate of the house the village had built for him, statuesque in his posture, a faint figure bathed in the scant light shed by countless brilliant stars and one thin crescent moon.
“Malang-sahib,” Shahnaz’s father began.
The malang raised a finger to silence the distraught man. “I know,” he said. “Leave her with me. Later, send your wife to take her home. The girl will need much care tonight.”
After the girl’s father had left, the malang led her indoors. She followed him with a beating heart but a certain peace flowing through her limbs. She could let go now: the malang was in charge, and he would know what to do. The only man who could intercede with Allah on her behalf was now in charge.
He sat her down on pillows in his private room, facing his own customary spot. Then he got down on folded knees and sniffed at her mouth. “Open,” he said. She opened her mouth wonderingly, and he sniffed again. Then he sat back in his spot, and picked up his prayer beads, shaking his head ruefully.
“You went to them.”
She clenched up timorously, her fists tightening. She shook her head.
“It’s no use lying, ” the malang murmured. “What’s done is done forever. When, child?”
“Before. Before sunset. They said just to eat something. It was only—others have done it, Hajji-sahib! I was hungry! I was thirsty—I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know…wai Allah! Suddenly it was night, and they were taking me…taking me somewhere? I didn’t want to, they forced me.” She began to cry.
The malang sighed. “My wife will give you some milk-tea and then you must go home.” He left the room, left Shahnaz crying, put on his slippers, tossed a cloak over his shoulders, and picked up his stick, a branch from a walnut tree, stripped of bark and worn smooth by weather. The thick end had been whittled to thin its girth. The top consisted of a gnarled knob the size of a small fist, which the malang’s hand engulfed entirely.
He picked his way down to the village. Where the road widened into a sort of square, he stood with his open hands held out in supplication, gazing skyward and murmuring. Then he closed his hands and ran them over his face as if to wash himself in prayer. Men came out of all the compounds and watched from a distance.
The malang wrapped his cloak around his shoulders and headed up the path toward the Red Pass. At the compound inhabited by the Engrayzees, he beat his stick upon the door. An Afghan guard opened up and the malang pushed past him, ignoring the guard’s protestations.
27
Rupert Oxley came out of his first-story quarters, pulling on his jacket
and adjusting his spectacles. “What’s all the commotion? Eh? What’s going on out there?” He peered about with a queasy grin. He had fretted about this possibility all night. Not that he could blame himself, that much he had settled in his mind. It was Hudson who took things over the edge, and even Hudson could not be held to account. The wench offered herself so willingly, up to a point. So willingly! And yet—again—the whole episode left Rupert feeling slimy with remorse.
Now he stood buttoning his fly and hoping the man in the courtyard wasn’t her husband, or father, or some blasted thing. He could not make out the fellow’s features, but the darkness seemed to magnify his size. In fact—good lord. He loomed like a horse! Rupert moved hesitantly into the yard. Perhaps he could set matters right with a few words of explanation. The girl’s willingness—that was the point to stress. Her almost frightening willingness. He might offer a bit of advice, too: rein her in, he might say. Oh, where was the damned translator when he was needed! “See here, old man—”
But the beggar pushed past Rupert with the wordless force of a boulder dislodged from a mountain slope and moving on a course set by gravity itself. Rupert remembered some story about a mad old hermit who lived in the hills. He caught a flash of molten eyes. The intruder swept upstairs to the second story and flung open the middle door of three. How did he know that Hudson lay in there, asleep? The madman strode right to Hudson’s bedside and without a word of warning brought his staff down—thwack!—on the poor man’s belly. Hudson let out a scream. Jerked out of slumbers, he balled up and clapped his arms over his head to defend against he knew not what.
The hermit raised his staff again. Rupert had to do something. He rushed to the old man from behind, wrapped his arms around him— “Hoy! Here now!” —and tightened his grip to squeeze the fight out of the lunatic, his mind fluttering with punishments he would order once the brute had been subdued—beating! imprisonment! Attacking an English officer in his sleep, good God!— hanging, perhaps! An example must—
But the hermit broke his grip and flung him away like a discarded jacket. Rupert slammed against the wall and dropped to the floor. How—? He watched Hudson scuttle on all fours toward the open door, trailing bedclothes. Rupert jumped up to grab the hermit’s cloak and keep him from giving chase. “Get my pistols!” he roared to Hudson.
At that sound, however, the hermit turned and came at Rupert, swinging his stick. He held it by the thin end. The other end was knobby and looked like a mace. Rupert made a grab but the knob hit his palm with such force it left his bones tingling, and then he couldn’t close his fingers! The hermit yanked the stick back and reared it for another blow. Rupert had no choice but to dive under the man’s raised arm and roll out to the corridor, where he got entangled with Hudson. In that moment, the hermit jostled past them. Now he towered between the Englishmen and their weapons, which were in a room at the end of the hall. There was no getting past the man: he seemed to fill the corridor, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. He was shaking his great head but the tangled tuft of beard sprouting from every part of his face barely seemed to move.
Rupert could not gather his thoughts for he had to watch that club, had to dodge it, retreat from it—and thus he fell back toward the stairs, with Hudson by his side. Then, in one mad rush, the old man drove them down to the yard. There, he set to beating them in earnest. Wherever Rupert scrambled, whichever way he jumped, that eerie madman was somehow there ahead of him. Was this a dream? Along the wall, Afghan servants stood watching idly. Rupert did not yell to them for help. What help could he expect from them? Tears of indignation blinded him. The stick cracked upon his forearm and broke the bone. He knew for he felt and heard the snap! Panic unleashed in him a gibber of mad thoughts. He would die in this courtyard, thousands of miles from home, unknown, unmourned. Dogs would tear up his mortal remains and leave the scraps of him to rot upon unholy soil! It was all one single conviction, all one single emotion. Torn apart by dogs. He mustn’t let them—must preserve his life. Torn! No shame in escape—his feet scrabbling against dirt—the stick missed, the madman turned on Hudson—Rupert saw his chance to shoot through the compound door—no shame in this. On the other side, a dozen or more of the savages stood on the loft of the hill, enjoying the sight of English officers getting drubbed. Yes, though all of them had taken his money greedily enough!
Rupert tore past them all, toward the open hills, the only direction that felt safe. Blind instinct told him to put distance between himself and the madman, just gain a few seconds of respite. Two or three seconds was all he needed and he would rally. Then he would go back and rescue Hudson. Ah, but Hudson had already saved himself. Here he was, coming fast! Hudson caught up, fell into stride next to Rupert, and the two men raced along the ridge of hills, huffing and gasping, heading toward the upper valley, where a small contingent of soldiers awaited them in a makeshift fort near Sorkhab. Hudson’s head was streaming blood. A scalp wound, Rupert hoped. For if the man’s skull was broken, he was done for—unbearable thought. Better not to think, just run. But at last, instinct gave way to exhaustion and Rupert’s feet slowed down. Hudson pulled up too. Silence surrounded them. They had outrun the madman. They were alone in these wild hills.
Only then did Rupert feel a tingling. Looking down, he realized he was not wearing shoes, just his heavy regimental socks. Hudson didn’t have even that much: he was barefoot. Now, with panic fading, disturbed thoughts began to squiggle in Rupert’s brain. What had he done? He and Hudson, two of her majesty’s crack troops, had just let one elderly native lunatic rout them with a stick! A stick! How would they ever explain this?
Hudson seemed to read his thoughts. “I wouldn’t say elderly, sir. He broke your arm. He broke my head. I counted thirty of ‘em. How many did you make it?”
Rupert frowned. Thirty? Yes, he might have seen that many along the hilltop. They were merely watching, but dogs turn into a pack so soon as they smell blood. Thinking back, he could almost hear the snarls. His hair prickled over his narrow escape. “Thirty or forty,” he agreed. “There was nothing we could do against so many.”
“And their leader—the horror! We’re lucky to come out alive.”
Rupert nodded, and they stood for a moment, letting their agreement congeal. Hudson rubbed his hands for warmth, lifting his bare feet up from the ground, first one, then the other, for although the day had been warm, the night had turned very chilly.
“Aye, but look here, “ Rupert burst out, “you can’t get to the garrison barefoot. It must be miles yet. You’ll need shoes, Sergeant. We must go back We’ll need shoes for you, and horses. We’ll get sticks along the way. And rocks perhaps. We’ll fight him.”
Hudson made no comment. They clutched themselves and shivered. The minutes tiptoed by and a formless dread rose inside them both, some black feeling rooted in nightmare. “Thirty or forty,” Rupert repeated.
“Or a hundred by now, maybe more,” said Hudson. “And they’ve got our firearms. What good’ll sticks and rocks do? I could bind my feet with handkerchiefs, sir. I have one, if you have another. We could push on to the fort.”
“Yes. Yes, that might best.” Rupert fumbled his handkerchief out of his coat pocket. Hudson pulled one from his sleeve. They wrapped his feet in these dressings well enough to let him pick his way over the stony ground.
By the time, they reached the fort, a hint of dawn stained the sky. The servants must have been asleep, for they took a damnable long time responding to fists pounding on the gate. Hudson stumbled as they entered, and Rupert had to pull him upright and support him, even though he himself felt three-quarters dead. Rupert's socks had worn through, but his frosted feet felt no pain, perhaps because of a greater pain masking it: that of his broken arm, which had swollen up alarmingly. But Sergeant Hudson was in worse shape. “Rum,” croaked Oxley.
Rum was brought, cold rum at first, but with assurances of hot rum on the way. Hudson said nothing. A nasty bump showed under his blood-caked hair.
The fort had
no surgeon, but an old quartermaster named Sheehan had some art in these matters from his days in the Peninsular wars. He washed and dressed both men’s wounds and prepared tubs of warm water in which they could soak their swollen feet, feet which he then rubbed tenderly with grease and clad in warm, dry woolens.
Other soldiers gathered around to find out what had happened; they muttered angrily when they heard about the bearded madman and his surprise attack on Her Majesty’s soldiers. “What set ‘em off?” Sheehan quizzed.
“Who can tell with such people?” Rupert retorted dully.
“Some offense to their religion,” Sheehan speculated. “They’re mighty techy that way. Fanatical, you know. You mought have stepped on their sacred cow. No telling what’ll offend the gods they worship. Their Allah, now, that’s a vengeful one, and they got others, too—strange gods, bloodthirsty gods with animal shapes as’ll make you tremble. I seen ‘em in Calcutta, sir, some of them temples? Horrible goblins, like, each one with that many John-Thomases as you wouldn’t believe! A hundred pricks to a creature, and that’s what they prays to. I seen ‘em in Calcutta. And here in these mountains, it’s bound to be all the worse. Well, you’ll have to take some men back there and teach them a lesson, sir.”
“Best do nothing till we hear from Kabul,” Hudson grunted, his mouth clenched against the pain.
