Companions of Paradise (35 page)

IT WAS noon before Hassan and Zulmai arrived at the caravanserai, Hassan riding a glossy chestnut stallion and leading a black mare. Behind them followed the eight mules, loaded with food supplies and live chickens in cages covered with felt wrappings. Beside the mules, a boy with a stick drove five nanny goats.

Terrified of what Hassan would say, but desperate to share his burden, Ghulam Ali ran heavily toward them and fell to his knees.

“Bibi is gone,” he sobbed, “she is gone!”

“What? When?”

The courier looked up, hot tears standing in his eyes. “I went to relieve myself this morning, out of sight of her tent. I could not wait any longer, Sahib.”

“And when you came back?” Hassan sat absolutely still on his stallion.

“They were gone. Nothing had been stolen. The bolsters, the rugs, all are still there. I do not know what happened. I never thought anyone would kidnap them.”

“I did not know,” Ghulam Ali added miserably, gesturing at the four empty servants’ tents, “that the servants had all run away.”

“Did anyone see them leave?” Zulmai demanded.

Ghulam Ali's face crumpled. “I did not think to ask. I have been so—”

“Get off your knees,” Zulmai ordered, “and ask the tea seller by the gate.”

“Two women in chaderis went past this morning,” the old man offered when the three men approached him. “I think they turned that way,” he added, pointing toward the city. “They appeared to be alone,” he added carefully, “and they did not seem to be ladies of wealth.”

Before he had finished speaking, Hassan clucked to his new stallion. “I do not know when I will be back,” he threw over his shoulder, as his horse cantered under the gate and onto the road.

“Ghulam Ali,” Zulmai ordered, “stay with our baggage. Do not let anyone disappear with our food stores. I will bring more pack animals to carry our tents, and then you and I will wait and see whether Hassan Ali Khan finds his wife.”

January 6, 1842

A
s she gulped her second bowl of soup, Mariana looked through a gap in the tea shop wall. She elbowed Nur Rahman, and pointed.

A thickly dressed man was approaching the chaikhana. Behind him strode a pair of blond, two-humped Bactrian camels.

Her eyes on the new guest, Mariana reached into the pocket of her poshteen, took out Hassan's medallion, and slid it from its chain and into her palm.

An olive
, read its delicate Arabic letters,
neither of the East, nor of the West.

“Here is what we will do,” she whispered.

Half an hour later, when the camel-driving customer put down his teacup and stood to leave, Mariana and Nur Rahman got up and followed him to where his tethered animals waited, their jaws moving rhythmically.

Nur Rahman cleared his throat. “Please,” he said sweetly, “will you take us toward Butkhak?”

The man's face was seamed from exposure to the sun. He frowned, his eyes politely averted from them. “But Butkhak is on the road to Jalalabad,” he replied dubiously. “Why do you want to go there? Do you not know what is happening?”

“We live just past Begrami,” Nur Rahman explained. “We have become late, and now we fear we will not reach there before sunset.”

The man shook his head. “I am not going that way.”

Nur Rahman held out his hand. Mariana's gold chain dangled from his fingers. “We can offer you this.”

The man shrugged, took the chain, and put it into his pocket. “If there is danger,” he warned, “I will turn back.”

“Once we are past Begrami, we will be sure to find the head of the British train,” Nur Rahman whispered.

The man picked up a stick. Making a curious guttural sound, he tapped the forelegs of one camel, then the other.

One after the other, they knelt obediently down, front knees first, hindquarters second.

Mariana's had mild, long-lashed eyes. It smelled warm and musty. Even kneeling, it was tall. She reached up and grasped two handfuls of its luxuriant hair, then, with a discreet boost from Nur Rahman, struggled onto its back, and settled between its humps.

Her plight could be worse, she thought, as they started off. The snow had stopped, although the sky was still heavy and gray. Her stomach was full, and the shaggy humps protected her from the fiercest blasts of wind. She pushed her hands into the sleeves of her poshteen, hunched her shoulders against the cold, hoping she was doing the right thing.

The afternoon light had begun to change. The city and the Bala Hisar were already behind them. Their escort strode rapidly along, saying nothing, the lead ropes in one hand.

As the light began to fade, sounds came from the distance, of a great body of men, carts, and animals on the move.

Their road was taking them nearer to the retreating army. Sounds began to distinguish themselves from the general din: shouts, cries, and shots.

The Ghilzais were still firing on the column. People must have been killed, but who?

She swayed with her camel's stride, listening intently to the sounds of battle. How long, she wondered, was the column? How much farther must they go to find the vanguard?

Their guide stopped and looked back at her. “We will reach Begrami after dark,” he announced. “Do you know the way to your house?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Nur Rahman fluted.

Mariana closed her eyes. She felt as if she had been traveling for weeks. The rhythmic chiming of the camels’ ankle bells reminded her of something

She awoke when her camel stopped.

Night had already fallen. Animals blew nearby. A chorus of competing voices combined with the creaks and groans of transport vehicles.

“We have reached Begrami,” their guide announced. He was barely visible in the blackness. “I cannot take you any farther. The foreigners and their army have blocked the way. They are all around us. I do not know what to do with you now,” he added mournfully. “I wish I had not agreed to help you.”

“Oh, no,” Nur Rahman assured him. “It is all right. We will get down now. We can walk the rest of the way.”

“Impossible,” the man declared. “I have taken responsibility for your safety. There is a fort a little way behind us. I must take you there.”

Another fort.
Mariana held her breath.

“Leave us here!” Nur Rahman's voice held a note of hysteria.

“I will not allow two women to walk through a foreign army camp in the middle of—”

“Leave us!” Nur Rahman screeched. “Make the camels kneel down! Keep the gold chain! We want to get off!”

The man said nothing, but a moment later Mariana heard his guttural noise again, and felt the tapping of his stick.

Her camel dropped, joltingly, to the ground. She slid from its back. Almost at once she felt Nur Rahman tug at her chaderi.

“Run,” he urged quietly, “before he changes his mind!”

Clutching each other, they hurried clumsily away.

“Make no sound,” Nur Rahman whispered.

At last they heard the man speak to his camels. A moment later the jingling of their ankle bells told them he was leaving.

Groans and cries came from ahead of them. Mariana's heart contracted as they picked their way toward the sound.

When they arrived, she peered around her with growing dismay.

The British camp, if it could be called one, was a disgrace. No cooking fires beckoned them. No lamplight glowed from inside sheltering tents. Barely visible, silhouetted against the pale snow, men lay singly and in groups as if they had fallen where they stood. Sobs and whimpers filled the air.

A shadowy form lay across Mariana's path. She bent over it.

“Where are the senior officers? Where is General Elphinstone?” she asked, first in English, then in Urdu.

The body in the snow proved to be an Indian sepoy. “I do not know where they are, Memsahib,” he replied through chattering teeth. “I only know that I am dying from the cold.”

Impulsively, she reached down and touched his arm. He wore only his regular uniform, the thin red coat he had worn throughout the summer and autumn.

“I am sorry,” was all she could manage.

Afraid to lose Nur Rahman in the darkness, she clutched a handful of his chaderi.

“I think we have found the rear of the column,” he whispered. “It is too late to make our way to the front.”

“What should we do now?” Despairing, she looked about her. “There is snow everywhere. We cannot stand up all night.”

“There is only one thing to do.”

His chaderi rustled as he pulled it off his shoulders. “We must take off our poshteens and spread one of them on the snow. Then we must lie down on it, and put the other one over us. That is how we will survive until the morning.”

An hour later, shivering against the snoring Nur Rahman, she listened to the screams of the wounded and the groans of the freezing, until her eyes closed.

AT THE front of the column, an exhausted-looking captain put his head around the door flap of the only standing tent. “Is there room for anyone else?” he inquired politely.

“No.” Lady Sale pointed to the bodies cramming the floor around her upright chair. “You can see for yourself that there is not a square inch remaining. Is it really true,” she added, turning to her son-in-law, “that only this tent has survived the march, of all the ones we brought from the cantonment?”

“I would not be surprised,” Captain Sturt replied painfully. “The insurgents fell on our pack animals the moment they left the gate.”

“We need only to manage for six more days,” Lady Macnaghten offered from her place between Sturt's wife and Charles Mott.

“If your raisins have not been stolen,” Mott suggested, “we might have them now.”

“You will find them in a leather bag inside the door,” she replied, “but do not give me any. I have no appetite at all.”

Outside the tent, soldiers lay in heaps, trying to keep warm. Officers called out, trying to find their regiments in the darkness.

“I doubt,” groaned someone from a corner of the tent, “that many of us will reach Jalalabad alive.”

“Croaker!” retorted Lady Sale.

MARIANA STIRRED, as light penetrated her eyelids. Why was her room so cold? Why was her head covered in cloth? What was that sound that vibrated all around her?

With a sharp intake of breath, she realized where she was. The sound she heard was an army on the march.

She shook Nur Rahman. “Wake up,” she ordered. “The column is moving.”

It was barely dawn. Shuddering from the cold, they tied on their sheepskins, pulled their chaderis over them, and took in their surroundings.

The corpse of the previous night's sepoy lay a dozen yards from where they had slept, its lower extremities as black as charred wood. In the distance, a ragged crowd followed the bloody path of the retreat, past the carcasses of fallen animals, past their own dying, their own dead.

Mariana shaded her eyes. Far ahead of them in the distance, a concentrated mass of marchers moved over a hill, toward a glorious pink-and-orange sunrise.

Some of the stragglers around them were native soldiers, their faces contorted from the pain of their wounds. Some were unarmed camp followers staggering on frozen feet. Still others were native women, their eyes dazed, their long hair falling down their backs, many carrying babies and small children, most wearing only flimsy shoes and thin shawls. How any of them still lived, even after one day, was a mystery to Mariana.

None of them would be able to keep up with the column. All were doomed.

Not a single British officer was to be seen.

Twenty yards from Mariana, a team of exhausted-looking bullocks dragged a nine-pound gun up an incline, their hooves slipping, while a dozen native artillerymen struggled to push the gun carriage from behind.

The bullocks meant that this was not Harry Fitzgerald's horse artillery. But where was the wheeled limber with supplies for the gun? Where were the officers who rode beside their men, barking orders, seeing that everything was done properly?

Had they run away, and left these poor gunners to their fate?

Perhaps they had. Nothing, no amount of incompetence or neglect would surprise Mariana now.

Two loud thuds echoed behind her. One artilleryman, then another, spun about and toppled to the snow.

The Ghilzais had returned.

“We must get away,” Nur Rahman cried urgently, tugging at her. “Come quickly! We must hide! The Ghilzai horsemen will be here soon. They will do more than shoot. They—”

She did not hear a word he said, for swaying with exhaustion on a gaunt horse, Harry Fitzgerald was trotting toward the lumbering gun and its frightened men.

The bones stood out on his face. His left arm was still strapped to his chest. He drew rein and shouted an order.

Deaf to Nur Rahman's entreaties, Mariana watched two gunners unhook a spike from the gun carriage, and hammer it into the top of the gun barrel, while the others worked to free the bullocks.

They were disabling the gun before they left it behind—the last, most painful action an artillery officer could take.

Without thinking, she threw back her chaderi and ran toward honest, heroic Harry Fitzgerald.

“No!” Nur Rahman wailed behind her.

She had not gone twenty feet before more shots came. A third gunner fell, then a fourth. Fitzgerald jerked in his saddle. His free arm flailing, he toppled to the ground.

He had not seen her.

Heart pounding, unable to scream, Mariana ran on, until some instinct made her turn and look behind her.

Nur Rahman had flung off his disguise. Fully revealed as a young man, he danced, grinning desperately, his feet stamping, his arms above his head, his fingers moving in graceful imitation of a dancing girl.

He did not stop until another shot thudded from behind a pile of rock. Then, in one motion, he dropped to his knees and fell face-forward into the filthy, trampled snow.

Mariana stopped running. Her mind a paralyzed blank, she looked from boy to man, and back again.

Two artillerymen bent briefly over the motionless Fitzgerald, then hurried away to continue their work.

Nur Rahman's arm lifted briefly, then dropped.

She turned, scrambled back to him, and fell to her knees at his side.

He had deliberately attracted the musket ball that had dropped him to the ground. She knew he had done it for her.

She grasped him by his sheepskin cloak and rolled him onto his back.

There was blood on his shirt where his poshteen had fallen open. He had been shot through the chest.

He stared, wide-eyed, into her face. “I am cold,” he whispered, fighting to breathe.

“Why did you dance like that?” she cried as she closed his poshteen over his chest.

He shook his head, as if she were asking the wrong question. “Pray for me,” he gasped.

“You did it to protect me, didn't you?” she demanded as she stuffed his discarded chaderi beneath his head.

“Take it off,” he croaked, plucking at the folds of cloth on her shoulder. “They believe you are a spy, or a dishonored woman retreating with the British army. They will aim at you again, and I will not be here to—”