Companions of Paradise (17 page)

The city bazaars were eerily silent as they passed. No wood sellers chopped their wares in the Chob Faroshi as they passed. No tinsmiths filled the air with rhythmic hammering. Even the Char Chatta shops were shuttered. As she tried to ignore the blisters growing on her feet, Mariana calculated how long it would take them to reach the cantonment.

Tonight she would recite the words on Haji Khan's little roll of paper. She had given him her word.

“I HAVE done nothing to harm you!
Nothing!”
Alexander Burnes shouted to the crowd. Below him, between the posts that held up his carved balcony, heavy thudding indicated that the mob was now forcing the door to his house. “Do not shoot,” he cautioned the guards who stood, muskets loaded, on the rooftop.

Beside him, his assistant surveyed the crowd with a practiced eye. “There were three hundred an hour ago,” said Major William Broadfoot. “Now I would say there are ten times that many. They are packed into the road here, and I suspect there are more, out of sight around the corners.”

Burnes had begun to perspire. “What of the back of the house?”

His companion shrugged.

“William,” Burnes said somberly, “I should have listened to the warnings. I am to be sacrificed to these savages, but you have no part in this.”

“It is my duty, sir,” Broadfoot assured him. “Do not worry. Reinforcements will be here soon. It is already two hours since we sent your letter to the cantonment.”

Before he could say more, the first shots ricocheted off the wall behind them. He pushed Burnes through the open shutters. “Get inside, sir,” he ordered, then turned his attention, and his musket, to the crowd. “Open fire!” he called to the guard on the roof.

He killed six Afghans before he dropped to the balcony floor, shot mercifully through the heart.

One by one, the six guards fell.

The mob burst into the wide courtyard, and set the stables, then the house, ablaze. Inside the burning house, Burnes put on his Afghan costume with shaking hands.

“Hurry,” said the Kashmiri who had come to suggest he escape by the back door.

“I
am
hurrying,” Burnes panted as he wound on his lucky turban, the one he had always worn on his woman-hunting forays.

They opened the back door only enough to let them squeeze outside and into the crowd that stood shoulder to shoulder, shifting impatiently. The crowd smelled of sweat, unwashed clothing, and lust for blood.

The door shut behind them.

Someone turned and looked into Burnes's face. He dropped his head, hoping…

“He is here, I have him!” The Kashmiri raised his voice. “Here is Eskandar Burnes!”

Before Sir Alexander Burnes, British Resident at Kabul, had time to protest the Kashmiri's betrayal, before he had time to pray, the mob had fallen upon him.

There was no room for jezails in the narrow street, so they used knives: heavy pointed churas with long, straight blades for thrusting; ivory-handled
kukri
knives with downward-curving blades, heavy enough to slash a man in half; beautifully weighted Persian daggers with decorated hilts, Indian
katars
for tiger hunting, with wedge-shaped blades and strange handles, damascened
khanjars
and
jam-biyas
, whose upward-curving blades were sharpened on both edges.

When at last the crowd turned away, satisfied with its work, Sir Alexander Burnes, British Resident at Kabul, was no more than a scattered collection of body parts and blood-soaked rags.

“The British will come, now,” spectators muttered as the jubilant crowd marched, shouting, through the city. “They will come with their great, damaging guns.
They will come.”

T
hey must get clear of the city, Mariana told herself as she toiled painfully past the wall of a large formal garden. Word of the attack on Burnes must have reached the cantonment hours ago. The British rescue party would already be on the march, bent on saving him, or avenging his death.

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 you. 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.