Companions Of Paradise Part 33

"Oh, no," Nur Rahman a.s.sured 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. 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, s.h.i.+vering 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 appet.i.te 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 b.l.o.o.d.y path of the retreat, past the carca.s.ses of fallen animals, past their own dying, their own dead.

Mariana shaded her eyes. Far ahead of them in the distance, a concentrated ma.s.s 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 s.h.i.+rt 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-"

He coughed, his face clenched.

"Please don't die, Nur Rahman," she begged. "Don't leave me alone here." don't die, Nur Rahman," she begged. "Don't leave me alone here."

There was nothing unsavory about him now. He was her lifeline.

"Pray for me," he repeated.

Still kneeling, she steepled her hands together and closed her eyes. "Heavenly Father," she began, thinking of her childhood, "I pray for the soul of-"

Fingers clutched at her. "Not foreign prayers," he gasped. "Pray to Allah."

"But I am. am. I may be a Christian, but-" I may be a Christian, but-"

His fringed eyes implored her. She could hear air whistling through the hole in his chest. "You are a good woman, Khanum. The prayer will go from your mouth to Allah's ear. I want-"

She knew what he wanted. Most of all Most of all, he had told her once, I long to be made pure again, and to see the face of the Beloved. I long to be made pure again, and to see the face of the Beloved.

"First," he whispered, "say La illaha illa Allah, Muhammad Rasul Allah- La illaha illa Allah, Muhammad Rasul Allah- there is no G.o.d save G.o.d, and Muhammad is the Messenger of G.o.d." there is no G.o.d save G.o.d, and Muhammad is the Messenger of G.o.d."

Have I asked you to recite the Shahada, Shahada, the attestation of faith? the attestation of faith? Haji Khan had asked her on the day Burnes was murdered, his voice rising. Haji Khan had asked her on the day Burnes was murdered, his voice rising.

No, she had replied.

Then I have not asked you to embrace Islam, he had said.

In Muns.h.i.+ Sahib's story of the king's messenger, wise words had set Muballigh free to return to his homeland. Perhaps these Arabic ones would do the same for Nur Rahman She glanced skyward. "Dear Lord," she whispered, "Haji Khan told me that You and Allah are the same. If You are not, please forgive me.

"La illaha illa Allah," she intoned, she intoned, "Muhammad Rasul Allah." "Muhammad Rasul Allah."

"Now say it twice more," Nur Rahman croaked. She did as she was asked.

There, she had done it.

Imagining the horror on her father's face, she looked down, expecting the boy to smile, but he was already fading.

She bent over him. "O Allah Most Gracious," she shouted over his rasping breath, "forgive Thy servant Nur Rahman, and reward him with the sight of Thy face. Give him loving companions of his own age, and let him drink from the fountain of-"

He stopped breathing.

"-Salsabil," she finished, and dropped her face into her ice-cold hands.

Othou soul," Safiya Sultana recited, her Qur'an open to the marked page where she had left off the previous day. Safiya Sultana recited, her Qur'an open to the marked page where she had left off the previous day.

"In complete rest And satisfaction!

Enter thou, then Among my devotees!