The Distant Kingdom Page 28

  She stood up again then, trying to shake the snow out of her skirts, which had now been damp and half-frozen for two days. She gave the two children another exiguous ration of the food she had brought and poured them each a drink of sherry, once again the only liquid that could be found from among the broken cases and baggage scattered about the bivouac. She herself accepted a tumblerful from Captain Sturt, and downed it like any trooper, feeling no ill-effects, only a momentary warmth.

  Shortly after that, at about midday, the order to advance was given and the column began to move into the gloomy defile that had obsessed the thoughts of nearly everyone. In spite of an escort of Afghan chiefs who rode in advance, almost all the Europeans were afraid of what they would suffer on that bleak road.

  Perdita and the children rode with Lady Sale and Emily Sturt; Marcus further back leading his demoralized sepoys and James Thurleigh with the general and his staff. To Perdita, as to nearly everyone else, the pass was a fearful sight. Almost no sun penetrated its narrow depths, and the cracked and creviced rocks rose steeply on either side of the road, across which poured a tumultuous winding torrent. The ponies had to pick their way through it again and again as it crossed and recrossed the road. On the third or fourth time, Annie’s yaboo stopped halfway across and refused to budge in spite of angry or encouraging slaps and all the child’s tearful urging.

  Perdita slipped off her own animal, gasping as the cold of the icy water soaked through her skirt and boots. She gave Charlie the reins of her pony and told him to lead it through, while she took Annie’s with both hands above the bit and, facing the reluctant beast, pulled hard. At last it picked up one foot and then another, and she turned around and led it out of the river, slipping badly at the edge where the stiller water had begun to freeze. Her ankle bent sickeningly, but, although grimacing with pain, she went grimly on up out of the water. She turned to wring as much water out of her skirt as she could before it froze and then remounted urging the children to catch up with Mrs Sturt.

  About half a mile further on, firing started, and she remembered Marcus’s description of his previous fight there. Murderous fire poured down on them and Perdita shouted to the children:

  ‘Now. Gallop. Follow Mrs Sturt. I am behind you. Go on. Whip him with the reins, Annie.’

  Bullets were whizzing past them and she could not believe that they would get through unhurt. Seeing that Annie could not make her pony follow Charlie’s, Perdita scooped the child up on to her own horse before her and together they galloped through, ducking absurdly as the iron rain whipped past. Perdita saw Lady Sale sway and made as if to stop, but that indomitable woman cried:

  ‘No, no. Go on. I shall do well enough.’

  The fierce little river impeded them time and again as it wound across the road, but they all splashed through, urging their mounts with complete recklessness and disregard for the treachery of loose stones and sudden troughs.

  The pass was five miles long, and when Perdita finally burst through into the sunlit valley at the end, it was almost impossible to believe that she had survived. Breathlessness bowed her forward over Annie, her ears rang and blood pounded through her body, but they had won through. When she had fought her lungs into almost regular breathing, she raised her head to see Charlie, his eyes sparkling and his cheeks bright red, riding up beside Emily Sturt, who said:

  ‘Lady Beaminster, are you hurt?’

  ‘No, Mrs Sturt; just winded for a moment. Where is your mama?’

  ‘She is here too. One bullet entered her arm, but she says the others damaged only the poshteen.‘

  They all dismounted and waited, getting gradually cold again, for their husbands and friends to struggle through, powerless to help until the dazed and wounded people appeared at the mouth of the defile. Emily thought she saw Sturt for a moment, but decided she had been mistaken when he did not emerge. Then came the general’s party almost intact, with Thurleigh winding a handkerchief around his left wrist. Perdita went towards him to help, half-afraid he would order her out of the way, but he did not. He held down his hand for her to secure the improvised bandage as he said:

  ‘Marcus?’

  She shook her head. Then seeing from his expression how he had translated her gesture, made herself speak:

  ‘Nothing yet. But none of his men are through yet either, and so we may hope.’

  He came at last, swaying in his saddle, supported by a subadhar, who headed over to Thurleigh in relief. This time Marcus had been wounded in the knee and seemed to be in bad pain, for his face was greenish-white under the dirt and he had bitten deeply into his bottom lip.

  Together James Thurleigh and Perdita helped him off the horse and laid him on to a pile of sheepskin coats. Perdita turned to her children and said:

  ‘Charlie, please go to Mrs Sturt and ask if she has any of that sherry left for Papa. Annie, come here and hold Papa’s head for me.’

  They did what they could to make Marcus less uncomfortable, which was not much, until Charlie came back with a bottle and the news that Captain Sturt was badly wounded:

  ‘Worse than Papa. He can’t speak and there’s lots of blood. He’s making a horrid noise.’

  Perdita put her hand to her eyes, unable to stop tears of horror: horror that the child should have to see such things, and horror that poor Sturt should suffer so much again. The tears seemed to be welling more and more quickly under her fingers and hard as she tried to stop them, she could not. She felt her arm gripped hard and heard Thurleigh’s voice, harsh:

  ‘Stop. There is a time and place for such nonsense. This is not it. Do something for your husband.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  By nightfall, Doctor Brydon had found time to dress Marcus’s wound, having roughly dug out the ball. He took Perdita on one side to say:

  ‘It will be painful, but he is not in danger, except of fever.’ Then he told her quickly of some of the others who had survived, and more who were dying, before hurrying to attend to as many of them as he could.

  Sturt was dying, he told her, and Maria Jamieson was already dead, although two of her children had got through alive; the sepoy leading their camel had marched doggedly through the pass in spite of his wounds. Mrs Trevor still lived with seven of her children, and young Mrs Mainwaring had heroically walked most of the way, carrying her child and struggling over the bodies of men and cattle as she went. Little Mary Anderson, Annie’s best friend, had been taken by some tribesmen, as had some other children Perdita did not know. It was thought that nearly three thousand had died in those five miles.

  Perdita’s mind could hardly take in the horror of it: so many men and women she had known, murdered, their bodies left to rot in that charnel house of a pass. And the children: they had had to watch such things, dying in pain and terror, or, worse perhaps, taken captive by their tormentors. In the face of such carnage to have survived unhurt seemed almost shameful; and yet the determination to live burned in Perdita still.

  The sufferings of the living were not at an end. As night fell the firing continued and the survivors lay down in the snow, colder than ever, hungry, many of them hoping that they would not wake again. As usual, Thurleigh joined the Beaminsters as soon as he could leave the general’s side, and as usual they made their poshteen bed and tried to sleep. This time they were afraid to lie in a circle in case someone accidentally kicked Marcus’s wounded leg, and so Perdita arranged them in a row, with Marcus at one edge. Thurleigh at the other. Perdita had the satisfaction of seeing the children sleep almost at once, exhausted by that wild and shattering ride, and soon afterwards she dropped into an uneasy doze, punctuated by nightmares and the sound of screams and groans that seemed part of the dreams. She was woken by a convulsive start in Marcus, lying beside her, and opened her eyes to see a young boy in Afghan dress kneeling over him. She was struggling out of the skins that covered her, hampered by her wet and clinging serge skirts, when Marcus screamed penetratingly.

  Seeing the moonlight gleam off a kn
ife in the boy’s hand, Perdita lunged at him, grabbing his right wrist. He must have been only twelve or so and although he was wirily strong, with her superior weight she managed to roll him on to his back on the ground. She dared not turn to see to her husband, for the boy squirmed and kicked at her violently.

  All around her she could see Afghan men and children running through the camp, slashing, stabbing at the wounded and the dead. Some of the sepoys and their officers tried to fight the tribesmen off; others lay apathetically, allowing themselves to be killed or hacked about, as though too battered by the horrors they had suffered to care whether they lived or died.

  Perdita heard Thurleigh’s despairing voice:

  ‘His eyes, dear God, his eyes.’

  Suddenly she understood what the boy beneath her had done to Marcus. Quicker than thought, impelled by hate and terror, she knelt astride him to keep him still and taking her hand from his wrist wrenched the knife from his hand. He writhed between her thighs, shrieking curses. She drove the knife into his chest, pushing hard through the rough leather of his neemchee. The blade slid in quite easily, and the body stilled. She could not believe that killing was so easy, and wrenched the knife out again to drive it back into the boy, and again once more.

  She felt a man’s hand on her shoulder and heard a rough English voice saying:

  ‘Enough. Enough, ma’am. The wretch is dead.’

  Dazed and sick, she allowed the man to help her up off the corpse. He bent down to pick up a handful of snow and used it to start washing the blood off her left hand. She raised the right, and in the thin light saw that it was dark with blood: sticky between her fingers and horrible under her nails. She looked at the hand as though she did not know what it was. Then her eyes dilated.

  ‘Marcus?’

  The man turned her round and she saw her husband lying with his head in Captain Thurleigh’s lap, blood all over his face.

  The children were huddled under the poshteens, looking at their father, both in tears but neither making a sound. Perdita turned back to the man and at last recognized him.

  ‘Sergeant Deane, thank you. Please find Doctor Brydon, or any of them, and tell him to come.’

  Watching him go, she realized that all the raiders had left the bivouac.

  She went back to her family and waited for the doctor to arrive. When he came twenty minutes later, she saw that he was shaking with fatigue and his fingers fumbled with the clasp of his bag of dressings. He did what little he could for Marcus. Thurleigh laid him down and took his hand.

  Perdita looked at them in silence, nearly every feeling beaten out of her by what she had seen and done; she wanted to lie down in the snow, undisturbed, and sleep for the rest of time. She tried to remember what it had felt like to be alive before this war and her mind fixed on Charles Byrd. Her conviction that she could get her family safely through to Jellalabad had dwindled to nothing, but through her despair she felt a longing to see Charles once more. Dying there in the snow would cut her off from him for eternity. The failing spark of her strength flickered once more and she tried to nurse it back into flame.

  ‘Captain Thurleigh, I think we should keep watch now. Have you a weapon?’

  ‘Of course, but you had better take this.’ She held out a smeared hand, into which he put the cold, hard weight of a revolver.

  ‘It is not cocked. Do you know how to fire it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said briefly, remembering how Marcus had taught her during the winter when Thurleigh had been away in Jellalabad. She turned to the children and persuaded them to lie down again. Charlie’s eyes were fixed on her face; he seemed unable to close them.

  ‘Mama, Mama, why is Papa crying like Captain Sturt?’

  Perdita stroked his forehead, wincing at the sight of the dried blood on her fingers. Making her voice as calm as she could, she tried to soothe him:

  ‘He has been hurt, Charles. We must all be as quiet as we can so that we do not disturb him. Lie down again. I’m coming in beside you, Annie. There is nothing to frighten you now. Lie down.’

  They obeyed, but she was afraid that they would not sleep. She herself sat beside them to spend what was left of the night straining to see if anyone was approaching in the murky moonlight, bitterly reproaching herself for sleeping earlier, and asking herself how any twelve-year-old child learned the cruelty necessary to do what had been done to Marcus. She had known that blinding was a traditional punishment for any ruler overthrown in Afghanistan, or an enemy defeated, but the reality of in far outstripped even her most grotesque imaginings. She thought it would have been less evil to kill than to maim him in such a way.

  Morning brought the usual shambles and uncertainty. Just after dawn there was a tremendous commotion as most of the fighting men and practically all the camp followers started to move off towards the next pass. Individuals were grabbing ponies or camels where they could, and Perdita lost no time in getting the children up, rolling up their poshteens and strapping them to the ponies. Then she helped Thurleigh get Marcus into his saddle.

  With his face set in vicarious pain, Thurleigh said:

  ‘I cannot stay. I must go to Elphinstone. Will you take his reins?’

  ‘Of course. Marcus, can you stay in the saddle, or shall I find a place in a khajavah for you?’

  He made a ghastly effort to smile in the direction of her voice and say:

  ‘I’ll stay on.’

  ‘Very well. But you must tell me if I go too fast, or if you want to stop. Now Annie, you must ride with Charlie today so that I can help Papa.’ She lifted the child up in front of Charlie, detaching her clinging hands as gently as possible. Then she gave her son strict instructions to take care of the little girl.

  They rode off, joining the milling force that was straggling across the valley. As they passed the small tent in which the surviving English wives had spent the night, she saw piles of Indian corpses. It was not until much later that she learned that the poor wretches had tried to force their way in to share what warmth they could. Being repulsed, they had simply lain down outside and died.

  Perdita and her family had not ridden half a mile before an order rang out to halt. They were beside a group of English women carried in camel panniers, one of whom threw her child down into the snow in despair. Perdita shared some of the woman’s feeling and muttered:

  ‘Oh Christ, what now?’ unaware that she was blaspheming.

  As usual, ignorant chaos reigned. Some said that the whole force was to be turned round; others that still more dangers awaited them between the valley and Tizeen; yet others that Akbar Khan was genuinely going to provide them with an escort and food this time. Messengers, both English and Afghan, came and went and no one took any notice of a party of tribesmen riding down on the right of the column until they had seized the bridle of Perdita’s pony, and Charlie’s. A few sepoys raised their muskets, and one or two even fired, but so wide that no one was hit.

  Perdita was too frightened to speak and looked wildly back at Marcus, only to realize that he could not help her; that she was now responsible for him as well as the children.

  He said painfully:

  ‘What is it, Perdita? Why are we riding away from the column? Who is firing?’

  ‘Oh, Marcus,’ she began, ‘they are taking us …’ She stopped, hearing wild shouts and the crunching of a pony’s hooves in the snow behind them. She narrowed her eyes against the painful glare and then said:

  ‘Marcus, Captain Thurleigh is coming.’

  ‘Thank God,’ he answered. But the tribesmen had heard him too, and two of them detached themselves from the raiding party, wheeled round then thundered down towards him. He took aim with his revolver, but before he could cock and fire it, they were on him and had snapped his hands behind his back, roughly tying them with harsh cord.

  They were driven quickly away from the column, and horrific pictures flashed one after another through Perdita’s mind: of poor Lieutenant Loveday’s starved beheaded body at Khelat-y-Ghil
zai; of Colonel Stoddart in the mad Nasrullah’s unspeakable prison; of young Mrs Smith running for her life among the rocks north of Candahar. Although last night the thought of lying down to sleep and never waking again had held some comfort, now the idea of dying filled her with terror, and at the thought of what the tribesmen might do to the living bodies of her children, bitter bile rose in her throat. She choked it down and at last found her voice:

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ she said in Pushtu to the man who had seized her bridle. ‘What do you want of us?’

  He turned and from under the coarse blue turban seemed to smile like a fiend.

  She shuddered, and was grateful for the sound of Captain Thurleigh’s English voice:

  ‘Do not give them the satisfaction, Lady Beaminster. What is coming will come, and all we have now is our pride.’

  Marcus said once more, lost in his fog of blindness and pain, and shivering under the weight of his damp and icy clothes:

  ‘What is happening?’

  Thurleigh answered in a calm tone, almost as though he were delivering an official report:

  ‘A group of tribesmen has overpowered us and seems to be taking us away from the valley into the hills. We do not know what they want with us, but they have shown us no violence.’

  ‘Why us?’

  ‘God knows,’ answered Thurleigh, but for him, as for the other two adults, that was the question that remained: what had they done, or what could they offer, that they had been singled out so terrifyingly? A little later, as though answering one of the others, he said:

  ‘I don’t think it can be ransom, for how could these ignorant savages understand Marcus’s position? If they were kidnapping for money, they would surely have taken one of the senior officers. No, it must have been a random choice. But for the love of God, why?’

  ‘Perdita?’

  ‘Yes, Marcus.’

  ‘Have they hurt you?’

  ‘No. Neither me, nor the children.’ She turned back to look down the valley, but the struggling, intractable column was now hidden from her by a spur of the hills. She sat back in the saddle and tried to think of nothing but the sight of the man leading the children’s pony, who appeared to be entertaining them, making faces at them and whistling. She had once heard that all Afghans love children, but after what she had seen on the retreat, she could not have believed that the affection could encompass the children of their enemies.