Some Kind of Grace, page 11
‘You must come with us,’ said Blackbeard.
‘Why? I am a simple traveller, doing no harm.’
‘Our chief wishes to see you.’
‘Who is your chief?’
‘Abdul Raof Khan.’
As McLeod had feared, Raof was the hater of the British.
‘And I am the son of Abdul Raof Khan,’ cried the fat man shrilly. ‘I shall be the next chief.’
McLeod noticed that Blackbeard scowled at that, and glanced round at the other horsemen.
‘The chief is very sick,’ he said.
‘But I am not a doctor,’ said McLeod. ‘I have no medicines to cure a bad sickness.’
‘No doctor, and no medicines can help him now. Tonight, tomorrow, he will be with God.’
Well, thought McLeod, why the hell look so glum about that? The old rogue had had a long enough innings of rape, pillage, and banditry. In any case, wasn’t death for him an entry into paradise where brown-eyed houris would be so accommodating he’d never miss his right hand. It would be different, though, with the fat son: the orthodox paradise might well be hell for him.
McLeod took care not to let his thoughts show on his face. It was wiser to wear a bold but not provocative look. If he appeared frightened, they might slit his throat like a sheep’s.
‘Our chief wishes you to come and speak with him before he dies,’ said Blackbeard.
‘But he does not know me. I am sure he did not know I was coming.’
‘We have been watching the road for days for an Englishman.’
‘But I am not an Englishman.’
‘No. So you say,’ Blackbeard scowled. ‘But you are a feringhee, a Christian foreigner. You will have to do. If we wait the chief will die.’
‘His hand is white,’ cried the fat man. ‘It will do.’
McLeod couldn’t resist glancing at his right hand; it wasn’t white, but he knew what the fat man had meant.
‘For many years,’ said Blackbeard bitterly, ‘the chief has had only one hand, though the meanest beggar in the city has had two. With one hand he has been a great warrior; no horseman in the land has been more skilful. But it is different now. He says a man of pride cannot go to God with one hand missing. What God gave must be returned in the same condition. So our chief says.’
McLeod couldn’t be sure whether this was meant as a grim joke on Blackbeard’s part or whether the chief really did want to take someone’s hand with him when he died. It was only too likely that the old scoundrel, in pious, delirious shame at having to give back to God not only a soul steeped in bloody sin but also a maimed body, had conceived this notion of having a feringhee’s hand buried with him. No doubt in the past, wielding his little tyranny, he had punished enemies by such amputations. Perhaps the friends of some such enemy had made his son a eunuch in revenge.
To remember that that very morning he had listened to the younger generation enthusiastically reciting ‘Cute twin mules’ was incredible enough, but hardly reassuring. This was still a country where the vague but sincere efforts to progress by a few were despised and so crippled by millions of traditionalists. Yet had not hospitality to strangers always been an important part of that tradition: McLeod had himself in remote poverty-stricken villages been given the best carpets to sit on and the choicest mutton to eat.
‘How far is it to your chiefs house?’ he asked.
‘An hour’s ride.’
‘Can I go in my car?’
‘There is no road for a car. You must ride a horse.’
‘Perhaps he cannot ride a horse,’ shrieked the fat man.
McLeod ignored that. ‘Who will look after my belongings while I am away?’ he asked.
‘I shall leave two men,’ said Blackbeard.
‘Maybe you will not come back,’ cried the fat man, shrilly giggling.
McLeod glanced up at Blackbeard, but found no reassurance in his dark scowl.
‘Here is a horse,’ said Blackbeard, as one of the two men who were to wait led it up.
As nimbly as he could, McLeod mounted. The first thing he discovered in the saddle was how useful two hands were. Was driving, he wondered, easier than riding to a man with only one.
As the fat man rode past he reached out with his sword and struck McLeod on the hand. He used the blade, but even so the blow was hard enough to cause pain and bring blood. When McLeod looked round at the other men, he thought some of them gave him smiles, stern enough but sympathetic. One, indeed, tapped first his brow and then his loins with his middle finger. It might have been an unconscious gesture, but it also might have been a hint that the chief’s son was out of his mind, and also that there was a reason for it.
As McLeod splashed across the river in the midst of that tatterdemalion but formidable cavalry, with his two hands conspicuous on the horse’s black mane, he realised that he would never be allowed to return to the capital parading a bleeding stump. Safer and tidier, after the truncation, which would of course be performed by the fat sadist with the out-of-date sword, to put a bullet in his head and dump him into a hole that even warriors like Blackbeard might condescend to dig. Besides, they had still to discover he was British.
For over an hour he rode into the hills. Several villages were passed that could have been turned into fortresses, and held against an enemy a thousand times stronger. But the village where the chief lived turned out to be the most impregnable and also in the most beautiful setting. The armoured cars and tanks of the government forces would have been useless there. Bombs might have destroyed it, but the planes would have had their wings sliced off by the sharp pinnacles that like giant porcupines lay all around.
Children, dogs, cockerels, donkeys, and even women watched the horsemen and their prisoner pass in the gloaming. One very old woman, shouted for eagerly by her small granddaughter, came tottering out of her house to look, and then to snarl and spit in exasperated disappointment at seeing so little to deserve her attention. Even more than Blackbeard and the fat smirker she frightened McLeod. They might cut off a hand, to punish an enemy; she was capable of tossing it to her dog to eat. Perhaps in the same battle where the chief had lost his hand her husband and sons had been killed.
Women were still working in the fields surrounding the chief’s house. They stood up and waved, so that McLeod could hear their bangles jingle. Some of the escort waved back. He did not know whether to be encouraged or further alarmed by that exchange of greetings. In any society where lovers waited for leisure and darkness to embrace, men could be treated hospitably, or men could be murdered: love and cruelty were each part of the pattern.
Inside the large compound of the chiefs house, where they dismounted, some scraggy hens ran about squawking, and a donkey, whose pizzle almost touched the ground, stood melancholically with its nose against a wall. It wasn’t a sight to inspire a man balanced on the edge of the grave. Perhaps no sight could. Certainly the hills didn’t, mauve in the twilight, or the tip of the moon gleaming above them.
They had to wait until Blackbeard and the fat son went in to prepare the chief. It had turned chilly, and McLeod couldn’t keep from shivering. He thought his guards might interpret it, not quite unjustly, as fear. None of them, though, stood near him, so that McLeod was reminded of the Englishman in Newbold’s poem condemned to die at dawn in sight of the Afghan snows. During the hours of darkness, sitting alone, he had remembered scenes of home, and so, sustained, had died in the morning like a gentleman. No cute twin mules and lovelorn donkeys had wandered into his memories.
At last Blackbeard came out. He gave orders for McLeod to be searched; this hadn’t been done before, apparently just to show how little they feared him. It seemed the chief was more cautious. But it wasn’t McLeod’s revolver they were looking for; this they handed back to him still loaded; his passport, with its gilt Britannic coat-of-arms, they took in ahead of him to their chief.
As he passed through an outer room where mutton was roasting on a charcoal fire, McLeod heard the weeping of women, and was so angered by it he nearly shouted to them wherever they were skulking to shut up for Christ’s sake. To grieve for an old bloodstained rogue was bad enough, but to do it while he was still on his deathbed planning more cruelty and bloodshed was intolerable. Likely, too, somewhere a pet mullah or two were oiling the gates of paradise.
The room in which the chief was lying was opulently furnished with red carpets and the skins of leopards; they covered walls as well as floor. The chief lay on and under quilts, red in colour with birds like pheasants embroidered on them in gold. His head and shoulders were propped up by red pillows. His left hand, clenched and veiny, was visible; it lay upon McLeod’s passport.
McLeod was taken aback. He had been expecting to see a crafty old cut-throat; instead he saw the patriarch of a tribe of harmless shepherds, with long white hair and beard, and a face refined by suffering and compassionate thought. Or so it seemed. Over his shoulders was a tunic with brass buttons; it was, McLeod realised, part of a British officer’s uniform.
Round the walls about a dozen men squatted on the carpet. They looked not half so formidable off their horses; but concern, too, was making them less fierce. On one side of the bed sat the fat man, nursing the naked sword on his knees. On the other side crouched Blackbeard, both fists clenched, brow twisted in thought. It struck McLeod then that his own trouble might not be the only one; indeed, to them, it was insignificant. Who was to succeed the old man? That was obviously the question tormenting Blackbeard and some of the others. The fat son seemed unconcerned; he took it for granted the succession would be his, beardless eunuch though he was. If the chief were to die soon, in the next hour or so, as seemed very likely, judging by his pallor and weakness, then McLeod was going to find himself embroiled in a small civil war. He didn’t think it would last long, but there might be a bullet or knife in it for him.
The old man lifted the hand off the passport to beckon to McLeod to come and sit near him. McLeod did so, with his hand pressed against his breast in greeting; but that was rather too conspicuous a place for it, and he quickly let it slip down to his side.
The chief smiled. ‘The Frenchmen,’ he whispered, ‘are gone.’
At first McLeod didn’t understand.
‘About three weeks ago their lorry went past.’
Now McLeod understood; he meant the archaeologists.
The frail hand stroked the passport. ‘British,’ murmured the low voice. From the passport his hand crept to the buttons of the tunic and to a badge, that of a British regiment.
‘I killed him,’ said the chief, ‘with this hand. He was young, and so was I. It was a long time ago.’
McLeod noticed one of the toughest-looking men involuntarily grinning in a kind of sympathy; squint-eyed, he picked his nose, and grinned thus.
Then they all stirred and muttered. The chief had pulled out his right hand from under the cover, and was holding it up; or rather he held up what should have been his right hand. Somehow the stump was not hideous. McLeod even felt for a foolish moment that if he was to have his own hand cut off, and the stump was to look like this, it might not be so horrible after all. But, of course, the chief’s, come gory and terrible from war, had grown domesticated over those thirty or forty years.
‘A life for a life,’ whispered the old chief.
His fat son regarded that as a sentence passed. His own hands grew itchy on the sword.
‘A hand for a hand,’ said the chief.
This time McLeod was sure it was not a threat to him, but rather a strange ironic comment by the dying old man on his long, revengeful life.
‘The British,’ muttered the chief, ‘were good fighters; but they could not conquer us.’ Suddenly he turned to Blackbeard and asked if McLeod had been given anything to eat and drink. When Blackbeard replied that there hadn’t been time, the old man was as indignant as his weakness let him. Someone was sent to have a meal prepared. McLeod saw no reason to say he had already eaten. In eating there was safety for hands, especially here where fingers were the only cutlery. Besides, once a man had eaten their food they would be reluctant to molest him.
The fat, would-be executioner was huffed. It seemed to McLeod, though, that most of the men seated round the walls were pleased.
The chief again signed to McLeod to bend near.
‘Why do you speak our language so well?’ he asked.
‘I lived in your country for four years.’
The chief smiled. ‘Good. You will do something for me.’
‘If I can, I shall be pleased to.’
‘Once, long ago, I insulted your king.’
By treacherously waylaying troops? Or murdering some envoy promised a safe passage?
‘I spat on his face,’ said the chief. ‘It was a picture, you understand. I found it in the pocket of this tunic. The man was dead. I killed him. I spat upon it. I should not have done that. It was not a thing for a chief to do. When you go back to England you will tell him that I, Abdul Raof Khan, apologise.’
‘That king is dead,’ said McLeod.
The old man was disappointed like a child. ‘To his son then, who has taken his place.’
‘His son is dead, too.’
‘To his grandson then.’
‘He had no grandson. It is his grand-daughter who now sits on the throne.’
‘A woman?’
‘Yes. The British have a queen, not a king.’
The chief seemed personally affronted; his confidence in the paradise so close now was weakened. He looked afraid.
‘Go and eat,’ he whispered. ‘When you have finished, come back and we shall talk again.’
McLeod bowed himself out. Blackbeard went with him, and two others chosen by nods. The chief’s son, like a great fat baby, played with the sword; he seemed unaware that his own death might be as close as his father’s.
In an outer room a rug was spread out, and on it was set a large plate heaped with orange-flavoured pilau, rice with pieces of tender mutton and chicken imbedded in it. There were also bowls of grapes and little pots of tea. A sniffling youth attended them.
Blackbeard sat beside McLeod, but though he was a courteous and attentive host his thoughts weren’t on the food at all, but rather on what might be happening in the chief’s bedroom. There the succession might at any moment have to be decided. McLeod noticed that their guns were placed where they could instantly seize them. For his own sake he hoped the old man would last the night.
He decided to ask Blackbeard about Kemp.
‘I believe,’ he said, ‘some months ago an Englishman and his wife were travelling in these parts.’
Blackbeard made no sign he had heard.
McLeod perservered. ‘According to the authorities in the capital,’ he said, ‘they were killed, murdered, by the people of a village not so very far from here.’
‘Far enough,’ said Blackbeard contemptuously.
‘You know the village then?’
‘As I know the dung in the fields. They are not our people.’
‘I know that.’
‘They are worthless creatures who scrape in the dirt like hens. If they are attacked, they do not fight like men; they hide or lie down to be flogged like sick curs. They own no horses. Even their headman rides on a donkey, with his feet in the dust. But in truth there is no headman. As in your own country, it is a woman who rules them. She is the headman’s mother: she is very old, with only one eye; but she is the only one with any guts.’
‘It is true then they killed this English couple? They don’t sound as if they would have the courage even to do that.’
‘In the snow,’ said Blackbeard impatiently, ‘they become desperate like wolves. A man and his wife asleep, they might attack in the dark; the whole village together, with the old woman urging them on.’
‘Yes, that’s how it might have happened. But did it actually happen? It is not so far from here. You would have heard the truth. Did they really kill this man and woman?’
Blackbeard was about to answer when a clamour suddenly broke out, and into the room rushed a man, with bubbles of blood at his mouth, gasping that the chief was dead and he himself had been killed by a supporter of the fat son. When he collapsed on his knees, in an attitude of prayer, the hilt of a knife was seen protruding from his back; the point was in his lungs.
Blackbeard was on his feet roaring to his men. Tramping pilau all over the carpet, and kicking cups about, they snatched up their guns with greasy hands and dashed out.
The man remained on his knees. Prayer in that country, though often performed in public with dozens of people close enough to tickle your upturned soles, was nevertheless a strictly private affair. Here now was the most grotesque example of that respected privacy.
McLeod had himself to keep alive. If he tried to flee, he would be sure to get lost and be savaged by some domestic hound or wild leopard; but if he remained there, and the fat son prevailed, he would be killed by inches. The blood that dripped from the kneeling man’s mouth and vanished into the bloodred carpet might have been his own, so sharply painful did his neck and wrists become at the thought of that long sword in the big melon-like fists.
He crouched in a nook beside the fire. From inside the house came yells, screams, wails, and shots; from outside the neighing of horses, more wailing, and the braying of a donkey, perhaps the one with its nose against the wall. He saw it with the face of the frustrated Major at Mazarat. He heard, too, in his imagination that class in the school at Kalak reciting with relish: ‘The fat son of the chief. He has no hand. The carpet is red. The dead man prays. The old man enters paradise.’
About half an hour later Blackbeard, accompanied by some of his men, came swaggering in. There was no sign of blood on them; it might have been washed off, for their beards glistened with wet. Blackbeard was solemn enough, but his followers were so jubilant they insisted on shaking hands with McLeod.
‘If you are ready,’ said Blackbeard, ‘you will be taken back to your car.’
‘I am ready.’
‘These two men will go with you.’
‘Thank you,’ said McLeod. ‘May I have my passport back? I’ll need it.’
