Leila Aboulela - The Kindness of Enemies

He looked more sombre now. ‘Your Highness, what happened to the little princess was not at all our intention. Indeed, your lives are precious to us.’

The words ‘little princess’ made her breasts leak. She would not risk speaking now.

‘It was Russian bullets that were fired at you, not ours.’ His voice turned cool with this defence.

She hardened against him. ‘They did not know that we were your captives.’

‘Perhaps so. If it will comfort you, I will immediately order a party to search for your missing child.’

Hope would keep the wound open for longer. Her voice rose. ‘I have done nothing to deserve this. What wrong have I and my children ever done to you?’

Ghazi folded his hands on his belt. ‘Believe me, I am saddened at how much you have suffered. My father is going to be very angry. I blame all this on the brutality of the Lezgins. They are uncouth soldiers of the line. But we were unable to spare my father’s elite force.’

Momentarily he looked young and unguarded. It gave her a surge of strength. ‘You will pay for what you have done to us. Do you think His Majesty the tsar will sit back and do nothing? Do you think my husband, Prince David, will not try to rescue us?’

Ghazi shifted and stood up straighter. ‘You are distraught, Your Highness and understandably in pain. I promise I will do everything I can for your wellbeing. My suggestion is that you rest and once you’re suitably dressed, I will take you to meet my father, the Imam of Chechnya and Dagestan. He has summoned you.’

‘What does he want?’

Ghazi smiled. ‘To speak to you, of course.’

‘I will not go to him.’

The young man raised his eyebrows. ‘He is Imam Shamil.’

With all her strength, she held herself straight. ‘And I am a princess of Georgia. I will not be summoned by him.’

Ghazi bowed and withdrew. She had won a very small victory.

They were given millet bread and dried apricots. It was good to see Alexander eating. He had been dreaming of cake with sugar on top. Anna still dreamt of Lydia, that she had been found, that she was safe, after all, lying on the armchair among the lilac flowers. In the morning she watched Alexander wander off and join the men. Madame Drancy, sensing her disquiet said, ‘They’re only showing him their horses.’

‘Still. I don’t trust them.’ When Alexander was a baby he had looked exactly like Lydia, the same colour hair, the same long lashes.

Madame Drancy was still speaking. ‘We’re going to be given face veils when we meet with Imam Shamil.’ The new clothes they had been given were nothing but ill-assorted rags. Loose Turkish trousers and a sack full of left-foot shoes. Madame Drancy, who had been stripped to her corset, was grateful to have them. Anna, though, refused to change.

She looked around her as if for the first time. The condition of the other prisoners was worse. They had been made to march on foot and many were ill with dysentery and typhoid. No patience or special treatment was given to them. Insolence was dealt with by a scimitar thrust or a shove off a mountain ledge. Women were snatched as handmaidens and children set to work as slaves. The friendliness Shamil’s men showed to Alexander, the relative respect she and Madame Drancy received was denied to the others. Innocent Georgian villagers and serfs who had nothing to do with the war between Russia and the Caucasus. Their crime in the eyes of the Muslims was that they had succumbed to Russia and were now her ally. Georgia had not resisted as it should. Anna bit her lips. Weren’t these the same words she had said to David? The thoughts that could not be voiced in public, the resentment that must stay hidden. We are Georgians, not Russians. But for the sake of peace her grandfather had ceded the throne and here she was, caught up in the war against Russia.

The Georgian prisoners raised their voices up to lament their fate. They started to sing of home and pain, of orphaned children and of how low their princess had fallen. It brought tears to Anna’s eyes. The flower of Kakheit has fallen into the Lezgins’ hands. Pray for our princess … She wished she could have protected them, she wished she could have spared them all this. Her helplessness frustrated her. But not all of the Georgian prisoners regarded her with goodwill. An elderly peasant woman was livid that the princess had been given a horse-cloth to lie on. She railed out loud against the injustice, decrying the privileges of royalty. When she attempted to seize the horse-cloth by force, Anna let her have it.

She had heard of the tower of Pohali, after which the fort was named, but it was the first time she had seen it. The top storey had been demolished by Shamil’s artillery. Behind it the mountains rose, arrogant. If she narrowed her eyes against the sun and looked up, she could see clumps of snow on the peaks. Ahead of them was a journey of more than three weeks. If David was ever going to rescue them, he would have come by now. The further they travelled up the mountains, the more difficult it would be for him to reach them. And when they arrived in Shamil’s stronghold at Dargo-Veddin, it would be too late.

Fresh horses, new captors and it was time to climb again, up steep zigzagged paths, through bushes that tore at her clothes, around ugly rocky aouls where strangers lined up to stare. In some of these villages, they would find kindness and hospitality. They would be welcomed into the most peculiar of designs: a hill inside a courtyard, which had to be climbed in order to reach the upper floor. Rooms without windows and only a door to a large balcony. The grudging shelter of stables, spending a night next to asses and oxen. And that was preferable to the hostile aouls, where the villagers crowded to throw stones at them. Her back ached, her toe was still sore. Now lice in her hair. She scratched until there was blood under her nails. They must dismount because the horses could not manage these dangerous paths. Wading in deep mud one day, crawling on hands and knees over a ravine. Surprising avalanches of snow, gifts from the summits, that were not expected to melt until the middle of July. She began to hate these rocky barren mountains; they were endless and cruel. She screamed, she could not help it, as she was led to mount a horse that had a severed hand dangling from the saddle. The hand was Georgian, she knew, because of the wedding band. ‘Assassins,’ she yelled at them and they laughed. Men with faces blackened by gunpowder. ‘To prevent sunburn,’ Madame Drancy explained to her in a moment of clarity.

Anna noticed a small swelling in her breast. Despite expressing every day, the milk had clotted and now her skin burned. Feverish, she started to ask again, ‘Have you seen my baby?’ But she asked in a feeble voice as if she was not expecting a reply, as if the words were a lament rather than a question. At long last there came news from the search party Ghazi had sent out. Servants from the estate had picked up Lydia’s body. She was buried in the neighbouring church of St George, one of the few buildings that had escaped the burning and looting.

The truth was a blow even though a part of her had expected it; a part of her had longed to be free from the daily tussle with hope. She wept continuously without any sound. Tears flowed freely until she could scarcely see ahead of her. Stumbling in a mix of sweat from the fever and pain from the news. Dragged tottering across a tree bridge, she lost her footing and had to be carried the rest of the day. Alexander needed her; she must be stronger than this. There he was, eating handfuls of snow, chewing on rhododendron leaves. His hair was riddled with vermin but he did not seem to care.

‘I wonder if my mother knows that we’ve been kidnapped,’ Madame Drancy was saying as she put a wet rag on Anna’s forehead to bring down the fever. ‘I have never let a week pass without writing to her.’ Anna hung on to every word. Conversation and prayers were the route to normality. ‘The news must have reached France by now. We’ve been climbing this mountain for nearly a month.’