The Russians continued to bellow their strident orders, but the child no longer paid any attention to them. They seemed unreal, like puppets. He could not understand what they said, nor what was going on. He recognized the gray beard of Urus-Datu, the emaciated figure of the muezzin, the score of men who had not followed his father. What were they doing? Had they come to give themselves up? Or were they here to defend the village, as Shamil had ordered?
He looked toward the village gates, where the women and children stood silently. His playmates, his enemies, their sisters, the mass of veiled girls and babies, the entire population observed the scene from afar, as he did. He could not pick out his mother and his little brother in the crowd. Crestfallen, he searched for Bahou-Messadou, whose presence always reassured him. She was nowhere to be found.
The wave of anxiety that washed over him made him catch his breath. For the first time since the khan had killed the Poles and he had run for cover, he wished Shamil were here. His inner voice begged him to come. He knew instinctively that he hadn’t the right—a Montagnard should cope by himself. Better than any other child, Jamal Eddin knew how Shamil’s son, the son of a Dagestan horseman, should behave.
The Montagnards had stopped a few feet away from the soldiers. The boy watched the Russians maneuver about to encircle them. He glanced at one group, then the other, then back at the village, hoping to see his mother and grandmother appear between the two watchtowers.
Powerless, his throat dry, clutched by a sense of foreboding he could neither define nor control, he watched the khan Ullou Bek translate the harangue of the lieutenant in the flat cap. When he had finished, old Urus-Datu answered the officer, proudly and directly.
“A man without arms is not a man. We have come to make peace, but we shall remain armed.”
No interpreter was necessary to understand the pantomime that followed. The lieutenant ordered all the Montagnards to throw down their kinjals, sabers, and pistols, here, at his feet.
“Come on,” he pleaded, “be reasonable. Give us your arms and no one will be harmed.”
The Montagnards hesitated. The muezzin was the first to come forward, silently offering his kinjal to the officer closest to him. Two, three, four others did the same, containing their rage and hatred.
One of the officers leaned over to whisper cockily in his comrade’s ear, “When we’re done disarming them, all we’ll have to do is take off their women’s pants.”
“When we’ve relieved them of their trousers, everything will be just fine,” his friend chuckled softly.
Did Urus-Datu, the head of the council, understand the gist of the insult from the expressions on their faces? He had been one of the most fervent partisans of submission. But when it was his turn, he refused to give up his pistols.
“To allow oneself to be disarmed is to allow oneself to be dishonored,” he said firmly.
The exasperated lieutenant launched into a new speech, explaining that it would be fruitless for them, for anyone, to resist the power of Russia.
“We know that Russia is strong,” the patriarch countered. “We know it is impossible to oppose Russia, we know that Russia will exterminate us with no trouble in the event of a revolt. We even know that one day or the next you will kill Shamil. We know all of that. But we cannot give you our arms.”
He hammered out the last phrase, word by word, as though this would make its import sink in, “We cannot do it!”
Jamal Eddin saw the Russians take aim at the old man. He turned halfway around to look at their rifles.
“Or else, yes, we can,” he concluded, raising his gun to aim at the forehead of the soldier who had made the tasteless joke, “like this!”
He shot the man at point-blank range, then casually threw his smoking weapon at the lieutenant’s feet.
What happened next made Jamal Eddin crouch lower in his hiding place.
A hail of bullets ricocheted off the rocks, all the way to his hole.
When the fusillade was over, he crept forward to take a look. The elders were lying about on the rocks where they had fallen. Ullou Bek lay among them, bathed in his own blood. Not a single Montagnard remained standing.
The women cried out. A second deafening salvo eclipsed their cries as they fell to the ground between the two watchtowers. Those who fled toward the mountain were shot in the back. The others were chased through the village. Their hatred, fear, and horror of the giaours intact, they defended themselves, pitifully, with handfuls of pebbles. They would not let themselves be taken.
When they could find no more rocks, they grabbed the blades of the bayonets aimed at them, pulling them off to slit the throats of their children. Then, using the bodies of their dead children as the ultimate weapon, they hit their assailants with them before stabbing themselves too.
Jamal Eddin heard the wails of the villagers in agony, the cries of the babies and the old people in the alleyways, broken by the explosions of rifle shots as soldiers shot blindly at anything that still moved.
“Who’s shooting?”
At the bottom of the pit, they heard the gunfire.
“Who’s shooting?”
The crackling of the fusillade spread hope and panic among the prisoners.
The Russian prisoners shouted, their faces turned up toward the hatch, trying to get the attention of their compatriots, whose voices they heard above.
Fatima, Bahou, and Patimat, hands pressed against their hearts to keep them from pounding, did not cry out. But they too peered up at the rays of light that filtered through the planks of the trap. Who was shooting? Shamil?
On the mountain ridge path, General Lanskoy’s soldiers, arriving at a forced march from the fort of Temir-Khan-Chura, were listening too. They, too, stopped and wondered who was shooting at Ghimri. Had the detachment of scouts General Klugenau sent to meet them been attacked? Every day spies had confirmed and reconfirmed that Shamil was not at home. Had he returned?
The men picked up the pace, hoping to arrive in time to relieve their comrades. They advanced on foot but had great difficulty restraining their horses and their cannons on the steep inclines.
Ahead, they saw that the aul was in flames.
The troop finished its vertiginous descent on the double.
Looking over the piles of corpses, General Lanskoy was quite relieved to learn that the carnage had cost the life of only one officer.
A veteran of Russia’s army in Poland, he had little experience with this kind of war. But he had read the reports of his predecessors and concluded, just as they had, that the Montagnards of Dagestan and Chechnya were incapable of listening to reason. The only way to civilize them was through terror. The law of strength was the only one that they were capable of understanding or respecting. The Russians had to act on this premise and then, applying the precepts of old General Yermolov, conqueror of Napoleon and first viceroy of the Caucasus: “Destroy the harvest. Kill the livestock. Burn the homes. Kill the women and children. Take hostages.” For the past twenty years, this tactic had proven effective.
Lieutenant Rostkov had no difficulty justifying the gun battle and the ensuing fire. The elders had more than deserved their fate. In place of the treasure of Avaria, they had proffered a few baubles. As for their imam, whom they had feigned to have in captivity, ready to deliver into Russian hands, they had lied. Shamil was nowhere to be found. These Montagnards were incorrigible, forever inventing ruses to rob and cheat the conqueror.