But beneath the heavy lambskin hat, the former lieutenant’s face is pale, his features more drawn than ever.
His regimental companions, his boyhood friends, the comrades he grew up with at the Russian court, gather round him one last time.
One of them unbuckles his baldric and hands him his own saber.
“Take it, as a remembrance.”
Choked with emotion, the lieutenant’s friend tries to joke, “But please, don’t kill any of ours with it!”
“Not ours,” the young man replies, his expression serious. Devastated by this farewell that he knows is definitive, he repeats, “Not ours, nor theirs.”
He leaps into the saddle on the white horse that was brought for him, the purebred that had been pawing the ground at the riverbank, the mount that will take him to the shadows where Shamil awaits him.
Far from this spot, the imam trembles too, with love and fear and impatience. His beloved son was torn from him by his enemies so long ago. How had the Russians brought up his son, the proud little eight-year-old boy he had been forced to surrender as a hostage? Has the eldest son of the imam Shamil become a giaour? A dog of an infidel? A renegade? A traitor?
Before going to prostrate himself at his father’s feet, in keeping with Muslim custom, the young man looks at the wagons carrying the captive princesses. Standing there in silence, the women seem to have been transformed into statues. All are dressed in rags and veils.
Through the long foulards that cover them, they look intensely at their liberator. They know him. They danced the mazurka with him at the court balls of the Winter Palace. Beneath the layers of fabric, their faces are streaked with tears of relief, gratitude, admiration, and pity.
They know how he was torn from his people and brought to Saint Petersburg by force. They know he has built a life for himself in Russia, that he is now a well-read officer, fond of the music of Glinka and French poetry. They know the czar considers him a favored son, a member of the imperial family, a lieutenant in the Russian army, to which he belongs completely.
They know that his renunciation of this world whose values are now his own is the only thing that has saved their lives.
They know as well that Czar Nicholas left him to choose freely. The young man could have refused this exchange. And that at this very hour, the imam’s son is sacrificing his very existence for them.
One of the three princesses knows other things as well. She knows that once, long ago, he loved her.
Watching him approach, she remembers the whispered secrets they once shared, when they were together.
The image of this horseman in black, running toward a destiny he rejects, reminds the princess of another, of the little boy fate had thrown into a universe he never should have known. It was sixteen years ago. A Chechen child rode down a mountain path, through the boulders, between his father’s eyrie and the Russian army camp. Behind him, the cadavers of his tortured people rotted, unburied, among the ash-colored rocks. He did not cry. He had kept his dagger and his saber. He would kill them all. Full of pride, hatred, and fear, the little boy had reached the camp of his executioners.
And now, today, he must return upon the same path. He must go back to his childhood, his reluctant steps forward taking him back. All he has lived for the past sixteen years, all he has learned at the hands of the invaders, he must forget.
He must unlearn everything, again.
He rides before the captives, and for a fleeting moment, their two worlds are one. The women are indistinguishable from one another. And nothing distinguishes him, a Chechen horseman, from their captors. Except that he is searching among the veiled women for his first love. His eyes finally come to rest upon the one he instinctively knows, beneath the shawls, is her.
He passes next to her and reins in his horse.
No words can express what the long look they exchange does: the adieu of Varenka, hostage of the imam Shamil and daughter of a Georgian prince, and Jamal Eddin, hostage of the czar and son of the imam.
Book One
The Years of Apprenticeship Among the Horsemen of the Caucasus
1834–1839
La ilaha illa Allah
There is no god but Allah
CHAPTER I
Without Limits
For those unfamiliar with the mountain, the path was impassable. The dogs, the sheep, even the goats hesitated to venture out on it. But old Bahou-Messadou traveled it back and forth between the village and the spring several times a day. She had gotten into the habit of going to fetch water before dawn, before the call of the muezzin, before the other women were up, when no one was around to witness the difficulty she suffered moving around in the early morning.
With a jug on her head and her veil held between her teeth, she walked into the darkness, feeling her way along with uncertain steps and a shaky distress that had filled her entire being ever since her son had left again, a visible sign of her emotional state. She knew from habit that her ankles might loosen up halfway down the path, but that her hips and knees would feel stiff all the way to the well. Only when she leaned over the coping to get hold of the rope, stretching her sore muscles to catch the bucket and, finally, hung over the coping with all her weight to bring the water up, would her joints loosen up. Concentrating on her chore would take her mind off her thoughts—the snatches of sentences, the accusations overheard or dreamed, the memories, the plans, even the prayers.
On the way back, head held high, the weight of the huge copper ewer compressing her spine, her limbs relaxed, she would walk with her back straight. No one would ever guess that Shamil’s mother carried a heavy heart full of apprehension.
Bahou-Messadou couldn’t put a finger on this unnamable burden. It had started a few days before, with the news that the second imam had been murdered, his assassins punished by a vengeful Shamil. She should have felt proud, even light-headed with joy. Her only son, born sickly and puny, had emerged as the spiritual guide and military chief of all the Caucasian Muslims, and all this thanks to his own valor, the fervor of his faith, his superior mind, nobility, and beauty. Today Allah had conferred upon him the supreme honor, the most sacred of powers. At this very moment at the mosque of Ashilta, Bahou-Messadou’s village, home of her ancestors, Shamil was being consecrated imam. The third imam of Dagestan and Chechnya.
The first had been killed here during a Russian attack two years ago. The second, yesterday, by renegade Muslims. This morning, Shamil would take their place as the shadow of God on earth. Why wasn’t she beaming with pride and joy? Any semblance of either was so mitigated that she felt guilty. Allah permitted—indeed Allah ordained—her to rejoice on this day. What was wrong with her, that her feelings were so unusually reserved?
Perhaps it was because of what she heard and sensed here in Shamil’s absence, in the elders’ attitude toward him, in things she had heard around the well. She would deal with the women’s gossip later.