Arresting a blood bath, in a toneless voice, Shamil urged Klugenau to retreat. Akbirdil and Yunus, daggers drawn, prepared to leap at his throat and restore their honor. He couldn’t hold his horsemen in check much longer.
Beside himself with anger, Klugenau did not move. He yelled a torrent of abuse at Akbirdil, every foul word in his vast vocabulary, enriched by fifty years of military life. The young aide-de-camp did his best to shut the general up and pull him back. Finally, still spewing wrath, Klugenau allowed himself to be led to his horse.
Shamil stood still as he watched Klugenau sling the crutch over his saddle and put his good foot in the stirrup to mount. The general tugged on the bridle to turn the horse around. His Cossacks followed.
Standing in the middle of the corridor to protect their retreat, Shamil watched the figure as he gestured in the direction of the fort at Temir-Khan-Chura. He did not move until Klugenau and the last of his men had left the ridge.
Jamal Eddin decided it was time to clear out. He disappeared into the group of horsemen, running back to jump on his pony. He hoped Shamil would forget that he had been there.
Nothing in his father’s behavior could have warned him of the violence of his anger, nor the scope of it. With the Russian gone, Shamil set off on the path to Akulgo, as planned, without a word for his son or a glance at his men.
No one could miss his displeasure, though, and all of them feared the severity of the punishment awaiting them. Akbirdil would pay dearly for his insubordination, as would Yunus and the other naïbs who had ignored his order to put away their kinjals. As for the presence of Jamal Eddin underfoot, the boy had no illusions about what he was in for. The trip seemed as short as it was clouded with threat. The switch or the whip? How many blows?
To everyone’s surprise, there was no tongue-lashing for Akbirdil or Yunus or the rest of the naïbs when they had reached the plateau of Akulgo. Even Jamal Eddin was not whipped. Shamil made no reference to his meeting with Klugenau. What had the general wanted? He was silent about the substance of their exchange.
Fatima the Beloved was probably the only one who grasped the extent of his anger that night. The insult he had just suffered was immeasurable. The Russians had summoned him for that? They had dared propose an arrangement that even the lowest and most cowardly of men could not have accepted? In return for promises and gifts? It was like throwing scraps to the pigs to lure them into the slaughterhouse. What they were demanding was capitulation, pure and simple.
The Russians took them for fools, Shamil and all the rest of the Caucasian Muslims. Evidently they had no idea who they were dealing with.
In the morning, Shamil had the prisoners, the hostages, the amanats, and those whose fathers, uncles, families, and villages had surrendered to the Russians or were prepared to do so gather on the village square. All the men in these mountains who, at one time or another, had dared speak to him of peace. All the men who had, even once, pronounced the word “surrender.” He had their eyes gouged out and their tongues torn out. And then he set them free, ordering them to go home and spread the message. The following day, a horseman left with his response for Klugenau:
“Even if I am to be cut up in little pieces for this refusal, I will not come to Tiflis to meet your padishah, for I have experienced your treachery far too many times.”
The insult was like a slap in the face to the czar, and his reaction was immediate. He replaced Fazi the Louse with a general said to be even more brutal, multiplied by ten the contingents of his army, and ordered total war. He wanted Shamil, dead or alive. The conquest of Chechnya and Dagestan became his first priority. The fight was now personal.
In the same spirit, Shamil set himself to the task of fortifying Akulgo.
Jamal Eddin finally had his answers.
First of all, he judged that he had behaved rather bravely. He hadn’t even been afraid during the incident with the crutch. Well, almost not. After that, he concluded that the Russians were vulgar beings, noisy and so impure that one could not even touch their hands. They lacked manners. What’s more, they smelled bad. Patimat was right. Hamzat’s captivity in the company of the Russians had sullied and dishonored him. The question was settled. That left one last problem: why had Shamil protected them when he had had them at his mercy?
Why had Shamil spared them?
Neither Yunus nor the sheik, not even Bahou-Messadou nor anyone he asked would—or could—explain this enigma to his satisfaction. The solution was a function of a principle so fundamental that even alluding to it was not considered proper.
So Jamal Eddin decided to consult the source.
He approached the imam just as he was coming from the mosque on Friday. Carrying the Koran, dressed in his green ceremonial robe, he was crossing the courtyard in the direction of his apartments. The child accosted him and, without formalities, went straight to the heart of the matter.
“Why did you protect Klugenau from Yunus’s and Akbirdil’s kinjals?”
Shamil stopped. But instead of answering, he asked him a question.
“Why do you think I did?”
Searching his thoughts, Jamal Eddin contemplated the question for a moment. He looked up at his father when he decided he had found the answer.
“For…”
He hesitated for a long moment, searching his father’s face with large, dark eyes. He began again, carefully.
“For…”
Shamil’s gaze was impenetrable.
With great precaution and respect and infinite pride, Jamal Eddin pronounced that glorious word, the word that was as sacred as the name of the Lord.
“For honor.”
“I understand,” Bahou-Messadou sighed, “but it will be difficult, very difficult.”
Jamal Eddin lay on one of the cushions in the little room reserved for him. Bahou had tied his arm to his belly and his body to the mattress. He could not move. And not being able to move drove him crazy. It had been four months already!
Last spring, when he was playing at acrobatics on the waterwheel, he had slipped between the planks. The wheel had continued to turn, crushing him in the stream and smashing him against the rocks. The result was three months at death’s door and a return to the realm of the women.
Of his multiple injuries, only one, an open fracture from shoulder to elbow, refused to heal. But he was doing well, and Shamil had just allowed him to leave the harem, where he had been smothered by the tyranny of Patimat all summer long.
So Bahou had brought him to the only room that opened out onto the upstairs gallery, between the den of the women and the imam’s apartments. The location of the room allowed Shamil to stop by to see his son whenever he had a spare moment. Mohammed Ghazi and their friends, their teacher, Jamaluddin, the atalik Yunus, and visitors of both sexes could come here too. Fatima could continue to bring healers to his bedside to sprinkle him with nail clippings, burn herbs on his chest, and swab him with ointments to chase away the evil spirits. And the surgeon Abdul Aziz, his grandfather from Untsukul, could throw the ants he carried in a pot on his wound.
“Remarkable ants, for their size and their ferocity,” he said. “When they have bitten into the flesh, I cut them in two so the pincers of their mandibles will continue to hold it together and suture the wound.”
Some of the visitors and some of the treatments tried Jamal Eddin’s patience, but he absolutely adored this great family fuss over him. Brothers in blood, word, and the service of God, he loved their presence, their noise, and their warmth. He loved this solid house where his relatives, his friends, and his friends’ friends gathered around him. He loved this suite of interior courtyards whose walls and towers sheltered the thirty naïbs, their wives, and their horses, this stone citadel with crenellated roofs that no one could enter except from the mountain. It was an impregnable fortress, like the peak village of Akulgo. Even on the bad days, when the spirits invaded his mind, he was not afraid that the demons would carry him off. No force of evil could tear him away from here, Bahou-Messadou had told him so. His adoration for her did the rest. She watched over him, and she was capable of anything.