Unconscious of or indifferent to danger, Jamal Eddin leaned back slightly against his father’s chest. Shamil put his arms around him and held him as he had once held him long ago, when he had whisked him away from the battlefield, seating him on his horse’s withers. Jamal Eddin snuggled up to his father’s breast, feeling his warmth and his strength. Eyes half-closed, he looked at the river, the rows of white tents, and the chain of mountains rising unevenly beyond the Russian camp. The blue mountains of the Caucasus, their mountains. He closed his eyes, still seeing the image of the mountains, distinct and luminous, in his mind’s eye. He felt his father praying, reaching toward God, and he let himself go, sinking back against him.
“O Lord,” Shamil murmured, “this child is the soul most precious to me on this earth. If you take me with a bullet in the forehead, do the same for my child.”
Jamal Eddin was still. He knew that, at this instant, his father was testing the will of the Almighty.
Did Allah want them both to die?
“Allah be with you.”
“The Lord be with you.”
“General Grabbe replied to our overtures,” Yunus said as he bent over to slip into the grotto where the council was meeting.
He carried a piece of paper in his hand.
“What kind of a Russian is he,” Shamil growled with disdain, “this Pavel Khristoforovitch Grabbe?”
“What can one say about a chief who doesn’t take part in combat? A coward.”
“And what else?”
“An enemy without honor. He lies like all the others.”
Shamil slowly breathed in the hot, muggy air, as though to absorb all this. His lieutenants had forced him to compromise, to feign a desire for peace in order to gain time and put off the final attack. They would simulate an overture for discussions, act as though they were debating the possibilities, and drag out the negotiations.
Until the Chechens got there.
“Four propositions.”
“I’m listening.”
“All of them unacceptable,” Yunus added calmly.
“Read aloud, so everyone can hear.”
“First, the imam will offer his son as a hostage, an amanat.”
Jamal Eddin could not help but start. Shamil was impassive.
“Go on.”
“Second, the imam and all the inhabitants of Akulgo will give up their arms to the officers before leaving the village and coming to surrender. They and their families will be safe, under house arrest in a location that General Grabbe reserves the right to choose. The rest—”
Shamil motioned for him to stop there.
“The rest we know. The massacre of the elders they disarmed at Ghimri, the disappearance of my nephew, taken as an amanat at Tiliq.”
“The rest,” Yunus continued to read, “is up to the magnanimity of the czar.”
“Send them an emissary with other propositions,” Barti Khan suggested.
This time, Yunus was not received. General Grabbe was waiting for new cannons. He too knew how to be crafty, to drag things out, to “negotiate oriental style,” he said.
He needed no reports from his spies, imagining with little effort the horror of the situation on the piton. The smell was enough. Even down here in the camp, the stench was such that the poor sentinels passed out on the riverbank, handkerchiefs to their noses. They had to be relayed every half hour. His soldiers, either conscripted peasants or serfs of the empire, had seen as much in Russia, yet nothing compared to the vile odor of Akulgo.
The general stalled, on the pretext that he would not open talks until the imam sent his son.
“Never will I give Jamal Eddin to the Russians.”
“You’re going to let all your people be massacred, just to spare your son?” Akbirdil said, astonished.
Hadn’t he sacrificed his own firstborn, Hamzat, without a word of hesitation? And the others, the eight naïbs present, hadn’t they sacrificed their own children?
“Your thinking is off, Imam, your judgment colored, and how can it be otherwise?” Barti Khan suggested. “You are both judge and defendant in this affair.”
The moment the rumor of peace spread, Fatima sensed danger. The infidels always demanded hostages in their talks with the Montagnards. People said they let their amanats starve to death in their forts, that they poisoned them.
She could not share the imam’s bed, for she was pregnant. She couldn’t even touch him, approach him, speak to him, or listen to him. But she did not let him out of her sight. When Shamil left the council den, when he went off by himself to pray or prepare for battle, he found her there, in her veils, kneeling in his pathway. Her eyes looked up into his in a silent appeal. With all her heart, the beloved begged for grace for their son.
Shamil fled from her presence.
Sitting on a rock at the entrance to the family grotto, Jamal Eddin felt vaguely bothered by the looks people gave him. In no way did he seize their significance. Picking lice off him, Patimat peered at him as though she were seeing him for the last time. She said nothing. She did not scold him. She just kept fussing over him, taking advantage of the calm to hunt the lice and shave his head meticulously. Her dedication to her task was scarcely typical.
But Patimat’s silly moods didn’t matter. If only she would get on with it and let him go!
It was his little brother, Mohammed Ghazi, who explained the meaning of this mixture of pity, accusation, impatience, and nostalgia that he read on the faces of the women. Toddling over to the stone where their aunt was sharpening his kinjal, he brought Jamal Eddin a stunning piece of news. The naïbs had decided to send him to the Russian camp. The suffering of Akulgo would soon end, thanks to him!
Jamal Eddin shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t believe a word of it. None of his father’s naïbs had ever let himself be taken alive. From his very birth, he had been conscious of their example. “Better death than the dishonor of captivity with the giaours.” All his father’s teachings rested on this principle: “Better to die than make peace with the infidels.” Hadn’t Bahou-Messadou paid with a hundred lashes for the sin of having spoken of surrender? The wrath of Allah would descend on the hypocrites guilty of dealing with the Russians.
But when Jamal Eddin looked into Shamil’s eyes, the look that met his was blank. He received no confirmation, no support, no certainty. His father’s eyes, so sure, so hard, met his only fleetingly.
The anguish the child glimpsed in them filled him with terror.
There was a new ultimatum from General Grabbe. If the imam’s son had not come down to the camp by sundown, he would raze Akulgo to the ground. Tomorrow he would take no quarter. It was up to the murids to decide the fate of their families. He gave them twenty-four hours.
Jamal Eddin was no longer allowed to listen to the council’s discussions. He waited outside. This isolation, which excluded him as though he had already suffered the contamination of the infidels, added to his anguished apprehension. He could stand being afraid, without question or complaint. He took pride in remaining silent. If he could prove his own valor, he thought, if he could show himself to be useful, docile, and brave, braver than the bravest, Shamil would find him indispensable and would save him.
Grateful and hopeful, he listened to his father fervently pleading his cause down in the grotto.
“These dogs won’t offer you peace, even if they hold my son. I am telling you now, sending my son as a hostage will in no way prove advantageous to us.”