“You have no further wishes?”
“When the exchange has taken place, return to me here with my son.”
Jamal Eddin watched the interpreter make his way back to the riverbank.
The four wagons shuddered to a start, accompanied by the thirty-five horsemen, led by the rider in white.
Jamal Eddin’s gaze was riveted to the convoy as it approached the riverbed. The wagons paused, sucked into the mud. For a moment it seemed that they might get stuck there and overturn, but they rattled on unsteadily to the other bank.
They continued a short distance across the plain and came at last to the dead tree. The first of the wagons stopped.
One of the murids—Khadji, the steward—waved a banner, the signal for the exchange.
The interpreter left the group and galloped toward Jamal Eddin.
As agreed, Lieutenant Shamil was accompanied by thirty-five lancers—including Sacha Milyutin and Buxhöwden—the four wagons containing gifts from the czar and his own books, the forty thousand rubles, and the Chechen prisoners the Russians had promised to release.
The convoy descended the hill with some difficulty. Jamal Eddin rode at the head, like Mohammed Ghazi.
The sun shone brightly, as though it were summertime. Shamil had calculated that, weather permitting, the giaours might be blinded by it. There were stagnant puddles on their side of the riverbank, attracting horseflies that would annoy and excite their mounts.
The Russian horses shook their heads, and their tails swatted their hindquarters furiously. The officers perspired beneath their caps.
Jamal Eddin felt nothing. Not the heat. Not his own sadness, not even fear.
Though he felt nothing, his mind was active, concentrating on the adversary’s every move, and the tension of a body ready to fight. He sensed a profound, almost physical wariness of the natural setting and the men he was about to meet.
He advanced without cover onto the plain with Chavchavadze.
They were flanked by two Russian army captains: Baron Nicholas, David’s second brother-in-law and representative of the empire, and Prince Bagration, Prince Orbeliani’s aide-de-camp and representative of the royal family of Georgia to which Anna and Varenka belonged. Prince Grigol Orbeliani, who had negotiated Varenka’s liberation, was not there. He was holding down the fort at Temir-Khan-Chura with the rear guard of the army, in case Shamil had lured the czar’s forces into a vast trap.
The four officers rode at the same gait and seemed bound together by the same thought: did the four wagons really contain the captives?
There was no sign of movement from the wagons, other than that of the fat blue flies that alighted on the canvas exterior then flew away to land again on another spot.
When the four men had reached the dead tree, Mohammed Ghazi’s horsemen closed ranks. The four wagons were hidden from the Russians by their bodies, their horses, their high black papakhas, and their banners.
David and Jamal Eddin exchanged a dubious look, both reining in their mounts to slow down slightly. What did this mean?
They saw that one of the Chechens held a toddler in front of him on the saddle. The murid kept him centered before him, like a shield. David recognized Alexander, his son who was not yet two.
What was this new blackmail?
The murid broke away from the group. What was he going to do with the child?
Hearts pounding, Jamal Eddin and David came to a halt and waited for the Chechen to approach.
Amazingly and unexpectedly, the horseman spontaneously handed the little boy over to his father and retreated.
David clasped his son in his arms and hugged him to his chest.
At the same moment, three little girls jumped out of the wagons. They ran between the horses’ limbs toward their father. The prince leaped from his horse to embrace his children.
Jamal Eddin could not bear to watch this touching scene of a family reunited.
He continued riding toward the wagons, heading off to the side to avoid the rider in white.
The ranks of the murids parted to let him pass. He reached the first wagon.
He waved a hand across the canvas, chasing away the flies, and pushed back the cover. His stomach churned with anxiety. What would he find? For the first time, he gave words to his fear: were the princesses still alive?
He pulled back one of the canvas flaps.
In the dim light, he could barely make out the figures of two women, veiled and dressed in rags, sitting on opposite benches. They seemed petrified. Had they been saved? Were they free? They did not dare believe it and continued to pray in muffled, breathless voices.
The princesses were unrecognizable under the layers of shawls that covered them from head to foot. He bowed politely and apologized for having been so long in coming.
He handed them a letter that their mother, Princess Anastasia, had written them when he had visited her shortly before leaving Russia. One of the phantoms took it from his hand without a word. Anna? Varenka? The form remained silent.
She would have liked to thank him, but the stress of captivity, the anxiety, the terror leading up to this day, and the apprehension that had filled these last hours had robbed her of her faculties.
She managed only to say, “My sister is in the second wagon.”
He nodded, left her, and approached the second wagon.
A figure was standing among the other seated ghosts. The princess Orbeliani. He knew her with absolute certainty, even smothered in these rags. Varenka, the love of his youth, his first love.
Though he could not read her expression, she saw his face clearly through the weave of her veil. She had recognized him instantly, and no wonder. Jamal Eddin, her dancing partner of so long ago, had been the primary subject of conversation for the many months of her captivity at Dargo-Veden.
Jamal Eddin, the eldest son, the kidnapped son, the cherished son of the imam.
Shamil’s three wives, his daughters, and their governesses—in fact, all the women in the seraglio—had listened avidly for rumors, stories, and spies’ reports that circulated in the village. They had followed Jamal Eddin’s path to his father’s fortress, from Poland to Saint Petersburg, Moscow to Vladikavkaz, Khassav-Yurt to the Mitchik.
For every one of them, his return was a personal victory, the triumph of their beloved master over the infidels, the triumph of God’s chosen over the treacherous giaours, a victory over the will, the wealth, and the power of the Great White Czar.
The princesses, too, had thought of the imam’s son every day of their captivity, even more than the other women. They had hoped and prayed for Jamal Eddin, anxiously awaiting his arrival every day.
Today they owed him their lives, and Varenka Ilyinitchna, Princess Orbeliani, knew it. And many other things as well.
She knew that, waltzing in his arms at the Peterhof-Alexandria cottage, her heart had been in his keeping. She had loved Jamal Eddin when she had been very young, loved him secretly, passionately, despite her own natural reserve and the calm her own shyness imposed, despite the outward appearance of chastity she had maintained.
She was still aware that back then, had he been more insistent and less sensitive, he could have dishonored her.
She knew that Shamil had considered keeping one of the prisoners to offer his son as a bride. He had chosen Princess Nina Baratachvili, the penniless niece of the Orbelianis and the Chavchavadzes. Of all the hostages, she was the only one who had never been married or had children. When Princess Nina, a virgin of eighteen, found out, she was horrified at the prospect of being abandoned by her aunts here in the mountains and handed over to a Chechen like chattel. She had flown into a rage, insulting the imam, and Varenka had avoided the potentially serious consequences of her tirade by offering herself in the princess’s place. One or the other of the prisoners, it was all the same to Shamil. He simply wanted to save a Russian princess for his son, and his own wives had assured him that she was young and pretty. The violence of David Chavchavadze’s outrage at the mere suggestion of delaying the liberation of the princess Orbeliani had prompted him to drop the idea.