Shamil scowled but said nothing. He feared disunion too much not to have considered making his position hereditary. He vividly remembered the power struggles that followed the deaths of the first two imams.

He patted his horse on the neck to make sure his coat was dry. The gentle slap of his palm resonated in the mountain air.

Yunus wanted to get this over with. He felt that what he was about to say was immodest and crude, and he tackled the subject only with extreme reluctance.

“Take another wife,” he said in a rush of words, “among the daughters of the Chechen chiefs, and a third and a fourth, since Mohammed permits it. You should form alliances everywhere, ties to all the peoples and all the tribes of the Caucasus. I’m telling you so on my own behalf, and on behalf of all your naïbs.”

“Enough! You’re talking like a woman.”

Shamil pretended to be angry, but he shared the same intuition that only blood ties could seal the union of the Caucasian tribes, with him as their leader. He should marry into the most powerful families and leave many successors in the service of God. He would need several sons to create a dynasty that would perpetuate his work. It was another wise piece of advice from Yunus. Beneath the red beard that hid his expression, a smile crept over his lips. All these circumvolutions to explain to him that he should procreate. Poor Yunus, he could not possibly know that his advice was late in coming. With his baggage, Shamil was bringing home a young girl of sixteen whom he had married last month. Her name was Jawarat. Born in Ghimri, she was the daughter of the khan of Irganai and the niece of the late Ullou Bek, who had corrupted the elders. In her belly she carried a third heir. Tomorrow she would arrive at Chirquata to take her place next to Bahou-Messadou.

Shamil had asked the witnesses at his marriage to say nothing until he had the chance to announce the news to his mother and the mother of his sons himself. Yunus’s words reassured him that the secret had been properly kept. His nights with the very young Jawarat changed none of his feelings for Fatima. She was still the beloved, and his fear of hurting her had not a little to do with his desire to meet his lieutenant outside the village before he returned there. Decisions of state must be made before he saw her or talked to her. In any case, his sister, who had been nagging him for years to take a second wife, would be satisfied. Well, no, she would not, for he had committed an unforgivable act against Patimat.

Four months earlier, the giaours had burned the mosque at Ashilta, symbol of his power, and recaptured Kunzakh. The leader of the hypocrites, Mohammed Mirza Khan—a puppet the Russians had placed on the throne of Avaria to do their bidding—had surrounded the murids in the aul of Tiliq. The siege had gone on for weeks, but the khan still had not taken the village. Negotiation was the only means open to Shamil to extricate himself from this stalemate. Before the negotiations, the khan had demanded hostages, as was customary, an unavoidable condition that Shamil was not in a position to reject.

It was customary for the party suing for peace to send its children to the enemy as a gage. Called amanats in the Caucasus, these human guarantees had to be the sons of influential families between two and eighteen years old, proof in the flesh of good faith. If negotiations fell apart, they could be executed or taken captive, but only breaking one’s word or an act of high treason justified such treatment. And that was rare. Once the accords were sealed and the peace concluded, the amanats returned home.

The regent of Kunzakh’s demands at Tiliq were extravagant. He wanted Shamil’s two sons as amanats. The khan himself did not believe his enemies would respond to such excess, but the murids, still in control of the village, were strong enough to make a counter-proposition. The imam offered the khan not two but three prestigious hostages: the sons of his two allies here in the aul and his own nephew, the first-born of his only sister. The khan was pressed for time and accepted. On July eighteenth, Shamil had taken little Hamzat from Patimat’s arms and given him to the hypocrites. This was the price of liberty.

Never could he have imagined that Mohammed Mirza would keep the child. When the peace had been agreed upon, he had returned the two other children, but not Hamzat. The khan had given the imam’s nephew to the infidels, and even the Polish spies could not find out what had happened to the boy. Had the Russians killed him?

This betrayal haunted both Shamil and Yunus. Two sons are not enough to ensure your lineage. If anything should happen to them…

A glacial wind was rising, and nightfall was near. It was time to let their horses drink and address the issue that Yunus could not resolve without his chief’s approval. What message of their reaction should he give the messenger, who awaited a response at this very moment in the village? The urgent decision of what stance to assume was sufficient reason for Shamil to return to Chirquata.

“Their man, the Russian emissary, did he bring news of my nephew?” he asked somberly.

Yunus shook his head no.

Shamil repressed a gesture of anger and nudged his horse in the direction of the fountain. It stood on a narrow strip of land that was part of the cliff, facing the abyss.

“Not a word about Hamzat in their letter,” Yunus added.

Hiding his disappointment, Shamil let his horse dip his nose into the fountain. The two mounts drank in long gulps, the water whistling through their teeth.

“The letter was from the commander of the fort at Temir-Khan-Chura,” Yunus went on. “He wants to meet you personally.”

Shamil expressed no surprise, rejection, or triumph. He waited for the rest.

“He proposes a one-on-one conversation, at whatever meeting place you find appropriate. You pick the day and the hour, but the sooner the better.”

“General Klüge von Klugenau is inviting me?” he said with irony.

The request was indeed a first. It was a tacit official recognition of the imam Shamil as the religious authority and military chief of all the tribes of Dagestan and the only individual to be addressed in a procedurally correct exchange. The offer was worth taking into consideration.

“He’ll probably try to buy you off,” Yunus grumbled.

“Coming from anyone else but General Klüge von Klugenau, the proposal of a meeting would be unacceptable.”

“It still is. Even from him.”

Shamil listened to his instinct and his past experience. Among the infidels, this swarming vermin they had to crush everywhere, Klugenau was the only one who was not entirely contemptible.

After the first destruction of Ghimri, when the population was starving to death in the grottos and he was off somewhere, delirious, in a shepherds’ hut, Klugenau had taken the trouble to have three mules carrying three heavy sacks of flour sent to the survivors. This gesture, unprecedented in the Caucasus, had earned him the surprise, gratitude, and even a kind of respect among the Montagnards. The initiative had also earned him the ire of his superior, General and Chief of Staff Karl Karlovitch Fézé. The butcher of Ghimri and Ashilta, nicknamed Fazi the Louse by the local population due to his small stature and his despicable acts, was hated by all. Since the matter of the three sacks of flour, Fézé and Klugenau had been continually at loggerheads, especially concerning the general strategy of “pacification.” Fézé maintained that the natives understood only violence and vowed to show them that he was “more ferocious than they were.” Klugenau, who had the reputation of being as bad-tempered and vulgar as he was honest and generous, believed other means could be effective.

Both of foreign origin—Fézé was Swiss, Klugenau, Austrian—they each sought to please their master, the czar. Each one accused the other of incompetence. Shamil’s spies at Temir-Khan-Chura regularly brought back stories of their petty little tricks and major confrontations.

The spies also revealed that ever since the Russians had taken Ghimri and recaptured Kunzakh, the giaours had behaved as though the holy war were over. These filthy liars even went so far as to congratulate their Great White Czar for his dazzling victory. The network of Polish informers intercepted their reports to Saint Petersburg and translated them. They described the imam as a vanquished rebel, in chains and begging on his knees for the czar’s mercy. Shamil relished the portrait. These dogs were fooling each other now, comforting each other. As for his chains and his cage, he was still at large.

“Do you recall, Yunus, which of these pigs was bragging about my capture?”

“The Louse.”

Shamil chuckled. “His padishah’s arrival has left him sleepless, fretting about how to negotiate an arrangement. Now that he’s pressed for time, he’s even willing to let his rival engage in discussions with me.”

“They’re weaving the ropes to hang themselves with. Well, let them put them around their necks.”

“All the same, let’s see what Klugenau proposes.”

For a moment, the two friends were lost in their own thoughts. Yunus had no doubts whatsoever: the imam should refuse the offer.

“Lies, nothing but lies,” he said. “They’re still trying to fool us. The Russians are just like lice that sneak in and crawl all over; they infiltrate and multiply, as poisonous as the serpents that slither through the deserts of Muhan. We must destroy them wherever we find them.”

Remembering these words, taken directly from one of Shamil’s sermons, reinforced Yunus’s bellicose feelings and further convinced him that any contact with the Russians was pointless. He continued, citing with feeling, almost word for word, what he had heard from Shamil’s own lips at the mosque.