In his thoughts, he spoke to himself as to a stranger. An inexperienced newcomer to Akulgo, the other eldest son of the imam, the other Jamal Eddin. He would have to take this one by the hand, lead him and advise him. You climb up here with me, away from all these moaning and groaning people. Climb in as close as you can to the wall. Lie down on your side and draw up your legs, there, like that. Pretty soon you won’t hear the wailing of the wounded around you or smell the stink of the dead. You won’t see or feel anything, not even the rock jabbing into your side. There, sleep.

But the real Jamal Eddin felt the rock, like a bayonet stabbing him in the small of the back. In his mind, the vision of the blue eyes of the flaxen-haired soldiers that he and Patimat had stoned to death played over and over like a hallucination. He heard the cracks of their splitting skulls as the rocks reached their marks, forcing them to let go. He felt a wild joy when one rock, by some miracle, annihilated several of them at once.

But he shuddered at the dull sound of their backs breaking on the boulders, the sound of bones exploding against the shingles.

The stalactites of the cave’s vault pricked him like the sting of the ants in his wound long ago. They touched the scar and reawakened the old pain. Bahou-Messadou, if only Bahou-Messadou had been there.

“Bahou, come!” he sobbed in his dream.

Maybe it would be better to get down from this ledge and lie on the ground. The rough patches wouldn’t be as rocky. But he did not move. In the shadows, he saw a bowl of lamb and rice, swimming in grease. He threw himself on it, hitting his head on a rock. The bowl had disappeared. Stunned, he no longer thought of food or of cuddling up at his mother’s side.

Fatima was eight months pregnant. She struggled for air with Jawarat, Patimat, Mohammed Ghazi, and Saïd, but what little there was to breathe was thick with the dust of ashes that hung suspended in the still heat. At the beginning of the siege, they had all returned to camp in the ruins of Shamil’s home at dusk. The naïbs’ daughters had still taken care of the livestock and scrubbed the steel blades of the kinjals, crusted with giaour blood. The old women had cooked flatbread on the braziers and tried to make life seem easier, as it once had been, in the evenings. That seemed like a long time ago. But earlier today, General Grabbe’s troops had bombarded the aul from the rear, and they could no longer take shelter there.

Was Fatima asleep? She was exhausted by the heat. In her state, she could not take part in combat. But the next day, when there was a period of calm, she would leave this hole and sneak out to the horses’ cadavers. She would deftly quarter them before the birds picked their carcasses clean. Mohammed Ghazi, smaller and more agile, invisible to any sniper, would help her.

On other nights, when the moon was not full, Jamal Eddin would go through the cadavers of the Russians who had been shot down by Akbirdil’s muskets beneath the tower. He would strip them of weapons and boots, and his older comrades would slit the throats of any who might have sounded the alarm.

While the little ones took care of the dead, the men made dangerous forays, crawling out to the ridges the infidels had taken. Those dogs were hoisting their cannons up here with pulleys. They hauled the artillery up in wicker baskets, the men in vessels of armored wood. Every night Shamil, Yunus, and a few others slithered over to the pulleys and cut the lines and cables, trying to overturn the vessels full of men so that they would fall into the depths of the canyon, their cries muffled by the rushing river.

Jamal Eddin knew that at this very moment his father was engaged in hand-to-hand combat somewhere in the moonlight and his heart beat faster. A thousand stings pricked his body. Lice. These filthy vermin multiplied as fast as the Russians, and he scratched himself bloody trying to relieve the itching. He knew how to get rid of them by burying every item of clothing separately in the ground, with only a scrap of material sticking out of the dirt. The lice would gather on this scrap, and then he had only to burn them. Burn all the lice—and the giaours with them. But where was there a corner in Akulgo where he could burn them?

Nights like this seemed to go on forever. Actually, he didn’t want to sleep. He was afraid of falling asleep and dreaming the same dreadful dream, always the same one, and far more terrifying than any of the daytime battles. At the beginning of the nightmare, he was happy. He thought he saw Shamil entering the grotto and walking toward him in the long green robe he wore for preaching on Fridays. In his extended arms, the imam carried the Book, wrapped in golden fabric. He shone like a flame above the sleeping women, his feet not touching the ground. He approached the stone table where Jamal Eddin was waiting for him. His face no longer looked like a clay mask as it had for weeks now, his beard covered with dust, an opaque veil clouding his gray eyes.

He smiled and said, “We have announced good news to the prophet, the birth of a boy of gentle character.”

Then it was God who spoke through the voice of the imam, “When the boy was old enough to accompany him, his father said, ‘Oh my son, I saw myself in a dream, and I was immolating you.’”

Shamil leaned down to him and asked, “What do you think of this?”

Looking into his father’s inquisitive eyes, those infinitely tender, amiable, and kind eyes, Jamal Eddin felt his heart stop, and he would wake up with a start, terrified.

He was seized with apprehension, a stark fear of the future. He wasn’t afraid of dying here with all his people. What made him tremble was the thought of being abandoned, alone in a deserted aul, with the giaours coming.


No one saw the little boy’s tears or heard him cry. Shamil, Yunus, and Akbirdil all knew it, and he knew it too. Akulgo would fall. They were vanquished, nearly vanquished.

August 10

The day’s attack ended as it had every day for the past two months. For the enemy, the results were dismaying. Nine hundred killed the day before, another five hundred today. There was not an officer left among the Russian scouts.

The only naïbs left to Shamil were Akbirdil and Yunus. The others—Surkhaï, Ali Bek, his ninety companions of the first hour—were all dead. Yes, the survivors could kill another few hundred giaours before perishing like martyrs on this rock. But would their sacrifice be a service to the holy war?

In the grotto where the council met, a heated discussion was taking place among the eight remaining members. The seventy days of siege had reduced these most faithful among the faithful to a state of skeletal emaciation. Sitting cross-legged, they kept their hats on and each rested a hand on the handle of one of the two kinjals crossed at his belt. Their eyes burned with fever above their black beards. Next to each sat a young boy, a son or nephew, who acted as aide-de-camp. This evening, there were only three child soldiers still fit enough to serve them, among them Jamal Eddin. He waited for his orders, standing a few steps behind his seated father. Shamil presided over the circle, with Yunus on his right and Akbirdil on his left. Neither said a word, but the others still had the strength to argue. Their guttural voices rang out beneath the vault of the grotto.

Shamil, impassive, let them say what he had heard whispered for days now, “What good does it do for all of us to disappear?”

Wasn’t it precisely the giaours’ mission to empty the Caucasus of all Muslims, wipe them off the face of the earth, annihilate them so that not one would remain? The imam should not give them this satisfaction. He should negotiate, not to surrender, but to survive, to go on. So that one day they could again resume the holy war and conquer the infidels.

Shamil tried hard to hide his indignation. How could the men of his own clan speak of such a thing? Even old Barti Khan, Bahou-Messadou’s twin brother, brought up the idea of opening negotiations. Even cousin Hadj Ibrahim, the muezzin of Akulgo, was in favor of speaking with the enemy.

Observing his father’s trembling shoulders, Jamal Eddin could sense Shamil’s efforts at self-control. Sheer exhaustion might cause him to burst into anger too soon. He must choose the right moment.

Though narrow-shouldered, with spindly legs that scarcely made him the ideal fighter, Hadj Ibrahim had the right to speak first. His green turban, proof of his pilgrimage to Mecca, indicated that his status was higher than the others’.

“With the tower, they’ve taken the left bank of the river. We’re completely surrounded,” cousin Ibrahim pointed out.

“There’s not a single drop of water left in the wells, not even for ablutions,” Uncle Barti added.

“I went down to the river last night,” Shamil interrupted, tight-lipped, as though saving his breath. “I brought up two goatskins.”

“That’s not enough to quench the thirst of five hundred people.”

“It will have to be.”

“Five hundred,” Shamil’s uncle said soberly, “out of four thousand in June. There are too many infidels, and they are too well armed and equipped. We know how this is going to end.”

Coming from anyone else, this kind of talk would have cost the upstart his life.

“Shut up or I’ll cut out your tongue, like all the others who spoke of capitulation.”

Shamil had once respected the courage of Barti Khan, but the hardships of the siege had transformed the old man into someone he no longer knew. The thin, white, unruly beard that covered the tip of his chin gave his face a vindictive expression. Beneath his eyelids, which were half-glued together by an infection, his gummy eyes, clear gray like Bahou-Messadou’s, shone with spiteful bitterness. His gaze was direct, but void of affability or wisdom.