Alexandra Lapierre - Between Love and Honor

They know how he was torn from his people and brought to Saint Petersburg by force. They know he has built a life for himself in Russia, that he is now a well-read officer, fond of the music of Glinka and French poetry. They know the czar considers him a favored son, a member of the imperial family, a lieutenant in the Russian army, to which he belongs completely.

They know that his renunciation of this world whose values are now his own is the only thing that has saved their lives.

They know as well that Czar Nicholas left him to choose freely. The young man could have refused this exchange. And that at this very hour, the imam’s son is sacrificing his very existence for them.

One of the three princesses knows other things as well. She knows that once, long ago, he loved her.

Watching him approach, she remembers the whispered secrets they once shared, when they were together.

The image of this horseman in black, running toward a destiny he rejects, reminds the princess of another, of the little boy fate had thrown into a universe he never should have known. It was sixteen years ago. A Chechen child rode down a mountain path, through the boulders, between his father’s eyrie and the Russian army camp. Behind him, the cadavers of his tortured people rotted, unburied, among the ash-colored rocks. He did not cry. He had kept his dagger and his saber. He would kill them all. Full of pride, hatred, and fear, the little boy had reached the camp of his executioners.

And now, today, he must return upon the same path. He must go back to his childhood, his reluctant steps forward taking him back. All he has lived for the past sixteen years, all he has learned at the hands of the invaders, he must forget.

He must unlearn everything, again.

He rides before the captives, and for a fleeting moment, their two worlds are one. The women are indistinguishable from one another. And nothing distinguishes him, a Chechen horseman, from their captors. Except that he is searching among the veiled women for his first love. His eyes finally come to rest upon the one he instinctively knows, beneath the shawls, is her.

He passes next to her and reins in his horse.

No words can express what the long look they exchange does: the adieu of Varenka, hostage of the imam Shamil and daughter of a Georgian prince, and Jamal Eddin, hostage of the czar and son of the imam.

Ghimri, a fortified village in Dagestan September 18, 1834

For those unfamiliar with the mountain, the path was impassable. The dogs, the sheep, even the goats hesitated to venture out on it. But old Bahou-Messadou traveled it back and forth between the village and the spring several times a day. She had gotten into the habit of going to fetch water before dawn, before the call of the muezzin, before the other women were up, when no one was around to witness the difficulty she suffered moving around in the early morning.

With a jug on her head and her veil held between her teeth, she walked into the darkness, feeling her way along with uncertain steps and a shaky distress that had filled her entire being ever since her son had left again, a visible sign of her emotional state. She knew from habit that her ankles might loosen up halfway down the path, but that her hips and knees would feel stiff all the way to the well. Only when she leaned over the coping to get hold of the rope, stretching her sore muscles to catch the bucket and, finally, hung over the coping with all her weight to bring the water up, would her joints loosen up. Concentrating on her chore would take her mind off her thoughts—the snatches of sentences, the accusations overheard or dreamed, the memories, the plans, even the prayers.

On the way back, head held high, the weight of the huge copper ewer compressing her spine, her limbs relaxed, she would walk with her back straight. No one would ever guess that Shamil’s mother carried a heavy heart full of apprehension.

Bahou-Messadou couldn’t put a finger on this unnamable burden. It had started a few days before, with the news that the second imam had been murdered, his assassins punished by a vengeful Shamil. She should have felt proud, even light-headed with joy. Her only son, born sickly and puny, had emerged as the spiritual guide and military chief of all the Caucasian Muslims, and all this thanks to his own valor, the fervor of his faith, his superior mind, nobility, and beauty. Today Allah had conferred upon him the supreme honor, the most sacred of powers. At this very moment at the mosque of Ashilta, Bahou-Messadou’s village, home of her ancestors, Shamil was being consecrated imam. The third imam of Dagestan and Chechnya.

The first had been killed here during a Russian attack two years ago. The second, yesterday, by renegade Muslims. This morning, Shamil would take their place as the shadow of God on earth. Why wasn’t she beaming with pride and joy? Any semblance of either was so mitigated that she felt guilty. Allah permitted—indeed Allah ordained—her to rejoice on this day. What was wrong with her, that her feelings were so unusually reserved?

Perhaps it was because of what she heard and sensed here in Shamil’s absence, in the elders’ attitude toward him, in things she had heard around the well. She would deal with the women’s gossip later.

For the time being, she needed to be alone in the silence of the night.

Bahou-Messadou knew that Shamil’s most ferocious adversaries were here at Ghimri, the aul, or mountain village, where he had been born, grown up, and gotten married. She knew that his community had voted against him when all the others had selected him as imam, and that his peers would have blocked his path had he wanted the consecration to take place here. She knew also that Shamil had broken their resistance with iron and fire. Was that why her son had emptied his own village of the faithful, dragging his troops four hours’ journey away to Ashilta, his chosen rallying point? Was it to avoid another bloodbath at Ghimri? Was that the reason?

Or was it because he was waiting for the men of Ghimri to openly betray him? Then he could break them, bring them to their knees, and force them over to his side. Was it a test? If so, Bahou-Messadou feared the consequences. She glanced around her.

It was a black, starless night, though she could see the reflection of the moon on the eternal snows across the mountain chain. The mountains. Their mass pressed into the tiny figure of Bahou-Messadou, closing in on every side but the left.

On the left was a drop into the void.

She heard the roar of the Avar Koysu, the raging river that rushed through the bottom of the chasm, and the soft, familiar sound of the pebbles that rolled beneath her thin soles and fell straight to the bottom of the gorge. Shamil was a good son who looked out for her, and he disapproved of her trips to the well in the black of night. But she did not need the daylight to know the number of steps between the ledges that hung over the path, which hung so low that the women had to bend over beneath the rock face to creep past. Bahou could smell the humidity of the rocks where the cliff face jutted out, she could feel the wind blowing about her feet, and she could hear the dull, muted roar of the river. She would slide the jug down from shoulder to belly and crouch down, holding the water close to her.

Nonetheless, had one of her grandchildren ventured out before the call of the muezzin to follow her here, she would have pinned his ears back.

Her thoughts returned to the village. When all was said and done, Bahou-Messadou was wary of Ghimri, even though she had lived there for forty-five years. She looked up to see the dawn piercing through the clouds that hung over the terraces of the aul.

Even though Ghimri was in the south, perhaps even farther south than Ashilta, the sun would not reach the hamlet, even on this clear September day. What Bahou-Messadou disliked most about Ghimri was the cold. How would they keep warm this winter, when Shamil had forbidden cutting down a single tree from the forest below? Not so much as a branch or the trunk of a beech tree or an oak, not even the bark of a chestnut tree. He saw the forest as vital, the best rampart to stave off a Russian assault. Bogged down in the branches, the Russian soldiers would become easy prey. As long as the forest was there, he said, the warriors of the Caucasus would be invincible, so he had issued strict orders that it be preserved everywhere. Anyone who touched it, even to gather wood to build a house or make a fire, would be punished. A felled tree would cost the offender a cow; two, his life. That was yet another source of discontent.