1 a vizier's daughter - Hazara.net

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A VIZIER’S DAUGHTER – A TALE OF THE HAZARA WAR
bad habit of yours, it is absolute strangers meeting you for the first
time.”
“Oh, how cruel you are to remind me of that again,” Shereen went on.
“I feel as if I could never get it out of my head. Why did you ever
bring us here? All this misfortune has come upon us through you.”
“Yes, indeed,” Halima went on most ungenerously. “What made you
say to that man that you were the chosen of Ferad Shah? It was ver y
forward of you and hardly true.”
“It was quite true,” Gul Begum said, “and you know it; besides, I did
not ask you to come with me. It was you who asked me to bring you,
and only two days ago you told the Bibi you were more than satisfied
with the treatment you had received. Why have you changed?”
“Why do you ask? Two days ago we did not know anything of the wa ys
of this household,” the girl’s mother said, ignoring the absolutely
incontestable statement that she was where she was by her own doing.
Then lowering her voice, “Two days ago we had not heard that cr y.”
“Was it a cry?” asked her sister-in-law. “Something woke up, but I
could not say what it was. Perhaps it was not a human cr y after all.
Might it not have been a jackal?”
Gul Begum, who was more especially addressed, said nothing.
Whatever her own ideas on the subject were she evidently wished to
keep them to herself. One little observation she had made when first
she woke that morning, but she revealed it to no one, and took an early
opportunity of obliterating what she had seen. It was a mark evidently
of a woman’s shoe on the wooden door sill, and the nature of the stain
left behind was unmistakable. It was blood.
Something of the old hunted look that Gul Begum had had in the old
terrible days with Mohamed Jan stole back into her eyes, and there was
something, too, denoting fixed resolve. Shereen did not feel
particularly friendly towards her cousin on account of the lecture she
had received as to the too free use of her unruly member, so she did not
join her cousin as usual, and Gul Begum was left to herself and her
thoughts, which did not seem to be of a particularly pleasant nature.
She started when Halima suddenly laid her hand on her shoulder.
“Look here, Gul Begum,” the older woman said in a whisper, “you
brought us here. You must devise some plan for getting us awa y. We
are here locked up like prisoners and surrounded by people who seem
capable of anything. This is far worse than Mohamed Jan’s house. You
have a way with people that makes them give in to you. Get us out of
this. I shall be driven mad with terror.”