Far Pavilions (10 page)

Duni Chand kept a string of horses on which he visited his fields and rode out hawking on the bad-lands by the river, and it was Ash's duty to carry grain and draw water, attend to the harness and lend a hand with anything from cutting grass to curry-combing. The work was arduous and the wages light, but having spent his infancy among horses – his supposed father, Daya Ram, had introduced him to them at an early age – he had never had the least fear of them. It not only pleased him to work with them, but the few annas thus earned gave him an enormous sense of importance. He was a man and a wage-earner and could now, if he so wished, afford to buy
halwa
from the sweetmeat-seller instead of stealing it. This was a step up in the world, and he informed Sita that he had decided to become a syce and earn enough money for the day when they would set out to find their valley. Mohammed Sherif, the head-syce, was reported to earn as much as twelve rupees a month, a vast sum that did not include
dustori
– the one anna on each rupee that he levied on every item of food or equipment purchased for use in the stables, and which more than doubled his salary.

‘When I am head-syce,’ said Ash grandly, ‘we will move to a big house and have a servant to do the cooking, and you will never have to do any more work, Mata-ji.’

It is just possible that he might have carried out his plan and spent his days attached to the stable of some petty nobleman. For as soon as it became apparent that he could ride anything on four legs, Mohammed Sherif, recognizing a born horseman, had permitted him to exercise his charges and taught him many valuable secrets of horsemanship, so that the year he spent in Duni Chand's stables had been a very happy one. But fate, with a certain amount of human assistance, had other plans for Ash; and the fall of a weather-worn slab of sandstone was to change the whole course of his life.

It happened on an April morning, almost three years to the day from the morning when Sita had led him away from the terrible vulture-filled camp in the Terai, and started out on the long road to Delhi. The young crown-prince, Lalji, Yuveraj of Gulkote, rode through the city to make offerings at the Temple of Vishnu. And as he passed under the arch of the ancient Charbagh Gate that stands at the junction of the Chandni Bazaar and the Street of the Coppersmiths, a slab of coping-stone slid from its place and fell into the roadway.

Ash had been standing in the forefront of the crowd, having wriggled his way, eel-like, between the close-packed legs of his elders, and his eye had been caught by a movement overhead. He had seen the slab shift and slip just as the head of the Yuveraj's horse emerged from the shadow of the arch, and almost without thinking (for there had not been time for conscious thought) he leapt at the bridle, and clutching it, checked the startled animal as the heavy slab of sandstone crashed into the street and exploded into a hundred sharp-edged fragments under the prancing hooves. Ash and the horse, together with several spectators, had been gashed by the flying splinters, and there was blood everywhere: on the hot white dust, the gay garments of the crowd and the ceremonial trappings of the horse.

The spectators had screamed and swayed and struggled, and the horse, maddened by pain and noise, would have bolted had not Ash held its head and talked to it and soothed it until the stunned escort, spurring forward, caught the reins from him, and closing up around their prince, shouldered him aside. There followed an interval of surging chaos filled with a clamour of questions and answers while the escort beat back the crowd and stared at the broken coping overhead, and a white-bearded horseman flung Ash a coin – a gold mohur, no less – and said ‘
Shabash
(Bravo), little one! That was well done indeed.’

The crowd, seeing that no one had suffered any serious hurt, yelled their approval, and the procession continued on its way to the accompaniment of frenzied cheers, the Yuveraj sitting straight-backed in the saddle and clutching the reins with hands that were noticeably unsteady. He had kept his seat on the plunging animal with creditable skill, and his future subjects were proud of him. But the small face under the jewelled turban was strained and colourless as he looked back over his shoulder, searching the sea of faces for the boy who had leapt so providentially at his horse's head.

A stranger in the crowd had hoisted Ash up on his shoulder so that he might see the procession depart, and for a brief moment the two children stared at each other, the black frightened eyes of the little prince meeting the interested grey ones of Duni Chand's stable-boy. Then the crowd surged between them, and half a minute later the procession reached the end of the Street of the Coppersmiths and turning it, was lost to sight.

Sita had been gratifyingly impressed by the gold piece, and even more by the tale of the morning's doings. After much discussion, they had decided to take the coin to Burgwan Lal, the jeweller, who was known to be an honest man, and exchange it for a suitable quantity of silver ornaments which Sita could wear until such time as they were in need of ready money. They had neither of them expected to hear any more of the affair – apart from the inevitable comments and congratulations of interested neighbours – but the following morning a stout and supercilious palace official, accompanied by two elderly retainers, knocked on the door of Duni Chand's house. His Highness the Yuveraj, explained the official loftily, desired the immediate attendance of this insignificant brat at the palace, where he would be given living quarters and some minor post in His Highness's household.

‘But I can't do that,’ protested Ash, dismayed. ‘My mother would not like to live alone, and I could not leave her. She would not want – He was brusquely interrupted:

‘What she wants is of no consequence. It is the order of His Highness that you work for him, and you had best make haste and clean yourself. You cannot come in those rags.’

There had been nothing for it but to obey, and Ash had been escorted back to the fruit-seller's shop, where he hurriedly changed into the only other garment he possessed, and comforted the distracted Sita, urging her not to worry for he would be back soon. Very soon –

‘Do not cry, mother. There is nothing to cry for. I shall tell the Yuveraj that I would much rather stay here, and because I saved him from injury he will let me return. You will see. Besides, they cannot keep me there against my will.’

Secure in this belief, he hugged her reassuringly and followed the Yuveraj's servants through the city gate and up to the Hawa Mahal – the fortress palace of the Rajahs of Gulkote.

4

The Palace of the Winds was approached by a steep causeway paved with slabs of granite that had been worn into ruts and hollows by the passing of generations of men, elephants and horses. The stone felt cold to Ash's bare feet as he trudged up it in the wake of the Yuveraj's servants, and looking up at the towering walls of rock, he was suddenly afraid.

He did not want to live and work in a fortress. He wanted to stay in the city where his friends lived, and tend Duni Chand's horses and learn wisdom from Mohammed Sherif the head groom. The Hawa Mahal looked a grim and unfriendly place, and the
Badshahi Darwaza
, the King's Gate, by which one entered it, did nothing to mitigate that impression. The great iron-studded doors yawned onto darkness, and there were guards armed with tulwars and jezails lounging in the shadows beyond the stone lintel. The causeway passed under a fretted balcony from where the mouths of cannon gaped down at them, and the sunlight was cut off as though by a sword as they entered a long tunnel, honeycombed on either side by niches, guardrooms and galleries that sloped upwards through the heart of the rock.

The transition from warm sunlight to cold shadow, and the eerie echo under the black vault of the roof, served to intensify Ash's unease, and glancing back over his shoulder to where the great gateway framed a view of the city basking comfortably in the heat haze, he was tempted to run. It seemed to him, suddenly, as though he was entering a prison from which he would never be able to escape, and that if he did not run away now, at once, he would lose freedom and friends and happiness and spend his days penned up behind bars like the talking minah that hung in a cage outside the potter's shop. It was a new and troubling thought, and he shivered as though with cold. But it would obviously be no easy task to dodge past so many guards, and it would be humiliating to be caught and dragged into the palace by force. Besides, he was curious to see the inside of the Hawa Mahal: no one he knew had ever been inside it, and it would be something to boast about to his friends. But as for staying there and working for the Yuveraj, he would not even consider it, and if they thought that they could make him they were wrong. He would escape over the walls and go back to the city, and if they followed him, then he and his mother would both run away. The world was wide, and somewhere among the mountains lay their own valley – that safe place where they could live as they pleased.

The tunnel took a sharp turn to the right and came out into a small open courtyard where there were more guards and more ancient bronze cannon. On the far side of it another gateway led into a vast quadrangle where two of the Rajah's elephants rocked at their pickets in the shade of a
chenar
tree, and a dozen chattering women washed clothes in the green water of a stone tank. Beyond this lay the main bulk of the palace. A fantastic jumble of walls, battlements and wooden balconies, fretted windows, airy turrets and carved galleries – the larger part of it screened from the city below by the outer bastion.

No one knew how old the original fortress was, though legend said that it had defied the armies of Sikundar Dulkhan (Alexander the Great) when that young conqueror swooped down into India from the passes of the north. But a substantial part of the present citadel had been built in the early years of the fifteenth century, by a robber chieftain who required an impregnable stronghold from which he and his followers could sally out to raid the fertile lands beyond the river, and retreat to in time of trouble. In those days it had been known as the
Kala Kila
, the ‘Black Fort’, not on account of its colour – for it had been built of the same harsh grey stone that formed the towering outcrop of rock upon which it stood – but in reference to its reputation, which was of the darkest. Later, when the territory had fallen to a Rajput adventurer, it had been considerably enlarged, and his son, who built the walled city on the plain below and became the first Rajah of Gulkote, had transformed the
Kala Kila
into a vast, ornately decorated royal residence which on account of its lofty position he re-named the Hawa Mahal – the ‘Palace of the Winds’.

It was here that the present Rajah lived in dilapidated splendour in a maze of rooms furnished with Persian carpets, dusty hangings shimmering with gold embroidery, and ornaments of jade or beaten silver, set with rubies and raw turquoise. Here too, in the Queen's rooms of the Zenana Quarters beyond the pierced wooden screens that separated the Hall of Audience from a garden full of fruit trees and roses, lived Janoo-Bai the Rani – her rival, the
Feringhi
-Rani, having died of a fever (though some said of poison) during the previous summer. And in a rabbit-warren of rooms that took up a whole wing of the palace, the little Yuveraj, known more familiarly by his ‘milk-name’ of Lalji, spent his days among the crowd of attendants, petty officials and hangers-on who had been assigned to his service by his father.

Led into his presence through a bewildering number of passages and antechambers, Ash found the heir of Gulkote seated cross-legged on a velvet cushion and engaged in teasing a ruffled cockatoo who looked to be as sour and out of temper as its tormentor. The glittering ceremonial dress of the previous day had been exchanged for tight muslin trousers and a plain linen
achkan
,
*
and in it he looked a good deal younger than he had appeared when mounted on a white stallion in the midst of the procession. Then, he had seemed every inch a prince – and the inches had been considerably increased by a sky-blue turban adorned by a tall aigrette and a flashing clasp of diamonds. But now he was only a small boy. A plump, pasty-faced child who could easily have been taken for two years younger than Ash instead of two years older, and who was not so much cross as frightened.

It was this last that dispelled Ash's awe and put him at his ease, because he too had on occasions taken refuge from fear in a show of ill-temper, and therefore recognized an emotion that was probably hidden from any of the bored adults in the room. It gave him a sudden fellow-feeling for this boy who would one day be Rajah of Gulkote. And an equally sudden urge to take his part against these undiscerning grown-ups who bowed so deferentially and spoke so soothingly in false, flattering voices, while their faces remained cold and sly.

They were not, thought Ash, eyeing them warily, a friendly-looking lot. They were all too fat and sleek and too pleased with themselves, and one of them, a richly dressed young dandy with a handsome dissolute face, who wore a single diamond earring dangling from one ear, was ostentatiously holding a scented handkerchief to his nose as though he feared that this brat from the city might have brought an odour of poverty and the stables with him. Ash looked away and made his bow before royalty, bending low with both hands to his forehead as the custom demanded, but now his gaze was both friendly and interested, and seeing this, the face of the Yuveraj lost some of its ill-temper.