Far Pavilions (175 page)

‘I I will do so,’ said the Sirdar – and as he spoke reached stealthily for the door, and before Ash had time to turn, snatched it open, whisked through and slammed it shut behind him. The heavy iron key had been on the outside, and even as Ash swung round and leapt forward he heard it turn in the lock.

He was caught and he knew it. The door was far too stout to be broken down and the window-bars were of iron and would not bend. Nevertheless he tugged frantically at the heavy latch and shouted to Nakshband Khan to let him out. But the only answer was the rasp of metal as the key was withdrawn, and then the Sirdar's voice speaking softly through the empty keyhole: ‘It is better this way, Sahib. I go now to Wali Mohammed's house, where I shall be safe. It is only a stone's throw from here, so I shall reach it long before those
shaitans
return; and when all is quiet again I will come back and release you.’

‘And what of the Guides?’ demanded Ash furiously. ‘How many of them do you think will be alive by then?’

‘That is in God's hands,’ replied the Sirdar, his voice almost inaudible, ‘– and there is neither hem nor border nor fringe to the mercy of Allah.’

Ash abandoned his assault on the door and fell to pleading, but there was no answer, and presently he realized that Nakshband Khan had gone – taking the key with him.

The room was a narrow oblong with the door at one end, the window at the other, and the entire building, like those on either side of it, was very different from the flimsy Residency houses, for it was of a much earlier date and had once been part of the inner defences. Its outer walls were solidly constructed, and the small square window-frames were of stone in which the bars had been set before the frames were built into the house front. Had Ash possessed a file it might have been possible for him, after hours of labour, to remove two of these (one would not have been enough), but the office equipment did not include that kind of file, and an examination of the lock showed him that nothing short of a considerable charge of gunpowder could blow it in, for it was of a pattern only seen in Europe in a few medieval dungeons; the bolt being formed from a thick rod of iron that when the key was turned, slid home into a deep iron socket embedded in the stone door frame. There was no point in attempting to use his pistol on the thing; the lock was far too strong and too simple for that, and the most that a bullet could do was to damage it so that when Nakshband Khan returned with the key he would be unable to open the door…

There was no longer any question of attempting to fetch help from the palace or to join Wally and the Guides in defending the Residency, or of getting back to Juli and the house in the city either. He was as securely trapped as the members of the British Mission to Afghanistan who were making frantic efforts to prepare for the attack that they knew must come at any moment; an attack that they would have to fend off alone unless the Amir sent troops to prevent the return of the mutineers, and closed the gates of the Bala Hissar to the Heratis and others who had made for their cantonments to fetch their rifles.

But the Amir had done nothing.

Yakoub Khan was a weakling, possessing none of the fire and steel of his grandfather the great Dost Mohammed, and few if any of the good qualities (and they were many) of his unfortunate father the late Shere Ali, who might have made an excellent ruler if he had been left to himself instead of being hounded unmercifully by an ambitious Viceroy. Yakoub Khan had ample military resources at his disposal: his Arsenal was crammed with rifles, ammunition and kegs of gunpowder, and quite apart from the mutinous regiments he had close on two thousand loyal troops in the Bala Hissar: the Kazilbashis and the Artillery, and the guard on the Treasury. These, had he given the order, would have closed the citadel against the troops from the cantonments and moved against the men of the Ardal Regiment, who were breaking into the Arsenal to seize rifles and ammunition for themselves, and passing out firearms to the riff-raff from the bazaar and any infidel-hater who would join them.

A mere hundred or so Kazilbashis, or two guns and their crews, sent posthaste to bar the way to the Mission's compound, could have halted the mob and almost certainly have dissuaded them from attacking. But Yakoub Khan was far more concerned for his own safety than that of the guests whom he had sworn to protect, and he would only weep and wring his hands, and bewail his fate.

‘My Kismet is bad,’ wept the Amir to the mullahs and syeds of Kabul, who had hurried to the palace to urge him to take immediate steps to save his guests.

‘Your tears will not help them,’ retorted the head Mullah sternly. ‘You must send soldiers to guard the approaches to their compound and turn back the mutineers. If you do not, they will all be murdered.’

‘That will not be my fault… I never wished it. As God is my witness, it will not be my fault, because I can do nothing – nothing.’

‘You can close the gates,’ said the head Mullah.

‘Of what use, when there are so many of these evil men already within the citadel?’

‘Then give orders for these guns here to be moved where they can fire on the troops when they return from their cantonments, and thus prevent them re-entering.’

‘How can I do that, when I know that if I did so, the whole city would rise against me and the
budmarshes
would force their way in and eat us all up? No, no, there is nothing I can do… I tell you, my Kismet is bad. I cannot fight against my fate.’

‘Then it is better that you should die rather than disgrace Islam,’ said the Mullah harshly.

But the weeping Amir was lost to all shame, and no argument or pleading – no appeals to him for the sake of honour and in the name of hospitality to protect those who were his guests – could galvanize him into taking any action whatsoever. The wild rioting, and the attack on Daud Shah that had resulted from the pay parade, had so terrified him that he did not dare give any order for fear that it would not be obeyed. For if it were not…? No, no, better anything than that. Oblivious of the scornful eyes of the mullahs, ministers and nobles who stood watching him, he tore his hair and rent his clothes, and bursting into renewed tears, turned from them to stumble away and shut himself up in his private rooms in the palace.

Yet weakling or no, he was still the Amir, and therefore, in name at least, head of the Government and lord and ruler of all Afghanistan. No one else dared give the orders that he himself would not give, and avoiding each others' eyes they followed him into the palace. When the British Envoy's messenger arrived with a letter asking for help and claiming his protection, a senior minister took it in to him, and the reply that was sent back consisted of that single procrastinating sentence:
As God wills, I am making preparations
, which was not even true – unless, of course, he was referring to preparations for the saving of his own skin.

Sir Louis had stared in stunned incredulity at this puerile answer to his urgent appeal for help. “‘Making preparations…” Good God! is
that
all he can say?’ breathed Sir Louis.

His hand clenched on the scrap of paper, crumpling it up, and lifting his head he gazed blindly out at the far snows, realizing in that moment that the man of whom he had written only a day or two ago ‘I personally believe he will prove a very good ally' was weak, worthless and a coward, a broken reed who should never have been trusted or relied upon; seeing at last and very clearly the futility of his Mission and the deadly nature of the trap into which he had led his entourage so proudly. ‘Her Britannic Majesty's Mission to the Court of Kabul' had lasted exactly six weeks – that was all; only forty-two days…

It had all seemed so feasible once – those brave schemes for establishing a British presence in Afghanistan as a first step towards planting the Union Jack on the far side of the Hindu Kush. But now, suddenly, he was not so sure that that strange fellow Pelham-Martyn – ‘Akbar’, who had been a friend of poor Wigram Battye's – had been so wrong-headed after all when he had argued so vehemently against the Forward Policy, insisting that the Afghans were a fiercely proud and courageous people who would never accept government by any foreign nation for more than a limited time, a year or two at most – and had quoted precedents to prove it.

‘But we shall be avenged,’ thought Sir Louis grimly. ‘Lytton will send an army to occupy Kabul and depose the Amir. But how long will they be able to stay here?… and how many lives will be lost before… before they have to retreat again? I must write again to the Amir. I must make him see that it is as much in his interests as ours to save us, because if we go down he will go down with us. I must write at once –’

But there was no time. The mutineers who had broken into the Arsenal were racing back armed with rifles, muskets and cartridge-belts, the majority heading for the compound, firing as they ran, while others took up positions on the rooftops of the surrounding houses, from where they would be able to fire directly down on to the beleaguered garrison. And as the first musket ball whipped across the compound, Sir Louis sloughed off the politician and the diplomat and became a soldier again. Flinging away the useless scrap of crumpled paper that bore a coward's reply to his appeal for help, he snatched up a rifle and made for the top of the Mess House where he had lately been helping to erect a make-shift parapet, and lying flat on the sun-baked roof took careful aim at a group of men who had begun to fire at the Residency.

The roof of the Mess House was the highest point in the Mission cormpound, and from it he had a clear view of the great Arsenal that looked down on the compound from the rising ground beyond the cavalry lines. The range was barely two hundred yards; and there was a man standing in the doorway handing out muskets…

Sir Louis fired and saw him throw up his hands and fall, and reloading swiftly, fired again: taking deliberate aim and paying no attention to the hail of bullets that pattered about him as men on the surrounding house-tops began to fire in reply at the roof of the barracks and the Residency. Below him several women of the town, who had been hiding in the servants' quarters where they had no business to be, ran screeching like pea-hens across the compound, herded by a sepoy and one of the
khidmatgars
to the
hammam
, the bath-house, that was built partly underground and where the majority of the servants had already taken refuge. But though Sir Louis heard them, he did not look down.

Had the compound been on higher ground it would have made an excellent defensive position, since it contained a series of courts, each separated from the next by low mud walls that could have been easily loopholed, and the defenders could have held off any number of attackers, inflicting enormous casualties for as long as their ammunition lasted. But its position was pre-cisely that of the arena of a bull-ring to which Wally had compared it on the day of the Mission's arrival, so that the walls that would have provided cover against a frontal attack were useless against an enemy that was able to fire down from above: and by now, on house-tops ahead and along one entire side of the Residency and its compound – in high windows and on the battlements of the Arsenal and even on the roofs of many buildings in the upper Bala Hissar – men clustered thick as flies on a sweetmeat stall, firing as fast as they could load and yelling in triumph whenever a shot told.

Yet for all the notice he took of them, Sir Louis Cavagnari might have been lying peacefully on a rifle-range, engaged in target-practice and intent on marking up a high score. He fired and re-loaded swiftly, calmly, methodically, aiming at the men who swarmed down from the Arsenal, and selecting those in the forefront so that the ones who pressed behind tripped over the bodies as they fell.

He was a superb marksman, and his first nine shots had accounted for nine of the enemy when a spent bullet, ricocheting off the low brick rim of the roof a few inches from his head, struck him on the forehead. His head dropped and his long body jerked once and lay still, while the rifle slid from his nerveless hands and toppled into the lane below.

An exultant yell burst from the enemy on the nearer house-tops, and Ash, who had been watching from the window of his room, drew a harsh breath between his teeth and thought: ‘Oh God, they've got him’ – and in the next moment, ‘No they haven't!’ For the wounded man began to raise himself slowly and painfully, first to his knees and then with an enormous effort to his feet.

Blood was pouring down from the gash in his forehead, blotting out one side of his face and staining his shoulder scarlet, and as he stood there, swaying, a score of muskets cracked and as many puffs of dust exploded all around him from the mud-plastered surface of the roof. But it was as though he bore a charmed life, because not one struck him, and after a moment or two he turned and walked unsteadily to the stairs that led down from the roof and groped his way down and out of sight.

The Mess House was full of servants who had run in from their quarters to take refuge in the Residency, and of Guides who were firing steadily through loopholes cut in the walls and through the wooden shutters, and who did not look round when the wounded Envoy reached the turn of the stairs. Walking unaided into the nearest bedroom, which happened to be Wally's, he told a trembling
masalchi
, whom he found hiding there, to go and fetch the Doctor-Sahib immediately. The youth fled, and a few minutes later Rosie arrived at the double, expecting, from the
masalchi
's description, to find his Chief dying or dead.

‘Only a scratch,’ said Sir Louis impatiently. ‘But it's made my head swim like the very devil. Tie it up like a good fellow and send one of those idiots for William. We've got to get another letter through to the Amir. He's our only hope, and – Oh, there you are, William. No, I'm all right. It's only a flesh wound. Get a pen and paper and write while Kelly patches me up – hurry. Are you ready?’

He began to dictate while William, having snatched pen and paper off the desk in the next room, wrote rapidly, and Rosie cleaned him up and bandaged his head, and stripping off the stained shirt replaced it with one of Wally's.