The Far Pavilions (18 page)

The current drew her out and down-stream, and he stood waist-deep in the water, straining his eyes to watch her go until at last her small shape was lost in the sun dazzle and he could see it no more. And when the brightness faded and the river turned from gold to opal, she had gone.

Ash turned and waded back to the shore, his legs numbed with cold and his teeth clenched together to keep them from chattering. He was hungry now, but he could not bring himself to eat the paste that he had made for Sita and that she had been unable to swallow, and he threw it away. He would have to find something to eat soon or he would not have the strength to go very far, and he had promised her… He lifted the sealed packet and the little wash-leather bags that were heavy with gold and silver coins, and weighed them in his hands, wishing he could leave them and knowing that he must not. They were his and he would have to take them. Removing only a single rupee for his immediate needs, he wrapped them again in the length of cloth and tied it about his waist as Sita had done, concealing it under his ragged garments. The folded sheet of paper with the faded, spidery writing that he could not read he hid in his turban, and now there was nothing left in the shallow cave to show that anyone had ever been there… Nothing but the footmarks and a slight depression in the sand where Sita had lain down to sleep on the previous night and where she had died in the dawn. He touched it very gently, as though she were still there and he feared to wake her.

As he did so, the first breath of the night wind blew in from across the river, and eddying about the cave, stirred up the dry silver sand and left it smooth again.

Ashton Hilary Akbar Pelham-Martyn shouldered his bundle and his burdens, and turning his back on the past, set out in the cold twilight to search for his own people.

7

‘It is for a Captain-Sahib. A Captain-Sahib of the Guides,’ said the bazaar letter-writer, peering at Hilary's last letter through a pair of scratched spectacles. ‘Yes, see – here it says “Mardan”. That is by Hoti Mardan, which is up Malakand way. Beyond Attock and the Indus, and across the Kabul River.’

‘
The Guides,
’ breathed Ash in an awed whisper. He would have made for Mardan long ago had he dared, but he knew that the Rani's men would expect him to go there and would lie in wait for him, for his friendship with Koda Dad's son had been no secret in the Hawa Mahal. But by now the watchers must surely have decided that he was too cunning to make such an obvious move, and they would have left to search elsewhere. Even if they had not, the situation itself had been drastically altered by the fact that he was no longer a friendless bazaar brat, hoping to find shelter with a sowar of the Guides, but a Sahib who could demand protection from his fellow Sahibs. Not only for himself, but for Zarin. And if necessary, for Koda Dad too.

‘The Guides,’ repeated Ash softly. And suddenly his eyes were bright with excitement and the grey despair that had filled his mind and heart for so many days began to shred away like mist at morning. His luck had changed at last.

‘It is the name of a
pulton
(regiment) that is stationed at Mardan,’ explained the letter-writer importantly, ‘and the Sahib's name is As-esh-taan. Captain Ash-tarn. As for the rest -’ he made as though to open the folded paper, but Ash snatched it back, explaining that it was only the Sahib's name and address that he needed, the rest was of no importance.

‘If it is a recommendation, it is better to know what has been said,’ advised the letter-writer sagely. ‘Then if harsh things have been written, one can tear it up and say that one has lost it. Or if it is a good recommendation, it may be sold for much money. Such things fetch good prices in the bazaars. Do you hope to take service with this Sahib, then?’

‘No, I – go on a visit to my cousin's wife's brother, who is his servant,’ improvised Ash glibly. ‘They told me the address, but I had forgotten it and I cannot read
Angrezi
.’

He paid over the half-anna that had been agreed upon and having made sure that he had memorized the name correctly, tucked the paper back among the folds of his turban and spent the other half-anna on a handful of roast
chunna
and a stick of peeled sugar-cane.

Ash had come a long way since the night he left the cave by the Jhelum River. It had not taken him long to discover how much farther and faster he could travel now that he was alone; or how right Sita had been when she had told him that he would be safer by himself, for he had heard of inquiries made in the villages and was aware that the hunt was still up. But since the men who hunted him knew that he would never leave his mother, they still looked for a hill-woman and a grey-eyed boy travelling together, and were not concerned with a single ragged urchin whose colouring, in the north-west of India where the Khyber hills lay along the horizon, was nothing out of the common.

He had not been questioned, but because he was afraid of doing anything that might draw attention to himself, he had not dared to ask for a translation of that paper in any of the smaller towns where such an inquiry might arouse interest. Only when he reached one large enough to boast half-a-dozen letter-writers had he felt safe enough to risk it; and now the name and address on it had turned out to be that of an officer of the Guides – Zarin's regiment. It was almost too good to be true.

Ash remembered that his mother had said she did not know what was written on that paper. But he thought that she must have had some suspicion, and that this perhaps explained her antipathy towards Koda Dad and his son, and her opposition to his plan of joining Zarin one day and enlisting in the same Corps. Yet in the end it was she who had set him on the road to Mardan, where he would see Zarin and become a sowar in the Guides – or even an officer, if this Captain-Sahib should prove to be a relative and prepared to help him. But that last was something he was never to know, for William Ashton was dead.

The Guides had taken part in the Ambeyla expedition, a campaign launched against certain hostile Border tribes in the autumn of the previous year, and William, still unaware that he possessed a nephew, had been killed in action only a few weeks after his sister's son escaped over the walls of the Hawa Mahal. But now it was spring, and the almonds were in bloom and the willows in bud as Ash took the road that leads from Attock to Peshawar.

The Kabul River ran red with the red earth of the Khyber that the spring rains and the melting of the snows in far-off Afghanistan had washed down on the flood, and the fords were impassable, so that he must cross by the bridge of boats at Nowshera. Ash had already made a detour of some dozen miles to avoid crossing the Indus by the Attock ferry, it having occurred to him that it would be an easy matter for a single man to keep a check on all who passed that way: in which he was wise, for there had indeed been a man on watch, an innocent-seeming traveller who appeared to be in no hurry, and who had made friends with the boatman and spent his days idly observing all those who used the ferry. Ash had crossed instead some five miles down-stream, having begged a lift on a farmer's raft, and from there made his way back to the Peshawar road. And now once again providence was kind to him, for in Nowshera a kindly villager on his way to Risalpur with a load of vege-ables gave him a lift, and on pretence of being sleepy he burrowed down behind the cabbages and knole-kole and crossed the bridge of boats unseen. So towards evening on that same day – dusty, footsore and very weary – he reached the cantonment of Mardan and asked for Sowar Zarin Khan of the Guides.

The Corps of Guides were back once more in their barracks after months of hard campaigning and harder fighting in the Yusafzai country, and eighteen months of active service had aged Zarin so that he was barely recognizable as the gay youth who had ridden away so light-heartedly from Gulkote. He had grown taller and broader, and acquired an impressive moustache in place of the budding growth that Ash remembered. But he was still the same Zarin, and he had been delighted to see Ashok.

‘My father sent word that you had left Gulkote, and I knew that you would come here one day,’ said Zarin, embracing him. ‘You will have to wait until you are full grown before you can enlist as a sowar, but I will speak to my eldest brother, who is now a Jemadar since the battle on the road to Ambeyla, and he will find you work. Is your mother here?’

‘She is dead,’ said Ash flatly. He found that he could not speak of her even to such an old friend as Zarin. But Zarin appeared to understand: he asked no question and said only, ‘I am sorry. She was a good mother to you, and I think it must be hard to lose even a bad one, for each of us has only the one to lose.’

‘It seems that I have had two,’ said Ash bleakly. And squatting down tiredly to warm himself at Zarin's fire, he told the tale of his escape from the Hawa Mahal and of the things that he had learned from Sita in the cave by the river, producing at last, in proof of the latter, a sheet of paper that bore the address of a dead officer of the Guides.

Zarin could not read the writing, but he too had been startled into belief by the sight of the money, for the coins spoke for themselves and did not need any translation. There were over two hundred of them, of which less than fifty were silver rupees and the rest sovereigns and gold mohurs; and that Sita should have concealed this small fortune for so many years seemed to prove that there must be at least some truth in her story.

‘I think we had better show this to my brother,’ said Zarin, looking doubtfully at the paper that Ash had thrust into his hand. ‘Perhaps he will be able to advise you, for I cannot. It is too dark a matter for me.’

Zarin's brother, the Jemadar, had no such doubts. There was only one course to take. Ashton-Sahib being dead, the whole affair must now be laid before Colonel Browne-Sahib, the Commandant, who would know how to deal with it. He himself, Awal Shah, would accompany the boy Ashok to the Colonel-Sahib's quarters immediately, because if there was any truth in this extraordinary story, the sooner both money and papers were placed in safe hands the better.

‘As for you, Zarin, you will say nothing of this to anyone. For if the Rani of Gulkote desires the boy's death, she will revenge herself on those who helped him to escape, and if she should hear that he is with us, she will suspect that our father had a hand in the matter. So it is better for all our sakes that the trail should be lost. I will go now to the Commandant-Sahib, and you, Ashok, will follow me, walking a little behind so that we are not seen to be together, and waiting outside until you are sent for. Come.’

The Jemadar stuffed the evidence into his pocket and strode out into the late sunlight, and Ash followed at a discreet distance and spent the next half hour perched on the edge of a culvert, tossing pebbles into the ditch below, and keeping a watchful eye on the Commandant's windows while the shadows lengthened on the dusty cantonment road and the sharp spring evening filled with the scent of woodsmoke and dung fires.

It was, though he did not know it, his last hour of independence. The last, for many years, of peace and freedom and idleness, and perhaps if he had realized that he might have broken his promise to Sita and run away while there was still time. Though even if he had escaped the Rani's assassins it is doubtful that he would have got very far, for Colonel Sam Browne, v.c, the Officiating Commandant of the Corps of Guides, having read the unfinished letter that Professor Pelham-Martyn had started to write to his brother-in-law William Ashton, was now engaged in removing the seals from a packet – that had been wrapped in oiled silk almost exactly seven years ago. It was already too late for Hilary's son to run away.

Three weeks later Ash was in Bombay, dressed in a hot and uncomfortable suit of European clothes and shod with even more uncomfortable European boots,
en route
for the land of his fathers.

His passage had been arranged and paid for by the officers of his uncle's Regiment, all of whom, after flatly refusing to believe that this beggar-brat could possibly be the nephew of poor William, had eventually been convinced by the evidence in the packet (which included a daguerreotype of Isobel, whose likeness to her son was startling, and another of Ash seated on Sita's lap and taken in Delhi on his fourth birthday – both sitters having been unhesitatingly identified by Zarin), together with a searching verbal and physical examination of the claimant. Once converted, William's friends could not do enough for the nephew of an officer who had served with the Corps since Hodson built the fort at Mardan, and whom everyone had liked. Though his nephew was not in the least grateful for their efforts on his behalf.

Ash had obeyed his foster-mother's last commands and handed over to the Sahib-log the papers and the money she had given him. Having done so, he would have preferred to live in the lines with Zarin and Awal Shah, and earn his living as a stable boy or a grass-cutter until he was old enough to join the Regiment. But this had not been permitted. Why couldn't people leave him alone? thought Ash resentfully. Why, always and everywhere, must there be dictatorial people who gave him unpalatable orders, restricted his liberty and over-rode his wishes – and others, who at a word from an evil and ambitious woman, were even prepared to hunt him across Hind and take his life, though they had no quarrel with him and he had done them no harm? It wasn't fair!

He had been happy in the bazaars of Gulkote and he had not wanted to leave the city and move to the Hawa Mahal. But he had been given no choice. And now it seemed that he must leave his friends and his homeland and go to his father's country; and once again there was no choice – and no appeal. He had walked into a trap as surely as on the day that he had entered the Hawa Mahal, and it was too late to try and escape from it, for the doors were already closing behind him. Perhaps when he grew up he would be allowed to do as he pleased – though in a world filled with oppression, assassins and interfering busy-bodies, he began to think it unlikely. But at least the Sahibs had promised that when the years of servitude in
Belait
were over, he would be permitted to return to Hind.

Colonel Sam Browne, the Commandant, told him that telegrams had been sent to his father's people, who would send him to school and turn him into a Sahib. Also that if he worked hard and did well in examinations (whatever those were) he would obtain a commission in the army and return to Mardan as an officer of the Guides; and it was that hope, rather than his promise to Sita or his fear of the Rani's men, that prevented Ash from making a break for freedom. That, and the fact that he was to travel to England in the care of a Sahib who was taking home two Indian servants; which meant that he would not be entirely alone and friendless. This last had been largely due to a chance remark of Jemadar Awal Shah's.

‘It is a pity,’ said Awal Shah to his Commanding Officer, ‘that the boy will forget the speech and the ways of this land, for a Sahib who can think and talk as one of us, and pass as either a Pathan or a Punjabi without question, would have made his mark in our Regiment. But in
Belait
he will forget and become as other Sahibs; which will be a great loss.’