The Lotus and the Wind (20 page)

‘So much I felt in my bones, even through this fat. I was like a young doe.’

‘Our enemies killed him near Attock on the borders of Ind, where he went with an important message. He died. He was true to his salt. What can you tell me that he--now--is no longer able to?’

‘Little. He was afraid when he went, so he talked to me. He could not say much. What would I understand? But he did say that much money, in gold, was reaching certain people here, from the west.’

‘From the west? Are you sure?’

‘Yes. From Herat and Meshed. He didn’t tell me why; I think he did not know. That was all. I must go. My brother will kill me if he finds me here.’

‘Listen. I’ll stay a week or so. We’ll get a chance to talk again. I have gold for you, for one thing, a pension from my government.’

‘Ah, gold. He deserved it. But he is dead. That I won’t show to my brother.’ She rose creakingly upright.

He said, ‘Wait. Whom used he to meet and talk with most?’

‘Zarfaraz the banker and Gol Mohamed the trader in the Narrow Street.’

‘I’ll remember.’

She slipped out. He fell asleep at once.

Late the following afternoon, leaving Jagbir behind in the gloomy house, he strolled into the town. In return for a penny a crippled beggar answered his languid question--‘Where, O beloved of Allah, might one expect to find Gol Mohamed the trader at this hour?’ Robin found the teashop indicated, squatted down, and ordered tea. Only one other customer was there. After a suitable time Robin said that this was a bigger town than Gharghara, in Hazarajat, where he came from. There followed, between long intervals of tea-sipping silence, various polite questions from the other customer, among them one which would have exposed

Robin’s ignorance of Gharghara--if he had not indeed lived there for a considerable time. Robin became more alert. After another hour, as the sun was setting, he said, ‘I must be going. Oh, yes, there is one small matter which had all but escaped me in my pleasure at conversing with you. Do you happen to know where Selim Beg is now, Selim Beg the Learned One?’

The other chewed on a cardamom seed, spat it out, and popped another into his mouth. ‘No.’

Robin shrugged. ‘He owes me a few rupees. Not enough to inconvenience him.’

A long pause. Still gazing out into the street, Gol Mohamed said, ‘I used to see him once or twice. He was a discreet man. He left town some months ago, I hear. I don’t know where he went. Why should I?’ Three minutes’ silence. ‘Some men from the west had business with him. Also a matter of debt, strangely. They were looking for him a day or two after he left.’ Silence again. ‘He seems to have had more debts than one suspected.’

Robin folded his robe about him and returned slowly to Tartar Street, leaving the other drinking tea and chewing cardamom seeds exactly as when they had met two hours earlier.

The following evening at the same hour Robin went to the shop of Zarfaraz the banker. The banker sat on a carpet on a low wooden dais at the far end of his shop. His turban was pushed to the back of his head, displaying his stubbly grey hair. His grey beard wagged as he muttered to himself, and the beads of an abacus between his knees clicked like shuttles under his fingers. An Uzbeg in loose robes and a sheepskin hat, sweating profusely, squatted with a blunderbuss in the front of the shop.

From the step Robin said, ‘Peace be with you, friend. Can you spare time for a little business?’

The banker looked at him over the tops of his spectacles, and after a time nodded imperceptibly. As Robin squatted near him, the old man said, ‘You are Khussro, to whom Selim Beg owes a few rupees?’

Robin said, ‘Yes. But I have come to ask if you will lend me some money.’

‘How much and what for?’ The banker continued working on the abacus, his fingers flicking the beads with such speed that the whole contraption rattled.

‘Two thousand. For horse-trading. Until the end of the season. At any reasonable rate of usury.’

The banker leaned forward and wrote in a ledger that lay open on the mat in front of him. ‘Where are you going to trade?’

Robin paused to emphasize his answer. ‘North.’

‘What security?’

‘Note of hand.’

The old man shook his head and glanced up for the first time in some minutes. ‘Not a hope.’ He added as an afterthought, ‘Horses are risky unless you know the ropes.’ He turned the ledger accidentally with his foot, and Robin saw the word ‘west’ written, the ink still wet on it. The old man picked up the book. ‘I’m getting old, can’t add now.’ He crossed out the word so that it was illegible and wrote a set of figures under it.

Robin said, ‘I know my business, Zarfaraz. One other thing--do
you
happen to know where Selim Beg is? The money he owes me might be enough to finance my trip if I am careful.’

The banker said, ‘I don’t know. And if I did I wouldn’t put his creditors on his trail. He doesn’t owe me anything. I was his friend--like Gol Mohamed the trader and Yakub the jeweller.’

Robin rose, saying carelessly, ‘He was a friend of mine too. Not all debts can be paid in rupees.’ He strolled back down the street, looking at the shopmen’s wares as he went. It did not take him long to find the shop of Yakub the jeweller. He paused there and began to examine the cheap scarabs, trinkets, and semi-precious stones on a tray near the front of the shop. He picked one up at random and said, ‘How much is this?’

The wizened jeweller leaned forward and peered myopically at the stone, his head close to Robin’s. ‘Midnight. Here,’ he mumbled.

Robin held the stone between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, turning it this way and that to catch its feeble lights. ‘That! For this trash?’

The passers-by pressed close but saw only the familiar scene, a bargain being struck. The jeweller shook his head mournfully and said, ‘The back door. Blue.’

Robin said, ‘Half that, and I might think about it.’ Yakub gesticulated and whined but when Robin put down a coin he took it, bit it, and hid it away in his belt. Robin moved on, the glass bauble in his hand. He circled around the bazaar until he found the alley behind the shops and in it noted Yakub’s blue-painted back door. When he reached the house he called for Jagbir and warned him to be ready at a quarter to twelve.

They slipped out of the house a few minutes before midnight and walked purposefully, like men on their way to an assignation, through the bazaar. The voices of singing harlots sounded muffled and nasal from the boarded upper storeys. When they came to the blue door Jagbir scratched it with his nails, and it was opened at once from inside. The shadowy figure of Yakub started back in the passageway, whining fearfully, ‘Who are you? Spare me!’ Jagbir stood aside, and Robin entered, closing the door behind him. To Yakub he whispered, ‘Don’t bolt it. My man stays outside.’

‘Oh, is that who it is? I was afraid--’

‘Well, hurry up, what have you got to tell me?’

‘I know something, sahib-bahadur.’

‘I am Khussro of Gharghara.’

‘Sahib, I was a jeweller for ten years in Delhi, in the Chandni Chowk. You know it?’

‘No.’

‘I was there during the Great Mutiny. Many English sahibs had to pretend at that time that they were something else. I can tell an English sahib day or night, deaf and blindfolded.’

‘You talk too much. What do you have to say?’

‘Don’t be afraid, though. None of these oafs would know you in a thousand years for what you are. Selim Beg went east. He was pursued, from the west.’

‘Why? Who by?’

‘A week before he left a traveller happened to tell me that the Russians were building a new town in the Akkal oasis on the edge of the Kara Kum, north of the mountains from Meshed. I asked myself why. I told Selim Beg. Perhaps he was taking that news east.’

‘Perhaps.’ The government of India had knowledge of the new town. It was not north of Balkh, but west, and it could not have anything to do with horses. It would probably turn out to be a station or depot of some kind on the railway that the Russians had just started building south-eastward from the Caspian Sea at Krasnovodsk. Robin said, ‘Do you know of anything to do with horses that Selim Beg was interested in?’

‘Horses? No, sahib. There would be a lot of camels around the new town, but horses.. .’ Robin felt his shrug.

‘The north, then? All this talk is of the west. Did Selim Beg mention the north? Did he go north before that last trip?’

Again the shrug. ‘The north? No.’

Robin paid him, slipped out, and returned to the house. He spent two more days in the same fashion, asking after Selim Beg, listening, inquiring, but found nothing further. The next evening at supper Selim Beg’s widow began to upbraid Jagbir over his behaviour with the servant girl. The girl was squatting in the women’s corner beside her but took no notice of what was being said. Neither did Jagbir. At last the widow directed her grumbling at Robin. ‘Lord, please beat that little Tartar savage of yours. Or tell him to keep away from the girl. When he’s here she does no work.’

Robin said, ‘Have you tried telling the girl to keep away from him?’

‘Tried?’ She was grumbling but laughing too. She had given up all pretence of keeping herself veiled in their presence. Glancing over his shoulder at her, Robin saw by the light of the smoky wick that her eyes were twinkling. It was the first time since she’d heard of Selim Beg’s death that she had shaken off, even for a minute, her pressing melancholy. Whatever Jagbir did, someone seemed to benefit. She went on shrilly. ‘Tried! I’ve beaten her until her little bottom is black and blue. She doesn’t mind as long as that--that young ram bruises the other side for her. Then she sleeps until midday, sleeps on her feet while she’s supposed to be working! Working!’

Jagbir ate, said nothing, and maintained intact the round emptiness of his expression. The girl giggled foolishly.

After the meal Robin wondered whether he should speak to Jagbir but decided not to. To-morrow or the next day they must leave Balkh. Jagbir took no more thought for the morrow than a young stag. He stole with one hand and gave back double value with the other. He had an instinct for life, which everyone understood. If Robin himself possessed it, his life with Anne would be happy, whatever the . . . But he must put young Savage to work on the imperial problems confronting him.

It was not often that the two parts of himself interfered with each other. When they did it always came about in the same way--that Robin broke into the deliberations or actions of Savage, as though to say, ‘Let me help. I am more concerned in this than you realize. I alone can lead you to a solution.’ It was not wholly a fanciful idea. In the train Hayling had asked him if he knew why he, particularly, had been chosen for this work. He had not known. He had thought once that Hayling might have got the job for him on Anne’s behalf--so that he, Robin, could erase the stigma of cowardice from his reputation and so make Anne’s life more comfortable. But he had soon realized that Hayling could not afford to indulge in such gestures, so he was glad when, there in the train, Hayling answered his own question. Hayling had spoken carefully, keeping his good eye fixed on Robin. ‘You have a feel, an affinity, for emptiness. If I am not mistaken, you are looking for something in emptiness--in other words, in nothing. You are unhappy because you think you might not find it, and unhappy--for other people’s sakes--because you think you might. The part of Asia where the solution of our problem lies consists of emptiness. Therefore I feel that the intrusion of the world there, however secret, however carefully concealed, will be more apparent to you than to others. Any Russian plans will involve the intrusion of the world. The desert and the mountains will look different, feel different--to you, not to me.’

Robin had nodded. Hayling’s single eye saw a long way, and his single hand had a firm grasp. What Hayling did not say, but what he must also know, was that his reasoning held good in reverse. Because the work lay in the wilderness, Robin must enter the wilderness. In finding a solution to the public problem he might find a solution to his personal mystery.

Soon after supper Robin went to his room, lay down on the rug, folded his hands on his chest, and closed his eyes. The time had come to move.

Where?

In Asia, England and Russia faced each other across land that was like a broad, long, rough-hewn table. The prize was India, the great diamond in England’s grasp at the eastern end of the table. The land was the deserts of Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkestan. For the most part there were no metalled roads, no rivers, and few people. Mountain ranges rose from the deserts, and the ruins of ancient civilizations dotted the oases. Geological chance had built a protective mountain barrier--the Karakorams, the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush--around the northern and western faces of India. England had no desire to advance from India against Russia, because whatever she took would be beyond the range of her sea power to hold. Already the landlocked Amir of Bukhara had asked Queen Victoria’s permission to join the British Empire and had been regretfully refused.

Russia did desire to advance, and what she took she could, since the advent of railways, hold and expand.