Far Pavilions (187 page)

There was a lurid glow in the sky above the Bala Hissar, but the houses there, like those in the city, were barred and shuttered; and in darkness – save only for a few lamps in the palace, where the sleepless Amir consulted with his ministers, and the Residency compound where the Mess House still burned with a red glare that rose and fell and flared up again, giving the staring faces of the dead a curious illusion of being alive and aware.

The compound was as silent and deserted as the streets had been, and here too nothing moved except the night wind and the wavering shadows, while the only sound was the steady purr and crackle of the flames, and from somewhere beyond the wall of the citadel, a night-bird crying.

The victorious Afghans had been so occupied with ransacking the buildings and mutilating the bodies of their enemies, that sunset had come upon them before they were aware of it and they had not had time to remove all their own dead. There were still a large number of these lying around the stables and near the entrance to the compound, and it was not too easy to differentiate between them and those jawans who having been Mohammedans, and in many cases Pathans, wore similar clothing. But Wally had been in uniform, and even by that lurid, flickering light it had been easy to pick him out.

He was lying face downward near the gun that he had hoped to capture, his broken sword still in his hand and his head turned a little sideways as though he were asleep. A tall, coltish, brown-haired young man who had celebrated his twenty-third birthday just over two weeks ago…

He had been terribly wounded, but unlike William, whose hacked and almost unrecognizable body lay a few yards away, he had not been mutilated after death, and Ash could only suppose that even his enemies had admired the boy's courage and spared him that customary degradation as a tribute to one who had fought a good fight.

Kneeling beside him, Ash turned him over very gently.

Wally's eyes were closed, and
rigor mortis
had not yet stiffened his long body. His face was begrimed by smoke and black powder and smeared with blood and the furrows of sweat, but apart from a shallow cut on the forehead it was unmarked by wounds. And he was smiling…

Ash smoothed back the dusty, ruffled hair with a gentle hand, and laying him down, stood up and walked over to the barracks, picking his way between the huddled dead and through the gaping archway.

There was a cistern in the courtyard, and having found it he removed his waist-cloth, tore a strip from it and soaking it in the water, went back to Wally to wash away the blood and grime as gently and carefully as though he were afraid that a rough touch might disturb him. When the young, smiling face was clean again, he brushed the dust from the crumpled tunic, set the sword beit straight above the swathed crimson of the Guides' waist-cloth, and hooked up the open collar.

There was nothing he could do to disguise the gaping swordcuts or the dark, clotted stains that surrounded them. But then they were honourable wounds. When he had set all straight, he took Wally's cold hand in his, and sitting beside him, talked to him as though he were still alive: telling him that what he had done would not be forgotten as long as men remembered the Guides, and that he could sleep quietly, for he had earned his rest – and gone to it as he wished to go, leading his men in battle. Telling him that he, Ash, would remember him always and that if he had a son he would call him Walter ‘– though I always said it was a terrible name, didn't I, Wally? Never mind, if he turns out half as well as you, we shall have every reason to be proud of him.’

He talked too of Juli and the new world they were going to build for themselves – the kingdom where strangers would not be regarded with suspicion and no door would ever be locked against them. And of that future that Wally would have no part in, except as an unfading memory of youth and laughter and unquenchable courage. ‘We had a lot of good times together, didn't we?’ said Ash. ‘It's good to remember that…’

He had taken no account of the passing time and had no idea of how quickly it had gone. He had come to the Residency with the intention of burning or burying Wally's body so that it would not be left to rot in the sun or be torn and disfigured by kites and carrion crows, but now he realized that he could not do this; the ground was too hard for him to dig a grave in it single-handed and the Residency was still burning far too fiercely to make it feasible for him to carry Wally's body into it without being badly burned himself – or possibly overcome by heat and smoke.

Besides, if the body were to disappear, rumours might spread that the Lieutenant-Sahib had not been killed after all but had recovered sufficiently to escape from the compound during the night, and must be hiding somewhere; which would certainly ensure a house-to-house search, and the possible death of a number of innocent people. Anyway, Wally would not know or care what happened to his body now that he had discarded it.

Ash laid down the quiet hand, and getting to his feet, stooped and lifted Wally from the ground, and carrying him to the gun, laid him on it, placing him carefully so that he should not fall. He had led three charges in an effort to take that gun, so it was only right that it should provide him with a bier on which he could lie in state; and when he was found there, those who came would only think that one of their number had placed him there for the same reason that he had been spared mutilation – in recognition of gallantry.

‘Goodbye, old fellow,’ said Ash quietly. ‘Sleep well!’

He lifted his hand in a gesture of farewell, and it was only as he turned away that he noticed that the stars had begun to pale, and knew that the moon must be rising. He had not realized that so much time had passed since he came into the compound to look for Wally, or that he had stayed far longer than he intended. Juli and Gul Baz would be waiting for him, and wondering if he had come to any harm; and Juli would think –

Ash began to run, and reaching the shadows of the houses around the Arsenal, fled through the network of narrow alleyways and streets to where the Shah Shahie Gate, still unguarded, gaped on a view of the valley and hills of Kabul lying grey in the waning starlight and the first rays of the rising moon.

Anjuli and Gul Baz had been waiting for him in the shelter of a clump of trees by the roadside. But though they had waited there for more than an hour in a growing fever of fear and anxiety, they asked no questions; for which Ash was more grateful than for anything else that either of them could have done for him.

He could not kiss Juli because she was wearing a bourka, but he put his arms about her and held her close for a brief moment, before turning aside to change quickly into the clothes that Gul Baz had ready for him. It would not do to travel as a scribe, and when he mounted one of the ponies a few minutes later he was to all outward appearances an Afridi, complete with rifle, bandolier and tulwar, and the wicked razor-edged knife that is carried by all men of Afghanistan.

‘I am ready,’ said Ash, ‘let us go. We have a long way to travel before dawn, and I can smell the morning.’

They rode out together from the shadows of the trees, leaving the Bala Hissar and the glowing torch of the burning Residency behind them, and spurred away across the flat lands towards the mountains…

And it may even be that they found their Kingdom.

NOTES FOR THE CURIOUS

The following notes are for the benefit of those readers who (in common with the author) like to know how much of a historical novel is true and how much is pure fiction.

Ash is a fictional character but the Guides and his fellow-officers in that Corps are not, and everything that they do in this book, with a few obvious exceptions, is true. The affair of the stolen carbines and their recovery actually happened; as did the incident of the sentry who fired at the rider of a supposedly stolen horse, the latter story being told me by my father, who himself heard the verdict given. It was my father who explained the Trinity to a group of jawans with the aid of a greasy tin and three drops of water, and he too failed his written language paper for the reason attributed to Ash, though unlike Ash he sat for the examination again, made two deliberate errors, and passed with flying colours.

Walter Hamilton did arrive in Rawalpindi in the autumn of 1874 and joined the Guides in 1876; and the poem is one of his own. A lone British officer (not in the Guides) actually did escort a little Rajput prince and his two sisters to their respective weddings, together with a far larger bridal camp than the one I have described – his included 2,000 elephants and ‘about 3,000 camels' for a start. When they finally arrived in the state where the boy was to be married, its ruler, the bride's uncle, behaved in the same manner as my fictitious Rana of Bhithor, and the officer dealt with the situation exactly as Ash did. The tale of the suttee is also fiction based on fact, as it is known that at least one Englishman rescued a widow from her husband's pyre, and subsequently married her.

All the Second Afghan War material is on record (except for Ash's involvement in it). Much of the information supplied to Cavagnari by ‘Akbar' was in fact supplied by an ‘unknown' spy or spies. Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem (later set to music) about the disaster that overtook the 10th Hussars on the eve of the Battle of Fatehabad; it is called ‘Ford o' Kabul River’, and has a most haunting tune. Wigram Battye's sowars did refuse to allow the stretcher-bearers to take his body back to Jalalabad, but insisted on carrying it themselves on a bier formed from cavalry lances; and when the British army pulled out of Afghanistan after the signing of the Treaty of Gandamak, his coffin was exhumed and sent by raft to India through unknown territory, where it was ambushed by tribesmen who killed several of the escort. He lies buried in the Old Cemetery at Mardan, and alongside him is the grave of his brother Fred, killed sixteen years later leading the Guides Infantry into battle during the Chitral Relief Expedition.

As for the defence of the Kabul Residency, very little is known about it, and that little is mostly based on hearsay – the evidence of those messengers who were sent to beg help from the Amir (only one of whom, the Shahzada Taimus, was actually involved in the fighting), together with a sepoy who was in the city buying flour when the attack came, and the three sowars who were out with the grass-cutters. No one else survived. The defenders of the Residency died to the last man, as is described in Henry Newbolt's poem ‘The Guides at Kabul’. All other accounts of the siege were collected over a month later from Afghans, few of whom would admit to being eyewitnesses, but who described what friends or acquaintances had, so they said, told them. For this reason I have had to make up my own mind about what really happened and fight the battle according to my own ideas – helped by the fact that the collected accounts tally to a certain extent; at least as to the order in which the various events took place.

There is a story that Walter's body was found next morning laid out on one of the guns that he tried to capture, and I have made use of it. There were also less pleasant stories, but as none of the bodies was ever found, no one knows what was done to them; except that Cavagnari's must have been burned in the Residency.

Ash's host in Kabul, the Sirdar, was a real person, and his conversations with the Envoy are on record; but as Zarin and Awal Shah are fictional characters I could not include either in the Escort, because the name of every Guide who accompanied the Envoy to Kabul is known, and the names of those who died there are engraved on the Cavagnari Arch at Mardan, where they can be seen to this day.

Finally, I would like to add that many British women and children were saved from massacre and given refuge by kindly Indians at the time of the Mutiny; and for years afterwards stories would crop up about a child rescued in this manner being brought up to think that it was a native of the country. Perhaps the best known of these tales is the one about the youngest daughter of General Wheeler of Cawnpore, who was supposed to have been discovered in the Zenana of a man who had either saved or abducted her, and when found showed no desire at all to be rescued! There are several versions of this tale, and probably none are true: but there is no reason to suppose that one or two children, orphaned during the Mutiny, did not grow up, and end their days believing that they were Indian by blood. And the story of the sepoy who accepted a drink from a little goatherd, which is also true, will be well known to many ex-Indian Army officers who were given their tale to translate either into or out of the vernacular by their munshis for their language exams.

GLOSSARY

Achkan
tight-fitting three-quarter-length coat

‘
Afsos!
’ ‘Sorrow!’; ‘How sad!’

Angrezi
English; Englishman

Angrezi-log
English people

Ayah
child's nurse

Baba
baby; young child

Baba-log
children

Badshahi
royal

Bai
brother

Barat
friends of the bridegroom

Begum
Mohammedan lady

Belait
England

Beshak
without doubt

Beta
son

‘
Be-wakufi!
’ ‘Stupidity’; ‘Nonsense!’

Bheesti
water-carrier

Bhoosa
straw

Bibi-gurh
women's house

Bourka
one-piece head-to-heels cloak, with small square of coarse net to see through

Boxwallah
European trader

Budmarsh
rascal; bad man

Burra khana
big dinner-party

Burra-Sahib
great man; top man

Cha-cha
uncle

Charpoy
bed (usually string or webbing)

Chatti
large earthenware water-pot

Chik
sun-blind made of split cane

Chirag
small earthenware oil lamp, used in festivals

Chokra
boy