The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [120]
The four men met some fifty yards from the mound and stood talking together for several minutes. Presently they squatted down on their hunkers to continue the conversation in more comfort, and Ash saw the flash of flint on tinder as a hookah was lit and passed round. They were too far away for him to be able to catch more than a faint murmur of voices and an occasional augh, yet he knew that if he attempted to leave they would see him, and he did not think they would take at all kindly to the idea that they had been spied upon. The very fact that they had chosen to meet at such an hour and in such a place was a clear indication that their business was not one they wished to advertise, and in the circumstances it seemed safer to stay where he was.
He had stayed there for the better part of an hour, becoming colder and crosser with every passing minute, and cursing himself for being such a fool as to indulge in nocturnal rambles. But at last the long wait was over and the four rose to their feet and went their separate ways: three of them heading back towards the hills while the fourth man returned the way he had come, passing again within a few feet of the mound. This time the moon was full on his face instead of behind him, but he had wrapped the loose end of his headcloth about his mouth and chin so that only a hawk-like nose and a pair of deep-set eyes were visible. Yet despite this, something about him struck Ash as familiar. The man was someone he knew: he was quite certain of that, though he did not know why he should be; but before he had time to think it out the man had passed him and gone.
Ash waited for a moment or two before turning to peer cautiously around the boulders and watch the tall figure hurrying away in the direction of Mardan, and only when he could see it no longer did he get to his feet, cramped and cold and with all thoughts of Belinda driven out of his head, and set out on the long walk homeward to the fort.
Looking back on it next morning in the brilliant light of a blue and gold autumn day, the incident lost the sinister overtones that moonlight had lent it, and appeared singularly innocuous. The four men had probably only met to discuss some urgent matter of purely tribal interest, and if they preferred to do so by night that was their affair. Ash put the whole thing out of his mind, and would probably never have thought of it again but for a chance encounter in the dusk some six days later…
There had been no polo on that particular evening, so he had taken a gun and gone after partridge in the scrub-land along the river, and returning shortly after sunset he met a man on the cantonment road by the cavalry lines: a sowar of his own squadron. The light was fading fast and it was only when they were almost abreast that Ash recognized him. Returning the man's salute, he walked on, and then stopped and turned, checked by a sudden memory. It was partly the man's gait – he had a trick of hitching one shoulder very slightly to match his stride. But there was something else: an old scar that divided his right eyebrow into two and that Ash had seen, without realizing it, on the upper part of a face glimpsed briefly in bright moonlight.
‘Dilasah Khan.’
‘Sahib?’ The man turned and came back. He was an Afridi-Pathan, and his tribe was one of many who in theory owe allegiance to the Amir of Afghanistan, but in practice acknowledge no law save their own. Recalling this, it occurred to Ash that the men Dilasah Khan had gone out to meet were almost certainly kinsmen bringing him news from his village, and that in all probability it concerned some blood-feud with a neighbouring tribe, one or more of whose members might be serving with him in the Guides.
British territory was held to be neutral ground and no blood-feud might be carried into it. But one step beyond the Border things were different, and Dilasah's fellow tribesmen might not wish to be tracked there. In any case, he had not been breaking the law, so it was hardly fair, thought Ash, to catechize him about