The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [152]
‘And all this,’ said the Garrison Commander, summing up, ‘because the poor devil had once, when crazed with wounds and thirst and at his last gasp, accepted a cup of milk from the hands of a child who might possibly have been an “untouchable”. Apparently he ought to have preferred death to the remote possibility of defilement. Can you beat it? And I assure you that the story is true, because a cousin of mine had it from the sepoy himself. Just shows you what we're up against in this country. But I suppose you've found that out for yourself by now.’
Ash had found it out many years ago. But he refrained from saying so and merely said that he thought that in these matters a fanatical regard for the letter-of-the-law and an obsessive terror of pollution was, in general, confined to the priests (who benefited greatly from it) and to the middle classes, both upper and lower. The nobility tended to be less hag-ridden by it, while royalty, secure in the knowledge of their own superiority over men of lesser birth, usually felt free to stretch the rules to suit themselves – fortified no doubt by the knowledge that if they overstepped the mark they could well afford to pay the Brahmins to put them right again with the gods. ‘It isn't so much that they are more broad-minded,’ said Ash, ‘but they are firm believers in the Divine Right of Kings; which is not surprising when one thinks that a number of the princely houses claim to be descended from a god – or from the sun or the moon. If you believe that, you can't really feel that you are quite like other men, so you can afford to do things that people with less exalted ancestors wouldn't dare do. Not that the great are irreligious – far from it. They can be just as devout. But possibly less bigoted.’
‘You may be right,’ acknowledged the Garrison Commander. ‘But then I have to admit that I don't know any of the ruling princes. Have some more port?’
The conversation had switched to pig-sticking and horses, and Ash had not returned to his tent until well after midnight.
The following morning had dawned wet and windy, so that he was able to sleep late, for under such conditions the camp took longer than usual to get on the move. And because of the weather, he again had little opportunity to take note of his fellow-travellers, who unlike himself were shrouded and unidentifiable under cloaks or blankets worn to keep out the wet. Not that this worried him, as there would be plenty of time later on, and he was more than content to jog along in silence; even the discomfort of spending the day in a damp saddle, head down against a gusty wind that tugged at his sodden cloak and drove the rain into his eyes, being infinitely preferable to being tied to an office desk in Rawalpindi. The almost total lack of paper-work was, in his opinion, one of the main advantages of this present assignment, another being that any problems that arose were likely to be familiar ones, differing only in degree from those that cropped up frequently at regimental durbars, and just as easily dealt with.
But in this he was mistaken, for that self-same evening he was to come up against one that was not only unfamiliar, but very difficult to deal with. And, potentially, extremely dangerous.
The fact that he was entirely unprepared for it was largely his own fault, though insufficient consultation between Army Headquarters in Rawalpindi and the Commandant of the Corps of Guides, together with inadequate briefing by the Political Department and the illness of the District Officer, could also be held responsible. But it was Ash's original attitude to his appointment – that disgusted dismissal of it as a mere matter of playing sheep-dog and chaperone to ‘a pair of dowds and a parcel of squealing women’ – that had led him into the old error of his early school-days: neglecting to do his homework.
He had no one to blame but himself, since he had, quite simply, not bothered