The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [272]
Two days later the last of the long column passed through the gorge under the guns of the fort crowning the ridge above it, to pitch their tents in the valley: and within a matter of hours Ash's fears weie fully realized and the Political Officer's confidence proved groundless.
The Rana sent a junior minister to announce that the terms of the marriage contracts drawn up in the previous year with His Highness the Maharajah of Karidkote were, on reflection, adjudged to be unsatisfactory, and the council had therefore decided that they must be re-negotiated on a more realistic scale. If the Sahib and such of the elders who chose to accompany him cared to present themselves at the city palace, the Rana would be pleased to receive them and discuss the matter in more detail, after which they would undoubtedly see the justice of his claims, and the affair would be speedily settled to the satisfaction of all.
The minister sweetened his message with a few fulsome compliments, and having tactfully ignored the Sahib's statement that there was nothing whatever to discuss, set the time of the meeting for the following morning and removed himself with some haste.
‘What did I tell you?’ demanded Ash. The question was not untinged by a certain gloomy satisfaction, for he had not relished the barely concealed accusation of timidity that the Political Officer's strictures on ‘undue and unnecessary caution’ had inferred. Or the angry grumbling in the camp and the reiterated fears of those who had agreed with Kaka-ji that the Rana must not be annoyed.
‘But he cannot do this to us,’ exploded a senior official, finding his voice at long last. ‘The terms were agreed. Everything was settled. He cannot in honour go back on them now.’
‘Can't he?’ returned Ash sceptically. ‘Well, all we can do is wait and see what he has to say before we decide what we can do about it. With luck it may not turn out to be as bad as we think.’
On the following morning Ash, Kaka-ji and Mulraj, attended by a small escort of cavalry, had ridden to the city to meet the Rana.
The ride was not a pleasant one. The unshaded road was little more than a cart-track, inches deep in dust and full of ruts and potholes, and the sun was very hot. The valley must have been a good two miles wide at the point where their camp had been pitched, but nearer the city it narrowed until its sides were less than half that distance apart, the gap between them forming a natural gateway that gave on to a wide plain encircled by hills and containing the life-blood of Bhithor – the great Rani Talab, the ‘Queen's Lake’. It was in the centre of this gap, midway between the two fort-crowned heights that flanked it, that the first Rana had built his capital in the reign of Krishna Deva Raya.
The city had changed very little since then. So little, that had its builders been able to return they would have found themselves on familiar ground, and still felt themselves at home, for here old customs and old ways still prevailed, and the lives of the inhabitants had altered almost as little as the solid sandstone of which their city was built or the jagged outline of the low hills that enclosed the valley. There were still only four gateways in the massive outer wall: the Hathi Pol – the ‘Elephant Gate’ – facing down the length of the valley, the Water Gate that looked eastward across the lake and the open country towards the far hills, and on the north and south, the Mori and the Thakur Gates, both of which faced an almost identical view – a belt of cultivated land three quarters of a mile wide, with beyond it the steep rise of a hillside topped by an ancient fort.
The cultivation gave the city the appearance of a rock standing in a river gorge and splitting the current into two streams: a green river made up of fields where the farmers grew grain and vegetables and sugar-cane,