The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [327]
33
There had been little conversation that night, as all three travellers were tired, and once in bed Ash had slept better than he had for many weeks.
His bed had been put out on a partially screened roof for greater coolness, and awakening in the pearly hot-weather dawn he looked down from the parapet and saw Zarin at his prayers in the garden below. Waiting until these were over, he went down to join him and walk and talk under fruit trees that were full of birds greeting the new day with a clamour of cawing and song. The talk had been mainly of the Regiment, for the subject of Gulkote could keep until Koda Dad was ready to listen, and Zarin had closed the long gap of the past year by bringing Ash up to date on a number of matters that for one reason or another he had not wished to entrust to a bazaar letter-writer. Details concerning his personal life and items of news about various men of Ash's old troop: the possibility of trouble with the Jówaki Afridis over the construction of a cart-road through the Khyber Pass, and the doings of those who had provided an escort for the Padisha's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, when he visited Lahore during the past cold weather.
The Prince, said Zarin, had been so pleased by the bearing and behaviour of the Guides that he had written to his august mother, who had replied by appointing him Honorary Colonel to the Corps, and commanding that in future the Guides should be styled ‘The Queen's Own Corps of Guides' and wear on their colours and appointments the Royal Cypher within the Garter (Zarin's translation of this last would have startled the College of Heralds considerably). By the time they had eaten the morning meal the sun was up, and after they had paid their respects to the lady of the house – who received them seated behind an ancient and much broken chik through which she could be plainly seen, but which preserved, if only technically, the rules of purdah – they were free to seek out Zarin's father.
It was already too hot to be abroad, so the three of them had spent the day in the old, high-ceilinged room that had been allotted to Koda Dad because it was the coolest in the house. Here, protected from the heat by kus-kus tatties, and sitting cross-legged on the uncarpeted floor of polished chunam that was pleasantly cool to the touch, Ash told for the third time the tale of his journey to Bhithor, this time with few evasions, telling it all from the beginning and leaving nothing out – save only that he had lost his heart to the girl who had once been known to all of them as ‘Kairi-Bai’.
Zarin had interrupted the tale with questions and exclamations, but Koda Dad, never a talkative man, had listened in silence, though it was to him rather than to Zarin that Ash spoke. The discovery of Hira Lal's earring had drawn a grunt of surprise from him and the account of Biju Ram's death a grim nod of approval, while a smile had commended Ash's handling of the Rana's attempt at blackmail. But apart from that he had offered no comments, and when at last the tale was ended, he said only: ‘It was an ill day for Gulkote when its Rajah's heart was caught by the beauty of an evil and covetous woman, and many paid for his folly with their lives. Yet for all his faults he was a good man, as I know well. I am sad to hear that he is dead, for he was a good friend to me during the many years that I lived in his shadow: thirty-and-three of them… for we were both young men when we met. Young and strong. And heedless… heedless…’
He sighed deeply and fell silent again, and after a moment or two Ash realized, with an odd sensation of panic, that Koda Dad had fallen into the light sleep of old age. It was only then that he noticed for the first time how many physical changes had come about since their last meeting: the thinness of body that the voluminous Pathan dress had partially disguised, and the many new wrinkles that seamed that familiar face; the curiously fragile appearance of the parchment-coloured skin that had once been so brown and