The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [33]
The transition from warm sunlight to cold shadow, and the eerie echo under the black vault of the roof, served to intensify Ash's unease, and glancing back over his shoulder to where the great gateway framed a view of the city basking comfortably in the heat haze, he was tempted to run. It seemed to him, suddenly, as though he was entering a prison from which he would never be able to escape, and that if he did not run away now, at once, he would lose freedom and friends and happiness and spend his days penned up behind bars like the talking minah that hung in a cage outside the potter's shop. It was a new and troubling thought, and he shivered as though with cold. But it would obviously be no easy task to dodge past so many guards, and it would be humiliating to be caught and dragged into the palace by force. Besides, he was curious to see the inside of the Hawa Mahal: no one he knew had ever been inside it, and it would be something to boast about to his friends. But as for staying there and working for the Yuveraj, he would not even consider it, and if they thought that they could make him they were wrong. He would escape over the walls and go back to the city, and if they followed him, then he and his mother would both run away. The world was wide, and somewhere among the mountains lay their own valley – that safe place where they could live as they pleased.
The tunnel took a sharp turn to the right and came out into a small open courtyard where there were more guards and more ancient bronze cannon. On the far side of it another gateway led into a vast quadrangle where two of the Rajah's elephants rocked at their pickets in the shade of a chenar tree, and a dozen chattering women washed clothes in the green water of a stone tank. Beyond this lay the main bulk of the palace. A fantastic jumble of walls, battlements and wooden balconies, fretted windows, airy turrets and carved galleries – the larger part of it screened from the city below by the outer bastion.
No one knew how old the original fortress was, though legend said that it had defied the armies of Sikundar Dulkhan (Alexander the Great) when that young conqueror swooped down into India from the passes of the north. But a substantial part of the present citadel had been built in the early years of the fifteenth century, by a robber chieftain who required an impregnable stronghold from which he and his followers could sally out to raid the fertile lands beyond the river, and retreat to in time of trouble. In those days it had been known as the Kala Kila, the ‘Black Fort’, not on account of its colour – for it had been built of the same harsh grey stone that formed the towering outcrop of rock upon which it stood – but in reference to its reputation, which was of the darkest. Later, when the territory had fallen to a Rajput adventurer, it had been considerably enlarged, and his son, who built the walled city on the plain below and became the first Rajah of Gulkote, had transformed the Kala Kila into a vast, ornately decorated royal residence which on account of its lofty position he re-named the Hawa Mahal – the ‘Palace of the Winds’.
It was here that the present Rajah lived in dilapidated splendour in a maze of rooms furnished with Persian carpets, dusty hangings shimmering with gold embroidery, and ornaments of jade or beaten silver, set with rubies and raw turquoise.