The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [41]
But in this last they were wrong. Lalji still trusted him (though he would have found it hard to explain why) and he had no intention of letting him go. The fate of Tuku and the violence that followed it were never referred to again, but Ash soon discovered that Lalji's threat to prevent his leaving the palace had not been an idle one. There was only one gate into the palace, the Badshai Darwaza: and after that day he could no longer go through it alone but only, on occasions, in the company of selected servants or officials, who saw to it that he did not stray off on his own or fail to return with them.
‘There is an order,’ said the sentries blandly, and turned him back. It was the same the next day and every day, and when Ash questioned Lalji, the boy had countered by saying: ‘Why should you wish to leave? Are you not comfortable here? If there is anything you lack you have only to tell Ram Dass, and he will send out for it. There is no need for you to go to the bazaars.’
‘But I only wish to see my friends,’ protested Ash.
‘Am I not your friend?’ asked the Yuveraj.
There was no answer to that, and Ash never knew who had given the order that he was not to be allowed to leave: the Rajah, or Lalji himself (who said he had not, but was not to be trusted), or perhaps Janoo-Bai, for reasons of her own? But whoever it was, the order was never rescinded, and he was always aware of it. He was a prisoner in the fortress, though he was allowed to go more or less where he chose inside the walls, and as the Hawa Mahal covered a very large area, he could hardly be considered as closely confined. Nor was he friendless, for he had made two good friends in the palace that year, and found at least one ally among the members of Lalji's suite.
Nevertheless, he felt the loss of his liberty keenly, for from the walls and the half-ruined towers and wooden pavilions that crowned them, he could see the world laid out before him like a coloured map, beckoning towards freedom and the far horizons. To the south-west lay the city, with beyond it the wide stretch of the plateau – its far rim sloping steeply down to the river and the rich land of the Punjab, so that sometimes, on clear days, one could even see the plains. But he seldom faced that way, for northward lay the foothills, and behind them, spanning the horizon from east to west, were the true hills and the vast, serrated massif of the Dur Khaima, beautiful and mysterious, robed in forests of rhododendron and deodar and crowned with snow.
Ash did not know that he had been born within sight of those snows, or that he had spent his earliest years among the high Himalayas, falling asleep to the sight of them rose-dyed by the sunset or silver under the moon, and waking to see them turn from apricot and amber to dazzling white in the full blaze of the morning. They were part of his subconscious mind, because once, long ago, he had known them by heart as other children know the frieze painted on a nursery wall. But looking at them now, he felt sure that somewhere in the folds of those mountains lay the valley that Sita used to speak of at bedtime: their own valley. That safe hidden place that they would one day reach by long marches over hill-roads and through passes where the wind shrieked between black rocks and green glaciers, and the cold glare of snowfields blinded the eyes.
Sita seldom spoke of their valley now; she was too busy during the daytime, and Ash slept in the Yuveraj's quarters at night. But the old bedtime story