The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [42]
The existence of that balcony was a secret shared only by Kairi, and its discovery had been a happy accident, for it could not be seen from inside the fortress, being hidden from view by the curves of the Mor Minar. The Mor Minar had been part of the original fort, a guard tower and a look-out, facing the foothills. But both roof and stairway had fallen long ago, and the entrance become blocked by rubble. The balcony was of a later date and had probably been built for the pleasure of some long-dead Rani, for it was no more than a folly, an elegant little pavilion of marble and red sandstone, pierced and carved into the semblance of frozen lace and topped by a hump-backed Hindu dome.
Fragments of wood still adhered to the rusty iron hinges that had once held a door, but the fragile-seeming screens still stood, except where there had once been a window cut in the marble tracery, from which the Rani and her ladies could look out towards the mountains. Here, on the front of the balcony, between the slender arches, there was now only open space and fragments of broken carving, below which the wall dropped for forty feet to meet the scrub and the steep rock faces, that in turn plunged downwards for more than four times that distance before merging into the plateau. There were goat tracks through the scrub, but few humans cared to climb so far; and even had they done so they might well have failed to notice the pavilion, for its outlines were lost against the weather-worn bulk of the Mor Minar.
Ash and Kairi, pursuing a truant marmoset, had clambered over the rubble that choked the ruined tower, and looking up the topless funnel had spied the fugitive half way up it. There must once have been rooms in the tower, but although no part of the floors remained, there were still traces of the stairway that had led up to them: broken stumps of stone, some barely large enough to provide foothold for the marmoset. But where a monkey can go an active child can often follow, and Ash had had plenty of practice on the roof-tops of the city, and possessed an excellent head for heights. Kairi too could climb like a squirrel, and the broken staircase had proved easy enough to negotiate once they had removed the untidy bundles of twigs and egg shells deposited there by generations of owls and jackdaws. They had scrambled up it, and following the marmoset through a doorway, found themselves in a carved and canopied balcony that hung dizzily over empty space, as secure and inaccessible as a swallow's nest.
Ash had been delighted with their find. Here at last was a hidden place to which he could retreat in time of trouble, and from where he could look out across the world and dream of the future – and be alone. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the palace, with its incessant whispers of treachery and intrigue, its cabals and plots and place-seeking, was banished by the clean air that crooned through the marble tracery and kept the little pavilion swept and garnished; and best of all there was no one to dispute his possession of it, for apart from the monkeys and owls, the hill crows and the little yellow-crested bul-buls, no one could have set foot in it for fifty years and by now, in all likelihood, its very existence was forgotten.
Given the choice, Ash would have traded the balcony for permission to visit the city whenever he chose, and had he been given it would not have run away – for Sita's sake, if for nothing else. But deprived of that liberty, it was doubly satisfying to