The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [487]
The Guides and matters military obviously filled his thoughts to the exclusion of all else, and the gay, careless and largely one-sided love affairs of the 'Pindi days that had inspired so much bad verse were apparently a thing of the past. If Wally wrote poems now, thought Ash, they would not be addressed to some damsel's blue eyes, but would probably be concerned with such abstract subjects as Patriotism or Immortality. And the next time he fell in love it would be for ever: he would marry the girl and settle down and raise a family.
But that would not be for a long while yet. Because it was plain that at present he was in love with the Guides and with the romance of Empire – the warring tribesmen and the wild Khyber hills, the swift night marches and the sudden dawn attack on some fortified stronghold across the Border, and the discipline and comradeship of life in a Corps that had never known what it was like to live on a peace-time footing, but had always been ready to march at a moment's notice should trouble flare up on that perennially inflammable Frontier.
Wally did not ask what Ash had been doing with himself during his term of attachment to Roper's Horse; the routine activities of a regiment stationed in some peaceful spot such as Ahmadabad being of little interest to either of them; and as Ash had written reasonably often (and most of his letters had contained some reference to the dullness of army life in the peaceful peninsula) Wally concentrated on the more enlivening topic of the Frontier in general and the Guides in particular. Only when that subject had been covered fairly exhaustively did he demand to know why Ash was masquerading in this outfit, and what had possessed him to waste a valuable leave sweating up the Indus on a dundhi instead of going on trek as they had planned, or even coming fishing in the Kangan Valley?
‘I asked Gul Baz what you'd been up to,’ said Wally, ‘but all he would say was that “doubtless the Sahib had good reasons for his actions and would explain them to me himself”. Well, it's waiting for an explanation I am, ye spalpeen, and if you're wishful to be forgiven, it had better be a good one.’
It's a long story,’ Ash warned him.
‘We've got all day,’ returned Wally comfortably, and, rolling his coat into a ball to make a pillow, he lay down in the shade and prepared to listen. ‘Carry on, Sergeant-Major. You have our ear.’
The story as told to Wally had taken rather longer to tell than the one Zarin had heard on the previous day, for Zarin had known Kairi-Bai and so did not need to be told anything of her background or people, or her childish attachment to the boy, Ashok. But when Ash had first told Wally of his youth in Gulkote he had not thought to mention Kairi-Bai, and later he had purposely concealed the fact that the State of Karidkote, whose princesses he had been charged with escorting to Bhithor, was the same place under a different name. So there was more that had to be told now; and after the first two minutes Wally was no longer lying lazily on his back, but sitting bolt upright, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
Zarin had listened to that tale without any noticeable change of expression, but it was not so with Wally; he had never been adept at concealing his emotions, and now his handsome, mobile face betrayed his thoughts as clearly as though they had been written there in capital letters; and reading them Ash realized that he had been wrong in thinking that Wally had not changed.
The old Wally would have been enthralled by it and his sympathies would all have been with Ash and the sad little Princess of Gulkote who, like the heroine of a fairy-tale, had suffered much at the hands of a wicked stepmother and a jealous half-sister. But the present Wally had acquired new