The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [492]
Ash added that in his opinion, it was perhaps not so strange that a city reputedly founded by the world's first murderer should have a reputation for treachery and violence; or that its rulers should have been faithful to the tradition of Cain, and indulged in murder and fratricide. The past history of the Amirs being one long tale of bloodshed: fathers killing their sons, sons plotting against their fathers and each other, and uncles disposing of their nephews. ‘It's a grisly tale, and if it's true that ghosts are the unquiet spirits of people who died terrible deaths – and that there are such things as ghosts – then Kabul must be full of them. It's a haunted place, and I hope I never see it again.’
‘Well, you will if there's war,’ observed Wally, ‘because the Guides will be in it so they will.’
‘True – if there is a war. But speaking for myself…’ the sentence ended in a yawn, and Ash settled himself back in a crotch among the tree roots and closed his eyes against the glaring day, and presently, feeling relaxed and peaceful because he and Wally were together again, he fell asleep.
Wally sat watching him for a long time, seeing the changes that he had missed to begin with, and other things that he had never bothered to notice before: the vulnerability of that thin, reckless face, the sensitive mouth that accorded so ill with the firm obstinate chin, and the purposeful line of the black eyebrows that were at odds with a brow and temples that would have better befitted a poet or a dreamer than a soldier. It was a face at war with itself, beautifully modelled and yet somehow lacking cohesion. And it seemed to Wally that, in spite of the deep unyouthful lines that scored it and the faint scar of that old wound, the sleeper, in some ways, had not really grown up. He still saw things as wrong or right, good or bad, and fair or unfair – as children did, before they learned better. He still thought that he could do something to alter them…
All at once Wally felt deeply sorry for his friend, who thought that because a thing was ‘unfair’ it was wrong and ought to be changed, and who, being unable to look at any problem either from a strictly European or a wholly Asiatic standpoint, was deprived of the comforting armour of national prejudice and left with no defence against the regional bigotries of East and West.
Ash, like his father Hilary, was a civilized and liberal-minded man with an interested and inquiring mind. But unlike Hilary, he had never grasped that the average mind is neither liberal or inquiring, but is in the main intolerant of any attitudes except its own firmly entrenched ones. He had his own gods, but they were neither Christian nor pagan. And he was not and never had been the dashing, romantic and wholly admirable hero of Wally's early imaginings, but was as fallible as the next man – and because of his unorthodox beginnings, possibly more prone to error than most. But he was still Ash, and no one, not even Wigram, could ever take his place in Wally's affections. A hoopoe flew down and began to probe for insects in the hard-packed earth, and Wally watched it idly for a moment or two before following Ash's example and drifting off into sleep.
By the time they awoke the sun was well down