The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [579]
William was back within fifteen minutes. The story, he reported, was unfortunately true. It had not only been vouched for by several of the Residency servants, but by two grass-cutters and a dozen men of the escort, including Jemadar Jiwand Singh of the Guides Cavalry and Havildar Hassan of the infantry.
‘Why was I not informed of this before?’ demanded Cavagnari, white with rage. ‘By God, I'll have those men disciplined! They should have reported it at once, if not to me, then to Hamilton or Kelly, or to you. And if young Hamilton knew, and did not tell me – Tell him I wish to speak to him immediately.’
‘I don't think he's here at the moment, sir. I believe he went out about an hour ago.’
‘Then send him to me the minute he comes back. He has no right to slip off without letting me know. Where the devil has he gone?’
I'm afraid I've no idea, sir,’ said William woodenly.
‘Then you should have. I will not have my officers leaving the Residency whenever they think fit. They ought to have more sense than to go jaunting about the city at a time like this. Not that I believe…’
He left the sentence unfinished and dismissing William with a curt gesture, sat scowling into the middle-distance and jerking at his beard with lean, angry fingers.
But Wally was not jaunting about the city. He had ridden out to see Ash, whom he had arranged to meet on the hillside to the south of Kabul where the Emperor Barbur lies buried. For it was the eighteenth of August and his birthday: he was twenty-three.
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The last resting place of Barbur – ‘Barbur the Tiger’, who had seized the Land of Cain only a few years after Columbus discovered America, and gone on to conquer India and establish an imperial dynasty that had lasted into Ash's own life-time – was in a walled garden on the slope of a hill to the south-west of the Shere Dawaza.
The spot had been known in Barbur's day as ‘The Place of Footsteps’, and it had been a favourite haunt of his, so much so that though he had died far away in India, at Agra, he had left instructions that his body was to be brought back there for burial. This his widow, Bibi Mubarika, had done, travelling to Agra to claim her husband's body and take it back through the passes to Kabul.
Nowadays the garden was known as ‘The Place of Barbur's Grave’, and few people visited it at this season, for Ramadan, the month of fasting, had begun. But as it was regarded as a pleasure park, no one would think it odd that the young Sahib who commanded the foreign Envoy's Indian escort should choose to visit such a historic spot, or that once there he should fall into conversation with one of the local sight-seers. In fact, Ash and Wally had the garden to themselves, for though the day had been sultry and overcast, no rain had fallen as yet, and the hot wind that herded the sluggish clouds across the valley was stirring up enough dust to keep all sensible Kabulis indoors.
A little stream in a formal channel flowed past the worn slab of marble and the ruined fragments of a pavilion that marked the great man's grave, and the wind strewed the water with fallen leaves and sent eddies of dust whirling between the trees and flowering shrubs, and through the carved wooden arches of a small memorial mosque – an open-sided, unpretentious building that like Barbur's tomb was sadly in need of repair. There had been only one devotee there that day, and it was not until he rose and came out that Wally realized it was Ash.
‘What were you doing in there?’ he inquired when they had greeted each other.
‘Saying a prayer for the Tiger. May he rest in peace,’ said Ash. ‘He was a great man. I've been reading his memoirs again, and I like to think that his bones are lying here under the grass and that I can sit beside them and remember the tremendous life he lived, the things he saw and did, the chances he took… Let's get out