The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [615]
‘Then it is better that you should die rather than disgrace Islam,’ said the Mullah harshly.
But the weeping Amir was lost to all shame, and no argument or pleading – no appeals to him for the sake of honour and in the name of hospitality to protect those who were his guests – could galvanize him into taking any action whatsoever. The wild rioting, and the attack on Daud Shah that had resulted from the pay parade, had so terrified him that he did not dare give any order for fear that it would not be obeyed. For if it were not…? No, no, better anything than that. Oblivious of the scornful eyes of the mullahs, ministers and nobles who stood watching him, he tore his hair and rent his clothes, and bursting into renewed tears, turned from them to stumble away and shut himself up in his private rooms in the palace.
Yet weakling or no, he was still the Amir, and therefore, in name at least, head of the Government and lord and ruler of all Afghanistan. No one else dared give the orders that he himself would not give, and avoiding each others' eyes they followed him into the palace. When the British Envoy's messenger arrived with a letter asking for help and claiming his protection, a senior minister took it in to him, and the reply that was sent back consisted of that single procrastinating sentence: As God wills, I am making preparations, which was not even true – unless, of course, he was referring to preparations for the saving of his own skin.
Sir Louis had stared in stunned incredulity at this puerile answer to his urgent appeal for help. “‘Making preparations…” Good God! is that all he can say?’ breathed Sir Louis.
His hand clenched on the scrap of paper, crumpling it up, and lifting his head he gazed blindly out at the far snows, realizing in that moment that the man of whom he had written only a day or two ago ‘I personally believe he will prove a very good ally' was weak, worthless and a coward, a broken reed who should never have been trusted or relied upon; seeing at last and very clearly the futility of his Mission and the deadly nature of the trap into which he had led his entourage so proudly. ‘Her Britannic Majesty's Mission to the Court of Kabul' had lasted exactly six weeks – that was all; only forty-two days…
It had all seemed so feasible once – those brave schemes for establishing a British presence in Afghanistan as a first step towards planting the Union Jack on the far side of the Hindu Kush. But now, suddenly, he was not so sure that that strange fellow Pelham-Martyn – ‘Akbar’, who had been a friend of poor Wigram Battye's – had been so wrong-headed after all when he had argued so vehemently against the Forward Policy, insisting that the Afghans were a fiercely proud and courageous people who would never accept government by any foreign nation for more than a limited time, a year or two at most – and had quoted precedents to prove it.
‘But we shall be avenged,’ thought Sir Louis grimly. ‘Lytton will send an army to occupy Kabul and depose the Amir. But how long will they be able to stay here?… and how many lives will be lost before… before they have to retreat again? I must write again to the Amir. I must make him see that it is as much in his interests as ours to save us, because if we go down he will go down with us. I must write at once –’
But there was no time. The mutineers who had broken into the Arsenal were racing back armed with rifles, muskets and cartridge-belts, the majority heading for the compound, firing as they ran, while others took up positions on the rooftops of the surrounding houses, from where they would be able to fire directly down on to the beleaguered garrison. And as the first musket ball whipped across the compound, Sir Louis sloughed off the politician and the diplomat and became a soldier again. Flinging away the useless scrap of crumpled paper that bore a coward's