The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [632]
But the mob that had howled so fervently for the blood of the Unbelievers was not to be turned from its savage sport by the mere sight of the Holy Book or the scared face of a child, heir to Afghanistan or no. The trembling tutor was pulled from his saddle and the Koran wrenched from his hands to be flung on the ground and kicked and trampled upon, while the mob shrieked insults and threats at the hapless ambassadors, jostling and clawing at them until they turned tail and fled back to the palace in fear of their lives.
But there was still one Afghan who did not fear the mob.
The indomitable Commander-in-Chief, Daud Shah, wounded as he was, left his bed, and summoning a few of his faithful troopers, rode out to face the scum of the city with as much courage as he had faced the mutineers of the Ardal Regiment earlier that same day. But the mob cared as little for the authority of the army as it had for the sacred Book of its loudly proclaimed faith. Its interest was concentrated on killing and loot, and it turned on the valiant General like a pack of snarling pariah-dogs attacking a cat; and like a wild cat he fought back with teeth and claws.
For a brief space he and his troopers managed to hold them off, but the odds were too great. He was dragged from his horse, and once on the ground, the mob closed in, kicking and stoning him. Only the intervention of a handful of his soldiers, who had seen him ride out and who now charged to the rescue, laying about them with such fury that they drove the mob back, saved the battered man and his hopelessly outnumbered troopers from death. But they had had no option but to withdraw, and supporting their wounded Commander-in-Chief they limped back to safety.
‘We can do no more,’ said the watching mullahs, and recognizing at last the fruitlessness of human intervention, they left the palace and returned to their mosques to pray instead for Allah's.
67
It seemed to Ash, as he raged to and fro racking his brains for a way of escape, that he had been trapped in this small, stifling cell for a lifetime… Could time have moved so slowly for the Guides who had been fighting all through that hot, interminable morning and on into the afternoon without a moment's respite, or were they too hard pressed to take account of it, unaware of its passing because they knew that for them each breath they drew could be the last one, and knowing it lived only for the moment, and that by the grace of God?
There must be some way of getting out… there must be.
Hours ago he had considered the possibility of hacking his way out through the mud ceiling between the joists, until the thud of feet on the hard mutti roof overhead warned him that there were men up there, a great many of them judging by the clamour of voices and the vicious crackle of muskets – as many as there were on every house-top and at every window within his range of vision, not to mention those that he could not see.
After that he had turned his attention to the floor. It should be comparatively easy to break through it, since like all the floors in the building it consisted of pine-wood planks supported on heavy crossbeams and plastered over with a mixture of mud and straw; and had it not been only too evident that the room below was already occupied by the enemy, who were firing out of the window immediately under his own, the long Afghan knife he carried with him would have made short work of the dried mud, and enabled him to pry loose a plank so that he could wrench up one or more neighbouring ones. But where the window was concerned the knife was use-ess.
Ash had spent some time on the window, and had actually made a rope so that