The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [637]
‘Taimus,’ called Wally.
‘Sahib?’ The sowar who had been firing from the other window lowered his carbine and turned to look at his Commanding Officer.
Wally said: ‘Jenkyns-Sahib has just written another letter to the Amir, asking for help. Do you think that you could reach the palace?’
‘I can try,’ said Taimus. He put his carbine down and came across to take the paper, and folding it small, hid it among his clothing.
Wally smiled and said quietly: ‘Shukria, Shahzada (Prince). Khuda hafiz!’
The man grinned at the title, saluted and went out to cross the lane into the barracks and survey the situation from the barrack roof, but a bare half-minute was enough to show him the impossibility of attempting to leave by the compound, for by now the mob were everywhere and not even a lizard could have got through. There was nothing for it but to go back to the Residency and see if he could not find some other way of escape. The back door had been blocked long ago, and since to have opened it again would have been to invite a flood of armed Afghans into the courtyard, he turned in desperation to the Envoy's House and went up to the roof, where one of the jawans who were still holding out there helped him up on to the curtain wall that shielded the roof from the view of the houses behind the Residency.
Standing there, he had been in full sight of the enemy on the roof of the Mess House and in the street below; and as he gazed down on the close-packed crowd of yelling, hate-distorted faces, he was suddenly filled with the same contempt for the mob that Cavagnari had felt much earlier that day. For Sowar Taimus, though serving as a trooper of the Guides, was also a prince of a royal line: a Shahzada – and an Afghan. His lip curled in disdain as he surveyed those contorted faces, and drawing a deep breath, he deliberately leapt into space, launching himself feet-first into the thick of the press below and landing on heads and shoulders that broke his fall.
The mob, momentarily stunned by shock, recovered itself and set on him with a howl of fury, but he fought his way through them, shouting that he was a prince and an Afghan and that he bore a message to the Amir; which would not have saved him had he not been recognized by a close friend, who rushing to the rescue had managed by dint of blows, high-words and cajolery to extract him from the clutches of the mob – battered and bleeding but alive – and helped him to reach the palace. But once there he had fared no better than anyone else.
The Amir was locked away, weeping, among his women; and though he had eventually agreed to see the Shahzada Taimus and to read the message he carried, he would only bewail his fate and reiterate that his Kismet was bad and that he was not to blame for this and could do nothing – nothing.
He had given orders that the Shahzada was to be detained, and this had been done. But though the Amir's Kismet was undoubtedly bad, Taimus's had proved to be far otherwise, because in the room into which he had been hurriedly thrust by the palace guards lay an Afghan who had been shot in the back during the first attack on the compound. The wounded man had been left to look after himself, and though by now he was in considerable pain, no one had done anything to help him because of the panic that prevailed in the palace. But Taimus had learned something of the treatment of wounds during his service in the Guides, and he had extracted the bullet with his knife, and having washed the wound and managed to staunch the bleeding, had bound it up with the sufferer's waist-cloth.
His grateful patient, who had proved to be a man of some standing, had repaid the debt by smuggling him out of the palace and arranging for his escape from Kabul. And Fate had been doubly kind to him that day, for not five minutes after he had leapt from the roof of the Envoy's House, and while he was still fighting his way forward through the frenzied crowd with his life hanging in the balance,