The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [70]
The Guides had taken part in the Ambeyla expedition, a campaign launched against certain hostile Border tribes in the autumn of the previous year, and William, still unaware that he possessed a nephew, had been killed in action only a few weeks after his sister's son escaped over the walls of the Hawa Mahal. But now it was spring, and the almonds were in bloom and the willows in bud as Ash took the road that leads from Attock to Peshawar.
The Kabul River ran red with the red earth of the Khyber that the spring rains and the melting of the snows in far-off Afghanistan had washed down on the flood, and the fords were impassable, so that he must cross by the bridge of boats at Nowshera. Ash had already made a detour of some dozen miles to avoid crossing the Indus by the Attock ferry, it having occurred to him that it would be an easy matter for a single man to keep a check on all who passed that way: in which he was wise, for there had indeed been a man on watch, an innocent-seeming traveller who appeared to be in no hurry, and who had made friends with the boatman and spent his days idly observing all those who used the ferry. Ash had crossed instead some five miles down-stream, having begged a lift on a farmer's raft, and from there made his way back to the Peshawar road. And now once again providence was kind to him, for in Nowshera a kindly villager on his way to Risalpur with a load of vege-ables gave him a lift, and on pretence of being sleepy he burrowed down behind the cabbages and knole-kole and crossed the bridge of boats unseen. So towards evening on that same day – dusty, footsore and very weary – he reached the cantonment of Mardan and asked for Sowar Zarin Khan of the Guides.
The Corps of Guides were back once more in their barracks after months of hard campaigning and harder fighting in the Yusafzai country, and eighteen months of active service had aged Zarin so that he was barely recognizable as the gay youth who had ridden away so light-heartedly from Gulkote. He had grown taller and broader, and acquired an impressive moustache in place of the budding growth that Ash remembered. But he was still the same Zarin, and he had been delighted to see Ashok.
‘My father sent word that you had left Gulkote, and I knew that you would come here one day,’ said Zarin, embracing him. ‘You will have to wait until you are full grown before you can enlist as a sowar, but I will speak to my eldest brother, who is now a Jemadar since the battle on the road to Ambeyla, and he will find you work. Is your mother here?’
‘She is dead,’ said Ash flatly. He found that he could not speak of her even to such an old friend as Zarin. But Zarin appeared to understand: he asked no question and said only, ‘I am sorry. She was a good mother to you, and I think it must be hard to lose even a bad one, for each of us has only the one to lose.’
‘It seems that I have had two,’ said Ash bleakly. And squatting down tiredly to warm himself at Zarin's fire, he told the tale of his escape from the Hawa Mahal and of the things that he had learned from Sita in the cave by the river, producing at last, in proof of the latter, a sheet of paper that bore the address of a dead officer of the Guides.
Zarin could not read the writing, but he too had been startled into belief by the sight of the money, for the coins spoke for themselves and did not need any translation. There were over two hundred of them, of which less than fifty were silver rupees and the rest sovereigns and gold mohurs; and that Sita should have concealed