The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [9]
‘Go away,’ whispered Akbar Khan to Hilary. ‘Take the boy and go quickly, lest you too die. Do not grieve for me. I am an old man and a cripple, wifeless and childless. Why should I fear to die? But you have the boy… and a son has need of a father.’
‘You have been a better father to him than I,’ said Hilary, holding his friend's hand.
Akbar Khan smiled. ‘That I know, for he has my heart, and I would have taught him – I would have taught him… It is too late. Leave quickly.’
‘There is nowhere to go,’ said Hilary. ‘How can one out-distance the black cholera? If we go it will go with us, and I have heard that more than a thousand are dying daily at Hardwar. We are better off here than in the towns, and soon you will be well – you are strong and will recover.’
But Akbar Khan had died.
Hilary wept for his friend as he had not wept for his wife. And when he had buried him he went to his tent where he wrote a letter to his brother in England and another to his lawyer, and enclosing both with certain other papers and daguerreotypes in his possession, made a small packet of the whole and wrapped it carefully in a square of oiled silk. That done and the packet sealed with wax, he picked up his pen again and began a third letter – that long-overdue letter to Isobel's brother, William Ashton, that he had meant to write years ago and somehow never written. But he had left it too late. The cholera that had killed his friend reached out a bony hand and touched him on the shoulder, and his pen faltered and fell to the floor.
An hour later, rousing himself from a bout of agony, Hilary folded the unfinished page and having slowly and painfully traced an address on it, called for his bearer, Karim Bux. But Karim Bux too was dying, and it was, at long last, Daya Ram's wife, Sita, who came hastening nervously through the dusk of the stricken camp, bringing a hurricane lamp and food for the ‘Burra-Sahib’. For the cook and his assistants had run away hours before.
The child had come with her, but when she saw how it was with his father she pushed him outside the reeking tent and would not let him enter.
‘That's right,’ gasped Hilary, approving the action. ‘You're a sensible woman – always said so. Look after him, Sita. Take him to his own people. Don't let him –’ He found that he could not finish the sentence and groping weakly for the single sheet of paper and the sealed packet, thrust it at her. ‘Money in that tin box – take it. That's right. Should be enough to get you to…’
Another convulsion shook him, and Sita, hiding money and papers in the folds of her sari, backed away, and grasping the child's hand hurried him to his own tent and put him to bed – for once, and to his indignation, without the songs and fairy tales that were the normal accompaniments of bedtime.
Hilary died that night, and by mid-afternoon on the following day the cholera had claimed four more lives. Among them, Daya Ram's. Those who remained – by now a mere handful – looted the empty tents of anything of value, and taking the horses and camels, fled southward into the Terai, leaving behind them the newly widowed Sita, for fear that she might have taken the infection from her dead husband, and with her the four-year-old orphan, Ash-Baba.
Years afterwards, when he had forgotten much else, Ash could still remember that night. The heat and the moonlight, the ugly sound of jackals and hyenas quarrelling and snarling within a stone's throw of the little tent where Sita crouched beside him, listening and trembling and patting his shoulder in a vain attempt to soothe his fears and send him to sleep. The flap and croak of gorged vultures