A God in Every Stone (13 page)

– I still think it would be better if you were at Dean's.

– You're very kind, but I'll be perfectly all right on my own.

– Will he come here for lessons? Your civilising mission?

– His name is Najeeb, and yes.

– A Pathan is a Pathan at any age, I hope you remember that. They're not accustomed to the company of women.

– I would swear this one has Greek blood in him. I call him the Herodotus of Peshawar.

– Just make sure there's always someone else about when he's here. I'll send over staff you can trust. And also, the Pashto teacher you were enquiring about – I know you said Hindko, but most people here understand Pashto and you can use it throughout the Peshawar Valley.

– You really are very kind. When your wife is back from Simla, you both must come over for supper.

– It'll be a while before she's back.

– It'll be a while before I have this place ready for entertaining guests.

– As you say, Miss Spencer. I'm available to you at all times.

Viv pretended not to understand his meaning, and walked out into the garden, smiling when he couldn't see her; she had no intention of taking him up on his availability but it was both useful and flattering to have a man as powerful as Remmick attendant on her every need. He'd even promised to introduce her to John Marshall who planned to resume excavating Taxila when the weather changed – and once Marshall heard about Labraunda he'd ask her to join him, of course he would.

The thought of returning to London in December was fading.

 

Days fell into a routine: in the morning, Pashto lessons with a retired Anglo-Indian schoolteacher; in the afternoon letter-writing and dozing in darkened, thick-walled rooms; in the evening, a lesson with Najeeb which might mean sitting in her garden with books or might mean an excursion to Gor Khatri, Bala Hisar, Pipal Mandi, the Museum – over and over, the Museum. At the end of the day there was almost always either a sundowner (or several) at the Peshawar Club with Remmick or an early supper at Dean's with the Forbeses. And then home before the stars were out, to read by lantern-light in her garden which must have been designed by someone of nocturnal habits, it was so rich in night-blooming flowers.

 

As the Allied forces faced setback after setback in Gallipoli the news reports about Armenians grew ever more dramatic. ‘ARMENIANS SENT TO DIE IN THE DESERT' read a headline. ‘MORE ARMENIAN HORRORS' said another. Surely the propaganda department was overplaying its hand?

 

She followed the shouts and splashes towards the swimming pool of the Peshawar Club. Through the trees she saw men falling from the sky – muscled and young, broad of shoulder, water drops glistening on pale chests, dark necks. Officers of the Frontier Corp, on leave after weeks of protecting Peshawar from the fanatics in the mud-and-pebbled hills. One had scarcely dived from the board before the next was there to take his place. Some fell like cannonballs, some swooped like swallows. Water and air, in both they were in their element. It was the ground they wanted nothing to do with, climbing from pool to high board by way of a rope-ladder that someone had tied to the railing.

One of them – sandy-haired – sat on the high board, legs swinging, surveying the world. The Lord of Everything. Viv looped her arm around a tree, watching him, watching them all. Here was the world set right again.

 

They sat beneath the weeping willow, Najeeb at the school desk which he had carried in last week from God knows where, and Viv in her rattan chair. The local name for weeping willow was
Majnu
, Najeeb had told her the first time he came out into her garden and followed it up with a retelling of the love story of Laila and Majnu, declaimed with such pride that she hadn't the heart to tell him she knew it already. In Labraunda, Mehmet had spun the tale out over several evenings, paying particular attention to Anna, the younger of the German women, as he spoke of Majnu's undying love. Cigarettes, figs, wine, and stories beneath the Carian sky – would it ever really be possible again?

Najeeb looked up from his Greek letters, and the wind turned the pages of his exercise book, smeared the freshly inked-in date. Viv leaned forward and placed a piece of grey slate onto the book to weigh it down. Picking it up, Najeeb examined the carved hand, palm turned up. A fragment from a stupa, one of many which had Atlas holding up a platform for the seated Buddha. It was worth very little – the Sikh man who owned an antiquities store in the Walled City had presented it to her as a gift as she was walking empty-handed out of his store, to ensure she would return – but it possessed a certain charm. Najeeb placed it between the pages of his exercise book and rubbed his pencil over the page; the colour of the stone so closely resembled the grey of a lead pencil that it seemed an act of metamorphosis, turning stone into paper.

She watched him, realised how familiar his expressions, his way of holding a pencil, the angle of his back as he bent over his books had become. She had been the one to suggest he came to her during his school holidays if he wanted to hear the stories of Peshawar, but he'd been the one to insist on Greek lessons and refuse to allow the start of the school term to force any change in their routine. Why d'you let him take advantage of you, Remmick had asked, but there was nothing in all of Peshawar that delighted her more than the hunger of Najeeb's mind, the tinge of covetousness in his curiosity – apparent now as he finished the rubbing and turned the stone fragment over in his hands. Did parenthood feel anything like this, she wondered, and smiled to think of Tahsin Bey lifting Najeeb onto his shoulders to look a giant Buddha in the eye.

– Do you want to hear about a treasure hunt?

– What treasure?

– The Circlet of Scylax. Remember Scylax from our first lesson?

– Of course. The Shade Man.

– The Emperor Darius so trusted him that he gave him a circlet – that's like a crown – decorated with figs. It was a special kind of circlet, reserved for heroes and men who slay monsters. Though the fig part was unique to Scylax. Long after Scylax died, his home of Caria was ruled by a dynasty called the Hecatomnids who had the Circlet as one of their prized possessions, and stamped it onto their coins.

– And then what happened to it?

– There's the question. Alexander conquered Caria in 334
BC
, the Hecatomnid period ended, and there's no further record of the Circlet. Except this.

She picked a slim, leather-bound book off the grass and, opening it to the right page, turned it towards him.

– The Fragments of Kallistos. He was a Byzantine historian, who didn't think to leave the great work of his life in a place where the moths wouldn't nibble on it. Read what's there; I'm getting more ice.

She stood, hoisted up the steel tub placed halfway between her chair and his desk, and sloshed the cold water within it onto his bare feet, to exclamations of delight. When she returned a few minutes later, ice steaming within the tub, she would have welcomed Najeeb's assistance in carrying the weight of it across the garden but he was bent over Kallistos, in the shade of the weeping willow, his concentration too beautiful to disrupt.

– So that's why, he cried out, looking up.

– Why what?

– Why you always spend so much time in the Museum looking at that ugly thing.

– What have you found in there?

She walked round to his side of the table, picked up the book and balanced it on his head as she read words she hadn't looked at in years.

 

She led the Holy Men to the Sacred Casket mounted with the Holy One which contained the Relics but they would not be tempted. Their mission was not one of theft, and they trusted the Casket would come under divine protection. She next implored them to take the great traveller's crown of figs which was in her safekeeping, but they saw no reason to carry something which had no value to them so she went outside and buried the crown at the base of the Great Statue of the Holy One. The light of the Holy One illuminated her task, so those who watched knew this was the right course of action.

 

The book shifted, fell against her torso as Najeeb tipped his head back to look at her.

– I guessed right, didn't I? The Sacred Casket is the Kanishka Casket. And the crown of figs is buried beneath a statue somewhere near where the casket was found? Somewhere in Shahji-ki-Dheri?

– A relic casket mounted with a holy figure? You could find a thousand objects scattered around the world which match that description. And most of them would probably have a statue in the vicinity.

He looked so disappointed she tugged a lock of his hair and said, No one's found the circlet in the eighty years since Kallistos' Fragments were rediscovered in a church attic. It would almost be rude to those who've tried for decades if an eleven-year-old ferreted out its location with a single glance.

– I'm twelve now.

– Are you? When did that happen?

– Last month.

– Why didn't you say? Put your books away immediately. We're going to find you some cake. Oh, and here – happy birthday.

She placed the stupa shard in his hand. He looked up at her, not understanding, and she said, Well, why shouldn't you have it? It's your history after all, Pactyike.

Najeeb ran his thumb over Atlas' wrist, a shimmer to his eyes which it took her a moment to recognise as tears. She could see it had been pleasing before, this piece of Gandharan art, but now that it lay in his palm, transformed into both gift and heritage, it had become precious. Together with the promise of cake it had entirely wiped Kallistos from his mind.

 

Viv knew this about Tahsin Bey: he wasn't reckless or foolish or lazy. A relic casket with a Buddha on top wouldn't be enough to make him set aside his dreams of finding the Circlet in Labraunda in favour of a stupa that wasn't built until five hundred years after the Circlet vanished from history. So there was something else; something he'd been certain she would work out if he just pointed her in the direction of Peshawar. Caspatyrus!
Where journeys begin and end
. Not her journey – the journey of the Circlet.

She bit down on her forkful of cake, watched Najeeb press his thumb against one of the few crumbs remaining on his plate and lift it to his mouth. The other patrons of the tea-shop – Indian and English both – kept glancing over at their table. She swapped around plates, gave him the slice she'd barely touched. It wasn't generosity; when he was eating he wasn't talking, and she needed to think.

How would a prized artefact of the Carian dynasts end up in Peshawar? And then came the answer, so obvious, so inevitable. Alexander. Of course. He would have taken the Circlet from Caria when he conquered it and carried it all the way to India – where he sent his Admiral Nearchus to sail down the Indus, following in the oar strokes of Scylax.

– Najeeb Gul, you are a wonder!

The boy looked up, mouth full of cake; in the tea-room, whispers.

 

Returning home, she knew exactly the book she needed.
Buddhist Records of the Western World
– an account of several Chinese travellers' visits to India, and to Shahji-ki-Dheri. She'd read it soon after she'd arrived in Peshawar but without knowing what she was looking for despite Tahsin Bey's insertion of the words ‘Sacred Casket' into his letter, which she should have recognised as an echo of Kallistos. Although  really, he could have been a little more forthcoming. Regardless, now that she was sitting at Najeeb's school desk in the garden with the book open in front of her, it seemed impossible she'd missed it: In AD 518 the Chinese pilgrim Sung-Yun travelled in the company of a Buddhist novice to India on the instructions of the Empress of China, in order to bring back Buddhist holy books from a country now ravaged by ‘a rude horde of Turks'. Tahsin Bey would have laughed at that, read it out loud to whoever was near by to listen – even if it was only Alice. Or perhaps he would be too absorbed, instead, in his conviction that Sung-Yun and his companion were the Holy Men whose ‘mission was not one that of theft'. She read all that Sung-Yun had written of Shahji-ki-Dheri, and moved on to the writings of Hiuen-Tsang, more than a century later. The rude horde of Turks and their descendants had worked their destruction – where Sung-Yun found temples and stupas, Hiuen-Tsang found ruins. But the Kanishka Stupa survived and –

 

To the south-west of the Great Stupa a hundred paces or so, there is a figure of Buddha in white stone about eighteen feet high. It is a standing figure, and looks to the north. It has many spiritual powers, and diffuses a brilliant light.

 

The Sacred Casket. The Likeness of the Holy One. The Holy Men. The Illuminating Statue. It was all there, every bit of it.

 

The last excavation at Shahji-ki-Dheri had taken place in 1911. Every year since then the Archaeological Survey of India, Frontier Circle reported a continuing leasing dispute with the owner of the land. The most recent report was promising – ‘the compulsory acquisition of the land may be considered'. Viv looked up the Land Acquisitions Act – there was no reason it couldn't be applied to Shahji-ki-Dheri. Perhaps all that was needed was a little nudge from the right quarters.