The Lotus and the Wind (23 page)

All that was Lieutenant Savage’s common sense. Robin, the uncertain, wanted to stay with Muralev--and had not Hayling said that the two natures complemented each other?

He thought: It does not matter what Muralev does or does not do; he is something. I’ve got to find out what he is. I’ll stay with them. If they plunge into some city and begin intriguing there, it will be different. But Muralev won’t. He’d hate it, he’d be no good.

Anne would think the night cold if she were here. She would find harshness in the smell of the desert and crudeness in the sour daytime smells of sweat, hot wool, and dust. There was a little pang in his breast to-night, but whether it was for what Anne would not know, or for what he lacked by her absence and because her glowing hair was not spread under his hand on the desert, he did not know.

He got up silently. Jagbir did not stir. Jagbir swam like a duck in the perilous waters of secret service, except that when he slept he sank fathoms deep in sleep, a log, an inert, stertorously heaving chunk of granite. He had a Gurkha’s single vision and unshakable faith in himself. The Muralevs were in their place, lying close to each other but not touching.

Robin slipped away to the north-east. As soon as the faint aromatic tang of the roots smouldering on the fire faded in his nostrils he quickened his pace. After half an hour he crossed the branch of the Karshi River where he had seen the hawk. Only the wind was awake, sighing over the desert, and an owl far to the west.

He came to the hill and climbed slowly. Coarse desert grass held the soil together; otherwise the edifice on the summit could not have stood for even five years. The hillock’s summit stood about forty feet above the dry bed of the river. He saw water to the west, short, motionless bars of dull green-yellow light. The moon, a week off the full, was lower and had taken on an orange tint. He walked to the ruins and found them nothing but a few square-cut stones, the chiselled edges softened by time and sand. He searched the hill carefully, but there was no statue. He thought the stones were sandstone, rose red and ‘half as old as time.’ It was difficult to define .the colour when the moon bathed them and his hands in orange.

He knelt then and searched among the stones. A coin here, another one? There might be. Did the conqueror pass by here? Yes. What did he see, what conquer? Not men--susliks, the bends and folds of the sand, this light on the Karshi streams. He rose from his knees. There was no coin here, and the moon lay athwart the horizon, a half-moon halved. He walked across the hill, lay down, and closed his eyes.

He heard breathing, the creak of dry leather, and the hiss of sand stirred by some effort more convulsive than the long fetch of wind. He saw Muralev breast the far slope. Feeling rather than seeing, without fear or excitement, he recorded Muralev’s wanderings about the hilltop. Muralev sat down among the stones. As the moon sank Muralev turned his face to the west and watched it. In the light of the stars he sat there alone and motionless. After half an hour he got up and walked across the flat hilltop, this time towards Robin.

Robin stood up. Muralev stepped back in an instinctive shuffling movement, and Robin thought the starlight flashed kindly on his eyes, but he was wearing spectacles, and no one could interpret light seen through a glass. It was not fright, whatever it was.

Muralev said quietly, ‘Khussro. I am glad to see you.’ Glad? It was a strange direction to take, a strange plane to choose for whatever talk they must hold with each other. Robin would have liked to meet him on that same calm, unreckoning level, but an efficient bell was clanging and made him say sharply, ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you realize the desert is dangerous at night? You might get lost, and then they will accuse me of murdering you.’

Muralev brushed aside this calculation, saying, ‘I came here to savour the ruin by night. I saw it by day but--I wanted to come at night.’

Robin thought, he means alone. She would have accompanied him if he had told her. She would be sure that whatever he saw she could see, whatever he sensed she could sense. But Muralev the agent ought to have some more convincing story than this.

Muralev said, ‘Places like this that are lonely and peaceful draw thoughts up from inside you, as the builders here drew up stones, to form a shrine.’ He looked out to the west. ‘Did you see the moon set? Why do you come here?’

Twice Robin tried to answer according to the laws of common sense--that was to say, on the level of deception. He wasn’t sure enough of himself to go direct to the truth. Muralev was. Muralev was that much older, that much farther along the road to certainty. No wonder, he thought, he had experienced so strong a feeling of recognition when they met in the darkened upper room in Bukhara. He could take courage now from Muralev’s example. Between them there could exist nothing but truth, even if part of it, that of their service to rival empires, must remain unspoken.

Robin found his coin and held it out on his palm to Muralev, turning his hand slightly so that the starlight showed the silver circle in it. He said, ‘Once, in another place, there was a hill like this and a ruin on it. I found this coin there. It is of Alexander the Great.’

Muralev’s irregular teeth glinted in a smile, and from the inside pocket of his coat he brought out a feather. Peering down, Robin thought that it was a pale sandy brown, barred at the tip with black. Muralev said, ‘There is my coin.’

‘What is it?’

‘It is a pin-feather of an inaccessible bird.’

‘What bird?’

‘I don’t know for certain. One of the bustard family, but a new species, I think, if I could only find it. I saw this one on a winter day near the Caspian ten years ago. It flew over, and a little later, while I was still watching it and it had become just a pinpoint in the east, this feather dropped down, spiralling down, round and round, to the ground at my feet.’

It would be foolish and unnecessary to ask whether Muralev hoped to find the bird here by the Karshi River in the middle of a chill September night. Robin himself was not expecting to find another coin. But the coin had brought him here, and the feather had brought Muralev.

Robin said, ‘I’m going back to camp now.’

‘I’ll stay here a little longer.’

Robin went down and returned the way he had come. By staying on the hill, so that they would not arrive in camp together, Muralev was forming a conspiracy with him. Its badges were the coin and the feather, and Lenya and Jagbir were outside it. There was no sense to be made of it, because it did not belong in the world where sense reigned.

Jagbir had awakened while he was away. Perhaps the cold had got in through his robes. As soon as he lay down Jagbir muttered, ‘I thought those two had murdered you.’ Anger and readiness for violence charged his low voice.

When Muralev returned, Jagbir had fallen asleep again, but Robin was still awake and he heard over there the woman’s voice, a whisper, as Muralev rolled into his blanket. He could guess the words and translate them into English or Gurkhali, because they were spoken in the same
lingua franca
of emotion, of mixed love and hate. ‘I thought those two had murdered you.’

The next morning the Muralevs rode out ahead as usual. About ten o’clock, when Robin and Jagbir and the donkeys and the led pack-pony reached a small oasis where the party was supposed to gather for a rest, there was no sign of the Muralevs. Visibility was bad and getting worse. A burning wind from the south whipped sand into their faces and lifted loose soil and hurled it at them, mixed with gravel and small stones. The air became dry as the inside of a bone.

After a brief pause at the deserted oasis they pushed on. Half an hour later they heard a shot some distance in front, a pause, another shot, two more. The rattle of a little fusillade, deadened and intermittently distorted, blew down to them in the howling wind. It could not be the Muralevs collecting specimens; there had been too many rifles firing. Jagbir unslung his rifle and held it ready across his saddle.

Through the grey-black, whirling pall two horsemen came at them, riding fast. Jagbir shouted, ‘The Muralevs.’ There were four or five others behind the Muralevs, to judge from the shooting, but the storm hid them. The Muralevs galloped up and wheeled the little ponies around.

She cried, ‘Bandits!’--shrieking into the storm. ‘Get off the trail, to the east.’ Her horse curvetted and bucked, but with her strong legs she held firm in the heaving saddle. She carried her rifle like a standard, the butt on her thigh. Muralev’s nose seemed longer than ever. A flying pebble cracked the glass of his spectacles, and he took them off and peered at them with half-shut eyes. The dust lay deep in the comers of his mouth and nose, smoothing out the angles of his face. To Robin he said, ‘I’m sorry.’ The woman yelled, ‘Go east for a bit! We will draw them off west. We can outdistance them. Meet us in Karshi.’

Jagbir cried, ‘No. We fight together. We have four rifles.’

‘No, no ... save our specimens... equipment... Karshi!’

She plunged away, and Muralev’s pony bolted after her. Jagbir cursed the donkeys into motion to the east. The wind howled and volleyed sand into their right ears. Robin thought, Jagbir’s right, we ought to have stayed together. Turki bandits were reputed to be cowards who never pressed an attack if resisted. But the Muralevs had gone. The woman just wanted a gallop and some excitement. He could have a look in their boxes before he reached Karshi. There might be something of importance in them.

In the lee of a low rock ridge Jagbir halted the donkeys. They all lowered their heads, men and animals alike, turned their backs on the storm, and stood still. No bandits appeared out of the murk, and after ten minutes they moved on. Robin rode a hundred yards ahead, searching the blackness downwind through smarting eyes. Once a horseman passed three hundred yards away, a rifle in his hand, and vanished. Still farther away someone fired a rifle. Another horseman appeared; at the shot he dug his heels into his horse, turned, and galloped towards the sound, the dust bowling around him. That must have been the Muralevs who fired. The woman was clever.

For another hour they expected every minute to see horsemen come lunging at them out of the dust. Robin rode with his nerves tightened to the limit. Last night he had decided to stay with Peter Muralev, whatever common sense thought of it, and now Muralev had gone. Plenty of things could happen before they all met together again in Karshi.

A brassy sky appeared above the dust. The dancing clouds boiled away down the wind. The desert spread slowly farther and farther to their sight, and it was twenty degrees cooler. Robin called a halt and looked all around but saw no one. He said anxiously, ‘Come on. We’ve got to get to Karshi to-night.’

As they waited in the crowded caravanserai in Karshi, and the hours passed, his nervousness increased. That night the Muralevs did not come, nor on the next day nor the next night nor the third day. The third evening a small caravan arrived from Bukhara. The camelmen had seen neither bandits nor strangers. In the night Robin lay awake, thinking. He must go out with Jagbir and search the southern deserts for Muralev’s body. He had forgotten in his worry to look into the boxes. He must do that.

In the morning he did and found nothing--a couple of skins, three books containing drawings of birds and animals, several knives, a few bottles of chemicals. They had had their notebooks with them. He closed the boxes and explained to Jagbir what must be done.

Above him a strange voice interrupted. ‘Khussro?’

‘Yes.’ He jumped up. It was an Uzbeg mounted on a big camel.

The man said, ‘I have a message from your employers.’

‘Yes, yes, where are they, are they all right?’

‘They are at Keikchi.’

‘Keikchi!’ Keikchi lay on the north bank of the Oxus and sixty miles due south of Karshi. He could not understand why they had had to go that far south.

‘At Keikchi. They are going on along the southern road to Balkh. They want you to meet them there, in Balkh.’

Jagbir cut in shortly. ‘What have you got to do with them?’

‘I was guarding my flock in the desert near Keikchi when they came. They paid me to deliver the message. I am an honest man.’ The Uzbeg glowered at Jagbir, turned his camel, and left the serai.

Robin sat down on a box. The society of the coin and the feather had been dissolved by Muralev, the Russian agent. He had something in common with the man, but--it wasn’t good enough, he couldn’t afford to be hoodwinked, led about by the nose. Firstly, then, the bandits could not possibly have forced them as far south as Keikchi. So the truth was that when the bandits came the woman saw her opportunity to be rid of him, Robin, at least for a time. Why did she want to be rid of him when she had hired him in the first place? He couldn’t answer that yet. Perhaps there was no answer beyond the already established fact that she had got rid of him. She had, so to speak, launched him on his own--but she had pointed him in a certain direction, south, before releasing him.

He shook his head. He thought he knew what Muralev would do, but it was the woman who had the power. He looked up. ‘Turfan, what will that woman do now? What’s she thinking?’

Jagbir answered, when he had taken time to understand the question, ‘She thinks you will go on to Balkh.’

‘Do you believe she will go there herself?’

‘No. That bandit attack was false. She arranged it all to get rid of us.’

Robin did not know. He could not be sure. He was positive that Muralev would not want to return to Bukhara; but the woman had the power. Jagbir was probably right about the bandits. It had been exciting and convincing enough at the time, but now, in his memory, it did not ring true. Nothing about the whole expedition rang true. He would do well to assume that, from the time he arrived in Balkh asking after Selim Beg, word had gone ahead to Bukhara describing him and Jagbir and giving their probable profession--British agents. Then the Muralevs had picked them up with the express purpose of getting rid of them by the most effective means, which was by sending them off with a good clue in the wrong direction. So much for that--except that Peter Muralev himself was a clue and a much more important one than notebooks or maps.