The Lotus and the Wind (4 page)

Then, as the sun was setting, they came to Peshawar. The buildings closed in, and the road narrowed to a street. Guides came from the cantonments west of the town to lead the soldiers to their quarters. A man came for the Colletts, and their carriage left the column. The bullock carts ground to a halt in the western outskirts of the bazaar and waited. Major Hildreth muttered, ‘Damn that fellow! He should have had someone here for us by now.’ But no one came.

When a tall, stately Pathan and a young British officer came walking down the road, Anne thought they must be the expected guides from the commissariat depot, which her father had been posted here to command, but they were not. Major Hayling went forward and said, ‘Hullo, Gluck, glad to see you. Ashraf Khan,
starrai mashe!’

‘Khwar mashe, janab ali. Joriye?’

The Pushtu greetings volleyed back and forth like tennis balls. Finally Hayling said, ‘This is the man. You’d better take a look at him, both of you, before having him buried. Yes, I’ve searched him. Nothing.’

The officer and the Pathan stooped under the hood of the bullock cart. The officer stood up almost at once and exclaimed, ‘When did he get this? Look, there’s a stab mark through the bandages on his chest.’

Hayling started forward. ‘My God, there is!’ He stepped back, and the two men stared at each other. Hayling said, ‘Pabbi. There was a scuffle there. Someone must have done it then.’

‘Yes, sir. Why?’

‘Been paid to, obviously. We could find out who, but not why. They wouldn’t have been told. We’ll have to do our best to get something out of them, though.’

‘Sir, may it not have been done to prevent him talking? The people in Pabbi might have thought he was still alive--and whoever it was that hired them to do the job.’

‘Yes, that would be their latest information, perhaps. Look here, Gluck, get Ashraf Khan to put the body on ice in our office somewhere. I don’t want to talk here, but we
may
recognize him if we ask the right people.’ His voice dropped so that Anne could not hear any more. After a minute the cart rolled away, with the young officer and the stately Pathan walking together behind it.

Anne cried, ‘Major Hayling! Who is he? Please tell me! I do want to know. I tried to help him.’

The major had remounted his horse. He said, ‘You deserve to know, Miss Hildreth, and I’ll tell you when I can. Goodbye for the moment, ma’am. Good-bye, Hildreth. Good-bye, Miss Hildreth; it’s been a pleasant trip for me--except for this--because of your company. May I hope I shall be allowed to see more of you when you are safely ensconced in this peaceful and happy cantonment?’ He smiled suddenly and added, ‘But I really would like to!’ waved his hook, and was gone.

The commissariat guides came, full of apologies, and the carriage moved. A wide, unpaved road led westward past scattered shops towards the military cantonment. Anne sat next to her father, facing backwards, and huddled closer into her wrap. A bitter wind from the Khyber Pass chilled her neck and made the lamps flicker in the open shop fronts. The sun had set; the twilight fell greyer and darker every minute on the walls and the road and the leaves of the trees. Down-country the light had seemed almost blue to her eyes at this time of day. Here the iron of the mountains hardened it and took away its life. She looked over her right shoulder and saw a dim, flat plain, and beyond that, high up, the snowy cliffs of the Tirah, where the sun lingered.

Frontiersmen strode by with long, lifting steps. The trotting carriage horses drew the Hildreths slowly past a column of marching Highlanders. The young soldiers marched on the shoulder of the road, their tall khaki topis nodding in time to the slow swing of their kilts. They trod heavily, seeming to keep close to the ground; they joked in the ranks, yet moved with much majesty. Their individual bodies and the sense of their collective movement were slow and stolid against the litheness of the Pathans.

A young tribesman passed; he walked as though dancing in the road, and sang to himself, and had oiled, bobbed hair with a red flower in it. Camels sailed through the dust, riding in like ships to port from distant seas. It was Robin who had quoted that bit to her--’a port belongs as much to the sea as to the land.’ So it was. Peshawar belonged to India and also to the mountains and the steppes and the sand deserts beyond the Khyber.

The camel bells tinkled, growing fainter, down the road. They must have come from Afghanistan--right through the war zone, perhaps; from Russia even, across the Oxus and over the snowy Hindu Kush. Sighing, she snuggled up against her father. She saw that her mother had gone to sleep. Her father put a pudgy hand on her shoulder, and she was comforted. He was fat and old and hardly ever understood what she meant--but he understood now. This breath of Central Asia smelled as discomforting in his nostrils as in hers. It was exotic and exciting, but ordinary people had to band together against it. If they did that, she and her father--she and Robin--they could make a place for themselves in the midst of its hostility. Outside that place there would be these barren rocks, bullets, the law of the hawk, the dust, and the piercing, lonely wind.

Her father whispered, ‘Do you really love him, miss?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Shhh!’

At the edge of cantonments an English sentry in a red coat challenged them. There was a strict curfew. Day and night sentries guarded the cantonment. From now on they were prisoners. But that was silly. This was not a prison but a place where there could be homes and softness and affection.

Before she went to sleep the face of the lone man appeared to her. People had wanted to kill him. She tried to imagine someone wanting to kill her--not just any Englishwoman, because of race, but her, herself, Anne Hildreth. She could not do it. Instead Major Hayling came to her. He was not alone, but surely he was lonely. And at last, Robin.

Robin was silent and strange, but when he looked at her, her heart rose up to meet his eyes. He said he liked the wilderness and all lonely places. Surely he meant that they challenged him, that they aroused him to go out and conquer them? Or perhaps he meant that in such places he could think undisturbed and dream of what he would do with the world and the life before him? She must find out. Particularly she must find out what he felt about her.

That first--because unless he hated her she was going to marry him and be his woman. She did not know what would come after that; she only knew that a crumb of it, a smile in passing, would mean more than the love of a thousand Haylings.

So--that first. Then she would force her mother to accept what was already a fact that could not be altered. Daddy would help, bless him.

Was love, when your man shared it and returned it, like being in the shelter of your father’s arm? Or like the mirror, and your skin taut and Robin’s imagined eyes over your shoulder? Robin Savage. Anne Catherine Hildreth. She was twenty-three and, oh, damn it, she was innocent. She’d have to watch Edith Collett and try to find out.

She went to sleep.

About a hundred miles west of Peshawar a young man in dark green walked slowly through a stream across his path. His head was bent, but he was not looking where to put his feet. The cold colour tones of the water interested him. Examining them closely, he saw that they reflected the leaden sky above and absorbed the green smoothness of the pebbles below. In midstream he stopped for a few seconds, the better to observe the colours. The water ran through his boots and soaked the trousers under his black leather leggings. Then he hitched up his sword, tugged the pistol in its black leather holster farther around to the other side until it was again under his right hand, and walked on.

A Gurkha rifleman walked two paces behind him, stopped when he stopped, and, like him, had been looking into the water. But the Gurkha, who was even younger than the young officer, was looking for fish. His uniform too was dark green; on his head he wore a blocked-out pillbox hat of black cloth in place of the lieutenant’s black topi.

Robin Savage, glancing up, saw that he had nearly walked into a camel’s backside, and slowed his pace. He turned his head to check that all was well. His orderly, Jagbir, was there, two paces behind him; behind Jagbir, the groom leading the charger; behind the groom, ten Gurkhas, now splashing through the stream that crossed and recrossed the trail; a long column of camels; among the camels, Indian camel-drivers shambling along like so many scarecrows, each man so huddled into a blanket that only his nose showed out. Beyond again, the trail curved around a rock and out of sight, and jagged mountains climbed up to pierce the low clouds.

Facing the front once more, he could see more camels, more Gurkhas, more camel-drivers. The path threaded down a steep slope to the beginnings of a rocky plain. He could see no more because the sky hung like a grey carpet overhead and wisps of snow-filled cloud trailed across the foothills. It must be snowing back there in the pass they had crossed yesterday. It was December 23rd, 1879. Two days to Christmas.

The camels kept coming along the trail, around the rock corner, across the stream, down the slope. Their loads--flour and meal and meat and ammunition and tents and cooking pots--swayed with their long strides. On one camel the load was two stretcher-panniers, called khajawas. A man lay in one, his weight balanced by a couple of sacks of rice in the khajawa on the other side. Robin had spoken to him earlier in the day; he had a raging fever from pneumonia, and the camel’s motion made him vomit every few minutes. They ought to put him in a hospital. But there was no hospital here, and the Afghans closed in behind the last man of the force as it passed by, and followed up to pick off the stragglers and the sick.

Robin turned again to look back at the mountains. They rose into the clouds, and in the clouds they rose up and up, perhaps to the sunlight. In the mountains the snow fell, and none saw it fall. He quoted aloud, ‘ “In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, in the lone glare of day, the snows descend upon that mountain; none beholds them there, nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, or the star-beams dart through them.” ‘ He shivered with the intensity of his need to see the secret snow. But, if he saw, the snow would no longer be secret. His own presence and the fact that he saw would take the magic out of the snow and the lonely wind that drove it. If he saw, Jagbir would see, and Jagbir would blow on his fingernails and say, ‘Snow, sahib,’ as if neither of them had ever seen snow before, and start collecting wood for a fire; the fire would crackle, the mystery would fade, driven out by coziness.

The camels were shying violently as they passed him, and the drivers reaching up, swearing, to grab at the head-ropes. The air was full of the extraordinary but indescribable noise made by empty ghi cans when their sheet metal bends and straightens under pressure. None of the camels was loaded with empty cans, so Robin realized slowly that Jagbir was imitating that inimitable noise. He turned his head. ‘Jagbir, stop that at once! Do you want one of these camels to break a leg?’

The young Gurkha grinned shyly. ‘No, sahib.’

‘All right. Now go back and tell Naik Dhanbahadur to come up to me, please.’

‘Huzoor?’

Robin sighed. Jagbir could understand every shade of meaning in a dog’s bark or a horse’s neigh, but when a human being spoke to him his low forehead wrinkled and his smooth face became painfully creased. It was not stupidity, though it looked like it. Jagbir could understand anything, and quickly, as long as it was set before him in some medium other than words--if he saw it, for instance, or felt it. Robin repeated, ‘Go back and tell Naik Dhanbahadur to come up to me, please.’

‘Hawas!’
The orderly’s brow cleared. He unslung his rifle, gripped it correctly at the point of balance, swung on his heel, and darted back along the column. He ran as though his life depended on it. For a second Robin watched him, then smiled and marched forward again. A British soldier would have trotted a few paces, stopped at the trailside, and delivered his message when Dhanbahadur drew level. But Jagbir had been told to go back, and he was going. Robin rested his left hand on his sword hilt and thought of Anne Hildreth. He must be in love, to think of her so often. He dreamed of her at night. She was kind and open and affectionate. She was beautiful. But--but what? He could ask her. Yes, but--

He did not hear the horse clatter up beside him. The rider’s hail jerked him out of his reverie, and he became puzzled even while he listened, because the last picture in his mind had been not of Anne, but of sunlit snow.

‘Hullo, Savage! Your company on baggage escort to-day?’ That was a silly question. He wouldn’t be here among the camels for any other reason, nor would his company be scattered in little groups up and down the unwieldy, vulnerable column. He said, ‘Yes.’ He had noticed that most people could answer these conversational gambits with a pleasant smile and a light phrase. He would have liked to possess that knack, but he did not. He just said ‘Yes’ flatly. He could often feel his brother officers reaching out for something about him to hold on to, a hand, a joke, a shared sentimentality, but he had nothing to offer and was sorry for it--well, not sorry, perhaps; he wasn’t sure about that.

This was Alan Mclain of the Highlanders, a tall, brick-complexioned subaltern of Robin’s own age, with fierce golden moustaches and bright blue eyes and the badge of the MacDonald Highlanders, a raven on a rock, on the left side of his khaki topi. He slowed his pony to a walk beside Robin. ‘Do you think we’ll get to Kabul to-morrow?’

‘I don’t know.’ After a pause Robin forced himself to add, ‘What do you think?’

‘Bad business if we don’t, I think. Old Alma’s so damned cautious. With General Bobs besieged we ought to be going hell for leather and devil take the hindmost. These bamshoots can’t stop us.’

‘No.’

‘I suppose it was difficult for him when he had conflicting orders, but when he made up his mind to disobey General Bright and go to Kabul I should have thought he’d move faster. ‘Tisn’t as if we’d had any fighting to do, worse luck.’