They trotted for some ten minutes before they put up a hare, which fell to Digby’s gun; then, in quick succession, a brace of partridge from a rowan bush, and a fox which had probably been stalking game and failed to notice the approach from upwind of the hunting party until it was nearly upon it. The hounds set off in chase of the fox, and only Porter saw what darted off in the opposite direction, some hundred yards off; a great male deer.
‘Sir!’ he shouted, and the party, just riding off after the fox, turned for a moment without halting.
‘After him, Sergeant!’ Frampton called, without checking his pace in the opposite direction. Porter spurred his horse, and, reaching for his musket, lit off up the incline, a single bearer following him. This would be a fine trophy for him to show the mess; this would be something to boast about.
The body of the party roared off in high spirits, though the fox promised no great sport; they had happened upon it, and all its wiles would not put more distance between them and it than would supply a half-hour’s chase. But they had not ridden for more than four minutes when the hounds put up another hare, which led them astray. By the time the hounds discovered the fox’s trail again, it had put some distance between itself and them. It was a good hour before they cornered it, in a hollow by a spring, and, in high spirits, they blooded Charlie in the English manner, to the frank curiosity of the bearers.
They rested by the spring for some minutes, laughing and joshing; Charlie refused to wash his face, and, dried with blood, he presented the appearance of a fine warrior to carry back to the cantonments. Frampton ceremoniously presented him with the brush, which he tucked seriously under his saddle, and they all collapsed onto the ground.
‘You see,’ Frampton said. ‘A fine thing, an Afghan chase. Why we do not exercise ourselves in this way every day, with so little otherwise to occupy us, I cannot understand.’
‘Frampton,’ Burnes said. ‘It seems to me that we are missing someone.’
‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘The Sergeant – Porter, is it? – he left us, pursuing a deer.’
‘I thought he was following us,’ Frampton said. ‘No matter. We will wait here, and he will find us shortly, with, no doubt, his twophy.’
5.
There were no landmarks here; the bare hills rose and fell, unmarked by any kind of incident. There were no signs of habitation, or even a memorable shape of rock by which he could orient himself, and by now, among these smooth hills, rising and falling in their bare brown way, Sergeant Porter considered himself thoroughly lost. How the deer had managed to evade him, he did not know; there was nothing to hide behind, nowhere to run, and yet it was gone. The bearer trotted wearily behind him, paying no attention to Porter’s shouts; there was nothing they could say to each other, and, as if in embarrassment, they hardly looked at each other. Occasionally the bearer rode forward quickly, and gestured, as if he had glimpsed the deer, but though Porter followed his directions, he had not seen anything for some time now. From time to time, a movement at the corner of the eye made Porter wheel, his musket already raised, but it was always a bird, or nothing he could see.
‘Useless,’ Porter muttered, and assented with the bearer’s gesture to halt. The deer, he had to accept, was quite gone now, and it would be best to return to the main body of the hunt. He wheeled his horse around. The bearer looked at him questioningly. It struck Porter for the first time that the bearer was not much more than a boy, and would be considered a very good-looking man in London; strange how these delicate looks surfaced in remote places, where the inhabitants would have no idea of the success they would have among the women of a civilized place. ‘Shikar,’ Porter said. ‘Go back. No good. Finish.’ The bearer shrugged, and dismounted with a single smooth gesture. ‘Oh, damn you,’ Porter said. ‘Why can’t you understand what I say?’
It seemed hopeless, and in any case Porter himself was all but exhausted now, so he, too, swung himself out of the saddle and squatted by the side of the bearer. He shrugged and grinned; an easy enough gesture for the native to understand, you might have thought, but he looked back, his face empty of any response. ‘And no food, neither,’ Porter said. ‘A waste of a day, and me in hot water if they have to send out to search for us, chum.’
There was no point in talking, but the Sergeant preferred chatting companionably to his dumb associate to sitting in silence in these silent bare hills. That way, surely, was the way to return; since he had split off from the main body of the hunt, his attention had been fixed on the quarry, and not the direction he was riding in, and now he was not at all sure where to return. The land, like his unwilling companion’s face, was blank, unspeaking, and silent.
They sat there for a while in silence. There was no noise but the wind; Porter wondered what time it could be. The sun was high in the sky, but it was no warmer; if anything, it was rather colder than first thing in the morning. A movement, somewhere at the corner of his eye, and a crackle as if of branches; over there, at the bottom of the valley, a little copse of trees, and within it something large, like – yes, like a deer. There it was. Porter rose, raising his musket, and strode ten paces towards it. The copse was quite still again, but the deer, now, had no escape. Porter congratulated himself; he would, after all, return to the hunt, the animal slung over his saddle. He lowered his musket, and waited.
Behind him there was a sudden noise; he turned, and the bearer was mounted, and riding away furiously, in the direction they had come from. ‘Damn you!’ Porter shouted; that would certainly startle the deer away. ‘Come back at once!’ But the bearer did not slow down, perhaps not understanding what Porter had shouted, and was soon over the hill. Oddly, he had not startled the deer, and the copse remained silent. That was a piece of luck. Leaving the horse where it was, Porter raised his musket, and, pointing directly at where he was sure the deer was hiding, he advanced with steady, trembling steps, towards his prize.
It was a good bag, in the end. As the afternoon began to fade, the others, two miles away, found themselves with an admirable assortment of game, besides the fox. Frampton even suggested staying where they were, for some further nocturnal sport, hunting hyenas; a thing none of the English had done, but a sport in which they understood the Afghans had established a considerable science. The provisions were exhausted, however, and none of them was equipped for a bivouac overnight; with regret, they determined to return, weary but cheerful.
Porter’s bearer had returned alone, and there was no point in waiting longer for the Sergeant. Frampton was irritated, but no more; for him to return alone to the cantonments was not the sort of behaviour anyone could condone, though he quite saw that it might make little sense, in certain situations, to wander about the hills in search of the party. ‘Damn’d fellow shouldn’t have wandered off like that,’ he said. ‘We should have done better if we had stuck together. If it turns out he lost his quawwy, I shall be most iwwitated. To inconvenience us and have nothing to show for it, that would be too bad. After all, this is not England – if he should be lost, we hardly have the men to send out for him. This is not familiar countwy, all in all. Damn the fellow. Gentlemen, five minutes?’
‘He may be lost, Frampton,’ Burnes said. ‘Should we send out for him?’
‘Porter? Not he,’ Frampton said. ‘A wily old bird like that, never lost in his life. Put him down in the wemotest and most bawwen desert, and he would be quite at home within an hour. Depend on it, he’s at this moment in the cantonments, woasting his feet and a pair of cwumpets at a fire, and laughing at us. I am most sewiously annoyed with the fellow. No more shikars for him, gentlemen.’
‘Should we ask the bearers for their opinion?’
‘The beawers? What can they, in heaven’s name, tell us, a dull lot of fellows like that? The one who weturned seemed quite unperturbed by the loss of his companion. Depend on it, there is nothing to concern ourselves with. I intend, however, to make the wetched Porter wegwet his conduct for weeks to come. He has quite spoiled my day with wowwy. Sh
all we weturn to lay our spoils at the feet of our masters?’
‘I don’t know the bearer who returned,’ Burnes said.
‘No?’ Frampton said. ‘A young man of parts, eager to offer his services to us since he seemed at something of a loose end, and a good wider, I perceive. Handsome fellow, too. I find it encouwaging, that the inhabitants seem more and more weady to join with us in expeditions of this sort. What was his name, Digby?’
‘Hasan, I believe, sir,’ Digby said.
‘Well, nothing further to be done,’ Frampton said. ‘Let us weturn and chastise the wetched Porter.’
6.
Burnes did not enjoy or look forward to his daily audiences with Shah Shujah; each time, as he and Macnaghten were ushered into the tawdry halls of the invisible Emperor, he could hardly suppress the thought, ‘the puppet Emperor’; the tiny figure in his toy-theatre setting, gesticulating and squawking on the tinsel throne. Shah Shujah’s method of conducting himself towards the British was far less civil and patient than Dost Mohammed’s had been. An observer would have quickly come to a false conclusion; it was Shah Shujah who exhibited all the haughty disdain of a king forced to entertain uninvited visitors; it would have been Dost Mohammed whose grateful civility suggested a debt to the people who had restored him to his throne, and maintained him there.
They were ushered into the audience hall, and kept waiting there unconscionably. It was quite altered from Dost Mohammed’s time; that austere space, shining with light and the eyes of the alert Amir, was gone, and in its place was a terrible apocalyptic splendour. It was something Burnes did not try to explain, not quite understanding it himself, and Macnaghten had entered the audience room for the first time without that sense of appalled shock. Macnaghten had not seen it before, and Burnes could not explain what he felt; that here was the worst of Shah Shujah’s deeds, the cruel display of riches and power and will. No one would have understood; perhaps only Mohan Lal and Gerard and Vitkevich, who had seen the halls of the Amir, and had known what Dost Mohammed had been. But Mohan Lal was in India, and Gerard was dead, and Vitkevich, he knew not where. To anyone else, to say that all Shah Shujah’s wickedness was in this pantomime transformation was to invite ridicule; and everyone knew the stories that drifted down from the Bala Hissar, the stories of the small boys, the courtiers, tortured slowly to death before Shah Shujah’s slow-lidded eyes; the Suddozye prince killed before the court by having molten gold poured down his throat. And all of them had heard, and would never forget, the long morning when they had brought the news to the Bala Hissar that Dost Mohammed had surrendered, and was kept in India under the personal care of the Governor General, and listened for two hours to Shah Shujah’s demands; listened to the Amir they had, in their wisdom, brought back to his kingdom, shrieking with one death after another, one torture after another, multiplying and repeating, blinding, flaying, boiling, disembowelling, demanding in his furious desire a hundred, a thousand deaths for Dost Mohammed, and they had known then what manner of man the new Amir of the Afghans was, and they had listened in silence. Was that not cruelty enough? But for Burnes, it was not; and the transformation of the room was the biggest sign that here was no man, but an impotent old dragon, waiting for its moment to strike and kill. Burnes entered this room and, for him, all Shah Shujah’s wickedness was already here, glittering like an arsenal.
Where had these treasures come from? Were they brought from Shah Shujah’s long exile; were they acquired hastily; were they brought up from some underground depository, left in cellars during Dost Mohammed’s long wise reign, and only now brought up to the state rooms of the palace? Somehow, Burnes thought this last. In his mind, he saw Dost Mohammed entering his new palace, and with a single disgusted gesture ordering the tawdry display of the deposed king to be buried somewhere unseen. He would like to know of it, perhaps even like to keep it. In his mind, Burnes saw his Amir ordering the cellars to be unlocked, and going in, alone, to contemplate the ruins of kingly vanity.
The room was hung with red and gold; the carpets and hangings swathing the muffled room, dotted about with great jewelled golden bowls, and at the head of the room, a barbaric glittering empty throne – that, surely, could not have been brought from India. Burnes remembered the room before, empty and clean and white, and how the noises of the palace and the world outside filtered in. This was muffled and silent, a sumptuous tomb, waiting for its Emperor to arrive.
They stood and waited in silence. Shah Shujah’s custom was to keep them at his pleasure for anything up to an hour. Macnaghten got out his watch, and shook it irritably. There was nothing to be done; tempting as it was to remind Shah Shujah who, here, was in the position of power, the consequences of such action were unpredictable. In India, the old man could be summoned; here, the English could only obey his whim. He was the bare scrap which concealed, in attempted modesty, the reality of the situation, and to cast him aside would not just be to admit the substance of the English presence, but to move their obligations onto an entirely new level. If the old man wanted to believe himself the true ruler of the kingdom, and the price of his belief insolently making Burnes and Macnaghten wait an hour, then that could be endured.
The arrival of the Amir was a slow one, and accompanied with the greatest ceremony. The guards flung open the doors, and the court nazir, preceded by some sort of footmen, entered with a slow marching step. Next, some more footmen, splendidly dressed in long gold coats, whose sole purpose was to scatter handfuls of rose petals in the path of the Amir, and, presumably, to sweep them up afterwards – a ceremonial invention, no doubt, of Shah Shujah’s. It was all too easy to imagine the angry exiled king, dwelling in his mind on rituals he would impose, and saying to himself, over the long course of years, ‘When I am King in Kabul again, I shall never walk on anything but rose petals …’ And then the court, the hired nobility, walking backwards, bowing constantly. Through all this, Burnes and Macnaghten stood stiffly, not being greeted or acknowledged. The court gathered behind the two English envoys, and, as one, flung themselves to the ground; and then, a long minute after, came the Amir, with his body-servants and his personal guards, taking cross little steps into the room, turning, and up the red-carpeted steps onto the golden throne. At length, the whole revolting procedure was done, and with a single gesture, he commanded the English envoys to begin their twenty minutes of compliments.
At length, business could begin. Questions of court finance were routinely run through, and Shah Shujah’s peremptory demands met with the gentlest possible suggestion of the likely consequences of increasing the burden of taxation on the citizens of Kabul; a daily discussion. Shah Shujah’s request for the head of Dost Mohammed was as regular a demand, and one which Macnaghten had no answer which could possibly satisfy, it was clear, however often it was repeated; and this was always followed by a lengthy denunciation of the British weakness in failing to find and kill the sons and brothers of his predecessor. A nervous moment; although Burnes knew nothing of the sons of Dost Mohammed, apart from those presently with him in India, he hoped that no one had told Shah Shujah that the Newab Jubbur Khan was a regular and welcome guest of his and his brother’s. Finally, in recent weeks, the thoughts of the Amir had turned to his great treasure, the Mountain of Light, and demands had started being made that the British should now demand the return of the Koh-i-Noor from the thief, the swindler, Runjeet Singh. It would not be long, Burnes thought, before Shah Shujah started making demands for the loan of forces to reclaim Peshawar, and the pretence in Calcutta that he was at all to be preferred to Dost Mohammed would have to be dropped. He waited, listening to Macnaghten’s steady, well-rehearsed explanations with practised patience.
When the Amir had finally run out of his familiar complaints, Macnaghten, for once, had something to raise with him.
‘Your Majesty’s aid is most urgently begged by us,’ Macnaghten began. ‘It may be a small question, but we feel that Your Majesty may be so good as to wish to help his valued allies and friends i
n what may prove to be a trivial matter. A valued soldier of ours failed to return from a hunting party yesterday, and his companions were obliged to abandon him by the onset of darkness.’
‘Speak on,’ Shah Shujah said, scowling.
‘Your Majesty’s patience is the wonder of his friends and the terror of his enemies,’ Macnaghten said. ‘We are greatly concerned for an English soldier’s wellbeing, and wish to find him; if he has been rescued by Your Majesty’s subjects, we will, I fear, have some difficulty in discovering him, owing to our unfamiliarity with the region where he was last seen. Were Your Majesty so good as to help us in this matter—’
‘You weary Us with matters of no importance,’ Shah Shujah said. ‘Where was he taken?’
Burnes stepped forward, bowing, and explained.
‘Do not waste my time,’ Shah Shujah said. ‘Your servant is dead. He was foolish to go to such a place, and he has learnt his lesson. I can do nothing for you. Pray that his death was swift.’
‘Your Majesty’s gracious sincerity awakes our unceasing admiration,’ Macnaghten muttered.
Each day, the audience ended in exactly the same way, as Macnaghten said something innocuous or even lavishly flattering to the puppet Amir, and Shah Shujah, out of his repertory, brought a daunting facial expression. He stared at them, as if grossly insulted, and said nothing more. This, it turned out, was the signal to go, and the two of them walked backwards out of the throne room, bowing deeply as they went. The court divided in two behind them, and Shah Shujah watched them all the way to the door with his unforgiving face. And what he would do without them …
The Mulberry Empire Page 50