The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  Somewhere else in the city, in a quiet house behind a simple door, another court sat and listened to a boy. The Prince had returned, and the whole city knew it; knew what the British did not know; knew what the Bala Hissar did not know; knew that their Prince was returned in the night, and waited for the day to dawn. It would not be long. Akbar sat in the innermost room of this merchant’s house, and around him were his brothers and cousins. They sat and listened, their attention entirely fixed on Hasan, the son of Khushhal, telling what he had done, proving his loyalty.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  1.

  ‘IN SIX MONTHS,’ Florentia Sale said, ‘you will return to find us as civilized as Calcutta. You know, Sale, I very much have it in mind to hold a ball this winter.’

  ‘A ball, my dear?’ Sale said.

  They were standing at the edge of the cantonments, saying their goodbyes. Sale was setting off for a six-month spell of duty in Jalalabad, to the east; Florentia, at her own request, was remaining in Kabul. As she very sensibly pointed out, she could be of no use to Sale in his duties in Jalalabad; could be of considerably more use to the ladies of the camp, to arrange diversions and be of help in small ways. Besides, the climate here was so healthy and the life so peaceful, it would be altogether more agreeable for her to spend a winter here, her third. As everybody agreed, there could be nothing more pleasant than the sharp Afghan winter; Florentia particularly anticipated the revival of one of the previous winter’s innovations, as Burnes – so admirable, so original – had suggested the possibility of skating. It had been many years since Florentia, long in the East, had thought of skating, but the clever Afghan blacksmiths had fashioned great numbers of skates for the British, and it had proved a delightful diversion on the deep-frozen river; even some of the Kabul nobility had taken to it, and very pretty they had looked, too, with their robes flying behind them and an expression of grim concentration beneath their turbans. And what a pleasure it had been to discover that she had not altogether lost the knack, and in a week could carve a perfect 8 in the ice, to general, gratifying astonishment. Yes, among the many new pleasures they had introduced to Kabul – racing, cricket, concerts – ice-skating was the most gratifying in Florentia’s memory, and she looked forward to the first hard frost eagerly. And this winter, perhaps, they could hold a ball or two on Sale’s return; it was not impossible.

  ‘You will have so wretched and dull a time on your manoeuvres,’ Lady Sale said brightly, ‘I feel it my duty to provide a pleasure for you on your return. Yes, a ball; I really think, now, we have enough ladies here to make it plausible, and no one can say we do not have musicians enough – after waking us with their marches every morning for the last three years, I do not see why we should not make some use of their talents. If only we had a pianoforte, Sale—’

  ‘I doubt, my dear, Jalalabad will supply a pianoforte, or I would be sure to return with one. But you will manage very well – you always do, my dear. Very well, a ball. I quite envy you your quiet six months here; you are right not to want to accompany me into the wilds.’

  ‘Abominably selfish of me, I know,’ Lady Sale said. An Afghan woman, in her heavy blue cloak, came out of the nearest tent, one of the officers’ tents, and shuffled past them. They both averted their eyes. ‘But, you know, I always wish to be where I can be of most use. Ah – here is Brydon. Good morning, Dr Brydon.’

  Brydon, on his morning rounds paying compliments and handing out palliatives, gave a deep bow and stopped. ‘You are departing on your duties, I perceive, General?’ he said.

  ‘Indeed,’ Sale said. ‘I truly wish – well, whatever my wishes, I am to leave you until the spring. Upon my word, I never had so pleasant a tour of duty as here, one so supplied with every pleasure or with fewer demands on my time. I fear I am in for a rude shock now; I have quite forgotten how arduous a soldier’s duties can be.’

  ‘You know, Dr Brydon,’ Florentia said, ‘General Sale always says this, but in truth, I am sure, he finds it rather dull here – a strenuous spell of duty quelling insurrection in the hills will be just the thing to invigorate him, so little is there to occupy us here. I never knew a quieter place. What was it Macnaghten was saying last night – quiet from Dan to Beersheba – yes, indeed. And how is dear Mrs Sturt? No news as yet?’

  ‘It cannot be many days, Lady Sale; but she is doing very well, and is bearing up with great good cheer. She is convinced that she will have a boy, this time, you know.’

  ‘I told her as much, indeed,’ Lady Sale said with an air of triumph. ‘One can always tell, Brydon, by the weight of the infant – I always knew, with each of my children. Not many days, you say? Good, good – I shall pay her a visit, this very morning. You know, Brydon, I expect you to act the beau while my husband is absent, and keep us all diverted with new fashions and surprising entertainments. I was in the middle of promising Sale a ball on his return, but so dull are we, that will be far too many months away to provide much of the pleasure of anticipation to us. I expect ingenuity – novelty – ideas from all my irregulars, Dr Brydon, I warn you.’

  ‘You see, Brydon,’ Sale said, ‘my wife will brook no insubordination.’

  ‘Lady Sale, ha ha, has shown herself so much the mother of invention,’ Brydon began brilliantly, ‘so much the queen of our little society, that our poor suggestions can only prove, ah …’

  ‘Well, Sale,’ Florentia said briskly, ‘off you go – if you dawdle much longer you will find yourself snowed in for the winter. And you will find pleasures enough, I dare say, wherever you find yourself. You return in April, I think?’

  ‘What pleasures can there be where Lady Sale is not?’ Brydon said, getting carried away, but they both ignored him; they gave each other a brisk joyless salute, and turned away, Sale to his horse and Florentia, no doubt, to bully servants and lecture the frightened pregnant young wives. Brydon, left standing there, watched them both go, for the moment forgetting where he was and where he had been going.

  2.

  It was two weeks before the information of the attack on Sale and his brigade reached Kabul. It had been in a pass a week’s march east of Kabul, as daylight was fading, and no doubt the effectiveness of the ambush had been due to the element of surprise, as the bandits startled a weary and inattentive body of men. Something like this might have been expected, and the one fatality and dozen injuries were not, in themselves, serious; moreover, once the English had retaliated, the encounter had come to a swift end as the Afghans took to their heels and fled. The narrow pass wound and curved, allowing any savage marksman opportunity enough to conceal himself and take careful aim; the sides of the pass were high and steep as cliffs, a deep fissure in a mountain, and as the men marched three abreast, they were ambushed by Afghans, crouching at the brim of the pass high above. Their aim was not good, and the jezail, the Afghan musket, was a primitive object, not allowing much accuracy; otherwise, it would have been no harder for the enemy than shooting fish in a barrel. The brigade had no means of protection, and in a few moments, a man lay dead; the English fire, directed wildly upwards, ricocheted against the sides of the pass, and hardly reached the enemy at all. The response itself, however, ineffectual as it was, seemed to impress the tribesmen, and the encounter was swiftly over. Sale himself had a wound in his leg, according to reports, but, the dead man aside, there were few serious injuries and the brigade continued on its path, more warily.

  The news of the assault on Sale’s brigade was received in different quarters in Kabul. Akbar heard it and nodded grimly; the men had done well, and this encounter was never intended to be more than a warning skirmish. If the battle honours on either side were equal – one of the sharpshooters had concealed himself ill, and the English had contrived to shoot him in the head – the weight of warning must be all on one side, as the English learnt to fear. Whatever they thought them, these exchanges constituted the stately opening moves of a game of chess, which Akbar, hunched over his white pieces, would always win with a cry of shah mat as he k
nocked the black king to the floor. Whatever significance they assigned to it, Akbar intended that in a five-minute skirmish they would understand that from here on, they were engaged in a game of black against white, and disaster upon disaster would visit them.

  The news was received by the English more casually than that; a sign of loose idle hostility, Macnaghten confidently said, not entertaining the possibility that war might have broken out. Florentia had continued to hold her dinners, and over her table, the general view was that something of this sort might at any moment occur in any quarter of the world. By the time the news had reached Kabul, the winter had begun, in that abrupt way it did here, with a single, heavy, overnight fall of snow, and Florentia Sale’s dining room was drowsy with three substantial fires. The more learned guests delved into the long communal memory of India, and recalled the disappearance of the thugs; and after all, Florentia reflected out loud, London too had its footpads and mohawks, and Sale was, by all accounts, quite well. A mere flesh wound, requiring only the most superficial attention, and all would be well; Sale had known worse, though for herself she much preferred the wisdom which was now evident, of staying in the safety of the Kabul cantonments.

  Burnes excused himself and his brother early, and made his way back through the streets of Kabul to the old merchant’s house. It seemed to him that the city was oddly peopled for the late hour; in normal circumstances, the Kabulis retired at darkness, and the streets were deserted by eight o’clock. Tonight, despite the cold, small groups of men clustered periodically; a dark patch, like a copse, glimpsed through the heavy falling snow, and then, as they approached, dark silent Afghan faces resolved themselves out of the lucent gloom, and fell back into obscurity. Some festival perhaps (and the city was always ready to celebrate the birth of some descendant of the Prophet with guns and firecrackers); but the groups were silent and sombre, and watched Burnes and Charlie go past narrowly. They, too, did not speak, and it appeared to Burnes that, in some leisurely, unemphatic way, they were being trailed; two or three men could be glimpsed through the quietly falling snow, walking fifteen paces behind them. Each of them followed them for five minutes or so, before falling back and seemingly handing over to a new band of silent attendants. The jingling noise of Burnes’s uniform as he walked briskly in the obscuring snow seemed unaccountably loud, and it was with some relief that they achieved the merchant’s house, and ordered the gates tightly shut for the night.

  Charlie said a quick goodnight and, shivering, went to the old women’s quarters of the house. Burnes, too, went to his quarters, and summoned Ahmed, his usual footman, to light the fires. Ahmed appeared in a matter of minutes, and behind him, an unfamiliar new servant, who stayed at the door; it was a matter of mild irritation to Burnes that the household was constantly augmenting itself without reference to him, and he found himself employing various street-acquaintances of his footmen and cooks for no better reason than his body-servants seemed to think that they, too, deserved followers to demonstrate the grandeur of one who served the English. It did no good to complain about this tendency of his household, and he resolved to leave the matter until the next day.

  Ahmed listened for a while, tipping his head from side to side in some kind of agreement while he laid the fire in the grate.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed in the end. ‘There is some discontent in the market. Perhaps Your Honour would care to remain in the house for a day or so.’

  Burnes looked at the man sharply; he had not considered that this might be a serious matter.

  ‘Do you advise me to remove to the cantonments? We are rather isolated here.’

  Ahmed seemed to consider the question. ‘Perhaps Your Honour would care to remain in His Honour’s house tomorrow,’ he at length concluded. ‘There he will be safe.’

  ‘What is the cause of this?’ Burnes said. He felt that Ahmed was unwilling to say more. Perhaps he was unwilling merely because he did not know what the reason for this discontent was.

  ‘Nothing, sir,’ Ahmed said. ‘A one-day wonder, and soon over. Perhaps Your Honour would prefer to stay in his house tomorrow.’

  Burnes suppressed his irritation; it might, too, be as Ahmed said, a one-day wonder over some trivial matter, a soldier fighting a merchant in the market, perhaps. Similar things had been known, and nothing ever came of it. He dismissed the thought of removing to the cantonments; and the snow was falling too heavily now to take so alarming a step.

  ‘Come forward,’ he called to the figure in the doorway. Ahmed cast a vague, worried look behind him as the man stepped forward and bowed. As he stood upright, his eyes cast downwards, Burnes recognized him, without quite remembering where from; a handsome man, delicately featured, a familiar face in the cantonments.

  ‘My brother,’ Ahmed explained. ‘He is visiting me, and asked to come and present his respects to my master.’

  Burnes nodded politely, and dismissed them. Perhaps Ahmed was right; there was some evident unrest about, for whatever cause, and there was no reason to venture from the house the next day. He had been in Kabul long enough to know that the mood of the city changed quickly, and if the cause of this mild hostility proved to be some fool of a sergeant’s having seduced someone’s wife, or getting drunk and starting a fight, it would all be forgotten in a day or two. Respect was the thing, and Kabul repaid that respect.

  It was a cold night, and Burnes woke from his uneasy, dreamless sleep three or four times, shivering deeply. Each time, in the confused small hours, it seemed to him that there was a vague rumble somewhere close at hand, like an army; each time he wrapped himself deeper in blankets and returned quickly to sleep. Once, he woke and in the dark of the room, there might have been another man there, standing somewhere in the shadows, the effect of the light cast by the last of the fire, but, muttering to himself, he brought the blanket over his tired aching head and sank back into the cold darkness.

  He woke, and it was morning, and he was alone. Or not alone, because there, his face white, was Charlie, half-dressed with a heavy Afghan robe thrown over his shoulders. Burnes screwed up his face; he felt sticky and stupid with his lack of sleep, and scratched his head, yawning.

  ‘Where’s Ahmed?’ Burnes said.

  ‘Gone, I think,’ Charlie said after a few moments. ‘Ally—’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘They’ve all gone, I think,’ Charlie said. ‘I can’t find anyone. No one woke me this morning.’

  Burnes yawned again, trying to think. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ he said.

  ‘Ally, don’t move – something terrible …’

  Burnes rolled over, away from his brother. He felt exhausted, limp and unequal to any of this. As he turned, his face brushed against something, and his hair caught in some sort of cold wet twigs.

  ‘Ally, don’t look – come away, Ally.’

  Burnes brought his hands up, and disentangled himself. What – there, somewhere in the night, someone had placed by him – what – a branch of a tree, some kind of – a mulberry branch, winter-bare and spiked. And something else, there, something solid and heavy and stinking; the smell, sharp now, brought up the dream again, some dream of wading through stench; some object wrapped in cloth, the size of a small boulder.

  ‘Come away,’ Charlie said; his mouth opened and closed, but the quiet terror of his voice seemed to have nothing to do with his white face. Burnes groped his way upright, pulling the blanket around him. The object was wrapped, and could be anything, but Burnes knew as well as his brother what it was. It was a trophy; it was the head, rotting, months old, of Sergeant Porter.

  Burnes leapt away, and for a moment the two of them stood there. Burnes’s clothes still lay where he had thrown them, the night before; and then he understood that they had been deserted. Quickly, he pulled on a shirt, tugged on his breeches and boots, and, half-dressed, with a blanket over his shoulders, holding his coat, he followed his brother out of the room. Charlie would not stand there, had fled as soon as he could, and Burnes followed him,
shaking, out of the house. It had stopped snowing, and the courtyard was deep in snow over which no foot had trod. The gates were bolted and secure; from somewhere, outside the house, there came a muffled noise of men talking. They hurried across, as if to Charlie’s quarters, but Burnes summoned himself, and held his brother’s arm for a moment.

  ‘All gone?’ he said.

  ‘I think so,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Have you made certain of it?’ Burnes said. Charlie shook his head. Burnes assembled himself, and, taking Charlie with him, he turned and went back. They went back into the house, and, not speaking, went through the rooms. Nothing had been touched, and the house seemed not to have been looted in any way. There was something frightening in this; robbery would at least have supplied a routine explanation. But each room was empty of people; the dining room, the study, the bedchambers; the two of them went through, and there was no one to be seen. In the night, the household had risen, and gone without a word. Even the kitchens were empty, abandoned; food lay about and piles of used dishes. They had fled as one, at some signal. They walked around the house, and then Burnes turned, and walked back the way he had come. There was nobody there, and there might never have been anyone in the house. Only outside the gates; there, they could hear, there was a faceless army of voices.

  For hours, it might have been, they sat and shivered in Charlie’s quarters, and for the first time, the ghosts of the evicted women seemed to gather about them, accusingly. They sat in silence, listening to what they could hear; the steady murmur outside. No attempt was being made on the house, just an unmoving hostile guard. The fire was out, and they shivered; neither of them made any move to relight it, nor did it occur to them to do such a thing, in the terrifying cold room. It might have been hours of silent listening before, from outside, a voice was raised, and, even in the room, they could hear what it called. ‘Burnes!’ it called. ‘Sikunder Burnes!’ For a moment Burnes shrank, hardly knowing what this meant, and then, like an echo in the snow, he realized that he knew the voice.