Kitabı oku: «The Mulberry Empire», sayfa 3

7.

In these long nights, Burnes dreamt of Montrose. He could not help it.

You went to the door of your chamber, and turned, and looked. The thin curtains were blowing in the summer breeze, and already, at this moment in the morning, the sun was lighting the thin white cloth, there at the narrow windows. You looked down at yourself, and there too, your white nightgown billowed out with the cool Scottish morning breeze, lit with the cool Scottish morning light. And there were your boy’s feet, there, on the floor, blue almost with the cold, and veiny. For a moment, you could go back and hug yourself in bed, while the first of the morning; there, your bed, cut and rumpled and squashy with your sleep; or you could do what you could do, run downstairs in your bare feet and throw open the Montrose door to the Montrose morning. Rub your eyes and moan like a dove with your sleep; push your fists into your eye sockets, and fret your sides with your own quick warming embrace. And there. The blue sky; the birds at song; the smell of the morning’s first earth and, behind you, the first clanking noises of the house, preparing itself for the day, as the maids raked the fire and the girl brought in the milk. Yes, he would run, in this cold he could see, and not only feel, down to look at the dreamt Montrose morning.

But then he turned and looked at Montrose, and it too had become an orchard city, high in the dry brown mountains; Scotland turned to Islam, the granite city turned to a city of mulberries, and the perfume wafting over Burnes’s sleep was not heather, the song was not that of the starling, but the heavy blossom of mulberry, the clean song of nightingales. It was as if he woke, and went to the Montrose window, and outside, there were orchards and orchards of mulberries. Mulberries outside, weighing the tree down, the tree glimpsed through the open Scottish door. And there, there, was a boy, a curious near-boy, a near-warrior, barely uniformed, a powdery beard against his soft skin, scurrying away outside, peering in at Burnes, in his high gleaming magnificence. And in his wake a sweet whiff of the many-perfumed city, a waft of dung and smoke and the high Scottish, yes, heathery Scottish mountain air; and the scent, too, of mulberries, growing outside somewhere, clotted on the trees, fallen and thick on the roads as dung. Burnes looked down at himself, and his bare nightgowned flesh was glittering with brass, with spurs, his boots bright with polish, but stained with the fruit flesh, the limbs of one who had walked long and far through the orchards. And as he woke, Burnes thought of something he knew, even after waking, to be true: that the fruit for which the English had the single name of mulberry had in Persian six separate names, and in Pushto, the language of the far high hills, the fruit had so many names that no one could ever know them all; a fruit which, before, had seemed single turned in Burnes’s dream into one with so many names that no man had ever counted them all, and no man would ever risk reciting the many divine names of the divine fruit.

They must have come early, the next morning. Burnes woke from his dream, and already he could hear the whinnying of the strange horses out there in the garden, their unfamiliar-sounding jingle. He lay there on the padded floor, his eyes open, and could see from their unnatural stillness that Gerard and Mohan Lal, too, had woken, and were lying without moving, their eyes closed, feigning sleep so as not to move, not just yet. He lay and listened to the terrifying noise of the horses. They were down there, the men who would take them to the Emperor, of whom they knew nothing, of whose cruelty and goodness they knew nothing. Down there, waiting with all the patience they were born with.

They dressed quickly, and after a breakfast of milk and flat bread, went down to their escorts. They were there, sitting peaceably on their horses, not dismounting, just waiting as they had waited, surely, for an hour or two. Burnes led the other two out. Mohan Lal awkwardly salaamed, a gesture which they returned perfunctorily; their unfamiliar, unwelcoming look at the guide confirming what Burnes had always felt, that his frankly inquiring gaze, noting down, say, a particular stirrup loop as peculiar to the region, was always one guaranteed to bring suspicion and dislike down, not just on him but on the whole party.

It was the first time out of the house in days, and Burnes could not help feeling stiff. He stretched, awkwardly, as the light almost hurt his eyes, and for the first time, he saw the city. Not arriving for the first time, where novelty coloured the vision, not through a window, making distant what was there to be seen, but seeing a city which, it now seemed, he knew from his memory. A scattered city, lying in the scoop of the earth, the brown cubed houses lying against the vast slow rise of the brown mountains like dice in a cupped pair of hands. All the way they had ridden here, the earth had seemed dully brown, unchanging, empty, like the momentarily empty earth after waterless months, from which all colour had been sucked, leaving only brown. But now, coming out into the air, it seemed as if everything had enriched, multiplied in the unchanging earth; the dazed eye, looking down from the dazzling clean blue of the sky, saw a hundred, a thousand tints in the bare mountain earth; browns whitening with chalk, a streak of vivid yellow, a shadow going into mauve in the early-morning sun. Everything, he saw, pausing here before the bleak dazzling sun, could be found here; horses, orchards, sky, water, earth, and now, waiting for the high remote Emperor, he seemed in terror and jubilation to see everything there was, everything, there in the earth.

‘Where are we going to?’ Burnes shouted to the mounted guards. He was glad to hear his voice sounded authoritative.

‘The Bala Hissar,’ one said, not looking down at him.

‘Is it far?’ Burnes called.

‘No,’ another horseman said. ‘Not far.’

‘The Emperor is waiting,’ the first horseman said. ‘It is time to go. Are you ready?’

‘Yes,’ Burnes said. ‘Yes, we are ready.’

They set off, their guard not dismounting but hemming them in between the horses’ high flanks. The horses walked with such stately gravity that at one moment, one of them could not bear the tenseness of the slow walk and wheeled abruptly off, circling like a hawk in the street before the rider brought the beast back. There could have been something brutal, a blunt assertion of power, in their making the party walk between the horses, like tethered slaves. They may have felt this – Gerard certainly felt this, to judge by his clenched-buttock stride, now the result of his august pride as much as his fluid bowels – but Burnes couldn’t feel any outrage in himself at this treatment. Rather, he felt, in his glittering exotic clothes, dress uniform draped splendidly with the heavy red court robes, like a pilgrim. An unworthy pilgrim, walking humbly up the hill to the great sawn-off blunt rock, the palace, the Bala Hissar, in the middle of which vast plain mass sat the Amir. Up there was the Emperor, politely patient, waiting; you could feel his calm wait here, walking the street between their mounted companions. And the mounted companions, too, seemed quiet, subdued by the Emperor’s patient quiet. What splendour was up there, Burnes could not tell; but he felt that there would be none. This city, plain-dressed, the high clean air given its florid perfume by the fruit trees, wasn’t ruled by some fabulous potentate; he could feel it. No cushion-fleshed tyrant in a pile of rubies sat up there, watching them approach; just a mind.

As they walked through the narrow mud streets, they were given a thorough inspection. The children came to the windows, and stood, staring; shadows, in the upstairs shuttered windows, showed them that the women of the city, too, were curious. The shops in the bazaar were opening, and, behind the piles of fruit, of bags of spice, the merchants and customers, sitting in the early sun, followed the procession with humorous open eyes. Over the city, the Bala Hissar, a great shapeless piece of power, and they walked the streets, not responding to the keen attention of the city.

They walked on, not speaking to each other or their guards. Occasionally, over their heads, one of the horsemen would call out to another, or to someone in the street. They called out in Pushto, and each time Gerard, walking by Burnes’s side, stiffened, knowing that they didn’t want to be understood. Burnes worked on his patience; if Gerard could be kept from speaking at least until his easily-ignited fury had died down, that would make things a great deal easier. After they had run the gauntlet of the bazaar, the houses seemed to drop away. The hill of the Bala Hissar itself was bare, clear for a siege.

This last stretch, as the road turned upwards, seemed to divide and stretch before them, and it seemed to Burnes, as the Bala Hissar receded from them, that this was the road in the paradox; that with each step, the road doubled in length, that each step grew smaller and more painful, and the great fortress would never be reached, as they laboured at its gates, endlessly. But it was mere minutes before they were there at the open gates, and their escort turned, at some unseen signal, and rode off, calling to each other, now, in Persian.

8.

A small man ran up to them and beckoned quickly with his two hands, scowling. He seemed alone, and they followed him into the big square court of the palace. It was quite empty, and they walked briskly across it into another opening, the doors swinging open. Two boys were lounging there, each with a jezail slung across his back, each turbanned massively, and they made some side-to-side swing of the head, acknowledging not them, but their little guide. He gestured and beckoned continuously, and they followed him into another hall, where a group of more soldierly youth stood, waiting, and then into another. As they walked through the rooms of the palace, they acquired some kind of attendance behind them, the boys forming a chattering guard behind them, and all the time the little man, dancing, beckoning, in front of them. They walked through one room after another, the heavy blunt-carved dark wood doors opening weightily, and in every room there was almost no furniture, almost nothing, just plain plaster walls, the narrow windows of a palace in a country which knew all about heat, and about cold. Abruptly, they all fell silent, and at a circling gesture from their guide, stopped. The guide looked them over, critically, as if for the first time, and, with a circling gesture, stirring something in the air, a half-smile, a nod at the guards at the door, conveyed somehow that here they were. The doors were brought open and their guards fell back behind them, as they walked, in an awe they tried to subdue, into the great hall of the Amir. And there he was.

The hall was bare, long and square, with a single step at the end rising to a modest platform. There was nothing in the room except a huge Turkey carpet, rich and deep as rubies. At the far end of the hall, perched on the edge of the step, sat the Amir. A group of courtiers and mullahs, ten or twelve, stood behind him; the courtiers wore swords dangling from their kummur-bund. As they entered, the group seemed to stiffen, and drew back, forming a little fan around the Amir, who did not rise. They bowed deeply from the far end of the hall, rose very slowly, and walked forward. Every five paces, they stopped and bowed again, an obeisance returned with a tiny benevolent craning of the neck by the Amir. It wasn’t a court ceremonial; just a ritual concocted to show the greatest possible deference, which, it was hoped, the Amir would take as some court ritual of Europe. Finally, at ten paces from the Amir, they dropped to their knees and bowed their heads very slowly to the floor, counted to five, as agreed, and raised them again.

The Amir was smiling. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said. He was a sharp-featured man, a scimitar of a nose scything through his beautiful humorous face, and his big dark eyes danced, curious or amused, from one to another. His robes were plain, and, like the earth, a dozen shades of brown, and wrapped around his body as he sat, cross-legged, on the edge of the step. By his side, the nobles looked savage, graceless, bundled like washing. He gave a small bow from the neck, not in humility but, as it were, cueing Burnes to speak.

‘Emperor,’ Burnes began. ‘Lord of the distant horizon, Emperor of the wind, King of the Afghans, Heir of Israel …’

That was not quite right. He continued.

‘Heir of Israel, we come to offer you the shade of our friendship. May the shade of our friendship always offer you rest and solace, may the waters of the love between our empires never run dry.’

‘May the song of the nightingale always bless your counsels,’ the Amir returned, ‘and may the wise horses of your empire bear you without tiring to your last home. Sit down, sit down.’

Burnes, Gerard and Mohan Lal awkwardly forced themselves into a cross-legged posture; a painful business in high-topped boots.

‘Greetings, Sikunder Burnes,’ the Amir said. ‘Your name is auspicious.’

An old and now familiar joke, from much repetition. Memories were long here, and every single Afghan, on hearing Burnes’s name, had asked him if he were Alexander the Great, come to rob the country again. It had seemed unfortunate; now, he had come to see it was just their sense of humour. ‘There is nothing, thank God, I share with the Greek Alexander, and come not to plunder your kingdom, but in all respect.’

The nobles, teetering with nervously thrilled anxiety, now gave way to a general giggling, stopped with one quick sideways jerk of the Amir’s head. Behind him, the two pairs of double doors, one on either side of the throne room, were half opened; it had clearly been a great honour that, on their entry into the Bala Hissar, the double doors were all opened. Out of the doors came now a procession of cooks, bearing great dishes of heavy beaten silver, starting with a whole steaming lamb, lying on its back with its legs pathetically upwards in a sea of steaming spinach. It was, Burnes estimated, ten o’clock in the morning, and Gerard was tensing at the sight.

‘How many kings are there in Europe?’ Dost Mohammed suddenly asked. ‘And Napoleon, is he still King in Europe?’

‘Ah—’ Burnes said, thrown off balance. But the Amir seemed hardly to mind.

‘I do not understand,’ the Amir continued. ‘It seems that the lands of the kings of Europe march with each other. Are they on good terms, or do they fight over their borders? How can they exist without destroying one another? I am most interested, Sikunder Burnes, to have the benefit of your wisdom and knowledge.’

Burnes recollected himself. He had been made sleepy by the East, and had been preparing for a long series of introductory gestures; the mutual flattery for half an hour, the commendation and reluctant acceptance of every single dish, the entertainment from the professional anecdotalist. He hadn’t anticipated anything like conversation starting up for at least two hours.

‘There are many countries in Europe, great Amir,’ he began. Dost Mohammed, gathering up his retinue, gestured them to their places on the carpet around the colossal morning feast. He drew Burnes to his right side, and seemed to be listening with great attention, the Amir’s big dark sad eyes fixed on him as he spoke. When the list had come to an end, he took a deep hissing breath through his nose, like a horse after exercise.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that your advancement in civilization, as you describe it, does not save you from war and dispute.’

‘It is to be feared so.’

The minor nobility and clergy, all trembling with curiosity, now responded to some kind of sign from the Amir, and fell on the food with a terrible cheerful eagerness.

‘It is said,’ a very young prince asked, ‘that in your country, the flesh of pigs is eaten. Is this true, Sikunder Burnes?’

The Amir waved away the question before Burnes could answer it. ‘Tell me about taxation in Europe,’ he said. ‘How do your kings collect money to conduct their wars?’

‘Such a thing can barely interest the great Amir,’ Gerard interposed, ‘so peaceful are his lands and the lives of the people under his wise rule.’

‘Nevertheless, I want to know,’ the Amir said, not taking his eyes off Burnes. ‘Tell me about taxation.’

‘And you, great Amir,’ Burnes said. ‘What do you know of the people of Europe? Have you, with your own eyes, seen the embassies of Russia?’

Dost Mohammed took a piece of bread, and chewed it, thoughtfully.

‘Pray, sir,’ Dr Gerard said abruptly. ‘What are your times of prayers?’

The mullah, on safe ground here, immediately began to rattle off the list. Gerard interrupted him. ‘You are enjoined, I think, by the Koran, to pray before sunrise and after sunset?’

‘Yes, yes,’ the mullah said. ‘Yes, and damned be the infidel who neglects such prayers.’

Gerard could hardly contain himself, his feet twitching with his suppressed theological glee. ‘Tell me, sir,’ he went on, his eyebrows shooting up in theatrical amazement, ‘how one of the faithful would carry out this injunction in the Arctic Circle?’

The mullah hardly paused. ‘In every part of the world are the injunctions of the Koran to be obeyed, except in some circumstances while travelling, when it is written that—’

‘Quite, quite, quite,’ Gerard went on. ‘But in the Arctic Circle, man.’

‘The—’ the mullah paused, uncertain.

‘The Arctic Circle is the utmost point of the earth, sir, the Ultima Thule, the furthest point on the geographical globe, far north of any inhabited or habitable spot. It exhibits – and this is my query – a seasonal curiosity, for five or six months of the year. In the winter, the sun does not rise; in the summer, the sun does not set, and the barren northern lands are plunged into a night which lasts for months, and, in the summer, a perpetual day. Sir, I repeat my question. How may these prayers be performed in a land where there is neither sunrise nor sunset? Are we to suppose that the faithful Esquimaux are only enjoined to perform their devotions twice a year?’

Gerard was enjoying himself too much, Burnes reflected, and now the mullah had had a moment to consider the question and make something up. He glanced at the Amir, and, to his slight surprise, there was no sense of insult there, but, over the sharp hooked nose, a glittering and amused look in the eyes. Dost Mohammed, too, was enjoying himself.

‘Quite, quite,’ the mullah said. ‘The Prophet himself visited the faithful Eska, the faithful Eska. It is said. And in such countries it has always been the custom that prayers are not required, in those countries, yes, it is sufficient to repeat the Quluma.’

‘Permit me to ask, sir,’ Burnes cut in with a confident feeling that, now, he was entertaining the Dost, ‘in which chapter of the Koran this doctrine may be found? We poor infidel, alas, may not claim to know or understand the sacred writings.’

‘Yes,’ Dost Mohammed added. ‘Yes, where is this extraordinary idea to be found? I do not remember such a thing. And when is the Prophet supposed to have found time to convert the Eska? I suppose at the same time he was travelling to Engelstan to pay his homage to Sikunder Burnes’s grandfather, fool.’

The poor mullah started to blush furiously, and the argument was taken up in the far corner of the room. Burnes dared to look directly at the Amir, who was twinkling graciously.

‘You see,’ the Amir said to Burnes, leaning over confidentially and entirely ignoring the gurgle and chatter of the debate, ‘both our fools and our wise men love to argue, and hope never to conclude their arguments. And in your country, do the wise debate, so as to outlast the nightingale’s song?’

‘From dusk to dawn, great Amir,’ Burnes said. ‘And in every land, I think.’

‘But your companion has made an interesting point,’ the Amir said. ‘And one which the mullahs, now, will never settle. Perhaps you should return in seven years, and see what conclusion they have reached, because I fear they will not agree today.’

The Amir looked distinctly amused by this prospect. Burnes looked at him, and the Amir looked, frankly, back; and, for once, looking into the eyes of one of the great princes of the Orient, Burnes did not feel like a rabbit transfixed by a snake.

‘The climate of your city is most healthy, great Amir,’ Burnes said, slipping back into idle compliments. ‘And the beauty of your people is the most remarkable I have ever seen in my travels.’

‘If you stay, Sikunder,’ the Amir said, shrugging briefly, ‘you will be struck by the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days, and you will not think the climate so fine.’

‘The Wind, Amir?’

‘It strikes at travellers, and may take only one. A pestilential wind, which strikes and kills.’ The other Afghans had fallen silent now. ‘It attacks like a cold wind, and leaves the traveller senseless. And the flesh of the man struck by the Wind falls from the bones, and limbs soften and fall away from each other, and the hair falls out at the touch. A disease of the low-lands, a curse of the Wind.’

‘Pray God—’ Gerard said.

‘And now, Sikunder Burnes,’ the Amir went on, quite calmly. ‘Let us speak of your European alchemists.’