by John Masters
So the true, the last word was as clear as the sapphire lake in the east: The Russians would use two routes, their main weight centre, their Mongol hordes north. Up to the moment of assault they would lead their victims to believe that the main weight of attack was going south and might even be directed against the Turkish Empire. Such a deception, if successful, would catch the British and Indian forces up to a thousand miles out of place.
But would the commander-in-chief in India, who had never met Lenya Muralev, believe there existed a woman with the nerve, the skill, and the judgment to use a poisoned well as bait to catch men already dying of thirst?
He glanced sideways at Muralev’s calm profile. Muralev had the written, irrefutable evidence in a wallet in that off-side saddlebag. It would be wrong to demand to see it, though. That would soil the wind of truth that blew over the pamir and gave him this calm certainty. He would not do it.
Above all he was happy because he had found Muralev in the place where he ought to be and doing what he ought to do. Now they would have a chance to talk together. Perhaps, even, they would together find the home of the inaccessible bird. He might be able to persuade Muralev to come to India for a time. Once they were over the border there’d be no need for hurry. They’d have time to talk and think. He would be able to ask and learn, and in learning gather some of Muralev’s hard-won peace.
Three days passed in rapid travelling. On the fourth morning Robin awoke two hours before the first light and awakened the others. At this time the wind was dark. Free-found, it raced across the pamir and tugged at the mean lean-to shelter, two pieces of felt, which Muralev shared with them. Jagbir slept always with his rifle between his knees, embracing its cold wood and burning steel as a Dutch burgomaster embraces his Dutch wife. The season was far advanced, and their fingers often became solid so that they fumbled for minutes on end to fasten a single leather toggle. They ate ground barley mixed with curds in a bowl.
Muralev said, ‘It will be a hard day. And remember, those Kirghiz told us the road’s bad.’
Yesterday they had come upon four nomads who had told them that a thousand horsemen had moved into camp just over the Russian border. Muralev thought that three or four small parties of cavalry would already be on the Chinese side, looking for them. There were no boundary fences on the pamir, and an officer could easily say he had crossed over by mistake. One such party would surely be on the pass ahead. Muralev had agreed, therefore, that it wasn’t safe to try the pass. Instead they must to-day find their own way over the spurs of Muztagh Ata. The pass was higher than sixteen thousand feet; their route would take them nearer nineteen thousand.
They mounted stiffly, and stiffly the ponies began to move. In the evening they had seen yurts in the plain five miles to the east, but no lights showed there now. In the fading stars, by the dawning rumours of day, Robin saw the two men ahead of him riding forward over the black nothingness of the ground. Here there were not even the bones of the preceding dead to guide them. After an hour he called out to Jagbir, ‘Choro, it sounds as though one of your food sacks is loose.’
Jagbir secured the thong, then turned his head with a smile. ‘Thank you, sahib.’
The answering smile faded from Robin’s lips. Jagbir’s face was yellow under a spectral yellow wash evenly laid on, thin but bright over his dark skin. He glowed with an emanation like that from decaying bodies or from jellyfish in eastern seas at night. His almond eyes contracted in amazement as he stared at something over Robin’s shoulder. Robin turned.
Usually in the first light the world was pale and green as though lying under shallow coastal water. The pallor deadened all colours, so that a woman’s scarlet sash would be seen as a lifeless, neutral slab. Now the light fanning out above the pamir, slanting up behind the distant serrations of the Alai, was yellow.
Muralev looked around and reined in his pony. The three came together and stared fearfully at the eastern horizon. Muralev said, ‘It is the burhan--to-day of all days!’
Often in the caravanserais travellers talked of the burhan. Robin, watching the yellow light crawl up the face of Muztagh Ata, muttered, ‘Shall we stay here until it’s blown over?’
‘We can’t. The men in the yurts saw us. She’ll know by now. To-morrow she’ll be here.’
Robin said, ‘It will be hard.’
Muralev answered, ‘To-day you will see God.’
Jagbir said curtly, ‘We’re wasting time.’
The ground sloped up. An hour later the plateau broke into soaring ridges, and they entered a steep gorge. All the while the light brightened until the sky from end to end shone brilliant yellow, chrome yellow, unspeckled by cloud or shadow, possessing no centre because the sun was invisible. The wind died away, and in the new, fearful hush they struggled on. At the snowline no sound but the roaring blast of the horses’ breath cracked the yellow ball of sky and snow imprisoning them.
The air began to move. A loud sound broke out, at once distant, close, unfocused, and oppressively loud, as though giants rolled rocks in the mountain under their feet and dwarfs rattled pebbles by their ears. The light flickered unsteadily, shading down from clear yellow to dull, to dark, to burnt ochre, to umber, the tones spreading across the horizon and racing up the sky. The blast hit them and threw them down, men and ponies, upon the shale and the snow.
Robin lay on his face, his fingers and nails pressed out and clawing into the shale to hold him. The wind boomed across the face of the ridge and dragged him with it. Pebbles and grit and snow lashed into his head and broke the skin, but the blood could not force out against the wind. The wind blew the breath back down his throat and he thought he would suffocate. The naked shingles of the world shifted under his fingers and tilted sideways.
Silence burst over the mountain, hurting his ears. He lay twenty yards from where he had stood when the blast came, and all the nails of his left hand were torn out by the roots. He began to bleed profusely. One pony lay kicking on its side, its back pressed against the rock whither the wind had blown it. A second screamed and struggled to its knees a hundred yards ahead. The third had vanished, leaving a broken rein in Jagbir’s hand.
‘Gone!’ Muralev shrieked and pointed down the long buttress-slope, not steep, not shallow, on which they tremblingly stood. The wind had dropped to gale force, and they could think. ‘Oh, hurry on! It’ll come again, all day.’
‘How often?’
‘Every ten, fifteen minutes--less, more.’
They hurried upwards. When the burhan came the second time they saw it thundering down the mountain, jerking at the pyramid of Muztagh Ata. Then they flung themselves to the ground, each clutching with one hand at rocks, boulders, rifles, whatever was near, their ponies’ reins looped around them. For the second time the burhan passed.
They stumbled upwards hour after hour through powder snow. This snow had been here since the beginning. The passing falls of the years were gone. The burhan took them and whipped them away across the roof of Asia. The light changed through the hours, minute by minute--yellow, green, yellow again, black suddenly, when they could see nothing, then yellow once more, and against it the needle-eyed notch in the snow wall ahead. The snow--green, yellow, with the light--hissed and crawled across the mountain. The burhan shouted to them that it came not from above the earth but from under it.
Five hundred feet below the notch another thunderclap struck them. They clung together on a narrow rock shelf, the snow slope steep above them to their left and steeper yet below them to their right. Robin, sheltered under an overhang, saw a hand close to his eyes. The fingers of the hand were dead white under the dark pigmentation of the skin. Then the snow drove at him, and he had to close his eyes. The fingers of Jagbir’s left hand were frostbitten. Where were the gloves? Gone, blown off, lost.
The wind changed direction and blew his feet from under him. The lip of the slope came to him, and he was looking down and moving down. The snow fell five thousand feet, not sheer but too steep to climb. He sa
w his pony tumbling head over heels down the slope, gathering speed in the centre of a cloud of racing, glittering, green snow. Perhaps the pony shrieked, but its shriek was lost in the wind. Then he was over, the wind swinging him around and forcing his body and feet over the edge. He dug in with his hands and hung on the lip, the wind turning him over on his wrists. He saw Jagbir’s face a yard away. It was like a child’s. Jagbir cried bitterly, his useless, frostbitten hands held out to Robin.
Muralev’s hand gripped Robin’s wrists. Jagbir sat down astride Muralev’s back, and Muralev hauled slowly, jerked back, hauled again. The wind abated. Robin dragged snow-spray and air into his lungs and slowly came to the ledge. Muralev turned him over and began to rub snow into his face. Robin saw Jagbir, crouching back under the overhang, his mouth still open, and furious, helpless tears freezing on his cheeks.
Jagbir’s faultless legs and cracked heart lifted them to the notch. Muralev’s pony, too, Jagbir pushed up the mountain. Jagbir alone still had his rifle, strapped across his back. In windless silence, under a yellow sky, they crossed the notch.
By nightfall they had reached the snowline again. They tore up a strip of felt and made mittens for Jagbir’s hands, and found juniper and stunted rhododendron on this southern face of the range, and lit a fire. The burhan passed away, and for a few hours they all slept, huddled together on the ground before the fire.
Robin awoke first and scrambled up to put more roots on the fire and blow it back into life. He glanced at the stars and knew it was about two o’clock. Muralev crept out to him, and for a while they crouched in silence by the fire.
Then Muralev said, ‘Jagbir’s left hand is bad. His right is much better.’ Several days’ growth of stubbly beard hid the outline of his face. Scratches and small holes pockmarked it where the burhan had blown stones and snow through the skin. His voice was harsher than ever, as though he had swallowed some of the flying gravel. When Robin nodded, he said, ‘What sort of a name is that--Jagbir? I’d like to know, so that I can remember him better and can place him in the world.’
Robin said, ‘He is a Gurkha, a Pun from Zilla Four Thousand Parbat in western Nepal. He is a rifleman of the Thirteenth Gurkhas.’ The fire muttered sullenly, and a wandering shaft of moonlight flitted across the silent tower of Muztagh Ata.
Muralev said, ‘He is the most loving man I ever knew. He is lucky.’
Robin nodded. He was tired, but with a pleasant lassitude, like a climber who has reached a summit, returned through the sleet, and come to his warm refuge. He said quietly, ‘What are we going to do?’
Red lights from the fire glowed in the depths of Muralev’s shadowed, bloodshot eyes. He had lost his spectacles in the burhan, and the eyes were puckered at the inner corners. He said, ‘I don’t know, Savage.’
Robin lay still. The moonlight went from Muztagh Ata, and Jagbir moaned in his sleep. Muralev said, ‘The course of my life has shown me that I must go out and search. I think I may end in a monastery, but first--forty days in the wilderness. Or forty months. Or forty years.’
Robin said eagerly, ‘Yes. But we ought to do good for people--not for any particular person, for all people. Perhaps we can find out things that are important but have been hidden or buried or forgotten.’
Jagbir had been moaning for some minutes. Now he got up, swaying unsteadily on his feet and blinking at the fire. They watched him, not speaking, until he walked away into the darkness.
Robin rushed on. ‘The people who act and work and love are good. People like us, who sit in deserts or are like Ishmael, people who try to get rid of all action, work, love--they are good too. God made all of us. Can we not find a bridge between the two kinds of people--buried in history, perhaps? In our minds, perhaps? We--’
He stopped short. Jagbir came towards them, heavy-footed and unsure, out of the darkness, and they rose together. After a long look into each other’s eyes they turned to help the rifleman lie down. But Jagbir staggered on and stopped only at the edge of the fire. His left arm ended in a lumpish tangle of bloody wool. Blood seeped through the wrappings and dripped sizzling into the fire. In his right hand he held Muralev’s wallet. He was young and badly hurt. The wound showed in his eyes. Gently Robin took the bandaged stub in his hands. ‘What have you done?’
‘Cut off the fingers. Stopped most of the flow with barley meal--and the cold. I’ve got his wallet.’ He stared at Muralev.
‘You shouldn’t have done it.’ Robin began to unwrap the bloody strips of felt, but Muralev said, ‘Leave it. We’ll only start the flow again. There’s nothing we can do.’
‘Chup!’ Jagbir silenced him with a threatening jerk of his right hand, which held the wallet. He returned to Robin. ‘We must open this, sahib.’
Robin took it because Jagbir pressed it into his hands. The padlock hung broken from the hasp. Robin looked at it, then at Jagbir’s hungry, hurt eyes. He did not want to open it. He did not need to. He knew the truth, and nothing in the wallet could make the truth truer.
Jagbir said, ‘There will be papers in there. Proof. The Jangi Lat Sahib will believe then.’ It was true. It would be like the legend of Alexander. They’d want to see ‘proof,’ and here it was.
Muralev said, ‘Please don’t open it.’
Robin murmured, ‘Why not?’ Of course he knew why not. Muralev had removed himself, once and for all, from the world of human struggles. Tacitly Robin had agreed to go with him, to travel with him at least until they could find their separate ways. But Jagbir’s eyes flamed with fighting, jealous love, and his hand dripped blood, drop by drop. The pressure of Jagbir’s love forced Robin’s hand to the lock. It was wrong. The lock would burn him. This was what he had to leave behind. But he said again, his voice made harsh by guilt, ‘Why not?’
‘You know.’
Robin opened the wallet. There was a thin file of papers inside. Muralev tugged urgently at the lobe of his ear, and his long face wrinkled miserably as Robin brought the papers to the firelight and began to examine them. Jagbir stared angrily at Muralev--a long, still-hungry look.
There was a map of western Asia. A thick, blue-inked line sprang down from southern Russia, crossed western Persia, and swung east. The head of the arrow rested on the Bolan Pass. A second arrow curved down from the Farghana through Samarkand to Balkh and crossed the Hindu Kush, and the head of that arrow rested on Peshawar. A few thin lines crept out from the Farghana towards the Russian pamirs, but before they reached the passes into India they swung back and rejoined the second arrow at Balkh. There were figures inked in beside these last lines.
‘What do these figures indicate?’ Robin asked tonelessly. ‘The number of days ahead of the start of the main assault that those forces are to begin their movements.’
‘Sufficiently far ahead to give us time to commit our troops to the northern passes?’
Muralev did not answer.
Robin held out another document, five pages of closely-written manuscript pinned together at the top left-hand corner. ‘And this?’
‘The detailed plan to which the map relates.’
‘And this?’ Robin put his finger on an isolated group of letters and figures in the top right-hand corner of the top sheet.
‘The serial number of that copy. Number five. There are only eleven in existence.’
Robin folded the papers back into the wallet. ‘I’ll carry it,’ Jagbir cut in, and held out his hand. ‘Under my shirt.’ Muralev sat down by the fire and drummed his fingers on his knees. Jagbir went back to the shelter.
Robin stood hunched and cold behind Muralev. Everything that he had known to be truth was deception. The Russians were going in centre and south--the main weight south, the Mongols centre after a feint at the northern passes on their way from Andijan to Balkh. So his visions were not visions but hallucinations, his certainties the self-cozenings of a madman. And for this he had committed a sin. Jagbir’s love had driven him, and his own love for his country. He had thought he would do England this last servic
e.
And there was Anne. Did he not see her face and eyes now? Had he not hoped in the deep of his heart to do his task so well that there would be recognition, medals perhaps, to make her proud?
All these were kinds of love; so, once more, love had caused sin. He was weak and foolish.
He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve hurt--I’ve hurt myself and you, and I’m--I’m sorry. What can I say?’
Muralev said, ‘You haven’t hurt me, my friend. Perhaps it is best that you did what you did. Perhaps I tried to stop you only because I did not want to be lonely. Really I know that you and I are not of one kind. I just hoped. But you do love, and I think you always will. I do not and never can. What are you thinking of?’
Robin caught quickly at the slow-passing images in his mind before the necessity to answer Muralev’s question could jerk him back to here and the fire and this present reality. He said slowly, ‘Anne--my wife. I was explaining why I had done it, opened the wallet. She was saying she didn’t want me to do it for her sake--just if I thought it was right. We were in a shikara in Kashmir, and the lotus in bloom everywhere.’
‘You see? You must go back. Jagbir is your charge and your load, because he will never understand. But I think your wife might. You must go back now and many times later, because also you must go away many times.’
‘Yes, yes! When I am here I see her and the lake. When I am there, though I love her, I see this and the snow that no one sees, and I keep wondering. What I’m looking for is always somewhere else.’
‘Perhaps. But do not be unhappy about it. There is joy in the search if you know love. For me--’ He hung his head, then got up slowly. ‘I’ll get wood and heat some gruel for Jagbir. Go over and keep him warm, friend, until I come.’
