The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher

brother of every Afghan,’ Gerard said, conventionally echoing what Burnes had said.

      ‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Jubbur Khan agreed. But then he seemed troubled, and said, once more, more emphatically, ‘The Amir is my brother.’

      ‘He is the brother of every Afghan,’ Gerard said again, idiotically.

      ‘He is your brother?’ Burnes cut in. ‘He is the son of your father?’

      ‘He is the son of my father,’ Jubbur Khan said, relieved. ‘Yes, he is the son of my father.’

      This explained a great deal. And now Jubbur Khan got up, as if he had said enough to explain who he was, and who the Amir was, and what the Europeans were. He got up, bowing on all sides, and swept out with massive graciousness, hardly waiting for his guests to raise themselves and bow graciously back, as if his good manners were such that no complementary response could possibly improve or complete them, and was out of the door and at the bottom of the stairs before Gerard succumbed to what had clearly been troubling him for some time, a colossal, harrumphing and malodorous fart, like a bough breaking under the sheer weight of fruit. The boy guard looked up, surprised and humorous. Burnes vastly bowed in his direction, the sleeves of his robe collapsing about his arms and hands. ‘And to you, O Lord of the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days,’ he said. ‘That, I expect, is a very good sign.’

      ‘Indeed,’ Mohan Lal said. ‘Your digestion is improving, to venture a fart. You need not have waited until the departure of the Newab, indeed. I have read that the Afghan custom is to fart at table.’

      ‘A risky business,’ Gerard said. ‘With nothing to eat but this damned greasy food.’

      6.

      Outside, there was a flicker of movement. A scarlet-leaved tree against the dense dusk sky trembled suddenly; a gust, quickly over, as if someone had shaken the tree’s trunk and run away. Another movement, something which might have been a bird, shooting up from the tree with a raucous squawk, abruptly muted. Gerard raised himself from where he lay, complete with food and boredom, and went to the window, where Burnes was already standing. Underneath the tree, a flash, sudden, of white, like the wink of a fish belly, turning in a black pool. For a moment the faces of the Afghans had turned up to the window, before returning to their usual occupation; their teeth and eyes winking white in the dusk. They could be guards; yes, they could be; or, conceivably, they could merely be sitting there, as they would sit there indifferently, whoever was inside the house of the Newab. Burnes did not know, and could not think who to ask.

      Out in the court, the squatting boys were preparing for their street-sport. There were five of them, and each clutched, underneath his arm, something which peeped and squawked, a weak piping squawk like an unoiled hinge. With his free hand, each dipped steadily into a little bag, tied to the sash at his waist next to the knife, and ate shrivelled-up little apricots, crunching and spitting the stones with all the absorption they had. In a moment, a boy threw down the piping bird under his arm, and, as if recognizing the challenge, the boy facing him in the circle threw down his bird, too. The two quails shivered their plumage back into plumpness, and nervously strutted in the other’s direction. The boys made an encouraging noise, a quick strange grunting rattle, like a pig eating a snake, and a handful of grain was flung down. The fight began.

      It was dark, below, and Burnes could see nothing of the sport; the faces were turned down in excited absorption, and all that could be heard was the occasional fierce cry from a boy, quickly stifled, the pipe and peck of two small birds fighting over a handful of grain. Burnes had seen the sport before, in the daylight, from this window. The rudimentary contest seemed never to weary or tire the street, and they squatted over the two little fat birds, watched them barge each other, pluck at each other with their fierce little beaks like toy birds, a harmless little bout between paint-bright tin birds, wheeling in their tin circles.

      Down there, small cries of excitement, quickly muted, were being made; this was not a game for cheering at, but one where the small shrieks of the birds, rending and tearing each other’s little flesh for grain, was to be heard and winced over. This was the sport – the one thing, as it were – which kept Kabul quiet, and everyone watched it; underneath the window, Burnes had seen fine horsemen, street boys – even, a couple of times, an idle Newab Jubbur Khan leaving his house for a morning constitutional – pause for a moment before the rapt silent bout. It was too dark to see, from the window, what was happening; you could not see which of the two birds was succeeding, which was succumbing. There was only the faint tremulous cries of small fat birds, assaulting each other furiously over grain which neither of them would eat. Burnes drew back into the room.

      The guard came in. But instead of sitting down in the corner, he stood at the door, and looked at them; at Burnes and Gerard and Mohan Lal. ‘He,’ the guard said finally, ‘will see you tomorrow.’ He made a small gesture with his head, the side-to-side twist, an acknowledgement of something, though none of them had said anything, and then left.

      They stared at each other.

      He will see you tomorrow, the guard had said, just that; and Burnes ran the sentence through his head, over and over again, to see if it was clear, if he had understood it correctly. Language brings opposite meanings so intimately together, and if the guard had said He will not see you tomorrow, there was a terrible danger that Burnes would have missed it. He ran through the sentence, over and over, adding words which he might have missed, substituting they for he, never for tomorrow, kill for see. He got to the end of it. He was absolutely sure of what he had heard. The Emperor of the Afghans would see them tomorrow.

      But with that certainty came an appalling and unanticipated terror. They had travelled to Kabul, never knowing what they would find there; had presented themselves at the gates; had submitted to their guesthouse garrison without more than a weak tremor of dread. And now, with the certainty that they would do what they had arrived to do, terror set upon Burnes. No; not quite that; it was not that something had struck at him. It was more that something had left him. As if, with the ordinary words, some great certain presence in him had abruptly fled, clearing the walls and windows, the barriers of his own skin without an effort. He sat, trying, almost, not to shake with the black terror of his own certainty, fleeing him, and waited for it to leave. It was the Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days, and it began in this room, it began its furious flight from this little room, and fled from him, his fear, his terror, his knowledge. He did not know, quite, what it was, what certainty he was losing with this flight, as if of wind; he could only feel it leaving, with no sense at all of what would be left of him when it was gone, what strength to carry out his task. He waited saying nothing, as if in thought, and in a moment it was over; the fleeing strength and certainty had, just at the door, turned and looked at him in quiet curiosity. At him: at the shell of what had housed all that certainty for so long. Turned and looked and left, leaving nothing but Burnes. He sat for a moment in silence, wanting not to show any fear, to anyone, ever again.

      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