The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher

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