The Lotus and the Wind (22 page)

The woman said, ‘We want to go into Afghanistan--to Balkh first, thence probably east, we are not sure. We hear there are rare birds in the upper valley of the Oxus.’

‘How did the lady hear?’ said Robin quickly, addressing the man.

‘We hear. We pay such men as you for news. We have been in these parts for some years, off and on. Well, we want to go, but the Amir will not let us. You realize that a Russian official advises him on many matters? That Russian is the brother of our greatest enemy. On his suggestion the Amir forbids us and has given orders that no one is to provide us with transport. Will you get ponies for us, arrange a small caravan, and take us? In secret, you understand.’

Robin stroked his chin. This latest information, if true, made it just possible that self-preservation was the Powindah’s only motive in steering him here. Better a percentage than the bastinado. He said, ‘My business brings me frequently to Bukhara--like the Powindah. Next year or the year after, when I return, the Amir will bastinado me or cause my ears to be cropped. Or perhaps he will have me thrown from the tower.’ There was a tower two hundred feet high near the Kok Lumbez mosque. Nearly every day a criminal was cast screaming from the summit.

Muralev rasped softly, ‘We don’t think so. The Amir’s adviser will shortly be replaced by a political agent, and we know who he will be--a friend of ours. Besides, we will pay you so well that you can afford to miss Bukhara for two or three years.’

Khussro would now want to know the truth behind the nonsense about catching birds, that they should be willing to spend so much money. But Robin did not want to press the Muralevs on that point yet. While he hesitated Muralev suddenly said, ‘You are a good man. I would like to go with you.’

In the context it was a strange remark. Robin noticed that Muralev had shadowed blue eyes and poor teeth. There was something familiar about him too--an air, a manner, a breath of aloofness or loneliness, something. Muralev said, ‘If we have to have someone with us in the deserts and the mountains, let it be you.’

Robin’s nerves, taut till then, relaxed. He smiled and said easily, ‘I will come.’

The Muralevs began to talk together in Russian, which Robin did not understand. He did not listen and did not look at them. There were three possibilities. Firstly, they might really be naturalists. If so, he’d be wasting his time with them, except that Muralev was an interesting man. Secondly, they might be Russian agents who had picked on him by chance to help them. That would be an amazing piece of luck. What was the Powindah’s part in this? Thirdly, they might be Russian agents who knew that he was a British agent. Then what was their object? It could not be to kill him because that they could arrange in Bukhara at any time for a few coppers. It must be that they wanted to put him on a false scent--either right off the track or on to a level of deception.

The woman’s whole personality shouted to him that she was not a naturalist. That left the other two possibilities, in both of which the Muralevs were Russian agents. Either suited him well enough. Even a false scent, if recognized as such, would be nearly as valuable as a true scent.

The Russians finished their discussion, and the woman turned to him. ‘Attend! We want a riding horse, properly saddled, for our servant. We don’t need horses for ourselves, because we have them. We want four or five ponies or donkeys to carry our tent, bedding, food, and the equipment we need to skin the birds and animals properly. Later, as we eat down our food, we will load the skins on the ponies. Can you get all that for us? Except the skinning things, of course, which we have here.’ She pointed to two leather-bound boxes-on the floor against the wall behind him.

‘I want to take my violin,’ the man said. The woman gestured with a helpless, affectionate smile and answered in Russian. She turned to Robin again. ‘How soon can you arrange it?’

Robin thought before answering. ‘Two days. On the second night I or my man will lead a donkey by here and stop for a minute in the courtyard, as though peddling. The donkey will have as load two empty boxes, like yours. While it is in the yard, change the boxes.’

‘Good! Excellent!’ the woman cried.

‘On the third morning I will set out at dawn on the road to Balkh--the one that goes by way of Karshi. You go out shooting, on horseback but without baggage of any kind, some time that morning. Go north. Circle around the town till you meet the Balkh road, then go down it. I’ll be waiting for you. We’ll have to set off again at once as soon as you come, so nurse your horses. You cannot take your servant. He must stay here. He can say he does not know why you haven’t returned from your shooting, if he’s asked. Or he can say you’re both ill of fever, smallpox. It depends how much he values his neck.’

’You seem to have much experience of these matters, Khussro,’ Muralev said with his quiet harshness.

‘No. But I live in Afghanistan.’

They both laughed, Muralev naturally, the woman with a full, slightly artificial trill.

Robin said, ‘The second night and the third morning, then. I’ll want two hundred roubles now for buying the animals, and fifteen a day--weekly, in advance--as long as you’re with me. All in gold.’ He noticed that it was the woman who gave him the money.

Later that day Robin completed his arrangements with the Powindah. All went well, and in the dawn of the third day he and Jagbir left Bukhara. The pack-pony’s head-rope was attached to Robin’s saddle, and Jagbir herded the five trotting donkeys as he rode. At nightfall the Muralevs joined them in the desert, and the whole party then moved on for another fifteen miles before pitching camp.

The next day the Muralevs cantered out ahead of the little caravan. He carried a collector’s haversack slung on his back. She wore baggy Russian trousers and top-boots, and she rode astride. Most of the time Robin could see them as little dots in the clear, dry atmosphere. Occasionally a trick of light made them very large ahead of him and raised them twenty feet or so, so that they seemed to be trotting on air well above the surface of the desert. They stopped frequently and Robin noted the places, and when he reached them looked carefully around to see what had interested the Muralevs. Sometimes he could detect nothing; sometimes they were places where the grass of the desert was slightly greener than elsewhere.

Towards the end of the day he caught up with them. Muralev casually turned over the page of the notebook on which he had been writing and beckoned him. When he came close Muralev showed him the book. The top page now carried a drawing of a small animal like a squirrel. Robin had seen many of them near this road when he had travelled it in the opposite direction. They were cheeky little things that sat up and chattered at travellers from a distance.

‘This is a suslik,’ Muralev said. ‘There are many varieties to be recorded. Have you seen any?’ He peered at Robin through his spectacles.

Robin shaded his eyes with his hand and glanced around. ‘There.’ He pointed.

Muralev took off his spectacles, stared, and said, ‘
Spermo-philopsis
. Not a true suslik, but we’d like him.’

‘There’ll be plenty around our camp to-night. We can’t stop here. We must get on. Come up!’ Robin jerked the pack-horse’s lead rope.

‘Are they easy to catch?’ the woman asked.

‘I’ve never seen anyone try. They are unclean, not to be eaten by believers.’

‘Of course. Well, let’s move on.’

Jagbir had already passed them. He could not afford to stop or the donkeys would scatter and begin to graze. The Muralevs fell in on either side of Robin, they all talked pleasantly enough together and in due course came to the staging site.

The following afternoon the Muralevs left camp as soon as it was pitched, and headed off on foot to the north-east. In that direction a man on horseback, or from a desert hillock, could see the broken green lines of vegetation marking the courses of the Karshi River, which here consisted of many channels that wandered through the desert like travellers lost and searching for water.

Jagbir freed the donkeys to graze. Robin saw that one of them was wandering off. As an excuse, it would do. He said, ‘One of the donkeys has strayed, fool. Can’t you keep an eye on them?’

Jagbir looked at the donkey, which was still in full view, and said, ‘Do you want me to go and find It, lord?’

‘No. Guard the camp.’

Robin mounted Bahram and set off on a circling course that would bring him through rolling dunes to the Muralevs. When he could get no closer without showing himself on the ridge tops, he dismounted, left the pony nibbling the grass, and climbed slowly up the dune. He dared not lie down; that would look suspicious if they were watching him, and he did not know exactly where they had got to. He stopped a few yards short of the crest so that, as he stood upright, only his head showed. For a minute he could not see them. Then he found them. They were on the near bank of a branch of the Karshi River. It did not seem to contain any water. They had their backs to him. The man was sitting, with something spread out on his knees--the notebook perhaps, or a larger volume. The woman was standing beside him, her rifle in her hand, moving her head slowly, looking around the grey and brown and green waste. Robin watched for ten minutes.

The susliks ran about and chattered at him from a safe distance. A hawk hung on racing wings above the desert. There was a hillock there, perhaps half a mile away across this nearest branch of the Karshi. The hill looked familiar, and he stared at it for a long time. There was a ruin on top, a heap of scattered stones, no more. He put his hand to his belt where Alexander’s coin lay. That was it. The hillock over there, though smaller, was the same shape as the hill by Tezin Kach. Well, Alexander had passed by this way too.

He shook his head, trying to dispel the warm haze of speculation that filled it. There was nothing more to see here. The Muralevs would soon go back to camp, and he had better be there before them. Whatever they were doing, they were not collecting specimens.

He walked down the dune, mounted, found the strayed donkey, and urged it back to camp. Soon afterwards a rifle banged from the direction where the Muralevs had been. Half an hour later they straggled into camp, the man dusty and tired, the woman looking as clean and strong as ever. Robin saw her take her husband’s hand as he sat down, and rub it gently and whisper something to him. The first time he had seen her he’d been sure that she was a Russian agent. Now he had another certainty, that she was a wife. She loved Muralev all right, but there was more to it than that. She was an agent and she was a wife. She must have had a great effect on him, on his personality, his spirit. He seemed too weakly fibred to match her. Anything, any person that she loved, she would overpower.

Later, when the fires were lit and she was cooking food, she looked up and spoke in Russian, wheedlingly. Muralev got out his violin, blew the sand from the battered surface, and began to play. He played a lilting gypsy air, and after the first statement the woman began to sing as she cooked. It was a desert darkness around them, grey-blue, cold, and a half-moon hung in the east. Orange leaves of flame grew in the fire and withered and grew again. The woman sang softly at first, but soon the rich contralto voice swelled and embraced the whole desert. Each note hung a time in the air, then vanished, without blur and without echo.

And there was a counterpoint. Jagbir was singing. Softly, level with the woman, far below the violin, he sang a Gurkha dancing song.
‘Jaun, jam, pareli, ankhen ma gazeli sama-jaunchhu Dehra Dun.’
His rhythm was different, his tune difficult and full of chromatic slides, his voice a nasal tenor. But it made a perfect counterpoint, and the meaning, the view of life, could not be far removed from that expressed in the woman’s gypsy melody. Jagbir’s song ran, ‘When you see mascara’d eyes winking, you know you’re near Dehra Dun.’

Robin thought drowsily that it was dangerous. But Jagbir would have guessed that the Muralevs could not recognize Gurkhali when they heard it. For his own part, dangerous or not, Robin was glad. He would always remember this night.

Muralev drew the bow across the strings in a violent discord. In Turki he said, ‘Enough!’ and put the instrument away. He turned to Robin. ‘We got a suslik,
Citellus fulvus oxianus
, a new species, I think. Perhaps it will become
Citellus fulvus oxianus Muralevi
. That means it will be named after her.’ He nodded towards his wife. ‘The suslik has too many enemies. Every animal in the desert likes to eat him, and all the birds of prey. After supper I shall have to work on the skin. I would rather have left him to live in the desert all his life.’

From the fire the woman said, ‘Don’t be silly, Peter. If we didn’t kill him, something else would. You’ve just said so.’

Robin thought: His fibres are not weaker than hers, but different. They run on another plane--like wings, perhaps--and she can’t understand. She is his wife and she will keep his feet on the ground by the sheer strength of her love.

The woman said cheerfully, ‘Food’s ready,’ and the group broke up.

Lying rolled in his robes, under blazing stars and the moon dark yellow in the west, Robin thought of the hill and the ruin he had seen a mile away. It was a beautiful night. But the work, the imperial problem, he had to think about that.

The Muralevs were naturalists after all. It was not only the technical talk and the Latin names, but the genuineness of Muralev’s manner. Well, they could easily enough be both naturalists and agents. They were taking him south when he wanted to go north, and they seemed to be reconnoitring for water, or forage, or both. The growth and decay of towns had altered the water plan of this area; rivers which used to reach the Oxus or the Sea of Aral now died in the desert. A water survey would certainly be necessary if large bodies of troops were to use this route, which had once been more important than it was now. The Muralevs would probably continue their survey south of the Afghan border. He ought not to waste much time with them. Once he had established what they were doing and in what area they were working, he should leave them and return north.