Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

They turned into another lane and Najeeb said it was the Street of Partridge Lovers, and looked startled when she laughed.

– What else? Tell me all the street names!

– The Street of Dentists. The Street of Potters. The Street of Felt Caps. The Street of Silver. The Street of Money-Changers. The Street of Coppersmiths. The Street of Englishwomen.

– The Street of Englishwomen?

– They buy and sell Englishwomen there. We will try to avoid it.

– Take a detour through the Street of Inventive Guides if you must.

He looked delighted to be caught out, and she found she was delighted to have been teased.

He handed her a plum which he had plucked from the basket carried on a man’s head in the nonchalant gesture of one to whom theft isn’t understood as a crime, and she recalled attending one of Woolley’s lectures in which he’d said it was important to watch one’s workmen on digs in Foreign Parts because they could teach one how to understand man as he once was – how he functioned, how his brain worked in times past. If that was true why shouldn’t the great men of the ancient world have some shadow in the present in addition to the slaves? She might yet find a Herodotus in this city with its Street of Storytellers and its centuries of Greek influence. Herodotus was a Carian, not a Greek! She could picture Tahsin Bey so clearly as he said it, rising to his toes, his sharply angled face a picture of outrage.

They reached another gateway, this one leading out of the Walled City – immediately the noise and rush fell away and they entered a rural world with cultivated fields on either side of a bumpy road. Somewhere in the middle of those fields was the Great Stupa of Kanishka.

Once there was the Great Stupa, seven hundred feet tall. From every point in the Peshawar Valley men and women could look up from the dust of their days to see the pillar ringed with gold which arose from its uppermost canopy of pearls. Surrounding the Stupa, a vast monastery complex. Everywhere a traveller looked there was the Buddha, carved over and over into and around the countryside, in an age when the people of this region had the vision to find the god in every stone. His serene eyes observing everything – here carved of white stone, and there of a reddish-blue which mysteriously turned golden when the sun touched it, and elsewhere the grey of Gandhara.

Now there was devastation cut into wheat fields. The low mound that was the remains of the Great Stupa lay abandoned, the earth around it pockmarked with trial pits and trenches, miniature stupas and rubble. The stupas were badly damaged, their carvings lacking the delicacy of the Gandhara statuary Viv had seen in the British Museum. And the long grass made it clear no one had been here in a long while. This was a place archaeologists had given up on. Too much of it destroyed, too little of value in what remained, to make recovery worthwhile. She wiped a trail of sweat off her neck; the familiarity of the morning’s heat had passed and now the sun burnt so brightly it had turned the sky white.

– Miss Spencer!

An echoing quality to the boy’s voice directed her to the largest of the trenches. She hurried over, scolding herself for not keeping an eye on him. When she looked into the trench she saw it had been dug deep to reveal part of a wall decorated with stucco figures of the Buddha – the boy, replicating the Buddha’s cross-legged pose, was gently stroking the knee of the Enlightened One. From now on when she heard the word ‘trench’ she wanted only to think of this. He turned towards her, grinning a huge grin as if he had been the one to discover the stucco figures. There were steps carved into the trench and she was soon crouching beside the boy. Reaching out, she touched the Buddha’s face, a shiver travelling all the way through her.

– If you like this, you should see what they have at the Museum.

– We can go there? Now?

– Don’t you have somewhere to be? School?

– Summer holidays.

– And your family won’t worry about you if you’re gone too long?

The words tugged all expressiveness off his face. Viv wondered what ‘family’ might mean to him, and why he’d been alone at a train station the previous morning. Best not to make any of that her business.

She looked at her watch. The previous evening, a couple in Dean’s dining room had introduced themselves as the Forbeses, apologised for not being at the train station to meet her – they’d been expecting her to send a telegram from Karachi to let them know which train she’d be on – and asked her to come to their home for lunch. Of course she’d be delighted, she’d said, and not only out of a sense of obligation; there was something about Mr Forbes – the manner of a medical professional perhaps – which she liked immensely, though the wife seemed a little on the nervy side.

– We can go there, but not now. Come to Dean’s again tomorrow.

It was evening already when she shook off the heaviness of an overlong afternoon sleep, brought on by the inexplicable stew for lunch at the Forbeses’, and walked out into Dean’s garden. The air was scented to an almost embarrassing degree – evening jasmine overlaid on whatever else had already been there. The emperor Babur hadn’t been exaggerating about blind men and Peshawar. Sitting down at a table, she looked towards the distant sentinels of the hills, clearly visible now, keeping the rest of the world at bay.

The bearer brought her a cup of tea and as she sipped it she watched the shadow of a man stride across Dean’s facade. When the shadow stopped next to the silhouette of a woman holding a teacup she realised there was someone standing at her elbow.

Red-faced and sweating, with features clustered around the nose so that the cheeks and forehead appeared excessive – those were things the shadows didn’t reveal. The shadow-man beamed at her, called her by name. His name was Remmick, he said; he wanted to welcome her to Peshawar. The Forbeses had told her about him. Remmick’s a Political, they said, as if it were a term she should undersand; he knows everyone’s business.

Once they had established that a sundowner was more suited to the time and weather than a cup of tea, Remmick the political agent asked what had brought an Englishwoman to Peshawar at the height of summer.

– I wish I had a good answer to that. I should be in London, I know. I was a VAD nurse until a few weeks ago, but I’m afraid I was rather useless, gave it up, and well, here I pathetically am.

She’d had to have this conversation with the Forbeses last night, and the speed with which Mr Forbes rushed in to tell an anecdote about a nurse he’d once worked with told her she should find a better story, if for no other reason than to spare her companions the necessity of covering up her shame. But she hadn’t yet been able to think of one.

– No one in Peshawar is in a position to hold it against you that you choose to be here rather than somewhere else. How good of you to have nursed – that’s more than most people have done. You should hold your head up with pride, Miss Spencer.

She inclined her head in gratitude, felt a burden lift. Two Englishmen in military uniform entered the garden. Viv looked at them, surprised by her feelings of contempt.

– Do you think they feel relieved or ashamed to be here, so far from the fight?

– Peshawar is never far from a fight.

Remmick pointed up towards the hills.

– There’s a fanatic up there, name of Haji Turangzai, with a band of blood-thirsty followers. You mustn’t worry about it – we’re accustomed to dealing with these hotheads. But I would advise against travelling outside the city, and certainly against venturing to the Khyber Pass, without clearing it with me first.

Remmick spoke with an air of authority that was parodic in a man so young – he couldn’t be much older than her – but his words had struck at something inside her. Kipling’s Peshawar! The North-West Frontier! Where even the finest hotel in town was a whitewashed barracks, a reminder that the world of guns lurked beneath every veneer. It was immensely comforting to know oneself in a world in which battles followed the template laid down in books of adventure and valour. The words ‘Khyber Pass’ sat on her tongue, fizzing with romance.

– The war seems so far away.

– I wouldn’t say that. The Haji’s given us trouble before but this time round it’s because the damned Turks have riled up the tribes in the name of the Caliphate. Told them to launch a Holy War against us. Forgive me, Miss Spencer. I shouldn’t use such language, but they really are such damned Turks.

– That seems to be the general consensus, she said, raising her glass to her lips, and wondering how to change the subject.

She returned to her rooms just as a liveried man was on his way out. In his hands a dustpan and her waste-paper basket. She caught hold of the rim of the basket, without saying a word, and he yielded it to her. Inside, a tangle of straw and grass. Her fingers burrowed through it and encountered a beak, a tiny featherless skull. She told herself there was no such thing as omens.

If she leaned in just a few inches and placed her mouth against the Cupid’s bow she might feel blood flow beneath the stone surface of the lips. But what would he want with her kiss, this man who walked away from his life the day his son was born, and became the Enlightened One?

Viv touched the face. The grey stone cool against her palm, the surface smooth except where a spade had left its mark against the forehead, just inches from the raised mole which marked the urna – she touched the scar in apology for the crimes of excavation. Her fingers traced the grooves between the tendrils of hair snaking towards the topknot. When she had first seen a Gandhara Buddha, at the British Museum, she had thought of the hair as Mediterranean but no longer – she looked over to Najeeb.

The boy was standing next to the webbed-fingered, larger-than-life Buddhas with their beautiful drapery which the museum guard claimed to have seen stir in the breeze. As she watched, Najeeb said something to the guard who crouched down and lifted the boy up onto his shoulders.

– Look, Miss Spencer!

He had spotted, and been struck by, the faint, unexpected pupil in the eye of one of the tall Buddhas – one round of the Museum and he’d already worked out that was unusual. For a long time he remained motionless, studying it, until Viv clapped her hands twice, and Najeeb dropped off the guard’s shoulder, agile, unconcerned by the possibility of hurt. Viv’s hand on his elbow, they walked around the high-ceilinged whitewashed halls of the Peshawar Museum, and this time instead of rushing from display to display he asked her to explain those things which had particularly caught his attention. He must be near the same age she’d been the first time Tahsin Bey took her to the British Museum, and answered every question with patience.

– This is all from here, Najeeb kept repeating. This also? This also?

– Yes, all of it. We’ve left it here instead of taking it back to London so you can see your own history.

They walked all along the galleries, until they had circled round to the case which displayed excavations at Shahji-ki-Dheri and Takht-i-Bahi. Here, a fragmented starving Buddha; there, the goddess Hariti holding a cornucopia in one hand, the palm of the other hand resting on the upper thigh of her consort. And most prominently positioned of all, a casket – on its lid the figure of the Buddha seated on lotus leaves, flanked by the Hindu gods Indra and Brahma. Along the rim of the lid wild geese were in flight and, beneath, stood the King, Kanishka himself, in his great boots and cloak; and that old familiar form of Eros draped a garland all around the casket. She pointed the different figures out to Najeeb, explained the word ‘syncretic’.

– I came to Peshawar because of this casket, Najeeb.

The boy wrinkled his nose.

– Why? It’s not very nice.

It was true, the casket was far from the most beautiful object here. Too crude, too fussy. Why did Tahsin Bey choose to draw her attention to this, of all the discoveries in all the archaeological journals of the world? She couldn’t shake the feeling there was something she’d missed.

– So this is a Mughal garden.

Najeeb looked at her, and shrugged.

– It’s where I like best in Peshawar, he said, as if that were more important.

Where-he-liked-best was Shalimar Garden – though he referred to it by the less evocative local name of Shahi Bagh – a vast park with pathways, bordering long rectangular ponds, along which Najeeb and Viv walked to the central, arched pavilion. In each pond, multiple fountains kept up a steady cascade of water which cooled the eye and ear. And the summer flowers dense with colour offered up a consolation for the heat. Najeeb had promised her the Garden’s wonders in exchange for those of the Museum, a boy alive to the reciprocal courtesies of his people.

– I come here after school to read, when I’m supposed to be at the mosque with the maulvi. Only my brother knows. Mr Dickens is my favourite. The maulvi doesn’t care, as long as I take him his money every month. I don’t like to waste my father’s money but my brother says as long as I use that time to learn it isn’t wrong, and I don’t learn anything from the maulvi – he’s so boring, he only makes me read the Qur’an out loud and doesn’t explain anything.

– Sloth is always preferable to zeal when it comes to the religious-minded, in my experience. I’m sure you get a lot more out of Mr Dickens.

– Also, where he teaches me in the mosque is so hot, and here there’s always shade.

– Yes, the importance of shade in Peshawar. A long-standing object of fascination for foreigners.

– It is?

Viv sat on the rim of a pond, scooped up a handful of warm water and sprinkled it onto her neck. Pulling her sketchbook out of her bag, she rested it on her knee, and was about to start drawing the two pavilions in her sight – the solid one, and its liquid reflection – when she caught Najeeb looking expectantly at her.

– Hmm? Oh, yes. There was a man called Scylax who came here long ago. Longer ago than anything in the Museum. He travelled from Peshawar all the way down the Indus, and when he went away he took stories of the tribes who lived here.

– Stories of the Yusufzai?

– Stories of shade. For instance, there was a tribe called the Otoliknoi whose ears were like winnowing fans and could protect them from the sun in the manner of umbrellas.

– What?

– Oh yes. You haven’t ever seen them? No? Keep a lookout. And also for the Skyapods or Shadow-Feet. When it gets too hot the Skyapods lie down on their backs and raise one leg up. Their huge feet cast a shadow so big it gives them complete shade.

– I’ve never seen that.

– Next you’ll be telling me you haven’t seen gold-hunting ants either.

– I haven’t!

He looked stricken.

– Lucky you. So much yet to discover. Where are you going?

He had darted off, in search of something or following something, she didn’t know which. When she caught up with him around the other side of the pavilion he was standing above a Pathan man who was lying on his back, allowing Najeeb to manoeuvre his one raised leg this way and that.

– Look, Miss Spencer, the feet don’t have to be so large. It’s all about the angle of the leg and the position of the sun. See?

She had been close to Najeeb’s age that bright summer’s day when she saw a constable bend his head to hear something a schoolboy was saying, and the sunlight shimmered off his helmet crest, turning him mythical. She had turned to Tahsin Bey, and said, Scylax, coming to London, might have written of the Glaucocephalos – the gleaming-headed man – who had light where there should be a face and drew his power from the sun. Today, for the first time, she entirely understood Tahsin Bey’s delight.

The older Pathan stood up at the sight of Viv, cuffed Najeeb on the head, and stalked away. The boy ran back to her.

– What’s a winnowing fan?

The greater part of Asia was explored by Darius, who desiring to know of the River Indus, which is a second river producing crocodiles of all the rivers in the world – to know, I say, of this river where it runs out into the sea, sent with ships, besides others whom he trusted to speak the truth, Scylax also, a man of Caryanda. These starting from the city of Caspatyrus and the land of the Pactyike, sailed down the river towards the east and the sunrising to the sea. .

Beneath the whirring, nestless fan, Najeeb was barely able to get through the sentence, his tongue thick as he tried to manoeuvre it around the unfamiliar names, his brain clearly defeated by the syntax. He looked up at her, despairing.

– That’s Herodotus, the Father of History. Writing more than two thousand years ago. It’s not a very good translation – Darius trusted Scylax especially. Kai de kai, the emphasising phrase goes. Caspatyrus is Peshawar.

– Peshawar? But there’s no river here.

– The Bara River has changed course through the centuries.

– So, the Pactyike. .?

– Yes. You, Najeeb Gul. You are Pactyike. He’s writing about the Pathans. Turn to the page with the bookmark. They – you – appear again.

Others however of the Indians are on the borders of the city of Caspatyrus and the country of Pactyike, dwelling towards the north of the other Indians. . these are the most warlike of the Indians. .

He stopped reading there.

– Miss Spencer, may I ask you something?

– Of course.

– Have you ever met anyone who’s been to war?

– Many. Very many.

– Do they ever become the way they were before?

– I don’t know. I’ve only known them in the middle of war, not after. Why do you ask?

– I just wondered. May I go now? It’s getting late.

– Yes, of course.

– And may I come back tomorrow?

– Yes. Of course.

– I hear you’ve found yourself a civilising mission.

Remmick reached over the gate to undo the bolt, and gestured for her to go ahead of him along the garden pathway toward the ‘modest’ bungalow available to rent.

– You work for Empire in large ways, Mr Remmick, I work in small ways. Oh, this is perfect!

She walked past the Ionic columns supporting a red-tiled sloping roof and in through the doorway to a darkened interior. Remmick, following, closed the door behind him and touched her waist – when she quickly moved away, he apologised. Can’t see a thing in here. There was a sound of something rusty being eased, and the sunlight rushed in, revealing a high-ceilinged corridor and Remmick standing beside the heavy wooden window shutters, one hand on the bolt. Beyond the corridor was a spacious room with a large writing desk at its centre, facing shutters that reached from floor to ceiling. Viv opened them and stepped out into a garden bordered with a line of trees bearing flame-coloured flowers; and at the far end, a weeping willow. Perfect, she repeated, stepping out onto the verandah.

– I still think it would be better if you were at Dean’s.

– You’re very kind, but I’ll be perfectly all right on my own.

– Will he come here for lessons? Your civilising mission?

– His name is Najeeb, and yes.

– A Pathan is a Pathan at any age, I hope you remember that. They’re not accustomed to the company of women.

– I would swear this one has Greek blood in him. I call him the Herodotus of Peshawar.

– Just make sure there’s always someone else about when he’s here. I’ll send over staff you can trust. And also, the Pashto teacher you were enquiring about – I know you said Hindko, but most people here understand Pashto and you can use it throughout the Peshawar Valley.

– You really are very kind. When your wife is back from Simla, you both must come over for supper.

– It’ll be a while before she’s back.

– It’ll be a while before I have this place ready for entertaining guests.

– As you say, Miss Spencer. I’m available to you at all times.

Viv pretended not to understand his meaning, and walked out into the garden, smiling when he couldn’t see her; she had no intention of taking him up on his availability but it was both useful and flattering to have a man as powerful as Remmick attendant on her every need. He’d even promised to introduce her to John Marshall who planned to resume excavating Taxila when the weather changed – and once Marshall heard about Labraunda he’d ask her to join him, of course he would.

The thought of returning to London in December was fading.

Days fell into a routine: in the morning, Pashto lessons with a retired Anglo-Indian schoolteacher; in the afternoon letter-writing and dozing in darkened, thick-walled rooms; the evening, a lesson with Najeeb which might mean sitting in her garden with books or might mean an excursion to Gor Khatri, Bala Hisar, Pipal Mandi, the Museum – over and over, the Museum. At the end of the day there was almost always either a sundowner (or several) at the Peshawar Club with Remmick or an early supper at Dean’s with the Forbeses. And then home before the stars were out, to read by lantern-light in her garden which must have been designed by someone of nocturnal habits, it was so rich in night-blooming flowers.

As the Allied forces faced setback after setback in Gallipoli the news reports about Armenians grew ever more dramatic. ‘ARMENIANS SENT TO DIE IN THE DESERT’ read a headline. ‘MORE ARMENIAN HORRORS’ said another. Surely the propaganda department was overplaying its hand?

She followed the shouts and splashes towards the swimming pool of the Peshawar Club. Through the trees she saw men falling from the sky – muscled and young, broad of shoulder, water drops glistening on pale chests, dark necks. Officers of the Frontier Corp, on leave after weeks of protecting Peshawar from the fanatics in the mud-and-pebbled hills. One had scarcely dived from the board before the next was there to take his place. Some fell like cannonballs, some swooped like swallows. Water and air, in both they were in their element. It was the ground they wanted nothing to do with, climbing from pool to high board by way of a rope-ladder that someone had tied to the railing.

One of them – sandy-haired – sat on the high board, legs swinging, surveying the world. The Lord of Everything. Viv looped her arm around a tree, watching him, watching them all. Here was the world set right again.

They sat beneath the weeping willow, Najeeb at the school desk which he had carried in last week from God knows where, and Viv in her rattan chair. The local name for weeping willow was Majnu, Najeeb had told her the first time he came out into her garden and followed it up with a retelling of the love story of Laila and Majnu, declaimed with such pride that she hadn’t the heart to tell him she knew it already. In Labraunda, Mehmet had spun the tale out over several evenings, paying particular attention to Anna, the younger of the German women, as he spoke of Majnu’s undying love. Cigarettes, figs, wine, and stories beneath the Carian sky – would it ever really be possible again?

Najeeb looked up from his Greek letters, and the wind turned the pages of his exercise book, smeared the freshly inked-in date. Viv leaned forward and placed a piece of grey slate onto the book to weigh it down. Picking it up, Najeeb examined the carved hand, palm turned up. A fragment from a stupa, one of many which had Atlas holding up a platform for the seated Buddha. It was worth very little – the Sikh man who owned an antiquities store in the Walled City had presented it to her as a gift as she was walking empty-handed out of his store, to ensure she would return – but it possessed a certain charm. Najeeb placed it between the pages of his exercise book and rubbed his pencil over the page; the colour of the stone so closely resembled the grey of a lead pencil that it seemed an act of metamorphosis, turning stone into paper.

She watched him, realised how familiar his expressions, his way of holding a pencil, the angle of his back as he bent over his books had become. She had been the one to suggest he came to her during his school holidays if he wanted to hear the stories of Peshawar, but he’d been the one to insist on Greek lessons and refuse to allow the start of the school term to force any change in their routine. Why d’you let him take advantage of you, Remmick had asked, but there was nothing in all of Peshawar that delighted her more than the hunger of Najeeb’s mind, the tinge of covetousness in his curiosity – apparent now as he finished the rubbing and turned the stone fragment over in his hands. Did parenthood feel anything like this, she wondered, and smiled to think of Tahsin Bey lifting Najeeb onto his shoulders to look a giant Buddha in the eye.

– Do you want to hear about a treasure hunt?

– What treasure?

– The Circlet of Scylax. Remember Scylax from our first lesson?

– Of course. The Shade Man.

– The Emperor Darius so trusted him that he gave him a circlet – that’s like a crown – decorated with figs. It was a special kind of circlet, reserved for heroes and men who slay monsters. Though the fig part was unique to Scylax. Long after Scylax died, his home of Caria was ruled by a dynasty called the Hecatomnids who had the Circlet as one of their prized possessions, and stamped it onto their coins.

– And then what happened to it?

– There’s the question. Alexander conquered Caria in 334 BC, the Hecatomnid period ended, and there’s no further record of the Circlet. Except this.

She picked a slim, leather-bound book off the grass and, opening it to the right page, turned it towards him.

– The Fragments of Kallistos. He was a Byzantine historian, who didn’t think to leave the great work of his life in a place where the moths wouldn’t nibble on it. Read what’s there; I’m getting more ice.

She stood, hoisted up the steel tub placed halfway between her chair and his desk, and sloshed the cold water within it onto his bare feet, to exclamations of delight. When she returned a few minutes later, ice steaming within the tub, she would have welcomed Najeeb’s assistance in carrying the weight of it across the garden but he was bent over Kallistos, in the shade of the weeping willow, his concentration too beautiful to disrupt.

– So that’s why, he cried out, looking up.

– Why what?

– Why you always spend so much time in the Museum looking at that ugly thing.

– What have you found in there?

She walked round to his side of the table, picked up the book and balanced it on his head as she read words she hadn’t looked at in years.

She led the holy men to the Sacred Casket mounted with the Holy One which contained the Relics but they would not be tempted. Their mission was not one of theft, and they trusted the Casket would come under divine protection. She next implored them to take the great traveller’s crown of figs which was in her safekeeping, but they saw no reason to carry something which had no value to them so she went outside and buried the crown at the base of the Great Statue of the Holy One. The light of the Holy One illuminated her task, so those who watched knew this was the right course of action.

The book shifted, fell against her torso as Najeeb tipped his head back to look at her.

– I guessed right, didn’t I? The Sacred Casket is the Kanishka Casket. And the crown of figs is buried beneath a statue somewhere near where the casket was found? Somewhere in Shahji-ki-Dheri?

– A relic casket mounted with a holy figure? You could find a thousand objects scattered around the world which match that description. And most of them would probably have a statue in the vicinity.

He looked so disappointed she tugged a lock of his hair and said, No one’s found the circlet in the eighty years since Kallistos’ Fragments were rediscovered in a church attic. It would almost be rude to those who’ve tried for decades if an eleven-year-old ferreted out its location with a single glance.

– I’m twelve now.

– Are you? When did that happen?

– Last month.

– Why didn’t you say? Put your books away immediately. We’re going to find you some cake. Oh, and here – happy birthday.

She placed the stupa shard in his hand. He looked up at her, not understanding, and she said, Well, why shouldn’t you have it. It’s your history after all, Pactyike.

Najeeb ran his thumb over Atlas’ wrist, a shimmer to his eyes which it took her a moment to recognise as tears. She could see it had been pleasing before, this piece of Gandharan art, but now that it lay in his palm, transformed into both gift and heritage, it had become precious. Together with the promise of cake it had entirely wiped Kallistos from his mind.

Viv knew this about Tahsin Bey: he wasn’t reckless or foolish or lazy. A relic casket with a Buddha on top wouldn’t be enough to make him set aside his dreams of finding the Circlet in Labraunda in favour of a stupa that wasn’t built until five hundred years after the Circlet vanished from history. So there was something else; something he’d been certain she would work out if he just pointed her in the direction of Peshawar. Caspatyrus! Where journeys begin and end. Not her journey – the journey of the Circlet.

She bit down on her forkful of cake, watched Najeeb press his thumb against one of the few crumbs remaining on his plate and lift it to his mouth. The other patrons of the tea-shop – Indian and English both – kept glancing over at their table. She swapped around plates, gave him the slice she’d barely touched. It wasn’t generosity; when he was eating he wasn’t talking, and she needed to think.

How would a prized artefact of the Carian dynasts end up in Peshawar? And then came the answer, so obvious, so inevitable. Alexander. Of course. He would have taken the Circlet from Caria when he conquered it and carried it all the way to India – where he sent his Admiral Nearchus to sail down the Indus, following in the oarstrokes of Scylax.

– Najeeb Gul, you are a wonder!

The boy looked up, mouth full of cake; in the tea-room, whispers.

Returning home, she knew exactly the book she needed. Buddhist Records of the Western World – an account of several Chinese travellers’ visits to India, and to Shahji-ki-Dheri. She’d read it soon after she’d arrived in Peshawar but without knowing what she was looking for despite Tahsin Bey’s insertion of the words ‘Sacred Casket’ into his letter, which she should have recognised as an echo of Kallistos. Although really, he could have been a little more forthcoming.Regardless, now that she was sitting at Najeeb’s school desk in the garden with the book open in front of her, it seemed impossible she’d missed it: In ad 518 the Chinese pilgrim Sung-Yun travelled in the company of a Buddhist novice to India on the instructions of the Empress of China, in order to bring back Buddhist holy books from a country now ravaged by ‘a rude horde of Turks’. Tahsin Bey would have laughed at that, read it out loud to whoever was near by to listen – even if it was only Alice. Or perhaps he would be too absorbed, instead, in his conviction that Sung-Yun and his companion were the Holy Men whose ‘mission was not that of theft’. She read all that Sung-Yun had written of Shahji-ki-Dheri, and moved on to the writings of Hiuen-Tsang, more than a century later. The rude horde of Turks and their descendants had worked their destruction – where Sung-Yun found temples and stupas, Hiuen-Tsang found ruins. But the Kanishka Stupa survived and –