Companions of Paradise by Thalassa Ali Read Free Book Online

so peaceful.
    “Macnaghten and Burnes do not seem to understand the locals,” her uncle continued, “not even the previous royal family. I discovered only yesterday that Dost Mohammad's eldest son has not gone into exile in India with his father, but has vanished instead into the mountains north of here. No one seems to know, or care, where he is. If he is like other Afghans, he will not forget the injury we have done his father. I fear,” he added thoughtfully, “we may have failed to understand the depth of these people's pride.”
    Pride. Mariana's munshi had told her that pride meant everything to an Afghan. Any one of them, especially a Pashtun tribesman, would willingly throw away his life to prove a point or defend a principle. He would never forget a service, would defend a guest to the death, and would offer asylum to anyone who asked properly, even someone who had murdered a member of his own family.
    “If an Afghan's honor requires revenge,” her old teacher had told her, “he will exact it, whatever the price. We have a saying in India: May God save me from the fangs of the snake, the claws of the tiger, and the vengeance of the Afghan. ”
    If all this were true, she thought, Afghanistan would be no easy country to control.
    FOR SIXTEEN hundred years, through the coming and going of kings great and small, through endless destruction and rebuilding, the Bala Hisar had stood upon a high spur of the Sher Darwaza heights, overlooking the Kabul plain.
    Its mud brick walls and heavy corner bastions had suffered considerable neglect in Dost Mohammad's time, but even in its dilapidated condition, the old citadel still cast a formidable shadow over the city at its feet.
    Inside its walls, the Bala Hisar was crowded with buildings. Palaces, barracks, courtyards, stables, gardens, and municipal buildings crammed its lower reaches, while above them, the fort, with its armory and its fearful dungeon, looked out upon its long, crumbling, fortified walls that even now climbed up and down the distant hills, protecting the Kabul plain from the ghosts of long-forgotten marauders.
    On the morning after the horse races, Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk, King of the Afghans, sat on a raised platform in the frescoed audience hall of his largest palace, his ministers ranged behind him. Sunlight entered the breezy clerestory windows above the king's head, glanced off his great striped turban, fell onto the shoulders of his embroidered coat and the silk bolster he leaned against, and bathed the rug where he sat, turning its tribal dyes to the color of precious stones.
    Two black-coated Englishmen sat on chairs before the king's platform, their own retinue of officers behind them.
    Shah Shuja regarded his guests with unhappy eyes. “Victory,” he announced in high-pitched Persian, “has become dust in my mouth.”
    The British Resident and the British Envoy glanced at each other. “Dust, Sire?” the Envoy repeated.
    “The chiefs,” the Shah responded impatiently, “show me no respect. You saw what Abdullah Khan did yesterday. Why should he, or anyone else, honor me when my enemies are still alive and un-blinded?”
    The king's ministers nodded, their eyes on Macnaghten and Burnes.
    “We do not,” replied the bespectacled Sir William Macnaghten, “believe it necessary to kill chiefs simply because they do not like us. Besides, Highness, they are paying their taxes. They would not be doing so, or offering you respect, if they were dead.”
    “Or if their eyes had been put out,” added the round-faced Sir Alexander Burnes.
    “Taxes, taxes.” The king raised beringed hands. “The Pashtun chiefs should not pay taxes.”
    “But,” argued Burnes, “the chiefs must pay you. You are their sovereign.”
    Shah Shuja's hands dropped into his lap. “I am elder among elders, chief among chiefs. I am no despot, to be wringing money from tribes who share amongst each other. Wherever I look, I have new enemies. If you would let me charge the