A Place With No Map? (2)

The trouble with wanting a secret was that secrets, in the kingdom of Lahore, were the single most expensive commodity there was. More expensive than shawls. The whole court ran on the buying and selling of who-knew-what, and a boy who wanted a place nobody knew about had to first survive the suspicion of every person whose entire profession was finding out.

So he did what he always did. He took the impossible thing apart into a stack of ordinary things, and he made each ordinary thing boring.

He needed land. Specifically he needed land that was three things at once, and the three things fought each other.

It had to be remote, far from the soft southern country where the British residents and their friendly travellers came and went. That meant the hills. The hills were full of eyes and bad roads and worse, but the hills were where the surveys did not yet reach.

It had to be defensible and walled, a place you could put a fence around and a gate on and a reason for both, without the wall itself screaming secret. A fort screamed secret. A garden did not. A hunting preserve did not. The royal family kept rakhs, walled game-reserves, all over the kingdom, miles of wall around nothing but deer and the right to shoot them, and nobody thought twice about it, because of course a prince needed somewhere to kill things in private. The Mughals had done it. The Sarkar did it. A walled estate where the young kanwars rode and hunted and learned the soldier’s trade away from the rot of the court was the most ordinary, most boring, most aristocratic request a serious boy could possibly make.

And it had to be the crown’s own, held directly, garrisoned by men who answered to the Sarkar and to no chief at all. Because a workshop on a sardar’s jagir was a workshop the sardar owned, and the whole point was that nobody owned this but him, and the Sarkar over him.

He spent three weeks finding the place, and he found it the way he found everything, by being a curious boy in a dull room. The dull room, this time, was the office where the maps were kept.

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“You are interested in the hill country, Kanwar Sahib,” said the old draughtsman, not as a question, watching the boy bent over the great cloth map of the northern territories with the absorbed stillness that the foundry had taught the boy was the safest face he owned.

“My grandfather took Kashmir before I was born,” said Angrez, which was true, and let the man assume the rest, which was that a warrior’s grandson dreamed of the high passes. He ran a careful finger along the line of the hills, north and west of Lahore, up toward Jammu, into the broken country of small rajas and smaller forts. ‘Show me where nobody is,’ he thought. ‘Show me the empty corner.’

The old man, pleased to be asked, talked. He talked about the Jammu hills, which the Dogra rajas held under the Sarkar, Gulab Singh and his brothers, and Angrez kept his face perfectly still at the name and filed every word. He talked about the hill states under the Sarkar, Bhimber and Kotli and Rajauri, and then about the plain to the south, about Kotli Loharan near Sialkot where the famous gun-barrels were forged, and Angrez’s pulse did something quiet and interested. And he put his finger, almost idly, on a place where the last fold of the hills came down to meet the plain, a walled town on an old road, with a river near it and a ring of low hard hills around a long shallow valley, far enough up to be cold in winter and far enough from anywhere that the only people who went there went there on purpose.

“Mirpur,” the old man said. “Hill country. Quiet. Good water, bad neighbours.” He smiled at his own joke. “Dogra country, more or less, these days.”

‘Dogra country,’ Angrez thought, and the part of him that had read the ending went very cold and very awake at once. ‘Of course it is. Of course the one corner of the kingdom that’s hidden enough to build a secret in is the exact corner that belongs, more or less, to the family that’s going to sell the place out from under us in fourteen years. Hai Rabba. The universe has a sense of humour and it is not a kind one.’

He looked at the little walled town at the foot of the hills for a long moment, and he did the arithmetic he could not stop doing.

A secret built in Dogra country was a secret built under the nose of Raja Dhian Singh’s own brother. That was insane. That was handing the future thieves a key to the workshop.

And yet.

The Dogras held the hills under the Sarkar. A crown preserve carved out of that country, walled, garrisoned by Khalsa men, supplied from Lahore, would be a small hard knot of the Sarkar’s own authority sitting right in the middle of the territory the Dogras were quietly turning into their private kingdom. It would needle them. It would be watched. It would be the most dangerous place in the world to keep a secret.

It would also be the one place in the whole north the British surveys would never, ever be allowed to reach, because the Dogras guarded their hills against outsiders more jealously than the Sarkar guarded anything, and an Englishman with a theodolite would get exactly as far up that road as the first Dogra picket and not one step further.

‘The Dogras will keep the British out for me,’ he thought, ‘while I keep an eye on the Dogras. We will guard each other’s secrets by accident, and hate each other on purpose, and the only person who knows the whole shape of it will be a boy nobody suspects of anything but reading too much.’

It was either the cleverest thing he had thought of in two lifetimes or the thing that was going to get him killed, and he was honest enough with himself, lying awake again that night, to admit he genuinely could not tell which.

‘Probably both,’ he decided, around the third hour. ‘Most of the good ones are both.‘

Notes

1. Rakh: a reserved game-preserve, often walled or otherwise enclosed, maintained by rulers and great nobles for hunting. The Mughals and Ranjit Singh both kept them. Mirpur lies in the hill country between the Punjab plain and the Jammu hills (in the modern day in Azad Kashmir); in this period the surrounding hill territories were held under Ranjit Singh by the Dogra raja Gulab Singh of Jammu. The walled research-and-training preserve described in this book is the novel’s invention. There was no such facility; the protagonist’s whole project is the counterfactual the story is built on. The geography, the Dogra control of the hills, and the renowned gun-barrel forges of Kotli Loharan, in the Sialkot plain south of these hills, are real. Hari Ram Gupta (History of the Sikhs, Vol. 5) has the Jammu province, running from Mirpur on the Jhelum to Kathua near the Ravi, entrusted to Raja Gulab Singh, and says of the matchlocks made at Kotli Loharan that “the Kotli barrels were superior in strength and beauty to others”.