The Field of Cloth of Gold? (2)

The Sarkar mended slowly, the way a hard-used body of fifty mends, and for a while Angrez had the rare clean joy of simply having him back, thin and irritable and alive.

The old man was, Angrez discovered, a catastrophe of a patient. He hid the hakim’s powders in his cheek and spat them into the durree the instant the man’s back was turned; he demanded mutton on the third day and roared like a wronged child when he was handed broth; and he had twice tried to get up and walk to the window to see whether the kingdom had had the impertinence to keep running without him. ‘Six days off his own coffin,’ Angrez thought, fielding a flung cup with the resignation of long practice, ‘and already the worst-behaved man in Asia. I prayed to Waheguru for exactly this, so I am not, on the whole, allowed to complain.’

Then, perhaps a week after the fever turned, when the old man was strong enough to sit up and be bored and dangerous again, he sent everyone out of the room. The hakim, the attendants, the boy with the fan. Everyone but his grandson.

“You sat with me,” the Sarkar said. It was not quite a question.

“Yes, Dada ji.”

“They tell me you would not leave. That you did not eat, and your father fed you like a calf.” The one eye, sunk deeper now in the thinned face, found him and held him. “And they tell me a thing I do not need telling, because I was there, down in the fire, and I heard you.” He let that sit. “You prayed over me. In the dark. I did not catch the most of it. But I caught enough, putt, and it has been sitting in me for a week, and now I am going to ask you about it, and you are going to give me the true answer, because I have just had a long look at the inside of my own coffin and I have no patience left for the other kind.” The eye did not blink. “You spoke of me as if you had already outlived me. As if I were a thing that had happened, long ago. The man the Sikhs are going to remember for three hundred years. A child does not pray that over a living grandfather. That is how an old man prays at a martyr’s samadh. Where does a boy of ten get a thing like that?”

This was the moment, and Angrez had not planned for it and could not have planned for it; he had broken the first rule of his whole second life on the fourth night of a fever, and was now sitting in the consequences. He could lie. He was good at lying. But the man across from him had just come back from the lip of death and was watching him with the eye that had read fifty years of liars, and Angrez was so tired, and he found he was about to do the most dangerous thing left to him, which was to hand over a careful, terrible piece of the truth.

“I am afraid, Dada ji,” he said.

“Of what.”

“Of after.” He made himself say the rest. “Not of you dying. Every man dies. Of after you. Of the first morning there is no you.” He looked at his own hands. “I lay there and I did the sum. Everything in this kingdom works because you are alive. The chiefs hold still because they fear you. The army obeys because it loves you. The Dogras smile and wait because you are watching them. The treasury is full and the borders hold and the court does not quite eat itself, all of it, all of it, because one man is in that bed being himself. And I do not think, Dada ji, that anything here knows how to work without you. I do not think anyone ever built the part that works without you. And the day you die is the day it all comes apart, and I knew it lying there, and I could not bear it, and it came out as a prayer because there was nothing else to do with it.”

The Sarkar was quiet a while.

“Faith and habit,” he said at last. “You said as much in the winter, you and your father, the day I sent you to the gold at Amritsar. I have turned it over since.” The eye narrowed. “I did not know, then, that it frightened you down to this.”

“You want the throne,” he said next. Flat. A stone dropped to see how deep the well was.

“No.” It came out clean, and Angrez watched the old man mark that it was clean. “I am ten. I do not want the throne. I will not want it at twenty. I have watched my whole life what the throne does to the people around it, and I would be glad never to sit in it.”

“You think your father cannot rule.”

He picked his way over that one, because it was mined. “I think my father is a better man than the court says, and I think you saw it yourself this week. But I do not think he can hold what you hold the way you hold it. No one can. You are not a king, Dada ji. You are a thing that happens to a people once in three hundred years, and it is not just to ask the next man to be that too. The next man should not have to be you. That is the whole of what frightens me: that we have built a kingdom that only stands if every king is you, and there is only ever going to be one of you.”

The eye sharpened, the king surfacing through the convalescent, interested now in spite of himself.

“And what would you do about it. If it were yours to do.”

“What I said in the winter,” Angrez said, and felt the old ground settle back under him. “It is the same thing, only I was too small then to say it plain. Build the parts that work without a great man. Slowly. Quietly. The dull machines, the way I bring you the loose threads. Not to take anything from you. To leave something under you, so that when you go there is a floor, and the thing does not fall all the way to the bottom.”

“And the English. You watch them. Why.”

“Because they are the patient ones.” He chose each word. “You watch them because they are strong. I watch them because they are not in a hurry, and the thing that kills an empire is never the enemy in a hurry. It is the patient one with the maps, who waits for the inside to rot, and then walks in and calls it a rescue.”

The Sarkar looked at him for a very long time, and Angrez made himself sit still under it and not perform, because performing now was the one thing that could finish him.

What the old man saw, Angrez could not be certain of, and would never be certain of. But he could watch the shape of the conclusion forming, because it was the conclusion he had spent his whole life steering people toward, only deeper now and far more dangerous: that this was no ordinary clever child; that the boy carried a fear of the future too large and too exact for his years; that there was a mind behind that small face older and colder than a child’s had any right to be. The Sarkar did not, could not, reach the truth, because the truth was not a thing a sane man of 1831 could reach. But he came near enough to be permanently and carefully struck by it, and that, Angrez understood as he sat there, was at once the most useful and the most perilous thing that had ever happened to him.

“My grandson is afraid the kingdom will die with me,” the Sarkar said at last, slowly, as though weighing the shape of the words. “And he is ten.” A long breath. “When I was ten I was afraid of my mother and of missing a meal. You are afraid of the year I die.” His scarred hand came across the coverlet and closed once, hard, over the boy’s. He was not smiling, and there was nothing of delight in it; he looked at the boy the way a man looks at a wound he has only just understood is deep. “They keep telling me what a remarkable grandson I have. They mean it kindly. I am no longer sure it is a kindness. Not one of them knows the half of it. I am not certain I do.”

And then he did the thing Angrez would remember longest, which was the thing a lesser man would never have done. A kind grandfather would have gathered the frightened child up and told him to stop carrying grown men’s fears, that all would be well, that these were no worries for a boy. The Sarkar did not. The Sarkar did not lie to himself, and had decided, somewhere in that long look, that he would not lie to the boy either.

“You will not carry it alone,” he said instead. “That is a fool’s way to carry a thing, and you are not a fool. You will carry it with me.”

And after that, slowly, across the months that followed, the shape of the boy’s life changed.

Nothing was announced. There was no ceremony, no title, nothing the court could point at and resent. But Angrez found himself, from that season on, let into rooms a boy was not let into: the smaller councils where the real decisions were fought out before they were performed in the darbar; the reading of dispatches the Sarkar had never before let near a child. He was allowed to put questions to officers and clerks and have them answered as though the questions mattered, because the Sarkar had quietly let it be known that they did. He was given a longer rein to ride and to travel and to look at things, the workshops and the magazines, the revenue of this district and that. And when he brought the old man a notion now, it was no longer received as the charming hobby of a bright child. It was weighed, and argued with, and sometimes refused, and sometimes, more and more, used, the way a man’s ideas are weighed and argued with and used.

The Sarkar spoke of the prayer only once more, and never asked the question that lay under all the others, the one he had circled and stepped back from in that room, because some questions a wise man decides he would rather not have answered. He only began, deliberately and without one word said about why, to make ready a ten-year-old for a weight no ten-year-old should bear, because that ten-year-old had convinced him, in one broken night and one hard hour, that the weight was real, and that the boy might just be the one creature in the kingdom built to take it.

He had spent a season in terror that the kingdom would not survive its king, and a long hard hour arguing with the king himself over whether it could. He did not yet know that a third party to that same question was already on its way up the river, to take the measure of it for itself.