The Lion in Winter? (1)

By the spring of 1834 the boy had become two people who answered to two different names, and he had stopped being able to tell, on any given morning, which of them woke up first.

To the kingdom he was Nau Nihal Singh, thirteen years old, the Sarkar’s favourite grandson, tall now and hard-handed and grave, a serious young prince who kept a hill estate where he trained the sons of good families and was said, in the bazaars, to be the one branch of the great tree that had not gone soft. To himself, in the dark, in the language nobody around him spoke, he was still Angrez, a dead schoolteacher from Surrey who had read the last chapter and was running out of margin to write in. The two of them shared a body and a secret and a clock, and lately, in a development the dead schoolteacher found more unsettling than he let himself dwell on, they had begun to share a name. He had caught himself, twice this month, thinking of himself as Nau Nihal even inside his own head.

‘That’s the body winning,’ he thought, the first time it happened, with a small cold lurch. ‘Or it’s the work. Maybe there’s no difference any more. Maybe a man becomes the thing he spends every waking hour pretending to be.’ He had decided not to fight it. A name was a tool. If the kingdom needed a Nau Nihal, it could have one, and the Angrez underneath would keep his own counsel, the way he always had, the way he always would, until the day they put him under a falling archway and he found out whether you could change that too.

By that spring he had also, very quietly, got a little of the other work done, the visible kind, down in Lahore where it showed. There was one honest ser now in the chief towns, cut in brass and kept by the kotwal, so that a man selling his grain was cheated a little less than his father had been. There were a few more relay-posts on the worst of the Multan road, so that a poor man’s complaint climbed to the Sarkar in three weeks instead of five. There were fuller granaries against the bad year, and a tighter hand on the mint, so that the Gurus’ coin went out as pure as the Gurus’ word. None of it was large, and none of it touched a single jagir or counted a single sardar’s horse, which was exactly why none of it had cost him anything but patience; the chiefs found nothing in any of it to fear, and the small people simply found the weight a little honester than before, and blessed a prince who had wanted it, in truth, for reasons that had nothing to do with grain. It was turning over on its own now, which was the only kind of good he had learned to trust.

What Lahore made of it was another matter, and Lahore was in no doubt. The grain-sellers had three accounts of the brass ser and held all three at once. The first was that the kotwal had been bought by the great dealers to ruin the small ones. The second was that the Kanwar had had a dream, which was what came of letting a boy spend his days with granthis. The third, and the most widely believed, was that it was the Sarkar’s own doing, like everything else, and that the grandson had been given the credit to make him popular. No grain-seller thought of thanking anybody. In the March of that year wheat stood at seventeen sers to the rupee in the Sarkar’s stores and thirteen in the shops, and the headmen of the bazaar had been told to see that no shop gave less than sixteen, on pain of a heavy fine and the loss of the shopkeeper’s nose. Beside that, an honest weight was the gentlest thing the government had done to a grain-seller all year, and they did not trust it for a moment.

He was at Mirpur when the news came.

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The hill had grown into itself in the two years since the Sarkar had granted it. The wall stood. The deer were fat and the cadets were lean and the front of the place was exactly the boring, wholesome, aristocratic thing it claimed to be: a dozen boys and a few hard old veterans, riding and shooting and freezing in the cold clean air, learning to be the kind of men the soft court no longer made.

The front of the place had opinions of its own, and on most mornings it gave them on the range.

The range was a strip of turf below the first wall with a whitewashed board at the far end of it, and the boys shot at the board by turns while two of the old men stood behind them and said what they thought. One was the risaldar, sixty years old, forty of them in the saddle with the Ghorcharhas, who carried a matchlock older than any cadet on the hill. He held that the Sarkar himself gave half of every day to watching men drill and shoot and to looking over their arms, and that a prince who kept a school ought to be found at the butts and not, as this one so often was, in a shed with his books. The other was the old Nihang, who stood a little apart in his blue, and watched the boys’ hands, and had not been heard to give an opinion on anything since he came.

Nau Nihal had an opinion that morning, and he had been rash enough to bring it out in front of the cadets. He wanted them to load together and fire together, on a word, the way the drilled battalions did at Lahore.

“On a word,” said the risaldar.

“All twelve at once, Risaldar ji. It frightens a horse more than twelve shots one after another.”

“It frightens the horse once.” The old man took the matchlock out of the nearest boy’s hands, looked down the barrel as though something might have been left in it, and gave it back. “Then the horse is past, Kanwar Sahib, and twelve boys are standing with empty guns, looking at the man who gave the word. I have been the horse. A Singh fires when he has something to hit. He does not need telling when. He needs telling to wait, and that I can teach them, and a firangi word cannot.”

‘He isn’t wrong,’ thought Angrez. ‘That’s the trouble with him.’

“The battalions at Lahore,” said Nau Nihal.

“The battalions at Lahore dance beautifully,” said the risaldar, with the courtesy of a man closing a door. “The dance of the dancing girls, we called that drill, when the Sarkar first brought it in, and I have seen nothing since to change the name. Bishan Singh. When you are ready, putt, and not before.”

Bishan Singh was never ready quickly. He took his time, and blew on his match, and hit the board a hand’s width from the middle, and grinned. Fazl, who kept the tally these days because a tally does not want a striker’s hand, made his mark.

“There,” said the risaldar. “And nobody said a word to him.”

Nau Nihal looked, for help he did not expect, at the Nihang.

“The boys have not eaten,” the Nihang said.

It was the only ruling anyone was going to get, and the range broke up for breakfast on the strength of it.

What the old men made of their Kanwar they said in the evenings, over the fire, and the cadets carried it about the hill: that he was a good boy, and sat a horse well enough, and had been spoiled by reading; that he counted things, which no soldier had ever needed to do; that he would make an officer on the day somebody took the pen out of his hand. They said it fondly. They had been saying it for two years, and every one of them slept forty paces from the second wall.

The back of the place did not officially exist.

Behind the second wall, in the low stone shed where the noise was wrong for a hunting estate, Lahna Singh Majithia stood over a bench with his sleeves shoved up and a look on his broad face that Nau Nihal had learned to read as the deepest contentment the man was capable of, which was the look of a problem behaving itself. The Sword of the State had aged. They all had. But put a difficult casting in front of him and the years fell off, and he was, this morning, holding up to the cold window-light a thing no army on earth had yet learned to make by the hundred to one unvarying measure: a finished percussion cap, one of a tray of two hundred, each one identical, each one a tiny sealed copper promise that a gun would fire in the rain.

“Two hundred,” Lahna Singh said. “Two hundred the same, Kanwar. Ilahi Bakhsh’s nephew can make forty in a day now without losing a finger, and he does not know what he is making, which is the part I like.” He set the cap down with the tenderness of a man handling a sleeping scorpion. “You have built a thing here that frightens me, putt. I want you to know that I know it. I help you because it is good work and because I am too far in and too curious to stop. But I know what is in this shed. I have known for a year. We are arming a war that has not started yet, against an enemy who does not know there will be one, in a country that would hang us all if it understood the first thing about it.”

“I know, Sardar ji,” said Nau Nihal.

“Do you.” Lahna Singh looked at him. “You are thirteen.”

“I know exactly how old I am,” said the boy, with a flatness that was, for once, entirely the dead man speaking, and Lahna Singh, who did not know about the dead man but had spent two years near the cold thing that lived behind the boy’s politeness, looked away first, which almost never happened.

It was into that silence that the rider came up the hill.

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A kingdom that runs on one man has a particular way of receiving the news that the one man has fallen. It does not, at first, sound like grief. It sounds like arithmetic.

The rider was one of Lahna Singh’s, a fort man, and he had killed two horses getting to Mirpur, and what he said, in the cold yard with the cadets going still around him, was this: that the Sarkar had been struck down. That four days back the rider had left a Lahore in uproar: in the durbar, in the middle of a sentence about the revenue of Multan, the Lion of the Punjab had stopped speaking, and the right side of his face had come loose like wet cloth, and he had gone down off the gold chair into the arms of the men nearest him, and he had not risen when the rider took horse.

Nau Nihal stood in the yard and heard the date land.

‘1834,’ the part of him that was Angrez thought, with the terrible flat clarity that had never once, in thirteen years, learned to feel like anything but watching a thing he had always known was coming. ‘The big one. Not the end. He lives, he lives years yet, the heart goes on past this. But this is the morning the wall shows the crack. This is where the slow part stops being slow.’

And then, under the historian, came the other thing, the thing that was not in any book, the thing that doubled him over a little in the cold as if he had been hit: that the small plain pock-marked one-eyed man who had picked him out of a cradle and called him his lion and handed him a hill with his eyes open was, four days’ hard ride away, lying broken in a dark room, and that the boy who loved him more than he had ever loved anyone in two whole lives had spent every one of those days up a mountain, fussing over copper caps, while it happened.

“Saddle the fast horses,” said Nau Nihal Singh, and his voice did not shake, because he had thirteen years of practice not letting it, and that was its own kind of grief. “Sardar ji, the shed is yours. You know what to do if I do not come back, and you know what to burn. I am going to my grandfather.”

Notes

1. The prices are Hari Ram Gupta’s (History of the Sikhs, Vol. 5), from the newspaper Jam-e-Jahan Numa: in March 1834 wheat sold at seventeen to the rupee in the government stores at Lahore and thirteen in the shops, and the bazaar headmen were ordered to see that no shopkeeper gave less than sixteen, defaulters to be heavily fined and to lose their noses. Gupta prints the measure in kilograms; the novel gives it in sers, which is Gupta’s own equivalence: his table of 1808 prices on the same page sets twenty seers at twenty kilograms. The bazaar’s three theories of the brass ser are the novel’s invention, like the ser itself.

2. That the Maharaja spent nearly half of every day inspecting parades, drill and shooting and examining arms and equipment is Captain Murray’s observation, given in Gupta. That the chiefs and the old troops called the new drill “the dance of dancing girls” is from the essay Reform and Resistance. The risaldar, his argument and the morning on the range are the novel’s invention; his title is the regular cavalry’s (Gupta gives a risaldar’s pay as forty to forty-eight rupees a month), the Ghorcharhas rode unregimented in derahs under their own sardars, and the hill’s use of the title for him is the novel’s courtesy. The old Nihang is the invented veteran of part (5) of Book Five.

3. Maharaja Ranjit Singh suffered a severe paralytic stroke in 1834 (some accounts place a major seizure in 1835), markedly worse than an earlier illness of 1826; it left him partially paralysed and impaired his speech, yet he recovered enough to continue ruling, and lived until 27 June 1839. The dating and the medical picture follow the general histories (e.g. Empire of the Sikhs). The kingdom’s fatal dependence on his single person, the “load-bearing wall” of this novel, is the settled judgement of the sources on why the state did not survive him. The manner of the stroke here, in darbar, in the middle of a sentence about the revenue of Multan, is the novel’s invention; no book in the library gives the day or the place. The historical Kanwar Nau Nihal Singh was not on a hill that spring: he crossed the Indus at the end of April 1834 with Ventura and Court at the head of nine thousand men, and Peshawar was annexed in May (Hari Ram Gupta, History of the Sikhs, Vol. 5); the novel keeps him at Mirpur, and then at the bedside, as the Note to Book Seven (3) already says.