Shantaram полностью

‘Through Khyber Pass, there came one of the most feared, brave, and brutal soldiers in the whole British Raj. His name was Roberts, Lord Frederick Roberts. He captured Kabul, and began a ruthless martial law there. On one day, eighty-seven Afghan soldiers were killed by hanging in the public square. Buildings and markets were destroyed, villages were burned, and hundreds of Afghan people were killed. In June, an Afghan Prince named Ayub Khan announced a jihad to drive out the British. He left Herat with ten thousand men. He was an ancestor of mine, a man of my family, and many of my kinsmen were in the army that he raised.’

He stopped talking and flicked a glance at me, his golden eyes gleaming beneath the silver-grey brows. His eyes were smiling, but his jaw was set and his lips were compressed so tightly that they showed white at the rims. Reassured, perhaps, that I was listening to him, he looked back to the smouldering horizon, and spoke again.

‘The British officer in charge of Kandahar city at that time, a man named Burrows, was sixty-three years old, the same age that I am today. He marched out of Kandahar with one thousand five hundred men-British and Indian soldiers-and he met Prince Ayub at a place called Maiwand. You can see the place from here, where we sit, when the weather is good enough. In the battle, both armies fired canons, killing hundreds of men in the most terrible ways that can be imagined. When they met each other, as one man to another man, they fired their guns at such close range that the bullets went through one body to strike the next. The British lost half their number. The Afghans lost two thousand five hundred men. But they won the battle, and the British were forced to retreat to Kandahar. Prince Ayub immediately surrounded the city, and the siege of Kandahar began.’

It was cold, bitterly cold on the windy tor, despite the unusually bright, clear sunlight. I felt my legs and arms growing numb, and I longed to stand up and stamp my feet, but I didn’t want to disturb him. Instead, I lit two beedies, and passed one to him. He accepted it, raising his eyebrow in thanks, and took two long puffs before continuing.

‘Lord Roberts-do you know something, Lin, my first teacher, my dear Mackenzie Esquire, always said this thing, Bobs your uncle, all the time, and it became a thing that I also said, to imitate him. Then, one day, he told me that the saying came from him, from Lord Frederick Roberts, because, you see, the man who killed my people in hundreds was so kind to his own soldiers that they called him Uncle Bobs. And they said that if he was in charge, everything would be well-Bobs your uncle. I never said that again, not ever, after he told me that. And something that is very strange-my dear Mackenzie Esquire was the grandson of a man who fought in the army of Lord Roberts. His grandfather and my kinsmen fought each other in the second British war against Afghanistan. That is why Mackenzie Esquire had such fascination for the history of my country and such knowledge about the wars. And, thanks be to Allah, I did have him as my friend, and my teacher, while men were still alive who bore the scars of fighting the war that killed his grandfather, and killed mine.’

He paused again, and we listened to the wind, feeling the first sting of the new snow that it was bringing to us: the shivering wind that began in distant Bamiyan, and dragged the snow and ice and frosty air from every mountain all the way to Kandahar.

‘And so Lord Roberts went from Kabul, with a force of ten thousand men, to relieve the siege of Kandahar. Two-thirds of his men were Indian soldiers-and they were good fighting men, those Indian Sepoys. Roberts marched them from Kabul to Kandahar, a distance of three hundred miles, in twenty-two days. Much more than the distance we covered, you and I, from Chaman, on our journey-and you know that took us a month, with good horses, and help from villages along the way. And they marched, from freezing snow mountains to burning desert, and then, after twenty days of this unbelievable march through hell, they fought a great battle with the army of Prince Ayub Khan, and they defeated him. Roberts saved the British in the city, and from that day, even after he became the field marshal of all the soldiers in the British Empire, he was always known as Roberts of Kandahar.’

‘Was Prince Ayub killed?’