boy, and he was at this moment standing in his best and simplest clothes two rooms away, trembling with nerves, no doubt. Still, it did no harm, that sort of thing. Had the Amir suddenly decided to inspect the boy’s teeth – the Amir’s own being so bad – it would not have done to ask him to wait on the pleasure of a seventeen-year-old boy.
4.
You know the one I mean, the Amir had said, querulously, as if it were absurd that anyone should think of another son. And as the court swept past the deeply bowing youth in the third anteroom, shrinking back into one of a file of attendants lining the little route between the throne room and Dost Mohammed’s suite of apartments, it was clear from the suddenly drawn eyes, the suddenly checked pace of half the court that they knew the son he meant, too. Dost Mohammed himself gave no sign of recognition in his purposeful stride, but, behind him, the nobility, normally so regulated, cannonaded each into each, tripped over each other as they caught sight of Hasan. For a moment they forgot how to walk. Khushhal himself had no idea. Well, he knew about the boy’s beauty, but he had no idea the fame of it had spread beyond the family into the city, and wasn’t entirely sure he liked the idea of his son being gazed at in the street, being the cause of lost sleep, being importuned to surrender what virtue, at seventeen, he still possessed, as if he were some bazaar-boy and not the son and grandson of princes. Still – Khushhal reflected – he himself had been famous, in his day (he relished the memory, twenty years back, of a trader at his shop abandoning a transaction and, open-mouthed, clambering up on a chair for a better view). If Hasan could be of use to the Amir, that, at any rate, was a more virtuous and useful end than, as Khushhal had, only using his God-sent gift of beauty to satisfy the lower urges with every bazaar-boy in Kabul, the heavens forgive him.
Hasan, at seventeen, was famous. Of course Dost Mohammed could only mean one of Khushhal’s sons. He meant the one who was an angel. Hasan, alone among the sons, was an angel. He had been so beautiful as a baby, as a boy, that his mother had feared for him, knowing that beautiful children often coarsen as they grow older, become overblown like a July rose, their temperament uncertain as they grow too accustomed to the regular supply of love. And when love as it must proves no certainty, they are not resigned to the fact, but are shocked and angry at the seeming injustice. She had veiled him for a time, like a girl baby, to keep off the demons his beauty would summon. Had those demons come? For beautiful children, love occupies too central a place in their mind, pushing other thoughts, wisdom, understanding to the edge, if not altogether out of their thoughts. We are not made for love alone. Love, in the end, is the prerogative of God, the force of whose love we glimpse in shadow, and dimly, when a man loves another. It is, perhaps, only those who for the first decade of their lives have been loved universally and without conditions, on account of their beauty, who go on believing the central fact of their life remains to love and be loved. Those lucky, unlucky people, so secure only in their insecurity, remain as they once were all their lives only in one respect: they always remain children.
The mother of Hasan said some of these things, and thought all of them, confiding the whole only in her prayers. How could this earthly angel not come to harm? But Hasan grew, and the light still shone beneath the soles of his feet as he lightly trod God’s earth. With each year, he remained beautiful; with each year, he became beautiful in a different way, since the beauty of a child is a changing thing, even when it is most constant. She never mentioned his name, never, never, in any context, for any purpose, without casting a net around his beloved skin by afterwards slipping in a ‘God willing’. It was so fragile, the radiant beauty which cushioned his steps, and nothing could touch, nothing, not even Time, could destroy it.
Khushhal had made a quick palms-down gesture and a hiss as he passed the boy, wanting him to stay where he was until Khushhal, with the court, had accompanied the Amir to the door of his apartments. The worst of his wives, the lewd contemptuous one, had been waiting there for the Amir; not respectfully, but waiting as if to insult him.
‘Dosto,’ she sang out the second the doors were opened, though she could have no doubt that the court was waiting just there for their dismissal. ‘I’ve been waiting for you for the whole day.’ She had an infuriating voice, with her drawling Suddozye-princess vowels. She had been a prize at the end of one of those footlingly interminable, brutal scraps with the Suddozye pretenders, and never missed a chance to display her contempt of the whole court and the Amir himself before the entire establishment – before Kabul, before the English ambassadors, if she could. Why the Amir didn’t simply toss her down a well …
‘I’ve been—’ the Amir sheepishly said.
‘I don’t care,’ came the voice. ‘Shut up with old women and bores and your sisters all day long. And you with your bores, I expect. Well, I need you here, now. I’ve lost my slippers, and you’re the only one who can find them for me. I need them now, slave.’ Her voice raised to a shrill little shriek with this last astonishing demand, and the court began to shuffle away in embarrassment, not even waiting for their dismissal. The Amir seemed oblivious of where he was.
‘Yes,’ he said, giggling a little. ‘Mistress.’
‘What did you say?’ the princess called. Her voice was cool and affectless as an unwearied dove’s. ‘Dosto? Slave?’
‘Yes, mistress,’ the Emperor said, more clearly, and then, suddenly, seemed to become aware again of the court. ‘That will do,’ he said briskly, dismissing his public humiliation. ‘I am not to be called upon.’
5.
The court scattered in overpowering embarrassment, almost before the double doors had swung shut on them. Khushhal found his way back to the anteroom where the boy Hasan still stood, waiting nervously. He beckoned to his son with the underside of his palm, a small flapping gesture, and together they walked through the mid-afternoon quiet of the palace’s public rooms.
‘Was that the Emperor?’ Hasan said after a time. He seemed nervous; but he usually seemed nervous, shrinking back within his skin from the unpredictable effects he had on people.
‘Have you never seen him?’ Khushhal said.
‘I think I have, years ago, when I was too small to know whom I was meeting and too long ago to remember his face afterwards. Of course I know the noble Akbar the Emperor’s son. Or I know who he is, not know him to be greeted by him. But I wasn’t sure of his father the Emperor.’
Khushhal gave him a sideways glance. ‘The Amir knows you, it seems. Or he has seen you, at least.’
‘I don’t know when that can have been,’ Hasan said reflectively, ‘for it’s not to be expected that the Amir’s life and mine take similar paths. He is not as I thought he would be.’
‘It is not for you to think how the Amir will appear, or consider what so great a man as he should be like,’ Khushhal said. Then he relented, as, with Hasan, he usually did relent, and said, ‘Of course, no one could expect you not to wonder what Akbar’s father would be like. They talk – at least the Amir talks – of sending Akbar as ambassador to the English in London.’
‘What for, father?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps the Amir has a lot to discuss with the English, and after all, they paid him the compliment of coming to visit him, so it would only be polite to send an ambassador to them with gifts, in return.’
Hasan’s attention had been drawn by a merchant of cloth, bringing materials into the fortress of the Bala Hissar. By now, they had passed beyond the state rooms and were in the outer shell of the palace, which resembled a market as much as anything,
