The Mountain of Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

his voice was sturdy, nothing like the rambling drawl he had affected in the middle terrace while in Shuja’s and Ibrahim’s presence. “You dare to draw my blood?”
    The guard’s hand shook. The old man wrapped a finger around the base of the spear’s blade and nudged it away.
    The outer door opened, and a captain in Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s army poked his head in. “Retreat, you fools!”he said quietly. When the guards fell out of formation, he came in through the gap, his hands folded across his waist. “I beg pardon, huzoor . They are new, know nothing about who you are.”
    The old man bent his head and contemplated the line of blood on his stomach. It was nothing, a mere scratch. He mopped it away and then wiped his hand on the folds of his dirty dhoti . “I appreciate,” he said, “the enthusiasm of these young men. It is vital that they question every person who enters and leaves the Shalimar. No harm done.”
    The captain bowed, the guards bowed, and the old man slipped out of the West Gate. Neither of them knew who he was, or why he had access to the Shalimar Gardens, where the Maharajah held Shah Shuja captive, only that he was someone of importance, a man it would be wise not to cross. The captain very much wanted to ask if the man would forget this little incident and not mention it to his king . . . but he did not know how to do this.
    The old man strode across the expanse of beaten mud outside the West Gate to the group of horsemen waiting at the far end. One of them brought a frolicking black horse to him, and running, he put one foot in a stirrup and heaved himself over its back. Even before he had settled in the saddle, he kicked his heels into its flanks. The entire party vanished in a froth of dust west toward the fort at Lahore, the lights from their torches smearing through the darkness and then fading away.
    As he rode, Fakir Azizuddin felt around the waistline of his dhoti and undid a small bundle. The set of lower teeth, of the purest ivory, fashioned by the Maharajah’s personal physician, Martin Honigberger, he popped into his mouth and maneuvered his tongue around until they lodged into place. As he did so, his lower lip filled out, the slope of his mouth became less awkward, his jawline firmed, and the years tumbled from his face. Azizuddin, foreign minister in Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s court, was as old as his king that year—thirty-seven.
    He had lost his teeth when a gang of the Akalis had swooped upon him in the middle of the night in Lahore, as he was returning home from an audience with his sovereign. This was before Ranjit Singh had subdued these most unlawful and marauding of warriors and made the Akalis part of his entourage and members of his personal bodyguards.
    Azizuddin’s massacre of the four men who had jumped upon him in an unlit alleyway had been instrumental in bringing about this submission. The first fist into his face had knocked out his teeth. With a hanging chin, blood streaming down his neck and drenching his clothes, Azizuddin had spun around in the darkness, his quick eye noting the positions of his assailants, his ears attuned to their breathing. A quoit, the Akali’s most powerful weapon, a slender circle of sharpened steel, had come whizzing through the air. Azizuddin had ducked and sent his dagger flying in the direction of the thrower. He had had only a sword left, and with it, deliberately, he’d slashed through each of the three men and left them cut up on the ground. The next morning, with a white, blood-mottled bandage securing his jaw to the upper half of his face, Azizuddin had listened as the Akali leader came to ask for a pardon. “Granted,” Azizuddin had said simply, “if you lay your arms down to my sovereign.”
    Every now and then, minor rebellions among the Akalis flared up, were quickly squashed, the rebels killed on the spot with no trial, no