Tower of Silence Read Online Free PDF

was what you had to do in an adventure, Christy said, her eyes glowing. You had to keep up your strength, so that when you saw a way ofoutwitting your captors you were strong enough to take the chance.
    Most of the children found the cornmeal mush horrid. Selina managed to choke down a few mouthfuls, but it made Douglas sick. He did it in the corner, but it splashed onto his shoes, and the smell of it in the hot enclosed space made two of the smallest girls sick as well. Christy and Selina cleaned them up with the water from the jug as well as they could, but it was not very good really.
    There was no lavatory in the hut, and after a while they had to use the corner farthest from the door. Normally Selina would have found this embarrassing beyond belief, but that kind of thing had stopped mattering by then.
    It was not money that the men wanted from the children’s parents; it was free pardons for some of their number who were in gaol. The children understood this after a while–Douglas had tried to overhear as much as he could, but in the end the man who was in charge of the plot told them about it. His English was not very good, and they had not understood very much of what he said about Hindus fighting Muslims–they had not actually been very sure which their captors were–but they had understood enough.
    It did not matter whether these men were Hindus or Muslims, because the outcome was going to be the same as far as the children were concerned. If the free pardons were not given by sunset that day the children were going to be taken out of the hut and shot.

CHAPTER THREE
    Sunset came gradually into the room Mary had been given at Moy, and she hated it, because it was not the gentle beautiful thing that people painted or wrote poems about: it was a slow, inexorable clotting of daylight, the dying sun smearing the sky with blood, and the blood oozing down onto the world and dripping into this cell…
    ‘It’s a nice room,’ the stupid young warder had said when he brought her here. He was baby-faced and earnest. He looked about sixteen, although he must be older, and his name badge said he was called Robert Glennon. Robbie. Mary had thought, Well, Master Robert or Robbie Glennon, if you like it so much, you live in it, but she had not said it because it was better to seem submissive and quiet until she had these people’s measure.
    In the house where she had lived until she was fourteen, sunset had been gentle and warm, creeping softly over the garden, turning the windows to melted gold. It ought to have been lovely, but in that house sunset was not something to admire or enjoy.
    ‘I hate sunset,’ Mary’s mother always said, not once, but over and over again.
    ‘Sunset is the hour your sister was taken from us,’ Mary’s father always added, regarding his wife anxiously.
    ‘Sunset on the twelfth of September 1948,’ said Mary’s mother, her face taking on the remote pinched look. Stupid, thought Mary. She looks so stupid. ‘Seven years old and three months, she was on that day, your lovely sister.’
    There was always a memorial service at the local church on 12 September, and then there was another one on 8 June. ‘Her birthday,’ said Mary’s mother reverently, counting off the years. In 1957, when Mary was six, and old enough to understand, her sister would have been coming up to her sixteenth birthday.
    ‘Sixteen,’ said Mary’s mother wistfully. ‘Just starting to go to dances.’
    ‘The belle of the ball she would have been as well.’
    They talked like this, even though the era of Rock Around the Clock and Blue Suede Shoes had started, and people of sixteen were jiving and rocking and rolling, wearing flirtily wide skirts, or tight jeans with ballet-pump shoes for bopping.
    ‘Show Mary the photographs, William. You see, Mary, what a very beautiful sister you had.’
    ‘Beautiful,’ said Mary obediently, although the black-and-white photograph really showed a bunchy-faced child with her