Shadow of the Moon (58 page)

‘They have refused the last consignment of Government flour,' said Alex. ‘It lies still unloaded in the carts. I have sent for grain from Deesa, so that they may grind it for themselves. Are there no elder men among the
pultons
who can see that these are lies made to frighten the foolish into ruin?'

‘They are like sheep,' said Niaz scornfully. ‘The leading one tumbles down, and all the rest fall over him. And surely the days of the Company are numbered when those who command the
pultons
no longer know the minds of their men.'

Alex said: ‘There was a man who wrote from Kabul in the war of ‘38, saying, “God may help us, for we are not allowed to help ourselves.”'

‘And if I remember aright,' growled Niaz, ‘in that war thy God withheld his help. Ah!' - his voice dropped from an undertone to a whisper - ‘that
manji
(boatman) spoke truth. He said that it came daily at this hour—'

A ripple broke the gleaming surface of the river and glittered in a dazzling shiver of light, and presently, inch by inch, an iron-grey shape drifted in towards the flat white sandbank and grounded as gently as a floating log.

‘It is a long shot,' murmured Niaz, ‘and into the eye of the sun. We should have gone lower.'

Alex said nothing. He waited patiently, as he had waited for the best part of the last two hours, until the creature drew its sixteen feet of ugly armour-plating out of the water and turned slowly and clumsily, lying full-length at an angle to the stream.

The crashing detonation of the shot echoed along the quiet river and sent a score of basking mud-turtles flipping back into the water and a flock of paddy-birds flapping off the far shallows. The big mugger jerked once and was still. Alex fired a second time and rose to his feet, beating the sand off his clothes as Niaz ran forward.

The bullets had ploughed into the beast's neck, severing the spinal cord, and it had moved no more than a foot.

‘Do we keep the skin?' inquired Niaz, pacing the length from jaws to tail on the wet sand.

‘No. That creature has taken the lives of over twenty men to my knowledge, and I have no wish to be reminded of it. Leave it to the kites. They will make short work of it.' Alex turned on his heel and walked back across the hot white sand with the evening sun stretching his shadow long and blue before him.

The mugger had taken a heavy toll of the city and the village five miles above it for many years, and only the day before it had taken Mothi, the eight-year-old son of Alex's grass-cutter. Mothi had been a friend of Alex's, and Alex had taken an afternoon off to lie up for the killer. But as he walked back across the sand he wondered why he had done so. To kill a dumb beast for revenge was surely a pointless action, since the creature had killed by instinct and for food, and its death would not bring back the child or any of the countless other humans whom it had fattened upon. The mugger too had a right to live, and who was to say that its victims had not been born and appointed to their end?

‘We interfere too much,' thought Alex tiredly. ‘Am I God that I should arbitrate?' He looked out across the flat lands and the quiet river, dusty gold in the low sunlight, and thought wryly: ‘I am thinking like a Hindu.'

A slow-moving shadow sailed across the white sands as a raw-necked vulture flapped clumsily to rest a yard or two beyond the red and grey shape at the water's edge, and waddled cautiously towards it.

‘That too was appointed,' said Niaz quietly, ‘for none may die before their allotted time.'

Alex turned his head and looked at Niaz reflectively, wondering how it was that this man should be able to follow his thoughts when there were so few of his own kind who could do so. His own kind, as represented by the garrison and officials of Lunjore, were as far out of touch with him at the present time as though they had been occupying separate worlds and speaking different languages. He had been unable to do more than scratch the surface of their determined blindness and complacency, and they were inclined to take anything he said as a reflection upon their own efficiency.

There had been that matter of the Government issue of flour. He had brought up at a general conference earlier that day the question of the refusal of the bazaars to accept or handle it, but the Commissioner had merely observed that if they didn't like it they could go without, and the majority view appeared to be that the whole thing was a storm in a teacup which would blow over if ignored. Colonel Packer was of the opinion that it was merely a trick on the part of the local farmers to force up the price of their own grain, Colonel Gardener-Smith, for his part, was sure that a few words of calm explanation would soon put his own Regiment to rights on the matter, and Colonel Moulson had remarked unpleasantly that he did not know what the garrison was coming to when members of it allowed themselves to be panicked by every petty rumour in the bazaars.

Alex had glanced down at his hands in the shadow of the table and had
been surprised to see that they were comparatively steady when he felt physically sick with rage and exasperation. The windy, unconstructive debate had dawdled to an indecisive close, and he had flung out into the sunlight without consulting the Commissioner or anyone else.

Two hours later, still possessed by that fury, he had gone out after the mugger. The long crawl across the hot open sands to the dusty and inadequate shelter of a thin outcrop of grass and casuarina that provided the only possible cover within rifle-shot, and the enforced stillness of the lengthy wait that followed, had done a great deal towards calming him. And looking down at the dead creature he had tasted a brief satisfaction in the knowledge that he had avenged the death of a friendly brown imp of whom he had been fond. But the satisfaction had been only momentary, and Niaz, watching him, had by some alchemy of friendship followed his thought and replied to it.

Yet the thought recurred as they walked back in the evening light along the river bank and across the dun-coloured plain towards the green-belt of trees that hid the cantonments. ‘I have taken the life of that creature for the sake of Mothi, who will not care, and to work off my rage, which will return; and yet I could not kill Kishan Prasad, or even leave him to drown, although that might have saved the lives of many more men, women and children than the mugger would have taken in all his life. Why? Because I believe that Kishan Prasad has a soul, and the beast has not? But if that were so, I have taken all that the mugger had, while Kishan Prasad would still have a soul. But then so had that priest at Khanwai, whose life I took. And so has that girl who would have burned herself with her husband on his funeral pyre if I had not heard in time and prevented it. But is she any happier for being forced to keep her life? If she had committed
suttee
she would have gone with her man, and her name would have been honoured in the villages: her very ashes would have been sacred. Now she can never re-marry, but will live out her life as a childless drudge, despised and neglected. We interfere too much. We take too much upon ourselves. By what right? - by what right?'

‘And why in the name of the four hundred and ninety-nine thousand angels,' thought Alex impatiently, as he had thought so often before, ‘can I not rid myself of this habit of seeing both sides of a thing instead of only my own? Which one
is
my own …?'

He had been dining out that evening, the occasion being a Guest Night of the 105th N.I., and had been half-inclined to send his excuses until it had occurred to him that his absence would undoubtedly be regarded as a fit of the sulks, and as it behoved him to try and keep on terms with the senior officers he had donned the tight, high-collared mess-dress of his Regiment, with its elaborate frogging and jingling spurs, and driven over to the barracks which lay two miles distant on the far side of the cantonments.

The Guest Night had been late and noisy, and it was long after midnight
before he had been able to leave. The sleepy syce deposited him in the porch and drove the trap round to the stable, and Alex walked stiffly up the verandah steps, tugging at the fastening of the braided collar and throwing it open with a sense of relief.

There was a light burning in his room, and the
chowkidar
, his blanket drawn over his head, lay sleeping soundly on a string cot in the porch and did not stir as Alex passed him. But as the spurs jingled in the silence, two shadows rose to their feet from the far side of the soft square of orange light that the oil-lamp in his bedroom threw across the matting of the verandah. One of them moved forward and lifted the
chik
that hung over the doorway to allow him to pass in.

‘Who have you there?' asked Alex in an undertone.

‘It is the Kotwal of Jalodri,' said Niaz. ‘He would have gone away, saying that he would come again in the morning, but I constrained him to stay, for he has news that concerns thee somewhat.'

‘Send him in,' said Alex.

The man slipped in under the lifted
chik
and stood blinking nervously in the yellow lamplight. Alex greeted him gravely and offered an apology for his having been kept so late. ‘What is the trouble with thee, Chuman Lal?'

‘I do not know,' whispered the Kotwal, his eyes rolling and starting like those of a frightened horse. ‘It is a thing I do not understand, and therefore I brought one to thee, and by night. But they told me thou hadst gone out to eat with the
Pulton
, and I would have gone back to my house, but thy servant constrained me to wait. He - he said that this was a matter of which thou hadst knowledge. If that be true, and there be some evil charm in this, it may be that thou canst draw it out.'

The man looked back quickly over his shoulder, but there was only Niaz behind him, and thrusting a trembling hand into the folds of his garments he drew out a chuppatti.

Alex's expression did not alter, but it was a moment or two before he spoke:

‘What evil is there in that?'

‘I do not know,' whispered the Kotwal, shuddering. ‘It was brought to me last night by a runner from Chumri, which is four
koss
to the north. He brought with him five of these things, together with a fragment of goat's flesh, and told me that I must prepare five more, breaking one of these which he had brought and mixing a little of it with the new five. These I must dispatch by a runner to the next village, sending also a portion of goat's flesh, to be given into the hand of the headman of that village, saying to him that he must do likewise and send in turn to the next village. And with it must also be said certain words that the runner from Chumri had spoken to me: “From the North to the South, and from the East to the West.” Then did I know that it was a charm.'

Alex stretched out his hand and took the thin flat cake of coarse-ground
flour, and stood looking down at it with the smile that he had taught himself to wear when his face was being watched by tense or frightened men for a clue to his thoughts. Niaz, who knew that faint, abstracted smile, grinned in recognition of it, and the Kotwal, looking anxiously from one to the other, visibly relaxed.

‘Here it comes,' thought Alex. ‘The fiery cross. This is what he spoke of in Malta; “…
as before the Mahratta rising
.” It was cakes and millet that were distributed through the villages then. This is the fruit of that devildom at Khanwai. “…
this may well do enough for the villages, but it will not serve for the sepoys
…”'

He handed the chuppatti back to the Kotwal and said: ‘And what hast thou done?'

‘I did as it was told me,' said the Kotwal. ‘Five I prepared and had sent by runner. Those that I received, saving only this one, I have wrapped in a cloth and buried deep. Huzoor, what is the meaning of this thing? I am a poor man and ignorant, and I fear that it may bring misfortune upon my house and my fields.'

‘There is nothing to fear,' said Alex quietly. ‘It is only, as thou knowest, that last year the rains failed and many of the crops failed also. That thing in thy hand is the food of all, and if it be a charm it is one that is sent for good; in propitiation, so that this year the rains will not fail and the crops of every village through which the chuppattis pass may be good.'

‘Ah!' said the Kotwal gratefully. ‘That is good talk. I will tell the village, for they feared greatly, wondering what evil this might portend. I will strew these things about the fields, and then surely my crops will prosper. And the goat's flesh? What is the meaning of that? Tara Chand, whose fields lie by mine, said that it foretold the fall of the Company's Government, for is it not said that—' The Kotwal stopped abruptly and coughed a small dry cough of embarrassment.

‘— that he who kills an Englishman sacrifices a goat to Kali,' finished Alex grimly. ‘So I also have heard. But the goat's flesh that was sent thee is but a sign that the flocks and herds shall increase, for in a good year there is grass and water for many. Tell them this in the villages, that they may know that it is a sign for good.'

The Kotwal salaamed deeply, and stowing the crumbling chuppatti with reverent care among the folds of the blanket he wore wound about him, he backed out of the room, and they heard his feet patter away on the matting of the verandah.

‘So it comes at last,' said Niaz softly, echoing Alex's own thought. ‘That was quick thinking. Will he believe?'

‘Let us hope so. It is the Government who will not!'

‘All Governments,' said Niaz cheerfully, ‘are as blind as the monkey of Mataram who did not wish to see.' And he squatted down to help Alex remove his boots and to regale him with the gossip of the lines.

Alex wrote a report on the mysterious distribution of the chuppattis the following morning and sent it across in triplicate to the Commissioner, who was pleased to be facetious on the subject that evening.

‘Damned if I ain't beginning to think Fred Moulson is right about you, Alex. Bees in the bonnet. Though its more like bats in the belfry, if y' ask me! Yes, yes, yes - I know y' had a wild tale last year about some hocus-pocus at Khanwai. But as I told y' then, it's a mistake to go pokin' about in that side of native life. Probably no connection with this at all. Far more likely that this is only some local big-wig propitiating the gods by a distribution of cakes; it ain't unusual - you should know that! And if you think I'm going to forward such a farrago of nonsense to the Governor, y'
must
be mad! Fiery cross indeed! No such thing! … Mahratta rising? What's that got to do with it? … Oh, nonsense! I don't believe a word of it - coincidence. That other business happened half a century ago.'