Shadow of the Moon (81 page)

He lifted him carefully against his shoulder and Niaz's eyes narrowed in the gloom as he strove to focus him. He drank a mouthful of the water and said again and urgently: ‘Go!'

‘We will go together,' said Alex. ‘Has it not been said that “death in the company of friends is a feast"?'

A bullet struck the heavy wood of the door and another cracked against the stone. He looked down at Niaz and smiled, and Niaz grinned back at him - the old carefree grin with which he had greeted every chance and mischance of life through the twelve eventful years that they had known each other - and he said in a clear strong voice: ‘It is better this way. It is not good to have a divided heart, and there is that in me which, were it not for thee, would have me follow such men as the Maulvi of Faizabad. We have had a good life, Sikunder Dulkhan - a good life - and though thou art an unbeliever, and therefore Hell-doomed, thou hast been as my brother. Lift me up, brother - it will be a good fight—'

His voice failed, and presently he began to mutter names and odd scraps of sentences, and Alex realized that in imagination he was back at Moodkee, watching the opening of the Khalsa cannonade and fretting for the order to charge. Then suddenly he laughed and raised himself in Alex's arms; pressing up as though he rose in his stirrups, and shouted aloud as he had shouted on the day of that charge - ‘
Shabash baiyan! Dauro! - Dauro! - Da
—' A rush of blood choked him, pouring from his mouth and dyeing Alex's coat and hands, and he fell back and was still.

A musket-ball struck a leaf of the wooden shutter over the window and filled the room with flying splinters. There were shouting voices and another fusillade of shots from outside the toll-house, and the bound men on the floor writhed and groaned in terror as a second bullet smashed through the shutter and struck the wall above their heads; but Alex did not move. He stayed quite still, holding Niaz's body in his arms; his mind entirely blank.
The noise outside the toll-house seemed to come from very far away and to have nothing whatever to do with him, and he was only aroused at last by a bullet fired at much closer range that smashed through the panel of the door and passed within an inch of his shoulder.

He laid Niaz down very carefully and stood up. His gaze fell on the water jar and he picked it up and drank thirstily, and poured what remained of it over his head and neck. He did not know how many men there were outside. A dozen? Twenty? They would get him in the end, but he should be able to account for some of them before the ammunition in the toll-house ran out. He took stock of it, and discovered that unless the police guard kept their ammunition elsewhere they had only been issued with a few rounds each. But there was still the supply he had brought for the rifle.

He picked up Niaz's revolver and loaded the single chamber that had been fired. A rifle, five muskets, two revolvers. A pocketful of ammunition. He might hold them off for an hour - perhaps a little longer—

There were two string
charpoys
in the stifling room and he stooped, and lifting Niaz laid him on one of them. He took up the rifle and loaded it, and crossing to the window lifted the bar of the shutter and pulled it aside. There were three sepoys not a dozen yards away, and putting down the rifle he jerked the revolver from its holster and fired, killing one and wounding a second.

It was nearing five o'clock when Alex fired the last round and dropped the useless weapon to the floor.

The heat of the closed stone building was appalling and his head and every muscle of his body ached abominably. The sun was sinking down towards the tree-tops and the walls of the room were hot to the touch. The three bound men who lay against the wall had ceased to move or whimper, and he wondered incuriously if they were dead from fear or thirst or one of the ricochetting bullets? He closed the shutter again, and sitting down on the
charpoy
beside Niaz, leaned his head against the wall and waited, watching the patch of sunlight from the broken shutter creep slowly across the floor and up the wall, and thinking odd disjointed thoughts. For the moment there was silence outside, but he knew that it would not be long before it dawned upon those outside that he must have come to the end of his ammunition. He had met every move with a shot so far and made it too dangerous to approach across the open, but after a time they would find that they could move without one, and draw their own conclusions.

He heard horses' hooves galloping down the Lunjore road towards the river, and heard them check some way above the toll-house. Reinforcements? He wondered how soon the mutinous regiments would arrive. They should be here by now. Unless, which seemed unlikely, someone had ridden back to tell them that the bridge had been destroyed and that there was no further point in their coming that way.

He wondered how Yusaf had fared, and if the destruction of the Hazrat Bagh road had been as successful as the blowing up of the bridge. It should have been - they had worked it out with considerable care. He hoped that Yusaf would not be too impatient, but would wait until all the guns and the wagons were well on the mined stretch of road. That should not only effectively block the road, but dispose of a considerable quantity of ammunition at the same time. Would they come that day, or would they wait until the thirty-first? A harlot's taunt had sprung the mine of the mutiny before its time, but now that it had been sprung that premature explosion, like the charges he had laid on the bridge, was setting off a succession of other explosions, and not all the pleas of the leaders could prevent the inflammable material they had prepared from catching fire from the flying sparks.

The hot room stank of sweat and urine, black powder, betel-nut and blood, and the gloom was noisy with the buzz of flies. Alex pulled down the end of Niaz's
puggari
so that it covered his face, and folded the quiet hands across his chest. They were beginning to stiffen already. It must be getting late. He rose and turned the
charpoy
so that the dead man's head was towards Mecca. There was no more water, so he could not wash as the ritual prescribed, but he rubbed his hands partially clean on his soiled handkerchief, and spoke the words of the
Du'a
over the quiet body - there being no one else who would ever speak them for Niaz:

‘May the Lord God, abundant in mercy, keep thee with the true speech: may he lead thee to the perfect path; may he grant thee knowledge of him and his prophets. May the mercy of God be fixed upon thee for ever. Ameen … O great and glorious God, we beseech thee with humility, make the earth comfortable to this thy servant's side, and raise his soul to thee, and with thee may he find mercy and forgiveness.'

The murmured words awoke a soft echo in the shuttered stone-walled room, and when they ceased there was only the buzz of the swarms of flies once more. Alex sat down again, and presently, from very far away, borne on the hot stillness and scarcely more than a vibration of sound, he heard the faint boom of an explosion. It was followed a second or two later by another and then a third— ‘Yusaf!' thought Alex contentedly. The Hazrat Bagh road had gone, and with it a large proportion of the contents of the Suthragunj arsenal, for the charges that he and Niaz and Yusaf had laid had not been sufficient to account for that sound at so long a range. That had been ammunition wagons blowing up. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.

A voice from outside the toll-house shouted for those within to come out and give themselves up. Alex made no reply, and emboldened by the silence, footsteps clattered at last on the shallow stone verandah and rifle butts battered on the door and the window shutters. These were followed after an interval by other sounds; dragging sounds and footsteps and voices all about the small building, and quite suddenly Alex realized what it was that they were
doing. They were piling wood and dry grass against the doors and windows and about the house. They were going to make a pyre of it. Well, he might as well go that way as any other. A funeral pyre for Niaz and himself. He settled himself more comfortably against the wall, and as he did so one of the men on the floor stirred and moaned.

The sound seemed to clear some numbness from his brain, and he remembered that he and Niaz were not the only occupants of the toll-house. There were three other men there, and he could not let them be burnt alive. ‘Wait a minute—' said Alex, speaking aloud. ‘Wait a minute—'

He dragged himself to his feet and walked unsteadily to the door, and as he did so he heard a man outside say triumphantly: ‘Did I not say so? It
is
a sahib! There are sahib-
log
in there!' and realized that he had spoken in English and that they did not know who was within.

A voice immediately outside the door said loudly: ‘Who is it? Who is within there?' and Alex's hand dropped from the bolt, for he knew that voice. He leant against the door because it was an effort to stand, and said: ‘It is I, Rao Sahib. Call off your butchers, for there are three in here who are bound hand and foot and who had no part in this. You cannot burn them alive. I will come out.'

He heard Kishan Prasad catch his breath. ‘Who else is with thee?'

‘None but Niaz Mohammed Khan, who is dead.'

There was a shouting and a rush of feet and he heard Kishan Prasad say furiously: ‘Stand back! - stand back, I say!' and a moment later the sound of a grumbling and reluctant retreat.

‘Open then,' said Kishan Prasad.

Alex picked up the empty revolver from the floor and thrust it into the holster with a gesture that was purely mechanical, and straightening his shoulders with an effort, he drew back the bolts and opened the door.

Kishan Prasad stared at him for a long moment and then stepped over the threshold and threw a quick look about the small room. He looked at Alex again and then turned away and stood blocking the narrow door, facing men whom Alex could not see.

‘There is but one sahib here,' he said. ‘The other man is dead and the three men they have bound are alive. This sahib I know, and because he once gave me my life at risk of his own, I say that he shall go free. Stand away!'

There was an ugly growl and a babble of voices: ‘And what of Heera Lal who lies dead? and Dhoolee Gookul - and Suddhoo and Jagraj and the others? - and Mohan whose leg is broken? It is a
feringhi
- kill him! Kill him!'

There was a rush of shouting men, but Kishan Prasad did not move from the narrow doorway and his voice rose clearly above the tumult: ‘Stand back!' cried Kishan Prasad. ‘I am a Brahmin; and if you would kill this man, you will have first to kill me.'

The babble died abruptly and the men drew back, for they were Hindus, and to kill a Brahmin would be sacrilege unspeakable, dooming them to the nethermost of hells, and to become outcasts among their fellow-men.

‘Go,' said Kishan Prasad, speaking over his shoulder to Alex. ‘Move out behind me and run for the jungle. I can do no more. The debt is paid.'

Alex said tiredly and without emotion: ‘Rao Sahib, if I had one bullet left in this gun, I would shoot you now for the things that have been done this day because of men like you.'

‘That may yet come,' said Kishan Prasad. ‘Go now—'

He moved out of the doorway, keeping between Alex and the group of snarling men at the far end of the verandah, and Alex backed away behind him, one hand against the wall, and reaching the end of the verandah, stepped down and to one side behind the shelter of the house, and turning, ran for the jungle behind the toll-house and the huts.

He heard the uproar break out behind him, and a lone shot whistled past his head. And then he was into the high grass and had turned parallel to the road and was running and stumbling through the thickets, keeping as close to the road as he dared in the belief that the pursuit would imagine him to be making straight for the thicker jungle instead of turning back up the Lunjore road. They would watch to see that he did not cross the road, and would not search the far side of it, so he must cross as soon as he could do so without being seen.

He wriggled into a thick patch of thorn-bamboo and lay still, listening for sounds of pursuit. There were no more shots, and though he could still hear shouting it seemed to go further and further away, and prove that his guess had been correct, and that they had expected him to run in a straight line, and were beating the jungle behind the toll-house. The sounds did not come his way, and after a time he heard horses' hooves on the road that lay barely a dozen yards from his hiding-place. Two of the men at least were riding back to Lunjore, and the voice of one of them, high-pitched and angry, came clearly to his ears:

‘What matter? He cannot cross the river and he has no food or arms. He will die slowly in the jungle. I am for Delhi; that is the place for such as …' The voices faded.

When he thought that they had gone far enough Alex crawled with infinite caution to within sight of the road and lay there for a long time, wondering if he dared cross it. He had reached a point roughly five hundred yards above the toll-house, but the road here ran straight as a spear for a mile or more, and there would be men watching it from the toll-house. He must not draw them to the far side of it. At present it lay empty on either side of him, but he could see men moving before the toll-house.

The sun touched the rim of the jungle and slid slowly below it, and a peacock called from the thickets behind him. Another horseman galloped
towards him from the direction of the river, raising a long cloud of dust. And suddenly it was simple.

The rider drew level with him and passed him, and Alex leapt to his feet and ran for the opposite side of the road, screened by the choking cloud of dust.

42

In Lunjore city the conches brayed and horns blared in the temples. Tom-toms beat and rockets flared while men rioted through the streets shouting that all Hind was freed forever from the ‘Company Sahib's' rule - that all the
feringhis
were dead, and the great days had returned. They wore stolen finery and displayed stolen goods, and boasted of the deeds they had done and the sahib-
log
they had slaughtered; they made wild and grandiose plans for the future, and fell to quarrelling over who should be governors, generals or captains of their provinces and armies.

A mile outside the city the cantonments lay silent and deserted. Here and there a bungalow still burned and creeping figures still slunk between the silent houses, searching for any loot that might have been overlooked during the day-long orgy of murder and robbery. But as the evening shadows lengthened, the dead who lay about the cantonments filled even the scum of the city with uneasiness and superstitious fear, and they fired a few more bungalows, leaving the night breeze to carry the sparks and fan the flames, and ran away shuddering.

The sepoys whom it had been intended to march into Oudh for the retaking of that province had turned westwards towards Delhi when the news had been brought that the bridge had gone, and the lines were deserted. In the silent Residency where the dead lay scattered through the quiet gardens and the darkening rooms, the Commissioner of Lunjore lay fathoms deep in drunken slumber, and a quarter of a mile away, in the jungle beyond the nullah, Mrs Holly died at last.

The jackals and the hyenas, the crows and the kites and the naked-necked vultures, would feast to the full for many days to come, for there were other dead on the plain that stretched towards Hazrat Bagh. The garrison of Suthragunj had risen at the news of the mutiny at Lunjore, and had killed their officers and seized the treasury and the arsenal, and left, as Kishan Prasad and his friends had planned, by the
kutcha
road to join with their fellow-mutineers and march in strength upon Oudh.

They had taken the guns and wagon-loads of powder and ammunition, and Yusaf had waited until those guns and wagons lay between given marks. He had fired then, at a target that Alex had set for him. And, as he had once told Niaz, he did not miss with a first shot, though he might be careless with a second. The charges set each other off for a quarter of a mile, and the wagon-loads of ammunition exploded with a crash and a detonation that was heard ten miles and more away. And when the smoke and the flame cleared there was no road, and what remained to be seen was not pleasant to look upon.

Yusaf waited until the shadows lengthened and the partridges began to call from among the grass and the thorn-scrub; until the last of the men from Suthragunj who were able to do so had disappeared in the direction from which they had come, and until there was no more movement from the shattered road. Then he drank deeply from his water-bottle, ate his fill of cold food, and wriggled out backwards from between the rocks.

He did not return to Lunjore, but moved off westwards, making like a homing pigeon for the North-West Frontier. From what he knew of Nikal Seyn and Jan Larr'in and Daly Sahib, the Guides at least would be fully employed, and he had many friends among the Guides. Who knew - they might already be marching to attack Delhi? And if so, he would join them on that march.

Yusaf slung his rifle Frontier-fashion across his shoulder and set off towards the red ball of the setting sun.

Winter and Lou Cottar had heard the faint, faraway crack of rifle-fire at the bridge-head, and the distant roar of the explosion. All that afternoon the firing had continued, and they had guessed what it meant and watched and listened - and waited.

Once Winter had picked up the shotgun that Niaz had left on the floor of the upper room, and had said desperately: ‘I'm going! - it can't be far away - he said it wasn't more than a mile. Listen! - it can't be as far as that. I - I might help.'

Lou Cottar had taken the gun from her. ‘He wouldn't thank you for it,' she said, and Winter had known that to be true.

For want of anything else to do they had set about turning the stone chamber into some semblance of a room. It had at least kept them occupied. Alex and Niaz had once spent two weeks in the Hirren Minar, shooting in the surrounding jungles, and they had made themselves tolerably comfortable. The room was large and square, and windowless on three sides. The fourth side consisted of three pillared arches, two of which still retained broken fragments of stone tracery. These led out onto a flat roof surrounded by a low, ruined parapet.

There were several
chiks
in one corner of the room, and though the white ants had damaged one or two of them they were in reasonably good repair, and Lou Cottar had hung them between the pillars, remarking that they would keep out the worst of the flies and mosquitoes. They had also curtained off a section of the room with sacking for Alex's use, convinced as they did so that he would not return, but denying the fear by that action.

Bamboo and dried grass had made primitive but efficient brooms, and they had swept and dusted, cleaned and tidied, in a desperate attempt to keep their hands occupied and their minds from thinking of the many things that did not bear thinking of. Of Mrs Holly, left to die alone in the jungle. Of Delia
Gardener-Smith's pretty head, with its wide eyes and open mouth, rolling along the planks of the bridge above the nullah. And of what must have happened to so many others whom they had known and left behind in the shambles of Lunjore. How many were dead? How many - or how few - were hiding and hunted like themselves, but with no refuge such as this?

It was no use thinking of these things. To think of them was to sink into clutching quicksands of panic and horror. It was better to occupy themselves with make-believe domesticity, and they were grateful to Lottie because she needed attention and care, and because to keep from frightening her they themselves must not show fear.

Lou Cottar, standing at the edge of the open roof by the crumbling parapet, had reported that she could see a glimpse of river and would fetch water. She had taken the
chatti
- Winter had lowered it after her on a rope - and set out to find her way through the dense jungle to the river bank that lay so near and yet took so long to reach. She had not returned for over an hour and Winter had received her with breathless relief. ‘I'm sorry,' said Mrs Cottar apologetically, ‘but it's so thick out there that I lost my way coming back, even though it is so near. We must mark the way when we go again. We'll have to pull the water up. I can't carry it up that ladder.'

Winter drank thirstily while Lou Cottar filled a small rusted tin with water and arranged a spray of wild gourd and jungle berries in it for Lottie. ‘I bathed,' said Lou Cottar, knotting up her wet hair. ‘It was wonderful. The bank is very steep and there are no shallows on this side, but there is a place where the river has cut in behind a tree and made a little beach, and I held onto the roots. You had better go too, before it gets dark. It gets dark so soon once the sun is down and—' She stopped as though she had forgotten what it was that she had meant to say.

The sun was almost at the level of the tree-tops, and they had heard no shots for some time. They looked at each other and looked away again; and said nothing because they were both thinking the same thing - that Alex must be dead.

‘We are on our own now,' thought Lou Cottar. ‘We shall have to get out of this by ourselves - if there is a way out. I expect we can do it. It's a pity about Lottie English - it's going to be difficult with her on our hands. I wonder if Josh will hear what happened? I wonder if— No. I won't think about it. I won't think of it!'

‘He is dead,' thought Winter. ‘If he were not, he would have come back by now. The bridge went hours ago - hours. And I called him a coward because I thought he should have stayed and been killed at the Residency instead of doing something sensible and dying at the bridge instead. I wish I hadn't said that. I wish I had told him that I didn't mean it. I wish I were dead too; it would be so much easier to be dead. But there is Lottie - and Mrs Cottar. And - and perhaps there are others somewhere. Or are they all dead?'

Conway must be dead … He at least had been in no condition to make his escape. It was odd to think that he had been her husband and now he was dead - and that she could feel nothing at all. The only emotion she could feel was a dull regret that she had made no apology to Alex. In the circumstances, a trivial emotion. But everything else was blunted and numb. Alex had told her once that you felt nothing but the blow when a bullet hit you, and that the pain only came when air reached the wound. The air had not breathed upon her brain or her heart yet, for she could feel no pain. Only numbness.

The faint, faraway crack of a lone shot broke the brooding stillness, and the two women turned their heads as one to listen. But there were no more shots. It was, somehow, a very final sound. Like a period at the end of a chapter.

‘I'll take some of Lottie's clothes and wash them in the river,' said Winter abruptly, ‘and my own. They'll dry in an hour.'

She removed her own torn, dusty, sweat-soaked clothes and wrapped herself in a length of faded blue cotton cloth that they had found rolled up in a bundle and stuffed in among a collection of odds and ends in one of the tin boxes. It made a skimpy though adequate sari, and she wound it about her in the fashion of the Indian women.

‘You know,' said Lou Cottar thoughtfully, ‘you could almost pass as an Indian if you'd get a little more sunburnt. It's your hair and eyes. It may be a help yet.'

‘I should have to learn to walk without shoes,' said Winter.

‘We may both have to,' said Lou Cottar grimly, and turned away to collect a few of Lottie's underclothes for Winter to rinse in the river.

They made a bundle of the clothes and Winter took the loaded revolver and went down the rope ladder. The jungle that had been so silent all day was waking to life as the shadows lengthened, and there were rustlings among the dry, golden grass, and birds sang and twittered and called from the thickets. A peacock fluttered up to a low bough of a tree, his gorgeous tail glinting in the low rays of the sun, and a chinkara fawn looked at Winter with soft, startled eyes over a tussock of grass before bounding away in the direction of the river.

Making her way through the tangle of dry grass and leaves and creepers her ears were filled with the sound of her own progress, but she could hear the bird-song above it, and with a vivid remembrance of the tiger they had seen that morning, she kept the revolver in her hand, though she had little fear that she would need to use it. The shots and the blowing-up of the bridge would have scared any large animal for miles, and after the heat and sweat of that terrible day the lure of cool water was not to be resisted.

The river ran gold in the evening light by the time she reached it, and the far bank was already in shadow. The water slid past like silk, so smooth and still that it seemed impossible that there could be strong and treacherous currents beneath that placid surface. It chuckled softly between the exposed
roots of a great tree that the wash of the stream had undermined, and lapped against a small shelving beach below the steep bank.

Something slid into the water with a splash, and Winter started back, remembering with sudden horror the corpse that she had seen pulled under the water near the bridge two months ago, and the words of the elderly gentleman who had said: ‘It is the mugger of the bridge.' But it was only a piece of the overhanging bank that had fallen, for she saw the soil and the grasses sweep past her with surprising swiftness. The bridge was a mile downstream, and the little beach looked safe enough. She clambered cautiously down the steep bank, and removing her makeshift sari, tucked it and the bundle of soiled clothing in a crutch among the tree roots, and let herself down into the water.

It was cool and delicious beyond belief, and she lay along the shelf of the bank and let the river run over her, drawing the heat and the ache from her tired body. Her hair spread out and rippled like water-weed in the pull of the stream, and the voice of the current slipping through the tree-roots made a soothing monotonous murmur in the silence.