The Damascened Blade

by Barbara Cleverly

  ‘Aerial reconnaissance.’

  ‘Aerial reconnaissance? On whose authority, I’d like to know? This is a sensitive situation! What fool authorized anyone to overfly tribal territory? If you’re trying to explain to me that the situation is incandescent I can think of nothing more likely to precipitate serious trouble than a mob of aggressive flying corps subalterns galloping through the skies above a friendly neighbouring state! I suppose this is the doing of that damn fool Moore-Simpson! Where the devil’s he? I need a few words of explanation from him! Where is he?’

  ‘Preparing to take the next flight up again, I think. Er, would you like to accompany him, sir? I’m sure room could be found in the rear observer’s seat for you,’ said Joe kindly.

  They left Burroughs spluttering with dismay and made their way to the football field in time to see a Bristol Fighter plane bouncing along to a halt feet from the boundary. The Scouts delegated to mark out the landing area doused the lighted flares they had set in each corner of the pitch and, chattering excitedly, hurried over to take a closer look at the aircraft. Fred was there to greet the two men as they climbed out and he introduced them to James and Joe.

  The pilot pulled off flying helmet and goggles and held out a hand, smiling and cheerful. Hugh Blackett was very young, very blond and very blue-eyed. As yet untanned and unlined, he could not have been long in India. It must have been all of two minutes since he was captaining the first eleven, Joe thought with stabbing reminders of the hundreds of young sacrifices he had seen making their way over to the enemy lines in the war. The wings on his chest were very new. The second man, who saluted negligently and got straight to work on the plane, was introduced as ‘Flight Sergeant Thomas Edwards, my ack emma.’ The single Observer wing on his chest was very faded.

  ‘Have to take your aircraft engineer with you in this country,’ Fred explained. ‘Now what I propose we do while Tommy does his stuff is retire to the ops room and have a look at this map I’ve got together. I’ll take her up for the next tour while Hugh gets his breakfast and then he can relieve me. Joe? James? Either one of you want to come up in the observer’s seat?’

  They made their way to a whitewashed, mud brick building at the centre of the fort. Tidy and uncluttered with everything to hand, it was a scene they were all familiar with. A large table dominated the room, filing cabinets and bookcases lined it and in a corner the only unmilitary note: a gouty armchair, one of its legs propped up on a copy of Whitaker’s Almanack 1910, a year-old copy of Punch lying open over one arm.

  The four heads descended on the map Fred had taken from the maps room and James began to fill in the topographical details. ‘Here’s the fort and here’s Afghanistan and somewhere between the two is what we’re looking for,’ he began.

  To their relief the pilot took in the problem at once, asking shrewd questions and supplying useful information of his own. He noted distances from friendly forts, fuel supplies, possible landing areas and traced the known route of the escaping Afghanis to the last known point nearly half-way along the Khyber.

  ‘Any word from Landi Kotal?’ he asked.

  ‘We heard nearly an hour ago that there has still been no sighting. They’ll let us know the minute they have anything. The only thing moving in the Khyber has been a Powindah caravan. On its way down to us to overnight by the river. They do this every year. They’re coming from Samarkand and Bokhara and en route for Peshawar. I thought we might stop them and have a word. If our friends were in the Khyber then they’ll know about it. The Powindah are a gypsy race. They’re called the postmen of the province and nothing escapes their intelligence system. Their Malik owes me a favour. The local Afridi snatched two of their little boys who’d strayed behind the caravan to chase a wandering sheep last year. They reported it to me and I took out a gasht.’

  ‘You took out a gasht?’ said Joe. ‘To chase up two boys and a stray sheep?’

  ‘Fifty Scouts went out. Wasn’t difficult. We found the mob, feasting on the missing sheep and one of them standing guard over the boys. We hauled in two of their sentries, held guns to their heads and didn’t put them down until the boys had been released. But the Afridis complained that they had only snatched them in revenge for the two of theirs who were taken by the Powindah the year before. They sell the poor little buggers as slaves.’

  James sighed. ‘You can never get back to the beginning of these things,’ he said wearily. ‘Or the end. All you can do is make it clear we don’t tolerate these goings-on.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Fred, anxious to draw their attention back to the map. ‘So this is our area and we’ll ignore the caravan on its way down. You’ll question them when they get here, James.’ He outlined with a finger the area of search. ‘The Bristol can fly for three hours before refuelling so we’ll count on – to be on the safe side – an hour out and an hour back. She can do a hundred and twenty-three miles per hour but we’re aiming to take it slowly and steadily. Stooging about at a slow speed you can see an amazing amount in normal conditions but,’ he sighed and swept a dismissive hand over the brown, crowded contours of the map, ‘doesn’t look very hopeful, I’m afraid. You could hide a division in this sort of terrain. And it’s all rocks, overhangs and cover of some sort all the way up to the Afghan border. It’s their own backyard. They have friends there who will hide them. They could be anywhere in fifty square miles by now.’

  ‘And don’t forget that they’re camouflaged – their clothes are brown and floppy, even their horses blend into the terrain,’ said James. ‘Their hearing is acute. They’ll hear you coming miles away and have plenty of time to hide themselves. It’s a wild goose chase!’

  ‘At least there won’t be any opposition from the air,’ said Joe, ‘but what about sniping from the ground? Any fear of that?’

  ‘There’s always fear of that,’ said Fred with a quick look at Hugh.

  ‘Thought I was in for some trouble on the way over,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Came up over the Bazar Valley. Didn’t realize it was miles out of your search area so I was keeping an eye peeled on the way. Twenty miles back over Afridi territory I thought I’d spotted a smudge of smoke in the sky. Here,’ he pointed at the map. ‘Rather high and no sign on the ground. Dispersing fire? I diverted to get a closer look but then I caught a flash of sunlight on metal. Looked like the start of a helio signal to me but then I remembered where I was and thought, “Rifle barrel. Bloody hell! Afridis are up!” I did a few acrobatics and went on my way. No shots.’

  ‘Well, if that’s all clear,’ said Fred, rolling up the map, ‘we’ll be off. Coming, Joe? Hugh, old son, we’ll relieve you of your hats and goggles and stuff.’

  Ten minutes later Joe was sitting nervously in the rear seat of the plane, which had been turned on its axis, watching as Fred with total confidence, enthusiasm even, fiddled with the controls, interminably carrying out checks. At last he was satisfied. ‘Switches off!’ he called to the flight sergeant standing by the propeller. Tommy Edwards swung the big blade of the propeller.

  ‘Contact, sir!’ he shouted back.

  ‘Contact!’

  The twelve cylinder Rolls Royce engine, hardly cooled, fired up reassuringly at the first attempt. Fred waited, listening to the note and checking again the dials in front of him. He raised his hands above his head to signal for the chocks to be pulled away and two Scouts standing by obliged. He took a firm grip of the throttle and began to move slowly forward over the football pitch. Tommy saluted, rather unnecessarily Joe thought, to indicate that the sky was clear and the plane started forward, gathering speed. Fred pulled the joystick back and the machine swept gracefully up into the air.

  Joe touched the folded sheet of paper tucked into his belt. Hugh had held it out to him the moment before he climbed into the plane. ‘Better have this with you, sir,’ he had said without emphasis. ‘We all carry one. Just in case.’

  Joe had run an eye over the short script. In English and in Urdu the document declared that a very large amount of money
would be handed by His Majesty’s Government to any person returning the bearer safe and sound. The better the condition of the airman, the larger the amount of money, it added. ‘More arithmetic on the frontier!’ Joe thought. He began to calculate the value of Fred’s experience and training, to say nothing of his own, adding on the cost of the aircraft and converting the sum into rupees in an effort to distract his mind from the terror he always felt when he left the safety of the ground. He checked his revolver. He familiarized himself with the two Lewis machine guns mounted to hand in the rear cockpit. There might be men in these hills who could not read either English or Urdu. Another problem was that the scheme of rewarding the tribesmen for delivering chaps back to base instead of killing them had given them an unexpected source of revenue and now any plane that flew overhead was seen as a legitimate target, a cash bonanza for the village. The number of planes lost in the ensuing turkey shoot had actually increased. As James said – how could you ever disentangle cause and effect in this country?

  He looked at the man who now held his life in his hands. The jaunty tilt of Fred’s head told him that he, at least, was relishing the situation and Joe wondered again about the emotions, the compulsions even, that drove him. The skill and pleasure he showed in controlling this infernal flying machine were obviously high on the list and soon Fred’s confident handling of the noisy, bucking brute began to soothe Joe’s nerves. He thought perhaps he might relax so far as to release the two-handed grip on his seat with which he had unconsciously and futilely been attempting to keep the plane aloft.

  Queasily, Joe looked over the side at the hills fought over so passionately for so many centuries. They had so little to offer and this was never more apparent than from a thousand feet up. Brown, barren, repellent, comfortless, he thought. In the distance green river valleys chequered with sugar cane fields and orchards only served to point up the desolation of the Tribal Territories. No wonder the inhabitants of this wilderness had made their living from raiding. Zan, zar, zamin – women, gold and land, and only available to those who were prepared to acquire a gun and use it to exact what they wanted.

  Covering the port side, Joe swept the bare crags, all depth reduced from up here to ripples on a shingle-strewn sandy beach any one of which could be sheltering an invisible troop of thirty horsemen. In minutes they were overflying the Khyber Pass which snaked, dark and sinister, even from a height, making its tortuous way following the track of the rushing Khyber river for thirty miles. The only sign of life was a huge dust cloud beneath which nothing was discernible. The nomad Powindahs on the move towards the fort? Joe assumed so. The fort at Landi Kotal when they reached it was barely distinguishable from the surrounding khaki-coloured rocks but Joe was heartened to see a friendly signal flicker up at them from below as they flew over. They flew on right to the Durand Line marking the extent of British claimed territory and, having no wish to start an international incident, Fred turned before he reached Afghanistan but not before they had a chance to survey from an even greater height the routes into the country. Still no sign of a troop of horsemen. Fred gave a thumbs down and signalled that he was about to turn for home.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lily, a few feet upstream of her horse, eagerly scooped up the ice-cold water and drank. That was the first and perhaps the most urgent of her needs attended to and now her mind was filled with the remaining two. She looked around her. The men seemed to have decided to settle down by the stream for a while. Lily noticed with interest their order of priority. First each had taken a small mat from his luggage and, kneeling on it, said his morning prayer, then they had attended to their horses and now at last they were turning their attention to unpacking promising-looking bundles from the pack mules. Breakfast? She walked tentatively through the developing encampment, leading her horse to join the others tethered some yards away. She noticed that each man as she drew level with him averted his eyes. In their own territory again presumably native rules applied once more and being a woman she became virtually invisible. To look away so as not to embarrass a woman was Pathan politeness.

  This just could have its advantages. Boldly, she walked to the far side of the encampment and kept on walking. No one watched her; no one followed her and with relief Lily found a large sheltering rock and spent some unsupervised minutes there. When she strolled casually back she found a fire had been lit and cooking pots had been set to boil up. Two men scrambled down from the hills carrying the carcass of a sheep and this they proceeded to butcher and prepare to roast, threading the chunks of meat on to long metal skewers which they held over the flat and now red-hot fire, fragrant with juniper and apricot twigs.

  Lily, almost insane with hunger as the scents of the roasting meat and herbs drifted towards her, sat apart from the group, unremarked and apparently invisible. She found a sheltered spot in the sunshine with her back to a rock and stared ahead, trying to make out where on earth they had come to. She was puzzled. All her instincts and the geographical information before her eyes told her that they were now facing and travelling south and must have done a wide loop – a detour of at least thirty miles through the hills. The land fell dramatically below them into a lush green valley stretching from east to west. ‘Wherever else we may be, that is definitely not Afghanistan,’ she concluded.

  She was quite certain that they were still west of the Durand Line that separated the North-West Frontier Province from its warlike neighbour to the east, still under, technically at least, the jurisdiction of the British Government, still the responsibility of Joe and James. Would they try to get her back? She couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t come for her at least. Her romantic imagination conjured up a picture of loyal Bengal Lancers riding knee to knee from the hills, sounding cavalry trumpets. And what about Rathmore, who only had himself to thank for his present perilous position? He was, after all, a Lord and Lords cut ice under the British flag. Hard to believe but she guessed he must be about as important as a US senator and certainly not dispensable, however stupid. The British would turn over every stone to find him. They’d send out the Mounted Infantry. They would muster every available soldier. Lily thought she knew about the British. Her original perception of ‘egotistical bastards’ had, thanks to her dramatic change in circumstances, mutated to ‘chivalrous rescuers’. They wouldn’t just let her be dragged off into the wilderness. They must know by now that she was missing. What were they doing about it? Her hopes of rescue, she found, always centred on Joe. It was Joe’s grim face and tall figure she expected to see around every twist in the trail. He would come.

  But in rescue lay another problem. Iskander. She watched him as he moved amongst his men, sharing the menial tasks with them, talking easily, always alert. He appeared quite unfatigued by his night in the saddle, unlike Rathmore who sat miserably slumped, no longer tied up but still under guard on the other side of the fire. And there they had made their first mistake, she thought with a secret smile. To waste energy on guarding that barrel of hog’s grease when they should have been keeping an eye on her showed a rigidity of attitude that could only work in her favour. Iskander, she was certain, knew more about the death of Zeman than he had declared so, by staying close to him, she ought to be able to find out what that knowledge was. He might come to regret taking her with him.

  Even as the thought formed she was instantly cast into a dilemma. What would happen if it came to a confrontation between Iskander and Joe? Would Joe shoot Iskander? Could she let that happen? Lily checked herself. She’d heard the tales of white women who’d been captured by Indian tribes in the West and had grown so used to life with their abductors that they had refused to come home again. Briefly the thought was intriguing but – well – that wasn’t going to happen to Lily Coblenz!

  At last the meal seemed to be ready and the men were passing out small metal plates piled high with rice and gravy and little discs of grilled lamb. Iskander who, alone of all the men, seemed prepared to look her in the eye, strolled over to her shelter
ed place and handed her a plate. It was made of tin and it shone with impeccable cleanness. He had spooned rice which seemed to be studded with pistachios and sultanas on to it from a pot and topped it with meat.

  ‘A small meal to keep you going,’ he said, ‘until we eat again properly at midday. We have not far to go now.’

  Certainly the most delicious meal she had ever eaten, Lily decided, scraping up the last bit of rice with her finger and licking it. Custom still pricked her to give a quick look around to make sure no one had seen her poor table manners but, of course, all eyes were averted and for that matter, all were licking their fingers. Basking in the sunshine with a full stomach and weary from her night’s ride Lily was almost asleep. A few seconds more and she would have missed it. As it was, her sharp ears picked up the sound even before the men were aware of it. A low buzzing sound was approaching along the valley from the south-east, a sound which she knew instantly to be the engine of a plane. Iskander rapped out a single word of command and the men froze, their khaki tunics and flowing baggy breeches melting into the rocks and earth. The fire had been doused, the horses were under the overhanging cliff. Lily realized that they were invisible to the plane even if it had been flying directly overhead.

  Iskander gave her a narrow-eyed glare which quite clearly told her to stay still. She nodded briefly back in understanding and, reassured, he turned his head, as had all, to look up into the sky, fascinated by the strange sight. Lily looked too. RAF roundels told her it was British and therefore, she estimated, flying from the base at . . . she couldn’t remember the name but she knew there was such a base about seventy miles south-west of the fort. Joyfully, she figured that this plane must be on its way to Gor Khatri and that her reasoning had been correct: the fort lay to her left. She fingered the shining tin plate which still lay on her lap and looked up at the sun. Helios. James had explained the signalling system to her. A tin plate was no substitute for the complex arrangement of mirrors and reflectors the army used but it would have to do. Swiftly calculating the angles, she waited for exactly the right moment. There would only be a split second available to her.