by M. M. Kaye
‘Divide and rule,’ thought Alex watching them as they passed, their feet almost noiseless on the dusty goat-track and their breathing loud in the warm silence of the late September night. As long as these people were divided by their castes and their creeds into antagonistic factions they would always be at the mercy of a conqueror, but if they once combined they could stand against any from sheer weight of numbers. ‘But they will never combine,’ thought Alex. ‘Never. Half of them hate each other more than they hate us. This will not last …’
Niaz jerked at his sleeve and whispered: ‘Why do we wait? It is not good to linger here. Let us go.’
‘Hush,’ said Alex softly. ‘There is a debt to pay. When these have gone we go back. There are some few who will remain. The priests will leave last, for there is work to do. They cannot leave the dead unburied.’
‘Has there been killing, then?’
‘Yes. Quiet - here is another—’
Two men this time. One tall and turbaned, his hawk nose clear-cut against the starlight; the other stout and muffled in a shawl that was wound about his shoulders and over his head as though to guard against the night air. The tall man did not walk furtively as the others had done. He strode past, brushing against the grasses, careless of noise, and although he spoke in an undertone his words were clearly audible:
‘Dogs and devil-worshippers!’ said the tall man furiously. ‘Must they stoop to such filth to ensure that none shall betray them for gain? Now are all our heads forfeit for this night’s work.’
‘Hush - oh hush!’ begged the stout man, pausing to peer anxiously over his shoulder. ‘Surely thine is forfeit already, Maulvi Sahib, because of the words thou hast spoken against the Angrezis.’
‘They will not hang me for a word,’ said the tall man scornfully, ‘for with the purblind vanity of their race they do not fear such talk. But let them hear of this killing and they will hunt us down like mad jackals - each one of us. Dogs and devil-worshippers—’ The sound of their voices faded as they disappeared into the darkness.
‘That is Ahmed Ullah, a talukdar of Faizabad,’ whispered Niaz. ‘He is one who goes up and down the land speaking against the Company’s Raj. They call him the Maulvi of Faizabad.’
At last the steady procession of shadowy figures ceased and for a full ten minutes no one passed along the narrow path. ‘Thirty-seven,’ said Niaz. ‘I have kept tally. There should be some few more, but not all came this way. Some came along the nullah from the northward. There are two paths that enter it from that end.’
Alex stood up with infinite caution and remained for a further minute or two listening intently. But the night was silent and nothing moved. Niaz said softly: ‘It is foolishness to go back into the tiger’s lair having once escaped. Forgo thy revenge and come away. There is more in this than one life.’
‘It was a child,’ said Alex. ‘An Angrezi child.’
‘Ah!’ said Niaz. ‘Let us go back, then.’
There was no other way of reaching the ruined fort except by the way they had taken before, and they crept down the steep sandy slope that led down into the nullah, their nerves tensing to each rattle of a dislodged pebble or slither of dry earth crumbling beneath their feet. The bed of the nullah was by now in complete darkness, but Niaz possessed eyes like a cat, and though Alex was not his equal in this he could see well enough not to be unduly troubled by it.
The huge stone-paved courtyard lay bathed in starlight in which the clumps of coarse grass, thorn and stunted saplings that had thrust up here and there between the paving-stones took on the appearance of crouching men, but nothing stirred except a breath of night wind in the grasses. The two men stole forward silently, moving from one clump of shadow to the next, until they reached the shelter of the peepul tree that straddled the entrance to the roofless hall.
The block of stone that closed the shaft still leant upright against the lowest step of the ruined stair that rose behind it, and from the shaft itself came a faint light and a murmur of voices. Alex left the shelter of the peepul tree and creeping forward until he was directly above it, knelt listening. A voice that was faintly familiar was speaking in tones of cold anger:
‘… so all are endangered!’
‘Nay, all are now bound one to another!’ replied another voice, a shrill hysterical voice. ‘None will dare betray us, since all are guilty of the blood - as thou thyself hast said! They will keep silence now for their lives’ sake. And was not this thing thine own scheme? A ruse - an excellent ruse! - for the unsettling of men’s minds? The making of this first one with spells and priests and incantations and the calling up of spirits, so that the tale of its beginning might hasten the work? And for such things a sacrifice is necessary - yes, necessary.’
‘A goat!’ snapped the first voice. ‘Had I known that aught else were planned—’
‘Yea, a goat,’ interrupted the second speaker. “‘A white goat for Kali!” It was thyself who chose that password! But now’ - the voice rose shrilly - ‘now is the spell doubly sure! Of what use to Mother Kali is the blood of one starveling bakri when we may offer her the blood of a thousand - nay, a hundred thousand feringhis? In this sacrifice we have given a sign and a promise of that which is to come. A child of the Abominable Ones - the eaters of cattle, the defilers of caste! - a male child. May it be the first of many! Would that their throats were as one throat, men, women and children together, that I might slit them with a single stroke!’ The voice rose until it was a scream of rage.
‘That would I too,’ said the first speaker. ‘But to slaughter a defenceless babe in this fashion is an abomination before Gods and men.’
‘Thou would’st spare the young of the serpent? Pho! That is indeed folly, since one such, if allowed to live, will one day sire many. They must be destroyed; leaf and branch, root and seed. Not one must be spared. Not one - not one!’
Alex heard the man stamp his feet furiously upon the ground so that the vault echoed. There was a brief silence and then the first speaker said shortly: ‘Well, it is done now and it cannot be undone. But though this may do well enough for the villages, it will not serve for the sepoys. For them it must be something that strikes deeper and that touches every man. They are already as tinder, but there is as yet no spark. No matter; we will find it.’
Alex felt a touch on his arm and Niaz whispered in his ear: ‘Let us let down the stone. I do not think they will lift it from below. They will be trapped like rats and die slowly.’
Alex’s eyes gleamed in the starlight and he rose to his feet, and then checked and shook his head. ‘No. They could, I think, find a way out. There are bats in that place, and where a bat can enter men might burrow a way out. We will wait. They must come up one by one.’
Niaz nodded and eased his knife from its sheath, and then quite suddenly his head came round with a jerk and he stiffened like a pointer, listening. ‘Back!’ said Niaz in a harsh whisper. ‘There are others here!’ They turned from the stair shaft and a moment later were once again among the shadows of the peepul tree, crouched down among the twisted roots.
Niaz’s ears had not deceived him. There was someone approaching from the dense jungle behind the ruined walls. A branch cracked and grasses rustled, and presently they heard the sound of shod feet on stone. Two men emerged from the blackness beyond a crumbling archway and passing under the shadow of the peepul tree stopped by the entrance to the stair shaft. In the clear starlight they were little more than dark silhouettes against the paler expanse of the open courtyard; shadows who carried something in their hands that looked, in the uncertain light, like short-handled axes. A nightjar called from the jungle away to the right and a moment later, from the opposite side, an owl hooted, and one of the shadows spoke:
‘The philao and the thiboa both! The omens are auspicious, though they come late. And the bhil is well hidden.’
There was a chink of metal striking against stone as the man rested the thing he carried, and Alex felt Niaz shiver and was aware with a
sense of shock that he was frightened. He had never known Niaz show fear before and had thought him a stranger to it. But now he could feel it shudder through the body whose shoulder touched his, and he knew that Niaz was sweating and shivering in the grip of a similar horror to the one he himself had experienced in the vault that lay beneath their feet.
The man who had spoken bent down and called softly down the shaft: ‘Ohé, thákur - it is done.’ He was answered from below, and a moment later a head appeared above the hole in the paving. Alex’s muscles tensed involuntarily but Niaz’s fingers clamped down upon his arm and checked him as four men one after another emerged from the shaft, the light from the vault below glimmering redly on the rubies that one of them wore in his ears. The men conferred together in whispers and he of the earrings said querulously : ‘It is late, and I have far to go before morning. The two down there can close the stair. Let us go.’ It was the same voice that Alex had heard screaming shrilly of death …
One of the men turned and called down the shaft: ‘We go now. Close the stone when all is finished.’ The faint light from below brightened for a brief moment as though more fuel had been thrown upon the brazier, and for an instant the speaker’s face showed clear against the surrounding darkness.
It was Kishan Prasad.
The next moment the group by the stair shaft had turned away and vanished as quietly as they had come, and the night was silent again.
The two who crouched in the shadow of the peepul tree did not move for a full five minutes after the last faint rustle had died away, and then at last Niaz released his grip on Alex’s arm and put up an unsteady hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
‘My father’s uncle spoke truth,’ said Niaz in a shaking whisper. ‘They are not all dead!’
‘Who are not dead?’
‘Those two were lughais - the diggers of the bhil, the buriers of the slain.
Didst thou not see that they carried the khussee? They are Phansigers. Thugs! The followers of Bhowani. The Stranglers!’ Niaz’s voice shook and Alex heard his teeth chatter. ‘Now do I know that this is an evil thing that must be stamped out, else will the old evils arise again. Two score years ago my father’s uncle aided Sleeman Sahib in the hunting down of the Stranglers, and he has told me—’ The words broke off in a shiver. ‘Let us go from here. Let us go quickly!’
‘In a little while,’ whispered Alex. ‘There are only two below.’
He rose and moved away from the peepul tree, and after a moment Niaz followed him. They crouched down on either side of the tilted slab of stone and waited, listening to the faint sounds from below while the shrunken moon sank below the horizon and the sky darkened. A jackal howled mournfully from the plain beyond the jungle and a little breeze awoke and rustled through the surrounding scrub, whispering through the leaves of the peepul tree and filling the silent night with a hundred small stealthy sounds.
At last the light below was extinguished and presently feet groped on the stairs and a man’s head lifted out of the black well of the stair shaft. Alex waited until his shoulders were clear of the shaft and then reached out and took him round the throat. The man uttered one choking gasp and then he was struggling frantically, his hands clawing the air. His bare feet beat a tattoo against the steep stone steps, and Alex lifted him clear with one savage heave as though he had been of no more weight than a sack of vegetables.
‘What is it? Hast thou fallen?’ asked a voice from the darkness below, and a second head appeared above the pavement. Niaz’s lean fingers closed about the fat throat and he jerked the man up and backward across the rim of the shaft and brought his head down upon the stone with a sharp sound like the cracking of an egg. It was enough.
‘This one at least will cut no more throats,’ said Niaz. ‘Is thine sped?’
‘Yes,’ said Alex breathlessly, and let the limp thing drop in a huddled heap at his feet. His hands were wet and sticky with the blood that had burst from the man’s mouth and nostrils, and he stooped, panting, and wiped them on the priestly robes.
‘What now?’ asked Niaz.
‘Throw them back. If any raise the stone to seek for them, they will find them waiting.’
They tumbled the bodies back into the shaft and lowered the stone above it. They could not see how the thing had been raised or on what principle the two dead priests would have lowered it into place, and they had no time to discover the trick of it. They put their shoulders to it and discovered that it took the last ounce of their combined strength to send it crashing into place. The noise of its fall broke the silence of the night as though it had been the crash of a cannon and awoke a hundred echoes from the ruined walls.
‘Quick,’ gasped Niaz. ‘If there be any within earshot they may return.’
They ran together across the wide, ruined courtyard and plunged into the blackness of the nullah, and ten minutes later they had reached the edge of the grazing grounds and the grove of trees where Alex had tethered the horses.
‘Where now?’ whispered Niaz, mounting a fidgeting horse with an ease that consorted ill with the character of Jatu the toy-seller. ‘We cannot ride together.’
‘Lunjore. I go by way of Pari.’
‘It were better to take a road south of Gunga,’ said Niaz. ‘There be few Pathans to be met with in these parts, and it is not safe for thee to ride the roads of Oudh.’
‘No roads are safe now,’ said Alex grimly.
‘True. Let us go swiftly, for in another hour it will be dawn. I would that I had my own mare between my knees in place of this bag of bones!’
By first light they were no more than a dozen miles from Khanwai, for the roads were rough and now that the moon had set the darkness made it necessary for them to keep the horses to a walk. As the dawn broke and the morning mists turned from silver-grey to rose and saffron, and the long low veils of smoke from the cow-dung fires of the villages stretched out across the plain, Niaz fell behind and Alex rode on alone through open country where peacocks screamed from the standing crops and the dew-diamonds on every blade and twig glittered in the first rays of the rising sun.
It was barely more than a hundred miles from Khanwai to Lunjore; less as the crow flies. He should be able to reach there some time during the night, but the horse would need rest. Alex had always been able to sleep in the saddle when necessary, but for the sake of the animal he rode he would be compelled to halt for some part of the day. The thought of any halt oppressed him, since his instinct was to keep going with all possible speed. He could not rid himself of the thought that at any hour the word might go out to look for Sheredil of the Usafzai who had stood in the full glare of the torchlight and shown Kishan Prasad’s ring.
Alex looked down at the ring now, and dropping the reins wrenched the thing off in a sudden spasm of loathing, and flung it away into the rank grass by the roadside.
It had been Kishan Prasad whose voice he had heard in the vault protesting against the murder, and it had undoubtedly been the priests and the unknown man with the ruby earrings who had been responsible for that foulness. But Kishan Prasad, whether he had condoned it or not, had convened that unholy coven, and as the instigator of it he could be held to account for all that had happened there, and summarily hanged for his part in the night’s work. Alex wondered yet again why he had not let the man die? He had had the chance, and some absurd, inexplicable quixotic streak born of background and upbringing had forced him into saving his life. And yet only a few hours ago he had killed another man, and the dried blood of that killing was still on his hands, spotting his clothing and dark under his fingernails. Yet a hundred such men were less dangerous than one Kishan Prasad. Was rage then, and not justice or reason, the incentive for killing?
Alex scowled down at his stained hands. There must not be a rising! It must be prevented at all costs; for if such a thing were to occur, and the blood-lust that he had witnessed last night were to be let loose, the British, who would do little now for the sake of reason, would do much under
the spur of blind rage, and the retribution that would follow an armed rising would be both harsh and horrible, engulfing innocent and guilty alike. His own behaviour was proof enough of that, for he, who had not been able to leave Kishan Prasad to die, had killed a man for rage and revenge - because he had seen that man murder a child. Yet if the fear and hatred that such men as Kishan Prasad were coaxing into flame were to flare out into rebellion, a thousand children would die worse deaths: ‘It must not happen,’ thought Alex desperately. ‘If it does it will leave a legacy of hatred and suspicion that will go on into the future until one day—’ The mare shied as a blackbuck bounded across the path, and the action brought his thoughts back from the problems of the future to those of the immediate present.
Shortly after mid-day, having watered his horse and tethered it some hundred yards within the borders of the surrounding jungle, he lay down and slept, and an hour later Niaz, jogging along in the hot dust with a party of armed men - the erstwhile retainers of an Oudh noble whose estates now lay under threat of confiscation by the Company’s Government, and whose acquaintance he had made on the road - noted that the print of a misshapen horseshoe no longer appeared upon the dusty surface of the road, and nodded to himself, realizing that Alex must have turned aside to rest his horse. That meant night riding, and it was safer to ride by night.
18
The low sun was shining between the grass stems and the bamboo canes when Alex awoke, and a jungle cock was calling from a cane-brake above the stream. Alex rummaged among the folds of his garment and produced the remains of a chuppatti, which he ate hungrily. The stream would provide water to quench his thirst and he need not stop again for food or rest until he reached Lunjore.