Shadow of the Moon

by M. M. Kaye

  Colonel Gardener-Smith’s worried gaze returned to the cartridge and he frowned at it, pulling at his lip. He said uneasily, but without conviction: ‘That is a point that cannot have escaped the attention of the responsible authorities.’

  ‘Why not? The method and manufacture of these things was worked out in England, not India, and the men responsible for it are not likely to possess any special knowledge of the caste system that prevails here.’

  ‘I do not believe …’ began the Colonel unhappily; and then once more a sense of irritation and frustration came over him. Of course there was always the danger of trouble breaking out in a conquered country! And despite the fact that he, like most other regimental soldiers of the old school, took little interest in affairs outside his immediate command, he too had lately been aware of a changing atmosphere and a lack of that sympathy and close co-operation between officers and men that had obtained in earlier and more troublous days. He could feel it in the air and sense it in the very faces and voices of his men, and he did not like it. But it was the New Order, that was all. New methods. New men. A new outlook. The lack of large-scale wars and operations to keep the troops occupied, and an inevitable slackening of discipline. Not what it had been in his young days. But the Bengal Army was still the finest fighting machine in the world. He was sure of that. This new feeling of restlessness in the ranks meant nothing; it would pass, and if only men like Randall would stop croaking of disaster life would be a much pleasanter affair. His men were all right. They were his own men and he could handle them; they would follow him anywhere - hadn’t he proved that? He wished Randall would leave well alone and stop this continual harrying … Bees in the bonnet. Buzz-buzz-buzz …

  He banged the table suddenly with his clenched fist and said violently: ‘What do you expect me to do about it, anyway? It’s none of my business - or yours! I’m not Master General of the Ordnance! These things will shortly be issued to every regiment in India.’

  ‘I know,’ said Alex tiredly. He reached out a hand and picked up the cartridge, and his face was suddenly blank: ‘But at least it can do no harm to ask for the official analysis of this stuff, and in the meantime it might be possible to manufacture our own wrapping papers here in Lunjore, so that the men can see for themselves what is used.’

  ‘That would be impossible,’ said Colonel Gardener-Smith shortly.

  ‘Nothing is impossible now,’ said Alex slowly. ‘Not even a mutiny of the Bengal Army.’

  Colonel Gardener-Smith stood up abruptly and pushed his chair back with unnecessary violence. ‘That is a point upon which we are unlikely to agree. If that is all you wished to see me about, I must ask you to excuse me, as I have a great many calls upon my time. I will bear in mind what you have said, and write at once to inquire into the composition of the lubrication which is being used. But you may be quite confident - as I am - that your fears will be proved groundless.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Alex in a colourless voice, and went out into the bright blaze of the mid-morning sunlight.

  He rode less with Winter after that and he did not again take out the Enfield rifle.

  Winter missed those early morning rides in his company, and did not know that the reason for their curtailment was the fact that it is difficult to arrive home in the early hours of the morning and still wake in time to ride before sunrise.

  Alex spent a great many of his nights in unexpected places; listening, watching, and occasionally - very occasionally - asking questions. It was an easier matter by night to pass unnoticed in the crowded bazaars and alleyways of the city, and he had sources of information there whose usefulness would have been severely curtailed had they been observed coming to his house. It was better that he should meet them outside the cantonments and in some other guise, and he had managed in this way to acquire a considerable quantity of curious information.

  Niaz too spent much of his time similarly occupied, but he did not frequent the city. Niaz had friends among the sepoys and was often to be found visiting the lines. Much of his information tallied with Alex’s, and none of it was in any way reassuring.

  ‘It is said,’ reported Niaz, chewing a grass-stem while Alex, lying full length in a small patch of dusty casuarina scrub, sighted carefully along the barrel of a heavy Westley Richards rifle, ‘that it is the purpose of the Government to convert all men, by force or fraud, to be Christians. This a jemadar of Colonel Gardener-Smith Sahib’s Pulton himself told me. But they say that as the feringhis are few, to force their faith upon all in Hind would be difficult; therefore they will accomplish it by fraud.’

  ‘With what purpose?’ asked Alex, screwing up his eyes against the low sunlight that glowed on the river.

  ‘So that they may use the sepoys to conquer all the world for them. When the sepoys go on ships, and to far countries, they become sick and do not fight so well; but it is not so with the sahib-log, and this, it is said, is because of the food that the sahibs eat. Therefore, if the Army were all of one caste - Christians - they too would eat the same food and be as strong, and as slaves of the sahib-log would fight their battles in a hundred countries. There is even now a tale that to this end the Company have ground up the bones of pigs and cattle and mixed that dust with the flour and with the grain, so that all who eat of it will thereby lose their caste. And being casteless will have to become Christians, and - hast thou heard this then?’

  Alex nodded. ‘I have heard. Do they in the lines believe it?’

  ‘Many believe, for they say that as the feringhis won many cities and provinces - and Oudh also - by fraud, why should they not do this? It is also well known that children purchased during years of famine have been placed in Christian schools. What do they say in the city?’

  ‘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.