by M. M. Kaye
Niaz waited until they were within range, and fired; aiming deliberately for the leading horse in order to create the maximum confusion. He saw the horse rear and fall, and the dust rose in a choking cloud as the men drew rein and came to a sudden stop. He re-loaded swiftly and fired into the dusty smother; heard a yell and the scream of a wounded horse and saw the riders scatter to either side of the road.
Knowing that they were unlikely to come any further for several minutes, he fetched the muskets belonging to the police guard that he had piled against the wall out of their reach. With several muskets and Alex’s rifle, he should be able to save time on loading. He looked at the priming of one and noted with irritation that its owner had permitted the weapon to reach an un-soldierly state of dirt. ‘Police!’ said Niaz, and spat scornfully to show his disgust.
He re-loaded the rifle again and watched with interest, reserving his fire, while the skirmishers at the road’s edge conferred together. Presently one of them cupped his hands about his mouth and, evidently under the impression that it was the bridge guard and the toll-keeper who were firing upon them, bellowed that they were friends and urged the guard to join them - the feringhis being dead and all Lunjore in the hands of its rightful owners.
The man moved incautiously out into the road and Niaz shot him and watched his riderless horse bolt down the road and gallop wildly past the toll-house. There was a crash and a splash as the frenzied animal went wide of the bridge and plunged headlong into the deep water, and Niaz heard shrill feminine screams from the three small huts twenty yards behind the toll-house where the toll-keeper’s family lived. A fusillade of shots spattered up the dust and chipped flakes of stone from the walls, and he saw the remaining horsemen hurriedly dismount and disappear into the jungle.
‘Now they will come up under cover on either side of the road,’ thought Niaz, and remembered with dread that Alex, working alone on the empty bridge, would provide an admirable target. He fired again at random into the jungle just ahead of where the men had entered it, discharging each of the muskets in turn and re-loading with feverish haste.
A woman ran out across the sun-scorched ground opposite the window, and a musket-ball fired from the jungle on the far side of the road whipped past her and smacked against the corner of the toll-house, sending a shower of chips flying. She shrieked and ran back again and Niaz grinned and fired in the direction from which the shot had come. Three more riderless horses galloped past with trailing reins and he heard their hooves thunder on the bridge and hoped that they had not ridden Alex into the water.
There was a back door to the toll-house and a woman beat upon it and screeched to her husband to come out and take refuge in the jungle for they were being attacked by dacoits, but the remainder of the police guard had presumably either run away or joined the sepoys. There were men now in the jungle opposite, and a bullet entered the open door and ricochetted round the small room.
Niaz turned from the narrow, iron-barred window in the end wall, and running to the door fired into the thick scrub on the opposite side of the road. As he did so something struck his chest and he fell sideways, the rifle jerking from his hand to slide along the floor and come to rest against the far wall.
After a moment he came dizzily to his knees and crawled towards the rifle, but he could not reach it. He groped instead for his revolver and dragging it painfully from its holster, raised himself a little and fired at a face that peered through the high grass at the road’s edge, and saw a man lurch forward and fall on his face in the dust. And then he heard the sound of running feet, a crash of shots, and Alex had leapt the stone step of the verandah, stumbled over him and turning, had fired his revolver at a man on horseback who rode shouting for the bridge.
The shouting voice stopped as though cut off with a knife and there was the sound of a fall, a clatter of hooves and a brief moment of silence. And then the crashing blast of an explosion; and another and another, joining together in a single shuddering roar of sound, and the glaring day was dark with flying splinters of wood and choked with the scent of cordite and the reek of black powder. Then silence slammed down like an iron shutter and the river gurgled no longer, but ran quiet and unimpeded from bank to bank.
Alex spoke breathlessly into that silence: ‘Quickly, before they recover - out by the back!’ He had barred the door behind him and was across the room, pulling at the heavy bolts that closed the back door. He drew it open a crack and said: ‘There is no one there - quick!’
‘I cannot,’ said Niaz.
Alex whipped round, seeing for the first time that Niaz had not been merely kneeling to fire, but was wounded, and he crossed the floor in a single bound. He knelt swiftly and thrust an arm under him, lifting him: ‘Hold about my neck and I can carry thee.’
‘No,’ said Niaz urgently. ‘This is the end for me. Go - and go swiftly while there is yet time - mera kham h$oBgya (my work is finished).’
Alex looked down at the greying face against his arm and the bright, swiftly spreading stain that soaked the dusty tunic, and pulling back the reddened cloth he saw that there was nothing that he or anyone could do, and a desperation and a wrenching rage beyond anything he had felt that day tore at him with the savagery of a taloned paw. He heard dimly and as though through a roaring fog, the crack of rifle-fire, but he did not move.
Niaz said: ‘Thou hast seen how it is with me … go now. I can still … fire a gun … it will hold them … for a little. Get to the jungle … there be the memsahibs to be … thought of—’
Winter - Lottie - Lou Cottar … If it had not been for them he, Alex, would have reached the river an hour or more ago. This would never have happened. How long would they live if he died? He had left Mrs Holly to die alone and slowly. He had had to - because of those three women. And because of the bridge. But the bridge had gone. He had stopped at least one road into Oudh, and perhaps by doing so had bought, at the price of his friend’s life, a little more time. Only a very little more, for there were so many other roads. Winter had courage, and so had Lou Cottar. And there was ammunition and a certain amount of food at the Hirren Minar.
Once again, and for a brief moment, he saw Winter’s face quite clearly, against the rough stone walls of the shadowed room; as clearly as he had seen it in Alice Batterslea’s garden. But it did not mean anything to him any more. She would have to take her chance. He would not leave Niaz to die alone as he had left Mrs Holly.
Alex drew his arm away very gently, laying Niaz back, and getting to his feet he closed and bolted the back door and dropped the shutters across the two windows, fitting the iron bars that held them into the sockets. He took up the guns one by one and loaded them methodically. There was an earthenware jar of water in the room and he fetched a brass lotah, stepping over the bodies of the three bound men who lay in a terrified huddle on the floor at the far end of the room, and filling it, brought it to Niaz.
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 Moodk
ee, 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.’