Shadow of the Moon

by M. M. Kaye

  ‘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 thing
s. 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.

  She did not know how long she lay there, mindless and still, with closed eyes, but presently the slow thought drifted through her brain that it would be easy - easy and pleasant - to slide into the main stream and let the current carry her out and down into the cool darkness of the deep water. There was nothing to live for and she was very tired …

  But even as she thought it, the voice of the water whispering against her ears seemed to change into another voice: a laboured, whispering voice that had spoken to her that morning - ‘… ’er ma was good to you. You owe ‘er something. Get along now, dearie …’

  Dear Mrs Holly! Was she dead? or was she still alive and alone and frightened? ‘She was braver than I am,’ thought Winter. ‘Braver than all of us. I couldn’t have done that. I must stay alive as long as I can because of Lottie - and Mrs Holly. Because Lottie is going to need help. There is nothing else to stay alive for—’

  She turned her head in the shallows and opened her eyes. The sky and the river were no longer gold but rose-pink, and the leaves and flowers of the tree that leaned over her made a stiff, formal pattern against that wash of colour. Something moved in the pattern, a green parrot with a scarlet beak and long green and blue tail feathers … And all at once the Gulab Mahal was there before her. The enchanted garden of her childhood. The formal patterns of leaves and flowers and brightly coloured birds that moved against a sunset sky, and that had remained fixed in her memory as a bright promise through all the grey, intervening years.

  The whisper of the water was no longer Mrs Holly’s voice, but old Aziza Begum�
��s, telling her stories in the twilight: Zobeida’s, making the old promise - ‘one day we will return to the Gulab Mahal, and all will be well …’ There was something else to stay alive for after all. Somehow, some day, she would reach the Rose Palace. She had promised herself that for too long to relinquish it now.

  A new energy seemed to flow through her with the thought, and she came to her feet and wrung out her wet hair, and reaching for the bundle of clothing among the roots, washed out the torn, soiled garments in the river. They made a damp, heavy bundle when she had finished but they would dry quickly. She climbed the bank again and wrapped the makeshift sari about her once more, leaving her wet hair hanging loose.

  A peacock cried in the jungle, and the call echoed across the wide river and was answered by another on the far bank. Pea-or … Pea-or … Pea-or! The cry seemed to underline the loneliness of the silent river and the dense miles of jungle, and to wail for all those who lay dead and who had been alive when that sun rose that was setting now. A savage and unbearable pain stabbed through the numbness about Winter’s heart. ‘The air is getting to it,’ she thought, and she picked up the wet bundle and the revolver and turned from the river to make her way back to the Hirren Minar, stumbling through the tangled grass and the thickets as though she had been blind and must feel her way.

  She had stayed far longer by the river than she had meant to do, and now the sun had gone and the swift twilight was closing in. She had marked her way carefully, but in the fading light the marks were no longer visible and she was unsure of her direction. Fear replaced the pain in her breast, and she stood still, trying to remember the landmarks that she had taken note of when she had left the ruined building. Presently she began to move again, though with more care, but she had gone less than a dozen yards when she stopped again at the edge of a small clearing.

  Something was moving in the jungle ahead of her, as though some large animal was walking slowly towards her through the dry, rustling undergrowth; and remembering the tiger she froze into stillness, her hand gripping the revolver. The sound came nearer and nearer, and now she could see the grass and the bushes on the far side of the clearing sway to the movement of something or someone who was moving directly towards her. Someone - was the hunt so close?