by M. M. Kaye
The change in her disturbed him and he tried without success to convince himself that he had imagined it, or that after so long a parting Belinda felt shy and possibly a little awkward at seeing him again, and that once this had worn off she would be her own sweet, familiar self again.
The only gleam of consolation in that dismal afternoon was the fact that George Garforth, who had also been invited, had received even less attention from Belinda than he himself had done. On the other hand, George was obviously very much at home in Mrs Harlowe's drawing-room, and on excellent terms with her (she had addressed him on several occasions as her ‘dear boy’) while politeness had compelled Belinda to devote most of her attention to entertaining a stout and elderly civilian who rejoiced in the name of Podmore-Smyth and was a friend of her father's.
It would be interesting to know what course Ash's life might have taken if he had never met Belinda, or having met her, had avoided provoking her into flirting with George Garforth. Only one of the three was to avoid suffering from the fact that the threads of their separate lives had become entangled, and now both George and Belinda were to play a part – though admittedly a very small one – in setting in train something that was to make all the difference to Ash's future, since both were responsible for the state of mind in which he had returned from Peshawar, and it was the thought of them that had later driven him out to walk in the moonlight.
He had gone to bed early, and when at last he fell asleep it was only to dream the same dream that had haunted his sleep during his first week in Mardan. Once again he found himself riding for his life – and Belinda's – across a stony plain between low, barren hills, while behind him the thud of pursuing hoof-beats grew louder and nearer until he awoke to find that the sound was no more than the hammering of his own heart…
The night was fresh and cool, but his body was wet with sweat, and he threw off his blanket and lay still, waiting for his racing heart-beats to slow down to their proper pace, and still subconsciously listening for sounds of pursuit. Beyond the open window the fort lay bathed in moonlight, but even the pariah dogs and jackals were silent, and except for the sentries the whole cantonment seemed asleep. Ash got up and went out onto the verandah and presently, seized by a sudden spasm of restlessness, he returned to don a dressing gown and a pair of chupplis – the heavy leather sandals that are the common footwear of the Border – and went out to walk off his disquiet in the night air. The sentry recognized him and let him pass with a murmured word in place of the conventional challenge, and he turned towards the parade ground and the open country that stretched away beyond it to meet the hills, his shadow dark before him on the dusty road.
There were a number of piquets encircling Mardan to give warning in case of an attack, but knowing the precise location of each one, Ash found little difficulty in avoiding them, and soon he had left the cantonment behind him and was striding out towards the hills. The plain was seamed with gullies and dotted with camel-thorn, boulders and sudden outcrops of rock, and the iron studs on the soles of his chupplis clicked on the stony ground and made a sound that was magnified out of all proportion by the silence. The noise disturbed his train of thought and became an active irritation, but eventually he came on a goat track where the dust lay inches deep, and after that he moved without sound.
The track wandered out across the plain in the aimless manner of goat tracks, and he kept to it for the best part of a mile, before turning aside to sit above it on the crest of a small hillock where a flat-topped rock, shaded by pampas grass and a pile of boulders, offered an inviting seat. The hillock was barely more than a mound, but seated on the rock with his back against a boulder, Ash looked out across the moon-washed levels and had the illusion that he was sitting high above the plain – as high and secluded as in the Queen's balcony on the Peacock Tower.
There had been a light fall of rain on the previous day, and in the clean, cold air even the peaks of the far mountains seemed very near: a day's march at most – or an hour's. Looking at them, Ash stopped thinking of Belinda and George and thought instead of other things: of another moonlight night, long ago, when he had made his way across just such a plain as this one towards a grove of chenar trees by the Gulkote road. He wondered what had become of Hira Lal. He would like to meet Hira Lal again, and repay a part of the debt he owed him for the horse and the money. One of these days he must take leave and… His thoughts came suddenly back from the past and his eyes narrowed and became intent.
Something was moving out on the plain and it could not be cattle, for there was no village near enough. Presumably, some kind of deer; chinkara perhaps? It was difficult to tell, for moonlight played tricks with one's eyesight. But as they were moving towards him and there was no wind to carry his scent to them, he would know soon enough. He had only to remain still and they would pass very close, for his clothing was the same colour as the rock, and sitting motionless in the shadows he would be almost invisible even to the keen eyes of a wild creature.
His interest was at first no more than idle. But all at once it ceased to be so, for the moonlight glinted on something that was not horns, but metal. He had been watching men, not wild game: armed men who carried muskets.
As they came nearer Ash could see that there were only three of them, and the sudden tension of his nerves relaxed. He had imagined for a moment that they might be a party of raiders from across the Border, swooping down to attack some sleeping village and carry off cattle and women. But three men could not do much harm and possibly they were only Powindahs – wandering, gipsy-like folk who live in tents and are always on the move. He did not think this very likely, for now that the days were pleasantly cool again, few men would choose to travel on foot by night. But whoever they were he preferred not to meet them, as their reasons for being abroad at such an hour were almost certainly discreditable, and cattle-thieves and outlaws were apt to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. He therefore stayed very still and was grateful for the lengthening shadows, and for the fact that the moon was behind him and shining straight into the eyes of the advancing men.
Secure in the knowledge that if he did not move they were unlikely to see him, he was able to relax and watch them approach with curiosity and a touch of impatience. He was beginning to feel chilly and he wished that the strangers would quicken their pace, for until they had passed and were well out of range, he himself would not be able to leave. Ash yawned – and a split second later was tense and listening.
The sound he had heard was a very small one, but it had not been made by the men who were moving towards him. It had come from much nearer and from somewhere behind him: at a guess, from not more than twenty or thirty yards away – though in that windless silence any sound would carry a considerable distance. This one had been no more than the rattle of a displaced pebble; but except for the mound on which he sat the plain for several hundred yards in every direction was as flat as a board, and no pebble could have dislodged itself, or struck against another with that degree of force, without assistance. He held his breath to listen and heard another sound that was as easy to recognize as the first had been: the click of an iron-studded chuppli striking against a stone. There was at least one other man approaching the mound, but from a different direction.
Several separate possibilities flashed through Ash's mind, all of them unpleasant. Blood-feuds bedevilled the Border country, and the man or men behind him might be laying a trap for those ahead. Or was he himself the quarry and had he perhaps been seen and followed by someone who had cause to hate the Guides? It had been a mistake to come out unarmed. But it was too late to regret that now, for once again metal clicked on stone and a pebble rattled, and Ash turned his head cautiously in the direction of the sound and waited with every nerve and muscle in his body tensed and ready.
There was a rustle close by as someone brushed against a thorn bush below the mound, and a moment later a lone man hurried past and went on without turning. He had gone too quickly for Ash to gain
more than a fleeting impression of a tall figure, muffled in a coarse woollen blanket and further protected from the night air by a length of cloth wound about his head and neck. Once past he was only a hurrying shape in the moonlight, and if he were armed it was certainly not with a musket, though the blanket probably concealed a Pathan knife. It was also clear that he had neither seen Ash nor suspected his presence. Yet there had been an indefinable suggestion of furtiveness about him – in the hunch of his shoulders and the way his head turned sharply from left to right, giving an impression of nervous haste and the fear of being followed.
The four men met some fifty yards from the mound and stood talking together for several minutes. Presently they squatted down on their hunkers to continue the conversation in more comfort, and Ash saw the flash of flint on tinder as a hookah was lit and passed round. They were too far away for him to be able to catch more than a faint murmur of voices and an occasional augh, yet he knew that if he attempted to leave they would see him, and he did not think they would take at all kindly to the idea that they had been spied upon. The very fact that they had chosen to meet at such an hour and in such a place was a clear indication that their business was not one they wished to advertise, and in the circumstances it seemed safer to stay where he was.
He had stayed there for the better part of an hour, becoming colder and crosser with every passing minute, and cursing himself for being such a fool as to indulge in nocturnal rambles. But at last the long wait was over and the four rose to their feet and went their separate ways: three of them heading back towards the hills while the fourth man returned the way he had come, passing again within a few feet of the mound. This time the moon was full on his face instead of behind him, but he had wrapped the loose end of his headcloth about his mouth and chin so that only a hawk-like nose and a pair of deep-set eyes were visible. Yet despite this, something about him struck Ash as familiar. The man was someone he knew: he was quite certain of that, though he did not know why he should be; but before he had time to think it out the man had passed him and gone.
Ash waited for a moment or two before turning to peer cautiously around the boulders and watch the tall figure hurrying away in the direction of Mardan, and only when he could see it no longer did he get to his feet, cramped and cold and with all thoughts of Belinda driven out of his head, and set out on the long walk homeward to the fort.
Looking back on it next morning in the brilliant light of a blue and gold autumn day, the incident lost the sinister overtones that moonlight had lent it, and appeared singularly innocuous. The four men had probably only met to discuss some urgent matter of purely tribal interest, and if they preferred to do so by night that was their affair. Ash put the whole thing out of his mind, and would probably never have thought of it again but for a chance encounter in the dusk some six days later…
There had been no polo on that particular evening, so he had taken a gun and gone after partridge in the scrub-land along the river, and returning shortly after sunset he met a man on the cantonment road by the cavalry lines: a sowar of his own squadron. The light was fading fast and it was only when they were almost abreast that Ash recognized him. Returning the man's salute, he walked on, and then stopped and turned, checked by a sudden memory. It was partly the man's gait – he had a trick of hitching one shoulder very slightly to match his stride. But there was something else: an old scar that divided his right eyebrow into two and that Ash had seen, without realizing it, on the upper part of a face glimpsed briefly in bright moonlight.
‘Dilasah Khan.’
‘Sahib?’ The man turned and came back. He was an Afridi-Pathan, and his tribe was one of many who in theory owe allegiance to the Amir of Afghanistan, but in practice acknowledge no law save their own. Recalling this, it occurred to Ash that the men Dilasah Khan had gone out to meet were almost certainly kinsmen bringing him news from his village, and that in all probability it concerned some blood-feud with a neighbouring tribe, one or more of whose members might be serving with him in the Guides.
British territory was held to be neutral ground and no blood-feud might be carried into it. But one step beyond the Border things were different, and Dilasah's fellow tribesmen might not wish to be tracked there. In any case, he had not been breaking the law, so it was hardly fair, thought Ash, to catechize him about something that he obviously wished to keep private. As he himself had suffered from similar interference in his time, and resented it, he did not say what he had meant to; which was, perhaps, a mistake, for if Dilasah had taken fright he might have changed his mind and his plans, and thereby saved, amongst other things, his own life. Though as his creed taught him that his fate was tied about his neck and could not be avoided, he would presumably have refused to believe that any action of his own, or anyone else's, could have altered it.
In the event, Ash said nothing of having seen him out on the plain by night, and spoke instead of some trivial matter concerned with the riding school, before sending the man on his way. But the incident, now that it had been recalled, refused to be dismissed from his mind, and for some unknown reason it nagged at him with the persistence of a fly that keeps settling on the face of a drowsing man. Because of this he paid more attention to Sowar Dilasah Khan than he would otherwise have done, and decided that he did not like him. The man was a good soldier and a more than adequate horseman, and there was no fault to be found with him on that level. But there was something about him that Ash could only define as ‘shifty’. Something in his manner which was tinged with obsequiousness (a most uncharacteristic quality in a tribesman) and in the way his eyes slid away, avoiding a direct gaze.
‘I don't trust that fellow Dilasah,’ confessed Ash, discussing the troop with his Squadron Commander. ‘I've seen one or two horses with that sort of look in their eyes, and I wouldn't have one if it was being given away with a pound of tea.’
‘Dilasah? Oh, nonsense,’ said the Squadron Commander. ‘Why, what's he been up to?’
‘Nothing. It's just that… I don't know. He gives me an uncomfortable feeling between my shoulder blades, that's all. I saw him out on the plain one night –’
Ash described the incident and the Squadron Commander laughed and dismissed it with a shrug of the shoulders and an interpretation that was similar to Ash's original one: ‘Ten to one there's been a row between his lot and the next-door village, and they were merely warning him to watch out for himself next time he goes on leave, because his cousin Habib has just shot their headman's son, Ali, and Ali's relations will be gunning for all or any of Habib's. Bet you it's that.’
‘I thought so too at first, but it can't have been, because he went out to meet them. That means that it was all arranged beforehand. The meeting, I mean.’
‘Well, why not? They'd probably sent a message to say that they had news for him. If it was about a killing, they wouldn't have risked saying more than that.’
‘I expect you're right. All the same, I've a feeling we ought to watch that fellow.’
‘You do that,’ agreed the Squadron Commander cordially. His tone conveyed a distinct suggestion of ‘run away and play’ and Ash flushed and dropped the subject. But he did not forget it and he was sufficiently interested to ask Ala Yar to make a few inquiries into the history and background of Sowar Dilasah Khan.
‘There are five others of his clan in the rissala (cavalry),’ reported Ala Yar. ‘All proud, fierce men – Afridis who have joined the Guides for izzat (honour) and because they love a fight. And also perhaps because their clan is rent by many blood-feuds, and here they cannot be ambushed and shot down without warning. There are two of them in your own troop: Malik Shah and Lal Mast.’
‘I know that. And they are both good men – the best. I have been out on shikar with Malik half a dozen times, and as for Lal Mast -’
Ala Yar held up a hand: ‘Hear me out. I had not finished. Their clan is a small one and so they are all in some way tied by blood – third, fourth and it may be fifteenth cousins a dozen times rem
oved. Yet it is a fact that not one of them has any liking for their kinsman, Dilasah. They say he is a cheat and sly; and like yourself, they distrust him.’
‘Why? In what way?’
‘Oh, for a dozen small things done in childhood. You know how it is with children: one of their number lies or cheats or runs tale-bearing to those in authority, and for this his playmates hold him in dislike. Even when they grow up and become men, the dislike remains. The others were not pleased when he joined the Guides, and they say that they do not understand why he did so, for it was unlike him. But he came with a good horse and rode it well, and he is also a fine marksman; he won his place fairly in competition with others, and as his officers speak well of him his kinsmen can have no complaint and from pride in their clan they will stand by him. Nevertheless they still dislike him, for he has at one time or another done each of them an ill turn – boy's tricks only; but men, as I have said, do not forget. Ask Malik or Lal Mast, next time you go out shooting with them.’
Ash had done so. But he had learned no more than Ala Yar had told him.
‘Dilasah? He is a serpent,’ said Malik Shah. ‘His blood runs slow and his tongue drips poison. When we were boys –’ He told a long tale of a childhood escapade that had ended in punishment and tears for all save Dilasah, who had instigated the whole affair and then betrayed his playfellows to authority and avoided the consequences by some spirited lying. It was plain that the episode still rankled, yet Malik admitted that a year in the Regiment had improved Dilasah out of all knowledge: ‘He has made a good soldier, and when we of the Guides are again called upon to fight battles, he may even bring credit upon us, and on his clan also. Still, it is strange that he should have wished to serve under the Sirkar and submit himself to discipline, for I would have said that he was the last man to choose this way of life. Yet – who knows? – he may have done some killing that has made life in our hills too dangerous for him, and so has sought safety here for a while. He would not be the only one to do so!’