by M. M. Kaye
That afternoon Zarin had gone to the Commandant and asked for special leave so that he might go in search of Pelham-Sahib. But this had been refused, and a few hours later, after a long talk with Mahdoo and a shorter and slightly acrimonious one with Zarin, Ala Yar had gone instead.
‘I am the Sahib's servant, and he has not yet dismissed me from his service,’ said Ala Yar. ‘There is also the promise that I made to Anderson-Sahib that I would see to it that the boy came to no harm, and as you cannot go after him, I must do so. That is all.’
‘I would go if I could,’ growled Zarin. ‘But I too am a servant. I serve the Sirkar and I cannot do as I please.’
‘I know. Therefore I go in your stead.’
‘You are an old fool,’ said Zarin angrily.
‘Maybe,’ agreed Ala Yar without rancour.
He left Mardan an hour before sunset, and Mahdoo accompanied him for a mile along the track that leads towards Afghanistan and stood to watch him grow smaller and smaller against the vast, desolate background of the plain and the Border hills, until at last the sun went down and the dusty purple twilight hid him from sight.
Book Three
World out of Time
13
‘There are men out there. Beyond the nullah, to the left,’ said one of the sentries, peering out at the moonlit plain. ‘Look – they are moving this way.’
His companion turned to stare in the direction of the pointing finger, and after a moment or two laughed and shook his head. ‘Gazelle. This drought has made the chinkara so bold that they do not fear to approach within a stone's throw. But if those clouds yonder do not fail us, there should soon be grass in plenty.’
The summer of 1874 had been a particularly trying one. The monsoon had been late and scanty and the plains around Mardan were burned to a dry golden-brown in which no trace of green showed. Dust-devils danced all day among the mirages and the parched thorn bushes, and the rivers ran low and sluggishly between banks of blinding white sand.
There was no grass on the hills either, and most of the game had moved up the far valleys in search of food. Only a few wild pig and chinkara had remained, and these plundered the fields of the villagers by night, and would occasionally even venture into the cantonment to eat the shrubs in Hodson's garden, or nibble the leaves of the mulberry tree that marked the place where Colonel Spottiswood had killed himself over seventeen years ago. The sentries had become so accustomed to the sight of them that a dark shape skirting the parade ground or moving among the shadows no longer brought a challenge followed by the crack of a carbine; and in any case, the section of Frontier adjacent to Mardan had been quiet for so long that men were becoming used to peace.
There had been no ‘Border incidents’ for over five years, and the Guides had had no active soldiering to occupy them. They had provided an escort under Jemadar Siffat Khan to accompany a new Envoy on a mission to Kashgar, and a year later two of the escort had carried the completed treaty from Kashgar to Calcutta in sixty days. A sepoy of the Guides Infantry had been detailed to accompany a messenger across the Oxus and from there, by way of Badakshan and Kabul, to India, and a sowar of the Cavalry, who had been sent to Persia with a British officer bound on a special mission, had been killed on the road to Teheran while defending the baggage from a gang of robbers. The Corps itself had taken part in a year-long ‘camp of exercise’ at Hasan Abdal, from where it had returned to Mardan in February of that year, to occupy itself with the normal routine of cantonment life, and pray throughout that hot weather for rain to temper the remorseless heat.
September had been as scorching as July, but now October was almost out, and the mercury in the thermometer that hung in the mess verandah retreated daily. Men went abroad again at midday, and the wind that blew off the mountains at sunset carried a refreshing edge of coolness. But apart from a few brief and isolated showers there had been no sign of the autumn rains – until tonight, when for the first time in many months there were clouds in the sky…
‘This time – Shukr Allah* – they will not fail us,’ said the sentry devoutly. ‘The wind is behind them and I can smell rain.’
‘I too,’ said his companion. The two men sniffed appreciatively, and as a sudden gust whirled up the dust and obscured any further movement on the plain, they turned together and continued on their rounds.
The wind had been blowing only fitfully since moonrise, but now it steadied and blew strongly, driving the banked clouds before it until presently they reached the moon and blotted it out. A quarter of an hour later the first swollen drops of rain splashed down out of the darkness: forerunners of a lashing torrent that within seconds turned the dust of the long, scorching summer into a sea of mud, and transformed every dry nullah and ditch into a fully fledged river.
Under cover of darkness and that raging bedlam of noise and water, the handful of men that one of the sentries had mistaken for chinkara passed the outposts unseen. But head-down against the wind-driven rain, they missed their way and were challenged by the guard on the gate of the fort.
It had been no part of their plan to be dragged before Authority that night. They had hoped to reach the cavalry lines without being detected, and to lie up there until morning; but as it was, the havildar in charge of the guard had sent for the Indian officer on duty, who in turn sent for the Duty Officer; and presently the Adjutant was fetched from the mess where he had been playing whist, and the Second-in-Command, who had retired early, aroused from his bed.
The Commandant had also retired early, but not to sleep. He had been writing his weekly letters home when he was interrupted by the entrance of two of his officers, accompanied by as sorry an object as had ever been seen in that room. A gaunt, bearded tribesman with a bandaged head, from whose tattered blanket, worn cloak-wise in the manner of the Frontier, a dozen little rivulets poured onto the Commandant's cherished Shiraz carpet. The bandage too leaked a steady red-stained trickle down one hollow and unshaven cheek, and the blanket that clung wetly to the man's scare-crow body failed to conceal that he held something long and bulky under its sodden folds. He let his arms drop, and the carbines that he had been carrying slid down and fell with a clatter into the circle of light shed by the oil lamp on the writing table.
‘There they are, sir,’ said Ash. ‘I'm sorry… we took so long… about it, but… it wasn't as easy as… we'd thought.’
The Commandant stared at him and did not speak. He found it difficult to believe that this was the boy who had stormed into his office nearly two years ago. This was a man. A tall one, for he had come late to his full height, and lean with the leanness of hard muscle and harder living. His eyes were sunk deep in his head, and he was ragged, unkempt and wounded, and dazed with fatigue. But he held himself erect and forced his tongue to the English that it had not spoken for so long:
‘I must… apologize, sir,’ said Ash haltingly, the words blurred by exhaustion, ‘for… letting you see us like – like this. We didn't mean… We meant to spend the night with Zarin and – make ourselves presentable, and in the morning… But the storm –’ His voice failed and he made a vague and entirely oriental gesture with one hand.
The Commandant turned to the Adjutant and said curtly: ‘Are the others out there?’
‘Yes, sir. All except Malik Shah.’
‘He's dead,’ said Ash tiredly.
‘And Dilasah Khan?’
‘He too. We got back most of the ammunition. He hadn't used much of it. Lal Mast has it…’ Ash stared down at the carbines for a long moment, and said with sudden bitterness: ‘I hope they're worth it. They cost three lives. That is a high price to pay for anything.’
‘For honour?’ suggested the Commandant in the same curt voice.
‘Oh – honour!’ said Ash; and laughed mirthlessly. ‘Malik and Ala Yar… Ala Yar… His voice broke and his eyes were suddenly full of tears. He said harshly: ‘May I go now, sir?’ And almost as he spoke he fell forward, as a tree falls, and lay sprawled and unconscious across the c
avalry carbines that had been stolen two years ago and recovered at the cost of three lives. One of them Ala Yar's…
‘He'll have to be cashiered, of course,’ said the Second-in-Command.
His tone made the remark less an assertion than a query, and his Commanding Officer, who had been drawing complicated patterns on the blotting paper, looked up sharply.
‘Well, I mean – it seems a pity,’ said the Major defensively. ‘After all, when you come to think of it, it was a damned fine show. I've been talking to Lal Mast and the others and they –’
‘So, oddly enough, have I,’ interrupted the Commandant with some asperity. ‘And if you intend to play Devil's Advocate, you're wasting your time. I don't need one.’
Two days had passed since Ash and his four companions had stumbled into Mardan, but the rain was still falling and the little fort was loud with the sound of water drumming upon the flat roofs, cascading from pipes and gutters, and splashing into the inch-deep lake that had replaced the dusty paths and parched lawns of the previous week. Malik Shah's family were to be awarded a pension, and his four fellow-tribesmen had been congratulated and reinstated, their uniforms returned and two years' back-pay handed over to them. But Lieutenant Pelham-Martyn, who faced a charge of Absent Without Leave for the space of twenty-three months and two days, was technically under close arrest – though in actual fact confined to bed in the quarters of the Medical Officer, Ambrose Kelly, with a high fever due to a head wound that had become septic. His fate and his future were still under discussion.
‘You mean you agree with me?’ demanded the Major, startled.
‘Of course I do. Why else should I have bothered to go over to Peshawar yesterday? You don't suppose I spent over an hour jawing with the Commissioner, and two more arguing with an assortment of brass-hats, just for the fun of it, do you? Ashton's an insurbordinate young bastard, but he's too valuable to throw away. Look – what's the most useful thing to any military commander who is planning a campaign or trying to keep order in a country like this? Information! Early and accurate information is worth more than all the guns and ammunition one could ask for, and that's why I'm going to fight like a steer to keep that young idiot. I don't imagine any other Corps could get away with it; but then we're not like any other Corps. We've always been pretty unorthodox, and if one of our officers can spend a couple of years on the other side of the Border without being spotted as an Englishman or shot as a spy, he's too bloody useful to lose and that's all there is to it. Though mark you, what he really deserves is a Court Martial. And they'd cashier him.’
‘But what the hell are we going to do with him?’ demanded the Major. ‘We can't just let him stay on here as though nothing had happened, can we?’
‘No, of course not. The sooner he leaves Mardan the better. I propose to see if I can't get him transferred to another unit for a couple of years. Preferably a British one, where he can cool his heels and mix with his own people for a change. He needs to get right away from his friends and the Frontier for a while; and it won't do him any harm to go somewhere down south.’
‘He'll probably get into even more trouble there,’ observed the Major pessimistically. ‘After all, he was brought up as a Hindu, wasn't he?’
‘What of it? The point is, he can't stay here just now. It would have a bad effect on discipline.’
Which is why Ashton Pelham-Martyn came to be stationed in Rawalpindi that winter.
If his Commanding Officer had had his way, Ash would have been sent somewhere a good deal further off. For although Rawalpindi is hardly true Frontier country (which in the north-west is held to start at Hasan Abdal, once a posting-stage of the Mogul Emperors on their journeys to Kashmir) it lies only one hundred and thirteen miles to the south-east of Mardan. But as the main object of those in authority had been to remove the offender from his regiment as soon as possible, and as the ‘Pindi Brigade had been able to provide an immediate vacancy (Ash would have been surprised to learn how many strings had been pulled to engineer that unorthodox posting), it would have to do for the present. Meanwhile the Commandant of the Guides had been promised that at the first opportunity Mr Pelham-Martyn would be moved further down south, and that on no account whatever would he be permitted to put so much as a foot inside the North-West Frontier Province, or go back across the Indus.
In the unlikely event of there being anyone there who could recall having seen him when he stopped at the 'Pindi dâk-bungalow on his way from Bombay to Mardan, over three years ago, they would certainly not have known him now, for he had changed beyond recognition – and not only outwardly. As a child in the Gulkote days he would, by European standards, have been considered old for his age; the city and the Hawa Mahal made few concessions to youth, and he had made an early acquaintance with the facts of life and death and evil. Yet later on, as a boy among boys of his own blood, he had seemed curiously young, for he had retained a child's way of looking at a problem and seeing it in the simplest possible terms, without realizing – or perhaps merely ignoring – the fact that every question is likely to have more than two sides to it.
Arriving back in Rawalpindi that winter he was still only twenty-two. But he had grown up at last – though he was always to retain a trace of the child and the boy and the young man he had once been, and despite the strictures of Koda Dad, to continue to see things as ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’. But he had learned many things in the land beyond the Border, not least among them to ride his temper on a tight rein, to think more carefully before he spoke, to curb his impatience and (surprisingly enough) to laugh.
Superficially, the change in him was more noticeable. For though he had removed both beard and moustache, the boyish look had gone for ever and his face bore deep, unyouthful lines that had been etched there by hunger and grief and hard living. It also bore a long, angry-looking scar that ran up into his hair above his left temple, pulling up one eyebrow and giving him a quizzical look which oddly enough was far from unattractive, and looking at him now one would have said he was a remarkably handsome man – and also, in some indefinable way, a dangerous one: someone to be reckoned with…
Accompanied by Gul Baz and Mahdoo, who was very shrivelled now and beginning to feel his years, Ash arrived in Rawalpindi to find that he had been allotted a half share in part of a small, dilapidated bungalow largely given over to offices and the storing of files. The quarters were cramped and dark, but compared with the places he had slept in during the past two years they seemed palatial; and having lived cheek-by-jowl with his fellow men for months on end, he had no objection at all to sharing them. The cantonment suffered from a chronic shortage of accommodation, and he was, in fact, lucky not to be sharing a tent. And even luckier, as it turned out, in his stable-companion; though a gangling young ensign almost four years his junior, newly arrived from Home and addicted to writing bad verse, was probably the last person whom Ash himself would have selected for a roommate. Yet surprisingly, it proved to be a great success. The two had taken to each other from the outset and were soon to find that they had a great deal in common.
Ensign Walter Richard Pollock Hamilton of the 70th Foot was at that time only a year younger than Ash had been when he landed at Bombay. And like Ash, he saw India as a wonderful and mysterious country, full of endless possibilities for excitement and adventure. He was a pleasant youth, good-tempered, high-spirited and intensely romantic – and he too had fallen desperately in love with a yellow-haired chit of sixteen during the voyage from England. The girl had had no objection to flirting with the tall handsome boy, but his suit had been rejected out of hand on the score of his youth, and two days out of Bombay she had become engaged to an elderly gentleman who must have been at least twice her age: ‘Thirty, if he was a day,’ declared Walter disgustedly. ‘And a civilian too. Some dreary fellow in the Political Department. Would you believe it, now?’
‘Only too easily,’ said Ash. ‘Belinda, let me tell you –’
But that story, as he told it now, was no
longer a tragic one, and any bitterness that remained was solely on George Garforth's account. For this was something else that had altered during the past two years; and looking back on his abortive romance, Ash could not only recognize it for the foolish and ephemeral thing it had been, but also see the comic side of it. Retold to Walter, the chronicle of his misfortune lost all trace of tragedy, and eventually became so hilarious that the ghost of Belinda was exorcized for ever, swept away on a gale of laughter into the limbo that is reserved for forgotten love-affairs. Walter's flirtatious sixteen-year-old had followed her there, and he celebrated the fact by writing a ribald poem entitled ‘Ode to Forsaken Subalterns’, that would have surprised and pained his fond relatives – who were used to more elevated out-pourings from ‘dear Wally’.
Wally rather fancied himself as a writer of verse. It was the only thing in which his sense of humour failed him, and his letters home were apt to contain deplorably amateur poems that were passed round the family circle and greatly admired by doting aunts and similar biased and unqualified critics, who considered them to be quite as good as ‘dear Mr Tennyson's’. And wrote to say so. The ‘Ode’, however, was in a very different style from any of his previous effusions, and Ash translated it into Urdu and had it set to music by a Kashmiri singer of his acquaintance. It subsequently achieved quite a success in the ‘Pindi bazaar, and versions of it (the more colourful ones) were sung for many years throughout the Punjab.
Wally himself was no mean singer, though the songs he sang were less secular. He had been a member of his school choir for several years, and nowadays, when he felt the urge to sing (which was often, for he sang whenever he was happy or exhilarated), he would launch into one of the more militant hymns of his youth: ‘Fight the good fight’, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers!’, ‘Forward be our watchword!’ or ‘For all the Saints’ – the last being a special favourite. There was no irreverence in this: Wally approved the sentiments and genuinely liked the familiar melodies (he said they were ‘corking tunes’) and could see no reason why hymns should only be sung in church; particularly the ones that conjured up for him visions of banners and trumpets and legions of armed men charging into battle to smite the troops of Midian. His fondness for these stirring anthems meant that the day in the bungalow invariably began with the sound of a baritone voice, accompanied by much splashing of bath water, announcing melodiously that ‘Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away’, or, alternatively, demanding ‘Oh, let thy soldiers, faithful true and bold, fight as the Saints who nobly fought of old, and win with them the Victor's crown of gold – Alle – luia! Al – le – lu – ia!’ Similar hymns frequently enlivened the evening rides, and once Wally had raced down the polo ground and scored the winning goal in the last two seconds of a hard-fought match, chanting ‘Forward into battle see our banners go!’