A Good Soldier

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  “There was one only a year ago. Another young sahib, like yourself, went to Zafarala. He was well supplied with money, but brought no goods. He set about ingratiating himself with the Nawab: with what purpose was not clear; but it was generally supposed that he was preparing the way for some business venture. Of course he did not speak our language as you do. At first the Nawab took a liking to him. Then he became suspicious. Or, to speak truth, suspicions were aroused in his mind by others who resented this intruder. Rumours began to circulate and I heard them on one of my visits to Nekshahr. The Nawab took it into his head that the young English sahib was a spy: that the British Government had sent him.”

  “What happened?”

  “One day, he was suddenly no longer to be seen. Men said that he was taken to the dungeons and tortured. He may still be locked up there. But my own belief is that he was murdered. One of my regular informants in the palace told me that the sahib was thrown into the alligator tank.”

  “Where had he come from?”

  “From Calcutta. And from there I also heard a tale from a reliable source. A rich merchant sent him to spy out the market, as it were. A British merchant: a certain Mukkle-ain Sahib.”

  *

  They had arrived within a few days of the place where Ramsey would leave the river and were now on a part of it where several tributaries joined it. They passed these confluences once or twice every day.

  With the air cooled by wind and rain, soothed by the motion of the scow, Ramsey slept soundly. He woke to shouts of alarm that sounded the louder for being carried by the breeze and reflected from the surface of the water.

  He tumbled off the charpai and thrust his feet into Pathan sansals, hearing the thud of bodies colliding and the clash of staves on steel. He reached for the metal trunk in which he kept his sword and firearms.

  Sher Mahommed Khan and Karim Baksh arrived from where they slept for’ard, each holding a shotgun which lay beside him while he slept and a knife wet with blood.

  “Rasiya Bediya, Sahib.” Sher Mahommed Khan turned and ran to the stern as a man’s voice screamed for help.

  Rasiya Bediya, the river pirates of these regions, another sub-tribe of the ubiquitous clan of criminals, vagabonds and mountebanks.

  Ramsey saw the spurt of flame and heard the report of Sher Mahommed Khan’s gun. Running astern with his sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, he found one of the sailors dead at the helmsman’s feet and a dead pirate beside him.

  The boat-master was calling to him and pointing downriver. By the bright starlight and half-moon he saw their other boat swinging away from them across the current. He also saw a fleet of the unique cocoon-shaped craft of the Rasiya Bediya around it and more making towards it from the scow. He fired at the nearest and a man fell overboard. Sher Mahommed Khan had reloaded and his shot killed another of the pirates.

  Ramsey shouted to the manjhi to turn and follow the other boat, which carried most of their cargo, then hurried forward with Sher Mahommed Khan to join Karim Baksh. Knife blades flashed, staves rose and fell, men grappled, yelled, tumbled. As quickly as Karim Baksh could reload there was the report and flash of his gun. The cocoon-like craft were alongside the scow and pirates were swarming aboard. Ramsey heard the crunch of Karim Baksh’s rifle butt on skull bone.

  Two of the sailors lay in the scuppers and four or five other bodies rolled about the deck, smearing blood on the planks as the boat heeled in going about.

  A man was hauling himself over the bulwarks and Ramsey swung his sword in a whistling arc. It sliced through the pirate’s neck. A jet of blood shot up, the head bounced across the deck, the body fell back into the river.

  The pirates were abandoning the scow, vaulting over the bulwarks into their boats. The scow had completed half its turn and lay beam-on to the current, which swept its bows round fast until it was heading downstream.

  The second vessel had gone about several minutes earlier and had put some 300 yards between the scow and itself. Ramsey fetched a gun and knelt at the rail with his two ex-sepoys. Between them and their cargo boat lay Dhala Rao’s. The one on which he and his retinue were, lay hove-to. Half a dozen of the pirates’ were pulling away from it. Ramsey shouted to his helmsman to steer as close to these as he could without losing water to their own quarry. He, Sher Mahommed Khan and Karim Baksh kept up a rapid fire on the pirates. There were two men aboard each boat and with every volley they killed three. The bows of the scow crashed into two of the cocoon-craft and sunk them. The other vessel, with Dhala Rao’s goods aboard, was heading downstream about half-way between the scow and Ramsey’s cargo boat. Ramsey could see boxes and bundles being rolled and tossed over the rails of both these into the pirates’ craft. As soon as the latter were fully laden they bore away. Ramsey and his men maintained their rapid fire, volley after volley, as they closed with the nearer cargo vessel. Men toppled over the side, those in the small craft receiving the stolen cargo and those at the rails who were passing it to them. Calling loudly to each other in alarm, the Rasiya Bediya began to abandon the vessel they had boarded and make for the shore, heavy fire following them and killing or wounding many.

  By the time the scow came within range of its companion vessel the latter had gone far downstream and athwart the current, so that it had reached the shallows on the far side. Ramsey and the other two picked off some of the pirates but the majority were receding in the distance and out of gunshot. The boat was drifting uncontrolled, the helm swinging at each vagary of wind and water. They boarded it and found that the master and crew had been clubbed senseless, then bound. Two had been killed and one pirate knifed to death.

  Ramsey saw the last of the Rasiya Bediya’s strange-looking craft disappearing among the inlets and small islands on the northern shore, with thousands of rupees’ worth of merchandise with which Angus MacLean had entrusted him; with less than eleven months left in which to pay for it.

  With so much lost, would he have enough revenue from what was left to do any more than repay the debt and leave him as poor as he was now? Could he even make enough to pay off what he owed?

  Chapter Seven

  The Rasiya Bediya had robbed Ramsey’s cargo boat of half its burthen. He told himself that it was as well that the sporting rifles and guns were with him on board the scow. The pirates did not use firearms. They preferred stealth, and knives and clubs as silent weapons, but would have sold them to dacoits to turn against other travellers, British women and children perhaps. He wondered if he and Dhala Rao had fallen into a simple trap, if the Shandar had lured them into delaying their journey for the sake of letting themselves be titillated by the nach girls and indulging their retainers, if they had passed word to their kin that here was a rare chance of plunder.

  When the bound sailors had been freed and the boat eased off the mud bank onto which it had drifted, he found that Dhala Rao’s two craft had come seeking him. The bajra came alongside the scow and Dhala Rao climbed aboard.

  “Rumgee Sahib, I am eternally in your debt. Thanks to you we recovered most of what was stolen from the Bajra and much of what was taken from the other boat.”

  “It did not delay us, Ji, we fired at the pirates as we passed you in pursuit of our own boat and its cargo.”

  “How can I repay your bravery and goodness?”

  “With friendship, Dhala Rao.”

  “That you have, Sahib Bahadur, and the allegiance of my sons and my brothers and all my family.”

  “Then I am a fortunate man.”

  The rain hissed and battered on the roofing in heavy drops. The swollen river gurgled past the hull in a succession of hearty slaps against the timbers, the wind tore the tops off the waves in tatters of spindrift that stung the eyes of anyone who looked over the side and of the lookout in the bows who called back to the steersman as he conned the boat past mud banks and exposed rocks, past logjams caused by trees uprooted in monsoon gales.

  Dhala Rao returned to his own boat and Ramsey sought sleep again. Death and
strife had been the pattern of his life ever since he came to manhood. It seemed that the pattern was not going to alter with his change of career. With the boat plunging and shuddering throughout its length under the pounding of the waves, he found himself on the brink of a ferment of fear that had nothing to do with physical danger. It was instead a misgiving that pierced him with the same intensity, a jet of flame that threatened to consume the scaffolding of confidence with which he had shored up all his doubts about his fitness for the enterprise on which he had embarked. He lay in the darkness with flimsy walls and roof to protect him from the storm and felt that he was even less stoutly protected against the threats of what appeared just then to be a punitive fate whose coils he could not escape.

  What was he doing on a storm-wracked river in northern central India, half a lakh of rupees in debt? Beset by crises he had not been trained to anticipate or resolve, when he could be secure in the fellowship of... of a disgraced regiment, he reminded himself and it renewed his desperate audacity. The moment of dismay passed. There was nothing new in a life of unpredictable dangers. The difference between those in his old life and his new one was that if he did not overcome them he would become a starveling pauper. But the thought did not keep him awake any longer.

  In the next two days of stiff breeze the big scow drew well ahead of the bajra. His way had already parted from Dhala Rao’s, as he followed a branch off the Jumna towards the border of Zafarala, before he woke one morning to find both his vessels moored at the ghat of a small town where his river journey ended.

  His optimism came flowing back. Another two weeks, allowing for the weather, should see him at Nekshahr, the state capital.

  The sun was already sucking the moisture from the rain-drenched earth. The sweltering heat was all the more oppressive after weeks of sailing in a cooling breeze. Tamarisks, laden with white and pink flowers, lined the banks between which the silted ochreous river rushed swollen by the water of a score of streams that had lain dry or carrying a turgid trickle for many months. The distinctive monsoon smell of damp ground warming under a strong sun rose from the fields and the mango groves. The inflated carcasses of drowned cattle were swept past, stinking. Two or three stenching drowned dogs were caught in a tangle of weeds by the ghat. Now and again the malodorous corpse of some dead Hindu which had been launched from the steps of the burning ghat wallowed past.

  None of these sights or stenches was enough to put him off his breakfast of chapati, boiled eggs, banana and mango. He had seen and smelled them every day for all these weeks.

  Sher Mahommed Khan, amongst all the other skills he attributed to himself, claimed to be an expert judge of horseflesh. As far as Ramsey knew, whatever knowledge his orderly had was acquired by hours of watching him school his horses; but he did not offend his pride by suggesting as much.

  “There is a Punjabi horse trader in this town. I learned this from the manjhi; who doubtless gets paid for sending his passengers to him.” The Pathan sounded as though nothing would induce him to look for a commission on so trifling a piece of advice. “If the sahib can spare us for an hour I will take Karim Baksh, who can haggle with him in Punjabi.”

  “It will save time if we all three go while the manjhi is arranging the hire of the bullock carts.”

  “More dasturi.” Sher Mahommed Khan put on a look as disapproving as a schoolmarm catching a pupil with a crib.

  “It is one of the perquisites of his job. Why begrudge it?”

  Why indeed, except that the money could go into the pockets of a deserving Pathan and his Punjabi friend if they had the time to spare.

  They caught the whiff of the stables at the end of the street and Ramsey quickened his step. He was keen to hurry on his way but there was also his love of horses to prompt him and the feeling that he was back in a familiar sphere after such a long time on the water. He had always enjoyed long marches in the regiment, whether riding or on foot. At the end of each day there was a measurable accomplishment, a contented tiredness, a memory of new landscapes; the pleasure of a bath in a stream or his portable tub, the drink, the food, the fellowship. The days ahead would be like that and the night under canvas with the call of night birds, the cry of jackals, the howling of wolves and perhaps the tiger’s roar and panther’s growl. They would surely see buck on their way and his gun would provide them with venison. It was the season for deer and nilgai, the huge antelope known as the blue bull, whose bones contained such delicious marrow.

  The horse trader was shifty, wall-eyed and smug in the knowledge that he had a local monopoly in his trade. He showed no particular cordiality for a customer of the same kith. It was quickly established that he was a townsman from Lahore while Karim Baksh hailed from farming stock whose home was a village near Dera Ismail Khan: wild country that bred fierce men along the marches of the North-West Frontier whence Sher Mahommed Khan had come.

  There was only one horse for which Ramsey was willing to bargain: a roan with good sloping shoulders, a short back and the width between its legs and depth of girth that indicated strong lungs and heart. It stood handsomely over 16 hands on fine clean hocks and short sloping pasterns, with plenty of bone below the knee.

  A groom holding the head-rope ran the horse up and down the space in front of the L-shaped stable block. It moved well with a good action, an ample stride and no exaggerated lift of the knees that might mean bad sight. Ramsey felt its legs for puffiness or sensitivity of the tendons; he looked up its nostrils to make sure they were not plugged to prevent mucus dribbling down; he pinched its windpipe immediately behind the jaw and the horse gave the long, sharp cough that showed it was sound, not the short, husky cough of a broken-winded wid.

  He glanced quickly towards Sher Mahommed Khan, who was watching him intently. Amused, he knew exactly what Sher Mahommed Khan would do on the next similar occasion to demonstrate his expertise.

  He gave the horse trader a grudging nod. “This animal looks as though it may just about carry me as far as Nekshahr without falling dead.”

  The horse dealer, all snivelling guile and bogus indifference, put a proprietorial hand on the animal’s quarters. “The Sahib Bahadur will not find a finer mount between here and Lahore. Did I not buy him from a Raja’s stable?”

  “To serve as curry or put between the shafts of a tikka gari.” Sher Mahommed Khan had a hand on the hilt of his long-bladed Pathan knife.

  The dealer ignored him. “Already it is almost spoken for, Bara Sahib. Bahadur. A rich sardar who saw it yesterday is coming back this noon to make a deal.”

  “He will find it already gone.” Ramsey beckoned to Karim Baksh and spoke to him in an undertone. “It is a good horse and I like its friendly eye. This rogue is right: I shall not find a better one in this town. Don’t haggle too long but don’t agree to more than a hundred and twenty rupees. The money is in this batua.” He handed him a bag of coins. “Bring the horse to the ghat as quickly as possible. Sher Mahommed Khan will come with me now to attend to the hire and loading of the carts.”

  Karim Baksh took the purse, stood to attention and saluted with a great flourish. The other two went back to the riverside, where eight bullock carts were lined up. The scow’s manjhi and a man who owned three of the carts and was therefore spokesman for the others squatted outside a waterfront chai khana, a teashop, leaning against its mud wall, smoking, drinking tea, gossiping and haggling.

  Sher Mahommed Khan looked disapproving when Ramsey joined them. He went grumpily on board the scow to fuss around Ramsey’s trunks and camping equipment and bully any sailor who incautiously came near him.

  Ramsey enjoyed using his knowledge of the vernacular. He was happy to sit and talk for a while, listening to the local peculiarities of the cart-owner’s speech, adapting his own so that he was properly understood, pleased to see the man’s surprise at an Englishman who could make himself sound like an Indian, of high or low birth as he found expedient.

  Karim Baksh returned followed by a groom leading the roan and another
pushing a hand-cart bearing oats and hay.

  Ramsey rose and walked across to him. Karim Baksh held out the purse. “There are still twenty rupees in your purse, Sahib.”

  “You did well.” Ramsey patted the roan’s flank and rubbed his muzzle, called to the teashop owner to bring sugar. “He deserves a noble name. I shall call him Sikander.” Alexander the Great. In his own way, Ramsey had as important conquests to make as the great general.

  Sher Mahommed Khan had swaggered ashore to join them and to show off his newly acquired horsiness: he bent and ran a hand up and down the horse’s off-fore.

  “What are you doing? If you dig your clumsy great fingers into him like that you’ll break a bone.”

  “I am making sure he has not gone lame between the stables and here, Sahib. These horse-copers...”

  “Yes, yes. Fetch my saddle and bridle and check the loading of the carts. I want to put many miles behind us before it rains.”

  Massy clouds were gathering.

  *

  The day’s first shower caught them a couple of hours after they had left the town. Ramsey rode at the head of the convoy at walking pace. Sher Mahommed Khan and Karim Baksh strode easily behind him, ten or twelve hours on foot nothing to them, used as they were to a long day’s march in serge uniforms, heavy shakos and burdened with a musket and 40 lb of accoutrements. The laden carts, each pulled by a pair of bullocks, creaked and swayed at two or three miles an hour while their lolling drivers dozed or sat in phlegmatic contemplation, or exchanged news and raillery with workers in adjacent fields or travellers in the opposite direction.

  Dust rose from the narrow, rutted truck. After months of drought, rain soaked in rapidly and the surface dried between rainfalls. The first heavy drops fell when they were within half a mile of a stand of shisham trees at the roadside. By the time they reached the shelter of the leaf-laden branches there were inches of mud on the road. They sheltered for nearly two hours before the rain stopped and they were able to continue. By then the road surface was so soft that the carts kept sinking almost up to their axles and a pair of bullocks would have to be taken out of the shafts of one and yoked to another to move it. In this way they toiled on until the sun again dried the mud and left only a few inches of it to impede them. This did not dry out completely before the next heavy shower and the next chance to shelter; under some huge sal trees this time.