One yakdan remained. A sepoy wandered into the bell of arms, humming a slant of melody under his breath. Amaury stooped and whispered into the hole. The workers froze and waited, still as stones. The soldier ambled out. Lips to Amaury’s ear, the Rohilla murmured, ‘Leave it, sahib. Too dangerous.’
Amaury shook his head. Grit and perspiration prickled his skin, the sweat crawled cold as winter rain. Summoning the dregs of strength they dropped the box in the pit, followed on hands and knees its shuffle along the shaft.
Sunlight slashed Amaury’s dark-accustomed eyes. Hidden from the courtyard by Vedvyas’s compound walls Rohillas fastened sack-cloth over the loads of kneeling camels who lifted supercilious heads and bubbled disapproval. Amaury inspected the lashings. ‘Well done! Lead, on, brothers.’ He covered his face, took a nosestring and plodded from the compound. The others followed - a scruffy chain of camel drovers delivering someone’s merchandise.
They filed through streets and descended the hill; and earned no more than cursory glances. At the foot they encountered Beddoes, escorting Amelia, in her palankeen from visiting the buzars. The Collector called a Hindi greeting. Amaury lowered his head and hunched his shoulders. He dared not answer - Beddoes would know his voice. The string plodded past in silence. ‘Damned surly rascals!’ Beddoes said.
They reached the village., unloaded the camels, lifted yakdans into carts. Amaury shed his rancid garments and dressed himself in regimentals. ‘Mount, brothers! Mount and away!’ Rohillas climbed to horse, wheeled from the square, cantered through the gates. A trackway headed westwards; this they took.
Trailing orifiammes of dust, clattering and lurching, fifteen thousand pounds which belonged to the Honourable Company vanished into the wilderness!
Todd gaped at the stricken havildar, saw his own consternation reflected in the anguished face. ‘Gone? All the Company funds? Good God, Richard - what shall we do?’
Anstruther sipped arrack punch, and replaced the cheroot between his lips. ‘Go to the quarter guard and inspect the damage, I should think. Has your fellow any idea who did it?’
‘None! How could he? Damme, Richard, we should organize a chase, hunt the robbers down!’
‘Beastly warm for riding abroad! But my dragoons are at your disposal,’ Anstruther conceded lazily, ‘provided you can discover where the scoundrels have gone.’
Todd paced the floor, dropped into a chair and clutched his temples. ‘Jesus, what an infernal pickle!’ He pointed a quivering finger. ‘Richard, you’re a royal officer, claiming seniority. ‘Tis your responsibility to decide what must be done!’
‘Stuff, Henry - you outrank my date of commission!’ He swallowed his drink, leaned head against the chairback. ‘My suggestion - I protest no more than that! - is we await Hugo’s advice. He will be back tomorrow.’
CHAPTER NINE
Todd sourly contemplated the hole in the treasury floor, and examined by a lantern’s light the rough-hewn sides. He crawled along the shaft, explored the rubble-heaped zenana room and returned on hands and knees. The lantern snipped a splinter of light from something that gleamed in the pit. A fallen coin, he thought, scrambling out to examine his find. No - a gold signet ring. He looked at the crest - a talbot’s head - and recognized it instantly.
Todd slowly revolved the ring between finger and thumb, scanned stupidly the circle of silent sepoys, round shocked eyes in swarthy faces, regimentals purpled by the lantern’s yellow flame. Hugo. Impossible! The thieves - whoever they were - had stolen the ring and dropped it in their haste. They must have ransacked Amaury’s quarters. When? Hugo had slept the night in his room, and left at dawn. Had he forgotten the ring, left it lying about? Then it was stolen by day, that morning or afternoon. How did robbers, laden with booty, stroll from Hurrondah in daylight?
The problem could be easily resolved. Todd turned on his heel. ‘You are under arrest, Chandu Lai,’ he told the forlorn havildar. ‘Gross dereliction of duty.’ He walked quickly to the palace, and entered Amaury’s rooms. The bed was made, mosquito curtains neatly draped; on a teakwood petit commode combs and razors and silver-backed brushes ranked in rows. He opened wardrobes: coats and scarlet jackets dangled on hangers; shirts and linen crammed a chest of drawers. Amaury’s banian watched him. ‘What does the sahib seek? If your honour would tell me--’
Todd said urgently, ‘Has the captain sahib taken any baggage on the exercise?’
‘A little food, some toilet articles in his saddlebags, a blanket roll - no more.’
‘Have any of his servants gone?’
‘No, sahib. When Amaury Sahib rides out he takes only a Rahtor orderly.’ The banian sneered. ‘An uncouth oaf, perfectly unfit to wait upon a sahib!’
Todd showed him the ring. ‘You recognize this?’
The banian peered, and looked surprised. ‘Certainly. Amaury Sahib never takes it from his finger.’
‘Has anything been stolen from his quarters?’
‘How is it possible? I myself have been here all day, and last night the sahib slept--’
Todd cut him short, and went to Welladvice’s quarters. The sailor owned few possessions; those that he had were gone. He strode across the courtyard, entered Vedvyas’s wing and went from room to room. All were deserted; the litter of departure festooned every chamber: broken tables, empty boxes, discarded cooking pots, frayed coconut matting - all shimmered with a powdering of dust. ‘Holloa, is anyone there?’ The echoes of his shouting bounced from wall to wall.
Vedvyas and Welladvice had run. Were they the culprits? And where was Hugo in this muddle?
Todd summoned a palankeen and was carried to Marriott’s house. He found Anstruther changing for dinner, related all he had learnt - and said nothing of the ring that burned a hole in his pocket. The cornet finished arranging his cravat, surveyed himself in a mirror, smoothed the folds. ‘A Coach-horn Fanfare,’ he observed. ‘Devilish difficult to tie. You have found your felons, Henry: that Vedvyas fellow and Welladvice - who is nothing, after all, but a blackguard foremastman. Too late for anything tonight - I’ll take my dragoons and follow at daybreak.’
‘I saw them go!’ Todd said desperately. ‘They had four bullock-teamed six-pounders, and two three-pounders drawn by horses. Nothing else. No pack animals or carts to carry the spoils!’
‘But every gun has a wagon team. I protest you monstrously innocent, Henry! I will wager there was blunt instead of round-shot in those wagons!’ A servant levered him into a crimson broadcloth coat; he patted the lapels and fastened silver-corded frogs. ‘One of Schultz’s best; he dunned me fifteen guineas!’
Todd gulped, and forced the question from his throat. ‘What do you think will happen to Hugo?’
‘Upon my word, I’d give a ransom to see his face when he gives the order “Roundshot - load”!’ Anstruther chuckled; then the smile abruptly left his lips. ‘He may be in a pickle, come to think. Those rascals will have to be rid of him - and sooner rather than late! By God! What fools we are!’ He struggled from his coat. ‘We must be after them directly. I’ll have Boot and Saddle sounded, and get my fellows started. Follow with your sepoys soon as you can!’
Todd touched the signet ring and felt a sickness in his stomach, as though winded by a blow. How could Hugo not have known?
Always, before the company marched, Amaury inspected guns and limbers, teams and wagons minutely; and pounced on the smallest error, a bucket hanging awry, a portfire-cutter misplaced. Go on a firing exercise with wagons clinking silver instead of shot? A wry smile twitched the ensign’s mouth.
He sank into a chair. ‘Put on your clothes again, Richard. We cannot trail the robbers in the dark. We do not even know where they have gone. In the morning we will send out searches. Meanwhile, we must quickly apprise Charles who, poor devil, is answerable to the Council for the loss!’
Anstruther, leg half-way into a riding boot, surveyed him in amazement. ‘Damn my eyes, you take this hellish coolly all of a sudden! Here’s Hugo riding guilelessly with a
gang who will slit his throat, and you--’
‘I am positive,’ Todd said tiredly, ‘Hugo can look after himself.’
Amaury, punishing the horses, reached Dharia with his treasure carts two days before the artillery arrived. Vedvyas was already there, having left the sluggish bullock teams in Welladvice’s charge. Families and followers were quartered in the least dilapidated buildings they could find - and immediately complained to Amaury that snakes infested the entire town. Already several children had been bitten., and died in torment. The menace must be removed, a Rahtor risaldar threatened; otherwise his people would soon abandon the place.
Amaury deposited in the citadel his precious yakdans under guard, and detailed parties armed with sticks and sabres to purge every house in the fortress. They killed cobras, kraits and vipers by the score; but as many as they killed escaped into holes and crannies and could not be hunted out.
At the end of a grilling, dangerous day he sat on a wall surrounding the temple court, mopped a streaming face, and examined with loathing his bamboo stave, slimed by dead-white snake flesh streaked with blood. ‘An impossible task,’ he grunted. ‘The place is blighted, alive with serpents.’
Vedvyas heavily agreed, plucked a handful of peepul leaves and wiped his scimitar blade. The old priest, squatting beside the lingam, crackled Hindi. Vedvyas crossed the temple forecourt and snapped a question. Amaury, brow in hands, did not attend the quavering voice that answered: he could not comprehend the old man’s dialect - an ancient language, he supposed, handed down by the temple’s priests from days beyond the Moghuls.
Vedvyas returned, and sat on the wall beside him. ‘If I understand the old fool right, he promises he can expel the snakes - provided we do not kill them.’
‘A wizard, undoubtedly.’ Amaury yawned; the day had been long and gruelling. ‘How will he work this miracle?’
‘He will not say. He wants us to evacuate all our people before tomorrow’s sunrise, and send them down to the plain. By noon, he swears, they can return - and find not a snake in Dharia.’
‘What do you think, Vedvyasjee?’
The mirasdar traced patterns with his swordpoint in the dust. ‘Holy men sometimes possess extraordinary powers, sahib. We face an insoluble problem - and anything is worth trying.’ Amaury’s jaded brain examined the alternative: a mass desertion of the fortress and a finish to all his plans. The old charlatan’s tricks, at least, would gain a day’s respite.
‘So be it. I shall issue orders.’
By daybreak the whole population, animal and human, mustered at the foot of Dharia’s mount: a noisy throng, rife with speculation - Amaury, averse to ridicule, had kept the reason close. He alone remained, stole inside the citadel and mounted to the battlements. Thence he surveyed the fortress like a map, the crooked canyoned streets and clustered unroofed houses like broken lidless boxes, the people crawling antlike on the plain below. The town was still and silent, patched brown and black in the sunlight and tapestried by shadows.
The priest, garlanded and saffron-robed, limped from the temple far below, his shaven cranium shining like a newly minted mohur. He crossed the forecourt, faced the citadel’s portal, raised his arms and sang a high-pitched wailing chant.
A rustling near his feet made Amaury jump for his life. Two cobras wriggled from drain spouts and slithered to the steps that led below. A krait like a thin black bootlace, the deadliest snake of all, writhed from a hole and followed. Amaury, shaking, half drew his sabre, remembered, and slammed it home - the priest had stipulated that the brutes must not be killed. He looked from an embrasure. The priest still stood at the door, keening his weird refrain. Snakes trickled from the citadel and coiled around his feet. He turned and shambled away, chanting as he went. The reptiles followed.
The old man wandered along the streets, paused in front of doorways and summoned from every house and stable, from every ruinous godown those glistening venomous coils. Amaury lost him in the alleyways and buildings; but his course was marked by a squirming stream streaked black and brown and grey. He quartered the town from end to end; the sun climbed high and shadows shrank.
Repelled and fascinated, Amaury watched from the battlements, sweat tickling his ribs.
The priest vanished in the barbican, emerged from the outer gate and tottered down the path, pursued by his deadly train. He stopped and turned, and flourished his arms. The chant mounted to a shriek, an eldritch screech like an anguished soul. In separate squirming ropes the snakes writhed right and left, were lost in rocks and scrub which speckled the slopes. The old man doddered down the track, mouthing incantations, turned at the foot and ascended. He shuffled to the citadel, cricked his neck and regarded the lonely silhouette cradled in an embrasure. A smile of infinite evil parted the pallid lips.
‘It is safe to come down, sahib,’ he squeaked in perfect Hindi. Amaury met him at the portal. ‘I have done as I promised,’ the ancient said. ‘Not a snake remains in Dharia.’
‘You have expelled them to the hillsides to swell the horrors already there. The road to the plain remains a perilous passage.’
The priest leered. ‘Not-so. My children are forbidden to approach the path. So long; as you respect them your people may use it safely. That I swear.’
‘You shall be rewarded. *
The patriarch cackled. ‘For saving Dharia’s guardians from your swords and staves? It was my duty, sahib. A man must protect his family!’
When Amaury reported to Vedvyas the mirasdar eyed him dubiously. ‘We saw none; of this from below. Are you certain, sahib? Perhaps the sun...’
‘You suggest an hallucination? I wish it were.’ Amaury shuddered. ‘I believe you will find no snakes inside the walls. As for the hillsides - a deterrent for escaladers, don’t you think?’
The gun company arrived. With every available hand on drag ropes, teams straining at the collars, the cannon were hauled up the zigzag road; while Welladvice related, grinning, a brush with Anstruther’s light dragoons near the borders of Berar. The city now contained six hundred people, men, women and children - a fraction of its capacity - and everyone set to work to make their quarters fit to live in.
Amaury had three immediate aims: to establish the bounds of Dharia’s jagir, make contact with village officials, and create an intelligence system. He vanished into the jungles with twenty troopers, visited the villages in turn and benignly informed the headmen that the Englishman they beheld was Dharia’s ruler. His claim was meekly accepted: years of anarchy had taught the peasants submission to any caprice of fate. Because the settlements were impoverished, fields untilled and cattle few and lean, Amaury distributed immediate subsidies for buying animals and seed corn, requiring in return that all the men they could spare should go at once to Dharia and join the work-force Vedvyas assembled for repairing the fortifications.
He wove an intelligence network, choosing in every village four sharp-witted youths to gamer everything of note that happened in the neighbourhood, and come hotfoot to Dharia with any urgent news.
He travelled to the district’s farthest confines, and discovered its boundaries vague as a clouded horizon: Berar and Dharia merged in a wasteland of hill and savannah; no one knew exactly an end or a beginning. The Bhonsla’s representative and symbol of authority garrisoned a place called Droog which Amaury, alone and afoot, cautiously reconnoitred. The garrison, he learned from a peasant, comprised eight hundred men with guns.
Droog, the sole remaining emblem of Raghujee Bhonsla’s rule, he must soon remove. He feared no repercussions from Marriott in Bahrampal, no Company expedition sent in pursuit. A ‘casus belli’ had ceased to exist: the ‘loan’ lifted from the treasury, he reflected with an inward smile, was already repaid. Berar remained. How long would the Bhonsla tolerate a freebooter seizing his lands?
After two months’ wandering Amaury returned to Dharia. By this time he resembled outwardly the men he led, hollow-cheeked and aquiline, face tanned tawny bronze, garments smelling of horse and sweat.
He had discarded, once and for all, his Company regimentals, and donned the flowing knee-length coat his troopers wore, bound at the waist by a broad silk sash. For weeks he had slept in the open or in verminous native huts, eaten only rice and flat unleavened bread, drunk nothing but water and sometimes sour toddy. Thankfully anticipating a bath, clean linen and civilized meals he slipped from the saddle, patted the countrybred stallion’s neck - Hannibal, pampered in a renovated stable, he kept as his battle charger - and faced an excited Vedvyas.
‘Pindaris in the north, sahib! They have looted a village twenty miles off!’
‘Then why are you here?’ Amaury grunted. ‘You should be away in chase!’ He shouted an order; a trumpet sang Boot and Saddle; bustle exploded in barracks and stables; Welladvice came running. ‘Who brought this information?’
Vedvyas indicated a youthful peasant, one of the village spies appointed only a fortnight earlier. Amaury patted his shoulder, gave him money. ‘Well done, lad. Find a horse and guide us. Mr Welladvice, harness the three-pounders. We march in fifteen minutes!’
Amaury cantered his little force through a sweltering afternoon, found the raiders’ trail and stretched the pace. They sighted a part of the quarry - for the Pindaris, sensing pursuit, had instantly split and divided - crossing a river steeply banked, a tendril of the Godaveri. Four hundred horsemen milled in a jostling throng, fighting for a footing on the ford. Amaury slapped Welladvice’s arm, and pointed.
Bouncing on their limiters the guns galloped to a flank. ‘Left take ground!’ yelled Welladvice, and each team wheeled to the left. ‘Halt - action front!’ The teams snapped about like cracking whips and flicked the gleaming barrels to a deadline on the ford. Riders hurtled from saddles, slipped the limbers; the teams, deprived of half their drivers, moved smoothly to the rear. Ammunition numbers tore caisson latches open, handed shot and cartridge; in a systematic frenzy gunners rammed home case shot, primed vents and lighted portfires, laid the guns on target. Welladvice stepped back, and raised an arm; caught Amaury’s sword-swung signal, chopped his hand.
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