The Lotus and the Wind

by John Masters

  ‘I’m sorry, Subadar-sahib. I forgot.’

  ‘Forgot! Shall I send the wounded back under escort?’

  Robin fingered the cold butt of his pistol. Forgot? He hadn’t even been in the battle; he still wasn’t.

  The wounded. . . . The brigade would advance down the valley in front of him after its attack. His wounded men would have an easier trip going down there then than going all the way back now. He said, ‘No, give them first-aid and keep them with us, sahib. And we’d better get ready to support the Highlanders on to their hill. And have “in position” signalled back, with the number of casualties.’

  ‘Hawas!’ The subadar saluted carefully and limped off, shouting orders and waving his sword. Jagbir opened his haversack, pulled out a cold chupatti, and began to stuff it into his mouth.

  From the valley ahead and from the hills on the left, whence the enemy had seen that Robin’s company was now on their flank, the Ghilzais opened up a sniping fire. Jagbir rolled over on his side behind a rock and went on eating. Subadar Maniraj chased the Gurkhas into covered firing positions. Perhaps there’ll be a counter-attack, Robin thought.

  Between drifting clouds he could see a long way towards the Hindu Kush in the north. Only the thickness of the air prevented him from seeing the whole world, surely. The heap of stones that Colonel Franklin had seen from below was a ruined building. Faded prayer flags fluttered in the icy breeze, their poles anchored among the sharp stones strewing the hilltop. Robin thought he saw a statue in the building. If so, it could not be a mosque. That was strange and interesting. He could see what was happening in the battle from there as well as from anywhere else. He walked over towards it.

  CHAPTER 4

  A small eminence rose out of the hilltop, on the right. There the ruin and the statue stood. From below, the ground had looked flat, but actually it undulated and gave shelter in its folds to all who did not stand or walk about. Robin thought, as he went, that Jagbir had not seen him go. The orderly continued to stuff chupatti into his mouth and talk with the bugler; he ought to have kept one eye always on Robin--also Robin ought to have told him where he was going. But Robin did not want anyone with him now, not even Jagbir. He could not be alone on the hilltop, since there were a hundred soldiers here, but he could be by himself. The soldiers were here, but they were about their business of cleaning rifles, replenishing ammunition, preparing for the advance or the counter-attack. With Jagbir it was different; he was Jagbir’s business.

  The old temple was small and square. Probably it had never been very high, and now it stood almost level with the stones out of which it had been made and many times remade. Robin stopped ten paces from it, wondering who had built it in the beginning, and thinking of the conquerors and the invaders who had passed this way before him. From the time of Alexander many captains, leading many armies, had come this way, bursting out of the turbulent civilizations of Persia and Mesopotamia towards the India that was Golconda.

  The outer walls were now one or two feet high. There had been an inner chamber, and the south wall of it was still three parts intact. The statue of the god sat on a little cracked stone dais in front of the wall. Robin paced slowly inside. Chips of sky-blue tile watered the dull stones of the inner chamber. Those would be relics of the Persians. The statue was descended from another civilization altogether; it represented the Lord Buddha, resting cross-legged in contemplation, looking, out of empty sockets in the almond shaped eyes, towards the empty north. The eyes must have been jewels, for they were gone.

  Robin settled down near the statue, with his back against the inner wall, and looked across the narrow saddle separating the hill from that other which was Mclain’s objective. He could look down on it, for it was appreciably lower than his. The Highlanders were moving up the slope. No enemy opposed their advance. Probably a few Ghilzais had been there earlier in the day, but they would have gone long since. Raising his head a little, Robin saw a line of Gurkhas stretched on their stomachs to his right, ready to give the Highlanders support if they needed it. But nothing happened. The Ghilzais had gone--to join their comrades of the main force, to go home--spirited away into the troubled gloom of the mountains. The steady sniping continued on the far flank, the left.

  The Highlanders continued their climb. Robin picked up his glasses and saw that Mclain carried a naked claymore in his right hand and a pistol in his left. Many of his soldiers smoked their pipes as they climbed. Their kilts were pale green and white, the ancient hunting tartan of MacDonald of the Isles. All the white spats moved together in a slow, pulling rhythm.

  He watched until they reached the top, passed over, and began to move down the forward slope. In a minute the hill would hide them. He wondered idly why Mclain was going over the crest when the general had ordered him to stay on top until the main attack developed. Well, those were his own orders, and the general had said Mclain’s were to be the same, but they might have been changed. It would have been a good idea for the general to speak to both of them at the same time, since they were to work in such close cooperation. Confusion over orders was fairly common in this brigade. Some of the young staff officers in Simla had hinted that the powers thought Old Alma something less than intelligent.

  Simla was a pleasant enough place, and his company had liked being on Viceroy’s Guard. They had had plenty of time off, and so had he. From Jakko in the dawn you could see half the peaks of Kangra and Bashahr. Walk or ride fifteen miles out, and the wind blew away the febrile excitements of Simla, the hothouse flowers, the perpetual struggles for place and notice. There were struggles for love too, but there the wind only sharpened his doubts. He had liked going out with Anne. He might have liked it better still if her parents had allowed her to ride all day with him so that they could pass beyond the reach of Simla’s atmosphere. If there was any girl in the world for him, it would be Anne. If. . . He absentmindedly touched his breast-pocket, where her last letter lay. She should be in Peshawar by now.

  At the back of the Highland company a soldier stopped on the crest, turned, and began to wave a short flag in Morse code. Robin read ‘No casualties.’ The signaller turned again and ran off to catch up with the still moving company. The message had not said ‘In position’ or ‘Reached objective’ or anything like that. So presumably Mclain did have different orders. Robin put down his glasses and picked up one of the chips of blue tile lying on the ground about him. A bursting shell had made a small hole, blackening and scoring the earth around it and loosening the texture of the soil. He dug his fingers into it, crumbling the friable stuff against his hand.

  He found a hard round thing in his fingers. Thinking it might be a shell splinter, he idly rubbed away the dirt clinging to it. Then he brushed it with the sleeve of his tunic. A small silver coin shone dimly in his hand. He bent his head, rubbed harder, and turned the coin this way and that, the better to catch the feeble light. Through the pitted, encrusted dirt of the years the shape of a head began to appear. The head was in profile, of a strong young man. His straight nose continued the line of his forehead, ending above a short upper lip and a curved, sensual but powerful mouth. The neck was strong as a young bull’s, the head set imperiously upon it, and the eyes were deep sunk.

  The coin lay flat in the palm of Robin’s hand. Others had thought out and fought out the battle for this hill; he had merely watched himself take part in it. But the little coin jerked every chord of sensibility in him and set them all throbbing. That face--two thousand and more years ago this young man had marched out of the west, but the years had not passed away from him. His cities still stood and carried his name. Perhaps that was not surprising, because he had built the cities of stone. The astonishment was that Alexander still lived in men’s hearts, though he was in his grave, and a hundred generations with him. In Asia peasants referred to him as if he had just passed their way last week and might come again next week. The more desolate the place, the more surely its people knew Alexander of Macedon. A mysterious pile of stones besi
de the road, a ruined tower on a hill--’Who built that?’ Robin had often asked. ‘Allah knows! Iskander, I expect.’ The fact that the tower could not have been more than three hundred years old only added to the magic. Other conquerors, followed by great armies, had trampled through these hills and across these deserts, the latest of them in the memory of old men’s grandfathers. But those had become--nothing; while hunters of the pamir knew every detail of their descent from Alexander. They might know nothing else; the traveller, searching back beyond living memory, might come upon twenty-two hundred years of oblivion--behind that, at the beginning, the shining young man Iskander, Alexander of Greece, Alexander the young god of the world’s morning.

  Robin closed his hand tightly on the coin. This he would never part with. It could not have been left here by Alexander himself, although he had passed this way. Perhaps he had sat on this hill and wondered why he was going where he was going. Robin rolled over on his side and looked more closely at the battered statue. It was Buddhist and it was old, but the face, for all the almond eyes, was Greek. It had been copied from one that had sat here before it, and that from another. The face had served different religions but always the same ideal of beauty. Sculptor after sculptor had moulded the statue into the conventions he knew, his hands trying to preserve the mysterious grace before him, each time losing something, always believing that the original had been a perfection suddenly waved into existence by the dazzling god.

  There would be a sculptor’s bones beneath this hill--dead by his own hand, his spirit wandering about among the stones, whispering, ‘Where is Greece, where is Alexander? I tried.’ Did the Ghilzais feel the magic here? Could it not, if it existed, bind the world together?

  And what did Alexander seek in the desert? If it had been the mere glory of battle he would not be remembered. Surely he came into the empty places not to conquer, but to find.

  The secret strength of things,

  Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

  Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee.

  And what wert thou and earth and stars and sea,

  If to the human mind’s imaginings

  Silence and solitude were vacancy?

  He did not know how long he lay on his side in his reverie. Shots close by the temple, much louder than the irregular enemy sniping, brought him back to the hilltop. He picked up his binoculars. Someone twenty or so yards away was shooting down into the declivity between this and the hill the Highlanders had hurried over. He did not need the glasses to see two men half running through that saddle. Coloured ornaments, which the Ghilzais seldom wore, glinted on their clothes; otherwise they were dressed like Afghans or tribesmen. One of them carried two rifles, the other, one. They walked quickly, then ran, then walked, somehow giving the impression that the battle was none of their business.

  As he watched, one of them fell. It was the man with two rifles. His comrade halted, darted half-way back to him, and came to an indecisive stop. As another shot kicked up the stones at his feet he turned again and ran on in his original direction. Now three or four more Gurkhas opened fire on him. He made no attempt to return the fire but ran faster, turning and jinking, until he was out of sight. A minute later Robin saw Jagbir bound down into the saddle where the man with the two rifles lay on his face among the stones.

  It would be Jagbir--slow-witted, kindhearted, animally aggressive, seventeen and a half years old. Had he no remorse for killing, almost as a demonstration of marksmanship, a passing stranger? That was unfair; Jagbir burned with fierce loyalty and affection for his clan. The man with the two rifles had not belonged to the clan.

  Jagbir trotted back up the hill, grinning widely, and brandishing one of the dead man’s rifles. He came straight to Robin. ‘For you, sahib. A present. There’s a place for it on your wall in Manali.’

  Robin took it from his hand and turned it over. ‘Thank you, Jagbir. Look, it’s engraved, chased. It’s an old jezail and beautifully made.’

  ‘I saw.’ The orderly shifted his feet, mumbling, ‘I knew you liked old things. The Afghans ought to practice with their rifles instead of writing on them. If they did, we--’

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He had already spoken for an unusually long time.

  Robin said, ‘I suppose the man’s dead?’

  ‘Yes. There was another. Got away.’

  ‘I saw.’

  Jagbir held out his hand. ‘I’ll carry it.’ Robin handed the rifle over.

  Subadar Maniraj hurried up, puffing and holding his side, creases of anxiety deep between his bloodshot eyes. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you, sahib.’ He turned on Jagbir. ‘Porcupine’s prick! Little lump of owl shit! Why don’t you--?’

  Robin interrupted. ‘It was my fault, Subadar-sahib. I’ve been sitting in this old temple. I found--this.’ He pulled the coin from his pocket. Maniraj did not look at it but gave Robin a sharp, purse-lipped glance, mixed of vexation, despair, and love. That expression had become familiar to Robin since he got command of the company.

  The old man said, ‘The Highlanders went over their hill and right on down, out of sight. I think we ought to go too, or their left flank will be in the air. They’re just like all British troops--never look where they’re going, never listen, chatter-chatter in the ranks. We ought to have gone before this.’

  Robin leaned back against the temple wall, noticing now for the first time that it gave him shelter from the bullets that continued to crack over the hill and smack short into the earth. The sniping blew up into one of its little flurries. The subadar knelt beside him. Jagbir stood in the open in the rigid position of attention he had assumed when the subadar started upbraiding him. Robin motioned him down and said to Maniraj, ‘Our orders are to stay here until the main attack goes in. It hasn’t yet, has it? There was to be artillery preparation. I haven’t heard any.’

  ‘I don’t know. The guns have been shooting. It sounds as if they’re still ranging. No messages on the flag. Can hardly see back there now. But we ought to go forward or those Highlanders will get into trouble.’

  ‘We’ll wait a bit,’ Robin said, after thinking briefly. ‘Until the main attack goes in, this hill is just as important as the valley down there. If we go there’ll be nothing to stop the Ghilzais walking along here and retaking it. Then they’ll be on the flank of the main attack and above our people when they get on down into the valley. Look.’ He pointed.

  The subadar shrugged his shoulders. ‘Very good, sahib.’ He rose, saluted, turned, and hurried off. Then he remembered that the riflemen could all see him and that he was being shot at. He straightened his back and slowed his pace to a stroll. Robin watched him go. If the old man were to talk to any other British officer of the regiment in the way he habitually spoke to Robin, he’d be under arrest in no time. But then the subadar knew that the other sahibs lived in the same world that he lived in, while Robin Savage was half the time somewhere else.

  Robin heard the crunch of nailed boots on the stones, sighed, and put away his coin. A voice from just below the crest cried, ‘Hey, Johnnie! Whaur’s the sab? Sahib kidder hi?’

  Jagbir answered the speaker. ‘Sahib y’heen chha.’ Robin thought: There must have been a gesture--no, there was no need, because there was also the other thing he hadn’t got, the mysterious sense of clan. He had seen Gurkhas and Highlanders lying side by side on the hills, holding eager conversation, each in his own language.

  A private and a corporal of the MacDonalds burst over the low wall into the remains of the temple. In spite of the raw cold the sweat poured down their sunburned faces under the tall, conical topis. Robin sat up and said, ‘Are you looking for me?’

  The two bearded soldiers drew to attention, sloped arms, and at a muttered ‘Hup!’ from the corporal saluted together by slapping the butts of their rifles with the extended palms of their right hands. Robin saw at once that the private’s right hand, his saluting hand, was torn and bleeding. He said, ‘You’re wounded. Here, kneel down
under cover. Let me look at it.’

  ‘I am only slightly wounded, sir,’ the private said in a sing-song voice. The corporal added, ‘We couldna kneel doon, sir. Yeerr Johnnies maucht think we were afrightit.’

  Well, aren’t you? Robin thought. You look like it. He saw the corporal’s lip twisted under his beard and believed for a moment that he was smiling at his own joke; then saw that he was not smiling but sneering, and knew at once why. Robin himself was well sheltered from the flying bullets by the inner wall. He could get up. Perhaps he ought to get up. But he was not afraid at all. As before, he was not even committed to this--this emotion, this violence.

  He did not get up. He said quietly, ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Mr. Mclain sent us, sir, for to tell ye to come quick. We’re a’ but in the bottom doon yonder, an’ there’s a lashin’ of these paythans ever’ which wa’, shut’n’ at us. Ten, twenty, maybe. Mr. Mclain says, sir,’ the corporal went on doggedly, ‘an’ ye’ll excuse me, sir, he says ye shud’ve been doon there an ‘oor sin’, an’ will ye for the Lord’s sake hurry noo--sir!’ Robin wanted time to think it over. Someone had got his orders wrong probably. But who? It needed time to work out what was best to do. He could not think properly while the two soldiers stood there like ramrods, the mist droplets pearling their kilts. The guns began to fire steadily on the left. That sounded more like the beginning of something. They weren’t ranging now. No one could see far. He couldn’t get a message through in time. Mclain might get into a little trouble--but he, Robin, had a job to do here, and clear orders.

  He said, ‘Tell Mr. Mclain that we’ll come as soon as I’m sure that the main attack is being pressed home. Those are my orders, and I can’t disobey them.’

  ‘Ye’re no cornin’ right awa’ on the split double lak’ Mr. Mclain askit, sir?’

  ‘Not at once. I think it will be within half an hour, though.’