The Faraway Drums

by Jon Cleary

  “Clive, Major Savanna has had his own little plot. He’s been trying to turn Bobs against me.”

  Farnol pulled up another chair, sat down opposite her. All the seductive posturing was out of the way now; they were getting down to brass—no, in her case, golden tacks. He might even get the truth from her.

  “Why should Savanna want to involve himself in your affairs? You’re the rightful ruler of Serog and you’re the one the Government recognizes. Why should we British want to bother ourselves with someone as—as unstable as your brother?”

  “Clive, the English have been trying to topple kings and princes for centuries—it’s their principal overseas sport. Not cricket, as foolish Bertie seems to think. I know I’m not popular with my people. It doesn’t worry me. I don’t believe in the Hereafter, so I’m not going to trouble myself by building up any heavenly credits amongst a lot of ignorant peasants.”

  He smiled. “Why are you honest only when you’re so despicable?”

  “Don’t try to flatter me, Clive.”

  His smile widened and he shook his head. “All right, no flattery. But you are dodging another question. Why do the English want you moved out and Bobs moved in?”

  “I didn’t say they did. I said Major Savanna did. Now whether that means the same thing, I don’t know. Perhaps you’d have to ask my brother.”

  “I’ll do that.” But he had no faith that he would get an honest answer, if one at all, from Mahendra. “How long has this—this plot of Savanna’s been going on?”

  “I’m not sure. I only learned of it two days ago. Last night I told Major Savanna what I knew. That was when I said he would have me to answer to.”

  It all sounded truthful enough. Then: “It wasn’t you who had the train stopped, so that we’d have to come down this way? No, you’re a plotter yourself, Mala, but that would be too elaborate. It was just sheer chance, was it?”

  “Yes. You see, the gods do smile on the wicked occasionally. They love their little ironies, just like the rest of us.”

  “Were you going to go on down to Delhi and wait till after the Durbar before you did anything about Savanna and your brother?”

  “No. I knew that Bobs is also coming down to the Durbar. He was planning to kill me in Delhi, but now he has the chance to kill me any time between now and the Durbar. He told me tonight he is coming with us in the morning.”

  III

  Lady Westbrook, declaring that she would be safe since no one was interested in killing off an old bird like herself, had gone back to her own room. Private Ahearn was sent across to Bridie’s room to sleep; Karim Singh made himself as comfortable as he could outside Farnol’s door and settled down to guard his master. That left Farnol and Bridie alone with the still unconscious Savanna.

  “Did you try to feed him any of the mustard?” Farnol said.

  “No. He might have vomited and choked. We’ll just have to be patient.”

  “We?”

  “I’m as interested in the mystery of all this as much as you are. Not just from a story angle, either. It’s personal now.” She was surprised at how concerned she had become for his safety, though she was not yet prepared to tell him so. “How did you fare with the Ranee?”

  “How did you know I’d been with her?”

  “I could smell her perfume on you when you came back in here.”

  “There was much less of that faring, as you put it, than you suspect. Mala had her designs on me—”

  “Oh my God!” Her reaction was a defensive one, against letting her feelings get away from her. Attack the man if you don’t want to be too attracted to him . . . “Do you have any modesty about your charms?”

  He considered for a moment. “No, I don’t think I have. Modesty is only an inferiority complex raised to being a virtue.”

  Well, she had always told herself she liked a man with an air of arrogance about him. “Go on,” she said resignedly.

  “One must face facts and I take it that, as a journalist, that’s all you’re interested in? She had designs on me and I declined her offer. May I go on further?”

  “Do.” She glanced at the still form of Savanna, glad that he could not hear this conversation. She knew that the conversation, flippant and trivial as it was, was a dance in which she and Farnol were trying to fit their steps together. They were life-and-death partners who didn’t yet know each other well enough for things to be taken for granted.

  “I learned quite a lot from Mala, but all it seems to have done is deepen the mystery.” He told her of Savanna’s attempt to drive a wedge between the Ranee and her brother. He did not tell her that the Ranee suspected Mahendra might try to kill her on the journey down to Delhi. He kept that information to himself in order to protect her from further worry, if from nothing else. He would have to see that she did not keep close company with the Ranee, though, knowing Mala, he thought that possibility would be remote. “I don’t think I’ll get to the bottom of it all until Major Savanna comes out of his coma.”

  “If he comes out . . .”

  He looked at Savanna, grey and still as an effigy of himself. “Yes. If . . .”

  Bridie sighed, sat back in her chair, all at once tired by the long frightening day. “Is it always like this for you? Is this what running an Empire means?”

  “I don’t run the Empire any more than you run your newspaper. I’m only a cog, just as you are.”

  “I didn’t mean you personally. I meant the whole British Raj. You’re masters of, what, four hundred million people? And how many are there of you?”

  “Not as many as you would think. A hundred thousand of us at the most, including the army. The whole of the Indian Civil Service, those who make India work, is run by only thirteen hundred British civil servants—they’ve learned how to delegate minor authority to the Indians and chee-chees who work for them. You must have noticed, India isn’t over-run with the English.”

  “Do you think of yourself as English? Lady Westbrook told me how long your family has been here.” It struck her that she was far less American, by several generations, than he was Indian.

  It was a question he had pondered on over the years, ever since he had come back from his schooling in England. “No, I don’t think I really am.”

  “Indian, then?”

  “No, not that, either.”

  “Then what happens to you if India ever demands its independence, as we Americans did? They will, you know, some day.”

  He surprised her by nodding. “Of course they will. But when they do, it will be the intellectuals and the moneymakers who will take over and the peasants and the coolies in the cities will be no better off, they’ll be just as poor as they ever were. My father once told me that no one will ever solve the economic problems of India. All the Raj has done, he said, was to make chaos work.”

  “Will they demand their independence soon?”

  “Men like Har Dayal are already demanding it. But how do you get an ocean of people to follow you?”

  “You English appear to have done it.”

  “No, they’re not our followers and we’re not their leaders. We couldn’t have done as much as we have without the cooperation of the princes. And they will never band together for independence—they’ll have too much to lose.”

  “So you use the selfishness of all these petty rulers like the Ranee and the Nawab and the bigger maharajahs to keep India under your thumb?”

  He smiled. “I’m surprised you Americans don’t burst with your self-righteousness. Some day, when America decides to have an Empire you people will do exactly what we’re doing.”

  “I hope I never live to see the day.” But even in her own ears she sounded as if she was talking from a pulpit.

  Farnol glanced at Savanna, saw the pale blue eyes wide open and looking at him. He got up hurriedly, crossed to the bed, excited by the thought that at least he would be able to question Savanna. But as soon as he leaned over the bed he saw the eyes were blind, unmoving. Savanna was dead. He
let out a curse and straightened up, thumping his fist on the bed.

  Bridie knew from the curse what had happened. She got up at once, went to the door and opened it. “You’d better come in, Karim. Major Savanna has just died.”

  Farnol remained standing beside the bed; his stare was almost as intense as that of the dead man. Savanna was beyond all the wages of Empire now; he no longer cared about whatever prizes he had hoped to achieve with his intrigue. His place in the order of precedence would no longer be a worry to him; and anonymity might after all be a joy in Paradise. He had died relatively young, as most men did in India; Farnol knew as a fact that one rarely saw old Europeans in the country; his own father at sixty-five was looked upon as a survivor. Farnol was a man in whom pity ran deep and, though he had never liked Savanna, all at once he felt sorry for the dead man. To die from poisoning somehow took all the dignity and honour of one’s dying.

  “Wrap him up in the sheet, Karim,” he said. “We’ll bury him first thing in the morning. Get some of the servants to dig a grave.”

  Karim bundled up the body, slung it across his shoulder; in such a country as his he was accustomed to the dead, they were part of the landscape. “I’ll put him across in Miss O’Brady’s room, sahib. That Irish chappie can keep an eye on him till morning. You get some sleep.” He had the tact not to say You and Miss O’Brady get some sleep: but he nodded at the bed. “I’ll wake you early, sahib, so you can say the prayers for Major Savanna.”

  Across the hall in Bridie’s room Ahearn looked with horror on the sheet-wrapped bundle Karim brought in and laid on the floor. “Holy Jay-sus, I can’t sleep with him in here!”

  “He can’t hurt you,” said Karim contemptuously. He could never understand some of the lower levels of the British Army, especially the Irish. They seemed to be full of more fears and superstitions than a child. “He’s dead. You don’t have to salute him or anything any more. Just let him lie there and ignore him.”

  “Ignorant coolie bastard,” said Ahearn after Karim had gone out and shut the door. He looked down at the body in the sheet, then lay down again on the bed and turned his back on it. “Jay-sus, Mary and Joseph . . .”

  In his room Farnol was saying, “Do you mind sleeping in the bed after a dead man’s been in it?”

  “I think I’d rather sleep here on this couch.” Bridie had her sensitivities if not her superstitions. “My mother thought every bed should be blessed with holy water after someone had died in it.”

  Farnol handed her two blankets and a pillow. “I’ll turn my back if you want to undress. You may find it uncomfortable sleeping in your stays.”

  “I don’t wear a corset when I’m travelling, thank you. But if you would turn your back, I should like to undo a few buttons.”

  Farnol lay down on the bed, pulled the remaining blankets over him, undid a few buttons of his own. “I wish we had met somewhere else. In England, perhaps at some country house party. I once spent a very pleasant weekend—” Then he smiled. “But you don’t want to hear that.”

  “No. Goodnight, Major.”

  But Bridie, too, wished that they had met in other circumstances. She felt that if they had, he would not be sleeping in the bed alone.

  5

  I

  Extract from the memoirs of Miss Bridie O’Brady:

  BURIALS, EVEN in the most mundane surroundings, always have their awkward air for us Caucasians, as if we have still not accepted them as part of the routine of living. Grief does take the stiffness out of some, but most of us, those there only to pay respect to the dead, are rigid with disquiet, selfishly aware of who might be lowered into the grave. In that early December morning in that narrow valley in the Himalayas, as we buried Major Savanna, none of us was limp with grief; but we were as awkward as gate-crashers at the wrong party. Not so the hundreds of palace staff who, despite the early hour, materialized to stand in a circle round the newly-dug grave as Karim and Private Ahearn lowered the body into it.

  “Can’t you shoo them away? Listen to them. It’s indecent, all that chatter.”

  “There’s no privacy in India, m’dear,” said Lady Westbrook. “There are always onlookers. Curiosity is a healthy habit with them. Just ignore ‘em.”

  I tried to do that, but it was not easy. I stared at the body, still wrapped only in a sheet and with no coffin, as it disappeared into the hole in the brown earth; Major Farnol had said a prayer, in a stiff formal voice that suggested he did not say many prayers in any circumstances at all. Karim and Ahearn stepped back and the two palace coolies who had dug the grave began to shovel dirt in on the body. The chatter in the crowd increased as it turned away and began to stream back towards the palace. The show was over and it was time to go to work.

  I drew my collar up against the chill morning air, looked up gratefully at the sun as it slipped in through the gap at the end of the valley. The dawn blue of the valley suddenly gave way to greens and browns; retreating shadows made quick sketches of the contours; the thin air sparkled for a moment or two as if full of tiny translucent insects that lived and died in an instant. Mist rose out of the river like steam, turned into wraiths that fled before the sun. On a high peak snow had fallen during the night and it glittered like a silvered mailed fist held in the sky.

  As we walked back towards the palace I heard barking and roaring and screeching. “That’s the menagerie,” Clive said. “Quite a clamour, eh?”

  “Do the animals know someone is dead?”

  “If they do, I don’t think they care.”

  “Do you? I mean about Major Savanna.”

  “He was an English officer, so I care about the way he died. But on a personal level, no. Not if you mean shall I miss him. We were never close. As a matter of fact, we detested each other. But—”

  “But?”

  “I’m not going to forget how he died. And I’ll do my best to find out why.”

  “I should let him rest, Clive.” Lady Westbrook was smoking her first cheroot of the day, spoiling the morning air. “You have enough to worry about with the possible plot against the King.”

  “What if it should all be linked?”

  Lady Westbrook looked surprised, a reaction I hadn’t seen in her up till now. “Your imagination is running away with you. Are you trying to play Sherlock Holmes?”

  So far this morning Clive (for that was what I was calling him in my mind now, not Major Farnol) had looked very stern; but now he smiled. Some people have a smile that can alter the whole set and character of their face; his was one of them. I wondered what he had been like as a younger man, before he had had to shoulder the burden of other men’s deaths: what he had been like at the country house party weekend, for instance. Some women are selfish and jealous, resentful of what they can never fully know, the years of a man’s life before he came into their own life. I was one of them.

  “I don’t think I should ever make a good detective, Viola. One needs patience to follow clues and I’m not a patient man.”

  “You have been warned, Bridie,” said Lady Westbrook, a matchmaker even at seven o’clock in the morning.

  The air now was full of the cries and roaring of animals. We came up the road to the main gates and I saw the fighting elephants moving restlessly at their stakes, lifting their heads and trumpeting challenges that chilled the blood. Down towards the river the caravan elephants were tied to their stakes, but they were quiet, they knew better than to advertise in a tough neighbourhood. The whole palace was coming alive, turning into the small town which it really was.

  Then through the gates came Prince Mahendra on a splendid black horse. Behind him were two mounted servants and behind them a small cart drawn by two horses. In it were two more servants and, in a cage behind them, two masked leopards.

  Mahendra reined in his horse. “Out walking so early? The English do so love to exercise, don’t they?”

  “We have been burying Major Savanna,” said Clive and pointed back along the valley to where the new grave was al
ready lost in the brightening sunlight.

  “Oh yes.” Mahendra’s mocking smile hadn’t changed. He was a man whose smile didn’t alter anything about him: it held the world at a distance. He was dressed this morning in khaki drill hunting clothes and the drab colour seemed to accentuate his thinness. “Well, I shall see you later. I am going hunting chinkara. My pets haven’t had a run lately.”

  I looked at the two leopards, could hear them growling softly in their throats. Pets?

  Clive said, “Your sister told me you were coming with us this morning when we leave.”

  “I am. You will wait for me.”

  “No, Your Highness. We go when I give the word. And that will be in, let’s say another hour.”

  “The caravan belongs to my sister and me. It will leave when we give the word, not you, Major.”

  He rode off and as the cart started up again the leopards’ growling increased. One of them turned its head in my direction and the sharp teeth showed under the black leather mask that stopped it from seeing me. It knew prey when it could smell it.

  “What’s a chinkara?” I said.

  “A small deer.” Clive was staring down the road after Mahendra, who had galloped ahead of his small retinue, disappearing in a cloud of dust. “He lets the leopards go, taking off their masks, when his bearers sight one. The chinkara hardly stands a chance with two leopards after it. But I think that would be Bobs’ idea of sport.”

  “I feel the whole Kugar family is a damn menagerie,” said Lady Westbrook. “They should all be wearing masks, including Mala.”

  Clive’s stern, angry face relaxed again as he smiled. “I should not let her hear you say that, Viola. You can’t run as fast as a chinkara.”

  She snorted, threw away the butt of her cheroot. “I’m going to have breakfast. I hope it’s a little more civilized than that muck we had for dinner last night. Porridge, bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, tea. How does that sound to you, m’dear?”