Soldier of the Raj

by Philip McCutchan

  The screams continued and so did the terrible jabbing of the red-hot iron, branding Jones for all time. Tears were streaming down his face now, and he was gasping for breath as he ran and twisted, fell and got up again almost like a comedy doll with a bias base. But it was Ogilvie himself, who, a fraction before Jones, reached his limit. As he saw the man’s bloated, tear-stained face turned towards him, as if in pleading, he stepped forward and opened his mouth to make what he now saw as an inevitable confession. Jones, however, beat him to it in the end.

  The arms salesman called out, ‘No more, Nashkar, I’ll tell you what I know. So help me God, but I can’t go on, Mr. Wilshaw.’ He fell in a heap on the ground, and the rest was a mumble. ‘Not you, Mr. Wilshaw. You wouldn’t be able to live with yourself after, I know your sort, not like me. You’re a sahib and I know what that means. So I’ll stay true to type and do the dirty to save you doing it.’ He lifted his head. His mouth was like jelly, wobbling and trembling. There was a tense silence, during which once again Ogilvie glanced at Healey. Healey’s hand was moving inside his robe, where Ogilvie knew he had a revolver. For a moment he wondered if Healey meant to shoot Jones before he talked, and then try to break the two of them out; but guessed that Healey wouldn’t risk that, since his own cover was safe.

  Jones said, ‘Nashkar, Mr. Wilshaw isn’t Mr. Wilshaw. I was told to bring him in as my makee-learn assistant.’

  ‘Told?’

  ‘Paid.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘A man. I don’t know who he was. He gave me cash.’ Jones shook. ‘That’s all I know. I swear it. I swear it before God. I can’t take any more of that iron. If I knew any more, I’d tell you, but I don’t. I don’t!’

  Nashkar nodded. A cold wind had started to blow around the group of men, and the sun, though high now, brought little warmth to the mountains. Thin streamers of milky cloud trailed over Afghanistan to the west. The Pathan said, ‘I think you speak the truth, seller of arms, but your supposed assistant clearly has much to say.’ He gestured to his followers. ‘Bring him to me.’

  Ogilvie was seized and hustled towards Nashkar Ali Khan.

  The Pathan lifted his right hand and gave him two stinging slaps, back-handers, across the cheeks, blows that rocked his head badly. ‘You will talk.’

  ‘I will not talk.’

  The Pathan smiled. ‘You sound very sure of yourself, Englishman, but I am far from sure. I watched your face a few minutes ago...you were ready to talk but you were saved the necessity. You do not like witnessing pain. I believe, as I have said, that Jones Sahib knows no more than he has spoken of already. It is you alone who can save him now.’

  He gave an order in Pushtu and two of the tribesmen went towards Jones and picked him up, setting him on his feet and holding him steady. Jones was blubbering like a baby, all control gone. Healey was still watching with supercilious lack of concern; but Ogilvie fancied he saw a more wary look in his eye, the beginning of a fear that Ogilvie might well break, and, in so doing, give away his own cover after all.

  But Ogilvie knew that whatever might happen now, he must never do that. He must shut his eyes to Jones’s weeping, his ears to the terrible cries that tore at him and rang across the peaks, echoing into the Afghan hills as the dreadful proceedings were resumed. The time for burning was past now, the embers of the smouldering fire kicked out in a shower of sparks. Fresh implements were brought, irons of different shapes and uses. To some extent at least, this was the Pathan creed of badal in action, an exercise in the stark cruelty of war-minded men, of a race that held human life as cheap as dirt and who, as fighters, scorned the fury of any gods. Ogilvie closed his eyes, but was made to open them again. Afterwards, he found his memory for detail unclear, as though his subconscious had drawn a protective veil over the images that had moved across his vision. His memories were a blur of demented screaming, of gushing blood as Jones’s tongue was drawn — not cut — from his mouth, drawn out by an iron clamp that extended it until something gave way and the bloody remnants were cast on the ground at his feet. He remembered the empty eye sockets, but without a conscious remembrance of the act that had put out the eyeballs. He could see the stumps of arms and legs after the hackings of a curved blade had severed them, one after the other, so that Jones was reduced to a twitching, sightless, speechless but still moaning trunk only just about alive. Cruelly, death would not come to him, though it was only a matter of time before he bled to death. Equally cruelly, Ogilvie could remember the actual end with terrible clarity: the sight of Jones finally being flayed with long whips that ripped the living skin from all that was left of him, of the shattered bloody mouth sending out bubbles of red blood that turned the whimpers and moans into grotesque gurgles, and the body bouncing up from the ground, into the air, propelled by desperate levering movements of the stumps, as it tried to evade the all-seeking, all-finding lashes of the whips.

  *

  When Jones was dead Ogilvie expected the same kind of treatment and wondered how long he would take to break. But he was wrong. Nashkar Ali Khan, showing no discomposure that he hadn’t talked, turned to him and said, ‘For you — whom I shall still address for the time being as Wilshaw Sahib — for you, a different treatment.’

  ‘Why so?’ Sick to the stomach, Ogilvie still had his head up, though his face was as white as a sheet beneath his tan. ‘Different in what way?’

  ‘You will see. I do not wish to kill you. I may have a use for you. I believe you are a British officer, sent into Waziristan to spy upon me.’

  Ogilvie shrugged. ‘Believe what you like. I can’t control your thoughts.’ Although the idea of continuing to live as a British officer, rather than die like Jones, had its attractions, his duty was still plain: he must scotch any suggestions that he was what he was.

  ‘Why do you persist in a denial of what is obvious?’

  ‘I do not know what is obvious, Nashkar Ali Khan. Except that I am a seller of arms.’

  The Pathan made a gesture of irritation. ‘Come, you cannot expect me to believe this now!’

  ‘It is nevertheless the truth. The man who paid money to Jones Sahib...he was from another arms firm. A rival. I was to be planted on Jones Sahib’s territory...to take over his contacts. I am employed, not by Jones Sahib’s firm, but by this other one. I can still arrange for a supply of arms.’ It was all he could think of, and it was as useless as he had expected it to be.

  Nashkar laughed loudly, lifting his arms to the sky. ‘I am taken for a fool, a child! If this is true, why did you not speak before?’

  ‘Because to do so would not have saved Jones Sahib any suffering, as well you know, Nashkar Ali Khan. You would have continued with the torture whatever had happened.’

  The Pathan nodded. ‘It is true I do not like being deceived by any man, but I think the true reason why you did not say this earlier is because Jones Sahib would have failed to order his thoughts in time to back you convincingly, and for him to die suited you better. Or that such fantasy has only at this moment flown into your mind, Wilshaw Sahib.’

  ‘I repeat, you must think your own thoughts. I cannot make you believe me if you do not wish to, Nashkar Ali Khan, but it takes a fool to turn away help before complete certainty is reached.’

  The Pathan laughed again. ‘Then to such extent, Wilshaw Sahib, I accept the name of fool!’ Impatient now, he swung away on his heel, striding to the edge of the flat rock with his garments blowing out along the cold wind, and stood for a moment gazing out, like the sadhu on his high peak overhead, at the brown and purple Afghan hills. He was a commanding figure, Ogilvie thought, and a very confident one. He had seemed in fact little troubled about having a spy in the camp, an attitude that seemed to indicate his plans as being so far advanced towards fulfilment as to be unassailable by any spying. Nevertheless, Ogilvie was surprised to note an air of frustration about the Pathan leader as Nashkar Ali Khan turned his back on the panorama of the hills and once again faced his prisoner. He walked almost moodily t
owards Ogilvie, and stopped in front of him. Fingering his beard he said, ‘A little subterfuge in your case, Wilshaw Sahib. A provocation, something to agitate the minds of your British soldiers. Many times throughout our history it has been of benefit to cause doubt and anxiety in the heads of the enemy.’

  ‘I have no connection with British soldiers, Nashkar Ali Khan. There is no enmity in my thoughts.’

  The Pathan laughed. ‘You are a foolish man, Wilshaw Sahib. So foolish! Were it not for the fact that I believe you to be a British officer, you would already be dead. As dead as Jones Sahib who — a mere seller of arms in very truth — had the temerity to bring you into my land! But as a British officer, Wilshaw Sahib, you may have a very welcome use.’

  It was true, Ogilvie thought. Bargaining, holding him as a hostage, using him as a threat in so many possible ways — he was much more use alive than dead, clearly. Jones hadn’t been.

  He said, ‘Very well, then. If you wish, regard me as a British officer. It’ll do you no good, of course, but it’s entirely your decision. What’s this subterfuge you spoke of?’

  ‘For now it remains known to me alone. Brooding upon this will do you no harm, Wilshaw Sahib, and you will do your brooding here, in the solitude of the mountain-tops.’ The Pathan had words with his followers after which three of the tribesmen, with the long-barrelled rifles in their hands, took charge of Ogilvie and led him away. Nashkar Ali Khan laid a friendly hand on Captain Healey’s shoulder. ‘Come, Earless One,’ he said. ‘For the time being, the fleshpots of Maizar once again — and you shall join me. If we are lucky, the time for fighting will come soon now.’

  Ogilvie’s last sight of them, as he looked back on starting a descent from the flat expanse of rock, was of the two men engaged in an amicable conversation. In close company with his escort, Ogilvie walked through the cavern, out into the fissure and across the pass, after which he was told to follow a path running up the mountain-side. They climbed for a long way, no easy matter in the rare atmosphere, stopping at last beside a hole in the hillside that reared above the lonely, barren track. To Ogilvie’s right the landscape fell away, to give the same outlook, but a much longer one, as had faced the flat rock where Jones had died: a splendid view into Afghanistan, home of the Pathans. And, looking upwards to a higher peak in the range where he stood — looking, as though his eye had been drawn involuntarily to the spot — Ogilvie saw what he had seen earlier, at a greater distance through his binoculars; the old carven face and skinny frame of the sadhu, Nashkar’s holy man, keeping his unending vigil for Ogilvie knew not what. It was a remarkable sight, almost a frightening one. There must surely be some sinister objective behind that cold and lonely vigil.

  The men of the escort party pushed Ogilvie towards the hole, ahead of the long, snaking bayonets, rustily projecting from the barrels of the rifles.

  ‘Into the cavity,’ one of them said in Pushtu.

  ‘There is no room.’ The hole was scarcely two feet in height, and little more in depth from the track. ‘I could not even curl up like a dog.’

  ‘There is room. See!’ The man pushed his rifle and bayonet into the hole, prodding downwards into darkness. He appeared not to touch bottom. Ogilvie, realizing the hopelessness of resistance, shrugged and moved forward and carefully lowered himself into the hole. It was a fearsome business, for anything might lurk in that pit, but he was fortified by Nashkar Ali Khan’s expressed desire to keep him alive. There was bottom, as his feet told him when his head was just about on a level with the tribesmen’s knees. This bottom felt like dry rock, with a thin covering of rubble. Tiny things, lizards probably, scuttled over his groping feet. His head, he found on looking upward, was an inch or two clear of the roof of the hole.

  The Pathans bent, and looked in on him; then turned away, and he heard grunting and straining noises, and the clumping, dragging sound of something heavy being brought towards the hole. It was a boulder, oval in shape, and weathered by its long sojourn in the hills to an overall smoothness like the egg of some colossal nightmare bird. This boulder was rolled and pushed towards Ogilvie, into the mouth of the hole, where its poles slotted neatly and very firmly into grooves on either side. Ogilvie’s eyes were just clear of it, and he was able to look out; but it formed a very effective key to a very effective prison.

  When the boulder was in place there was some low chatter outside and soon after this Ogilvie heard footsteps going away. He was not, however, to be left alone. More footsteps, slower ones close at hand, told him this; and a moment later he saw the feet and the hem of the dirty garment of the Pathan who had been left on guard.

  He could still see the holy man, as motionless as before.

  The silence of the high hills was intense, a living force of nature. Occasionally and startlingly, it was broken by the raucous squawk of a bird, or the horrible slow flap of greedy vultures’ wings as the birds of prey circled expectantly overhead, foul birds bent upon a foul meal — carrion birds that, oddly, seemed not to go near the lonely sadhu, so far as Ogilvie could see.

  Hours passed in this silence; the sun went down into the distant Afghan hills. There was a crack of a rifle from somewhere; the vultures, crying out, wheeled away, flapping off for a look. Perhaps, in the silence, a man had died. There was no apparent human reaction, and even the Pathan, sitting down outside the hole, showed no interest; he didn’t even move the scrawny legs thrust out before his body. But soon after this he stirred, and held a water-bottle through the hole, putting it to Ogilvie’s lips.

  ‘Drink,’ he said.

  Ogilvie did so, though he guessed the water would be far from clean. ‘Food,’ he said.

  ‘Patience, Englishman.’

  More time passed, then once again the guard rose to his feet stiffly and pushed some tough substance into Ogilvie’s mouth — it tasted like meat of some kind, but had the consistency of india-rubber. Ogilvie retched, but forced himself to swallow. Life had to be maintained. As night fell, he dozed, slipping into uneasy nightmares, into disordered thoughts. The constriction of the elongated hole was of itself painful; he longed to stretch his limbs, which shook and twitched with inaction and restlessness; but he could do no more, in what was in effect a sheath that enclosed him in as glove-like a fashion as any sword’s scabbard, than wriggle his fingers and shuffle his feet. It was a claustrophobic feeling that could soon bring panic — and almost had already. Each time he had felt that panic encroaching Ogilvie had taken a deep breath and forced his thoughts away from the hole, away from his body, to roam in the free world.

  Next day as the sun came up, invisibly behind him, to lighten the grandeur of the hills, the guard provided breakfast: a drink from the water-bottle, and some crushed maize which the dirty hands once again fed directly into his mouth. At least it was nourishment; if he was not to be feted, he was not to be totally starved. It was proof that Nashkar Ali Khan had meant what he said, and it was proof to be held on to as an earnest of eventual release.

  Munching maize, he looked upward at the sadhu’s peak. The old man was still there, still motionless. ‘What does the sadhu eat?’ he asked his warder. ‘Manna from heaven?’

  ‘The sadhu is fasting,’ the man answered. He turned away from Ogilvie to stare upward. ‘A fast of indefinite length, it is said, but he will survive.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It is written.’

  ‘What is he waiting for? Is that written, too?’

  ‘All is written, and men have only to read and follow. Or listen to the words of the wise men, the men who read, and then follow. The sadhu awaits a sign.’

  ‘I see.’ Ogilvie hesitated. ‘What is this sign, then?’

  ‘No man can say what form the sign will take, but when it comes, the sadhu will know.’

  ‘Is it the sign for fighting, for war...war on the British?’

  The tribesman said, ‘Yes, even so, Englishman. It will be the sign for deliverance, for the throwing-off of a yoke for too long strung about the necks of my ra
ce. When the sign shows itself. there will be a most mighty upsurge that will overwhelm the usurpers and cast them into the sea whence they came.’ There was fervour in the man’s eyes and voice, dedication in his whole being. ‘It is this for which the whole Pathan nation now waits,’ He lifted a lean, hard arm. ‘Up there, upon the peak, the sadhu sits as you see. Upon our loftiest peak, from where he watches over the land of our ultimate birth. It is he who soon will light the lamp, and when he lights it, Englishman, its glow will instantly be seen along the borders of the British Raj, and all men will follow it.’

  ‘And Nashkar Ali Khan?’

  ‘He is our leader, and we will follow him!

  ‘But only on the word of the sadhu?’

  The man nodded. ‘Even so.’

  Ogilvie found this interesting; evidently O’Kelly had been as right as Healey had thought. Without the sadhu, Nashkar Ali Khan might well dwindle to the status of a mere khel chieftain; Without the sadhu, the fervour would go out of the tribes. He asked, ‘And the sign which the sadhu awaits...if this does not come, what then?’

  ‘The sign will come,’ the man said with firm conviction.

  ‘But if it should not?’ Ogilvie persisted.

  ‘It is a useless speculation. The sign will come. The sadhu has promised this.’