It was noon, for the sun stood directly overhead; but there was still no cloud of dust on the plain. Yusaf settled himself more comfortably and waited.
‘How much longer - dear God, how much longer!’ whimpered Chrissie Wilkinson, lying where she had fallen when they had battered down the door of Winter’s bedroom and dragged her out screaming from under the bed. The blood from her wounds was caked and drying, and it seemed impossible that anyone could be so mutilated and in such agony and still live.
She had lain there for hours, hearing the screams and the shouting and the horrible confusion of noise. Hearing at last only her own hoarse, laboured breathing - each breath an unbelievable torture. There was someone lying beside her whose head rested upon her, and whose outflung arm lay across her, its weight adding to her agony. Someone who surely was also alive? Her glazing eyes lit with a last flicker of recognition: ‘Con,’ she whimpered. ‘Con—’ But he did not move. Nothing moved in all that silent house except the scarlet waves of pain that washed over her but would not drown her.
‘They are all dead,’ thought Chrissie Wilkinson. ‘All dead - how much longer—’
She tried to move her head, and died.
But they were not all dead. Twenty-seven of those who had taken refuge in the Residency that morning were dead, but others had escaped into the jungle and one had escaped in a different manner.
The mutineers and the mob who had rushed the Residency had burst into the empty hall to be met by the Commissioner of Lunjore, clad only in a pair of thin cotton pantaloons and a gaily coloured dressing-gown, and swaying dangerously on his feet.
‘C’mon in!’ urged the Commissioner expansively. ‘Plen’y of drink. Welcome!’
He advanced unsteadily towards them and the men drew back. ‘He is mad!’ muttered one. ‘He is surely mad.’
The East is tolerant of madness, believing those who suffer from it to be afflicted by God and therefore under divine protection. They did not touch the Commissioner, but one of them, pushing past the others, slashed with a tulwar at a large oil painting that hung on the wall and ripped the canvas from top to bottom.
‘Thash the idea!’ yelled the Commissioner with enthusiasm. The destructive instinct that brandy was apt to unloose in him caught fire, and lunging at a large pottery jar full of canna lilies that stood on the hall table, he sent it toppling. It crashed to the floor, sending water, flowers and chips of pottery flying, and the Commissioner bellowed with laughter, and stumbling to the door into the drawing-room, flung it open and waved in the mob. ‘C’mon! Lesh break it up - thash th’ shpirit!’
He had raged through the house, shouting and yelling with the shouting, yelling, frenzied horde, assisting them with howls of drunken laughter to smash and destroy; oblivious, in the tumult, of the shrieks of women and children dragged out of hiding and butchered among the wreckage; blind to the blood and the agony, and seeing only a noisy drunken mob of fellow-revellers rioting through the rooms in jolly carouse.
‘He is mad—’; ‘He is afflicted of Allah—’ They had not harmed him and at last they had gone; rushing out of the blood-stained shambles they had made, their arms laden with loot, to seek other victims and wreck other bungalows.
The Commissioner of Lunjore, left alone in the silent house, had reeled towards his room shouting for his bearer and for Iman Bux. But no one had answered him.
Where the devil had they all got to? It was Winter’s fault … where was she? It was a wife’s duty to see that a house was properly run - servants on duty. Disgraceful! - he would tell her so at once.
He stumbled over the threshold of his wife’s room and stopped. Why, there was Chrissie! Dear Chrissie. Always been fond of Chrissie - good for anything. Worth six of his wife …
He wavered towards her, tripped, collapsed onto the floor beside her and plunged into oblivion.
Niaz had meant to ride to within half a mile of the bridge and then, striking off at a tangent into the thick jungle, make for the Hirren Minar by a route which he and Alex had often used before. He should by rights have reached it several hours before Alex, but he did not do so.
By the irony of fate it was a bullet fired by one of the five British women who had preferred to remain in their own bungalows rather than take refuge at the Residency, that had brought down his horse. Laura Campion, standing over the body of her dying husband on the verandah of her bungalow, had fired his musket at a mob of sepoys who had pursued the wounded man from the lines. The bullet went wide, and Niaz’s horse, neck stretched at a gallop, had crossed the line of fire.
Niaz struck the dry grass verge of the roadway, rolled into a ditch and lay still.
He recovered consciousness within a few minutes, and not long afterwards, shaken and badly bruised but otherwise unhurt, he was crawling down the ditch towards a culvert where the drive leading into Captain Garrowby’s bungalow branched off the road. As he did so he had heard the explosion of the Magazine, and had not known if it also signalled Alex’s death. But he did not turn back.
There was a tangle of oleanders growing by the gate of Captain Garrowby’s bungalow, and Niaz, waiting his opportunity, left the culvert and took refuge among them. Since the night that he had been knifed leaving the lines he had had few illusions on the score of his safety if the sepoys should mutiny, and he preferred to keep out of the public eye. But he must have a horse, and there would be horses in the stables behind the bungalow.
There was a smell of smoke in the hot air and a crackling sound, and emerging from the shelter of the oleanders he saw that the bungalow was on fire. He ran across the garden, keeping to the shelter of the shrubs and trees, and saw a mob of sepoys between the back of the bungalow and the stables, cutting off his approach. Niaz did not linger. He scrambled over the compound wall and fifteen minutes later he was a quarter of a mile away, wriggling along a drain behind Mr Joshua Cottar’s stables. But Josh Cottar had taken four of his horses with him when he had left for Calcutta, and Mrs Cottar had driven to the Residency in a carriage and pair, accompanied by a syce riding the remaining horse. The stable doors stood open and the stables were empty.
It had not proved in the least easy to steal a horse that morning, for the mutinous sepoys and the bazaar rabble had scattered through the cantonments, shouting and firing off their muskets, hunting down the British and attacking, looting and burning the bungalows. But Alex might be dead, and if so it was doubly necessary that he, Niaz, should reach the Hirren Minar and the bridge. He would have to do so even if it meant walking.
Crouched behind a prickly cactus hedge he heard a mob of men stream past, coming from the direction of the city - a mob who shouted the battle-cry of his creed: Deen! Deen! Fatteh Mohammed! An odd shiver tingled through him at the sound and he set his teeth and tried to shut his ears to the fierce cry that had been a clarion call to all men of his faith for over a thousand years.
A dried finger of the cactus overhead, withered by the sun, threw a shadow on the hot, hard ground before him. A curved shadow in the shape of the sickle moon - the emblem of that faith. Niaz stared at it, seeing it, in a sudden wave of superstition, as a sign. The sign of the once great Empire of the Moguls, shrunk now to no more than a shadow on the ground. Men of his race and creed were fighting now to raise that Empire from the dust into which it had fallen, and if they succeeded, a Mogul of the House of Timur would once again rule over the greater part of India. Once again there would be Mohammedan Viceroys and Generals and Governors.
‘Ya Allah! Ya Allah! Allah ho Akhbar! Fatteh Mohammed’ … The sounds died away, but the echoes still rang in his ears as he ran on, keeping to the cover of trees and walls, taking short cuts across the compounds of burning bungalows, and making for the road that led out of Lunjore towards Oudh.
He had eventually stolen a dhobi’s donkey, and mounted on this had made good time, his dangling feet barely clearing the ground as the thin little beast ambled briskly along through the choking dust. And he might well have covered several miles in this ma
nner had it not been for a sadhu. But he had turned a bend in the road and come upon a sadhu who stood upon a little brick platform before a shrine under a peepul tree by the roadside, exhorting an excited mob of villagers.
The sadhu had apparently recognized Niaz, for he had flung out a skinny arm and a pointing finger, and screamed a string of imprecations, and the villagers, armed with sticks and stones and other primitive but painful weapons had moved to the attack, but paused at the sight of the revolver in Niaz’s hand. ‘Kill!’ howled the sadhu. ‘Kill the follower of the feringhis - the traitor - the betrayer!’
Niaz fired and the man fell forward, coughing blood. ‘That for thy knife in my back!’ called Niaz, and abandoning the donkey took to his heels and the shelter of the high grass and scrub at the edge of a cane-field. A second shot discouraged the villagers from pursuit, and he made his escape across an irrigation ditch and into an orange orchard.
An hour later he had dragged a portly bunnia from the back of a starved-looking pony, and was riding as hard as he could persuade the animal to gallop in the direction of the bridge of boats.
There was seldom much traffic on the roads in the heat of the day during the hot weather, and he passed an occasional lumbering bullock cart, but nothing else. He had abandoned the pony by the roadside when he took to the jungle, finding it easier to make his way on foot, and had arrived at the ruined hide-out barely fifteen minutes before Alex.
Something grunted and crashed away through the undergrowth as he approached it, and Niaz had entered the jungle-choked ruin with caution and groped in the gloom for the length of stout bamboo that he knew he would find against one wall. A moment or two later he had operated the primitive mechanism that released the rope ladder, and was in the upper room collecting sundry packages with feverish haste.
He had been descending with his load when Alex arrived and both of them had been too exhausted for speech. They had looked at each other for a long moment and then Alex had climbed the ladder. He dipped a tin mug into the water that stood in the covered earthenware chatti and drank it thirstily. The water was warm and stale and there was not overmuch of it for a good deal had evaporated since he had filled the chatti almost three weeks ago. There was brandy there too, and he drank some of that, and fetching the Westley Richards rifle from its hiding-place in the ruined dome above, loaded it. Niaz returned from below and fetched a shotgun from the same place, and Alex looked up and shook his head: ‘Nay, leave it. I have this’ - he touched the revolver. ‘How much time have we?’
Niaz shrugged his shoulders. ‘An hour - two hours - a day. Who knows?’
He saw Alex draw a quick breath of relief and said: ‘I was delayed, and therefore I came slowly’ - he gave a brief account of that delay. ‘But there are none on the road as yet, and there being no rissala they must come on foot. I do not think they will come too soon. They are mad from killing and they are breaking into the bungalows to rob and burn.’
‘When there are no more left to kill they will be afraid and come away quickly,’ said Alex, filling his pockets with spare ammunition and reaching for powder-flask and shot.
‘Assuredly,’ said Niaz, following his example. ‘But there is little shade on that road, and they must march. How didst thou come?’
‘By the jungle,’ said Alex briefly.
‘On foot then?’
Alex nodded. ‘All but a few of those who were in the Residency Koti were slain. I came away across the nullah with three memsahibs whom I left half a koss from here. They follow, but slowly. I have marked the way. Let us go.’
They descended the swaying ladder and shouldering their burdens went out into the hot shadows of the forest. The river ran past less than two hundred yards from the Hirren Minar, but the banks were steep and overhung by the dense jungle so that none passed that way, and the road and the bridge of boats lay away to the right, a scant mile from the hidden ruin. No paths led there, but Alex and Niaz knew this part of the jungle well, and they had their own tracks through the apparently trackless thickets and the man-high grass, the trees and the cane-brakes.
They moved with more and more caution as they neared the road, and presently the jungle thinned out a little and they heard the gurgle of the river running between the boats, and the creak and strain of the bridge.
‘Wait here,’ whispered Niaz. ‘I will go forward and see if the road be clear.’ He laid down the load he carried and wriggled away like a lizard through the thick scrub.
Alex sat down with his back to a tree-trunk and tried not to think of a dozen things that he had seen that morning. Things that made his stomach heave and cramp with rage, and a red haze swim in his brain so that some primitive, unreasoning, tribal instinct had made him, for one dreadful instant, want to get his hands round Niaz’s throat at the Hirren Minar - because of the things that men of Niaz’s race had done that day. He had seen, too, for a fractional moment, a like antagonism in Niaz’s face, and known that the drag of race and blood had pulled at him also. It had been there for less than a breath, but he had recognized it for what it was.
‘But we are not only our people - we are ourselves,’ thought Alex, ‘ourselves! No we are not - we are chained together by environment and customs and blood … “I arm their hands and furnish the pretence …”’ He found that he was unable to think clearly and wished that he need never think again.
The undergrowth rustled and gave up Niaz who said cheerfully and without troubling to lower his voice: ‘I have locked the toll-keeper and the police guard in the toll-house and have taken away their muskets. Remains now those on the far side.’
Alex said: ‘Had they heard aught?’
‘Nay; for two slept, and that they would not have done had the news been told.’ He lifted his discarded burden and said: ‘Why do we not cut the boats loose? That would suffice.’
‘For a time only, for the boats would strand and they would use them again. And I would close this road.’
They came out cautiously into the thinner belt of jungle by the bridge-head where the grass was trampled down and the ashes of old fires showed where travellers had stopped for the night. The road lay long and empty under the dancing waves of heat, and the small stone-built toll-house was silent. There was no sound to be heard except the gurgling of water between the close-lashed boats.
Alex glanced at the toll-house under frowning brows and Niaz said sweetly: ‘They will not cry out. I have bound them.’
‘And the others in the huts behind?’
‘They sleep. And all the muskets were in the toll-house. They will not move for some hours yet. Why should they? There was no outcry.’
They walked down the slope of the road onto the bridge, into the full blaze of the blinding noonday and the sun-dazzled water, the creaking planks hot under their feet. The heat shimmered off the wood in quivering waves that smelt of tar, and the glittering river that slid beneath them did not cool it. The banks narrowed and the river ran deep from a hundred yards above the bridge to a mile below, for the bridge spanned it at its narrowest point. But upstream the sand bars and the shallows widened until they were lost in the heat haze. There were row upon row of mud-turtles basking in the glare at the edge of the sand bars on the far side of the river, but except for the turtles there seemed to be nothing else alive within a dozen miles, and the hollow sound of their footsteps on the planks of the bridge was loud in the hot silence.
A drowsy toll-keeper heard it and came reluctantly to the door of the mud hut that served as a toll-house on the Oudh bank of the river. Seeing a sahib he salaamed and hurriedly straightened his turban. Alex returned the salute and inquired as to the prospects of shikar in the jungles by the bridge. He had, he said, glancing down at the stain that Mrs Holly’s blood had left on the sleeve of his coat, shot a leopard that morning not a mile up the road. While he talked Niaz moved between them and the hut.
Five minutes later the horrified toll-keeper and the two men in the hut who constituted the bridge guard were sitting gagged
and bound in the inner room, and Niaz was making fast the door. He carried the two antiquated muskets out and flung them into the water as he and Alex ran back along the causeway and onto the bridge.
They worked swiftly and methodically in the boiling sun, laying the charges, tamping and connecting fuses, never certain that the intense heat of the hot wood and the burning metal would not detonate the explosive of itself. The sweat poured off them and the dazzling glare off the river scorched their faces and hurt their eyeballs.
‘Listen!’ said Niaz suddenly. ‘There are horses on the road.’
Alex leapt to his feet and stood for a moment listening intently; and heard the faint faraway sound that Niaz had heard. He snatched up the rifle and thrust it at Niaz. ‘Four more and we have done. Hold them off for a little—’
Niaz turned and raced for the bridge-head and Alex bent to the charges again, working with feverish speed. The sound of horses’ hooves was clearer now and presently he heard the crack of a rifle-shot, but he did not lift his head or look round. He must have more time - only a little more time. The noise of the river was astonishingly loud under his feet, and the heat of the iron bands that reinforced the planking burnt his hands as though it were red-hot. Once again he seemed to hear Sir Henry’s voice speaking from the shadows of the verandah in the Lucknow Residency - ‘… it is time we need - time most of all—’
‘Only five minutes!’ prayed Alex, ‘it isn’t much to ask - only five minutes—!’
He heard a fusillade of shots and a bullet sang past his head like a hornet, but still he did not look round.
Niaz reached the toll-house, and leaping the step of the shallow verandah, unbarred the door and ran to the small window that looked down the long Lunjore road, ignoring the groans of the three bound and gagged men who watched him from the floor with starting eyes.
There were perhaps twelve or fifteen riders, sepoys from Lunjore, advancing at a leisurely trot for the bridge; either men bringing the news of the rising to Oudh, or an advance party sent to secure the bridge for the main body of the mutineers who would cross later that day to swell the ranks of the malcontents in the newly annexed province.