Nightrunners of Bengal (23 page)

Subadar Narain lay half stunned among the crowd outside
the courthouse, quite close to Rodney. He watched Rodney
get up and run, and lifted his pistol, then slowly lowered it.
Turning, he looked straight into Naik Parasiya’s angry eyes.
The naik’s teeth were clenched; he said, “We
have
to kill
them now, Subadar-sahib
. Anyone
who is not for us is
against us” The Mohammedans of the 60th were running
together; they dribbled at the mouth and screamed, “Din!
Din! Din!” The subadar climbed shakily to his feet. Mad
ness. What could he do if this was happening all over India?
He’d wait and see, and try to get control of them again when
they calmed down.

Fifty yards away Ensign Horace Simpkin died quickly. His
clothes were blown off him, and flash burns covered the front
of his body from forehead to feet. He was blind and dying,
and the Union Jack waved somewhere above in a lightning-
shot murk of pain. When he saw that the 88th had mutinied,
he had run to blow up their magazine. That would take away
their power; the 13th and 60th would have time to come to
the rescue; he’d save Bhowani for England. That was what
he meant to do. But a piece of Indian timber, whirled by
fire, did it a second earlier. The magazine blew up in his
face. He was dying, and he remembered his debts. It was his
duty as an officer and a gentleman to repay the money
lenders what he had borrowed, and the interest at twelve
per cent per month. Captain Savage had lent him fifty rupees.
He wouldn’t leave an estate big enough to pay them. He
wriggled on the ground and groaned. Emma
—
it was his duty
to support her, and she said she was starving. The Union
Jack blurred until it was only the blood-red St. George’s
Cross of England, flying above the winds of agony, fluttering
and whipping at the staff while black smoke boiled round
it.

Harriet Caversham woke to a smell of burning. She sat up,
sniffed and nudged her husband sharply. “Eustace, some
thing is on fire. Go and see about it at once.” Lieutenant
Colonel Caversham was singing an aria in a golden tenor,
while the thousands who filled the mighty hall wept and
applauded. He heard and obeyed, still three-parts asleep, his
mind singing. A line of flame ran across the ceiling cloth,
and he saw that the thatch above was on fire. Blinking, he
guided his wife out before him on to the verandah, so that
the sepoys among the trees shot her first. She fell back dead
into his arms. He stared down at her and out at the lawn.
The flames silhouetted him and made him a perfect target
but it took them three more shots. To the last he had no
faintest notion of what it was that kept smashing into his
stomach and chest.

Two-Bottle Tom Myers was in his own room. His wife
and Rachel slept in the next room and sometimes one or
the other would come and sit with him, but he was alone
now. He lay fully clothed on his bed, gripping the wooden
frame and watching the ceiling. God the All-Terrible ad
vanced on him in cloud and fire and a wrinkling spread of
grey, lined with scarlet. God the punishing Father came like
a scorpion, and the scorpion crawled over his head, curled
its tail, was large and larger, grey and black, and lined with
scarlet.
Let there be no mercy. Let my sweat run and my blood come, and the silent scorpion stride down with giant strides. I have sinned against heaven, and in Thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called Thy son. Others see me and follow me, and I do not die. Strike.
The wrath of God struck
down in light. The brilliance blinded him and seared him.
The hand of God came out of the violet light and pressed
him down and smothered him. His bladder and bowels
emptied, he jerked once, and closed his eyes with a smile.
The sepoys, creeping into the stench a minute later with a
lamp, did not touch him for he was clearly dead. There was
no secret leader here, and they muttered prayers and ran
out of the bungalow. Mother Myers and Rachel huddled
together in the next room, listening to the silence.

Lachman the bearer ran fast through cantonments, the
cook’s carving knife in his hand. He thought fast, too: the
goldsmith in the Street of the Metalworkers had a room at
the back to shelter them for a few days, and could get a
horse somehow. Sher Dil hadn’t been a bad old man
—
for
a Mohammedan—but he’d really been showing his age these
last two years. He presumed too much; it wasn’t right or
dignified that the great Captain Savage-sahib should be called
Rodney-sahib as if he were still a baby. Now that the sepoys
had killed the old fool, Savage-sahib would certainly pro
mote
him
Lachman,
to butler.
Then he could serve the sahib
for ever, and be near him, and the work would be most
properly done. The sepoys
—
treacherous swine, they’d catch
it when Savage-sahib was able to get back at them. But
Lachman had to find him first and help him to escape, or
they’d murder him. He’d thought of everything: knife, money
—
all his own savings and all his wife’s gold trinkets
—
hidden
pistol, ammunition, set of native clothes. He’d get the sahib
away all right. Sepoys stopped him from time to time, and
he always answered, “I’m looking for my sahib. I want to
kill him, or at least stick this into his corpse, the bullying
white swine!”

Ursula Herrold held the sides of her cot and giggled. She
loved the shakos and the dark faces
—
nice hard hands to
lift and swing and tickle, much better and harder than Ayah
could, nearly as nice as Daddy. Gurgle and shout. This
always made them laugh and lift her up when she was out
for a walk with Ayah and met them. “Cummany! lef-righ-
lef-righ!” She stamped her bare feet in time with her own
shout, and crowed down the muzzle of the rifle.

The Rani of Kishanpur stood on her battlements in a
hushed night. A dust storm had raved about the fort at dusk,
whipping the trees in crazy fury, and it was cooler. She faced
west, gripping the edge of the stone and feeling its rough
ness with her hands. She saw nothing out there and knew
she never would see anything except the silent river and the
jungle. She swallowed from time to time and waited there
until the sun came up behind her. Then she ran down to her
son on his cushions and hugged him, and did not leave the
room all day.

The battering pandemonium stopped. Rodney heard men shouting “Din! Din!”; others near him lay breathless and open-mouthed against the earth. He scrambled to his feet and ran round the back of the court, northward through the gardens. Behind him the crowd breathed, all together, like a huge animal, but there was no pursuit He did not think anyone had seen him go.

He worked towards his own bungalow as fast as he could, stumbling, climbing awkwardly over walls, dodging past servants’ quarters. He had no weapon; one thing at a time—get to Robin and Joanna. His head ached fiercely and his eyes brimmed over; shock and strain were physical hurts, as definite as the agony of his burns. He knew a sudden reasonless certainty that on this night all India had exploded into smoke and fire, that all its millions would be his enemies and he would find no pity or shelter in all its miles of plain and jungle. To right and left the bungalows burned, and outside each one men moved about in silhouette. Some of them were shouting excitedly and firing rifles; in others the first panic of fear had gone, so that they stood about in whispering knots.

And, kneeling in the shallow irrigation ditches, lying face down across the well copings, spread-eagled in the flowerbeds, crumpled in the dusty paths, lay the broken and the dead. There were white and brown, master and servant and sepoy; a disjointed body at the foot of the Sculleys’ garden wall; a girl in a nightgown, armless under a jacaranda; a sepoy across her, bayoneted; bright flames from a bungalow, and shrieks, where a woman burned alive and troopers waited, carbines ready. That was the Cummings’. Isobel would have been with Dotty van Steengaard; Caroline too, perhaps. He checked his pace—but he couldn’t stop now. A ripple of insane expectation changed his pain to pleasure.
He’d split a sepoy apart with a steel edge, drag his entrails out slowly, by hand, while the man still lived. His eyes flared in his blackened face, and blood ran out under his fingernails.

At the lower wall of his own garden he saw that the bungalow, the servants’ quarters, and the stables were on fire. He heard the horses screaming and the beating of their hoofs against the walls and doors. Something in white lay on its back near the carriage porch; straining his eyes, he thought it was the corpse of Sher Dil. Ten or eleven sepoys of the 88th wandered around the garden, searching aimlessly. The flames picked out their scarlet coats, white trousers, white crossbelts, and immensely high black shakos, and twinkled on crests and buttons. He had seen them a score of times like that, round campfires. He ran straight forward on them, his hands open.

The cry choked in his throat and he knelt quickly. Beneath his feet a face glistened dark and wet in a bed of canas. The dull scarlet flowers were crushed down, and beside the face there was a white bundle. He put out his hands and touched them. His batman Rambir, shot in the throat and chest, lay on his back with his hands crooked up. His son Robin lay beside Rambir, face down in his nightshirt, the back of his head a black and clotted blur. Rodney felt the skull gently and thought it was not broken. Blood still trickled under the fair hair and dripped on the earth. They must have held him by the ankles, dashed him once against a wall or a tree, and thought they’d killed him. Rodney gathered him up and pressed him, kissing the round face and purple eyelids. The boy breathed in quick shallow gasps. The sepoys still moved about the lawn.

One of them stopped by the banyan tree across the drive and looked up into it. At once he shouted in triumph to the others, and they all ran together under the tree’s drooping air roots. The first man scrambled into a fork and on up out of sight. The leaves shook, a woman screamed. Joanna crashed through the branches and fell sideways on the hard earth. Rodney held his son tighter and slipped slowly over
the edge of reason. He must go to her, and his son was alive in his arms. He must go; his arms crept down, he could not make his muscles obey; slowly he laid his son in the flowers. He climbed to his feet and lurched forward.

At the first stride a blow smashed against the side of his head and he reeled into the earth. He fought to hold consciousness, fought murderously to get on, his legs still running, his eyes forward. The thing behind hit him again. Heavy bodies pressed down on his back. A hand that smelled of smoke and sweat clapped over his mouth. He closed his jaws on it, tearing at the flesh until the bones grated in his teeth.

Two sepoys dragged Joanna round the lawn by her ankles. Her hair trailed on the grass, and her embroidered white nightdress rode up over her thighs. She shrieked and moaned as they bayoneted her in the breasts and belly and face.

He was on his knees again, running on his knees, bursting towards her. A third blow exploded in his head, and the world expanded; he could just see her a hundred feet away, spread naked and dying under their bodies. A man sobbed into his ear, “Lie still, lie still. Do not look.”

He could not close his eyes. A harsh voice cried, “Enough!” She must be unconscious and nearly dead—Joanna, whom he had sworn to love and protect; Joanna whom he did not love and had not protected, his wife and Robin’s mother, who had not liked to be left alone with Indians.

“Lie still, sahib, or we’ll all die—the baby too. They are like mad dogs.”

Blood filled his mouth. The hand lay crushed and placid between his grinding teeth.

Her raw body quivered no more. A sepoy bent over with his rifle and put the muzzle to her ear. Still Rodney could not shut his eyes. At the explosion waves of fiery darkness engulfed him.

Later everything was the same, but reasonable. Men straddled his back and held him to the ground. That was
fine; he was quite comfortable. A mangled hand lay in his tight-clenched mouth; it tasted sweet, of blood, and he let it drop. It was a beautiful night, hot, but beautiful and red-lit. Someone had burned his face with a torch. The buildings crackled merrily, and sepoys stared at the lovely light. Joanna had chosen to sleep out naked on the lawn. He knew by the stirring in the trees that dawn was near. He recalled an aimless bustling in the night, but now all was in order. He heard the familiar rhythm of marching men and the sound of a trumpet call—the Rally—blown twice from somewhere in the 60th’s lines. It was indeed a beautiful smoky scarlet night.

One of the men on his back was muttering urgently, something about the dawn coming; the other grunted. Rodney recognized the voice and the grunt now—that cocksure little beast Ramdass, and dear gloomily silent old Harisingh.

He said, “Ramdass, Harisingh, what are you doing here? It’s long after Last Post.”

Tears splashed warm on his neck…. Ramdass’s voice, whispering, “Shhh! Look.”

A pressure on his head…. He peered round into the gloom. Behind his feet Robin and Rambir lay together among the cannas. His teeth chattered and he struggled to get up, but the two on his back held him down.

“Lie still. It’s all over. We couldn’t let you be killed. We followed you after the explosion.”