Nightrunners of Bengal (31 page)

Rodney turned without a word and ran down the hill in the darkness. He would have liked to make a speech or let the tears come, but he couldn’t. Perhaps she would die, even after this. Even so the opium would not be wasted. Nothing was wasted in these days in this village; each action and thought illumined dark corners of the past, and would throw light somewhere, in some heart, for the rest of time.

Mrs. Hatch knelt beside Caroline on one side, and the headman’s wife on the other. The women here, like the men in the other house, were naked from the waist down, but neither he nor they cared now. Mrs. Hatch looked at the opium and snorted. “Wot’s that there—dope?”

The headman’s wife snatched it from his hand, whispering, “Who gave you this? I did not know there was any in the village. This could have saved—it doesn’t matter.”

She broke off a piece, called for milk, and crumbled the opium between her fingers into the bowl. Rodney watched Caroline; after these six days he knew exactly where she was on the short steep road. She was more than halfway down, near the edge of the last abyss. From there he had seen a few, a very few, climb slowly back to life; most went over the edge, slithering fast and ending at the burning ghats. Her skin was wrinkled and dead, and her nose pointed; great forces pushed her remorselessly on, great will power struggled to hold her back. The cramps seized her throat and constricted her breathing, but the panic was in Mrs. Hatch’s eyes and in his own. She tried to smile at him when he came in; then a spasm contracted her, and he closed his eyes. When the spluttering stopped he looked again and saw that the headman’s wife was giving her the milk. She did not want it; her throat muscles clenched to refuse it, and when it was down her stomach heaved to reject it. Slowly, while sweat burst out on her forehead and her eyes started, she forced her will to mastery and drank, sip by sip and drop by drop.

A second battle began, to keep it down. His own face and neck contracted with hers, and when, after two minutes, the milk spurted out and splashed over the floor, he could no longer stand. He stumbled into the yard and sat down in the dust, where he could see the shadows moving across the far wall of the sickroom, and waited there till day.

When Mrs. Hatch came out into the glare of mid-morning and said, “I’m going to sleep now, Capting, like ’er,” and grinned a haggard grin, he fainted.

Caroline was almost the last patient in either ward. Three days later the cholera went on its way. The priest said they had burned seventy-eight of Chalisgon’s population of three hundred; no one could remember how many more had had the disease and recovered. The day it left them, the dazed villagers lay down and slept. That night, as after a hurricane, there was an instinctive orgy in which the survivors reassured themselves of their wonderful, wild aliveness.

Four faces were absent from the gathering in the headman’s front room—Piroo in the woods, Caroline asleep in her back room, Karmadass and the silent twin dead. Rodney, the headman, and the talkative twin passed round a goatskin of toddy; the priest was in his place but did not drink. Mrs. Hatch and the headman’s wife cackled hilariously together in their corner, and between times drank freely from another container of toddy. In spite of the empty places and the overpowering heat it was a gay and light place.

In radiant moonlight Rodney went down to the stream for water. The people he passed greeted him with their unfailing courtesy. They bowed low and joined their hands, because he was of a ruling class; but this time they smiled with their eyes too, because he had proved himself their equal. Drums were beating at the verge of the jungle and men singing in the huts by the stream. In the alleys women moved with uneasy sexuality, and men’s voices throbbed when they spoke to them. Others, men and women, grovelled drunk in
the dirt and sang raucously. They were not throwing coloured powder about, nor were they so riotous as the celebrants of the Holi in Kishanpur, but the atmosphere was the same and for the same reason: the Holi was the spring of the year, this debauch the spring of a new life. A star in the south made him think of Robin, and then of Gondwara. They’d have to move on as soon as Caroline was fit. He would speak about it later.

The headman and the twin broke off a conversation suddenly as he came in with the water. They were both a little drunk; he set down the jar and said, puzzled, “What is it, my friends?”

The headman scratched the skin behind his ear. “Well, it’s like this——”

“Go on!” The twin took a swig of toddy and wiped his lips. “Tell him. It’s all right.”

“Sahib, you have heard us speak of Naital,” the headman said, “the place where there used to be a town and a lake, five miles up our little stream? Well, we think the Rani’s store of rifles, guns, and powder is up there.”

Rodney exclaimed automatically. He remembered what he had overheard at Monkeys’ Well. The Silver Guru said then that the carts were on their way to “the lake.” It might be this one. He said, “What makes you think so?”

“The direct trail from Kishanpur to Gondwara goes through Naital. It passes not far from here, up there in the jungle. One day, weeks ago, one of our boys was out late looking for a lost goat. He saw many carts going south—but they didn’t pass Pipalpani, the next village, twenty miles on, the headman there told me. Then, we’ve been forbidden to go to Naital or graze flocks near it for nearly six months now. The order said something about a new hunting preserve, but old Lalla Ram, who is dead, didn’t believe that and went secretly to see. There are a few soldiers, he said, not many, living in an old temple there.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before, if you knew it all the time?”

The headman shrugged his shoulders and was silent. The twin, Lalla Ram’s brother, answered suddenly, “Captain-sahib, if anything happens to that store the Dewan will burn this village himself, and torture everyone he can catch here. We sheltered you; that was a duty laid on us by the gods, and we would
never
have given you up. But this was different. We know nothing of war.”

Rodney smiled. Guns had little place in a world ruled by cholera and famine. He said, “Why are you telling me now, then? Don’t be afraid. I won’t touch the cannon. It’s my duty, I suppose, but I can’t—now.”

The headman scratched behind the other ear. “Now—we want you to destroy it We have seen you and we have had time to think. We have heard news. There is blood all over the face of the land, and fire, and killing. The sepoys hunt like dogs up and down from the Ganges to the Indus. Of the village people, how should we know? We think they will give shelter where they can, like us. We hear this, and we talk, and we are foolish; but we think there will be a great battle at Gondwara. We know that the madness will be crushed quickly there, or will linger on. We will help you, and you must be quick, because the Rani’s army marched from Kishanpur yesterday, and will be here tomorrow. After that it will be hopeless.”

Rodney got up and paced the room, his head stooping under the beams. Turning by the front wall, he saw Caroline in the narrow passage at the back. Pale but smiling, she leaned against the door-jamb, and he crossed the room to her. “Go back to bed, Caroline, and rest. We’ll have to leave here at dawn.”

She replied, “I heard what they said. I’ve been lying listening to the music and the singing down by the stream. There’s a night bird outside my window, and there’s a big round moon again—the Holi, the mutiny, tonight. It’s a lovely night tonight though.”

“We mustn’t get them into trouble, We must slip off and go quickly to Gondwara. We have a duty there—at least I
have. What’s the date, the seventh? It’ll be a close-run thing.”

They had been talking in English, but the others seemed to be able to read the tone of their voices.

The priest rose to his feet. “I gave you the last piece of opium in the village, for the miss-sahiba. You—all of you—gave us the last of your strength. But we are not merchants, to balance favours. It is our wish that the cannon be destroyed. The headman will go now and arrange for the whole village to live in the jungles for a time. It will be healthier; and besides, the English government will repay us and repair what damage the Dewan does.”

“He may catch some of you, pandit-ji. And we can’t bring the dead back to life, however good the cause they died in.”

The priest shrugged. “No. Our people don’t know much about causes, sahib. Here death is death. But they will not catch many of us. They will be too busy.”

The headman paused by the outer door. “There are twenty fit young men in the village. Perhaps some older ones too can be spared. They will all be drunk, or making more men to replace those we have lost—but I will bring them.” He laughed uproariously and slapped his knee. “Heavens, there are going to be some rough words said to me tonight. They’ll be here in two hours for you to tell them what to do. Say it all many times, for they will be fuddled—like me. We are willing, but we know nothing of war. We can fight, I think. There are quarrels enough, God knows.”

He went out, and the priest and the twin followed. The headman’s wife looked at her winking pots and began slowly to collect them into a sack. The three English people stood silent in the back doorway and watched her.

Rodney harshly ordered Caroline back to bed and told Mrs. Hatch to go with her. They scurried off like mice, and he went out into the courtyard, sat on the low wall, and tried to think. The oxen champed steadily, and he scratched the nearest one’s back with the toe of his boot. In the dark
night a wispy cloud formation had begun to blot out the stars; distant thunder muttered under the horizon. There would be no rain tonight, or tomorrow, or perhaps for two weeks, but the monsoon was on its way.

H
E LAY on the wooded ridge west of Naital, the rocks pressing hot against his belly and thighs. In front of him the air shimmered over a narrow valley. Locusts screeched in the dry jungle; each time one of the men moved a twig snapped or a leaf crackled. There were twenty-two villagers in his party, the youngest a boy of fifteen, the oldest the grizzled twin. They squatted in a bunch behind the crest, and each carried an axe, a hoe, or a pointed stake. They were his little army, and he their general. He thought of his torn trousers, his boots with the holes in the toes, his ragged white shirt; perhaps an officer of the 13th had gone worse clothed into battle, but he doubted it. His rifle lay beside him.

He looked at the sun; in another quarter of an hour he’d have to start moving. Each separate villager’s face was eager, but as a group they were worried and uncertain. His own purpose firm, he wished he did not know these men so well, or that they could have been professionals. They might die in this adventure, but he was thinking of the headman’s wife and her polished brass cooking pots; that was the sort of thing professionals did not have to think about He began for the last time to run over his plans, trying to see them and judge them dispassionately.

The party had left Chalisgon before first light and, walking in single file on game trails, arrived on this ridge-line at
seven. Five minutes later Piroo had come with Robin and the cart through the jungles to join them. Here, where the trees thinned out and exposed the Naital valley, he sent the rest to wait in cover while he studied the scene with Piroo. They were at the head of a slope surfaced with spear grass and reddish stones, and scattered with big round sal trees, oaks, and a few bushes. Less than a mile away across the valley the ground rose again, thickly wooded, to the rolling Sindhya plateau. North and south the Naital stream wound through the hills in a gorge two hundred feet deep; here its valley widened, and at the lower end, where the hills closed in again, the Rawan of that past century had built the dam.

Looking down, he had estimated it was thirty feet high at the centre, where there had once been a weir and perhaps wooden gates to control the outflow. Its farther end rested against the abrupt slope. On the hither side it curved round, shallower and shallower, until after a hundred yards the ground rose up to meet it. It was twenty feet wide across the top of the highest part, where the weir had been, and slanted out and down to double that at the base. As the ground rose to it the dam widened, as though the king had ordered the builders to use in each hundred-foot run always the same number of three-foot cubes of red granite; so it spread out and became a paved promenade beside the lake. There the king had planted shade trees and set pavilions, small temples, and other buildings whose use Rodney could not guess. The irrigation channels had in those days taken off from the foot of the weir; the traces of them curved round the contours of the lower slope. He thought they must have been an afterthought, and the farmers’ prosperity an accident of the king’s arcadia.

The town of Naital had been upstream, to his right. The women would have walked down from it to the new lake and washed clothes. The cattle would have grazed at the edge of the hanging jungle, the fields below would have been rich, and all day a noise of people. The lake would have been nearly three-quarters of a mile wide and two miles long,
and in the evenings veiled by gauzy drifts of wood smoke. When the king came with his court, they’d make another tapestry; the men of the village would stop work to watch the king flying his hawks at water fowl and heron, and would be happy in their privilege of seeing such a gorgeous sight.

That king had lived secure; his grandson had spent his energy in a struggle for survival against the Tiger State, Lalkot. Naital died; the weir broke, the gates vanished. The assault of a hundred and fifty monsoons had shattered hundreds of granite cubes and strewed the valley for miles downstream with the wreckage. As the town decayed, men had chipped other blocks into small pieces and used them to mend their houses and byres. Now the houses and byres were fallen down, and square-cut stones littered their levelled standings. Striped mosquitoes and huge gnats whined in a waste of tall brown reeds where the lake had been. From July to November it would be a marsh; at this season it was a dry and sour-smelling barren, with pools of black water hidden among the reeds and the little stream winding invisible through the middle. Egrets and the little herons, the paddy birds, haunted it, and a pair of sarus cranes lived at the lower end. Vivid kingfishers flashed down the secret aisles by day; and at night tigers stepped through the jungle to drink below the dam.

At half-past seven he and Piroo had crawled down the hill to reconnoitre. From a hiding place they saw that nine or ten soldiers appeared to be living in one of the pavilions on the dam, among a welter of dirty sacks, piled rifles, bedding rolls, and cooking pots. One of their number, apparently a sentry, sat under a tree and played on a bamboo flute. Rodney decided that the Rani’s stores must be in the other buildings, noticing that the roof of one had recently been patched with wood and cloth. He wormed back up to the ridge here, Piroo behind him, and made his plan.

The cart had been standing among the trees in a shallow dip. Caroline was resting in it; outside, Mrs. Hatch was
trying to keep Robin quiet. He walked over and, speaking harshly, ordered two of the men to take the cart to the top end of the valley and wait near the stream until he came.

Caroline smiled with weak cheerfulness and said, “Please don’t worry, Rodney. I’ll see he gets to Gondwara, whatever happens.”

He stared at her, turned on his heel, and strode back to the ridge crest. He’d have a few more hours at least to remember her face.

The attack itself, to be executed by untrained villagers, had to be simple, and it did not take fifteen minutes to think out the plan. Piroo would stalk and kill the sentry; the rest, headed by Rodney, would then make a direct rush from close quarters and overpower the other soldiers. To get into position Piroo would work round well below the dam, cross the stream, and come in through the dried marsh from the opposite direction. He would take out the sentry an hour after noon, when all the soldiers were likely to be asleep. The reeds, the ruined steps of the dam, and the trees and buildings should give him ample cover; he was to be as silent as possible.

By that time Rodney’s party were to be at the foot of the hill and as close to the promenade as they could get. When they saw Piroo attack the sentry, or when an alarm was raised, they would rush forward in a body and bear down the guard by weight of numbers. If it went well they would have three or four hours to destroy the stores and cannon before the Rani’s forces came up the dusty road. He would have preferred to attack at night, but there was no time, for the army would be here by dusk and after that attack would be hopeless.

That was the plan, and so far there had been no hitch. It was past noon, Piroo had long been gone, and the valley drowsed in the heat. Rodney glanced at the sun once more and whispered to the old twin, “Are we all ready now?”

“Yes.”

“Spread out then, and follow me, the way we practised back there. Stop when I stop—and for heaven’s sake no one make a noise.”

“Bahut achcha.”

As they moved off, a pair of long-tailed green parrots shrieked away among the trees; then the hillside dozed again, humming in the lazy heat of noon. The party advanced slowly, first on the right, then on the left, in the middle, the right again, two or three at a time. After twenty minutes they reached the foot of the slope, crossed the road, and were on a level with the top of the dam. The scattered buildings stood up in silhouette against the forest curtain across the marsh. The sentry sat under his tree, with his side face to them. Quickly Rodney edged the raiders over an uncomfortably bare stretch. Two minutes more and they were crouched forty yards from the dam in the thick evergreen hollows of some korinda bushes, the old irrigation channels winding close below them.

The valley stirred with the aimless noises of midday. Monkeys crashed distantly in the trees across the marsh. Behind and to the right of his party, where the town had stood, some bigger animal was moving across the hill; a peacock blared
hauk hauk,
a little brown and white cheetal stag trotted out of the willow cover, shook his horns, and ran across the flat place above. It might be a bear frightening them, or perhaps a tiger—but the stag had not been very alarmed. Pig—the peacock had made a mistake; the boar came out and sniffed the breeze; his sounder followed him—three sows and a score of piglets. They began rooting about among the stones under an arm of thin acacias sticking out of the jungle. The high sun moved infinitesimally across the sky. The opposite slope was thick with sal; through the hot weather, as the other trees wilted and faded, the sal had stood like dark green cathedrals among them. Now, in the harshest weeks of the year, they had begun their miracle and were putting out new leaves—freshest brightest green.

He could not see down into the marsh because of the dam,
but the paddy birds kept hopping up and flying round above the reeds. Piroo was on his way. The villagers’ faces were tight, and their eyes moved from side to side. He muttered to them to be quiet and smiled at them.

The new sentry’s yellow coat was unbuttoned, and his rifle leaned against the tree beside him. He sang quietly to himself, breaking the melody to puff at a cigarette. The smell of it crept across the slope to the watchers, tainting the hot clean jungle air.

Though he was looking full at the place, Rodney could not believe for a second that he saw a head coming over the far edge of the promenade. With no sense of urgency he noted the flat expression on Piroo’s face, noted that he never stopped moving, noted that he searched with his eyes and came steadily snaking on and over and up. On to the promenade, over the flat stones, up to the sentry’s tree. Rodney started in a nervous spasm of release.

“Get ready!”

He watched a play, the same that he had seen from the cart at Monkeys’ Well. That had been a shadow drama, distorting the depth of death and cruelty into two flat dimensions, and therefore more horrible than this. Yet the sentry was a young man, humming a pleasant tune.

Piroo reached the tree, crouched, drew the black square from his waist and without a pause came on round the near side of the trunk. Without a pause the black silk whipped and the humming stopped. Piroo had his right foot jammed into the soldier’s back, and strained away with the silk like a bar in his hands.

Rodney waited until the sentry’s face was black. He sprang up. “Charge!”

The villagers ran towards the dam with a ragged scream, and waved their hoes and spades and axes in the air. Rodney bounded forward. This was it; he’d got them. He scrambled up the stone blocks, and at the top saw the soldiers beginning to tumble out of their houses and look around them with sleepy eyes and mouths foolishly open.

The Silver Guru rose like a splotched ghost from the shadow of a building and stretched out his arms. Rodney heard the villagers cry out and felt them check their pace. The Silver Guru said softly, “Stop!”

Rodney yelled, “
Come on!
” swung up the rifle, fired—and missed. He was alone, for every one of the villagers had stopped. He ran on, the bayonet point levelled. But three soldiers were out now, and their rifles pointed at his body.

The Silver Guru said again, “Stop!”

He stopped and lowered the point It was all over. In the moment when the men of Chalisgon faltered it was over. It was that sort of plan; success rested on a particular second, and the second had gone. He could not reach the Guru before the three soldiers shot him down. More were out now, scared and fingering the trigger. The Silver Guru’s reputation protected the dump better than any number of soldiers. Rodney wondered how long he had been here, and why he had come.

He stood sullenly, holding the empty rifle in front of him. The Guru told him to drop it, and he let it clatter to the stones. What would they do to the villagers? For their sake he would have to fight and make a diversion so that some at least could escape. From the corner of his eye he gauged the distance to the nearest soldier. The men of Chalisgon huddled foolishly on the edge of the promenade.

The Guru raised one silver arm, palm towards them, and said gently, “You are true men, and will be rewarded. Neither you nor your village will be harmed. You have my word, and you know who I am. I am the Silver Guru of Bhowani. Go quietly to your homes now. Be as true to your Rani, who is an Indian like you, as you have been to this Englishman.”

Rodney eyed him coldly. He was a traitor, and would die for it, but he knew men. Perhaps he even meant what he said. If all the leaders of the mutiny were like him, the people might turn against the British. But, if even a few had been like him, India would never have needed the British, and the Honourable East India Company would still be the
trading company it started out to be. It didn’t matter now. All questions of right and wrong had been drowned in blood; the words would mean nothing until there was no more blood to spill.

The villagers shuffled away. The old twin turned as he went and cast Rodney a despairing look, a mixture of shame, anger, and resignation. A soldier found the dead sentry’s corpse and exclaimed angrily over it. Another ran out and lifted his rifle to shoot at the villagers trailing dejectedly down the path towards Chalisgon. Rodney realized that the Silver Guru and the soldiers thought that his party had killed their comrade. Piroo had got away.

The Silver Guru cried sharply, “Don’t shoot. They are brave men.” He added, turning to the havildar, “You would do well to place another sentry, and order one man to watch the sahib here. Come with me please, Captain. Let us sit down in the shade and wait till the Rani’s army comes.”

He led the way across the promenade and, bending his knees, squatted straight-spined near the edge. His back was to the marsh, and he faced the two temples where the cannon were. Rodney, glancing over his shoulder, saw that the guns had been assembled; there were four twelve-pounders in each of the temples, surrounded by kegs and boxes. He swore silently, but the soldier was inches behind him, and the others were watching suspiciously, and he could do nothing. He sat down very close to the Guru, who motioned him off with a twinkle in his grey eyes.