Shadow of the Moon (79 page)

They heard no further sound for several minutes, not even a rustle in the grass; and presently Winter put up a shaking hand and wiped the sweat out of her eyes, and the two women lowered their burden to the ground and sat down abruptly.

‘Has it gone?' whispered Lou Cottar through dry lips.

‘Yes.'

‘It may be waiting; why didn't you fire?'

Winter turned and looked at her. She said: ‘You didn't see what happened to - to some of the others this morning, but I did. We are safer with animals. A shot might be heard.'

Mrs Cottar licked her dry lips and shivered in the stifling heat. ‘Yes. You are right. We must get on. Help me up, my muscles have gone stiff.'

They heard no more movements in the jungle, and almost an hour later they saw something loom up out of the tangle of scrub and
sal
trees and bamboo that was not a shadow but a solid wall of creeper-covered stone, and knew that they had reached the end of that day's journey.

The ruin that Alex and Niaz had stumbled across three years ago while tracking a wounded leopard through the dense jungle had perhaps once been the hunting lodge of some forgotten king, or all that remained of a long-vanished city. Niaz had named it the Hirren Minar - the Deer Tower - because they had found the antlers of a buck in the grass by the threshold, and they had kept its discovery to themselves. Only Alam Din was aware of its existence, for despite the fact that it lay barely a mile from the bridge of boats, the jungle here was not only dense but scored with deep nullahs, choked with scrub and high grass, and known to be the haunt of tigers. They had frequently used it as a base when on shooting leave, and over the last three years there had lurked at the back of Alex's mind the germ of the
thought that some day a hiding place such as this might prove more than useful.

All that remained was part of a two-storeyed building topped by a low, ruined dome. Thickets of bamboo grew closely about it, and lantana and the rank jungle grass smothered the fallen blocks of stone and pressed up between the paving. It was hot and very dark inside, and smelt strongly of the wild boar and his family who had recently been inhabiting it. There was also a distinct smell of leopard. The stairway that led up to the top storey had fallen centuries ago, and only a gaping hole remained in one corner of the black, bat-haunted ceiling of the single cell-like lower room.

The trodden grass showed where Alex and at least one other had passed in, but the ruin was as silent as the silent jungle, the hot sunlight and the chequered shadows.

‘There is no one here,' whispered Lou Cottar, and the dark stone walls about her whispered back, ‘…
no one here
.'

‘But there is a ladder,' said Winter. ‘Look!'

Hanging from the jagged hole in the roof was a serviceable rope ladder, and they tugged at it tentatively. It appeared to be quite fast. Winter set her foot on it, but Lou Cottar caught her arm: ‘Be careful! there could be someone up there.'

They stood still and listened, holding their breath, but they could hear no sound. ‘Water—' moaned Lottie, ‘…
Water
,' whispered the echo. Winter gave a little jerk of her shoulders and started upward, and a minute later she had vanished through the broken aperture. Presently her head reappeared. ‘It's all right. Can you get Lottie up? There's water here. There's - there's everything!' Her voice broke.

Two rough and ready beds, a roll of matting, some tin boxes, an oil-lamp and an earthenware
chatti
containing water would not have been considered ‘everything' - or even ‘anything' - a few hours ago. But the world had dissolved under their feet during those hours, and the sight of these few and homely objects helped in some way to solidify it again.

The water in the
chatti
was warm and stale and there was not a great deal of it. There was a tin mug, recently used, standing beside it and they watched while Lottie drank, and then drank thirstily but sparingly themselves, and wetted their handkerchiefs in it to cool Lottie's hot body.

‘There, there, darling,' said Winter, forcing her voice to placid reassurance. ‘You'll be all right now. You must rest. We're safe now … we're safe.'

But for how long?

41

‘How much longer?' muttered Yusaf, crouched between two rocks on the burning plain five miles beyond the cantonments and overlooking the
kutcha
road that stretched across the rough open country towards Hazrat Bagh. ‘Pray Allah they do not wait until nightfall!'

He took a drink from his water bottle and was grateful that the month of Ramadan at least was over. To have kept that vigil fasting and without being permitted to quench his thirst would have been hard indeed.

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 manner 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?'