Shadow of the Moon (87 page)

Lou said thoughtfully and with entire seriousness: ‘You'll have to get me some milk. I wonder if we could keep a goat?'

Alex finished his meal and came over to look at the skinny, wrinkled little object with the fluff of reddish-gold down on its head that had cost Lottie her life, and looking at it he had a sudden warm feeling of achievement. He had not been able to save Lottie, but he had at least saved this minute scrap of new life from dying before it had lived, and all at once that seemed a thing as well worth doing as the saving of a province. He touched the tiny waving hand, and felt it close about his finger with the instinctive and unexpected tenacity of a sea anemone.

Alex laughed and said: ‘You shall have your goat, Lou, if I have to steal it. What are you going to call her?'

‘Amanda,' said Lou promptly.

‘Good Lord! Why? Did Lottie—?'

‘No,' said Lou. ‘Lottie was sure it was going to be a boy. She never knew it wasn't. It's just that I think Amanda is a nice name for her. It means “worthy of love”.'

Alex stroked the downy head with a forefinger and Lou looked up at him and smiled. ‘Still three women on your hands, Alex.'

‘Four,' said Alex with a grin. ‘You've forgotten the goat. And I can clearly see that a goat is going to be more trouble than the rest of you put together.'

It was a prophecy that was to prove lamentably correct.

Alex had slept most of that day and had gone out at sunset. He had returned at dawn dragging an exceedingly vocal goat procured for him with suspicious ease by Kashmera, whom Alex suspected of having stolen it. The goat had been loath to accompany him, and he had been compelled to carry it for the first part of the way.

Lou and Winter had attempted to milk it, collectively and severally, and had been reduced first to desperation and then to helpless mirth in the process. Alex had refused to help. He said that he considered that he had discharged his part in the affair by procuring the animal, and that he was damned if he was going to turn
gopi
. They must learn to deal with it themselves.

They had done so, and the baby throve. It was astonishingly tenacious of life, and survived the untutored treatment to which it was subjected, as it had survived the horrors and hazards of that pregnancy and premature birth. The goat gave far more trouble. It evinced a desire to stray and could be trusted to eat its way through any and every rope. Alex constructed a strong door of thick bamboo poles to replace the flimsier curtain of grass
over the entrance to the Hirren Minar, and they kept the goat in the lower chamber at night.

It had awakened them the second night by bleating plaintively and monotonously, and when at last it had ceased they had heard a rasping, scratching sound, and Alex, who had been sleeping on the open roof, had looked down over the ruined parapet and seen by the clear starlight and a waning moon the beautiful black-barred body of a tigress who crouched before the bamboo door, clawing at it with a taloned paw. The tigress had heard the movement above her and had looked up, her eyes glinting like green moons, and she had stared at him for a full minute before leaping away into the thickets.

Alex had strengthened the door, lashing a double layer of bamboo poles the thickness of his arm across and across it, and the next night the tigress had been back again. He heard the scrape of her claws, and lifting a lump of earth that he had taken the precaution to bring with him dropped it on her from above. There was a sharp and un-tigerlike yelp and she had bounded away into the jungle.

‘Why didn't you drop something heavier?' demanded Lou, who had been an interested spectator.

‘Because I have no desire to have a wounded tiger in this bit of the jungle,' said Alex. ‘They are unpleasant things to have around.'

‘But it will only be back tomorrow night.'

‘Probably. But it won't get through that door. There's that baby of yours starting now. If it isn't one thing it's another. Who wouldn't be a bachelor?'

Lou had laughed and hurried back to feed the wailing child, and the next night they had been awakened at moonrise by a leopard snarling and tearing at the bamboo door. But apart from these disturbances the long, burning, breathless days were peaceful enough.

The jungle dried and shrivelled and turned brown about them, and the river shrank; but still the monsoon delayed. They never spoke of Lottie, as they never spoke of all those whom they had known in Lunjore, or of anything that had happened there. Their life went on as before, except that now there was the baby to look after in place of Lottie, and Lou had lost her restlessness.

Lou had never liked children. She had not wanted any of her own, or been in the least disappointed when none had been born to her; she had looked upon it as a blessing. But somewhere, unsuspected by anyone, least of all by herself, there must have lurked an unquenchable spark of the maternal instinct; and now, unexpectedly, it had sprung alight.

Perhaps Lottie, dying, had been able to sense its presence and its potential strength, for it was not to Alex or to Winter that she had spoken. She had said: ‘Look after him, Lou,' and Lou had taken the child and looked at it with a sudden awe-struck and exultant sense of possession.

That sense of possession had grown stronger every day, and now she did not mind how long they stayed in the Hirren Minar. She was afraid of moving
from it. They were safe here and they must not take any risks. She could even bear the intolerable heat better because the child seemed to take no harm from it, but she waited and panted and prayed for the rains. If only the rains would break!

‘Alex, how much longer will it be?'

‘God knows,' said Alex. ‘Any day now.'

The news from the outside world, if it could be believed, was not encouraging. Sir Henry Lawrence had fought a disastrous action at Chinut and had been heavily defeated, and now he and the British in Lucknow were closely besieged in the Residency. General Wheeler and the Cawnpore garrison were reported to be at their last gasp in the torn and shattered and pitifully inadequate entrenchments that they had scratched up out of the earth, and where they had fought and died and held out under the glaring heat and the blizzard of shot and shell since the sixth of June. In Jhansi the Rani had urged on her people to revolt, and had offered terms to the Europeans who had taken refuge in the fort. The terms had been accepted, and they had surrendered - only to be seized, bound and slaughtered; men, women and children together. Not one had been spared in that cold-blooded butchery.

Mutiny had broken out in Allahabad where the sepoys had murdered their officers and massacred all Christians, and the only news that seemed to hold out hope was that the British still clung to the Ridge before Delhi, although their force was as yet more besieged than besieging.

‘Wait yet awhile,' urged Kashmera, as he had urged so often before. ‘Thou art safe in the jungle.'

But the jungle had finished with them, and it would not let them wait.

45

Alex had been setting a snare at the entrance to a small clearing some fifty yards from the Hirren Minar when he smelt smoke.

He had not been feeling at all well that day. His head ached and he thought angrily that Lou or Winter had disobeyed orders and lit an early fire. Then all at once he realized that the hot wind that was rustling the dry grass and dead leaves was blowing towards the Hirren Minar, and not away from it. There must be someone else in the jungle, and upwind of him. He left the snare and returned swiftly, pulling the grass back over the path that he had taken, and ordered the two women, who were about to leave for their evening bathe, to get back into the upper room.

‘Pull up the ladder and keep a revolver handy,' said Alex peremptorily. ‘And drag the slab over that hole. I'm going to have a look round. Don't move until I come back.'

He had disappeared and they had waited a long time, making no noise and listening to the interminable croon of the hot wind and the monotonous rustle and clank of the dry bamboos. Presently Winter had lifted her head and sniffed as Alex had done.

‘Smoke! So that's why— Lou, suppose it's some of the others? It might be. We can't have been the only ones to get away.'

‘More likely charcoal-burners,' said Lou in a whisper. ‘If it were men hunting for us they wouldn't warn us by lighting fires.'

Alex had returned half an hour later and called up to them that they could come down. He looked strained and uneasy. The smoke had come strongly on the wind, but the wind was dying now with the dying day, and soon it would be dark enough for him to verify his fears.

Lou, carrying the baby, had made straight for the river, but Winter had stopped and looked at Alex with anxious eyes: ‘What is it? What are you afraid of? Is it men?'

‘I hope so,' said Alex with an uneasy movement of his shoulders. ‘We could probably deal with them - or avoid them.'

‘Then what is it?'

Alex's eyes were searching the sky to the south-west. There had been clouds in the sky all day; dirty copper-coloured clouds which he had hoped might mean rain at last. But was there something more than clouds there? He said: ‘I think the jungle is on fire somewhere over there. It may burn out, but— Oh well, we shall soon know.'

The wind died and the smell of smoke died with it, but later, as the sky darkened, a pink wavering glow that was not the sunset grew steadily brighter
until it drowned out the last of the daylight and spanned the horizon from north to south.

Alex watched it from the roof of the Hirren Minar. ‘It may miss us,' he thought. ‘Or it may burn out before it reaches us.' But he had little hope of it doing either. So little hope that he made a bundle of those few things that seemed to him urgently necessary, and carried them down to the river bank.

Presently the wind rose again, and now it brought with it not only the smell of smoke, but drifting ash. Soon there would be sparks, and the forest was tinder-dry from the scorching June days. He returned to find the two women standing on the open roof watching the sky, their faces clearly illumined by the distant glow. They turned together to face him, and once again, as on that day in the jungle when they had fled from Lunjore, their eyes were wide and strained but devoid of panic, and he knew that the anxiety in Lou's was not for herself, but only for the child she held.

Looking at them Alex was conscious of a confused mixture of emotions that included gratitude, relief, tenderness, a passionate admiration, and a disgust of himself because he had once considered them as nothing more than millstones round his neck and a tiresome responsibility of which he wished he could rid himself. He found that his voice was a little difficult to control and said with unnecessary curtness: ‘Can either of you swim?'

‘Yes,' said Winter, who had spent a few weeks every summer at Scarborough - Lady Julia considering the sea air good for growing girls.

‘A little,' said Lou Cottar. ‘But - but Amanda—'

Alex said: ‘We'll have to make some sort of raft. Just in case. Get me all the ropes you can, Lou, and give that child some food. Light the lamp, Winter - and get a fire going below. We'll have to see what we're doing.' He disappeared down the ladder and they heard him hacking down the heavy bamboo door that he had built to protect the goat.

They worked with feverish haste, tearing down the split-cane
chiks
and using them to face that triple platform of bamboo, and carrying down the box that Lou had been using as a cradle. The door made an admirable raft, and Alex found himself feeling grateful to the goat for the first time since they had acquired it. The perspiration poured off them as they worked, for the heat of the fire added itself to the remorseless heat of the June night, and the wind blew that heat across them so that soon it hurt to breathe. The air was full of smoke now, and they could hear the crackle of the flames, while the light of the fire that Winter had lit in the stone room was no longer necessary, because the world about the Hirren Minar was as bright as though it were bathed in a red sunset.

Alex said: ‘Bring anything that isn't too heavy and that you think is worth bringing. I can manage this; it doesn't weigh so much. We may have half an hour or so yet, but it isn't safe to bet on it. Be as quick as you can.'

He departed with the raft, and they went back up the ladder for the last time, and collecting all the food they could carry, took a last look about the
queer stone chamber in which they had lived in such discomfort and found such strange happiness and content, and Winter smiled at it with sudden tears in her eyes, as though she were saying good-bye to a dear friend. Then she helped Lou down the ladder with the baby, and they were out in the jungle and Lou was hurrying towards the river while Winter followed her dragging the protesting goat.

They could not have found the way by night, familiar as it had become; but this was not night. This was daylight, and hotter than any day they had ever known. The fire was no longer a distant crackling chorus, but a steady roar, and the sky was a brilliant rose-pink pall of smoke shot through with sparks. A bird was singing gaily among the branches of a thorn bush as though it imagined that the dawn had broken, and the undergrowth was alive with movement. Peacocks, jungle-fowl, porcupine, a fox, three jackals and a chital hind ran past them, making for the river, and there was a crashing among the bushes as a bull nilghai thrust its way into a clearing, saw them, and backed away snorting.

If the wind had died the fire would not have reached them for several hours, but the wind drove the sparks ahead of the wall of flame, and where they fell they started new fires, so that the roaring blaze leapt forward with seven-league boots and ate up the miles with terrifying swiftness.

Alex was waiting for them on the little shelving strip of bank where they had bathed so often. The makeshift raft floated high and light in the water, and he was lashing the tin box to the centre of it. He took the baby from Lou and laid it in the box among an assortment of bundles, and stretched a strip of wet cloth above it as an added precaution against smoke and sparks. It was less easy to get the goat on board and safely tethered, but they managed it.

‘You can't swim in that, Winter,' said Lou, hurriedly divesting herself of her dress. ‘I'm sorry, Alex, but this is no time for modesty.'

Alex grinned at her and waded out as far as the steeply shelving bank allowed, while Winter, following Lou's example, removed her sari and rewound it, wrapping it around her in a straight strip so that it covered her from armpit to knee.

Crouching in the cool water under the shelter of the high bank the heat was not so intolerable, but the river looked appallingly wide - the far bank as though it were miles away. Lou remembered the muggers who haunted every Indian river, and shuddered. She said anxiously, looking back at the jungle: ‘Don't let's go until we have to. It's still quite far away. It may miss us after all.'

Alex said: ‘Not a chance, I'm afraid. Look over there. They know.'

Lou Cottar turned her head and looked. A herd of nilghai were plunging down the steep bank not twenty yards below them, and taking to the water to swim out steadily into the red-dyed river where the current took them down in a long, slanting line towards the far shore. A moment later there was a crash above them, and a wild boar, his tushes and his little pig eyes gleaming
in the leaping light, slithered down the bank and without paying the smallest attention to them launched himself into deep water. And then suddenly there were animals all about them, so that the steep banks seemed alive with terrified forest creatures, and for a moment or two they forgot their own danger in the wonder of that sight.

A tawny, spotted shape leapt down the bank and crouched on the narrow ledge almost within reach of their hands, snarling with terror, its tail lashing wildly. But the leopard's green gaze passed them by, for his fear and his hate were not for them but for the fire behind him, and presently he too took to the water. From somewhere further up the bank they heard the unmistakable snarling roar of a tiger, and a troop of frantic monkeys leapt and howled in the tree above their heads. One of the monkeys, a mother clutching a skinny big-eyed baby, sprang down upon the raft and huddled against the bleating goat, chattering and grimacing.

‘Come on,' said Alex. ‘If we wait any longer we shall have a cargo-load of stowaways.' He found that he had to shout to make himself heard above the roar and crash, and that he felt oddly stupid and lightheaded: he would have liked to have sat down in the water and stayed where he was. He pulled himself together with an effort and said: ‘Listen, Lou, I've rigged up a sort of tow rope and I'll go ahead with it. If you're not much of a swimmer, keep hold of the raft and keep upstream of it. Winter—' He turned to look at her and fought down the choking fear that threatened him; the fear of the current; of the man-eating muggers of the river - ‘Winter, you push from behind. Give me as much help as you can, and - and don't for God's sake let go.'

He had made a rough-and-ready harness of rope, and with that across his shoulders he struck out from the bank and felt the current catch him and draw him and the raft downstream as a shower of sparks fell hissing into the river.

He did not glance back but swam on steadily, striving with everything in him to keep from being drawn too far down the stream, because the road and the shattered remains of the bridge lay only a mile away, and there would be men in the huddle of mud and wattle huts behind the toll-house on the Oudh bank where he and Niaz had tied up the occupants on the day they blew up the bridge. He could be certain, too, that the toll-keeper and his family from the Lunjore side would have procured a boat and crossed the river to join them when they saw the fire approaching. It would be dangerous to land anywhere near there, and he must not let the raft be swept too far downstream.

The oil-smooth surface of the water was filmed with ash and charred leaves and full of frantic swimming animals, many of whom clawed at the raft and held onto it, dragging sodden shivering little bodies onto the sheltering bamboos; squirrels, rats, mice and a bedraggled mongoose. There were pig and deer; sambhur, chital, kaka, blackbuck; nilghai, jackals, panthers,
tigers, a scaly four-foot iguana and a solitary elephant with a broken tusk in the river that night, swimming as desperately as the four humans for the safety of the far bank.

It seemed to Alex as though they would never reach the other side. As though the river were endless. His head ached and his muscles seemed to have no strength in them, and there was a cramping pain in his stomach. The rope bit into his shoulders and caught across his throat and choked him, and he could feel the drag of the dead weight pulling to the pull of the current, for Lou could do little more than cling to it and keep afloat. And then quite suddenly there were sandbanks ahead of him as though they had lifted from the river, and the current no longer pulled at him, and he had reached the shallows.