The Deceivers (26 page)

Another shot boomed as he stood panting by the ford, gaping to understand the panoramic struggle about him. A last sepoy, cornered, his back against a tree, swung his empty musket as five Deceivers ran at him. They pressed him back against the trunk; a man behind him swung the rumal. Another Deceiver moved quickly, caught the screaming children, and in two quick motions they lay sprawled in the road. The other children were dead. The women were dead in their dull red and blacks. The sepoys were dead in their scarlet coats; their white drawers, blue edged, were soiled with the dust and mud of the road.

Piroo’s sharp face pressed into his own. ‘You, Jemadar-sahib! Yes, you are our Jemadar now. He said so, didn’t he?’ He motioned to the corpse in the water. ‘What now? Quick. The cavalry are on us.’

‘Why?’ William faltered.

‘We didn’t pay the rajah his cut last time we were through here. He heard we were coming somehow. What now? Quick!’ William thought quickly, his stupor gone and self-hatred ruling in its place. Everyone who had deserved to live was dead. Should he now let the band be caught by the cavalry? Why? The rajah of Padampur was just another murderer, from what Piroo said. Like the Deceivers, he picked up money by every means in his power. He knew about them, and their bands paid him ‘protection’ to be left alone while in his territories. He might punish one band, as now, but he would do nothing to help destroy the system. He would have William put away quietly.

William knew that, whatever he did later, now he must somehow lead the band to safety. It was no use telling them to disperse and slip away in small groups. In this country cavalry would catch most of them. The valley was wide open except near the river, where trees and scrub and rank grass made riding difficult. Besides, there was a better way. He remembered Chandra Sen’s tactics on the Betul road.

The Deceivers pressed round him. He said urgently, ‘Get the muskets and ammunition. Reload. Drag the bodies out of sight, no farther. Horsemen, mount! Ride up the road, meet the cavalry, pretend to fight them. When they’re engaged, break and flee,
that
way, into the edge of grass there. Make sure they follow at split gallop. The rest of you, get in there in the grass. Trip the horses, bring them down, then use all your weapons. Don’t let anyone escape!’

Piroo raised his hand in acknowledgement, and a gleam of admiration shone unwillingly in his face. The band ran to carry out William’s orders, moving silently, with speed and practised certainty. They hurled the children’s bodies over the thorns into the darkness of the bush. They dragged the sepoys out of sight. A minute more and the dead women with the dusty skirts were gone. The five horsemen, Yasin leading them, splashed fast through the ford and galloped north and out of sight.

Piroo took charge of the rest and ran with them across the stream into the tall grass on the far bank. William hurried after, struggling to keep his feet in the knee-deep water. A clangour and mingled shouts sounded down the road from the north. Only a minute had passed since Yasin’s mounted band had rattled round that corner a quarter of a mile away.

In the grass the bear troupe and the other men on foot worked with the speed and energy of ants. Some quickly, surely, loaded the muskets, lying on their sides so that the muzzles and the stabbing ramrods would not show above the grass. Others cut swathes of grass, then worked in pairs, twisting in opposite directions, plaiting short loose ropes. Knives flickered under the river bank where men cut stakes and with short, desperate strokes sharpened them.

William remembered his horse, and the bullocks, and the bear across the river, and the man in charge of them. None of these were doing any work. How many stranglings and garrotings and burials had that horribly human bear seen? Surely it too could choke a man to death, or dig, or cut sharp stakes? He turned and stared north.

Yasin’s horsemen flashed into sight, bending low, as if in terror, over their horses’ withers. At the corner they left the road and galloped across country directly towards the band hidden in the grass. One of them, waving a musket, turned and fired clumsily at unseen pursuers.

The Padampur cavalry galloped into view, brilliant in pink cloaks and tight green silk trousers and chain-mail jerkins and round steel helmets. The wild shouting grew to a roar. William counted anxiously and made it seventeen. A man more gorgeously dressed than the rest, wearing a fan of egret plumes on his helmet, rode at their head. He heard Piroo’s voice in his ear. ‘The rajah-sahib himself. He must be very angry.’

William’s lips twisted in a derisive smile. He had another person to despise now, to place in the long gallery with himself and the rest of the human race. The rajah of Padampur had an unctuous record in his dealings with the English. He kept a brilliant court and entertained with a lavish, unexpectedly civilized charm. William sneered because so many Residents and Political Agents had been deceived; because so much power for good, so much wealth, nourished itself on banditry and was expended for the benefit of murder. What terrors did the ordinary people of India not have to live with?

The horsemen under Yasin played their role perfectly. The pursuing cavalry could not see their contorted faces, but they had written panic into the stoop of their backs. They reached the grass and did not look down as they galloped past. Yasin’s horse swerved widely but could not avoid stamping on a Deceiver’s back. The man writhed like a pounded snake, his face greeny-brown and his back broken, but he made no sound.

The rajah’s long, aristocrat’s face was contorted like a wolf’s as he screamed, ‘Come back, swine! Sons of whores! Come back! Pigs! Cowards!’

His cavalry screamed behind him. Yasin’s men urged their horses over the bank forty yards ahead and plunged into the water. The cavalry, riding in a loose crescent, the rajah in the middle and the points back, pounded into the long grass.

The hidden men jerked the plaited ropes which lay between them, leaned back, and held the ropes two feet off the ground. Men propped the butts of the sharp stakes against the unyielding soil and inclined the points forward so that they slid into muscle and flesh as the horses galloped on to them. The grass rose up, and weapons reached out of it. Yasin’s horsemen turned round and galloped back into the battle. Muskets exploded in a sudden fusillade. The black puffs of powder smoke drifted through the grass. Daggers flashed in the bright sun, the triumphant yells of the cavalry died in hiccuped cries of panic, from across the river the bear roared in his cage. The Deceivers rose up screaming. William stood with them, and his heart pounded, and his fingers kneaded the rumal in his waistband.

The rajah’s horse stumbled beside him. The rajah’s black moustache and blazing-black eyes hurtled down on him. He saw them near, and as personal enemies, against the background of heaving grass and embossed round shields and coloured clothes and whirling swords. The rajah fell forward at his feet and struggled to free a short dagger from his sash.

All the brightness outside, and the movement, were reflected in black mirrors behind William’s eyes, and the rumal was in his hand. A wolf snarled at his feet. It was the evil of Kali, as the harlot girl had been the lust of Kali, and he could strangle it in one motion. It was the evil thing that God made and, having made, strove to destroy. His knuckles sprang up white ... he heard the double crack.

He bowed his head and slowly, luxuriously, let his wrists turn down. The rumal unloosed. There was never such power as this in all the world, or such fulfilment.

Piroo was beside him. The fight was finished. William said, ‘All done?’

‘All, Jemadar-sahib. Some of their horses have run away, some are dead, some we have.’

Piroo’s voice was pure respect, and in his face the awe of a man who meets Death walking in at his gate or comes suddenly upon Dedication praying in the streets. The awe was in Hussein’s eyes too, mixed there with a panic fear, as of the supernatural.

The chief burier lifted up his voice. ‘Oh, Jemadar-sahib-bahadur, now we know why our leader who is dead said you might be the greatest that the Deceivers have ever known.’ Here was the second of the strong emotions that exalted him -- the admiration of a smaller for a greater in the same craft. A village carpenter had praised a chair he’d made once, and it had felt like this.

‘What now, Jemadar-sahib?’ Piroo asked humbly. ‘There will be trouble over this. From Padampur they will send the rest of the army after us.’

William shrugged. ‘I think not. There will be a new rajah. After this, he will be advised to make peace with us.’

It was true. The Deceivers were a monster, shapeless but universal, headless but possessed of many brains. Anything wielding less than the full power of the English government would have to come to terms with them. William knew now that nearly every rajah, nearly every important squire and landowner in the country, must know something of the Deceivers. Some helped them overtly, some did not, all kept silent.

Together they strengthened and executed the law of nature, which always weakens the weak, robs the poor, and murders the defenceless.

He raised his head quickly. ‘What’s that?’

Piroo sniffed. ‘A fire! Quick, someone, run and put it out, over there!’

Flames, almost without colour in the sunlight, leaped up where a musket blast had set fire to tinder-dry grass. Blue smoke rose denser and denser, carrying with it black shreds of burned grass.

‘No!’ William’s voice was imperative. ‘Take everything of value off the cavalrymen, leave the bodies. Bring the sepoys and the women and children out of the bushes. Scatter them about in the grass. Leave them all to the fire. The flames will mar them, half hiding, half revealing. Leave their muskets by the sepoys, their swords and shields by the cavalry. Hurry!’

Already his men were dragging up the hastily hidden victims of the massacre at the ford.

He went on steadily, talking to Piroo. ‘It is well known that the cavalrymen of these petty rajahs are robbers each and every one -- the rajahs too. Here is the story of a robbery, and a brave defence. The new rajah will be quiet, or he will have to explain to the English Company what happened to ten of their sepoys.’

He was the leader. There was no dispute among his men or within himself. His heart was hard, and he could watch without emotion as the foolish women and the stupid soldiers were thrown into the flames. The woman at Kahari should be there, in this pyre, with her dreams. The acrid smoke smarted in his eyes. He was the leader. He had to be. Only so could he cover the thin sheets of paper and record for ever the beautiful honeycomb detail of the Deceivers’ world. It would be the work not of months but of years, years on the wonderful road where a man could find power and fulfilment. At the end, after he was dead perhaps, that outside world of Governors and Governors-General could read, and admire, and be staggered with their own pettiness.

He said, ‘Bury our dead in the pit we dug for the others. Thanksgiving tomorrow morning. We’ll move now. East first, until we’re out of Padampur.’

Hussein trotted up, the two dead children under his arms flopping like bundles of cloth. He threw them down. William’s eyes hurt as the flames roared up, and Hussein backed away, shading his face and holding his hands across his mouth.

A dry wind of March blew steadily out of the south and scorched his face. Since November he had led his band in a great circle: north to the Jumna and beyond, east through Rohilkand, Tirhut, and the foothills of the Oudh Terai; south through the villages that skirt the city of Allahabad; thence south by west. Sagthali lay six stages ahead on this road, but the band would turn off tomorrow or the next day.

Yesterday Mr Wilson had passed, riding in the same direction among many police and servants, his head sunk on his chest. William noted the pistols in the saddle holsters and the armed men behind him, and wondered again that the Deceivers never attacked Europeans. His band had on occasion murdered travellers better armed than that. But the English never carried cash or valuables on them, and the ensuing commotion would be dangerous. Kali knew best.

He had thought then, and many times since the affair at Padampur, whether he should get a message to Mr Wilson -- and to Madhya perhaps -- telling him of the Deceivers’ rendezvous at Parsola, and asking him to bring up cavalry. He had not done it before, and he did not do it now, when Mr Wilson’s passing gave him an opportunity. For one thing, he did not think he would be believed; then the rumours would go out, the Deceivers would hear, the rendezvous would be altered, the sale cancelled. Further, though it would be a big step forward to catch all the Deceivers who came to the Parsola sale, he knew that, however many came, they would still be only a small fraction of the whole network. He had decided that if circumstances permitted he would bide his time, complete this phase of his investigations at Parsola, and spend the summer persuading the government that large-scale operations must begin with the following Dussehra.

He hitched his weight forward to sit more easily in the rough saddle of the Cutch mare he now rode. The horse that Yasin had bought for him in Manikwal had long since been sold. They had captured and disposed of forty horses since then. Hussein had bought this mare in the Kuraon bazaar a few days back. No one would find it easy to trace the movements of the band through its horses. And now the end of the journey was in sight. Soon they would reach Parsola by the Mala marsh. The village and the marsh were in his district, not twenty-five miles from his headquarters at Madhya. His district? His headquarters? The phrases sounded ridiculous.

At Parsola they would meet many other bands and dispose of their jewels to the brokers assembled by Chandra Sen. But, according to report, Chandra Sen himself never came to the annual sales. He stayed at his home or chose that time to visit in Madhya. His object was to keep in touch with the authorities and be ready to distract them if for any reason they showed signs of investigating the area of the sale.

It was lucky that Chandra Sen would not be at Parsola, because he had already seen William in the guise of Gopal the weaver, and he knew that the Collector of Madhya had disappeared. If he saw ‘Gopal’ again, he would certainly connect the two things.