The Faraway Drums (2 page)

Farnol took aim. The men were less than a hundred yards below him, easy targets. He felt no compunction about killing in cold blood; he had learned long ago that one didn’t survive if one waited to be hot-blooded about it. Killing was not like making love: one did not work up to it.

He squeezed the trigger, saw one of the men slump down as if all his bones had suddenly melted. He jerked back the bolt, ejected the cartridge, slammed the bolt home again, took aim, fired. A second man, spinning round to face up the slope, stood as if he had been pulled up by a rope, then fell backwards over the rim of a ledge. Farnol aimed the Lee-Enfield a third time, but the third man had slid down below the rock in front of him, got a shot off up the slope as Farnol switched his aim.

Farnol
knew at once that he was not going to be able to draw a bead on the man in his new position. He hesitated, scanning the slope; above him the prayer-flags cracked in the rising wind. On the next ridge the goat-herd still stood looking at this duel that was no business of his; Farnol silently cursed him for his disinterest. He was like the bloody villagers who stood on the sidelines of the polo matches down on the plains, careless of who won or lost, showing approval only if one of the players toppled from his pony and broke his leg or neck. That was India: four hundred million bystanders.

He straightened up, sped down the slope, slipping and sliding, heading for a large rock that would give him all the shelter he would need. Then, while he was in full flight, going too fast to drop down, he saw the man rise up, his rifle at his shoulder. Farnol knew he was going to die. A hillman like this one would have spent his life aiming at moving targets: sambhar, gooral sheep, pheasants and men. But the enemy bullet, if it was fired at all, came nowhere near Farnol. As he hit the ground, hurling himself forward to slide down towards the big rock, he caught a lopsided glimpse of the rifleman falling forward, losing his rifle as he did so.

Farnol lay a moment, getting his breath, waiting for the man to reach for his rifle. But he lay still, one arm flung out towards the gun. Farnol got to his feet, aching from the crash of his body against the rocky ground, gravel rash scorching him like sunburn, blood running from a cut above his eye. Moving cautiously, rifle at the ready, he went down towards me hillman. He saw Karim standing up on the next ridge, but he made no sign towards the Sikh; there would be time later to thank Karim for the shot that had saved his life. He paused about ten feet from the ambusher, tensed as the man’s arm quivered, trying to grab the rifle just beyond the reach of the weakly clawing hand. Then he moved down, put his foot on the rifle. He recognized it: a Krenk, a very old one, a Russian weapon.

He looked down at the dying man, said in Hindi, “Why did you try to kill me?”

The man stared up at him out of fierce eyes that were already glazing with death. The rattle was in his throat as he whispered, “Raj—will die!”

II

Karim Singh came scrambling across from the other ridge. “Sahib, that was a damned close thing! If it were not for my marvellous accuracy, you would be dead!”

“
I am grateful for your marvellous accuracy.” One could hardly tick off a man for his conceit, not when he’d just saved your life. “Take a look at the other two.”

Karim went across to inspect the other two hillmen, came back to report they were both dead. “You too, sahib, are marvellously accurate. But haven’t I always said so? Such marvellous shots, we are. Our skill leaves me speechless!”

Farnol, deaf to the speechless Karim, was examining the dead man. He pulled his turban down over the cut above his eye and for a moment the flow of blood was staunched. He still felt sore and stiff from his plunge down the slope, but his mind was alert with questions. He went through the man’s pockets, but there was nothing in them to identify him. Some dried apricots, a string of prayer-beads: the sustenance of the traveller in these hills. Farnol himself carried apricots in his pocket, but he had never felt the need of prayer-beads.

He lifted the man’s arm to lay it by his side; he was a neat man who liked to see even the dead laid out neatly. The ragged sleeve fell back and he saw the marking on the inside of the arm at the bend of the elbow. It was smudged, not a very good tattoo; it looked like a dagger standing in the middle of a jagged circle. He stood up, went down to the other bodies, looked at the right arms: the same marking was there just inside the elbow. One of the tattoos was clearer than the others and he recognized it now for what it was meant to be: a dagger driven into the centre of a crown.

He got slowly to his feet, not wanting to believe the thought crystallizing in his mind.
Raj—will die!
He had taken it as a threat against himself, taking it for granted that the ambushers had somehow known who he was: a political agent, a representative of the British Raj. But the man had meant someone much higher than himself, someone for whom he had no other name but Raj. The word could mean kingdom, a ruler or a great ruler.

Or
The
Great Ruler: George the Fifth, King of England, already down in Bombay and on his way to Delhi where he was to be crowned Emperor of India.

III

“You must remember, Major Farnol, you cannot rule this part of the world forever.”

“We have no intention ever of trying to rule Tibet.” The lama had given himself no name and
Farnol
knew better than to ask. He knew the etiquette and protocol of these mountains as well as he did those of the messes, the stations and the government offices down on the plains; he took care to respect these customs more than he did those of his own kind. “Other people covet your country more than we do.”

He was not convinced that what he said was true. Eight years ago Francis Younghusband had led a British expedition up through the passes east of Lue and on to Lhasa; Curzon, the then Viceroy, had dreamed of Britain ruling the Roof of the World as well as the Indian sub-continent. The British influence had declined after Younghusband and Curzon both retired from the imperial service, but Farnol knew there were still men in India and Whitehall who dreamed of enlarging the Empire.

“I am not concerned for my country.” The lama was no more than skin and bone, a shrivelled gourd for the inner peace that kept him alive. Unafraid of death, he waited patiently for its arrival like a passenger at a wayside station waiting for a train that ran to no schedule. “I speak of India. Time is running out for the English.”

“Perhaps. But it won’t run out in my lifetime.” But there were doubts nibbling like mice at all he had been brought up to believe in. “Not even if I live to your great and honourable age.”

The lama’s withered gums did not make an attractive smile; the warm humour was in the faded eyes peering out from its veil of wrinkles. “I hope you live so long, Major Farnol. But I warn you—there are men in the hills south of here who are plotting to drive the English out of India.”

“Where can I find them?”

But the lama waved a vague hand; it looked to Farnol like a floating leaf. They were seated cross-legged on the terrace that ran along below the southern wall of the monastery; there was no fence to the edge of the terrace and below them there was a cliff that fell sheer for at least two thousand feet. Across the deep valley, an arm’s length away on the thin shining air, was the lowest range of the Eternal Snows; Farnol would have to cross it on his way back into India. He had crossed the frontier marked by the cartographers, but it was not marked on the mountains and he knew he would never be asked for a visa.

“Somewhere. Who knows?” The mountains were gods to the people who lived amongst them and the lama would not betray the plotters the gods had chosen to hide. Such a betrayal would need a sign from the gods themselves.

Farnol
bit into one of the small Lachen apples that one of the younger monks had brought him and the lama. He had also brought some small barley cakes, an urn of tea and a bowl of yak butter. Farnol had already eaten one of the cakes and taken a sip of the buttered tea; but in all his time in these mountains he had never learned to like the taste of either. The Lachen apple, tart as the small Christmas apples he had once eaten in England, cleansed his mouth.

“Should I fear for my own life going back through the mountains?”

The lama’s bones creaked with his shrug; the eighty-one beads of his rosary click-clicked their way between the dry twigs of his fingers. “Are you afraid of death?”

“Yes.” When you are thirty-two years old, your health is good and your prostate gland is something you don’t know you possess, why should one be unafraid of death?

The lama’s smile was all gums and wrinkles. “You should spend more time here with us.”

At the far corner of the terrace where it turned round the monastery wall, a man was seated facing north and east. Farnol guessed the direction of his gaze, towards Kailas, the holiest of all the holy mountains. It was there amidst the Eternal Snows, lying not only in heaven and earth but in the hearts of believers. Farnol could imagine the meditation of the unmoving man at the far end of the terrace, the trance-like contemplation which could make him part of the mountains and the mountains part of him, one with the gods. He himself had always felt the mysticism of these high places, but scepticism had always denied him the transcendental feeling that the true believer could achieve.

The lama saw Farnol looking at the man. “A seeker after the truth—he comes from the south. He is not one of us but he seeks the same truth.”

“Do many come here from the outside?”

“Not many, but some. We always make them welcome. We should make you welcome if you wished to stay.”

“I must leave for Simla tomorrow.” He smiled. “But not to seek the truth, not there.” Not amongst the little tin gods.

“As a young man I worked as a bearer in Simla. Are you Church of England?”

“Occasionally.” At Christmas, Easter and on compulsory church parades back at the regiment.

“The Church of England doesn’t understand contemplation.” He remembered the vicar’s wife
for
whom he had worked, who had always tried to tell him that cleanliness was next to godliness. He now hadn’t had a bath in sixty years and he was sure he was as close to God as any shiny-skinned Christian. “But then neither does the Englishman, does he? I watched him in Simla. When he was not working he was playing polo or that strange game, cricket—”

“There’s time for contemplation there. The spectators often go into trances.”

But the lama, a wise man but unlearned in the wisdom of the west, missed the joke. Or perhaps, Farnol thought, the English sense of humour doesn’t translate well into Tibetan. He spoke five languages besides English, but humour was always the note that slipped on the tongue.

“Take care, Major Farnol. Do not spend so much time on the playing fields. I hear whispers—” Again the leaf of his hand floated in the air. “The caravans coming back bring us rumours of men in certain villages who will soon be going south to start their work.”

“Tibetans or Indians?” Farnol saw the lama’s hesitation and pressed the question: “You can tell me without offending the gods. You don’t want our soldiers coming so far north to seek them out, not again.”

“All I can say is that they are not our people,” said the lama and Farnol knew he would tell only the truth. “They are Indian. But I can tell you no more than that. The gods will tell you if they wish to.”

The man at the end of the terrace stood up. Farnol, his attention distracted for a moment from the lama, watched fascinated as the mystic, wrapped in a long brown robe, seemed to move in a trance towards the very edge of the terrace, as if he were going to step out on to the clear shining air. Farnol stopped himself from crying out; he knew better than to interfere. He knew how some of these men could put themselves into a state where they achieved the seemingly impossible: to walk through fire and come out unharmed, to sit naked amongst the ice of the highest places and be unaffected. But men did not walk on the air above a valley two thousand feet deep. Christ may have walked on the water but even He had never shown that He could walk on air.

The man abruptly stopped; Farnol guessed that his toes must be curled over the very edge of the tremendous drop. He stood there poised, unmoving, seemingly leaning on the breeze that blew up from the valley; Farnol waited for him to plunge off into the void. Then he turned round; Farnol would swear that for a moment the man actually stepped off the terrace edge, stood on the air. Then he walked back across
the
terrace, gliding in the long brown robe. As he disappeared past the corner of the monastery wall he looked towards Farnol and the lama. Farnol caught a glimpse of a black beard, a hooked nose and dark deep-set eyes that he was sure saw neither himself nor the lama.

“Were the gods protecting that man when he stood there on the edge?”

“Who knows? We can only put our trust in them. You should put your trust in them, too.”

“I only wish I could.” But that was not the truth: he had the sceptic’s false faith in himself.

All that had been a month ago and since then, journeying slowly back through the high passes, working the villages for information like an insurance salesman looking for new clients, he had learned nothing from the gods or any less exalted source. He had heard a rumour or two, but they had been only echoes; nobody knew, or would tell, where the gossip had begun. Once, in a village, a man had pointed a finger, but when Farnol had looked round the man the finger had been pointed at had disappeared; when he turned back the would-be informer had also disappeared. It had always been like that here in the Himalayas: mystery and magic were part of the atmosphere, conjurers, mesmerists and the occasional charlatan were as native to the mountains as the gooral sheep and the snow leopard. The only defence was never to show your bewilderment.

So he had slowly come down from the high places till he found himself on the Tibet Road above the Satluj River and there been ambushed.