The Lotus and the Wind (2 page)

She found two Gurkha riflemen beside her. They held her jacket, tugging at its hem gently and grinning shyly. They pointed back down the road and said together,
‘Wapas, miss sahib, wapas jao.’
Their Hindustani sounded as angular and awkward as her own--well, it would be. Gurkhas came from Nepal, Robin had told her, and were not Indians at all.

She caught one’s arm, pointed at the lone man on the hill, and yelled, ‘
Dekko! Admi!
Oh dear, that one--is he friend?’ Then she pointed to the right, screaming, ‘
Badmash
there! Not here,
there!
’

The riflemen at once saw the lone man to the left of the rock. They lifted their rifles while Anne shook her head and screamed, ‘No, no!’ and looked around for someone who could interpret.

There was no one. She saw the Highlanders and the rest of the Gurkhas struggling up the right-hand part of the slope. If they went on in that direction they would come to where the lone man’s enemies lay hidden. She saw her father’s broad back up there, and on the hill close to him the bare bottom of a Highlander whose kilts had been pushed up over his body when he had stumbled on the rock. The Highlander got up, and the wind blew the laughter and the clattering of arms and the vile, incomprehensible words down to her. She heard Hayling’s voice raised, swearing, ordering, becoming fainter as the soldiers worked farther away across the hill. Out in front of them a shot was fired, then another. The firing grew to a fusillade. The soldiers stopped to fire, then ran forward behind her father, swung right, and puffed over the ridge and out of sight.

The lone man still crouched in full view on the hillside. On the road the bullock drivers hissed soothingly to their animals. A woman in green knelt in the ditch to tend the wounded Highland private’s arm, and Anne saw with surprise that it was Edith Collett, whom her mother called ‘fast.’

Then, from straight up the hill, four Pathans broke cover and ran down on the lone man with the jezail. He twisted around his rock, aimed, fired, and dropped down again. One of the running men fell, the others came on, bounding from rock to rock with their robes flying and the sun in their hawk faces. The soldiers, over to the right, could not see them. The lone man rose, turned, and threw himself with desperate steps down the hill towards the road.

‘He’s looking for shelter, he wants help!’ Anne screamed. The two Gurkha riflemen once more raised their rifles. One of the running trio of Pathans dropped to his knee, steadied, and fired. The lone man curled up like a shot rabbit and fell headlong. Where he fell, he crawled and writhed forward still, and still held to the long jezail in his right hand. Wriggling by jerks and spasms, he reached a cleft of the rock. Anne cried, ‘Save him!’ and found herself running up the hill. She forgot the bullets and the tightness in her throat. Her mind was empty of everything but the lone man’s face. He had been so close to safety when the bullet from behind smashed him down; he was not young, but his face was the face of a man lost, a man far from mother or wife or daughter.

She stumbled up the hill. The running Pathans came on. The two Gurkhas began to shoot, hurrying a few paces, shooting, reloading, running again, yelling to her to come back. She understood the sense, although the words meant nothing. Her mother began to scream once more.

One of the three Pathans went down, shot in the head by the Gurkha to her right. She saw his bearded face melt, and he was gone. The other Pathans made to stop and shoot, but after a fractional hesitation they changed their minds and ran on. She and the Gurkhas could not reach the lone man before his enemies did. Her breath pumped in her lungs and her face grew scarlet. The lone man lay sprawled on his stomach. A red stream of his blood trickled down the stones. His right hand moved aimlessly across the bare face of the rock slab below his head. He had let go of the jezail. The Pathans reached him when Anne and the riflemen were still twenty yards away. Knives flashed, and the Pathans swooped. A long steel glitter ended in the lone man’s back.

The Gurkhas’ rifles exploded by her ear, but their hands were sweaty and unsteady, and both shots missed. The Pathans, without stopping their headlong pace, snatched up the lone man’s jezail and swerved around and bounded like stags back up the hill. They ran with tireless, irregular strides, jinking, separating, coming together again, their robes flying. The Gurkhas fired twice more each, but the Pathans ran on. Then they were gone.

Anne sank slowly to her knees beside the lone man. She did not feel the sharp stones beneath her. She caught hold of the knife-handle in his back and pulled. The blade grated on bone, blood bubbled under her fingers. If she had been told to do it she could not have, but it did not seem horrible now. He needed all she could give him. Anger against his enemies nearly suffocated her.

The blade grated free. For half a minute the blood oozed out through the lone man’s robe, then it stopped. Anne lifted her head, the tears wet on her cheeks, and saw the two Gurkhas standing beside her. They looked down, their mouths hard; one of them stirred the wounded man with the toe of his boot.
‘Wakhli, badmash,’
he said, and shook his head and wrinkled his nose.

Anne whispered, ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to carry him down.’ She made motions of lifting the man, who lay still on his stomach, his head turned to one side. She saw that his eyes were open and expressionless. His mouth hung open, but he could not move hand or foot. He had lost his turban, and the blood was clotting under his long hair.

Boots crunched closer along the hillside towards her. Major Hayling leaned, panting, at her side, his good left hand on his thigh, sweat pouring down behind the black patch on his right eye. Five or six Highlanders came, gathered round, and peered down at the wounded man and up at the hill. One of them said, ‘Weel, ye kilt this yin, Johnny!’ and clapped the Gurkhas on the back.

‘No!’ Anne cried. ‘He’s not dead. And he wasn’t shooting at us. It was him the others were after!’

Hayling frowned and said curtly, ‘Get a blanket. Hurry.’ One of the Highlanders shambled away down the hill.

Hayling bent over the wounded man and spoke to him softly, insistently, in a harsh tongue. At last he stood up. ‘He can’t speak. I’m afraid he’s paralysed. I wish I knew where he came from. He’s not from around here. Nor are the others, the two dead up there. If they were, it would be easier.’

Still frowning, he stood there, his hook against the metal of his belt buckle. Anne sat down suddenly and put her head in her hands. Through her dizziness she heard Hayling ask, ‘What was this man doing, Miss Hildreth, when you first saw him?’

His voice was alert, a little hard. He had taken off his helmet, and she saw the grey in his thick dark hair and noticed how hunched he was in the shoulders, how middle-aged now and tired. She liked him better than she had ever done.

She told him all that had happened. Hayling shook his head slowly, looking down always at the robed man on the rock, whose bleak eyes were fixed across the road towards the north. The man lay absolutely without motion or stir. Anne saw that he was still breathing.

Hayling said, ‘They took his jezail? In every other way it seems like a blood feud. But why should they risk so much for his jezail? You’re sure it wasn’t a modern rifle?’

‘It was one of those long old-fashioned guns with brass bands around it.’

‘H’m. And they certainly weren’t trying to rob the convoy, Those aren’t quite ordinary Pathan clothes. He’s from farther west somewhere, from over the passes. Here he ought to be a Khattak or a Jowaki or an Afridi or a Yusufzai--but he isn’t.’

The Highlander returned, carrying a blanket, and with the help of three other soldiers began to lift the wounded man, not gently, on to it. Hayling snapped, ‘Careful there! He’s badly wounded. And he’s not an enemy.’

When the soldiers raised the man Anne saw the blood on the rock where his body had lain, and she knew then that he could not live, and began to cry again. His blood formed patterns, lying in a pool in the centre, in streaks at the edges. The streaks looked like letters of the Arabic manuscripts she had seen pinned up in Indian bazaars, like the lettering in the stone of old mosques.

She said hesitantly, shaking her head to free her eyes from tears, ‘Isn’t that--writing?’

Hayling knelt quickly and peered at the face of the rock. It had been in the shade of the cleft where the man had lain; Anne remembered his hand had been there once, aimlessly moving. On the grey rock, in darkly shining outlines, she saw the signs:

‘
Atlar
,’ Hayling said slowly. ‘Horses--in Turki or some Turkic language. Horses.’ He stood a moment longer, then said, ‘Come down the hill now, Miss Hildreth.’

She did not want to ask any questions. The two Gurkhas stood solicitously over her while she was sick. Then she was back on the road, and her father was there, scolding and puffing, and her mother was there, talking, talking. . . . The lone man was there, stretched on the rough blanket on the floor of a bullock cart, his open eyes staring at the roof. Hayling was there in the bullock cart, sitting by his head.

Her father handed her into the carriage, and she felt the gruff admiration in his voice. ‘Silly girl... brave... lie back, lie back.’ She heard voices up and down the road, Major Hayling’s among them. ‘We must reach Nowshera to-night. Push on.’ The carriage wheels creaked. She half fainted, half slept.

Her eyes closed, Anne knew that she was lying in a bed in one of the Nowshera dak-bungalow’s three rooms. The door was ajar into the centre room, which was used as a living and dining-room by the travellers who spent the night in the bungalow. Anne remembered waking once or twice on the journey, then dozing off again, then arriving here and refusing to be undressed by her mother. She had undressed by herself and got into bed. Now it was dark, and if she opened her eyes she would see that the oil lamp on the table in the centre room sent a vertical beam of light through the door and up the wall near her head.

She knew her father was in there, sprawled back in a wicker chair; and her mother, sitting upright near the table; and Major Hayling--he would be by the window because the lone man was there on a cot, still without the power of speech. In her mother’s voice she had heard the desire to protest against such a misuse of dak-bungalows, which were reserved for European travellers. But the lone man lay there. His presence and the forms of death that sat at his head filled both rooms, so that Anne thought: If I let my hand drop over the edge of my bed it will touch his lined face. She almost called out that she was awake, then decided not to. She was tired, and frightened that the dying man might be left alone with death if they all came to her.

She heard her father say, ‘I still don’t understand quite, I must say. By the way, where’s the wounded Highlander?’

‘In the cantonment hospital,’ Hayling said, and went on to answer indirectly the Hildreths’ unspoken complaint. ‘The surgeon said there was no hope for this poor fellow, so I thought it would be better to have him here where it’s easier for me to be with him if he regains the power to speak. The surgeon said there was nothing more he could do, that even the bandages were as good as he could tie. Mrs. Collett did a wonderfully neat job--where are the Colletts, by the way?’

‘Ah, h’m, yes, Mrs. Collett. She and her husband are spending the night with friends in the cantonment.’ Major Hildreth coughed nervously, as he always did when circumstances forced him to bring Edith Collett’s name into a conversation. The first time, back in Meerut, he’d made the mistake of saying what a good-looking woman she was. Now Anne heard her mother sniff, and herself became angry. Mrs. Collett was supposed to be fast. Perhaps she was. But she did her best to look attractive, and she laughed cheerfully with gentlemen and had a sort of tantalizing scorn for them, which they loved. Why, on account of that, should her mother sneer even at Edith Collett’s ability to tie a good bandage?

‘The Colletts are going to be in Peshawar, are they not?’ Major Hayling inquired suavely. Anne could imagine the queer, curved little smile on his face, a smile that his listeners could interpret any way they chose. Major Hayling too was said to be fast, but, because he was an eligible bachelor, her mother did not mind.

Mrs. Hildreth said coldly, ‘I believe
she
is. Captain Collett is going up to Afghanistan to his regiment. Why she could not stay behind in Simla or Meerut until he returns, instead of coming up to Peshawar, I am at a loss to understand.’

‘Oh, come, Mrs. Hildreth, perhaps she wishes to be near her husband, for when he gets leave.’

‘Major Hayling, you are a man of the world. You know perfectly well that she is coming up here because in Peshawar there will be many gentlemen whose wives for one reason or another have not been able to accompany them that far.’

Major Hayling chuckled. It was peculiar to be lying here and listening to her mother’s gossip, just as though they were all still in India proper, when they weren’t in India, and a dying man lay on the floor. She imagined she could hear his breathing, slow, faint, unsteady, under the voices in that room and under the muttering of the servants in the compound and under the singing of the soldiers in their tents. Her mind ran back down the Grand Trunk Road to the whole rushed, muddled excitement. She crouched again in the ditch, the rocky hill in front of her, and wished Robin had been there. He would have been so carelessly brave. Then she heard Major Hayling speak, more softly than before.