The Lotus and the Wind (6 page)

Subadar Maniraj was yelling something to Robin from across the hill. With surprise he noted that he could not hear because of the noise of the battle. Howitzer shells rumbled overhead like lazy trains on an iron bridge, the bursts reverberating among the hills. Bullets clattered, and the Ghilzais screamed.

Suddenly there was silence. The company reached the shelter of the last convexity of the hill’s slope. Here the Ghilzais on the crest could not see them. This time Robin plainly heard the old subadar’s yell. ‘Fix bayonets and charge, sahib!’

The bugler did not wait. He whipped the bugle to his lips and blew the calls. The green men slammed their bayonets home on the bosses, lifted their rifles, and surged forward.
‘Ayo Gurkhali!’

The bayonets glittered on the crest, piercing the lowering snow clouds. Robin began to run. Battle was as exciting and as awful as he had expected; but he was only observing it. He had not committed any of his heart to it, and little of his mind.

A Ghilzai popped up like a jack-in-the-box from the ground fifteen feet off and ran forward with a yell. Robin stood still and watched the man coming on, his knife raised. In that fraction of a second he saw the passion in the dark eyes and then a flicker of something else. Doubt? Why? . . . The man had a beard. Surely this was he who had fired at Robin down the hill. Then the eyes and the thing in the eyes faded, and the eyes dipped and the top of the head dipped. At Robin’s elbow the smoke wisped from Jagbir’s rifle. Standing motionless still, Robin watched Jagbir draw his kukri, grab the wounded Ghilzai’s hair, tug his head back, and with a single sweeping stroke decapitate him. Then Jagbir, laughing, threw the head across at the bugler and said, ‘Catch?’

Robin drew out his binoculars and searched the hillcrest and the barren terrain around it. Ahead, the hill bent down to a fairly wide, mist-wreathed valley. That was the valley which, according to the general, lay across the rear of the enemy facing the main body of the brigade. Close to his right was the hill which was Mclain’s first objective. Looking back, he could see the Highlanders fanning out at its base in preparation for the assault.

Subadar Maniraj was at his elbow, his face grey-green and the whites of his eyes red. Those red eyes--you read about them, but Gurkhas’ eyes actually went watery red in battle. And with women?

The subadar said, ‘We’ve got five of their bodies up here. The rest ran away. Riflemen Narbir and Tulbahadur killed, seven wounded, none seriously. And’--the old man’s voice grew angry--’why didn’t you draw your sword, your pistol, sahib? You might have been killed. I saw. What would your father say to me?’

‘I’m sorry, Subadar-sahib. I forgot.’

‘Forgot! Shall I send the wounded back under escort?’

Robin fingered the cold butt of his pistol. Forgot? He hadn’t even been in the battle; he still wasn’t.

The wounded. . . . The brigade would advance down the valley in front of him after its attack. His wounded men would have an easier trip going down there then than going all the way back now. He said, ‘No, give them first-aid and keep them with us, sahib. And we’d better get ready to support the Highlanders on to their hill. And have “in position” signalled back, with the number of casualties.’

‘Hawas!’
The subadar saluted carefully and limped off, shouting orders and waving his sword. Jagbir opened his haversack, pulled out a cold chupatti, and began to stuff it into his mouth.

From the valley ahead and from the hills on the left, whence the enemy had seen that Robin’s company was now on their flank, the Ghilzais opened up a sniping fire. Jagbir rolled over on his side behind a rock and went on eating. Subadar Maniraj chased the Gurkhas into covered firing positions. Perhaps there’ll be a counter-attack, Robin thought.

Between drifting clouds he could see a long way towards the Hindu Kush in the north. Only the thickness of the air prevented him from seeing the whole world, surely. The heap of stones that Colonel Franklin had seen from below was a ruined building. Faded prayer flags fluttered in the icy breeze, their poles anchored among the sharp stones strewing the hilltop. Robin thought he saw a statue in the building. If so, it could not be a mosque. That was strange and interesting. He could see what was happening in the battle from there as well as from anywhere else. He walked over towards it.

A small eminence rose out of the hilltop, on the right. There the ruin and the statue stood. From below, the ground had looked flat, but actually it undulated and gave shelter in its folds to all who did not stand or walk about. Robin thought, as he went, that Jagbir had not seen him go. The orderly continued to stuff chupatti into his mouth and talk with the bugler; he ought to have kept one eye always on Robin--also Robin ought to have told him where he was going. But Robin did not want anyone with him now, not even Jagbir. He could not be alone on the hilltop, since there were a hundred soldiers here, but he could be by himself. The soldiers were here, but they were about their business of cleaning rifles, replenishing ammunition, preparing for the advance or the counter-attack. With Jagbir it was different; he was Jagbir’s business.

The old temple was small and square. Probably it had never been very high, and now it stood almost level with the stones out of which it had been made and many times remade. Robin stopped ten paces from it, wondering who had built it in the beginning, and thinking of the conquerors and the invaders who had passed this way before him. From the time of Alexander many captains, leading many armies, had come this way, bursting out of the turbulent civilizations of Persia and Mesopotamia towards the India that was Golconda.

The outer walls were now one or two feet high. There had been an inner chamber, and the south wall of it was still three parts intact. The statue of the god sat on a little cracked stone dais in front of the wall. Robin paced slowly inside. Chips of sky-blue tile watered the dull stones of the inner chamber. Those would be relics of the Persians. The statue was descended from another civilization altogether; it represented the Lord Buddha, resting cross-legged in contemplation, looking, out of empty sockets in the almond shaped eyes, towards the empty north. The eyes must have been jewels, for they were gone.

Robin settled down near the statue, with his back against the inner wall, and looked across the narrow saddle separating the hill from that other which was Mclain’s objective. He could look down on it, for it was appreciably lower than his. The Highlanders were moving up the slope. No enemy opposed their advance. Probably a few Ghilzais had been there earlier in the day, but they would have gone long since. Raising his head a little, Robin saw a line of Gurkhas stretched on their stomachs to his right, ready to give the Highlanders support if they needed it. But nothing happened. The Ghilzais had gone--to join their comrades of the main force, to go home--spirited away into the troubled gloom of the mountains. The steady sniping continued on the far flank, the left.

The Highlanders continued their climb. Robin picked up his glasses and saw that Mclain carried a naked claymore in his right hand and a pistol in his left. Many of his soldiers smoked their pipes as they climbed. Their kilts were pale green and white, the ancient hunting tartan of MacDonald of the Isles. All the white spats moved together in a slow, pulling rhythm.

He watched until they reached the top, passed over, and began to move down the forward slope. In a minute the hill would hide them. He wondered idly why Mclain was going over the crest when the general had ordered him to stay on top until the main attack developed. Well, those were his own orders, and the general had said Mclain’s were to be the same, but they might have been changed. It would have been a good idea for the general to speak to both of them at the same time, since they were to work in such close cooperation. Confusion over orders was fairly common in this brigade. Some of the young staff officers in Simla had hinted that the powers thought Old Alma something less than intelligent.

Simla was a pleasant enough place, and his company had liked being on Viceroy’s Guard. They had had plenty of time off, and so had he. From Jakko in the dawn you could see half the peaks of Kangra and Bashahr. Walk or ride fifteen miles out, and the wind blew away the febrile excitements of Simla, the hothouse flowers, the perpetual struggles for place and notice. There were struggles for love too, but there the wind only sharpened his doubts. He had liked going out with Anne. He might have liked it better still if her parents had allowed her to ride all day with him so that they could pass beyond the reach of Simla’s atmosphere. If there was any girl in the world for him, it would be Anne. If. . . He absentmindedly touched his breast-pocket, where her last letter lay. She should be in Peshawar by now.

At the back of the Highland company a soldier stopped on the crest, turned, and began to wave a short flag in Morse code. Robin read ‘No casualties.’ The signaller turned again and ran off to catch up with the still moving company. The message had not said ‘In position’ or ‘Reached objective’ or anything like that. So presumably Mclain did have different orders. Robin put down his glasses and picked up one of the chips of blue tile lying on the ground about him. A bursting shell had made a small hole, blackening and scoring the earth around it and loosening the texture of the soil. He dug his fingers into it, crumbling the friable stuff against his hand.

He found a hard round thing in his fingers. Thinking it might be a shell splinter, he idly rubbed away the dirt clinging to it. Then he brushed it with the sleeve of his tunic. A small silver coin shone dimly in his hand. He bent his head, rubbed harder, and turned the coin this way and that, the better to catch the feeble light. Through the pitted, encrusted dirt of the years the shape of a head began to appear. The head was in profile, of a strong young man. His straight nose continued the line of his forehead, ending above a short upper lip and a curved, sensual but powerful mouth. The neck was strong as a young bull’s, the head set imperiously upon it, and the eyes were deep sunk.

The coin lay flat in the palm of Robin’s hand. Others had thought out and fought out the battle for this hill; he had merely watched himself take part in it. But the little coin jerked every chord of sensibility in him and set them all throbbing. That face--two thousand and more years ago this young man had marched out of the west, but the years had not passed away from him. His cities still stood and carried his name. Perhaps that was not surprising, because he had built the cities of stone. The astonishment was that Alexander still lived in men’s hearts, though he was in his grave, and a hundred generations with him. In Asia peasants referred to him as if he had just passed their way last week and might come again next week. The more desolate the place, the more surely its people knew Alexander of Macedon. A mysterious pile of stones beside the road, a ruined tower on a hill--’Who built that?’ Robin had often asked. ‘Allah knows! Iskander, I expect.’ The fact that the tower could not have been more than three hundred years old only added to the magic. Other conquerors, followed by great armies, had trampled through these hills and across these deserts, the latest of them in the memory of old men’s grandfathers. But those had become--nothing; while hunters of the pamir knew every detail of their descent from Alexander. They might know nothing else; the traveller, searching back beyond living memory, might come upon twenty-two hundred years of oblivion--behind that, at the beginning, the shining young man Iskander, Alexander of Greece, Alexander the young god of the world’s morning.

Robin closed his hand tightly on the coin. This he would never part with. It could not have been left here by Alexander himself, although he had passed this way. Perhaps he had sat on this hill and wondered why he was going where he was going. Robin rolled over on his side and looked more closely at the battered statue. It was Buddhist and it was old, but the face, for all the almond eyes, was Greek. It had been copied from one that had sat here before it, and that from another. The face had served different religions but always the same ideal of beauty. Sculptor after sculptor had moulded the statue into the conventions he knew, his hands trying to preserve the mysterious grace before him, each time losing something, always believing that the original had been a perfection suddenly waved into existence by the dazzling god.

There would be a sculptor’s bones beneath this hill--dead by his own hand, his spirit wandering about among the stones, whispering, ‘Where is Greece, where is Alexander? I tried.’ Did the Ghilzais feel the magic here? Could it not, if it existed, bind the world together?

And what did Alexander seek in the desert? If it had been the mere glory of battle he would not be remembered. Surely he came into the empty places not to conquer, but to find.

The secret strength of things,
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee.
And what wert thou and earth and stars and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?

He did not know how long he lay on his side in his reverie. Shots close by the temple, much louder than the irregular enemy sniping, brought him back to the hilltop. He picked up his binoculars. Someone twenty or so yards away was shooting down into the declivity between this and the hill the Highlanders had hurried over. He did not need the glasses to see two men half running through that saddle. Coloured ornaments, which the Ghilzais seldom wore, glinted on their clothes; otherwise they were dressed like Afghans or tribesmen. One of them carried two rifles, the other, one. They walked quickly, then ran, then walked, somehow giving the impression that the battle was none of their business.

As he watched, one of them fell. It was the man with two rifles. His comrade halted, darted half-way back to him, and came to an indecisive stop. As another shot kicked up the stones at his feet he turned again and ran on in his original direction. Now three or four more Gurkhas opened fire on him. He made no attempt to return the fire but ran faster, turning and jinking, until he was out of sight. A minute later Robin saw Jagbir bound down into the saddle where the man with the two rifles lay on his face among the stones.