William turned his horse out of the middle of the road and glanced down, following the direction of the Jemadar’s upflung hand. A rolling plain, not wide but fertile and patched with dark green jungle and light green grass, spread out before them. A haze of dust hung over the centre of it. Staring under his hand, William thought he saw splashes of red in the dust.
He said, ‘Women -- taking the cattle home.’
‘Have you gone blind, Gopal? And since when have the women of Bandelkhand brought the cattle in from the fields at ten o’clock in the morning? They’re redcoats, sepoys’ -- he peered keenly down -- ‘with their women. Going the same way as us. I wonder . . .’ He sat musing unhurriedly in the saddle, like a man who debates with himself some little question of convenience, such as whether to stop now or later for a morning pipe.
Away to the left and far down on the plain a lonely jack donkey set up an agonized braying. The Jemadar tensed and waited, his head turned to the right. Faintly the bray rebounded in hiccuping echoes from the face of the escarpment. The Jemadar lifted his eyes and clasped his hands. ‘O Kali, greatest Kali, we hear and obey. I had almost begun to think. Folly, folly! Faith is all.’
He returned to them, the authority of a general in his face and voice. ‘How many would you say there are?’
William hesitated. Without a glass he could see only the dust and a blur of little red dots and neutral-coloured spots. Hussein answered at once, catching up the question so that the Jemadar did not have time to notice William’s delay in answering. ‘Eight sepoys I can see. There are probably one or two more ahead as scouts. Five women, four or five small children. I can’t see whether one of the women is carrying a baby or a bundle.’
‘That’s what I make it. Hussein, you go ahead, catch them up. Beg their protection. Put out the signs if they change direction, move faster --
you
know. Gopal, get out to the east, four miles. There’s a trail along the ridges. Our buriers are moving by it with the bear, giving shows in the villages. Bring them in to this road at the ford below Padampur -- that’s two days ahead -- early in the morning. Lie up close. That’ll be the bhil, so prepare the grave. I’m going back now. I’ve got to warn the party on the other flank. Let’s see, there are eight over that side, and -- oh, we’ll have plenty for the job. All clear? Kali is with us! Remember, the ford below Padampur, and we will come about midday.’
He jerked his reins, waved his hand, and cantered back down the road, riding on the grassy verge where his horse raised no dust as it flew along under the boughs.
William sat motionless, his horse drooping its head in the shade. Hussein said brusquely, ‘I knew about Chandra Sen. And he knows about me. He’s one of the few men in this part of India who does. That’s why I had to get out of your jail. He got the news that I’d been taken that day, all right. Haven’t you worked out that he left his village the same evening?’
‘But why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Would you have believed me, before the murder of the thakur’s party made you see how big the Deceivers are? Before you caught Chandra Sen? Even then you didn’t realize! I told you I had to lift the curtain slowly, or you’d be blinded. Besides, it was no good just knowing about Chandra Sen. You’d have had to get evidence. Don’t worry. He doesn’t know where I’ve gone or that you’re with me.’
William sat silent. At last he said, ‘I still have to get evidence against him.’
Hussein said, ‘You? You’re a strangler.’
‘Hold your tongue! Are we going to kill the sepoys?’
‘Of course.’
‘Some of them might be armed.’
‘They might,’ Hussein said dryly. ‘They are sometimes allowed to take muskets on leave as protection against dacoits on the road. And once, I know, they were warned against Deceivers, but that was fifteen years ago and everyone’s forgotten. Several times some English official or other has got hold of information about us. Then he has chased us out of his district, and reported, I suppose. But they’ve never worked together, and it always blew over. They’ll never destroy us until one of them finds out everything, and forces the Lat Sahib to believe everything, and plans a campaign to cover all India. And that one who finds out must fear Kali, or he will not understand her. But he must not love her.’ His voice was sad. It roughened suddenly. ‘The sepoys are our merchandise. You are the beloved of Kali. And a strangler. Behave like one, or die.’
Two days later William and the eight men of the bear troupe sat in a wood three hundred yards from the point where the trail came out of thin jungle and crossed the Padampur stream. The town and fortress of Padampur lay out of sight three miles to the north, across the stream and behind undulating hills.
William’s horse stood under a tree and swished its tail. The bear sat up on its hunkers inside the wooden-slatted cage built for it on the frame of a bullock cart. The bullocks were lying down, securely tethered. The bear looked towards William, and slavered and beat its forepaws together. It had taken a liking to him and William hated it and its obscene gestures of affection.
The men of the troupe looked like -- men of a troupe with a dancing bear. At this season scores of such parties moved about the roads of India. Some of the villagers might have wondered why they had no women with them, as was customary. But who cared? They sat quietly, grouped around William, and waited. These men, who were mere buriers by rank, treated him with respect because of his reputation as a strangler, and because of the high regard which they knew their Jemadar held for him.
The grave was dug, under the bank of a dry backwater nearby, and concealed in thick brush. The men had dug without making a noise, pressing their picks and hoes into the earth rather than striking with them. The sharpened stakes, the log, the rough club lay neatly stacked beside the pit. No stranger who came in by accident to the troupe’s resting place would see anything suspicious. Besides, there would be ample warning. One of the diggers, a man who could whistle like a parakeet, lay hidden in the trees across the stream where he could see in both directions. Another crouched in concealment a mile back up the trail, ready to talk with the Jemadar or receive a sign from him.
William waited, fingered his rumal, and tried not to look at the bear. By logic, it was no more evil to murder the sepoys than to murder the Nawab and his wives and their innocent followers: if anything, less evil, because the sepoys were at least well-armed men in the vigour of life and capable of defending themselves. But William had been an officer of sepoys, and in his mind this coming affair had grown until it was the giant embodiment of evil. He was sick at heart. He had meant only to do good. In trying to help his people, he had caught himself in these chains of evil. But if he had not followed the Deceivers, and become one of them, the evil would never have been uncovered. In the time since he set out with Hussein, no circumstances had changed. What had been true them was true now. If he fled now, and acted on what he already knew, he could make only a little cut in the Deceivers’ organization, which would quickly heal, and all would soon again be as it was before. ‘A campaign to cover all India,’ Hussein had said; and it was true. Where was God, the true Christian God? Had God arranged it, so loathing Kali, that even to know her was to know Death, become Death?
The oppression of the goddess’s wide-spreading sins bore down on him. He had said he would not kill. He had been a Christian, believing in the value of the life that God lent to mankind and sanctified by the lending. He could stand no more. He had become two men, a Christian and a Deceiver, and was being torn apart by remorse. His notes had enough in them to bring the evil fully out into the open. Then, surely, no one could deny that there was need of a great unified campaign. Thinking further, he swore to himself, and knew that men could deny, and would, and still not be wicked, only complacent. The weight of death began to pile up on his head. He had failed Mary, and God.
The chief of the buriers muttered, ‘Gopal-ji, one comes, running. It is the sentry from the road.’ The men rose to their feet, hitched up their loincloths, hefted their hoes in their hands, and stood unobtrusively ready. The bear raised its head and stopped whining. The bullocks champed on their cud.
The sentry ran through the trees and came to them. ‘A traveller, southbound, cries that the Padampur rajah’s cavalry is getting ready in the city for some job down this way. I managed to tell the Jemadar. He’s going to do our affair, just the same. The omens are good.’ The sentry leaned forward, panting and holding his sides. ‘Quick, to the ford! Hide there. The signal, “
The water is deep
,” from the Jemadar. Hurry!’ He was gone.
One man stayed with the bear; William and the rest scurried crouching through the tall grass beside the river until they saw the road ahead. They lay down, in cover beside the ford, on the right of the road.
As they dropped, breathing hard, to the earth, the leading sepoys came down the incline to the ford. They looked uneasily alert and their muskets were ready in their hands. Some of the Deceivers walked behind them, mingling with women and other sepoys. William did not know what had put the sepoys on their guard, but it was clear that they did not trust their new-found companions of the road. Yet they could do nothing. Relying on their arms, ignorant of the octopus power of the organization that sought to kill them, they came on.
At the water those in front waited for the others to catch up. The main party came down the road in a close-knit group, surrounding a bullock cart. A heavily pregnant woman rode in the cart on top of a pile of baggage; a sepoy sat on the bar, driving it; his musket was slung across his shoulders. Two children, of about six and nine years old, played tag immediately behind the cart. The other women swung lightly along together with no loads on their heads, their saris drawn half across their faces. One carried a baby on her hip. The Jemadar and two or three more Deceivers walked among the soldiers and women, and seemed to be talking, and kept glancing over their shoulders at the remainder of the band coming along close behind.
William crumbled the earth between his fingers where he lay. He saw that the Jemadar had gained the confidence of the sepoys. They had come to trust his large friendliness and engaging personality. It was probably he who had planted in them their suspicions of the rest of the band, so, naturally, they drew closer to him. That was it. He saw another five Deceivers hurry up from the rear, to be received into the party about the bullock cart.
Now all of them glanced suspiciously, almost warningly, at the other travellers in the caravan. The Jemadar whispered with Hussein and a sepoy. William could not hear the words but he could guess at them: ‘This ford is a dangerous place. If these fellows are indeed bad men, as I suspect, let us close up for protection.’ The more the sepoys closed up, the less effective would their firearms be.
He could hear nothing to the north, and wondered whether the rajah of Padampur’s cavalry would come, and what their errand was. That situation was far from clear. He would have to find out about it as soon as he could. Had the rajah known the band was coming? If so, how? How much else did he know? And why didn’t the Jemadar postpone this attack until the cavalry were past?
But he himself did not have to wait. This was his moment of release, offered to him in perfect circumstances. The success of the ambush depended as much on him and the men of the bear troupe as on anything. A force of law -- the rajah’s cavalry -- was at hand. How far were they? Cautiously he eyed the men lying around him. None carried the rumal which, seen in another’s hand or imagined in another’s loincloth, now made William sweat and tremble; but they were all armed with their digging implements and hidden knives.
Yet this was the moment. He must shout his warning now, run out, and take his chance among the sepoys.
No, not now; in a second or two, when he would have a better chance of surviving. The risk of death did not frighten him; but if he was killed all the evidence would be lost for ever, all the dead dead in vain. Hussein alone knew where he had buried the notes. Hussein could go back and dig them up, but he wouldn’t. Hussein seemed to be struggling still against Kali, but William knew he would lose his fight and his soul.
William waited, his mouth open, and watched the Jemadar, and listened for the hoofbeats of cavalry. The Jemadar stood in his stirrups to peer down at the shallow stream. He said with owlish surprise, ‘
The water is deep
,’ and leaped off his horse on to the back of a sepoy who was already in the shallows and beginning to cross the ford, and bore him down into the water. On the bank Piroo’s cloth whirled in a semi-circle, pulled out by the weight of the wrapped rupee. The sepoys and women broke out in a wild confusion of shouts and screams. The men of the bear troupe crouched like sprinters about to begin a race and looked at William. William sprang to his feet and opened his mouth wide to shout a warning.
The moment had passed. Already men and women and children had died.
A sepoy with a fear-crazed face, running to find shelter from the inexplicable horror, burst into William’s hiding-place. The man was on him, and had a musket in his hands. He saw William, his pupils contracted, his arms jerked down, and he thrust the muzzle of the musket against William’s breast. William yelled, ‘Look out!’ and flung himself sideways. He heard his own hysterical laugh. Whom was he warning now?
His sideways movement ended in a pivot off the left foot, the rumal jumped into his hands and whirled through the air. Both ends were in his hands. He looked down and saw nothing but his tight, white knuckles. He felt the powerful jerk from his thighs and waist and shoulders. His wrists cracked in. and up against the sepoy’s neck. Another crack burst over it. A slow warmth crept up his spine and mingled in his brain -with the falling, fading scarlet coat.
At last he heard his own choking sobs. He stumbled forward out of the sheltering bushes. The Jemadar lay on his face in the water at the edge of the river. Blood trickled from his head, reddening the placid water downstream where it ran over submerged green and brown stones. The tang of gunpowder burned sharp in William’s nostrils, but he had heard nothing. His arm hurt; he saw black powder marks on it near the elbow. The sepoy must have fired his musket before he died.