you away as a prisoner, he’ll slight these walls and take away the
Rajah’s treasures.”
“There are no treasures here,” Beny Singh said, but no one believed
him. He was soothing the little dog which had been frightened by the
Englishman’s harsh voice.
“And he’ll give your women to his men as playthings,” Dodd added
nastily.
Beny Singh shuddered. His wife, his concubines and his children were
all in the palace, and they were all dear to him. He pampered them,
worshipped them and adored them.
“Perhaps I should remove my people from the fort?” he suggested
hesitantly.
“I could take them to Multai?
The British will never reach Multai.”
“You’d run away?” Dodd asked in his harsh voice.
“You bloody won’t!”
He spoke those three words in English, but everyone understood what
they meant. He leaned forward.
“If you run away,” he said, ‘the garrison loses heart. The rest of the
soldiers can’t take their women away, so why should you? We fight them
here, and we stop them here. Stop them dead!”
He stood and walked to the pavilion’s edge where he spat onto the
green-scummed bank before turning back to Beny Singh.
“Your women are safe here, Killadar. I could hold this fortress from
now till the world’s end with just a hundred men.”
“The British are djinns,” Beny Singh whispered. The dog in his arms
was shivering.
“They are not djinns,” Dodd snapped.
“There are no demons! They don’t exist!”
“Winged djinns,” Beny Singh said in almost a whimper, ‘invisible
djinnsl In the air!”
Dodd spat again.
“Bloody hell,” he said in English, then turned fast towards Beny
Singh.
“I’m an English demon. Me! Understand? I’m a djinn, and if you take
your women away I’ll follow you and I’ll come to them at night and fill
them with black bile.” He bared his yellowed teeth and the Killadar
shuddered. The white dog barked shrilly.
Manu Bappoo waved Dodd back to his seat. Dodd was the only European
officer left in his forces and, though Bappoo was glad to have the
Englishman’s services, there were times when Colonel Dodd could be
tiresome.
“If there are djinns,” Bappoo told Singh, ‘they will be on our side.”
He waited while the Killadar soothed the frightened dog, then he leaned
forward.
“Tell me,” he demanded of Beny Singh, ‘can the British take the
fortress by using the roads up the hill?”
Beny Singh thought about those two steep winding roads that twisted up
the hill beneath Gawilghur’s walls. No man could survive those climbs,
not if the defenders were raining round shot and rocks down the
precipitous slopes.
“No,” he admitted.
“So they can only come one way. Only one way! Across the land bridge.
And my men will guard the Outer Fort, and Colonel Dodd’s men will
defend the Inner Fort.”
“And no one,” Dodd said harshly, ‘no one will get past my Cobras.”
He still resented that his well-trained, white-coated soldiers were not
defending the Outer Fort, but he had accepted Manu Bappoo’s argument
that the important thing was to hold the Inner Fort. If, by some
chance, the British did capture the Outer Fort, they would never fight
past Dodd’s men.
“My men,” Dodd growled, ‘have never been defeated. They never will
be.”
Manu Bappoo smiled at the nervous Beny Singh.
“You see, Killadar, you will die here of old age.”
“Or of too many women,” another man put in, provoking laughter.
A cannon sounded from the Outer Fort’s northern ramparts, followed a
few seconds later by another. No one knew what might have caused the
firing and so the dozen men followed Manu Bappoo as he left the
pavilion and walked towards the Inner Fort’s northern ramparts.
Silverfurred monkeys chattered at the soldiers from the high
branches.
Arab guards stood at the gate of the Rajah’s garden. They were posted
to stop any common soldiers of the garrison going to the paths beside
the tank where the Killadar’s women liked to stroll in the cool of the
evening. A hundred paces beyond the garden gate was a steep sided rock
pit, about twice as deep as a man stood high, and Dodd paused to look
down into its shadowed depths. The sides had been chiselled smooth by