stone-workers so that nothing could climb up from the floor that was
littered with white bones.
“The Traitor’s Hole,” Bappoo said, as he paused beside Dodd, ‘but the
bones are from baby monkeys.”
“But they do eat men?” Dodd asked, intrigued by the shadowed blackness
at the foot of the’^hole.
“They kill men,” Bappoo said, ‘but don’t eat them. They’re not big
enough.”
“I can’t see any,” Dodd said, disappointed, then suddenly a sinuous
shadow writhed swiftly between two crevices.
“There!” he said happily.
“Don’t they grow big enough to eat men?”
“Most years they escape,” Bappoo said.
“The monsoon floods the pit and the snakes swim to the top and wriggle
out. Then we must find new ones. This year we’ve been saved the
trouble. These snakes will grow bigger than usual.”
Beny Singh waited a few paces away, clutching his small dog as though
he feared Dodd would throw it down to the snakes.
“There’s a bastard who ought to be fed to the snakes,” Dodd said to
Bappoo, nodding towards the Killadar.
“My brother likes him,” Bappoo said mildly, touching Dodd’s arm to
indicate that they should walk on.
“They share tastes.”
“Such as?”
“Women, music, luxury. We really do not need him here.”
Dodd shook his head.
“If you let him go, sahib, then half the damned garrison will want to
run away. And if you let the women go, what will the men fight for?
Besides, do you really think there’s any danger?”
“None,” Bappoo admitted. He had led the officers up a steep rock
stairway to a natural bastion where a vast iron gun was trained across
the chasm towards the distant cliffs of the high plateau. From here
the far cliffs were almost a mile away, but Dodd could just see a group
of horsemen clustered at the chasm’s edge. It was those horsemen, all
in native robes, who had prompted the Outer Fort’s gunners to open
fire, but the gunners, seeing their shots fall well short of the
target, had given up.
Dodd drew out his telescope, trained it, and saw a man in the uniform
of the Royal Engineers sitting on the ground a few paces from his
companions. The engineer was sketching. The horsemen were all
Indians.
Dodd lowered the telescope and looked at the huge iron gun.
“Is it loaded?” he asked the gunners.
“Yes, sahib.”
“A haideri apiece if you can kill the man in the dark uniform. The one
sitting at the cliff’s edge.”
The gunners laughed. Their gun was over twenty feet long and its
wrought-iron barrel was cast with decorations that had been painted
green, white and red. A pile of round shot, each over a foot in
diameter, stood beside the massive carriage that was made from giant
baulks of teak. The gun captain fussed over his aim, shouting at his
men to lever the vast carriage a thumb’s width to the right, then a
finger’s breadth back, until at last he was satisfied. He squinted
along the barrel for a second, waved the officers who had followed
Bappoo to move away from the great gun, then leaned over the breach to
dab his glowing port fire onto the gun’s touch-hole.
The reed glowed and smoked for a second as the fire dashed down to the
charge, then the vast cannon crashed back, the teak runners sliding up
the timber ramp that formed the lower half of the carriage.
Smoke jetted out into the chasm as a hundred startled birds flapped
from their nests on the rock faces and circled in the warm air.
Dodd had been standing to one side, watching the engineer through his
glass. For a second he actually saw the great round shot as a flicker
of grey in the lower right quadrant of his lens, then he saw a boulder
close to the engineer shatter into scraps. The engineer fell sideways,
his sketch pad falling, but then he picked himself up and scrambled up
the slope to where his horse was being guarded by the cavalrymen.
Dodd took a single gold coin from his pouch and tossed it to the
gunner.
“You missed,” he said, ‘but it was damned fine shooting.”