“Thank you, sahib.”
A whimper made Dodd turn. Beny Singh had handed his dog to a servant
and was staring through an ivory-barrelled telescope at the enemy
horsemen.
“What is it?” Bappoo asked him.
“Syud Sevajee,” Singh said in a small voice.
“Who’s Syud Sevajee?” Dodd asked.
Bappoo grinned.
“His father was once kill adar here, but he died.
Was it poison?” he asked Beny Singh.
“He just died,” Singh said.
“He just died!”
“Murdered, probably,” Bappoo said with amusement, ‘and Beny Singh
became kill adar and took the dead man’s daughter as his concubine.”
Dodd turned to see the enemy horsemen vanishing among the trees beyond
the far cliff.
“Come for revenge, has he? You still want to leave?” he demanded of
Beny Singh.
“Because that fellow will be waiting for you. He’ll track you through
the hills, Killadar, and slit your throat in the night’s darkness.”
“We shall stay here and fight,” Beny Singh declared, retrieving the dog
from his servant.
“Fight and win,” Dodd said, and he imagined the British breaching
batteries on that far cliff, and he imagined the slaughter that would
be made among the crews by this one vast gun. And there were fifty
other heavy guns waiting to greet the British approach, and hundreds of
lighter pieces that fired smaller missiles. Guns, rockets, canister,
muskets and cliffs, those were Gawilghur’s de fences and Dodd reckoned
the British stood no chance. No chance at all. The big gun’s smoke
drifted away in the small breeze.
“They will die here,” Dodd said, ‘and we shall chase the survivors
south and cut them down like dogs.” He turned and looked at Beny
Singh.
“You see the chasm? That is where their demons will die. Their wings
will be scorched, they will fall like burning stones to their deaths,
and their screams will lull your children to a dreamless sleep.” He
knew he spoke true, for Gawilghur was impregnable.
“I take pleasure, no, Dilip, make that I take humble pleasure in
reporting the recovery of a quantity of stolen stores.” Captain
Torrance paused. Night had just fallen and Torrance uncorked a bottle
of arrack and took a sip.
“Am I going too fast for you?”
“Yes, sahib,” Dilip, the middle-aged clerk, answered.
“Humble pleasure,” he said aloud as his pen moved laboriously over the
paper, ‘in reporting the recovery of a quantity of stolen stores.”
“Add a list of the stores,” Torrance ordered.
“You can do that later.
Just leave a space, man.”
“Yes, sahib,” Dilip said.
“I had suspected for some time,” Torrance intoned, then scowled as
someone knocked on the door.
“Come,” he shouted, ‘if you must.”
Sharpe opened the door and was immediately entangled in the muslin. He
fought his way past its folds.
“It’s you,” Torrance said unpleasantly.
“Me, sir.”
“You let some moths in,” Torrance complained.
“Sorry, sir.”
“That is why the muslin is there, Sharpe, to keep out moths, ensigns
and other insignificant nuisances. Kill the moths, Dilip.”
The clerk dutifully chased the moths about the room, swatting them with
a roll of paper. The windows, like the door, were closely screened
with muslin on the outside of which moths clustered, attracted by the
candles that were set in silver sticks on Torrance’s table. Dilip’s
work was spread on the table, while Captain Torrance lay in a wide
hammock slung from the roof beams. He was naked.
“Do I offend you, Sharpe?”
“Offend me, sir?”
“I am naked, or had you not noticed?”
“Doesn’t bother me, sir.”
“Nudity keeps clothes clean. You should try it. Is the last of the
enemy dead, Dilip?”
“The moths are all deceased, sahib.”
“Then we shall continue. Where were we?”
‘ “I had suspected for some time,” Dilip read back the report.
“Surmised is better, I think. I had surmised for some time.” Torrance
paused to draw on the mouthpiece of a silver-bellied hookah.
“What are you doing here, Sharpe?”
“Come to get orders, sir.”
“How very assiduous of you. I had surmised for some time that
depredations I can spell it if you cannot, Dilip were being made upon
the stores entrusted to my command. What the devil were you doing,
Sharpe, poking about Naig’s tents?”