Читать книгу The Faraway Drums - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 6

It was a beautifully clear day for an ambush. Clive Farnol was working his way up from the Satluj River towards the Tibet Road, climbing a steep rocky ridge, when it happened. The first bullet hit one of the four Paharee porters, tumbling him backwards down the slope, and the next three shots sent chips flying from a rock right beside Farnol.

He heard Karim Singh swear and the three surviving porters cry out in fear. Then he swore himself as another bullet whined away off the rock only inches from his face, flicking grit into his face. He tried to roll himself into a ball behind the rock, no easy task for a man as tall as himself, and squinted over his shoulder at Karim. The Sikh was equally tall and he looked awkward and embarrassed as he tried to make himself as small a target as possible. The three porters, all small men, were already sliding back down the ridge, their packs abandoned, their swiftly retreating backs declaring neutrality.

‘Coward buggers,’ said Karim, spitting down the ridge.

Farnol felt he couldn’t blame the porters; it wasn’t in their contract that they should die for five annas a day. The shooting had stopped, but he knew that it was not finished. The ambushers, whoever they were, were probably working their way to better positions to pick off him and Karim. But who were they? Why had they chosen to shoot at this small party of travellers? He and Karim were both in hillmen’s dress: baggy breeches, faded shirts, goatskin vests and turbans. True, they both carried Lee-Enfield rifles, but the chances were that the rifles firing on them were also Lee-Enfields; stolen British Army weapons were a mark of honour amongst the hillmen, a sort of self-conferred, lethal Order of the Indian Empire. But why waste bullets on what, from a distance, would have looked like nothing more than a small party of villagers moving down from the high mountains to Simla? Any ordinary band of dacoits would have waited till the party had climbed up to the road, then set on them, cut their throats with kris and taken what loot they wanted from the packs carried by the porters. And, of course, taken the two rifles.

Farnol suddenly rose up, scrambled up the hill and fell into a depression behind a larger rock; bullets chased him but missed. Karim remained where he was, now lying flat on his back behind a thin spine of rock; he had worked out that the shots were all coming from one direction, a ridge above them and to their left. He was an old hand at ambushes, having seen them from both sides.

Farnol looked around him. In the far distance, whence they had come, he could see the Eternal Snows, the last barrier of the Himalayas; the morning sky was absolutely cloudless and the mountains had the sharp-edged look of white glass. Nearer, the hills fell away as steep ridges, some of them patterned with the corduroy of terraces; he could see the tiny figures of peasants tilling the rocky ground, sowing the wheat that would turn the terraces into bright strips of green in late March. On a ridge up near the road a man and a woman were digging stones and rocks from a new terrace and carting them up to the roadway where they would be used as fill: the ridges were harvested for everything that would bring in a few annas. Still nearer, on a ridge across a deep ravine, Farnol could see a goat-herd and his herd moving, like a small cloud-shadow, up towards the road. The goat-herd had stopped and was looking Farnol’s way, a disinterested spectator of the ambush: he looked at the distance as if 1 e were as unconcerned as his goats.

A flash of movement tugged at Farnol’s eye: a man ran down from the road to an outcrop of rock high to the left. Farnol turned his head and looked at the ridge on his right. A thick cloak of silver fir that ran up its spine was broken for a few yards by a gully, then continued across to cover the top of the ridge on which he lay.

‘I’m going up to the road, Karim.’

‘If you say so, sahib.’ Karim Singh was that rarity, a cautious Sikh who always weighed discretion against valour; he was no coward but he always thought twice before attempting to be a hero. He would deride others for their instant cowardice, as he just had the porters, but they were Paharees and, being a Sikh, he could not think of them with anything but derision.

‘When I reach there, you follow me.’

‘If you say so, sahib. But wouldn’t it be better to wait till nightfall?’

‘Karim, that won’t be for another eight hours!’ Then Farnol sighed. ‘I don’t know why I bother to keep you with me.’

‘You have become accustomed to me, sahib.’

True, Farnol thought. A man’s loyalty was worth more than his bravery. But he wished he had been fortunate enough to have found a legendary Sikh, one of those black-bearded heroes whom Rudyard Kipling was always writing about. Mr Kipling should be here now . . . Another shot rang out, the bullet whining away once more off the rock above Farnol.

‘I want you up there on the road five minutes after I get there. Five minutes, less if you can make it. Understand?’

He didn’t wait for Karim’s usual answer – ‘If you say so, sahib’ – but all at once rose up and flung himself down the side slope of the ridge. He heard another bullet ricochet away above him, but he kept hurtling down the slope, a tall two-legged mountain goat that, like its four-legged brethren, managed by some miracle to stay on its feet. He reached the bottom of a gully, crossed it and scrambled up to the protecting shadows of the firs. He kept moving, his lungs beginning to ache through moving so quickly in the thin air. Then something hit him and he fell sideways into a tree, all the air going out of him in a great painful gasp. For an instant he wondered why it had not occurred to him that there might be more ambushers here amongst the trees.

Then he saw the big sambhar stag go plunging down through the trees, its head twisting as its antlers struck a tree-trunk, its panic evident in the reckless way it skidded and slid and jumped down the steep slope. Farnol stood up, felt for broken bones, decided there was none and moved on, stiffly now, up through the trees. He had been shooting sambhar for ten years, but he had never been closer than a hundred yards to them. It would be something to tell in the mess, if ever he got back to the mess, that he had been knocked down by a stag as big as a small elephant. Or so it had seemed.

He worked his way up the ridge, stopping only once, to catch his breath and to check he had a full magazine in his rifle. He wore a bandolier of ammunition, but he did not want to get into a protracted battle with the ambushers. He had no idea how many were in the band of dacoits, but he guessed there were no more than three or four.

He came to the edge of the trees, and saw the road running slightly downhill to his left. That meant, with luck, he should be above the enemy, a golden rule amongst hillmen. He had been born in these hills; he had been sent to England, to Wellington and Sandhurst, to be educated; his real education, that needed for survival here, had been bred into him at birth. Four generations of Farnols had fought in India and three of them had been born here; there were instincts inherent in him that still prevailed under the varnish that the years in England had applied. He understood as well as anyone that the tribesmen of these hills, from Afghanistan as far east as Nagaland, knew as much about fighting as any graduate of Sandhurst, probably a great deal more.

He crossed the road at a run, made it to the forest of firs that continued up the slope. He moved swiftly, his experience showing in the way he made use of his cover: like Karim Singh, he was a veteran of ambushes. But on those other occasions he had half-expected them, had known the reason for them.

He came to the spot where, on the opposite side of the road, there was a cairn of stones with a pole of prayer-flags fluttering above it. Pious travellers had built the cairn over the years, each adding a stone to it as he passed; Farnol offered his own prayer of thanks to the religious who had built such a fine redoubt for him. He ran across the road again, took cover behind the big pile of stones and looked down the slope below him. Above him the prayer-flags fluttered like live birds tied by their feet to the pole.

He saw the three men, each crouched behind his own rock, all three of them armed with long-barrelled rifles; he had been wrong about their having Lee-Enfields and he wondered what sort of guns they were. He looked around for a fourth man, one who should have been left up here on the higher ground as a look-out; but he could see no one. These men below him were either amateurs, new to the ambush game, or they were drugged with hashish, had thrown caution to the mountain wind in the excitement of killing. So far, however, they were not excited or crazed enough to stand up and charge down on where Karim still lay behind his low rock.

Farnol took aim. The men were less than a hundred yards below him, easy targets. He felt no compunction about killing in cold blood; he had learned long ago that one didn’t survive if one waited to be hot-blooded about it. Killing was not like making love: one did not work up to it.

He squeezed the trigger, saw one of the men slump down as if all his bones had suddenly melted. He jerked back the bolt, ejected the cartridge, slammed the bolt home again, took aim, fired. A second man, spinning round to face up the slope, stood as if he had been pulled up by a rope, then fell backwards over the rim of a ledge. Farnol aimed the Lee-Enfield a third time, but the third man had slid down below the rock in front of him, got a shot off up the slope as Farnol switched his aim.

Farnol knew at once that he was not going to be able to draw a bead on the man in his new position. He hesitated, scanning the slope; above him the prayer-flags cracked in the rising wind. On the next ridge the goat-herd still stood looking at this duel that was no business of his; Farnol silently cursed him for his disinterest. He was like the bloody villagers who stood on the sidelines of the polo matches down on the plains, careless of who won or lost, showing approval only if one of the players toppled from his pony and broke his leg or neck. That was India: four hundred million bystanders.

He straightened up, sped down the slope, slipping and sliding, heading for a large rock that would give him all the shelter he would need. Then, while he was in full flight, going too fast to drop down, he saw the man rise up, his rifle at his shoulder. Farnol knew he was going to die. A hillman like this one would have spent his life aiming at moving targets: sambhar, gooral sheep, pheasants and men. But the enemy bullet, if it was fired at all, came nowhere near Farnol. As he hit the ground, hurling himself forward to slide down towards the big rock, he caught a lopsided glimpse of the rifleman falling forward, losing his rifle as he did so.

Farnol lay a moment, getting his breath, waiting for the man to reach for his rifle. But he lay still, one arm flung out towards the gun. Farnol got to his feet, aching from the crash of his body against the rocky ground, gravel rash scorching him like sunburn, blood running from a cut above his eye. Moving cautiously, rifle at the ready, he went down towards the hillman. He saw Karim standing up on the next ridge, but he made no sign towards the Sikh; there would be time later to thank Karim for the shot that had saved his life. He paused about ten feet from the ambusher, tensed as the man’s arm quivered, trying to grab the rifle just beyond the reach of the weakly clawing hand. Then he moved down, put his foot on the rifle. He recognized it: a Krenk, a very old one, a Russian weapon.

He looked down at the dying man, said in Hindi, ‘Why did you try to kill me?’

The man stared up at him out of fierce eyes that were already glazing with death. The rattle was in his throat as he whispered, ‘Raj – will die!’