Читать книгу The Faraway Drums - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 7

Karim Singh came scrambling across from the other ridge. ‘Sahib, that was a damned close thing! If it were not for my marvellous accuracy, you would be dead!’

‘I am grateful for your marvellous accuracy.’ One could hardly tick off a man for his conceit, not when he’d just saved your life. ‘Take a look at the other two.’

Karim went across to inspect the other two hillmen, came back to report they were both dead. ‘You too, sahib, are marvellously accurate. But haven’t I always said so? Such marvellous shots, we are. Our skill leaves me speechless!’

Farnol, deaf to the speechless Karim, was examining the dead man. He pulled his turban down over the cut above his eye and for a moment the flow of blood was staunched. He still felt sore and stiff from his plunge down the slope, but his mind was alert with questions. He went through the man’s pockets, but there was nothing in them to identify him. Some dried apricots, a string of prayer-beads: the sustenance of the traveller in these hills. Farnol himself carried apricots in his pocket, but he had never felt the need of prayer-beads.

He lifted the man’s arm to lay it by his side; he was a neat man who liked to see even the dead laid out neatly. The ragged sleeve fell back and he saw the marking on the inside of the arm at the bend of the elbow. It was smudged, not a very good tattoo; it looked like a dagger standing in the middle of a jagged circle. He stood up, went down to the other bodies, looked at the right arms: the same marking was there just inside the elbow. One of the tattoos was clearer than the others and he recognized it now for what it was meant to be: a dagger driven into the centre of a crown.

He got slowly to his feet, not wanting to believe the thought crystallizing in his mind. Raj – will die! He had taken it as a threat against himself, taking it for granted that the ambushers had somehow known who he was: a political agent, a representative of the British Raj. But the man had meant someone much higher than himself, someone for whom he had no other name but Raj. The word could mean kingdom, a ruler or a great ruler.

Or The Great Ruler: George the Fifth, King of England, already down in Bombay and on his way to Delhi where he was to be crowned Emperor of India.