He was a somewhat listless and drowsy-looking boy who grew into a strapping young man with a large sloping forehead that belonged on a marble bust of one of the ancient Greek philosophers. His stature, his features, his remoteness, a habit of staring into the distance, as his heart stirred to inexplicable, abruptly-appearing internal images —all these things gave La Borgne an unintentional air of conscious superiority; it was this distant stare that inadvertently rested on a Sardinian officer in an inn in the European year of 1768.
The officer turned back to his food and felt La Borgne’s grey eyes burn into the back of his neck. The food was rough and provincial, but good. The officer laid down his knife and turned slowly to look over his shoulder. La Borgne sat with an untouched glass of wine in front of him, his hands on the table; his glance, filled with something that could have been mistaken for hauteur, was unwavering. By making a physical effort, the officer was able to turn away again; he gestured to a waiter.
‘Who is that? Behind me.’
‘Benoit La Borgne. His father is a priest, and wants him to be a lawyer, but he does nothing.’
The Sardinian turned back to La Borgne, who was still lost in a waking dream, feeling vague unnameable tugs at his soul, pointing him in some unspecified direction.
‘Why do you look at me, sir?’
La Borgne said nothing. The Sardinian pushed back his chair and stood up.
‘Why are you looking at me?’
La Borgne gradually became aware of a dark, mustachioed face glowering at him. Unbidden, the words sprang to his lips:
‘Your face: it reminds me of a pig’s behind.’
A quiver of rage passed through the Sardinian’s body; he patted his pockets, looking for his gloves. Remembering that he had put them on the chair beside him, he turned, but Benoit La Borgne, seized by a wild purpose, had already sprung up and moved around the table between them; the Sardinian felt a hand spin him around, and then he reeled back, his right cheek stinging.
‘Outside,’ said La Borgne, already turning away. Outside, behind the inn, the Sardinian attempted to suppress the bewilderment that threatened to turn into fear; taking off his coat, he clenched his teeth and looked at La Borgne, trying to hold on to his anger, but the other’s cold, blank face and relaxed movements only served to increase his nervousness. The Sardinian had to look away, at the ground, at the yellow hay and brown soil, at the insects crawling across the little yard, at the dung and the cat staring back at him with unmoving, flashing dark eyes.
The Sardinian’s uneasiness mounted; in a few minutes he was actually trembling, but by then it was too late because he was crossing swords with a stone-eyed La Borgne; panicking, the officer flung himself forward into a thrust at the other’s eyes which was parried with a force that made his wrist numb, and then he was backing away, flinging up his blade to block a huge hacking slash at his neck; the Sardinian’s fingers and forearm rang with the shock, and then his blood, deep red, spurted over bright steel which protruded from his belly; blood which spurted, then, over La Borgne’s hand. As he slowly knelt (his sabre already rolling away over the rough reddened earth) the Sardinian looked up at La Borgne, and saw, for the first time, eyes blink and a lip twitch, and wanted to ask why, how, when, why, but the face was already lost in mist, unknown, unreal.
For La Borgne, then, there were witnesses, a furious magistrate and an outraged father. The magistrate threatened proceedings and prison, but was pacified by repeated visits by the good père and a promise from La Borgne to leave the province. Filled with a gratefully-felt sense of purpose, La Borgne set out for France and the famed mercenary ranks of the Irish Brigade.
He spent the next few years in Landrecies, Flanders and the Isle of France, learning the trade and craft of soldiering from men from every nation in Europe. For a while, in the tramp of close-order drill and the eager reconstruction of past victories, La Borgne’s mind was clear, unvisited by the glisten of blood and the smell of fantastical animals; he kept The Romance of Alexander hidden and locked in his trunk. In barracks, however, he became aware of certain stories that were heard at the time of the setting of the sun, that perfumed the dreams of the rough, scarred men who slept, twitching, on wooden beds. There was a story about a huge diamond that glittered, waiting to be taken, in the forehead of a grotesque heathen idol. There was another story about a magical tree that, when shaken, showered rubies and pearls onto the ground. There were swarthy magicians whose curses bit and mangled like war-dogs, beautiful women who twined and twisted and teased and, always, wealth beyond imagining. These stories seduced La Borgne; despite himself, he found himself seeking out the best of the story-tellers, the ones who constructed the most enchanting and the most grotesque of fictions; caught, he struggled —he enjoyed the monotony of days defined by bugle calls and sweat-stained rule-books. For the first time in his life, he was free; he sensed danger in the titillations of the seemingly innocent tales that webbed the twilight air.
Sure enough, one bright crisp morning, La Borgne found himself telling the story of Alexander and a giant knot. ‘Listen,’ he said, to the circle of scarred men, and even as he told the story, as he invented and changed and caressed with his words, he felt the familiar, dangerous turbulence in his heart, like a storm of deep colours from a distant, unknown landscape. He understood that he had learnt enough, that his time of peace was over, that for him there was no deliverance from the tyranny of the future. The next day, he resigned his commission and began wandering through Europe until he was in Greece, where an Admiral Orloff was commanding a Russian force against the Turks, in a war that has already passed out of memory and myth into the deathly still of libraries.
Once again, La Borgne found time assuming a jagged, fragmented form, leaving him with sudden gasps of awareness and long periods that passed in a daze; and so one morning, before dawn, with the sea lightening from a deep black to an opaque grey, he found himself in a creaky boat crowded with Russian sailors and marines, moving slowly towards a dark mass called Tenedos. He clutched a pistol butt in one hand and a sheathed sabre in the other; listening to the slow groaning of the oars, feeling the way the brass arced smoothly across the polished wood of the pistol and the rough felt on the sheath that scraped across his thumb, La Borgne thought of what was to follow in a few minutes, but could feel no fear. Around him, the staccato hiss of whispered prayers rose to hang above the boat, but La Borgne could feel only an exhilarated wonder —the water lapped quietly against aged wood —and a white calm; he tried to imagine what was to come, the tearing boom of cannon fire and the blood. The wakening birds on shore twittered at the red tinge seeping over the horizon.
On shore, he crouched and ran, ahead of a line of men, towards the darkness massed under thickets of palm-trees and brush. Hearing a soft cough behind him, a curious cough with liquid in it, La Borgne turned his head to the right to look; his legs slid out and to the sides, his head seemed to slip back, sand swept up in a soft puff. He noticed that the sun had come up. There were feet, huge feet, black and awkward, soundless, running past his eyes. A sea-gull wheeled overhead. The sky is huge; it can swallow you up.
He woke in a creaking cart filled with blood and groaning, wounded Russians. He felt cord biting into his wrists, behind his back; a long, thin explosion of pain grew at the back of his head with each motion of the cart and drifted into his eyes. He raised his head, his cheeks brushing over wet cloth and stained flesh, then struggled to sit up. A bearded face bared teeth at him from the front of the cart, screaming invective in a foreign tongue; dizzy, his head rocking, La Borgne watched as an arm curled behind the face and swung back, as a black length of leather curved around and disappeared in a blur to crack, with a sound like dry wood breaking, along his temple. He fell back to the filthy bottom of the cart and wept.
A month later, La Borgne and the other survivors of the disastrous Russian attack on Tenedos were sold as slaves. Dressed in rags, ashamed of the manacles on their wrists and shamed by the vociferous bargai
ning, the prisoners avoided each other’s eyes and did not care to say good-bye as they were led away. La Borgne was again possessed by an unnatural calm. The manacles around his wrists and his status as a draught animal had released him from his visions; he therefore took to the life of a slave with enthusiasm. In the household of a Turkish noble of middle rank, he hewed wood and drew water with relief and a kind of love; the children of the household soon clustered around the burly pale man and attempted to teach him their language, often scolding him and even cuffing him when he proved slow to learn. La Borgne smiled and shook his head like a bear, like a trapped animal glad to be in captivity and out of the jungle.
The Turk, meanwhile, conducted negotiations with La Borgne’s father the priest through letters and couriers; two years after the battle of Tenedos fat sacks of gold arrived at the Turk’s house on mules. Told that he was free, that he was supposed to leave, that he had to leave, La Borgne sat on his haunches in the fashion of the East and raised his hands to his face and wept, a nine-year-old Turkish boy by his right knee and a four-year-old girl to the left.
In Constantinople, then, he awaited a visitation, a direction, waited for some mad phantom poet to take hold of the strings again and fill him with purpose, with envy, lust, greed, anger and love. When nothing came, when no ghost horses wheeled about him and when no mysterious daggers beckoned, La Borgne felt a great disappointment grow within him. He stumbled through the crowded streets, pushing aside orange-sellers and potters and mullahs; slowly, he became aware that one word seemed to float on top of the buzzing murmur in the bazaars and cafes, a word that he heard even when it was spoken on the far side of a crowded room, a word that sounded like a distant drum in his ears: Hindustan.
La Borgne understood. Armed with letters of introduction from various European noblemen whom he had met in his wanderings, he made his way to St. Petersburg and presented himself at the court of Catherine. There was no reason, no reason that is comprehensible now, so many years later, no reason why that woman, that queen, should have agreed to finance a stranger’s trip to Hindustan. It could have been that she remembered the czar Peter’s greed, his intention of sending armies through the passes of the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas to acquire the fabled riches of Hindustan, to extend the borders of the monolith that he envisioned till they disappeared into the warm depths of the Indian Ocean. Or perhaps it was just that Catherine saw a kindred soul, another far-eyed face hiding internal hauntings. Or perhaps Catherine thought it inadvisable to detain one who strained towards the future, who was called by what-was-to-come as some men and women are beckoned by religion; a week after his first audience with the queen, La Borgne rode to the south.
In Aleppo, he found a caravan bound for Baghdad; harassed by wandering bands of horsemen from a Persian army scattered by the Turks, the long line of carts turned around a quarter of the way out and slowly made its way back. But La Borgne had seen his visions and heard voices speak to him; he found a ship bound for Alexandria. A storm picked up the boat near the delta of the Nile and flung it about like a toy, splitting it from end to end and scattering its passengers over the steel-grey water. La Borgne was found vomiting yellow and green bile onto a white beach by a group of Arab traders mounted on camels; the Arabs were bound by a code of honour bred in the desert, a code which forbade them from mistreating the weak and the sick. The Arabs picked up the unbeliever and tied him to a camel-saddle. Three days later, they dropped him, face down, into the mud on the outskirts of Cairo and disappeared into the heat-waves.
La Borgne recovered speedily from heat-stroke and starvation. Again, his stature and bearing and his air of mystery, the electric, dangerous smell of purpose that hovered around his body, assured that he was provided with money and letters of introduction; strangers reached into their pockets, strangers fed and clothed him. Armed and outfitted, La Borgne set sail for Madras over calm seas, the curved bow parting even, complaisant water at the Cape of Good Hope, then past Madagascar, through long, quiet days with a good wind behind. There were no more storms. La Borgne leaned against a bulkhead, at peace. The Hindustan that he was approaching was witnessing the decline of the Moghul empire and suffering the consequent fratricidal struggles. There would be place for a soldier.
Ten years after he had left his father’s house, La Borgne smelt the odour of grass and mud and knew he was home; a skiff carried him to a flat, wide beach. He fell to his knees and scooped up handfuls of sand and flung them over his head. The sand clung to his hair, making him look older than his twenty-seven years. La Borgne laughed; he felt the sun on his face. He stripped off his jacket and flung it into the water. A few children, dark and curious, dressed in many folds of fine white cloth, emerged from the line of trees that ran around the beach. La Borgne laughed again.
In Madras he found Moulin, a tall, thin French officer with white hair and a scar that stretched from a corner of his forehead across an empty socket to just above his lip. Moulin read La Borgne’s letters of introduction and took him back to his sprawling house in the middle of a thicket of trees and pointed him firmly towards the bathroom; when La Borgne emerged he found a new set of clothing laid out for him, a pair of closely-fitting cotton pants and a finely-embroidered, light coat that seemed to float against his skin. Moulin and La Borgne sat in a balcony, a breeze shifting their hair. Servants brought out plates of food.
‘This is a pulau: rice and meat,’ and La Borgne found himself leaning low over a dish, stuffing food into his mouth with both hands, the insides of his mouth dancing. ‘I have a cook from Lucknow, and this is zarda, sweet rice with saffron and raisins, and this is kabab, ground beef, and this is paratha, bread,’ and La Borgne was dizzy with the spices and the smells, rich and thick and heavy; later, the servants brought out hookahs that burbled gently, and La Borgne felt the quiet of the evening settle around him.
He was awakened from a deep dreamless sleep by the hollow click of hooves against stone. He sat up, and Moulin was looking away, to the west, where a line of horsemen drifted across the sun. ‘Learn their languages,’ Moulin said, and pointed to his scar. ‘They can do this, but often they send a message to you on the evening before they attack, asking to be granted the honour of combat.’ He shook his head. ‘Somebody is going to take all this. On the field they fight each to himself, like it’s a personal quarrel. I was a barber in Lyons, and now I eat like this.’ He rubbed his face, and then said morosely: ‘You’re going to get dysentery soon. Diarrhoea.’
‘No, I won’t,’ said La Borgne, and he didn’t, and the days and then the years flashed by with an increasing velocity; fulfilled, he found a commission with the French forces stationed in Pondicherry; here, for the first time, he drilled Indian troops and encountered, irrespective of the age or religion of the men, that particular and peculiar mixture of pride, loyalty and anarchistic self-importance that distinguished these soldiers from any other martial caste in the world; La Borgne drilled, ordered and trained —he was at peace; then, predictably, he had to move on.
This time, there was a different kind of vision, a stirring of the flesh; he was found in the bed of another officer’s wife; officers trained in the European way were scarce, and no duels were allowed, so La Borgne mounted a black horse and rode into the beckoning interior, into the boiling confusion of the clans and states and castes seeking to inherit the mantle of the Moghuls; let us say that he rode across dusty plains and swollen rivers, from Calcutta to Lucknow to Delhi (where the Moghul Shah Alam huddled in his palace and sought release from the misery of his life in piety) and down to the south again; let us say that finally he attracted the attention of a power-broker named Madhoji Sindhia, a man who ruled in the name of the Peshwa but insisted on being referred to as a Patel, a village head-man; let us say that La Borgne entered the service of this crafty Maratha whose armies circled the Deccan and sniffed at the outskirts of Delhi; let us say that La Borgne raised and trained two battalions of infantry for Madhoji, using all his skill, presence and sometimes his physical
strength to transmute immensely skilled, courageous, individualistic and unruly men from every clan and class into a single mass, a thing of mechanics, a phalanx, a machine which finally turned and wheeled on order, coerced into synchronization by La Borgne’s magical certitude (wheeling and turning while sometimes enduring the laughter and sneers of the proud wild cavalrymen who passed by, sniffing elegantly at roses); La Borgne persisted, driven, and was, finally, to a degree, successful.
Let us say, then, that La Borgne found himself one morning on a field near the village of Lalsot, near Jaipur, with his two battalions ranged to the left of the enfeebled imperial army of Shah Alam, in line with the Maratha cavalry of Madhoji Sindhia; let us say that these men were ranged against the armies of Jaipur and Jodhpur and the troops led by the Moghul nobles Muhammed Beg Hamadani and Ismail Beg; the particulars of this war are now confusing and dimmed by the years —as always, the causes could be said to include the lust for power, greed, fear, anger, ignorance and also courage, loyalty and love; let us just say that on this field of Lalsot, Benoit La Borgne became Benoit de Boigne, that years of wandering had pointed the boy who had been fascinated by the clock-work motion of the flour-mill towards this morning.
Horses danced uneasily as the whoosh of shells tore at the air, followed, a fraction of a moment later, by the dull thudding of the artillery pieces; Muhammed Hamadani was disintegrated by a cannon ball; his head spiralled through the air, sprinkling blood over his men, who moved back uneasily, muttering. Ismail Beg, sensing panic, spurred his horse to the forefront; shouting, he led the ranked squadrons against the Maratha cavalry ranged opposite him. The Marathas reeled; on their left, La Borgne saw a twinkling, silver mass beginning to move towards him. A convulsion seemed to pass through the ranks of his brigades, a whisper moving in quick waves, back and forth:
Red Earth and Pouring Rain Page 4
