The Nizam's Daughters

by Mallinson, Allan

  Dark as it was, Hervey grasped the principle and wondered why he had not seen the same on campaign. Perhaps, however, in the everyday of the Indian bazaar or the London emporium, such a thing seemed overcontrived for its simple product. Yet no-one who had been on campaign would ever undervalue hot tea before stand-to on a day when battle was expected.

  ‘Johnson,’ he said simply, with a note of disbelieving admiration, ‘I do not know how I should fare without you!’

  They ate some chapattis and gave the horses a little corn, and soon the first shafts of daylight were piercing the darkness behind them. He told Johnson to take the three horses a little way back along the nullah, and then he and the subedar ascended its sides, and a hillock no wider than a dewpond, so that they might spy out the strength of the nizam’s lure. He was confident they would be able to do so undetected: the subedar knew the ground well from many a patrol, and the dastak official whom they had sought out at the village a mile or so back had confirmed that here exactly was where they would see the redoubts. He would have wished the sun were not rising behind them, for it risked their exposure in silhouette to an observer still concealed by the darkness. But then, had the positions been reversed, he would not have been able to use his telescope for fear of the sun’s reflection on its lens. In any case, avoiding a silhouette was but part of the scouting cavalryman’s art: he must find some background cover – a bush, or suchlike.

  They found a handy euphorbia and crawled under its protecting greenery. Hervey took out his telescope and searched in the direction the official had indicated. He had first been surprised there were no campfires, and now, with the glass to his eye, he could find no flame, no movement – no activity whatever. And there was not a sound, either. These, truly, were soldiers of high discipline, he muttered to the subedar.

  As the light grew, almost with each tick of Hervey’s full hunter, he was able at last to make out one of the redoubts. ‘The guns must be run in: I can see nothing of them,’ he whispered, rubbing the condensation from the eyepiece before taking a further look. It was the same with the second redoubt: the embrasure could be made out clear enough, but again the gun appeared to be run in. He found the third: it was the same. Surely the guns would be run out for the dawn stand-to? Yet each of the eight redoubts looked, in the half-light, asleep, inattentive – not even the sign of a sentry. If only he now had the half-troop and the galloper guns: he wagered he could storm each in turn and take them at the point of the sword. Scarcely would the enemy have time to rouse! He even thought of rushing the nearest redoubt himself and, with the subedar, turning the gun on the other seven. But he knew well enough that, so alerted, they would overpower him first. No, he would have to wait another night and take each by stealth. But then he had spread word that the rajah’s troops were advancing: they would be waiting tomorrow, alert – surely?

  The sun was now glinting over the hills to the east, the light growing ever stronger. After five more minutes, still peering through his telescope, Hervey started suddenly: ‘Great heavens! There’s no-one there – no-one at all!’

  The subedar looked at him in astonishment. ‘Why would they build redoubts like that and then abandon them as quickly, sahib?’

  ‘I don’t know, Subedar sahib; I simply don’t know.’

  He called for the horses, but as he did so there was a fearful squeal from one of them, and then squeals from all three. ‘What in God’s name is Johnson doing?’ he rasped as they scrambled down the hillock and into the nullah. The squealing continued as they ran to where Johnson was struggling to keep hold of the reins of the three terrified animals – rearing, jumping and kicking in a manner he had rarely seen. ‘What is it Johnson? What’s got into them?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir; they was all just ’aving a bit of this couch grass and suddenly they all goes barmy!’

  ‘Snake, sahib! They are panicking because of snake!’

  There was no sign of a snake, however.

  ‘They know when there is snake, sahib; it is most likely gone by now, though.’

  The horses were, indeed, settling. Hervey took Jessye’s reins and brought his hand up to her muzzle to reassure her. ‘Oh God,’ he said suddenly. ‘Subedar sahib, come look here: there’s blood on her nose!’

  The subedar took one look and sucked in air between his teeth. ‘It is snakebite, sahib – no mistake.’

  Hervey looked closer and saw the tell-tale pinpricks from which the blood oozed. He went cold with dread: he had heard of horses dying within minutes of a snakebite. Jessye was now standing stock-still, her legs spread as if to keep herself braced. She began to pant. Only a month before Waterloo he had read of a condition described as ‘shock’, explaining why he had seen horses most cruelly mutilated on the battlefield which had not succumbed, and yet others with little apparent injury failing to recover. The paper suggested it was a collapse of the respiratory system – and Jessye’s quickened breathing, and now her sweating flanks, pointed to just this. He called for a knife, but then decided against making free with it across the bite since the poison would already be deep. He took off the saddle and bridle as she began to shake.

  In a while her forelegs began to buckle and she almost fell to the ground, just managing instead to drop unsteadily to her knees and then to roll onto her side. She lay sweating prodigiously, her breathing now growing shallow. ‘Sahib, send to the village for sadhu,’ pleaded the subedar.

  Hervey had to check himself: the subedar’s plea was well meant, but he wanted no fakir dancing about his mare. He knew in his heart that nothing could be done for her, nothing that could arrest the poison’s evil, now deep in her vitals. Would Selden have bled her? The poison was in her blood, and bleeding would remove some of it, would it not? But Selden had always been so sceptical of bleeding. He would surely urge that not one drop of blood was better placed than in a vein. Jessye had survived so much – three years of the Peninsula, and then Waterloo. To succumb now to something that slithered in the couch grass was ignoble, the basest of ends – like Edmonds’s death to the first volley in that battle. He pulled his pistol from the saddle and began to prime it. He would not let her end come from a serpent: better that she die at the hand of a friend. He lifted her head, and she grunted. He pulled her ears, blew in her nostrils, wiped the blood from her muzzle, keeping the pistol out of sight as tears streamed down his cheeks. ‘Is she in pain, Subedar sahib?’

  ‘No sahib, she not in pain. Snake’s poison in horse only make it sleep in peace. Let me fetch sadhu, sahib. He know many mantras to draw out poison.’

  ‘Thank you, Subedar sahib, but no. I can feel her slipping away even as we speak.’ He brought the pistol to her head, gently but firmly putting the barrel to the fossa over her left eye so that the ball would not strike bone. He pulled the hammer back carefully to full cock, the ‘click’ as it engaged in the notch of the trigger arm seeming louder than he had ever heard. He prayed it would take just the one round . . . and then he drew the pistol away. ‘If she is in no pain, let her lie in the sun at rest, Subedar sahib. Let her remaining time be peaceful. I don’t want her to hear another shot: she’s heard too many.’

  ‘Yes, sahib; let her pass in peace with the sun on her.’

  It had been no more than five minutes since he heard the commotion, but he knew he should now be about the business of the guns. Every instinct, every precept he had been taught and every lesson from life told him so, for in war, time was the only commodity which, once lost, could not be regained. ‘Johnson, stay with her until . . .’ He found himself choking on the words. ‘And then have her buried – I don’t want her on a pyre.’

  ‘Ay sir,’ replied Johnson quietly, just as moved at her plight, for he had been with Hervey, and therefore Jessye, for more than three years.

  He cradled her head to his chest and whispered a farewell in her ear, tears now running freely. He gave Johnson a handful of silver to see to her burial. ‘There will be men in the village who will dig. Find whatever horse you can to
get back to Chintalpore.’

  Then he sprang up with all the resolve he could muster and leapt into the saddle of Johnson’s mount. ‘Come, Subedar sahib,’ he called briskly, his face streaked where the tears had washed the caked dust. He dug his spurs into the little Arab, and did not look back.

  The redoubts were as empty as if they had never been occupied. Except that there was the unmistakable spoor of heavy guns – and easy to follow, for their wheel-ruts were as deep again as those of the wagons that had accompanied them. Hervey soon found the tracks of eight pieces converging beside the Godavari. This could not be a fording place, surely? There was no exit that he could see on the far bank. Had the nizam withdrawn his guns, therefore? Surely not on hearing that the rajah’s troops were marching west. There must therefore have been some interior cause for withdrawal, but it seemed unusually coincident. Which left only the possibility that the guns were taken downstream. To Chintalpore? Or to the Pindarees? If Haidarabad had known that the rajah’s forces were not moving west after all – that they were not, indeed, to be drawn by this lure – then the nizam’s men would have removed the guns at once. But how might Haidarabad have learned of this? Hervey had, after all, told only one man. Surely he and Locke had not been overheard? Surely Locke had not . . .? And then came the awful realization: the Maharashtri girl. Like the wretched Samson at Gaza, groaned Hervey, who ‘weakly to a woman revealed it’. He groaned again: Locke – brave, true, foolish. ‘O impotence of mind, in body strong!’

  But what was the purpose now of railing? Indeed, the guns, if they were on the river, were powerless. With the lightest galloper gun he could force them to surrender, or even send them to the bottom! He looked again at the river, to the middle where the stream seemed fastest. A tree trunk bobbed obligingly by, giving him the chance to assess the speed. It seemed little more than marching pace, and since there was no breeze he estimated that barges carrying the guns could not exceed a horse’s jogtrot. They had had, perhaps, six hours’ start at most. They might be, say, forty miles downstream – at Chintalpore. His heart sank. But his duty was clear either way: if the guns were making for Chintalpore, his place was back at the rajah’s palace. And if they had not been able to make such speed . . .

  He swung the mare round. ‘Subedar sahib,’ he shouted, ‘the guns are on the river between us and Chintalpore. We are going to destroy them!’

  He had two options. To pace his mare so that, if the half-troop and the galloper guns had made slow progress (perhaps not yet even arrived at Chintalpore), they did at least reach them; or else he could make all speed at once in the hope of meeting the troop in time either to intercept – or at least catch up – the boats. Hope was not a principle of war, he reminded himself, yet surely the second option was the only one?

  Now he would do something he had never done before. He would push his horse until it fell of exhaustion. Had he contemplated the act coolly and at length, he might have balked at it. Yet now, scenting the distant possibility of a kill, he felt nothing. He unfastened the holsters from the saddle and flung them and their pistols into the river. He unbuckled his sabre – a fine tulwar from the rajah’s armoury – and hurled that into the river too. And when the time came – when he needed just another mile from his mare – he would throw off shako and tunic, and discard the saddle to ride, as Xenophon prescribed, bareback. The subedar followed his example: everything – his own sacred tulwar included – he cast like Hervey into the waters of the Godavari.

  After two hours at a truly prodigious pace, their horses tiring desperately with every stride, Hervey was suddenly inspirited by the distant appearance of the lancer troop. He pushed his little mare back into a gallop to close the remaining quarter of a mile, and kicked up so much dust that the troop was taking guard as he hallooed them. ‘Have you seen any boats on the river?’ he shouted.

  The rissaldar looked confused. Hervey tried again, this time in Urdu. Still there was no reply. He cursed and looked at the subedar. ‘In heaven’s name ask him if he’s seen boats on the river – a dozen, maybe more; big boats, big enough to carry the nizam’s guns!’

  With a concoction of English, Urdu and Telugu he eventually established that a small flotilla that might answer thus – certainly unusual in appearance, with several craft roped together, and having an uncommonly large number of people aboard – had passed them by almost an hour ago. Hervey’s face lit up at the news. He explained what he wanted and soon the rissaldar’s face was lit up too. The troop’s officer trotted back down the column to relay the intention, and the sowars’ faces took on the same aspect. Hervey wanted one more thing, however: paper and pencil. The rissaldar obliged, handing him his sabretache, and in less than a minute he had scribbled his message for Locke. It read simply, ‘Nizam’s daughters on river. Shall intercept. Make speed to Chintalpore in case elude me. There is spy in palace who knows our last conversation. Hervey.’ He gave it to a dafadar with instructions to ride for Jhansikote at all speed.

  Changing horses to a big country-bred which tried to bite his arm as he mounted, Hervey hastened to the head of the column. ‘Very well then, Rissaldar sahib, let’s be about it!’

  Though the rissaldar knew not the precise meaning of Hervey’s Urdu, the sense was clear enough, and, with an appeal to Shiva, he put his thirty men and the guns straight into a gallop.

  Sooner than Hervey expected, they caught up with the flotilla of shallow-draught vessels taking the most powerful guns in southern India deep into the territory of the rajah. The sight filled him with a powerful sense of violation, and a glimpse into the eyes of the sowars behind him would have revealed the same. They had not hated these men from Haidarabad before. Though most of the nizam’s soldiers were Mussulmans they were brothers nonetheless. Perhaps it was the outrage of sibling betrayal which now fired these Hindoos of Chintalpore, for when they saw the boats they quickened the pace without orders. Soon they were in a flat gallop, the guns bouncing behind the bigger country-bred geldings. As they drew parallel and then overtook the boats which, here on the curve of the river, were much closer to the sowars’ bank, the nizam’s gunners realized what was to come, and there was at once commotion where before there had been only torpor. The guns themselves were covered by canvases – not that they could have been fired from such flimsy craft even had they been ready – and some of the gunners sought the meagre protection of concealment beneath them.

  The sowars unhitched the galloper guns before the wheels had even stopped turning, swinging them at the boats with frenzied heaving. They opened fire so quickly that Hervey thought they must have been loaded ready. He urged them on with the most sanguinary imprecations. He wanted no measured action, only the most ferocious assault: what might these sepoys of the nizam be capable of if they were not subdued rapidly and with the greatest violence? The rissaldar, suffused with that same resolve, and without waiting for orders, spread his men along the bank to deal with those who were, willingly or otherwise, about to enter the water. The galloper guns found their mark easily. Although the Godavari, even before the monsoon, was wide at this point (perhaps as much as two hundred yards), it was a placid – even a sluggish – stream, and the guns needed no elevation. Against river barges a single four-pound shot did the most fearful destruction (they were just beyond the range of canister), and with targets that stood practically still, the business of re-laying was nothing. The first to strike home carried away the head of one of the sepoys, leaving his body standing for several seconds before it toppled forward and over the side. Blood spattered about the others and sent them into a frenzy. An officer tried to rally them to some resistance, but he fell to a carbine ball, coolly discharged from the saddle by a diminutive Tamil who was not prepared to wait for the sabre. The others were soon loading theirs, but next the second galloper gun fired a corrected shot, low, which smashed through the gunwale and sent a torrent of splinters as lethal as grape across the deck of the third barge, leaving not a man standing for’ard. Sepoys on the fourth barge began a
brisk return of fire, but to little effect, and Hervey ordered the jemadar to have the sowars direct their carbine fire at this and the following barges, which were much closer to the bank, to suppress the resistance until the galloper guns could play on them in turn.

  The lead barge was now ablaze, the first gun having fired one of its precious fused shells into the shrouded cargo, and sepoys were soon jumping from the sides. Some could not swim: they thrashed wildly, calling upon Allah until the Godavari claimed them. Some struck for the distant bank, but a dozen sowars put their horses into the river after them. There could be no doubting who would win the race. Others, accepting their fate or hopeful of mercy, made for the nearer side. Sowars waded in to meet them, slinging lances over the shoulder to draw sabres instead, and the shallows soon ran red – brackish though the river was. Some of them, impatient of waiting for the remaining fugitives to leave the barge, swam their horses towards the craft to assail the would-be survivors with the steel point of the ten feet of bamboo. The second barge was now sinking, its gunwales below water, its sepoys, seeing the slaughter of the first, unable to commit themselves to the fate attending whichever course they chose. Those on the third made no attempt at resistance, climbing instead into the water on the cover-side, holding on desperately, doubtless hoping that the barge would somehow drift out of reach of the guns. But it edged instead into the second, which was wallowing midstream. Both guns now turned on it. The first round struck just below the waterline, and the barge’s fate was sealed, if slowly. But the other gun still had one fused shell, and it took only seconds to have the vessel ablaze, forcing the sepoys finally to choose their fate. However, none were to feel the sabre or the lance’s point, for before the most resolute had made a dozen strokes the barge blew up, sending a fountain of matchwood higher than the tallest mathi trees on either bank. On seeing this the sepoys on the fourth barge began throwing down their muskets and jumping into the water. Hervey guessed that the powder was carried on just two barges, this and the third, and he shouted for the galloper guns to play now on the last two, whose sepoys were returning fire briskly but with almost no effect from behind the cover of the gunwales.