The Faraway Drums

by Jon Cleary

  “You are sure of that, sahib?”

  “Of course.” But then he was not so sure. Once a target, always a target: a man’s conceit could run away with him. What if Ganga had been the target, if someone had wanted her silenced before she told him too much? Could Bertie have suspected her and arranged for her to be watched and disposed of? Was all his grief a sham?

  “How much longer before we get to Kalka, sir?” said Ahearn.

  “What?” His mind was spinning like a lottery barrel. “Two nights, I should think.”

  “What happens to me then, sir?” Ahearn was thinking of doing another bunk. Things were too bloody dangerous around here. He’d be far better off on his own, yes.

  “That’s up to you. I can turn you over to the provosts in Kalka or you can come on down to Delhi with me and I’ll see what I can do about having you transferred to my regiment.”

  Karim Singh looked sideways at Ahearn, wondering why the sahib would want a deserting Irish bugger in Farnol’s Horse. The Indian Army was meant for better men than that.

  “I think I’ll be coming down to Delhi, sir,” said Ahearn, who had had experience of being handed over to the provosts.

  Farnol rode on up ahead and the Irishman and the Sikh were left to themselves. The Ranee’s escort were riding immediately behind them, but neither Karim Singh nor Ahearn thought of getting into conversation with them. Each had his own standards for the proper company he should keep.

  “You think I’d be doing meself a favour if I joined His Nibs’ regiment?”

  “His Nibs? You mean Major Farnol?” Karim sounded as disapproving as a governess. “You’d have to smarten yourself up. We’re a very posh regiment, as good as The Guides or the Bengal Lancers or Probyn’s Horse, or any of them. We only take the best chaps.”

  Karim’s father and grandfather had served in Farnol’s Horse, always as bearer to a Farnol. Sikhs preferred to be soldiers of the line, but the Singhs had never considered themselves as being anything less by being a bearer to a Farnol. They were never expected to do menial tasks, there were always coolies to be found to carry the water, make the bed, clean the boots; but when they were alone together in the field, camped in the hills, Karim took as much pride as a family butler in caring for his master. He and the sahib were part of the regiment and, in Karim’s eyes, everything they did was in the name of the regiment. The top brass in Calcutta or Delhi might not think so, but Karim Singh’s second religion was the regiment and one of his gods was the sahib and he never gave a thought to the brass. The only judges, in his eyes, were the other posh regiments.

  He was 35 years old and he hoped he would grow old in the regiment. He had a wife and two sons in a village in the Punjab and, more often than he would confess to the sahib, he longed to see more of them. To his secret shame, he had found he was also a family man; he kept it hidden, as if it were a venereal disease. But the pox would be forgiven; but not love of a wife and kids. His trouble was that he did not know his sahib as well as he thought: Farnol would not only have forgiven him his love of his family but been delighted by it. Farnol, too, had his secrets.

  “Do you have a wife?” Karim said.

  “Me?” said Ahearn and almost fell out of his saddle laughing. “Jay-sus, man, who’d have me? Some coolie girl?”

  “Some coolie women make good wives.” His own wife was not a coolie: not to him, though maybe to the English.

  “No offence, man. But if I married a cool—an Indian woman, I’d be trapped here in this bloody country for life. Yes. I could never take her home to Belfast with me when me time was up. Not to Belfast, they’d never let her in.” He could not take himself home, either: he knew that now for a fact, yes. He dreamed of America or Australia, where there were opportunities for the Irish, so long as there wasn’t an Englishman or a Scotsman ahead of them for a job. The trouble was, the bloody English and Scots were everywhere. The Welsh left home, too, but wherever they went they disappeared down the coal mines and were never heard of again. “She’d die in bloody Belfast, if they let her in at all. So would I.”

  “There are women going to waste in this country.” Karim was glad he had no daughters, though his wife always wished for one.

  “I know. I been looking at them wives of the Nawab. Five of ‘em. Six of ‘em in another week or two, I suppose—he’ll get a replacement for that one he’s burning back there. Them fellers run their zenanas, they can always get reinforcements. I’d like to reinforce one of them wives, make her pregnant, up the duff.” He looked up ahead at the howdahs swaying like coracles on the tide of the elephants’ backs. A wife looked back at him and he dreamed that she was smiling at him behind her veil. He raised a hand and waved, but she turned her head away disdainfully. He said bitterly, and he meant Mother India as well as the contemptuous wife, “Bitch.”

  “You watch out,” said Karim. “You get too close to those wives and the Nawab’s chaps will put a bullet in you. Or cut off your balls.”

  “Jay-sus,” said Ahearn, who had never heard of an Irish eunuch and did not want to be the first.

  It was mid-afternoon before the Nawab caught up with the caravan. Farnol did not question him as to what had delayed him, but it did seem as if the cremated Ganga’s ashes had taken a long time to cool. The ashes were in an Army and Navy Stores’ biscuit tin and were under the care of the eldest wife in one of the howdahs; as if the Nawab still thought the youngest wife was safe only within the zenana. He was quiet and sober-faced as he joined Farnol, Bridie and Mahendra at the head of the line. He was no longer Bertie, the flannelled fool.

  “Will you report her death?” he asked Farnol. “I’d rather you didn’t, you know.”

  “Are we still in Serog?”

  “I think so. Are we, Bobs?”

  Mahendra, quiet and sober-faced as his fellow prince, nodded. “Our boundary is the next bridge.”

  “Where shall we be then?” said Farnol.

  “In Pandar.”

  Oh Christ, thought Farnol. It struck him that he had worked the wrong side of the Simla hills, always to the north and never down here where they sloped towards the plains and British rule. But that was where he had been ordered to go; the English always had a blind eye for trouble close to home. They treated the Scots and the Irish and the Welsh that way and it worked; so, they had evidently thought, with the States of Serog, Kalanpur and Pandar. But now trouble could be on the very doorstep and he knew nothing of the lie of the land.

  “All right, Bertie, no report. Bobs can report it if he wishes.”

  “It is Mala’s business, not mine,” said Mahendra.

  “Why don’t you just scatter the poor girl’s ashes to the winds and forget all about her?” Bridie was burning, but she would leave no ashes.

  “That is not in very good taste, Miss O’Brady,” said the Nawab stiffly. He had taken on another character altogether, but it didn’t fit him. He had played the second-hand Englishman too long, the plummy Oxford accent kept asserting itself as if mocking him.

  “I know,” said Bridie. “But I don’t think any of you are in good taste. You are all trying to pass the buck. The poor girl’s death should be investigated.”

  “By whom? Sherlock Holmes?”

  She looked at all three of them and saw that they were allies, if uncomfortable ones. “Oh my God! Doesn’t anyone care for the girl?”

  “I do.” The Nawab looked genuinely hurt and Bridie was instantly sorry for her remark.

  “We have our rights,” said Mahendra. “We, not the English, rule our own States. We have power over life and death, so they say.”

  That sounded a little melodramatic, Farnol thought; but he knew it was true. He was ashamed that Ganga’s death could be put aside; yet it suited his purpose for the time being. He had to stay on speaking terms with the Nawab and Mahendra. He would learn nothing if he cut himself off from them. In a land where the population, especially the educated minority of it, loved talking as much as breathing, one always stood the chance of catchin
g a slip of the tongue.

  “So no one will do anything about her death?” said Bridie. She might have been harrying some District Attorney due for re-election.

  “We did not say that.” The Nawab moved his horse up beside that of Mahendra, showing Bridie his back and the horse’s rump, closing the subject.

  Bridie looked at Farnol and he shook his head, silently asking her to be silent. She shut her lips tight and he remarked how plain even a good-looking woman can be when she is disapproving.

  Back in the coach, with Zoltan Monday riding beside it like some better-class postillion, the three other women and the Baron had been very quiet, each for his or her own reason.

  Magda, bored and drowsy, glanced lazily out at her husband, wishing they were in bed together. She did not enjoy these excursions to the outlands of the world; she was a woman for pavements. She did not mind accompanying Zoltan out of Europe if it meant they stayed in some hotel like the Perapalas in Constantinople; she would have enjoyed the stay in the palace at Serog had the circumstances been different. But the dreary, dusty trips to meet clients were a dreadful bore; lately, the trips seemed to be getting longer and drearier, as if the customers for armaments were retreating to the outposts of the world they hoped to conquer. She was no student of revolutionary politics, she longed only for the journey in which clients came with their lists and their cash to hotels like Shepheard’s in Cairo or the Grande Bretagne in Athens.

  “Not much longer, my love,” said Zoltan in Hungarian, as if reading her thoughts.

  “I think it would be much better manners if we all spoke English,” said Lady Westbrook, coming out of her own torpor.

  “My husband was making love to me.” Magda smiled, coming awake. She delighted in verbal thrusting, just as she did the other sort. “Would it be good manners if he spoke in English?”

  “It would be entertaining and perhaps enlightening,” said Lady Westbrook, forgetting her own manners.

  “Is love-making so different in England and Hungary?” The Ranee languidly sat up straighter, glanced at Zoltan, wondered if she had missed something there under the deerstalker cap and the tweed knickerbockers.

  “Ladies, please,” said the Baron. “Spare my blushes. I’m still capable of them, even at my age.”

  Zoltan Monday smiled indulgently at his wife, but not before he had seen the Ranee glance towards him. He had heard of her reputation before he had come up to Simla; he gathered intelligence even more thoroughly than the clients who used the weapons he sold them. He wondered what she would be like in bed, if she thought the Kama Sutra just a primer or an advanced study book; but he would never attempt to find out. Afraid of losing Magda, he never allowed himself to be unfaithful to her. But there was another hunger in the Ranee besides her sexual hunger: he recognized the lust for power. After all, he had been selling to that vice all his business life, it was as familiar to him as the catalogues in his suitcase.

  They passed through several small villages, where the villagers came out to pay their homage and the children hoped for a coin or two from the Ranee or Prince Mahendra, which they didn’t get. In the late afternoon the caravan crossed the river again, this time over a solidly constructed bridge; now they were in Pandar. The countryside didn’t change and only a few in the caravan appreciated that they had crossed a boundary. But Farnol felt it, like an itch in his back. He knew, more than most, that crossing a state boundary meant entering another state of mind.

  “Do you have to request permission to pass through, Bertie?”

  “My cousin and I are the best of friends.” But the Nawab’s tone was not reassuring. “Our families haven’t fought in two generations.”

  “Bertie’s family was on the English side in the Mutiny,” said Mahendra. “Sankar’s grandfather backed the sepoys. The English have never forgiven them for that. Nor have the princes.”

  “What about Sankar? Is he for the English?”

  “Of course,” said the Nawab, cutting in ahead of Mahendra.

  “Did you see him often in England?”

  The Nawab seemed to hesitate; or perhaps he was just steadying his horse. “He lived on the Continent.”

  “Where?”

  “Clive, how you do ask questions!”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do. Where did he live?”

  The Nawab’s horse was restive again. “In Germany, at Baden-Baden. He loves to gamble.”

  “He must wish for a casino at Simla. He’d find the whist or bridge parties rather dull. He must dislike us English for being so staid.”

  “He is one of us, dear chap. We princes are realists. We know the Raj and ourselves are complementary. We shouldn’t exist without each other.”

  “We know how much the English depend on us, all 562 of us.” Mahendra suddenly seemed to have a passion for detail; or anyway selective detail. “The big ones like Kashmir and Hyderabad, the medium-sized ones like Dholpur and the small ones like us.”

  “There are many smaller than you,” said Farnol. “Don’t cry poor.”

  Then they turned a corner in the road through the hills and there was a large village and, just outside it, a guard post. Four armed soldiers came out of a grass hut and stood hesitantly in the middle of the road, nonplussed by this army coming down on them.

  “Move aside,” said Mahendra at the head of the column.

  “Your Highness—” The senior soldier kept his rifle slung over his shoulder; he knew when belligerence was foolhardy.

  “There is a road tax for travellers. His Highness the Rajah has just declared we must collect it.”

  “How much?” said the Nawab.

  “One anna per person, Your Highness.”

  “Ridiculous,” said Mahendra.

  “Write him an IOU,” said Farnol, sitting easy, amused at this display of fiscal banditry. He wondered just how recently Sankar had decreed that tax must be paid. An hour ago, perhaps?

  “It is not a joking matter,” said Mahendra. “I should not dream of taxing Sankar if he rode through my territory.”

  My territory: Farnol noted the possession, even if it was only illusory.

  “Perhaps I’d better take over for a moment.” He pushed his horse forward, assuming authority, certain that Mahendra and the Nawab would not want to lose face by disputing it in front of the four soldiers in the roadway. He looked down at the senior soldier. “I am Major Farnol, a British officer. I am escorting Their Highnesses and Her Highness the Ranee of Serog down to Delhi as the guests of the Government. As such they do not have to pay taxes. You will let us through.”

  “Yes, sahib.” The man knew a real soldier when he saw one. He called himself one of the Rajah’s soldiers, but he knew it was a joke. His rifle was his uniform; without it he looked like everyone else. But he knew how to stand to attention. “Yes, sahib. But you will explain to His Highness the Rajah if you see him—?”

  “Of course.” Then Farnol looked at the two princes: “As you said, we’re complementary. We have our uses for each other. I’ve saved you all of six or seven rupees.”

  They passed through the village, which spread out on the narrow stretch of flat ground on either side of the road and climbed in terraces up the sides of the hills. Clouds hung like kapok on the mountains and there was a smell of rain in the air. Smoke from the evening fires had flattened out till it looked like a floating roof above the village. The main street became crowded as the caravan moved down it and Bridie, riding at the head with Farnol and the two princes, felt like an American queen. Perhaps, when she got back to America, she should look for some politician who might one day be President . . . Unlike certain others in the caravan, she did not crave power, but she found she liked all the benefits that went with it. Power corrupts everyone, even consorts and ladies-in-waiting. And newspaperwomen, she admitted wryly.

  Camp was already set up by the advance guard a quarter of a mile down the road from the village. Hawkers were squatting around it like beakless vultures; children held out the tiny begging-bow
l of their hands and asked for baksheesh. The escorts cleared them away with loud authority and they went uncomplainingly, with that resignation that Bridie, becoming familiar with it now, found distressing.

  “If only they’d protest,” she said to Farnol. “Why do they let themselves be pushed around like that?”

  “If we stayed here, they’d be back tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. They win, in the end. You finish up buying from them just to get rid of them. They know that.”

  A merchant came into the camp with a cart drawn by two camels, having bribed two of the escort to turn their backs. He looked about him and saw a tourist.

  “Memsahib!” He pulled back a tarpaulin and exposed rolls of silk in the cart, in colours so rich they challenged the dusk. He whipped out a roll and flung an end over Bridie’s shoulder and looked at Farnol. “Buy a sari for the lady, sahib.”

  “No,” said Bridie. “I’d feel an impostor, a fake.”

  “You’re right.” But Farnol could see her in a sari and the image excited him. Saris came off so much more easily than dresses and petticoats and all those damned things women wore. “The English ladies in Delhi would blackball you. East is East and West is West and never the togs should meet . . .”

  “Do you wear a turban with your dress uniform, like the Bengal Lancers?”

  “Of course. It’s the way we chaps in the Indian Army distinguish ourselves from the British Army. Men are allowed to dress up. The ladies excuse it because they like us to look dashing. We all looked dashing before the Victorians spoiled everything.” Then he spoke to the merchant: “Does the road go past the Rajah’s palace?”

  “No, sahib.” He was a portly man with a waxed moustache and the slyly friendly eyes of a man who never sold on credit: he had to convince one of his own honesty while he suspected yours. “The palace is further back in the hills. The side road to it is blocked by guards.”

  “Do you ever see His Highness down here?”

  “Never, sahib. We have never set eyes on the new Rajah. Nor on the old one, either. Life is very quiet here, except for the new taxes.”