Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One: The Tracker
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two: The Crusade
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Geoffrey Wilson was born in South Africa, grew up in New Zealand and then backpacked around the world before eventually settling in the United Kingdom.
He studied Hinduism and Buddhism at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and has been fascinated by India since travelling there in the early 1990s.
LAND OF HOPE AND GLORY
Geoffrey Wilson
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Geoffrey Wilson 2011
The right of Geoffrey Wilson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN: 9781444721119
Hardback ISBN: 9781444721102
Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
For Helena, for everything
Prologue
Harold Neary flinched at the first crack of a musket. A bullet whined past in the dark. Then another. But Harold spurred his horse on towards the line of soldiers who stood ahead in the gully.
Tonight he would kill Rajthanans. Nothing would stop him.
The Sergeant Major – riding beside Harold – drew his scimitar and shouted, ‘Charge!’
Harold and his eight other comrades lifted their swords too and roused a cry somewhere between a cheer and a shriek. They thundered down, the musket flashes rippling before them, the bullets thickening.
Harold gripped his scimitar tight as he rode. His heart flew, but there was no need for fear. God was on his side.
He thought of his brother, who had died fighting the Indians – the Rajthanans. Those heathens thought they were so high and mighty, the lords of England, but Harold would teach them that they couldn’t lord it over him. When he’d served in their army, they’d shouted at him, flogged him, practically starved him, but he’d survived. And while he still had strength he would slaughter as many of the bastards as he could.
Cloud covered the moon and in the faint light Harold could barely see the scattered row of forty European soldiers – only their faces and hands stood out. Their fingers, like fireflies, darted to ammunition pouches, lifted cartridges, slammed ramrods down barrels. Grey powder smoke drifted along the line. Behind stood Rajthanan officers in silver turbans that brightened at each firearm spark.
And further back rose the bone-white tower of the sattva link, shining slightly against the black background of the hills.
Bullets hissed around Harold. With a metal scream, one struck a scimitar. To Harold’s left, young Turner cried out and jerked back off his horse.
Turner. Down. That left just nine riders.
‘Steady, men!’ the Sergeant Major shouted.
Harold glanced at his commander. The Sergeant Major was a big man with broad shoulders and thick arms. In the grey light his face was like battered tin: his nose crushed, his ears mangled and his shaven head pocked and dented by old injuries.
He was a great man, the Sergeant Major, and one of the toughest soldiers Harold had ever met. It was the Sergeant Major who had convinced them all to don peasant clothes and take to the hills. It was the Sergeant Major who had taught them how to fight the Rajthanans, how to burst out of the wilderness and attack before anyone knew what was happening, and then vanish again as quickly as they had appeared.
Harold would follow the Sergeant Major anywhere.
The enemy were near now. The Europeans stopped firing, clicked the catches on their weapons to release their knives, and formed a line of pointed steel. Their faces were set hard beneath their blue cloth caps and the brass buttons shone on their blue tunics. Harold had worn a uniform like that for three years. He’d fought for the Rajthanans just like these men. But no more.
The Rajthanan officers screamed for their men to hold steady.
Harold remembered hearing the news that the Rajthanans had murdered his brother and then he was shouting so hard his throat ached and the sound seemed to blot out everything else, save for the wind whipping past and the undulating movement of the horse.
He swerved and aimed for the nearest officer. For a few seconds he could see his opponents in great detail: wide eyes, teeth, nostrils. It was like a dream.
Then his horse jumped and the soldiers dived. He swung his blade, hitting nothing. He couldn’t see the officer. He heard hooves nearby colliding with heads and chests. Scimitar chimed against knife-musket.
And then he was through. He glanced about, and saw that none of his comrades had fallen and their pace had hardly slowed.
‘To the tower!’ the Sergeant Major bellowed.
Harold wanted to stay and fight, to get his first kill, but he had to keep up.
The windowless, two-storey tower loomed ahead in the narrowest point of the gully. A twenty-foot-high brass rod topped the pointed roof.
Away to the right, a set of tents came alive. Soldiers stumbled out in their underclothes and almost fell over as they pulled on their trousers. They came running up the slight incline in their nightshirts, baying like dogs. Harold could make out snatches of what sounded like Andalusian.
The Sergeant Major shouted to Harold and pointed towards the tower. Harold followed his leader over to an arched entrance and leapt from his charger. He released a sack hanging across the back of the horse, then humped the heavy weight on to one shoulder.
The Sergeant Major glanced at him. Harold grinned, patting the sack. Within that cloth was something worth more to him right now than gold.
Powder.
The Sergeant Major went first up the circular stone stairway, drawing an ornate, multi-barrelled pistol from his belt. It was dark, save for a trace of misty light from above.
Harold breathed heavily and his heart whispered in his ears. He shook the long hair out of his eyes.
Near the top of the stairs they paused. Above them was an archway, out of which floated the faint light.
‘Anyone up there?’ the Sergeant Major called. ‘Give yourselves up and we’ll spare you.’
No response.
Harold heard shouting and pistol shots outside. His comrades would be fighting off the soldiers. There wasn’t much time.
/> They advanced up the stair.
With a sudden high-pitched cry, an Indian officer charged through the arch, stumbling down the first few steps. He fired his pistol straight at the Sergeant Major. The hammer clicked—
Nothing happened – a misfire. The officer’s face dropped.
The Sergeant Major smiled, his pistol cracked and smoke blurred the stairwell. The officer’s left cheek flared open and spat blood against the wall; the white row of his teeth was visible inside the wound, as though he were smirking. He fell forward, clattered and jerked on the steps.
‘Good shot, sir,’ Harold said. Another heathen dead.
The Sergeant Major grinned, his eyes quivering in the dim light. ‘Any more up there? Give yourselves up.’
Silence.
They crept up the remaining steps. The Sergeant Major pressed himself against the stone wall, then swung into the entrance, holding the pistol before him.
Nothing happened.
He looked down at Harold. ‘There’s no one.’
Staggering under the weight of the sack, Harold ran up the stairs and entered a stone-walled room lit by pale yellow lanterns. To one side, on top of a pedestal, stood a spherical wire cage, within which squatted a metal shape that looked like a creature dredged from the sea. Numerous crab-like claws hung from its sides and a mass of mandibles and feelers covered its head.
Harold stopped dead and made the sign of the cross. That thing was one of the Rajthanans’ devils. Avatars they called them.
The Sergeant Major stared at the device and rubbed his hand over his shaved head. He shot a look at Harold and nodded.
Harold took a step towards the machine, noticing a copper cable leading from the thing’s back, across the floor, along one wall and up through the centre of the ceiling.
The avatar moved. One claw scraped along the bottom of the cage and a feeler lifted.
Harold hesitated. He’d heard the Rajthanans fed these beasts on human blood. Whether that was true or not, he’d like to see them all smashed to pieces as soon as the Rajthanans were kicked out of England. The country was in the grip of black magic and only the crusade would free it.
‘Hurry up,’ the Sergeant Major said. ‘It’s harmless.’
Harold swallowed. He stepped up to the pedestal and heaved the sack to the floor. The avatar moved more rapidly, scuttling about in the cage and snapping its claws.
Harold pushed the hair back from his eyes, struck a match and lifted the fuse sewn into the side of the sack. He looked up at the avatar, which was now scratching frantically at the bars and making a clicking noise, as if it knew what was coming.
Harold smiled and lit the fuse. The flame settled into a red glow that crept up the hemp cord.
‘Let’s go,’ the Sergeant Major said.
They charged down the stairs and came out in the middle of a melee. Only six riders remained – one more had fallen. At least fifty soldiers ran about the horses and jabbed with their knife-muskets. The riders slashed left and right with their scimitars and continually circled to avoid being struck. Pistol shots rang out intermittently and Harold caught the sulphurous scent of powder smoke.
Two soldiers lunged with knife-muskets as Harold came out of the entrance. The Sergeant Major skipped to the side and dashed his opponent’s head against the wall, but Harold moved more slowly. He saw the gleaming blade rush towards him and strike him in the shoulder. His arm went cold as the knife grated against bone. He gasped and fell back against the tower, the knife still stuck firmly and the soldier still holding on to the musket.
Harold locked eyes with the European soldier. The man’s face was twisted with battle fury and he was panting so hard Harold could smell his stale breath.
‘Bastard heathen,’ Harold managed to say, and spat in the soldier’s face.
Then the Sergeant Major roared and punched the man on the side of the head. The soldier stumbled sideways, his round cloth hat flying off. The musket slipped out, tearing an even greater wound in Harold’s shoulder.
Harold shivered. He could see the Sergeant Major kicking the fallen soldier in the face, but the scene was becoming blurry and strange.
He had to stay awake. He couldn’t let the heathens beat him.
‘You all right?’ The Sergeant Major was suddenly standing before him.
Harold nodded. Sickness welled in his stomach and his arm was like ice. He shuddered and stumbled, but the Sergeant Major caught him and helped him up on to the nearby horse.
The Sergeant Major then swung himself up behind and fired his pistol in the air. ‘Knights, ride!’
Harold felt the charger galloping. He slumped forward against the animal’s mane and clung on as tightly as he could with his one good arm. His six remaining comrades bounced along to either side, stray musket and pistol fire flying after them.
Something was wrong. Grimacing at the pain, he looked back and saw that the tower was still standing. Had the fuse gone out? Had the heathens found the powder sack?
Then the top storey of the tower blossomed into a red and yellow flower that lit the whole valley for a moment. A baritone pulse rushed out and rippled through his bones. Chunks of stone whistled in the dark and soldiers scrambled for cover. The horse stumbled slightly, but didn’t fall.
Harold smiled. That was for his brother.
The Sergeant Major lifted his fist in the air and gave a defiant cheer. The other riders joined him.
But their celebration was cut short by the sound of shots from the darkness off to the left. Around a dozen horsemen were riding from the camp and bearing down on them.
‘Hurry, knights,’ the Sergeant Major shouted, and they spurred and slapped their horses onward.
They turned into the trees at the end of the gully and the horses scrambled over an embankment. Then they sped on through the mottled gloom of the forest. Branches and leaves leapt in front of them. Shrubs appeared and disappeared like clouds of dust. The horses whinnied and rolled their eyes.
Every jolt sent a wave of sickness through Harold and he could hear himself groaning.
After what seemed a long time, they came out on to a grassy slope. They zigzagged up, the horses skidding and kicking up clods of earth. They took around ten minutes to reach the summit, where they paused and looked down.
Harold blinked. The cloud had lifted now and he could see a wide sweep of the countryside rolling away in great folds and buckles, like the ocean at night. The knots of forest, indistinct valleys, open hills and heaths were all powdered by the moon.
‘Down there,’ hissed Smith, pointing to the line of trees they’d left earlier.
Harold could just make out the enemy cantering along beside the woods several hundred feet to the left.
The Sergeant Major snapped open a spyglass and followed the horsemen for a moment. ‘Must have lost us in the forest. Don’t think they’ve seen us yet. Come on.’
They turned and galloped down a short slope before reaching a further stretch of trees. They followed a track that wound through the undergrowth, leaves slapping against the horses’ sides.
Harold felt himself slipping away, then shook his head and managed to pull himself back.
After a few minutes, the Sergeant Major called a halt, dismounted and walked to the rear of the group.
Dizzy with pain, Harold looked back over his shoulder and watched as his leader sat cross-legged on the ground, rested a hand on each knee and closed his eyes.
The Sergeant Major breathed slowly and deeply. Apart from the rise and fall of his chest, he was still. The sound of insects swirled and an owl hooted in the distance.
Then Harold noticed the faint, sweet scent of incense – the smell of sattva, that mysterious vapour the Rajthanans used for their machines and avatars and unholy powers. He was leery of it, as he was of all the Rajthanans’ devilry, but the Sergeant Major had some skill with it, and Harold had grudgingly come to accept that it had its uses.
Sometimes you had to fight black magic with black magic.
Harold’s comrades shifted in their saddles – they were just as nervous of sattva as he was.
The Sergeant Major blew gently and a strange breeze seemed to emanate from his body and flow back along the path with a hiss. But it wasn’t so much a breeze as a warping of the scene itself. Tree trunks, branches and the leaf-littered ground all rippled, as if reflected in a pool of water into which stones have been cast. Slowly, the horse tracks on the path disappeared, as if sinking into the earth. The twigs and small branches that had snapped as the horses passed, regrew. The wind rose in strength and then faded, the whorls and eddies subsiding. All evidence that the riders had been there had now vanished.
The Sergeant Major stood, chuckled and rubbed his hands together. He walked back to his charger and said to Harold, ‘You still with us?’
Harold tried to speak, but couldn’t form the words. He grunted as he fought back the vomit stinging his throat.
‘We’ll get you back soon.’ The Sergeant Major mounted and looked across at the riders. ‘Well done, knights. Our land is in darkness, but our crusade will bring light. God’s will in England.’
‘God’s will in England,’ the others said in unison.
As they moved off, Harold felt as though the night were thickening and suffocating him. If he drifted off he was sure he would die. And yet he had to stay alive to keep up the fight against the Rajthanans.
The pain in his shoulder seemed to be the only thing he could cling to – he concentrated on it, sensed the swell and ebb in its intensity. But even that was fading now.
He had to hold on . . . but he was letting go.
PART ONE
THE TRACKER
1
DORSETSHIRE, 617 – RAJTHANAN NEW CALENDAR (1852 – EUROPEAN NATIVE CALENDAR)
Jack Casey crept through the trees near the front of the house. It was after nine at night, but it was summer and the sky still suspended trails of blue within the darkness. He could see the lantern beside the front gate and make out the new guard, Edwin, leaning against the wall beside it, picking at something in the sole of his boot.
Land of Hope and Glory Page 1
