The Faraway Drums (11 page)

“Nonsense, she wasn’t shot at. It was Major Farnol they were after. They’d have mowed us all down in a moment if they’d wanted to. Sit her up, Baron, put her head down between her knees. There, that’s better.”

“I should have brought another coach.” The Ranee was wasting no sympathy, a property she had in only small supply. “Let’s move on.”

“May I ride with my wife?” said Monday.

“There’s no room,” said the Ranee and poked her parasol into the back of her coachman. “Drive on!”

Magda lifted her head from between her knees and looked at the princess opposite her. The two women stared at each other and Lady Westbrook, eyes as alert as those of a Pathan scout, saw the battle lines drawn. She gave herself a sniff of the smelling salts and sat back to enjoy the rest of the journey.

Monday reached across, patted his wife’s shoulder and rode back to the rear of the procession. Farnol mounted his horse and went up to the front again. After a moment Bridie followed him, but the Nawab remained to ride beside the coach.

“What sort of story will you write about all this?” said Farnol.

“It isn’t over yet, is it?” Bridie was slowly learning how to control her horse, but she knew she
would
never make a good rider. She wondered if she would ever make a good foreign correspondent.

Farnol hesitated, then shook his head. He felt reasonably certain that no one else was in any real danger, unless another bullet aimed at him should go astray. He was still puzzled as to why the assassins, whoever they were, should be going to such lengths to kill him; and where had Rupert Savanna disappeared to and what was his connection with the Ranee? Why had an arms salesman, and a salesman for a German firm at that, suddenly appeared in these hills? His puzzlement increased his suspicion: he looked back up the road and saw a caravan of potential enemies.

“Do you mind if I stay close to you?” said Bridie.

“That may not be healthy.”

“Maybe not. But I’d still feel safer.”

He smiled at her, wondering why women always used such an obvious weapon as flattery. “You honour me, Miss O’Brady.”

“And I give you a pain in the neck, too. You don’t fool me, Major.”

“I don’t think any man has ever done that, has he?”

“If a woman never let a man fool her occasionally, her life would be very dry and unexciting.”

“Stay close to me, Miss O’Brady, and we’ll fool each other.”

“Thank you. Now we’ve both been warned.”

The road wound down through a forest of blue pine. Farnol could see ahead to where the forest petered out and the southern slopes of the hills began their sparsely cloaked descent to the plains. Down there he would find little cover if they should be attacked again and he began to wonder if there was an alternative route.

They came round a bend and suddenly they were in a small village. They passed down the main street, which was also the bazaar; but business was slack and storekeepers came to their doors and shouted invitations to come in and buy. Then they saw the Ranee and abruptly shut up and bowed their heads; this was her domain and they knew she was no customer. Children stared wide-eyed at the modest magnificence of the procession; above them, on the roof-tops, monkeys stared with eyes just as big but shrewder. The Ranee reached into the silk handbag she carried, took out a handful of small coins and tossed them out; the children, thrashing about them with closed fists, just beat the monkeys to the money. One monkey did
manage
to grab a coin and retreated to a roof-top where it bit on the coin, found it inedible and, imitating the Ranee’s benevolence, tossed it back down to the children.

The caravan passed through the village, then the pines started to thin out. The sun dropped behind the mountain above them and the air abruptly turned cool. Farnol pulled his horse to one side and waited till the coach came up to him.

“We are going to make camp soon, Your Highness. This is your territory—where do you suggest?”

“My dear Clive, when I’m this close to home, I don’t camp out. We shall detour and call in at the palace.”

“I say, old girl, do you think that’s wise?” The Nawab was on the other side of the coach; he looked across at Farnol. “Mala’s brother, Mahendra, doesn’t make visitors welcome.”

Farnol had never visited the palace of Serog, but he knew of it. It had stood since the 16th century and once had been one of the glories of northern India. He had also heard of Mala’s mentally unstable brother, known as Mad Mahendra and discreetly ignored by every arm of the British Raj. The palace did not suggest itself as a hospitable inn for the night.

But he knew better than to attempt to change the Ranee’s mind; that would be like trying to alter the course of the Ganges with a shovel. The procession moved on, came to a side road which cut away through the last of the now thin forest. The lead horsemen, on a cry from the Ranee’s coachman, turned off the main road and led the way through a narrow ravine that abruptly grew into a high-walled gorge. It was a natural gateway, Farnol saw at once, an ideal spot where intruders could be turned back.

Armed tribesmen, four on either side of the narrow road, materialized out of the rocks at the foot of the gorge’s walls. Farnol called a halt and rode ahead, spoke in Hindi: “The Ranee comes home. Let us pass.”

They looked at him with hostile suspicion; he imagined he could see their fingers curling on the triggers of their rifles. Then one of them looked towards the coach, saw the Ranee and instantly shouted to his colleagues. All eight jumped down from the rocks and rushed to pay their respects to their mistress. Farnol breathed a sigh of relief and moved the procession through. Then he fell in beside Bridie.

Bridie was curious: “But this place is only a few miles from Simla—doesn’t she ever come down
here?
Is it hers or her brother’s?”

“Hers. She belongs to one of those families where the eldest child, girl or boy, inherits everything. Her brother is more than half-mad—I gather he’s something of a handful. So she leaves him here and prefers to live up in Simla or, in the winter, down in Bombay. She likes her social life and—” he glanced up at the towering walls of the gorge “—I don’t think there would be much around here.”

Then the gorge opened out and the procession came into a narrow valley that was almost lush after the rocky barrenness they had passed through. The slopes of the mountains on the northern side were sparsely timbered; erosion scars showed like old yellow wounds on the rocky earth. But the slopes on the southern side and the floor of the valley were thick with pines, rhododendrons, laurels; meadows of autumn-yellowed grass stretched away on either side of a narrow tumbling river. Farnol knew such pockets of near-lushness could exist in these hills; he had seen such valleys even further north and at higher altitudes. They were oases protected from the fierce sun that, aided by the searing winds from the deserts of the western Punjab and Rajputana, killed all young vegetation on the mountains’ southern slopes. The people who lived in this valley might never see the majesty of the Himalayas, but they would never have to scratch for a living as did those who lived on the mountain-tops and were surrounded by the most breathtaking views in all the world. But even those who lived on mountain-tops did so only because it gave them the opportunity to see an approaching enemy. He had never met a peasant hillman who chose his home because of the view it gave him.

The procession came round the end of a ridge running down from the southern wall of the valley and straight ahead, on a low bluff above the white-wealed river, was the palace of Serog.

“Oh my!” Bridie pulled her horse to one side while she paused to stare at the magnificent castle. “It’s like something out of a fairy tale!”

“Its history is as full of blood and gore as most fairy tales.”

The palace, or castle, for it was both, towered above the river in rising terraces on which marble-domed guard-towers, delicately decorated with pierced grilles, looked as fragile as pavilions of candy. Inside the thick outer walls the main buildings of the castle merged into each other through corner towers that rose from the ground to be topped, a hundred feet high, with blue domes that seemed to be nothing more substantial than mirages on the blue light of the late afternoon. The castle dominated the entire valley, but
the
effect was of a great blue-and-white cloud that had floated down to the valley floor rather than a threatening mass of rock and marble.

Farnol was a hundred yards from the castle before he recognized the huge dark rocks on either side of the great gateway. They were rows of fighting elephants, thirty or forty of them, their tusks tipped with metal and each beast chained to a stake at a safe distance from those on either side of it. He wondered how often Mad Mahendra came out on to his castle walk and ordered the elephants to be let loose to fight each other in a welter of blood.

He halted the procession and waited for the Ranee to bring her coach forward. “You’d better go in first, Your Highness. Your brother may not welcome us.”

“He knows better than to disagree with me,” said the Ranee and her tone suggested that everyone should know better.

“Perhaps we’d better get out,” said Magda Monday.

“Stay where you are,” ordered the Ranee and rapped her driver on the back with her parasol.

The coach went in under the great decorated arch of the gateway and Farnol and the rest of the party sat and waited. The fighting elephants began to raise their heads and trumpet as they became aware of the elephants in the caravan; the latter became restless, began to back off, wanting nothing to do with the hoodlums beneath the castle walls. The Nawab and Zoltan Monday rode up beside Farnol and Bridie.

“How long do we stay here, Clive?” said the Nawab.

“Just for the night. I want to be down in Kalka by Wednesday evening at the latest.”

“I think we’d have been safer camping by the roadside. I take it you’ve never met Mahendra? Sometimes he can be as charming and sane as you and I—” He smiled at Bridie to let her know how charming he, at least, could be. “But other times . . . One of his ancestors was the biggest butcher in our history. Mahendra composes songs to his memory.”

“He must be charming,” said Bridie.

A man came to the gateway and beckoned to Farnol. The procession slowly made its way into the great courtyard of the castle. Farnol was surprised at the size of the courtyard; there seemed to be room enough for a small army. The coach was drawn up beneath a high portico attached to the main building; the Ranee and the coach’s three other passengers stood on the steps that led up to the tall, wide doors studded
with
big brass spikes. Nothing about the castle of Serog suggested any welcome to visitors.

Prince Mahendra was standing on the steps above his sister. He was a slim young man, younger than Farnol had expected: he could not have been more than twenty. He wore a pale blue silk
achkan
, the long tight-fitting coat that came to his knees; his head was wrapped in a pink turban and he had a magnificent ruby in the lobe of one ear. Round his neck was a double strand of spinel rubies, each as large as a small pigeon’s egg and his thin left arm seemed held down by the weight of the diamond-encrusted bracelet on his wrist.

“He must have seen us coming and got dressed in a hurry,” the Nawab whispered to Bridie. “This family is so bally vulgar.”

Today appeared to be one of Mahendra’s days of charm and sanity. He greeted all the women, with the exception of the Nawab’s wives, with a bow and a smile. He shook hands with all the men and Farnol was impressed with the strength in the thin brown fingers. He could see now that
thin
best described the prince. He was almost skeletal, as if his flesh had been worn away by the fever of his occasional madness.

“Do come in, how splendid of you to visit me! My sister insists that I always have the palace ready for her, but she never comes.” He kissed the Ranee’s cheek. “Mala my dearest sister, welcome home.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic, Bobs. Take us inside and see everyone is settled in. We’ll all be down for dinner, except Bertie’s wives. Put them in the
zenana
and see they’re fed.”

The Political Service had a dossier on Prince Mahendra, as it had on all the princes, great and small. Farnol had read it and he knew that Mahendra’s full name was Roberts Akbar Mahendra Kugar of Serog. At the time of his birth the Commander-in-Chief in India had been Sir Frederick (later Lord) Roberts; the baby prince’s father had been a great admirer of Bobs and had named his son after the general. The boy, as he grew older, had been labelled with the C-in-C’s nickname. Farnol was to wonder what the now retired field-marshal would think if he knew that a young madman now answered to the famous nickname.

The guests were led into the main entrance hall, which looked like a great roofed cloister with colonnaded arcades on three sides. The floors were blue-and-white marble, laid in an intricate Persian pattern; the domed roof was a diminished reflection of the floor, the pattern being the same but smaller.
Everything
looked as if it had been washed every day for centuries and Farnol wondered in surprise if cleanliness was one of Mahendra’s fetishes.

Mahendra put a brown claw on Farnol’s sleeve as he was about to follow Bridie up the wide stairs to the bedrooms. “Pray stay a moment, Major Farnol.” He had a soft singsong voice, that of a man who might talk or sing to himself for hours on end. “Have you seen your Major Savanna lately?”

The Ranee, the last to ascend the stairs, turned back. “What about him?”

Farnol stayed silent, letting the subject of Rupert Savanna lie between the brother and sister. He saw Mahendra’s eyes widen slightly, then narrow, and he wondered how long the prince’s charm was going to last. It was obvious that Bobs did not believe in wasting charm on his sister.

“He sent me a message that he would come down here last night. He didn’t turn up.”

“Does he come here often?” said Farnol.

“Of course not,” said the Ranee quickly. “Bobs doesn’t encourage visitors. The Major has disappeared, Bobs, but don’t worry about it. He’ll turn up.”