The Faraway Drums. Jon Cleary
of men in certain villages who will soon be going south to start their work.’
‘Tibetans or Indians?’ Farnol saw the lama’s hesitation and pressed the question: ‘You can tell me without offending the gods. You don’t want our soldiers coming so far north to seek them out, not again.’
‘All I can say is that they are not our people,’ said the lama and Farnol knew he would tell only the truth. ‘They are Indian. But I can tell you no more than that. The gods will tell you if they wish to.’
The man at the end of the terrace stood up. Farnol, his attention distracted for a moment from the lama, watched fascinated as the mystic, wrapped in a long brown robe, seemed to move in a trance towards the very edge of the terrace, as if he were going to step out on to the clear shining air. Farnol stopped himself from crying out; he knew better than to interfere. He knew how some of these men could put themselves into a state where they achieved the seemingly impossible: to walk through fire and come out unharmed, to sit naked amongst the ice of the highest places and be unaffected. But men did not walk on the air above a valley two thousand feet deep. Christ may have walked on the water but even He had never shown that He could walk on air.
The man abruptly stopped; Farnol guessed that his toes must be curled over the very edge of the tremendous drop. He stood there poised, unmoving, seemingly leaning on the breeze that blew up from the valley; Farnol waited for him to plunge off into the void. Then he turned round; Farnol would swear that for a moment the man actually stepped off the terrace edge, stood on the air. Then he walked back across the terrace, gliding in the long brown robe. As he disappeared past the corner of the monastery wall he looked towards Farnol and the lama. Farnol caught a glimpse of a black beard, a hooked nose and dark deep-set eyes that he was sure saw neither himself nor the lama.
‘Were the gods protecting that man when he stood there on the edge?’
‘Who knows? We can only put our trust in them. You should put your trust in them, too.’
‘I only wish I could.’ But that was not the truth: he had the sceptic’s false faith in himself.
All that had been a month ago and since then, journeying slowly back through the high passes, working the villages for information like an insurance salesman looking for new clients, he had learned nothing from the gods or any less exalted source. He had heard a rumour or two, but they had been only echoes; nobody knew, or would tell, where the gossip had begun. Once, in a village, a man had pointed a finger, but when Farnol had looked round the man the finger had been pointed at had disappeared; when he turned back the would-be informer had also disappeared. It had always been like that here in the Himalayas: mystery and magic were part of the atmosphere, conjurers, mesmerists and the occasional charlatan were as native to the mountains as the gooral sheep and the snow leopard. The only defence was never to show your bewilderment.
So he had slowly come down from the high places till he found himself on the Tibet Road above the Satluj River and there been ambushed.
He and Karim buried the three ambushers and the dead porter under cairns of stones, mindful that they would wish their own bodies to be treated that way, safe from the jaws of jackals. Then Karim had shouted at the top of his large voice, a trumpet call for the cowardly, despicable, thieving porter-buggers to come back up the ridge and pick up their packs. The porters, who had not yet been paid, a shrewd yoke that generally kept them from running too far, came back, suffered a lash or two from Karim’s lathi cane, picked up their loads and fell in behind Farnol and Karim. That night and the next Farnol and Karim took turns in keeping guard when they camped, but nobody had appeared to disturb or attack them. Yet Farnol had felt every step back along the Road, through Narkanda, Theog and Fagu, that he was being watched. But whenever he looked back, no matter how quickly, he saw no one.
On the third day after the ambush, in the late afternoon, Farnol walked into Simla. Smoke came up the steep slopes of the narrow ridge on which the town seemed to be plastered rather than built. Down in the bazaar and in the houses where the native population lived on the south side of the ridge, cooking fires had been lit and the smoke rose like an evening mist, drifting into the rear of the Europeans’ bungalows built on the upper roads. Maids came hurrying to close the windows, shouting abuse down at the lower life who dared cause this inconvenience. The lower life replied with abuse as thick and pungent as the smoke. It was an evening ritual that each level would miss if ever it were discontinued.
Farnol walked along the road just below the Mall. Indians were not allowed to walk on the Mall, the road that ran along the top of the ridge; that hand-swept, spotless roadway was reserved strictly for Europeans and the Indian nobles. Even they, too, were restricted in that they could not ride in a carriage or motor car; that privilege was reserved for the Viceroy, who, when in residence at the Lodge, would drive the length of the ridge every Sunday morning to church while lesser souls tested their faith with their feet or rode amongst the fleas in a rickshaw.
Farnol, still dressed as a hillman, did not want any run-in with the police till he reached the Viceregal Lodge. Several of the better-class Indians, out for their evening promenade, necks held stiff in their Celluloid collars, looked contemptuously at him, Karim and the three porters; but there was something about the bearing of the tall bearded hillman that stopped them from telling him to get down to one of the even lower roads. Farnol smiled to himself, knowing their thoughts: there was no one more jealous of his station than the Indian who worked for the Indian Civil Service. But then there was no one more class conscious than the English Brahmins of the ICS.
‘Snob buggers,’ said Karim Singh, who had his own contempt for office wallahs. ‘When do we go down to Delhi, sahib?’
‘Tomorrow, perhaps the day after. It will depend on Colonel Lathrop.’
A lot would depend on George Lathrop. It was he who had recruited Farnol from Farnol’s Horse and, three years ago, sent him into the North-West Frontier as a political agent. Since then there had been other excursions, all of them dangerous, not all of them rewarding; Farnol, a man ambitious for a certain degree of comfort, had had moments when he had wondered why he agreed to work for Lathrop. He had been born in India of a family that had first come here in 1750 to work for the East India Company; his great-great-grandfather had formed Farnol’s Horse, a Company regiment, in 1776 and the eldest son or only son of each succeeding generation had been expected to join the regiment. After his education in England Clive had returned to join the Horse, to find his place in the circumscribed life that was the way of the Indian Army. Even if all the blood in him was English, he had been infected by Indian ways: he saw the sybaritic life that the princes lived and he had longed for the opportunity to fall prey to such corruption. He had slept with the daughters of princes and with the wives of several; had he been caught his pure English blood would have run very freely out of his slit throat and down his dress uniform, for princes had a proper sense of occasion even for executions and would not have allowed him to die in regimental undress. But his success with the ladies, by their being clandestine, had not led to any invitations to join the luxury life in the palaces. In the end, bored by life in the regiment, he had instead accepted Lathrop’s invitation to be seconded to the Political Service. He had also come to realize that if some prince did offer his daughter in marriage, he would probably back out. He was the sort of man who wished to be corrupted only at a distance or, if closer, then only occasionally.
Three months ago, at the beginning of September, Lathrop had sent him up the Tibet Road to the mythical frontier only believed in by statesmen and cartographers. The word had gone out earlier in the year that on the 12th day of December in this year of grace 1911, George the Fifth of Great Britain and his consort Queen Mary were coming to Delhi to be crowned, at a Great Durbar, Emperor and Empress of India. Farnol had been instructed to find out if the hill tribes were excited by the news, troubled by it or if, indeed, they cared at all. The general attitude, he had found, had been one of bemused puzzlement: King Who? In a region so remote that some villages did not know the name of the headman of the next village fifty miles away on the other side of a mountain, there was little cause for the clapping of hands and shouts of Hats off, the King! when someone produced a piece of paper and read to them the news that a Great Raj from over Le sea (‘What is a sea, sahib?’) was coming to let