The Faraway Drums

CHAPTER ONE

1

It was a beautifully clear day for an ambush. Clive Farnol was working his way up from the Satluj River towards the Tibet Road, climbing a steep rocky ridge, when it happened. The first bullet hit one of the four Paharee porters, tumbling him backwards down the slope, and the next three shots sent chips flying from a rock right beside Farnol.

He heard Karim Singh swear and the three surviving porters cry out in fear. Then he swore himself as another bullet whined away off the rock only inches from his face, flicking grit into his face. He tried to roll himself into a ball behind the rock, no easy task for a man as tall as himself, and squinted over his shoulder at Karim. The Sikh was equally tall and he looked awkward and embarrassed as he tried to make himself as small a target as possible. The three porters, all small men, were already sliding back down the ridge, their packs abandoned, their swiftly retreating backs declaring neutrality.

‘Coward buggers,’ said Karim, spitting down the ridge.

Farnol felt he couldn’t blame the porters; it wasn’t in their contract that they should die for five annas a day. The shooting had stopped, but he knew that it was not finished. The ambushers, whoever they were, were probably working their way to better positions to pick off him and Karim. But who were they? Why had they chosen to shoot at this small party of travellers? He and Karim were both in hillmen’s dress: baggy breeches, faded shirts, goatskin vests and turbans. True, they both carried Lee-Enfield rifles, but the chances were that the rifles firing on them were also Lee-Enfields; stolen British Army weapons were a mark of honour amongst the hillmen, a sort of self-conferred, lethal Order of the Indian Empire. But why waste bullets on what, from a distance, would have looked like nothing more than a small party of villagers moving down from the high mountains to Simla? Any ordinary band of dacoits would have waited till the party had climbed up to the road, then set on them, cut their throats with kris and taken what loot they wanted from the packs carried by the porters. And, of course, taken the two rifles.

Farnol suddenly rose up, scrambled up the hill and fell into a depression behind a larger rock; bullets chased him but missed. Karim remained where he was, now lying flat on his back behind a thin spine of rock; he had worked out that the shots were all coming from one direction, a ridge above them and to their left. He was an old hand at ambushes, having seen them from both sides.

Farnol looked around him. In the far distance, whence they had come, he could see the Eternal Snows, the last barrier of the Himalayas; the morning sky was absolutely cloudless and the mountains had the sharp-edged look of white glass. Nearer, the hills fell away as steep ridges, some of them patterned with the corduroy of terraces; he could see the tiny figures of peasants tilling the rocky ground, sowing the wheat that would turn the terraces into bright strips of green in late March. On a ridge up near the road a man and a woman were digging stones and rocks from a new terrace and carting them up to the roadway where they would be used as fill: the ridges were harvested for everything that would bring in a few annas. Still nearer, on a ridge across a deep ravine, Farnol could see a goat-herd and his herd moving, like a small cloud-shadow, up towards the road. The goat-herd had stopped and was looking Farnol’s way, a disinterested spectator of the ambush: he looked at the distance as if 1 e were as unconcerned as his goats.

A flash of movement tugged at Farnol’s eye: a man ran down from the road to an outcrop of rock high to the left. Farnol turned his head and looked at the ridge on his right. A thick cloak of silver fir that ran up its spine was broken for a few yards by a gully, then continued across to cover the top of the ridge on which he lay.

‘I’m going up to the road, Karim.’

‘If you say so, sahib.’ Karim Singh was that rarity, a cautious Sikh who always weighed discretion against valour; he was no coward but he always thought twice before attempting to be a hero. He would deride others for their instant cowardice, as he just had the porters, but they were Paharees and, being a Sikh, he could not think of them with anything but derision.

‘When I reach there, you follow me.’

‘If you say so, sahib. But wouldn’t it be better to wait till nightfall?’

‘Karim, that won’t be for another eight hours!’ Then Farnol sighed. ‘I don’t know why I bother to keep you with me.’

‘You have become accustomed to me, sahib.’

True, Farnol thought. A man’s loyalty was worth more than his bravery. But he wished he had been fortunate enough to have found a legendary Sikh, one of those black-bearded heroes whom Rudyard Kipling was always writing about. Mr Kipling should be here now . . . Another shot rang out, the bullet whining away once more off the rock above Farnol.

‘I want you up there on the road five minutes after I get there. Five minutes, less if you can make it. Understand?’

He didn’t wait for Karim’s usual answer – ‘If you say so, sahib’ – but all at once rose up and flung himself down the side slope of the ridge. He heard another bullet ricochet away above him, but he kept hurtling down the slope, a tall two-legged mountain goat that, like its four-legged brethren, managed by some miracle to stay on its feet. He reached the bottom of a gully, crossed it and scrambled up to the protecting shadows of the firs. He kept moving, his lungs beginning to ache through moving so quickly in the thin air. Then something hit him and he fell sideways into a tree, all the air going out of him in a great painful gasp. For an instant he wondered why it had not occurred to him that there might be more ambushers here amongst the trees.

Then he saw the big sambhar stag go plunging down through the trees, its head twisting as its antlers struck a tree-trunk, its panic evident in the reckless way it skidded and slid and jumped down the steep slope. Farnol stood up, felt for broken bones, decided there was none and moved on, stiffly now, up through the trees. He had been shooting sambhar for ten years, but he had never been closer than a hundred yards to them. It would be something to tell in the mess, if ever he got back to the mess, that he had been knocked down by a stag as big as a small elephant. Or so it had seemed.

He worked his way up the ridge, stopping only once, to catch his breath and to check he had a full magazine in his rifle. He wore a bandolier of ammunition, but he did not want to get into a protracted battle with the ambushers. He had no idea how many were in the band of dacoits, but he guessed there were no more than three or four.

He came to the edge of the trees, and saw the road running slightly downhill to his left. That meant, with luck, he should be above the enemy, a golden rule amongst hillmen. He had been born in these hills; he had been sent to England, to Wellington and Sandhurst, to be educated; his real education, that needed for survival here, had been bred into him at birth. Four generations of Farnols had fought in India and three of them had been born here; there were instincts inherent in him that still prevailed under the varnish that the years in England had applied. He understood as well as anyone that the tribesmen of these hills, from Afghanistan as far east as Nagaland, knew as much about fighting as any graduate of Sandhurst, probably a great deal more.

He crossed the road at a run, made it to the forest of firs that continued up the slope. He moved swiftly, his experience showing in the way he made use of his cover: like Karim Singh, he was a veteran of ambushes. But on those other occasions he had half-expected them, had known the reason for them.

He came to the spot where, on the opposite side of the road, there was a cairn of stones with a pole of prayer-flags fluttering above it. Pious travellers had built the cairn over the years, each adding a stone to it as he passed; Farnol offered his own prayer of thanks to the religious who had built such a fine redoubt for him. He ran across the road again, took cover behind the big pile of stones and looked down the slope below him. Above him the prayer-flags fluttered like live birds tied by their feet to the pole.

He saw the three men, each crouched behind his own rock, all three of them armed with long-barrelled rifles; he had been wrong about their having Lee-Enfields and he wondered what sort of guns they were. He looked around for a fourth man, one who should have been left up here on the higher ground as a look-out; but he could see no one. These men below him were either amateurs, new to the ambush game, or they were drugged with hashish, had thrown caution to the mountain wind in the excitement of killing. So far, however, they were not excited or crazed enough to stand up and charge down on where Karim still lay behind his low rock.

Farnol took aim. The men were less than a hundred yards below him, easy targets. He felt no compunction about killing in cold blood; he had learned long ago that one didn’t survive if one waited to be hot-blooded about it. Killing was not like making love: one did not work up to it.

He squeezed the trigger, saw one of the men slump down as if all his bones had suddenly melted. He jerked back the bolt, ejected the cartridge, slammed the bolt home again, took aim, fired. A second man, spinning round to face up the slope, stood as if he had been pulled up by a rope, then fell backwards over the rim of a ledge. Farnol aimed the Lee-Enfield a third time, but the third man had slid down below the rock in front of him, got a shot off up the slope as Farnol switched his aim.

Farnol knew at once that he was not going to be able to draw a bead on the man in his new position. He hesitated, scanning the slope; above him the prayer-flags cracked in the rising wind. On the next ridge the goat-herd still stood looking at this duel that was no business of his; Farnol silently cursed him for his disinterest. He was like the bloody villagers who stood on the sidelines of the polo matches down on the plains, careless of who won or lost, showing approval only if one of the players toppled from his pony and broke his leg or neck. That was India: four hundred million bystanders.

He straightened up, sped down the slope, slipping and sliding, heading for a large rock that would give him all the shelter he would need. Then, while he was in full flight, going too fast to drop down, he saw the man rise up, his rifle at his shoulder. Farnol knew he was going to die. A hillman like this one would have spent his life aiming at moving targets: sambhar, gooral sheep, pheasants and men. But the enemy bullet, if it was fired at all, came nowhere near Farnol. As he hit the ground, hurling himself forward to slide down towards the big rock, he caught a lopsided glimpse of the rifleman falling forward, losing his rifle as he did so.

Farnol lay a moment, getting his breath, waiting for the man to reach for his rifle. But he lay still, one arm flung out towards the gun. Farnol got to his feet, aching from the crash of his body against the rocky ground, gravel rash scorching him like sunburn, blood running from a cut above his eye. Moving cautiously, rifle at the ready, he went down towards the hillman. He saw Karim standing up on the next ridge, but he made no sign towards the Sikh; there would be time later to thank Karim for the shot that had saved his life. He paused about ten feet from the ambusher, tensed as the man’s arm quivered, trying to grab the rifle just beyond the reach of the weakly clawing hand. Then he moved down, put his foot on the rifle. He recognized it: a Krenk, a very old one, a Russian weapon.

He looked down at the dying man, said in Hindi, ‘Why did you try to kill me?’

The man stared up at him out of fierce eyes that were already glazing with death. The rattle was in his throat as he whispered, ‘Raj – will die!’

2

Karim Singh came scrambling across from the other ridge. ‘Sahib, that was a damned close thing! If it were not for my marvellous accuracy, you would be dead!’

‘I am grateful for your marvellous accuracy.’ One could hardly tick off a man for his conceit, not when he’d just saved your life. ‘Take a look at the other two.’

Karim went across to inspect the other two hillmen, came back to report they were both dead. ‘You too, sahib, are marvellously accurate. But haven’t I always said so? Such marvellous shots, we are. Our skill leaves me speechless!’

Farnol, deaf to the speechless Karim, was examining the dead man. He pulled his turban down over the cut above his eye and for a moment the flow of blood was staunched. He still felt sore and stiff from his plunge down the slope, but his mind was alert with questions. He went through the man’s pockets, but there was nothing in them to identify him. Some dried apricots, a string of prayer-beads: the sustenance of the traveller in these hills. Farnol himself carried apricots in his pocket, but he had never felt the need of prayer-beads.

He lifted the man’s arm to lay it by his side; he was a neat man who liked to see even the dead laid out neatly. The ragged sleeve fell back and he saw the marking on the inside of the arm at the bend of the elbow. It was smudged, not a very good tattoo; it looked like a dagger standing in the middle of a jagged circle. He stood up, went down to the other bodies, looked at the right arms: the same marking was there just inside the elbow. One of the tattoos was clearer than the others and he recognized it now for what it was meant to be: a dagger driven into the centre of a crown.

He got slowly to his feet, not wanting to believe the thought crystallizing in his mind. Raj – will die! He had taken it as a threat against himself, taking it for granted that the ambushers had somehow known who he was: a political agent, a representative of the British Raj. But the man had meant someone much higher than himself, someone for whom he had no other name but Raj. The word could mean kingdom, a ruler or a great ruler.

Or The Great Ruler: George the Fifth, King of England, already down in Bombay and on his way to Delhi where he was to be crowned Emperor of India.

3

‘You must remember, Major Farnol, you cannot rule this part of the world forever.’

‘We have no intention ever of trying to rule Tibet.’ The lama had given himself no name and Farnol knew better than to ask. He knew the etiquette and protocol of these mountains as well as he did those of the messes, the stations and the government offices down on the plains; he took care to respect these customs more than he did those of his own kind. ‘Other people covet your country more than we do.’

He was not convinced that what he said was true. Eight years ago Francis Younghusband had led a British expedition up through the passes east of Lue and on to Lhasa; Curzon, the then Viceroy, had dreamed of Britain ruling the Roof of the World as well as the Indian sub-continent. The British influence had declined after Younghusband and Curzon both retired from the imperial service, but Farnol knew there were still men in India and Whitehall who dreamed of enlarging the Empire.

‘I am not concerned for my country.’ The lama was no more than skin and bone, a shrivelled gourd for the inner peace that kept him alive. Unafraid of death, he waited patiently for its arrival like a passenger at a wayside station waiting for a train that ran to no schedule. ‘I speak of India. Time is running out for the English.’

‘Perhaps. But it won’t run out in my lifetime.’ But there were doubts nibbling like mice at all he had been brought up to believe in. ‘Not even if I live to your great and honourable age.’

The lama’s withered gums did not make an attractive smile; the warm humour was in the faded eyes peering out from its veil of wrinkles. ‘I hope you live so long, Major Farnol. But I warn you – there are men in the hills south of here who are plotting to drive the English out of India.’

‘Where can I find them?’

But the lama waved a vague hand; it looked to Farnol like a floating leaf. They were seated cross-legged on the terrace that ran along below the southern wall of the monastery; there was no fence to the edge of the terrace and below them there was a cliff that fell sheer for at least two thousand feet. Across the deep valley, an arm’s length away on the thin shining air, was the lowest range of the Eternal Snows; Farnol would have to cross it on his way back into India. He had crossed the frontier marked by the cartographers, but it was not marked on the mountains and he knew he would never be asked for a visa.

‘Somewhere. Who knows?’ The mountains were gods to the people who lived amongst them and the lama would not betray the plotters the gods had chosen to hide. Such a betrayal would need a sign from the gods themselves.

Farnol bit into one of the small Lachen apples that one of the younger monks had brought him and the lama. He had also brought some small barley cakes, an urn of tea and a bowl of yak butter. Farnol had already eaten one of the cakes and taken a sip of the buttered tea; but in all his time in these mountains he had never learned to like the taste of either. The Lachen apple, tart as the small Christmas apples he had once eaten in England, cleansed his mouth.

‘Should I fear for my own life going back through the mountains?’

The lama’s bones creaked with his shrug; the eighty-one beads of his rosary click-clicked their way between the dry twigs of his fingers. ‘Are you afraid of death?’

‘Yes.’ When you are thirty-two years did, your health is good and your prostate gland is something you don’t know you possess, why should one be unafraid of death?

The lama’s smile was all gums and wrinkles. ‘You should spend more time here with us.’

At the far corner of the terrace where it turned round the monastery wall, a man was seated facing north and east. Farnol guessed the direction of his gaze, towards Kailas, the holiest of all the holy mountains. It was there amidst the Eternal Snows, lying not only in heaven and earth but in the hearts of believers. Farnol could imagine the meditation of the unmoving man at the far end of the terrace, the trancelike contemplation which could make him part of the mountains and the mountains part of him, one with the gods. He himself had always felt the mysticism of these high places, but scepticism had always denied him the transcendental feeling that the true believer could achieve.

The lama saw Farnol looking at the man. ‘A seeker after the truth – he comes from the south. He is not one of us but he seeks the same truth.’

‘Do many come here from the outside?’

‘Not many, but some. We always make them welcome. We should make you welcome if you wished to stay.’

‘I must leave for Simla tomorrow.’ He smiled. ‘But not to seek the truth, not there.’ Not amongst the little tin gods.

‘As a young man I worked as a bearer in Simla. Are you Church of England?’

‘Occasionally.’ At Christmas, Easter and on compulsory church parades back at the regiment.

‘The Church of England doesn’t understand contemplation.’ He remembered the vicar’s wife for whom he had worked, who had always tried to tell him that cleanliness was next to godliness. He now hadn’t had a bath in sixty years and he was sure he was as close to God as any shiny-skinned Christian. ‘But then neither does the Englishman, does he? I watched him in Simla. When he was not working he was playing polo or that strange game, cricket –’

‘There’s time for contemplation there. The spectators often go into trances.’

But the lama, a wise man but unlearned in the wisdom of the west, missed the joke. Or perhaps, Farnol thought, the English sense of humour doesn’t translate well into Tibetan. He spoke five languages besides English, but humour was always the note that slipped on the tongue.

‘Take care, Major Farnol. Do not spend so much time on the playing fields. I hear whispers –’ Again the leaf of his hand floated in the air. ‘The caravans coming back bring us rumours 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.