Ian McDonald - River of Gods

The bad men ride into town in the rain straddling their hot hot Japanese trail bikes. Chunar is everything Dataraja Anand promised; parochial, muddy, inbred, and closed for the night. The only action is the decrypt call centre, a translucent cylinder of inflatable polythene on the cheapest edge of cheap-town. The bad boys slide to a dirt-crunching halt beneath the Chunar Fort. Like most old things it is bigger and more imposing close up. For imposing read: pretty fucking unassailable on its river crag. Like something out of one of those Pak revenge movies where the guy gets even for the murder of his wife-to-be by taking the fat bad guy and his baradari in their clan keep. Shiv peers up through the slanting rain at the European-style white house set at the edge of the parapet. Floodlit by the whim of Ramanandacharya, it is a beacon for kilometres up and down this dreary looping stretch of the Ganga. Warren Hastings Pavilion, according to Anand’s Rough Guide. Warren Hastings. Sounds like a name they’d make up for you in a call centre.

From this junction four ways lead. Behind to where they’re from. Right to the pontoon bridge. Left into what there is of Chunar; a few muddy galis, one Coke sign, and a radio somewhere tuned to a filmi station. Ahead, the cobbled road curves behind the guard towers and up through the arched gate into Chunar Fort.

Now that he is here, beneath those crumbling sandstone towers—now that he has seen all his plans work through one by one to their only possible conclusion—Shiv realises he absolutely has to do this thing. And he is afraid of those guard towers and the path curving up where he cannot see. But he is more afraid to let Yogendra see that when it comes to it, he is not a raja. Shiv fumbles a little plastic bag out of his light-scatter combats, shakes out two pills.

“Hey.”

Yogendra wrinkles his nose. “Take the edge off it.”

The pills are a hero’s send-off from Priya, when he finally ran her down to club MUSST. Bodies turning in the stream. Tassled garial boots falling into the big blue. At the foot of the fort in the rain, Shiv swallows both pills.

“Okay,” he says twisting the throttle, revving the sweet little Japanese engine. “Let’s do it.”

“No,” says Yogendra. Shiv double-takes him and it is not the drugs.

“Say?”

“Go this way, we die.” Shiv switches off the engine. “We have a plan. Anand.”

“Anand knows fuck. Anand is a fat kif-head thinks movies are life. We go that way, we get shot to pieces.”

Shiv has never heard so many words in a line from Yogendra. The kid has more: “Bikes, tasers, in fast, out: James Bond shit. Fucking Anand and girls in catsuits. We do not go this way.”

Priya’s little helpers are making Shiv feel ballsy and immortal and don’t-give-a-fuck. He shakes his head at his apprentice and balls a fist to smack him off his bike. Yogendra’s blade flashes in the floodlight.

“You hit me again, I cut you, man.”

Shiv is numb in astonishment. He thinks it’s astonishment.

“I tell you what you do. We find another way in, back way in, we sneak right? Like burglars. That way, we live.”

“Anand.”

“Fuck Anand!” Shiv has never heard Yogendra’s voice raised before. “Fuck Anand, this time we do it Yogendra’s way.”

Yogendra spins his bike, throttles, and takes off left up through the dark, muddy back streets of Chunar. Shiv follows past yapping pi-dogs and the skeletal spines of papaya trees. Yogendra stands up on the footpegs as he bumps the bike up flights of shallow steps, scanning the dark walls rising above the shops and lean-tos for weakness. They follow the twine of streets up on to the flank of the bluff. Yogendra’s instinct is true. Like a Cantonment society bibi, Chunar Port maintains an imposing elevated front but it’s all gone to shit round the back. The dirt road skirts the foot of the crumbling masonry revetments; rusting tin signs and sagging wire mesh mark this section of the fort as an old Indian army base, abandoned since nationhood. Finally the walls give way altogether into a gaping entrance, once the main access to the military camp, now roughly seated with corrugated iron and barbed wire. Yogendra kicks his bike to a stop and examines the metal. He rattles a sheet, tugs a corner. Steel screeches and gives way. Shiv helps, they heave, together they bend and tear a raja-sized gap. Inside Yogendra flips open his palmer to check GPS readings against Anand’s map. The Warren Hastings Pavilion glows like a Christian wedding cake in the distance. The badmashes crouch by the foot of the wall while Shiv breaks out nightwatch goggles. The dark dark night turns into an antique black-and-white movie like one of those worthy Satyajit Ray things about poor people and trains. The Pavilion is as bright as the sun. Yogendra locates the nearest security camera. It’s on a stanchion on the wall against the base of the well tower in the south, a good two-hundred-metre dash through the rain-dripping black-and-white world. The roofless shells of the former Indian Army barracks give fine cover. Lightning still breaks to the west, over the sangam of Allahabad where three sacred rivers, Yamuna, Ganga, and invisible Saraswati come together and armies confront each on the dark plains. Each flash blinds the nightwatch visor’s circuits but Shiv just freezes in position. While the camera is looking the other way Shiv and Yogendra sneak up into its blind spot. Shiv pulls the emp grenade and arms it. He flexes his fingers one at a time on the firing pin: no time now for cramp. Shiv drops the grenade. He squeezes his eyes shut as the pulse overloads his night-watch but even so painful tears start. Purple paisley patterns swirl inside his lids. Yogendra shins up the stanchion like a monkey and patches the special palmer into the com feed.

“Promised you, didn’t I?” Anand had said tossing the palmer in his hand. “Switch her on, stick this spike into the main com line. My little djinn inside, she’s sweet. Once she’s in, the cam can be looking right at you and all the aeai’ll see is background. Cloak of invisibility.”

“You get it?” Shiv whispers. Yogendra taps him twice on the back. Shiv and Yogendra work around the base of the tower to the southern, tourist gate but Shiv still holds his breath as they step out in front of the spy-eye, expecting the wail of an alarm; the drone of the hovercam coming up over the battlements with neurotoxin darts armed; the sudden rattle of automatic fire; the rasp of the killing machine drawing its blade.

The ground drops underneath the tower to the southern path. Below it is a small overgrown graveyard; Christian from the shape of the grave markers. The resting place of the Angreez soldiers who once held this fort. Fool them, Shiv thinks. Worthless place to die. Beneath the little wooded cemetery are a couple of hardscrabble houses, dhobi ghats, and the river curving out of sight. The climb down to the tourist gate is treacherous, the sandstone slippery in the rain. Most fool of all; Bill Gates for dreaming his money can beat death.

The plan calls for Shiv and Yogendra to double back along the wall over the main gate to the northern parapet overlooking the bridge, from where it is an easy drop down to the Hastings Pavilion, but as the two raiders crouch beneath the battlement listening through the distant thunder for sounds of security, Yogendra taps Shiv on the arm, makes a screwing gesture by the side of his visor. Shiv rarchets up the magnification, breathes a small curse in the name of his small gods. In monochrome vision he can clearly see two security bots flank the main entrance, gatling turrets slung between their two legs. Behind the killing machines is a dazzlingly lit security post. Shiv can make out the military grade assault rifles slung on the wall behind the dozing sentry, boots on the desk, television screen a plane of white. It is defiantly not a girli in a red catsuit.