Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

‘Will you go?’

Thomas turned and leapt, without a word, covering the distance to Uday in a stride, mace rising across body and splintering Uday’s sword on his parry, sending him stumbling back, sprawling, Thomas was over him, a shoulder hit Skinner at the plexus, collapsed him like a sack, on, The Red One swung up, cut, men hesitated, retreated, jostling and pushing to get out of the way, a gap opened, Iqbal Singh and the others followed, swinging, through the hole in the wall, into a smoke-filled corridor, men falling rapidly as they ran, backs pierced and bloodied by swords, pikes, spears (a long-ago rissaldar’s voice: ‘Remember, children, it is when you break and run, when you can’t see them, when you can’t parry or thrust, that they’ll massacre you, cut you down…’). Afterwards he could never remember that corridor, he only remembered stumbling into a stinking alley, and the sting of two long cuts on his torso, under his right arm, and a bloody gouge in his thigh. They ran in a single file down the lane, and he went first amongst them, guiding them away from the wider streets, and keeping to the close and narrow, but he did not know where he was going.

Then they heard horses screaming, a resonant blowing sound that hung among the houses. They found the stable easily enough, behind a white palace, but inside there was the steady cracking noise of burning, and smoke, and the horses flung themselves against wood, brick, stone. Thomas threw back a stall door, and around him men grabbed desperately at manes, and then he was up, smooth muscle underneath, sliding, falling, but no, out of the door; in front of Thomas and Iqbal, a man lost his grip, rolled on the horse’s back, clutching, disappeared underneath, and hooves bore down and impacted with the sound of tearing cloth, and now they were racing downhill through back alleys and little-known lanes, and men threw themselves aside, no time for even a cut. Thomas leaned over the horse’s neck, arm around it, Princess-of-the-Heart slung around his wrist by a leather thong, froth covered the horse’s neck, flicked back into Thomas’ face, he tasted, cherished the animal; now the houses petered out and the dusty slope ended in a bluff that dropped down a hundred feet into the moat, turn turn turn, and they rode along parallel to the precipice but lancers spurred out of the town, cutting them off, and Thomas shouted, where, pulled the horse’s mane, turn, tugging to the right, turn. He could see the shiny points of the lances, turn, ten-foot lances, come around, boy, and the pursuers opened out into line, they were many, they rode outwards, flanking, a half-moon, a scythe, no escape, none, but: the drop.

Thomas could feel his heart racing: Oh, come my lovely, come my heart, old friend, we are for the cliff, the precipice, come my beautiful, turn again, quick quick quickly, and now nothing impedes us, the summer has expended its dry poisonous malice, the monsoon rumbles again in the clouds, now the sky waits for us. Thomas dropped his weapons, leaned over further and reached out and gently, as gently as he could, clapped his palms over the horse’s eyes, no fear, and the edge raced up, swallowed them, unhesitating, and both man and animal screamed, full-throated. They fell, all the smooth-muscled equine grace gone from the animal: it huddled like a child, limbs crossing each other. The air pulled at them; Thomas opened his arms, extended his limbs, the wind stroked the hair away from his face and streamed it behind him, he stretched his fingers, and below, the sinuous green form of the moat rotated, readying to receive him, and, turning, Thomas fell close to the horse, and its huge brown eye watched him impassively, impartially, and he felt something break in his chest, felt the bubbling heat of new birth, it took him so that he curled and stretched, felt no pain, no fear, and still the calm golden eye, and he cried out I love you O I love you, and the water took them.

Coughing, Thomas pulled himself onto the crumbling slope on the outer side of the moat, while behind him, a groaning wreckage of men and horses shrieked and bubbled and settled quickly into the water. He tugged on weeds, scrabbling up the bank, which collapsed and gave way under him; behind him, stones and missiles hurled from the parapet above crashed down and exploded skulls, crushed bones already snapped by the fall. He turned his head for an instant, but his mount was lost in the spuming, offal-like mess settling quickly into the green water, so then he slithered out onto level ground, crawled frantically on his hands and knees for a yard or two, then tottered to his feet and meandered dizzily, arms held out at right angles from his body, towards the relative safety of a line of trees.

Once in the concealing shade of the copse, he paused, trembling, leant against a peepul tree, then clumsily folded into a half-reclining position. A moment later, Iqbal Singh flung himself to the ground beside him, inhaling with deep breaths and exhaling with little cries, ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah,’ and as they lay there, a dozen men, then two dozen, wet, leaving trails of sludge, groped their way into the darkness and sat shuddering. Above, the figures on the parapet seemed to lose interest and wheeled off; Thomas reached out for his tree and stood with quaking knees. He looked up at the wall, at the blank height of rock and masonry, which, because of the angle of his vision, cut off any sight of the town or buildings above; his mouth opened and a muscle jumped and fluttered in his jaw, and then he howled, wailed, spraying little pink balls of spittle that ruptured against leaves and mud, leaving quick stains and marks.

‘Now, enough,’ Iqbal Singh said. ‘You did enough.’

But Thomas bawled again, this time moving his head back and forth and making a red shower that Iqbal ducked away from; Thomas’ eyes were half-closed, and his teeth seemed to be rooted in masses of blackish blood.

‘Now,’ Iqbal said again. ‘Now enough. These came with you, these men, over that thing, some blindly, some without wanting to, but all followed. They came unknowingly, following you, but now they are yours forever. Now they’ll follow you anywhere, Jahaj Jung.’

Thomas swallowed, hiccupped, turned away, then back; he raised a hand to his face, and it came away gritty and black, with green snot curling over the wrist; he looked down at himself. Much of the plate armour was gone, and the chain mail was torn and slashed, and hung in tatters where he had taken thrusts he could not remember. He nodded, then again, and turned and began to walk through the trees, followed by the others; after a few minutes, he said, in a very conversational tone, without turning back, causing Iqbal to start: ‘I wonder what happened to the eunuch?’

‘He survived,’ Iqbal said after a moment. ‘He must have. His kind always do.’

‘And so,’ said Sandeep, ‘Thomas attempted, briefly, to escape from his destiny, from the inertial velocity of his name, Jahaj Jung, which led him inevitably towards a certain jungle, a city, a wilderness peopled by a man and two lions, even as it beguiled him away from the virgin forests of the Vehi. Friends, friends, we struggle, we scream, we dreamt, but forms make us, metaphors break us, names are mantras (hide them) and the goddess Vac, queen of speech, is the hidden mistress of the world; but come, to work again.

Months pass, and in a town named Barrackpore in Bengal, two men — or let us be blunt — two Avadhi Brahmins, who just happen to be neighbours of the fellow Skinner we have just met, two Brahmins addicted to oration and given to sermonizing, are discussing the fate of poetry and the character of Alexander of Macedon — sometimes called the Great, and sometimes, by Indians, Sikander the Madman. They are gossipping about the intrigues at the court of their RajaSahib, a minor princeling controlled by the British; about their friend, the Daroga; their neighbour, John Hercules Skinner, who is the British resident at this court; and they are contemplating the role of this Alexander, Sikander, in history. Listen…