Unknown - The Devils Children

She led them down the ladder. Ajeet came last.

By the flint pile she marshaled them into a crocodile, with the smallest children in the middle clutching their useless but heartening pebbles. But the big boys and girls, back and front, were armed with flints that really would make an enemy hesitate. She looked for the last time toward the house. A flurry of shouts and a scream rose from the far side. A wisp of smoke came from the stable, and Dimpal was leading a huge horse over the grass toward her.

“The other one vamoosed,” he said, smiling. “But this one is too dashed friendly. Can you take him with you?”

Nicky dithered, frightened by the animal’s size. “I’m used to horses, miss,” said the red-headed girl. “I’ll mind him.”

She took the halter and Dimpal started back toward the battlefield, in a careful copy of Uncle Chacha’s energy-preserving trot.

“Now,” said Nicky, “I don’t want to go past the house and along the road because that might make things difficult for my friends. Who knows the best way across the fields?”

Several voices answered and all the hands pointed the same way. She chose a dark, sensible-looking boy as her guide and set off. They crossed the big lawn, skirted a little wood, used a tarred footbridge to cross a dry ditch among bamboos, and came to a gate at the end of the garden. They wound slowly up the wheatfield beyond, tramping their path through stalks which had already dropped their seed and were now so brittle that the first gale of winter would push them over to lie and rot. A sudden rustling, as of a large animal disturbed, shook the stems to their left.

“Ready!” shouted Nicky. Thirty fists came up with rocks poised — though the pudgy arms at the center scarcely rose above the wheat stalks. Out of the wheat a naked man bounded like a startled deer. He gazed wild-eyed at the children for a moment; then, amid whoops and jeers, he was scampering up the hill. Nicky called her army into line of march again. That must have been the man she first saw escaping across the lawn in the gray, chill air before sunrise. She looked to her left and was astounded to see that the sun had still not crossed the low hilltop, though the air was gold with its coming. Less than an hour ago, then, the attack had begun.

Her guide led them slantwise up to a second gate, beyond which was a pasture full of cows who stared at them in stolid boredom as they trooped across. The cries from the house were faint and few now, but a strange mutter seemed to be growing in the village. The next gate led into a lane, all arched over with hazels, which her guide wanted to turn along;

but Nicky thought they were still dangerously close to the big house and insisted on pushing through the fields behind the straggle of cottages that ran down the main road to the Borough.

More pasture here, and they had to skirt around a marshy piece where the stream that flowed through the White House gardens rose. The mutter from the village was like the roar of surf, and above it floated indistinguishable human shouts. Looking to her right as they slanted down towards the uproar, Nicky saw a slow column of smoke billowing up into the blissful morning. She realized what had happened.

“Run!” she cried. “Run, but keep together!”

If they didn’t reach the road in time, a hundred maddened villagers would be roaring down to the big house to slaughter every living thing there, Sikh or robber. It was no use reaching the road alone — she had to come with all the children, safe. The villagers had seen the smoke from the stables and decided that the robbers had fired the barn where their hostages lay. And it would be the Sikhs’ fault.

The line moved down hill, slowed to the pace of exhausted and ill-fed six-year-olds stumbling through the tussocks.

“You three,” gasped Nicky to the older ones nearest her, “run to the road. Try to stop the village from attacking my friends. Tell them all the children are safe.”

The messengers went down the slope in a happy freewheeling gallop, as if it had been a game for a summer evening. Nicky grabbed the wrists of the two smallest children and half helped, half hauled them over the hummocky turf. Other children dropped their flints and copied her. And here was a path, a narrow channel between the wall of a chapel and the fence of a pub garden, and now they were in the road, gasping, while the three messengers shrank from the roaring tide of the enraged village as it poured down the road toward them, led by little old Maxie waving a carpenter’s hammer. The men were yelling, but the women were silent, and they were more terrible still: marching in their snowy aprons, faces drawn into gray lines with rage and weeping, fingers clenched round the handles of carving knives and cleavers.

Terrified by the sight, Nicky’s army melted to the walls of the road. She stood helpless in the middle, still gripping the fat wrists of the two small children.

The tide of vengeance tried to halt, but the villagers at the back, who could not see what had happened, jostled into the ones who could. The news spread like flame through dry hay. The roaring anger changed and became a great hoarse splendor of cheering and relief. Mother after mother dropped her weapon and ran forward, arms outstretched. They came in a white whirl, like doves homing to the dovecote, and knelt in the road to hug their children.

Nicky ran to Maxie.

“Can you get the men to come and help my friends?” she cried. “They’ve killed half the robbers, but they’re still fighting.”

Maxie looked round at the bellowing crowd and nodded.

“Lift me up, Dave,” he crowed to the stout man beside him.

Dave and another man swung him up to their shoulders as if he’d been a child held high to watch a king come past. He raised his arms like Moses on the mount and waited for the cheering to die.

“Men o’ Felpham,” he crowed. “You know as the Devil’s Children have rescued our childer out of the hands of the robbers. Now they’re fighting them to the death down at White House. Do we go help them?”

A mutter of doubt ran through the crowd.

“We’ve taken the horses,” cried Nicky. “Look, I’ve brought one. And we’ve burned the place where the armor was, and we’ve killed half the robbers. We’ve killed the worst of the horsemen.”

The mutter changed its note, and rose.

“Do we go help them?” crowed Maxie again. “Or do we let it be said that the men o’ Felpham stood and watched while a handful of strangers did their fighting for them?”

The mutter returned to the note that Nicky had first heard, the noise of surf in a gale.

“Okay, Dave,” said Maxie, “you can put me down.”

The women pulled their children aside to let the bellowing army pass. Nicky picked up a fallen cleaver and walked beside Maxie.

“Five of my grandchilder there,” he said. “You go home now, girl. This is no business for a child.”

“I'm coming to make sure you don’t hurt my friends,” she said.

“Shan’t do that. Not now.”

“Well, I’m coming anyway.”

Maxie looked over his shoulder.

“Hey!” he crowed. “You get off that horse, Dave Gracey, and let the girl ride. She’ll be safer up there.”

The stout man slid down, grinning, and whisked Nicky up to the broad and cushiony back. She had ridden ponies on holidays, sometimes, but never a creature as tall as this, never bareback and without reins, though Dave Gracey still held the halter. She seemed a mile in the air, and clutched the coarse mane with her left hand.

But after minute she found that she wasn't afraid of the height, because the back was so broad and the horse’s movement, at this pace, so steady, that she might have been riding on a palanquin. She let go of the mane, rested the cruel cleaver across her lap, straightened her back and neck and rode like a queen.