The Lotus and the Wind Read Free Page A

Five or six Highlanders came, gathered round, and peered down at the wounded man and up at the hill. One of them said, ‘Weel, ye kilt this yin, Johnny!’ and clapped the Gurkhas on the back.
    ‘No!’ Anne cried. ‘He’s not dead. And he wasn’t shooting at us. It was him the others were after!’
    Hayling frowned and said curtly, ‘Get a blanket. Hurry.’ One of the Highlanders shambled away down the hill.
    Hayling bent over the wounded man and spoke to him softly, insistently, in a harsh tongue. At last he stood up. ‘He can’t speak. I’m afraid he’s paralysed. I wish I knew where he came from. He’s not from around here. Nor are the others, the two dead up there. If they were, it would be easier.’
    Still frowning, he stood there, his hook against the metal of his belt buckle. Anne sat down suddenly and put her head in her hands. Through her dizziness she heard Hayling ask, ‘What was this man doing, Miss Hildreth, when you first saw him?’
    His voice was alert, a little hard. He had taken off his helmet, and she saw the grey in his thick dark hair and noticed how hunched he was in the shoulders, how middle-aged now and tired. She liked him better than she had ever done.
    She told him all that had happened. Hayling shook his head slowly, looking down always at the robed man on the rock, whose bleak eyes were fixed across the road towards the north. The man lay absolutely without motion or stir. Anne saw that he was still breathing.
    Hayling said, ‘They took his jezail? In every other way it seems like a blood feud. But why should they risk so much for his jezail? You’re sure it wasn’t a modern rifle?’
    ‘It was one of those long old-fashioned guns with brass bands around it.’
    ‘H’m. And they certainly weren’t trying to rob the convoy, Those aren’t quite ordinary Pathan clothes. He’s from farther west somewhere, from over the passes. Here he ought to be a Khattak or a Jowaki or an Afridi or a Yusufzai--but he isn’t.’
    The Highlander returned, carrying a blanket, and with the help of three other soldiers began to lift the wounded man, not gently, on to it. Hayling snapped, ‘Careful there! He’s badly wounded. And he’s not an enemy.’
    When the soldiers raised the man Anne saw the blood on the rock where his body had lain, and she knew then that he could not live, and began to cry again. His blood formed patterns, lying in a pool in the centre, in streaks at the edges. The streaks looked like letters of the Arabic manuscripts she had seen pinned up in Indian bazaars, like the lettering in the stone of old mosques.
    She said hesitantly, shaking her head to free her eyes from tears, ‘Isn’t that--writing?’
    Hayling knelt quickly and peered at the face of the rock. It had been in the shade of the cleft where the man had lain; Anne remembered his hand had been there once, aimlessly moving. On the grey rock, in darkly shining outlines, she saw the signs:
    ‘ Atlar ,’ Hayling said slowly. ‘Horses--in Turki or some Turkic language. Horses.’ He stood a moment longer, then said, ‘Come down the hill now, Miss Hildreth.’
    She did not want to ask any questions. The two Gurkhas stood solicitously over her while she was sick. Then she was back on the road, and her father was there, scolding and puffing, and her mother was there, talking, talking. . . . The lone man was there, stretched on the rough blanket on the floor of a bullock cart, his open eyes staring at the roof. Hayling was there in the bullock cart, sitting by his head.
    Her father handed her into the carriage, and she felt the gruff admiration in his voice. ‘Silly girl... brave... lie back, lie back.’ She heard voices up and down the road, Major Hayling’s among them. ‘We must reach Nowshera to-night. Push on.’ The carriage wheels creaked. She half fainted, half slept.
     

CHAPTER 2
     
    Her eyes closed, Anne knew that she was lying in a bed in one of the Nowshera dak-bungalow’s three rooms. The door