Time's Eye Read Free Page B

Ruddy’s country, Josh reminded himself; Josh was here to report, not to judge. And anyhow, he admitted guiltily, it was good to wake up to warm water and a mug or two of hot tea.
    He dried himself off and dressed quickly. He took one last glance in the mirror, and finger-combed his mop of unruly black hair. As an afterthought he slipped his revolver into his belt. Then he made for the door.
    It was the afternoon of March 24, 1885. Or so Josh still believed.
    Inside the fort there was a great deal of excitement. Across the deeply shadowed square, soldiers rushed to the gate. Josh joined the cheerful crowd.
    Many of the British stationed here at Jamrud were of the 72nd Highlanders, and though some were dressed informally in loose, knee-length native trousers, others wore their khaki jackets and red trews. But white faces were rare; Gurkhas and Sikhs outnumbered British by three to one. Anyhow, this afternoon Europeans and
sepoys
alike pushed and bustled to get out of the fort. These men, stationed in this desolate place far from their families for months on end, would give anything for a “do,” a bit of novelty to break up the monotony. But on the way to the gate Josh noticed Captain Grove, the fort’s commander, making his way across the square, with a very worried expression on his face.
    As he emerged into the low afternoon sunlight outside the fort Josh was briefly dazzled. The air had a dry chill, and he found himself shivering. The sky was eggshell blue and empty of cloud, but close to the western horizon, he saw, there was a band of darkness, like a storm front. Such turbulent weather was unusual for this time of year.
    This was the North–West Frontier, the place where India met Asia. For the imperial British, this great corridor, running from northeast to southwest between the mountain ranges to the north and the Indus to the south, was the natural boundary of their Indian dominion—but it was a raw and bleeding edge, and on its stability depended the security of the most precious province of the British Empire. And the fort of Jamrud was stuck smack in the middle of it.
    The fort itself was a sprawling place, with a curtain of heavy stone walls and broad corner watchtowers. Outside the walls, conical tents had been set up in rows, military neat. Jamrud had originally been built by the Sikhs, who had long governed here and mounted their own wars against the Afghans; by now it was thoroughly British.
    Today it wasn’t the destiny of empires that was on anybody’s mind. The soldiers streamed out over the heavily trampled patch of earth that served as the fort’s parade ground, heading for a spot perhaps a hundred yards from the gate. There, Josh could see what looked like a pawnbroker’s ball hovering in the air. It was silvered, and glinted brightly in the sunlight. A crowd of perhaps fifty troopers, orderlies and noncombatants had gathered under that mysterious sphere, a mob in various states of informal dress.
    In the middle of it all, of course, was Ruddy. Even now he was taking command of the situation, stalking back and forth beneath the hovering ball, peering up at it through his gig-lamp spectacles and scratching his chin as if he were as sage as Newton. Ruddy was short, no more than five feet six, and somewhat squat, perhaps a little pudgy. He had a broad face, a defiant mustache and over bristling eyebrows a wide slab of a forehead already exposed by a receding tide of hair.
Bristling—
yes, thought Josh with a kind of exasperated fondness, bristling was the word for Ruddy. With his stiff, if vigorous, bearing, he looked thirty-nine, not nineteen. He had an unsightly red blemish on his cheek, his “Lahore sore,” that he thought had come from an ant bite, which would respond to no treatment.
    The soldiers sometimes mocked Ruddy for his self-importance and pomposity—no fighting man had much time for noncombatants anyhow. But at the same time they were fond of him; in his dispatches to the
CMG
,