The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [299]
Fleury now was gasping for breath, but ready to congratulate himself. He sat down on the bottom step with his head between his knees trying to recover. Looking up, however, he found a giant, bearded sepoy standing a yard in front of him, his sabre already raised to despatch him...somehow he managed to parry the blow and struck at the sepoy, but the sepoy turned his sabre with ease, twisted it out of his hand and threw it away, grinning. Fleury unhopefully punched at the bearded face with his bare fists, an attack which unfortunately passed unnoticed by the sepoy who was busy preparing to deal a death blow with his own sabre. Fleury, too weak to run, watched his adversary fascinated. The sepoy seemed to swell as he drew back his sword; he grew larger and larger until it seemed that his tunic, on which Fleury could see the unfaded marks left from where he had ripped the insignia of his rank in the Company’s army, must burst; his face grew redder and redder as he raised his sabre in both hands, as if his motive were not merely to kill Fleury but to chop him in two, lengthwise, with one stroke. But the stroke was never delivered. Instead, he removed his eyes from Fleury’s terrified face and dropped them to his own stomach, for a bright tip of metal had suddenly sprung out of it, a little to the right of his belly button. Both he and Fleury stared at it in astonishment. And then the sepoy stopped swelling and began to shrivel. Soon he was normal size again. But he continued to shrivel until, suddenly, he dropped out of sight revealing Harry’s rather earnest features peering at Fleury to see if he was alright.
“I think we’ve got rid of them all for the time being,” he said, putting a foot in the small of the sepoy’s back to withdraw his sabre. “The infantry turned, thank Heaven!”
“Think how apt fins are to water, wings to air, how well the earth suits its inhabitants!” exclaimed the Padre, suddenly appearing at Fleury’s side as if conjured up by this reference to Heaven. “In everything on earth we see evidence of design. Turn from your blindness, I beg you in His name. Everything, from fish’s eye, to caterpillar’s food, to bird’s wing and gizzard, bears manifest evidence of the Supreme Design. What other explanation can you find for them in your darkness?”
Fleury stared at the Padre, too harrowed and exhausted to speak. Could it not be, he wondered vaguely, trembling on the brink of an idea that would have made him famous, that somehow or other fish designed their own eyes?
But no, that was, of course, quite impossible. So he submitted to the Padre. But although the evidence of Divine Design could not seriously be questioned, he still thought...well, it was more a matter of feeling really...But the Padre was too overjoyed that Fleury’s ears should have at last been opened to the truth to listen to his equivocations about feelings and emotions. He sank down, his knees using the chest of the bearded sepoy as a hassock, and gave thanks, for the sepoys had been repulsed at every quarter.
“We gat not this by our own sword,” he sang in explanation, “neither was it our own arm that saved us: but thy right hand, and thine arm, and the light of thy countenance, because thou hadst a favour unto us.”
13
The Collector had risen a little before dawn. While eating breakfast in the company of his two eldest daughters he made one or two brief, factual entries in his diary under the heading of the previous day, Thursday, 11 June. Breakfast was the main meal of the day and consisted of roast mutton, chapatis, rice and jam. As it stood, the ration of meat, bone included, was sixteen ounces for the men and twelve for the ladies and children,