The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [538]
‘By jove yes!’ agreed Wally in heartfelt tones. ‘Faith, will you just think of having to sweat up that divil of a nullah with the sun scorching your back and every blessed rock and stone red hot. It's lucky we are.’
His spirits rose as he spurred away to take up his station at the head of his troop, singing as he went, and wholly oblivious to the fact that the sun was blazing down just as fiercely on the open slope below the plateau as it was on the steep, rocky nullah and the toiling infantry; or that the tunic of his own uniform was already wet through with sweat. He was conscious only of an exhilarating chill compounded of excitement and tense anticipation, as the line of mounted men formed up and galloped forward to face the enemy position.
A trumpet blared, and obeying the signal the cavalry halted in a cloud of dust. As it settled there was a moment or two of complete silence in which Wally found himself sharply aware of innumerable small details. The way the sun gleamed along the barrels of the limbered guns; the small sharp-edged shadows under every stone, and the way the wide sweep of barren ground that sloped up ahead seemed to reflect the light like snow; the smell of horses and leather and harness oil, of dust, sweat and sunbaked earth; the tiny far-off figures of thousands of tribesmen, clustered thick as swarming bees along the rim of the plateau above, and very high overhead a single watchful lammergeyer gliding in lazy spirals – a lone dark speck in an enormous cloudless arch of blue.
The uniforms of the artillery on the right were a strong note of colour in the sun-bleached desolation of that harsh landscape, and beyond them, almost hidden by the tensely poised gun teams, he could see the khaki helmets of the 10th Hussars who, if the Khugianis could be lured down from those fortified heights, would attack their left flank while the Guides charged their centre.
‘Two hundred jawans –’ thought Wally ‘– and we shall be riding uphill to meet more than ten times that number of fanatical tribesmen who hate our guts and can't wait to get at us.’
The odds were so tremendous that they should have been frightening, but instead he was aware of a curious dreamlike feeling of unreality and no real fear, or any trace of animosity towards those tiny puppet-figures up there, who in a little while would be fighting with him face to face and doing their best to kill him – as he would do his best to kill them. It seemed a little foolish and he knew a fleeting moment of regret, but it was drowned almost instantly in a heady surge of elation in which he could hear the blood begin to sing softly in his ears. He felt light-headed and joyous, and no longer impatient. Time, for the moment, seemed to have stopped still – as once the sun had stopped for Joshua. There was no hurry…
A breath of wind blew down the valley and dispersed the dust, and the brief spell of silence was broken by a curt command from Major Stewart of the Horse Artillery. On the word his waiting gunners sprang to life, and plying whip and spur, swept forward at a gallop, the gun wheels bounding over the stony ground and the dust whirling up behind them.
They raced on for five hundred yards, and then, pulling up, unlimbered the guns and opened fire at extreme range on the serried masses of the enemy on the heights.
The brilliance of the afternoon sunlight dimmed the flash of the explosions to no more than a fractional glitter, but in that hot stillness the smoke formed a wall that looked as white and as solid as cotton wool, and the bare hillsides threw back the sudden crash of sound and sent it reverberating round the valley until the very air seemed to shudder to it. Wally's charger, Mushki, threw up her head and backed a little, snorting. But the tribesmen on the heights jeered as the shells fell short, and fired their muskets in reply, while some, on the right, advanced boldly under cover of a ridge, bearing the red standard with them.
Seeing them move, the gunners instantly limbered up