The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [645]
As he did so a solitary turbanless Afghan whose hair and clothes were white with plaster and brick dust, raced from the left to join him, and was recognized by two sowars with a yell of ‘Pelham-Dulkhan! Pelham-Sahib-Bahadur!’
Wally heard that greeting above the clash of battle, and glancing swiftly aside saw Ash fighting beside him – a knife in one hand and a tulwar snatched from a dead Herati in the other: and he laughed triumphantly and cried, ‘Ash! I knew you'd come. Now we'll show ‘em -!’
Ash laughed back at him, drunk with the terrible intoxication of battle and the relief of fast, violent action after the frustrations of that long nerve-wracking day of helpless watching… of seeing his comrades die one by one without being able to lift hand or arm to help them. His wild exhilaration communicated itself to Wally, who suddenly lifted out of himself was fighting like one inspired.
Afghans are not small men, but the boy seemed to tower above them, wielding his sabre like a master – or one of Charlemagne's Paladins. And as he fought he sang. It was, as usual, a hymn: the same that Ash himself had sung as he galloped Dagobaz across the plain of Bhithor on the morning of the Rana's funeral. But hearing it now he felt his heart jerk roughly, for this was not a verse that Wally had ever sung before, and listening to it he realized that the boy cherished no false hopes. This was his last fight and he knew it, and his choice of that particular verse was deliberate, a valediction. For calm and rest had never held any appeal for Wally, yet now he sang of both – loudly and joyously so that the words were clearly audible above the clamour of the fight…
‘The golden evening brightens in the West,’ sang Wally, plying that deadly sabre: ‘Soon, soon, to faithful warriors comes their rest. Sweet is the calm of Paradise the Blest; Alleluia! Al-le-lu –’
‘Look out, Wally!’ yelled Ash, and beating aside the blade of an opponent, leapt back to attack an Afghan armed with a long knife who had come up behind them unseen.
But even if Wally had heard, the warning came too late. The knife drove home to the hilt between his shoulder-blades, and as Ash's tulwar slashed through his attacker's neck, he staggered, and firing his last round, flung the useless revolver into a bearded face. The man reeled back, tripped and fell, and Wally transferred his sabre to his left hand: but his arm was weakening and he could not lift it. The point dropped and caught on a roughness in the ground, and as he pitched forward, the blade snapped.
In the same moment the butt of a jezail crashed down on Ash's head with stunning force, and for a split second lights seemed to explode inside his skull before he plunged down into blackness. And then the tulwars flashed and the dust fumed up in a blinding cloud as the mob closed in.
A few paces behind them, William had already fallen with a scimitar half buried in his skull and his right arm shattered below the elbow. And Rosie too was dead, his crumpled body lying barely a yard beyond the barrack archway, where he had been struck down by a musket-ball through the temple as he ran out at Wally's heels.
Of the rest, two, like Surgeon-Major Kelly, had died before they reached the gun, and three more had been wounded. But the survivors had obeyed their commander's orders to the letter: they had not looked aside or attempted to fight, but harnessing themselves to the gun had strained every nerve and muscle to drag it back. Yet even as they panted and struggled, others among them dropped; and now the ground was too littered with bodies, fallen weapons and spent bullets, and the dust too sticky with spilt blood, to make the task a