Free Nightrunners of Bengal by John Masters Page B

showed only in a blacker blackness against the horizon. He saw the quarter-guard lights in his camp by the river, a mile upstream.
    He had never talked with her here at night, and did not know why he expected her. Leaning on the parapet, he turned his head. She was a pale oval face, a vague spread of gold and silver. The sari lay back in a sweep on her shoulders, the stars gleamed on the central parting down her black hair, and her eyes were on him—they had never been so huge and moving-black. Her lips were painted dark. She had a round red caste mark between her eyebrows; a ruby ring on a finger of her right hand made a spark of fire. He knew that she was not surprised to see him.
    She leaned against the parapet beside him, and after a minute asked softly, “What are you looking at?”
    “That light. It’s in my camp.” He pointed with his chin. She put her hand on his sleeve in a natural gesture.
    “Why will you not let me come and see it? It is my land. I wish to know what a sepoy’s camp is like. Show it to me tomorrow—please.”
    He smiled and drew smoke into his lungs. “No, ma’am. I will not.”
    He felt her stiffen, then at once relax. She left the hand resting on his arm and sighed. “I am sorry. I forget sometimes that I am not the queen of your English Company. But I wish to know. I have never been in any camp; they would not let me. When I go out to Kishan Falls on Monday, it will be the first time. Tell me about it.”
    The single light by the river filled the darkness, and he was there, standing beside it. The tents were ranged in a single row, facing the water; the sentries strode their posts; monkeys chattered suddenly by the Monkeys’ Well behind; a leopard’s sawing cough boomed across the river in front; the soldiers slept. She didn’t want to know about all that. He answered her, pausing between his sentences. She spoke English well, if a little formally, and understood it without effort, but he had to speak slowly.
    “You won’t see the best part—choosing the place and pitching camp. With us the sepoys put up the tents on a bugle call, all together, and the men of each tent try to get it done first. Next, they dig drainage cuts round, and they’re always very cheerful then—I don’t know why. I have one tent to sleep in, and one as an office, and that’s where I rest and read too. I eat outside unless it rains. The sepoys make a fireplace of mud for me in one wall of the tent. The orderly and the bearer spread my mats on the grass inside. The day we pitched camp down there, Rambir was imitating a Pathan carpet pedlar—you may not have seen one, but plenty of them come down from the north every cold weather. Rambir waved the mats about and made plocking noises, like bootsbeing pulled out of wet mud. That’s the way they imitate the Pathans’ language, and it always amuses them; all the sepoys in earshot were chuckling as they worked. But Rambir’s a great buffoon, and that wasn’t enough for him. In the middle of all this gibberish he made one phrase come out clearly enough: ‘Beautiful carpets—eight annas to you, eight rupees to a sahib!’ Then everyone looked at me out of the corner of his eye to see if I had taken the point.
    He laughed, warm with the memory.
    “Then we clear the camp of stones, and settle down and make ourselves comfortable. Some officers have glass doors to their tents, you know. I like to clean my guns when there is nothing else to do. In the evening the Native Officers come to my tent and I sit there with my shirt unbuttoned and my legs stretched out, and we talk about the next day’s work and so on. Sometimes I have to wear my greatcoat because it’s chilly.”
    “What time do you start work?”
    “Not very early yet. No one’s heard the coppersmith bird or the brainfever bird, and we don’t count the hot weather as really begun until we do. Reveille’s still at six, first parade, seven—but I’ll put them forward an hour soon. By eleven