Free The Lotus and the Wind by John Masters Page B

although Rifleman Jagbir Pun, carrying a service rifle and a long jezail, walked in his steps behind him.
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    A new, light wind whirled the snow across the crest of the ridge that separated the main valley from the shallow gorge into which the MacDonalds had strayed. Thin snow dusted the rocks so that the gorge knew neither life nor colour--only the whiteness, and the blackness under the lee of the rocks and under the hunched bodies.
    The first they passed lay on his back, propped against the steep hillside, his young face turned to the sky and the snow falling into his open mouth. A single, fierce, upward knife-stroke had entered his belly and slashed up through belt and tunic and skin so that his entrails hung out over his kilt. His rifle and ammunition pouches were gone. And another nearby, his kilt up, displayed a mangled red mush at the base of his stomach to show that he had been castrated. Another, sprawled forward, lay separate by ten feet from his head and the glaring eyeballs in it. Up and down the gorge floor and on the steep sides, the Highland men lay in the isolation of death. The corporal who had brought Mclain’s message lay here. They had taken his kilt, and the richly woven fabric would be cut and shaped to cover a Ghilzai woman’s head against the next snow.
    The Highlanders who had come to bury their dead stood huddled together in the ravine. No one among them spoke, and Robin felt the current of their emotion begin to rise, striking from one man into another, spreading outward, doubling and redoubling in strength as it passed. The soldiers began to growl together like animals in a pit.
    The captain spoke, the sergeants shouted hoarsely, the men ran to get picks and shovels from the camels. In the bed of the ravine, the only place where their picks could break the iron soil, half of them began to dig furiously. The other half spread in threes on the hill, sought out the bodies, and carried them down. The lieutenant stood at the edge of the widening grave with a notebook and a pencil, and wrote down the name and rank each corpse had held. The colour-sergeant emptied the first pack to be brought to him, and thereafter searched each body and put the rings, the money, and the tobacco from it into the pack, while the lieutenant wrote.
    Up and down the gorge sentries peered into the snow. The diggers and the searchers carried their rifles slung across their backs, though all knew that there was now no need. The Ghilzais had made their ambush and killed their enemies and gone. An instant of time, an opportunity seized, had wiped out the general’s cautious combinations and sound manoeuvrings. The Ghilzais would not return.
    Robin sat down on a rock and groped back through time to the fight in the ravine. The men and their actions came easily before him--the eruption in the mist, the bayonets and swords, a few startled shouts, the overwhelming silent storm of the knifemen. He sought further, below the actions to the emotions, to the place where Mclain had been. Only there could he gain full contact with any other human being.
    It was no good. Mclain had come back to his pride and did not know him any more. No one did. No one in the world. Certainly not his father, Colonel Rodney Savage, C.B. Nor his stepmother, Caroline, for all her strange insights, because she had long ago turned her spirit to face his father’s. She hadn’t liked his mother, either; she couldn’t have, or she would not have married his father, not so soon.
    It was no good, and it was better so. He had known people and trusted them once--his mother, for instance, and his father. No clear image of that time survived with him, but sometimes he felt a glow like a distant fire and recognized it as the memory of childish love. He gathered snow in his hands and waited for the bite of it, watching the diggers and thinking--had he actually seen his mother suffer the pains of death, and greater pangs before dying? Had his father