Red Runs the Helmand. Patrick Mercer

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СКАЧАТЬ Billy knew that Sam resented him and the preferential treatment he received, and on the few occasions that they were together as boys, and then as young men, he wasn’t slow to show it. Everything became a contest – no fish could be pulled from a stream or bird shot from a rainy sky without its becoming a test of manhood. At first Billy was always bettered by his bigger brother, who would challenge him to runs over the heather or bogs or turn a fishing trip into a swimming challenge across an icy lough, which he always lost. But as Billy grew, he began to win, so Sam ensured that the contests became more intense.

      It was just before Sam had gone off to the Bombay Army, Billy remembered, that things had come to a head. He was home from school and Sam was full of piss and vinegar about his new adventure, full of brag about the Indians he would soon command and the glamour of that country. Then Billy had made some disparaging comment about native troops and the great Mutiny and Sam had retorted with something snide about Maude, Billy’s dead Protestant mother. Billy knew he was being daft, for he’d never known his mother – she had died in childbirth, allowing his father to marry again – and he loved his step-mother, Mary, but the sneer was too much and he had flown at his brother just outside the tack-room.

      There hadn’t been much to it, really. Both boys were scraped and bruised by Billy’s first onslaught – he could feel the granite of the stableyard setts even now – before Finn the groom was pulling them apart and promising ‘a damn good leatherin’ to the pair o’ ye if you don’t stop it, so’. But, Finn’s intercession lay at the root of the trouble even now. Billy knew that if they’d been allowed to fight on, for them both to get the bile out of their systems, there might have been some settlement. Instead Finn had made them shake hands and Sam was away too early the next day for there to be any further rapprochement.

      They’d not seen each other since that drizzly afternoon in Cork four years ago, but now Billy found himself at the end of the sun-baked earth, yet within spitting distance of the brother he’d hoped never to see again. The brother, Billy thought, who’d chosen to keep his own father’s name – well, God rot Sam Keenan, and the unlucky sods he commands.

      Morgan was pulled back from his thoughts by a trickle of tribesmen on their way to market. At first the soldiers passed one or two heavily laden donkeys swaying up the gritty main road towards the town, their loads of newly woven baskets towering above them. Their owners ignored Morgan’s and his men’s attempts at cheerful greetings, and as the traffic became denser the troops gave up any attempt to humour the population.

      ‘Close up at the rear, please, Sar’nt Kelly.’ Morgan had to yell down the street to be heard at the back of the patrol: the closer they got to the Bardurani Gate, the thicker the press of people and animals became.

      ‘Right, sir. Come on, you lot, shift yourselves,’ answered Kelly, provoking the last pair of soldiers to break into a shuffling run, their eyes wide at the medley of sights, colours and smells before them. Like his men, Morgan was fascinated by what he saw – camels carrying earthenware pots, herds of bleating goats and sheep, driven by boys with long, whippy sticks, mules and asses with rolled carpets and every manner of cheap, Birmingham-made pots and pans, even a dog pulling a crude cart that squeaked under a load of apricots. And the stink filled his nostrils. Animal piss and human sweat, aromatic smells from little charcoal braziers where urchin cooks touted fried meat and cheese, stale puddles and the universal scent of smoke and shit. The women, Morgan noticed, swivelled great kohl-dark eyes away from his gaze behind the slits of the black burkhas that hid them from head to toe. But that was more than he got from any of the men. Tall hillmen, Mohmands, Afridis and Wazirs, each one heavily armed, strode past on sandalled feet while stockmen with broad, flat, Mongol faces and men from the plains – Durrani Ghilzais, Yusufzais – looked straight through him. It was as if he and his troops didn’t exist, as if some unspoken agreement between all the men dictated that the Feringhee should be made to feel as invisible as possible.

      The noise was vast. Tradesmen proclaiming their wares, the rattle of sheep and goats’ bells, the hammering of smiths and, above all else, the Babel of a dozen different tongues and dialects, all competing to be heard above the others. So vast, indeed, that Morgan didn’t hear his leading left-hand man’s initial shout of alarm; he didn’t hear the soldier’s cry, ‘You little sod!’ The first he knew of the attack was when Thompson yelled in pain, which jerked him from his reverie in time to see a blur of white robes and khaki drill, a thrashing bundle of boots and sandals in the nearby gutter, one of his soldiers falling, rifle clattering, helmet rolling, sprawling on what seemed to be a boy as steel flashed and jabbed.

      Private Battle reacted faster than his officer. While Morgan groped to draw his sword and understand the sudden bedlam, the older soldier rushed to help his mate, saw the boy pinioned below a shrieking wounded Thompson and a six-inch blade poking time and again into his comrade’s side. As Morgan ran he watched Battle’s bayonet rise and fall, spitting the brown, writhing form of a boy who, he guessed, could be no more than twelve years old. Now it was the child’s turn to cry out as the lethally sharp metal punctured his right arm, then cracked through his shoulder blade before transfixing him to the ground.

      ‘You murdering little fucker!’ Battle was standing astride both Thompson and the boy, trying to shake the assassin loose from his jammed bayonet. ‘Get off, won’t you?’

      As Morgan sprinted up to the tangled trio, he looked down into the lad’s face. It was twisted in a combination of hate and pain, teeth bared, not yet old enough to be yellowed by tobacco, his dirty white robes and turban stained with his own and Thompson’s blood. The more Battle tugged at his weapon, the more the child rose and sagged, firmly skewered on the steel; all three shouted in a rising cacophony.

      Without a second’s hesitation, Billy Morgan drove his sword firmly into the boy’s chest, remembering at the last moment to twist his blade so that it might not stick in the child’s ribs. The point passed straight through his target’s heart and Morgan saw both dirty little fists grab at the steel before falling away, just as the lad’s eyes opened wide in a spasm of shock and his whiskerless jaw sagged open.

      Now Battle finished a job that was already done. At last his blade came clear and, with a stream of filthy language, the burly soldier kicked and kicked at the youth’s face with iron-shod boots, then stamped down hard until bone crunched and blood oozed from blue-bruised lips and a splintered nose.

      ‘All right, Battle, that’s enough – that’s enough, d’you hear me?’ Sergeant Kelly was suddenly on the scene. ‘Help Thompson. The kid’s dead enough.’ There was something calming, soothing, in Kelly’s tone for, despite the gore and horror all around him, he had hardly raised his voice. ‘You all right, sir?’

      Morgan was suddenly aware that Kelly had taken him by the elbow, that his sword was free of the corpse and that, somehow, a spray of someone’s blood was daubed across his trousers. ‘Yes, Sar’nt Kelly, I’m fine.’ Morgan looked at the attacker’s sightless eyes and realised he had killed this boy, but he felt none of the nausea that was supposed to accompany such things and no more regret at having taken such a young life than he would after shooting a snipe. ‘How badly hurt is Thompson?’

      ‘I’ve seen worse, sir.’ Kelly was stooping over the casualty, who clutched his left side where several rents in his khaki oozed red, blotching the cloth, his face screwed up in pain. ‘He’s got some puncture wounds, but none are deep. Come on, son, on yer feet,’ Sergeant Kelly helped Thompson – who let out a great hiss of pain – to stand up. ‘Get his rifle an’ headdress, Hyde.’

      But as the wounded man leant against his sergeant for support, Morgan was suddenly aware that the bellowing throng had gone quiet. Where the people had pressed and crowded about their business, Morgan could now see nothing but a circle of hard, silent faces, only the children showing open-mouthed curiosity, everyone else staring with badly concealed hatred. As he looked at the people, though, the crowd parted and СКАЧАТЬ