“Watch yourself now,” he says.
Hamid stands back and raises both his arms above his head, palms facing forwards—it is a gesture of silent refusal but also, Sumner realizes, of surrender. But surrender to whom?
There is the crack of a musket from the balcony above them, and the back of Price’s head explodes in a brief carnation of blood and bone. Wilkie, swiveling on his heels, points his rifle and shoots wildly upwards but hits nothing, and is then shot twice himself—first through the neck and then high up on the chest. They are being ambushed; the place is alive with sepoys. O’Dowd grabs Sumner by the arm and drags him backwards into the safety and darkness of the house. Wilkie is writhing on the flagstones outside; blood is squirting in crimson pulses from his punctured neck. Sumner pushes open the street door with the toe of his boot and an answering bullet thumps into the door frame from outside. One of the ambushers vaults over the rickety balcony and dashes towards them screaming. O’Dowd shoots at him but misses. The sepoy’s saber meets O’Dowd’s abdomen and emerges, reddened and dripping, halfway up his back. O’Dowd coughs blood, gasps, looks amazed at what has been done to him. As he pushes the sword in still harder, the sepoy’s expression is urgent and passionate. His pitch-black eyes bulge wildly; his brown skin is slick with sweat. Sumner is standing two feet away from him, no more; he lifts his rifle to his shoulder and fires. The man’s face disappears instantly and is replaced by a shallow, bowl-like concavity filled with meat and gristle, and crazed and shattered fragments of teeth and tongue. Sumner drops his rifle and kicks open the front door. As he steps into the street, a bullet bites him in the calf and another smashes into the wall inches from his head. He staggers, grunts, topples backwards for a second, but then rights himself and commences a lopsided dash for safety. Another bullet whines above his head. He can feel a warm squelch as his left boot fills with blood. From behind him, there is screaming. The street is littered with shattered masonry, potsherds, sackcloth, bones, and dust. Shops and kiosks lie empty-shelved on either hand, their sagging shamianas holed and rotting. He abandons the road and plunges sideways into the crackpot labyrinth of lanes and alleyways.
The high stucco walls are fractured and grease-streaked. There is a smell of sewage, a roar of bluebottles. Sumner limps on, frantic and directionless, until the pain forces him to halt. He crouches in a doorway and prizes off his boot. The wound itself is clean enough but the shinbone is broken. He rips a strip of flannel from his shirttail and binds the wound as tightly as he can to stop the bleeding. As he does so, a hot wave of nausea and faintness passes over him. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he sees a black swirl of pigeons wheeling and gathering like airborne spores in the darkening sky. The moon is out already; from all sides there is the constant dreary boom of ordnance. He thinks of Wilkie and O’Dowd and starts to shudder. He takes a long breath in and tells himself to sharpen the fuck up or he will die just like they did. The city will fall tomorrow for sure, he tells himself; when the British troops sober up, they will press forwards. If he sits tight and remains alive, they will find him and bring him home.
He gets to his feet and looks about for a place to hide. The door opposite is ajar. He limps across to it, dripping blood as he goes. Behind the door is a room with dusty matting and a broken divan pushed up against one wall. There is an unglazed water jar in one corner, empty, and a teakettle and glasses scattered over the floor. The single high window looks onto the alleyway and gives little light. On the far wall, an archway concealed by a curtain opens onto another smaller room with a skylight and a cooking stove. There is a wooden cupboard, but the cupboard is empty. The room smells of old ghee, ashes, and wood smoke. In one corner of it, a small boy is lying curled on a filthy blanket.
Sumner watches him for a moment, wondering whether he is alive or dead. It is too dark to tell whether he is breathing or not. With difficulty, Sumner leans down and touches the boy’s cheek. The touch leaves a faint red fingerprint behind. The boy stirs, moves his hand across his face as though brushing away a fly, and then wakes. When he sees Sumner standing there, he is startled and cries out with alarm. Sumner hushes him. The boy stops shouting but still looks scared and suspicious. Sumner takes a slow step backwards, not taking his eyes off the boy, and lowers himself gradually onto the dirt floor.
“I need water,” he says. “Look. I am wounded.” He points at his oozing leg. “Here.”
He reaches into his coat pocket for a coin and realizes that he still has the ring. He doesn’t remember putting it in his pocket, but here it is. He shows it to the boy, then gestures for him to take it.
“I need water,” he says again. “Pani.”
The boy looks at the ring without moving. He is around ten or eleven years old—thin-faced, bare-chested, and shoeless, wearing a grubby dhoti and a canvas vest.
“Pani,” he echoes.
“Yes,” Sumner nods. “Pani, but tell no one I am here. Tomorrow when the British soldiers come I will help you. I will keep you safe.”
After a pause, the boy answers him in Hindustani: a long line of empty, clashing syllables like the bleating of a goat. What is a child doing sleeping in a place like this? Sumner wonders. In an empty room in a city that has become a battleground? Are his family all dead? Is there no one left to protect him? He remembers, twenty years before, lying in the dark in the abandoned cabin after his parents were removed to the typhus hospital in Castlebar. His mother had sworn to him they would come back soon, she had held his two hands tight in hers and solemnly sworn to it, but they never did. It was only William Harper the surgeon who happened to recall the missing child, who rode back the next day and found the boy still lying where they had left him. Harper was wearing his green tweed suit that day; his pigskin boots were muddy and wet from the road. He lifted the boy up off the soiled pallet and carried him outside. Sumner remembers, even now, the smells of wool and leather, the damp warmth of the surgeon’s steady breathing and his soft easeful curses, like a newfangled form of prayer.
“When the British soldiers get here I will keep you safe,” Sumner insists again. “I will protect you. Do you understand?”
The boy stares at him for a moment longer, then nods and leaves the room. Sumner returns the ring to his pocket, closes his eyes, leans his head against the wall, and waits. The flesh around his wound is hot and badly swollen. The leg is pulsing with pain, and his thirst is becoming unbearable. He wonders if the boy will betray him now, if the next person he sees will be his murderer. He would be easy enough to kill in his present condition: he has no weapon to defend himself with and little strength left for the struggle even if he had one.