The North Water(17)

“The wound is too severe,” he says. “The bone is shattered. He can’t live long.”

“You can cut it off,” the man insists.

“You want a son with only one leg?” Wilkie asks.

The man doesn’t answer. Corbyn shakes his head again.

“We can’t help you,” he says. “This hospital is for soldiers.”

“British soldiers,” Wilkie says.

The man doesn’t move. Blood is dripping from the child’s shattered leg onto the newly mopped floor. Clouds of flies are still buzzing around their heads, and every now and then one of the wounded soldiers groans or calls out for help.

“You’re not busy,” the man says, looking around. “You have time now.”

“We can’t help you,” Corbyn says again. “You should go.”

“I am not a sepoy,” the man says. “My name is Hamid. I am a servant. I work for Farook the moneylender.”

“Why are you still in the city? Why didn’t you flee with all the others before the assault began?”

“I must protect my master’s house and its contents.”

O’Dowd shakes his head and laughs.

“He’s a shameless liar,” he says. “Any man left in this city is a traitor by definition and deserves only hanging.”

“What about the child?” Sumner asks.

The others turn to look at him.

“The child is a casualty of war,” Corbyn says. “And we are certainly not under orders to assist the offspring of the enemy.”

“I am not your enemy,” the man says.

“So you say.”

The man turns to Sumner hopefully. Sumner sits down again and lights his pipe. The child’s blood drips steadily onto the floor.

“I can show you treasure,” the man says. “If you help me now, I can show you treasure.”

“What treasure?” Wilkie asks. “How much?”

“Two lakhs,” he says. “Gold and jewels. See here.”

He lays the child down carefully on a trestle table and removes a small kidskin pouch from his tunic. He offers the pouch to Corbyn, and Corbyn takes and opens it. He tips the coins into his palm, looks at them for a moment, pushes them around with his forefinger, then passes them to Wilkie.

“Many more like that,” the man says. “Many more.”

“Where is this treasure?” Corbyn asks. “How far away?”

“Not far. Very close. I can show you now.”

Wilkie passes the coins to O’Dowd, and O’Dowd passes them to Sumner. The coins are warm and faintly greasy to the touch. The edges are unmilled and the surfaces are marked with elegant ribbons of Arabic script.

“You don’t really believe him?” Wilkie says.

“How many more like this?” Corbyn asks. “A hundred? Two hundred?”

“Two thousand,” the man says. “My master is a famous moneylender. I buried them myself before he fled.”

Corbyn walks over to the boy and peels the blood-soaked wrapping from his leg. He peers down and sniffs the gaping wound.

“We could remove it from the hip,” he says. “But he will probably die anyway.”

“Will you do it now?”

“Not now. When you get back here with all that treasure.”

The man looks unhappy, nods, then leans down and whispers something to the boy.

“You three go with him,” Corbyn says, “and take Price. Arm yourselves, and if you don’t like the way something looks, shoot this bastard and come straight back. I’ll stay here with the boy.”

For a moment no one moves. Corbyn looks at them steadily.

“Four equal shares and a tithe each for Price,” he says. “And what the prize agents don’t ever learn about can’t hurt them.”

*

They leave the field hospital and enter the city proper through the smoking wreckage of the Cashmere Gate. They clamber over hillocks of shattered masonry, past piles of smoldering corpses being sniffed at and nibbled by pariah dogs. Above them, tatter-winged vultures flap and complain, mortars fizzle and thump. There is a stench of cordite and scorched flesh, a distant sound of musketry. They wend their way through narrow, blasted streets clogged with broken furniture, eviscerated animals, and abandoned weaponry. Sumner imagines behind every barricade and loophole a crouching sepoy ready to shoot. He thinks that the risk they are taking is too great and that the treasure itself is probably a lie, but he knows it would be foolish to refuse a man like Corbyn. The British army is built on influence, and if a man wishes to rise he must be careful who he knows. Corbyn has friends on the Army Medical Board, and his brother-in-law is an inspector of hospitals. The man himself is boastful and dull, to be sure, but to be connected to him by this shared secret, this pile of illegal loot, would not be a bad thing for Sumner at all. It might even, he thinks, be his path out of the Sixty-First Foot and into a more respectable regiment. But only, of course, if the loot is real.

They turn a corner and come across a gun emplacement and a gaggle of drunken infantrymen. One of them is playing the squeeze-box, another has his britches down and is evacuating into a wooden bucket; empty brandy bottles are scattered around.

“Who goes there?” one of them shouts.