Land of Hope and Glory

About the Author

Geoffrey Wilson was born in South Africa, grew up in New Zealand and then backpacked around the world before eventually settling in the United Kingdom.

He studied Hinduism and Buddhism at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and has been fascinated by India since travelling there in the early 1990s.

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Geoffrey Wilson 2011

The right of Geoffrey Wilson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN: 9781444721119

Hardback ISBN: 9781444721102

Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

For Helena, for everything

Prologue

H
arold Neary flinched at the first crack of a musket. A bullet whined past in the dark. Then another. But Harold spurred his horse on towards the line of soldiers who stood ahead in the gully.

Tonight he would kill Rajthanans. Nothing would stop him.

The Sergeant Major – riding beside Harold – drew his scimitar and shouted, ‘Charge!’

Harold and his eight other comrades lifted their swords too and roused a cry somewhere between a cheer and a shriek. They thundered down, the musket flashes rippling before them, the bullets thickening.

Harold gripped his scimitar tight as he rode. His heart flew, but there was no need for fear. God was on his side.

He thought of his brother, who had died fighting the Indians – the Rajthanans. Those heathens thought they were so high and mighty, the lords of England, but Harold would teach them that they couldn’t lord it over him. When he’d served in their army, they’d shouted at him, flogged him, practically starved him, but he’d survived. And while he still had strength he would slaughter as many of the bastards as he could.

Cloud covered the moon and in the faint light Harold could barely see the scattered row of forty European soldiers – only their faces and hands stood out. Their fingers, like fireflies, darted to ammunition pouches, lifted cartridges, slammed ramrods down barrels. Grey powder smoke drifted along the line. Behind stood Rajthanan officers in silver turbans that brightened at each firearm spark.

And further back rose the bone-white tower of the sattva link, shining slightly against the black background of the hills.

Bullets hissed around Harold. With a metal scream, one struck a scimitar. To Harold’s left, young Turner cried out and jerked back off his horse.

Turner. Down. That left just nine riders.

‘Steady, men!’ the Sergeant Major shouted.

Harold glanced at his commander. The Sergeant Major was a big man with broad shoulders and thick arms. In the grey light his face was like battered tin: his nose crushed, his ears mangled and his shaven head pocked and dented by old injuries.

He was a great man, the Sergeant Major, and one of the toughest soldiers Harold had ever met. It was the Sergeant Major who had convinced them all to don peasant clothes and take to the hills. It was the Sergeant Major who had taught them how to fight the Rajthanans, how to burst out of the wilderness and attack before anyone knew what was happening, and then vanish again as quickly as they had appeared.

Harold would follow the Sergeant Major anywhere.

The enemy were near now. The Europeans stopped firing, clicked the catches on their weapons to release their knives, and formed a line of pointed steel. Their faces were set hard beneath their blue cloth caps and the brass buttons shone on their blue tunics. Harold had worn a uniform like that for three years. He’d fought for the Rajthanans just like these men. But no more.

The Rajthanan officers screamed for their men to hold steady.

Harold remembered hearing the news that the Rajthanans had murdered his brother and then he was shouting so hard his throat ached and the sound seemed to blot out everything else, save for the wind whipping past and the undulating movement of the horse.

He swerved and aimed for the nearest officer. For a few seconds he could see his opponents in great detail: wide eyes, teeth, nostrils. It was like a dream.

Then his horse jumped and the soldiers dived. He swung his blade, hitting nothing. He couldn’t see the officer. He heard hooves nearby colliding with heads and chests. Scimitar chimed against knife-musket.

And then he was through. He glanced about, and saw that none of his comrades had fallen and their pace had hardly slowed.

‘To the tower!’ the Sergeant Major bellowed.

Harold wanted to stay and fight, to get his first kill, but he had to keep up.

The windowless, two-storey tower loomed ahead in the narrowest point of the gully. A twenty-foot-high brass rod topped the pointed roof.

Away to the right, a set of tents came alive. Soldiers stumbled out in their underclothes and almost fell over as they pulled on their trousers. They came running up the slight incline in their nightshirts, baying like dogs. Harold could make out snatches of what sounded like Andalusian.

The Sergeant Major shouted to Harold and pointed towards the tower. Harold followed his leader over to an arched entrance and leapt from his charger. He released a sack hanging across the back of the horse, then humped the heavy weight on to one shoulder.

The Sergeant Major glanced at him. Harold grinned, patting the sack. Within that cloth was something worth more to him right now than gold.

Powder.

The Sergeant Major went first up the circular stone stairway, drawing an ornate, multi-barrelled pistol from his belt. It was dark, save for a trace of misty light from above.

Harold breathed heavily and his heart whispered in his ears. He shook the long hair out of his eyes.

Near the top of the stairs they paused. Above them was an archway, out of which floated the faint light.

‘Anyone up there?’ the Sergeant Major called. ‘Give yourselves up and we’ll spare you.’

No response.

Harold heard shouting and pistol shots outside. His comrades would be fighting off the soldiers. There wasn’t much time.

They advanced up the stair.

With a sudden high-pitched cry, an Indian officer charged through the arch, stumbling down the first few steps. He fired his pistol straight at the Sergeant Major. The hammer clicked—

Nothing happened – a misfire. The officer’s face dropped.

The Sergeant Major smiled, his pistol cracked and smoke blurred the stairwell. The officer’s left cheek flared open and spat blood against the wall; the white row of his teeth was visible inside the wound, as though he were smirking. He fell forward, clattered and jerked on the steps.

‘Good shot, sir,’ Harold said. Another heathen dead.

The Sergeant Major grinned, his eyes quivering in the dim light. ‘Any more up there? Give yourselves up.’

Silence.

They crept up the remaining steps. The Sergeant Major pressed himself against the stone wall, then swung into the entrance, holding the pistol before him.

Nothing happened.

He looked down at Harold. ‘There’s no one.’

Staggering under the weight of the sack, Harold ran up the stairs and entered a stone-walled room lit by pale yellow lanterns. To one side, on top of a pedestal, stood a spherical wire cage, within which squatted a metal shape that looked like a creature dredged from the sea. Numerous crab-like claws hung from its sides and a mass of mandibles and feelers covered its head.

Harold stopped dead and made the sign of the cross. That thing was one of the Rajthanans’ devils. Avatars they called them.

The Sergeant Major stared at the device and rubbed his hand over his shaved head. He shot a look at Harold and nodded.

Harold took a step towards the machine, noticing a copper cable leading from the thing’s back, across the floor, along one wall and up through the centre of the ceiling.

The avatar moved. One claw scraped along the bottom of the cage and a feeler lifted.

Harold hesitated. He’d heard the Rajthanans fed these beasts on human blood. Whether that was true or not, he’d like to see them all smashed to pieces as soon as the Rajthanans were kicked out of England. The country was in the grip of black magic and only the crusade would free it.

‘Hurry up,’ the Sergeant Major said. ‘It’s harmless.’

Harold swallowed. He stepped up to the pedestal and heaved the sack to the floor. The avatar moved more rapidly, scuttling about in the cage and snapping its claws.

Harold pushed the hair back from his eyes, struck a match and lifted the fuse sewn into the side of the sack. He looked up at the avatar, which was now scratching frantically at the bars and making a clicking noise, as if it knew what was coming.

Harold smiled and lit the fuse. The flame settled into a red glow that crept up the hemp cord.

‘Let’s go,’ the Sergeant Major said.

They charged down the stairs and came out in the middle of a melee. Only six riders remained – one more had fallen. At least fifty soldiers ran about the horses and jabbed with their knife-muskets. The riders slashed left and right with their scimitars and continually circled to avoid being struck. Pistol shots rang out intermittently and Harold caught the sulphurous scent of powder smoke.

Two soldiers lunged with knife-muskets as Harold came out of the entrance. The Sergeant Major skipped to the side and dashed his opponent’s head against the wall, but Harold moved more slowly. He saw the gleaming blade rush towards him and strike him in the shoulder. His arm went cold as the knife grated against bone. He gasped and fell back against the tower, the knife still stuck firmly and the soldier still holding on to the musket.