Adam Horne passed the row of East India Company warehouses lining the Bombay waterfront and hurried across a rope and wood footbridge connecting the dockyards to the native bazaar built on the marshlands. The sun was blazing high in the sky and Horne felt the heat prickle through his woollen uniform. As he stepped from the footbridge onto the embankment, he longed to rip open the gold buttons and free himself from the high-collared jacket, the stifling shirt and restricting waistband. A meeting with Commodore Watson was one of the rare times in Marine service when he donned the heavy frock-coat and breeches copied from the officer’s dress of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. Still, he would not have to endure the discomfort for much longer. Soon he would be shirtless, wearing dungri breeches, standing barefoot on the quarterdeck of the Huma and inhaling raw salty air, and meanwhile he was in a hurry.
Despite his disapproval of today’s fight between his Marine, Fred Babcock, and an Asian seaman, Horne did not want to miss the match. He frowned inwardly as he remembered how Babcock had become involved in the challenge at a waterfront beer shop. He had been arguing about bareknuckle fighting, boasting that the English were champions of all pugilists. The other men in the beer shop had been seamen off a Malagasy raiding boat. One of the raiders had challenged the loud-mouthed Babcock to a fight, and Horne had no power on shore to prevent the fight from taking place.
The harbour marketplace was crowded with hawking pedlars, herdsmen in brightly coloured headdresses, dhoolie bearers carrying veiled women peering through curtains. Horne moved through the din of shrill voices and jangling bells, momentarily forgetting about Fred Babcock’s fight as he mulled over the meeting he had left a few minutes ago at Rose Cottage.
Elated at being granted the Huma, Horne wondered if he would have command of the frigate merely to sail to Madras. Would it now be his official command?
And what about the mission? Would there be sealed orders aboard ship disclosing more details, or would he have to wait until Madras to hear where the Governors suspected their missing employee might have fled? The man must have disappeared with a great deal of money for the Governors to be sending the Bombay Marine after him.
First, though, there was work to accomplish here in port. The Huma was being provisioned at this very moment, Watson had explained. It was therefore vital to ensure that there was no cheating. A baker’s dozen might be thirteen, but a naval storeman’s dozen too often counted eleven, ten, nine …
The sound of wailing recalled Horne to his surroundings.
To his left, he saw a field stretching between the tented bazaar stalls and a clay hovel. In the centre, a circle of people sat cross-legged around a cluster of flopping vultures. Looking more closely and seeing that the vultures were fighting over—pulling apart—a human corpse, Horne realised he was witnessing a Parsi funeral.
Parsis were Indians who believed that to bury their dead in the earth—or to cremate a body by fire or inter it in the sea—was to defile those earthly elements with carrion. The Parsi mourners held one another’s hands as they sat around the funeral altar, chanting prayers as the vultures voraciously tore apart the decayed flesh, the birds gorging themselves on the human feast, flopping away when they were glutted.
Horne quickened his pace, checking his disapproval of the Indian tradition as he remembered how the Parsis criticised Europeans for burying their dead in the earth. Did it really matter whether a body was eaten by vultures or by worms?
By association, his thoughts returned to Commodore Watson’s remarks about being dead and buried when Horne returned from Madras.
Was Watson really so ill? If so, what was the cause? He had not seemed feverish, or no more than Horne himself in this stifling weather. In this woollen frock-coat.
Horne thought of the English world which the Watsons had recreated in India, the cozy nest they had built in the Old Church quarters, with its rural British atmosphere and homely smells. Horne himself had been in India for how long? Eight years. How European had he remained? Had he become easternised without noticing the changes in himself? His rooms near Bombay Castle were as simple as the cell of a hermit priest; no more than a place to sleep, a station to await the next command.
His commands had been few: first aboard the Eclipse which had been destroyed in a storm off the Coromandel Coast; latterly on the Huma, the frigate he had captured from pirates in the past year. Neither ship had afforded him the luxuries enjoyed by the officers of His Majesty’s Navy. But, then, he was not desirous of luxury; he had abandoned households of servants back home in England. He had not tried to replace them in India, and certainly never at sea.
Reaching the Buddhist shrine he had been told to look for as a landmark, Horne turned into a deserted alleyway. As he moved farther into the dark shadows, he rested one hand on the hilt of his sword. The golden buttons fronting his jacket would melt down very nicely for some young Hindu bride’s dowry; the glittering epaulets on his shoulders would fetch many rupees in the Thieves’ Market.
Emerging at the alley’s far end, he spotted the large shed with the conical straw roof where the fight was supposedly being fought. The low plank door stood ajar and, as Horne approached, he heard whistles and the babble of excited voices.
Pausing to prime his flintlock, he tucked the pistol into his waistband, then removed his hat to stoop and pass through the low doorway.
* * *
Horne resumed his full height inside the large barn, smelling the redolence of sweet straw intermixed with the stench of rancid perspiration. As his eyes adjusted to the faint light filtering through a hole in the roof, he appraised the crowd gathered in the middle of the dirt floor, the majority of the men being half-naked Asians with dhotties twisted around their loins and turbans knotted on their heads. Jabbering like noisy birds in a cage, the tawny-skinned men craned their necks to see the activity in the centre of the shed.
Pushing through the crowd, Horne spotted brawny Fred Babcock and his swarthy opponent. The two men faced one another as they revolved in a circle, dipping and weaving, bodies smeared with dirt.
As Horne edged closer, he saw that the contest was not the usual bareknuckle fight he had expected. The Asian had obviously chosen a local form of combat.
Each man had his left hand tied behind his back and the right hand lashed to a cudgel, a thick piece of wood with a hollow base to accomodate the fist and carved to resemble clenched fingers. The combatants’ feet were bare except for a leather strap holding a blade to the right ankle.
Watching the fighters as they jabbed the air with their fists and kicked their ankle blades at one another, Horne understood why many Indians believed that this sport was the forerunner of cockfighting. Afghani in origin, the club-and-blade contest had been brought to India by Moghul conquerers in the sixteenth century, when their fourteen-year-old ruler, Akbar, had ordered such matches to be held in Delhi between Hindu captives, to decide their fate.
Despite its historic origins, Horne’s first instinct was to stop the match. It was not sport. It was blood lust. The ankle blades were sharply honed, the hand cudgels lethal weapons. The men might maim or kill one another.
Circling Babcock, the pirate jabbed with the wooden fist, at the same time twisting the scythe-like blade jutting from his foot. Excited voices rose from the spectators, the majority of men cheering for the Malagasy, calling his name—Katu—and urging him to kill the topiwallah, a foreigner.
A few natives cheered for Babcock, but his loudest support came from the small clutch of Marines standing across on the opposite side of the circle from Horne. Jingee, the delicately-boned Tamil, excitedly wagged his white-turbanned head, shouting like a man twice his size. Kiro bellowed in his native Japanese, making cutting and chopping movements with his hands as if he himself were fighting the pirate. Dirk Groot jabbered excitedly in a mixture of Dutch and English, his brilliant blue eyes following the two men inside the circle of noisy spectators.
The only Marine who visibly disapproved of the match was the African, Jud, his black face scowling and wincing as the men pummelled each other.
Horne turned from his men back to the fight.
The pirate steadied himself from a blow in the stomach, quickly bringing his fist down sideways. The edge of the carved fingers drew a line of scarlet across Babcock’s bare shoulder.
Lowering his head, Babcock charged forward like a bull.
Katu stepped aside, twisting his right foot to raise the blade towards Babcock’s stomach.
Babcock dived sideways.
Continuing to circle, Katu punched the wooden fist to block Babcock’s path.
Horne saw the quick movement and knew that the oak fist could crack Babcock’s skull, but, spotting the obstacle himself, Babcock dodged again and drove his left knee into Katu’s groin. As the pirate doubled over in pain, Babcock grabbed him by his greasy shanks of hair, simultaneously raising his right ankle to drive his throat onto the blade.
At that moment a blast rent the air.
* * *
‘Enough!’ Horne boomed over the rabble’s cheers and catcalls.
Babcock paused in his attack, gaping at Horne who was holding a smoking flintlock in one hand.
The pirate saw Babcock hesitate and, falling back, raised his right foot to slice open his stomach.
Horne had anticipated the action. Flourishing his sword, he jabbed at the man’s throat, driving him to the ground and thundering, ‘I ordered stop!’
Keeping his eyes on the Malagasy seaman, he shouted, ‘Babcock, report to the Huma immediately!’
‘But, Horne—’
‘Do as I say, Babcock. Report to the Huma.’
Raising his voice, Horne called to the surrounding group, ‘All of you. Out of here. Go.’
The uniform might be stifling, he thought, but seeing the crowd begin to disperse, he realised that the frock-coat’s blue-and-gold magnificence was recognised as a symbol of unquestionable authority.
He pointed at the four Marines, adding for good measure, ‘What are you men gawking at? I’m talking to all of you. Out!’
Jingee the Tamil’s dark eyes were large and alert under his white turban. ‘Leave and go to the … Huma, Captain sahib? Our old ship?’
‘That’s what I said.’ Horne pointed at the doorway. ‘Now out of here, all of you, before some Company snoop comes along and we have to answer to Commodore Watson for this fight.’
Dirk Groot, the Dutchman, asked, ‘Do we have a new command, schipper?’
‘You won’t have anything if you’re all thrown back into Bombay prison for attending illegal assemblies.’
Horne noticed a group of Malagasy seamen loitering beyond the low doorway. Hand on the hilt of his sword, he moved outside to disperse them before his men emerged from the barn. The last thing he wanted was for the Malagasies to try and settle the score in a grudge fight arranged for a later hour, in another part of town.