Coromandel! by John Masters

light illumined his way, but whether it filtered down from above the clouds or came up through the chalky earth he did not know. He felt hungry and pulled out a rabbit leg and gnawed it as he walked.
    The Avon ran south through the Plain in a deep and narrow valley to his right. The roads from Devizes and Pewsey, going towards Salisbury, joined each other just north of Challbury, which stood at the entrance of the valley. The wind blew from that quarter now, and he heard the drum of hoofs and saw a lantern moving like a will-o’-the-wisp southward along the road. ‘Fools!’ he muttered to himself, ‘I could hear them a mile off if I was on that, road, and get off and let them pass.’ It was comforting to talk to himself as he hurried on.
    But that meant that the chase was spreading out in all directions. The majority might be following Molly through Pewsey, but they were taking no chances. Sir Tristram must have sent men to warn all the squires around. The watches would be out in the villages, but horsemen would be his greatest danger. There might be twenty or thirty of them in the lanes by now.
    He stopped suddenly and listened--only the wind; but he thought he had heard again the dull beat of hoofs, now on turf, and somewhere in front. He lay down and put his ear to the earth. Quite clearly he heard the thud-thud. He turned right and hurried diagonally down the slope towards the Avon. Horsemen were spreading over the Plain. Someone had guessed he would go on foot across the Plain rather than on horseback up the vale--probably his father.
    He came to the Avon and stopped a moment to collect his thoughts. Men would be watching the river if they had had time to get here. They could have done that only on horseback; so he should hear the horses stamping and breathing before he saw the men. They might be on either side of the stream, or both.
    He began to walk very slowly southward on the left bank. The rushing of the water drowned the shush-shush of his shoes in the grass, but the same noise would hide the sounds made by men and horses. Challbury was on the hill up there to his right. If men had come down to the river they would probably be hereabouts, where a cart track led from the village to the stream.
    It was not the horses he heard first but a man coughing close ahead of him. He stopped and crouched. A voice from the opposite side of the stream muttered, ‘Hold your coughing, Peter.’ That was Phineas Granger who spoke--to Peter Sale. They were two of Sir Tristram’s men. They knew this water as well as he did.
    Jason took off his shoes and dropped them into his sack. He stepped into the river, crouched low to the surface, and moved forward, feeling with his toes for his footing as he went. The river was twenty feet wide here, no more.
    The enemy lurked about him, and there was a vital message in his sack. He was carrying it to his captain. The Turks lay in wait, and Coromandel was beleaguered. He had a bloody knife in his belt. . . . But there used to be a pair of moorfowl that nested every year in the old snagged tree which had blown down when he was a little boy. The tree lay in the middle of the stream, not quite straight across, leaving only a foot or two clear between each end and the bank. He reached out his hands and felt the smooth dead wood. He could see Peter Sale now, a shape to his left in the blackness. He sank under the water and crawled forward on his stomach, holding his breath, below the arch of the tree. He came up and breathed out with a gasp, but he heard the changed sound of the water and he knew he was damming it with his body. He heard Granger call in a low voice, ‘See anything in the river, Peter?’
    Sale said, ‘Nothing. It’s as black as pitch.’
    ‘I heard something.’
    Jason kept creeping forward. The wind blew through his clothes, and he shivered with the cold of it. The water dripped loudly from him into the rush of the stream. God’s blood, his map and books would be wet! He