“I’ve got his shoulders,” said Gopal. “We’ve found something to carry him on outside. Can you manage?”
Nicky staggered out into the sunlight and saw Ajeet spreading hay onto a hurdle.
“This end,” said Gopal. “Turn your back to it. Now get down as low as you can and I’ll lift him off.”
Nicky crouched, then sat; she twisted to ease the wounded leg onto the hay, and at last stood, shuddering with the long effort and feeling such sudden lightness that a breeze could have blown her away.
“Well done, Nicky,” said Gopal. “Lift his leg, Ajeet, while I put more hay under it. If we get it higher than the body it might bleed less badly. And then we will need to lash it into place, so that it does not flop about while we are carrying him. A rope or a strap.”
“No,” said Ajeet, “something softer. What about your puggri?”
“It is such a nuisance to do up again,” said Gopal ruefully, but he began to unwind the long folds of his turban. His black hair fell over his shoulders, like a girl’s, but he twisted it up with a few practiced flicks and pinned it into place with the square wooden comb. The cloth was long enough to go three times around the hurdle, lashing the leg comfortably firm. The child muttered and stirred, but did not wake. His face looked a nasty yellowy gray beneath the tear-streaked dirt.
“Where shall we take him?” said Nicky.
“Up to the farm,” said Gopal.
“He won’t like that,” said Nicky. “Nor will the villagers. They’ll think we’ve stolen his soul away, or something.”
“Never mind,” said Gopal. “First, we don’t know which house, or even which village, to take him to. Second, he must have proper medical attention, and he won’t get that in the village.”
“All right,” said Nicky.
Gopal took the front of the hurdle, Nicky and Ajeet the two back corners. The first stretch along the deep lane was manageable, but after that it became harder even than plowing, and they had to rest every fifty yards. They were battling up through the barley field when a voice hissed at them from the trees. They all stopped and looked into the shadow, too tired to be frightened.
It was the risaldar, statuesque with his long bow, waiting for a rabbit or a pheasant. Obviously he was cross that they had spoilt his hunting, but after a question or two in Punjabi, answered by Gopal, he stepped out from his cover, handed the bow to Nicky, and took the girls’ end of the hurdle. For the rest of the journey the children worked shift and shift on the front corners.
The communal supper was being carried out of the artist’s cottage when they at last settled the hurdle wearily across the wellhead. The usual cackle of argument rose as the women gathered around the wounded boy, while the steam from the big bowls of curry rose pungent through the evening air. But Cousin Punam shushed the cooks away and had the hurdle carried into one of the sheds beside the farmyard.
“We will take the sock and shoe off while he’s still fainted,” she said, snipping busily with a pair of nail scissors. “Then he will never know how much it hurts, eh? I did not think, when I was doing my training, that so soon I would have to be a qualified doctor. A little boiled water, a little disinfectant, cotton wool . . . Ai, but that’s a nasty cut! Pull very gently at this bit of sock, Nicky, while I cut here. Ah, how dirty! That’s it, good — throw it straight on the fire. And don’t come back for five minutes, Nicky, because now I must do something you will not like.”
It was still more than an hour till nightfall. The last gold of sunset lay slant across the fields and in it the swifts still wheeled, hundreds of feet up, too high for her to hear their bloodless screaming. It was going to be another blazing day tomorrow, just right for the dreary toil of reaping and threshing. She leaned against the cottage wall and looked down at the square brick tower of the church, warm in that warm light. What next? The boy would be in trouble in the village if they learnt he had crossed the bad wires; if the Sikhs simply put him on the hurdle and carried him down to the Borough, they could expect more suspicion than gratitude — and Cousin Punam had been going to do something “wrong” to him . . . Nicky would have to remind her to tie the wound up with a clean rag, and not anything out of her bag . . .
Cousin Punam had finished, but was talking to someone. Nicky heard the words “. . . tetanus injection . . .” before she called out to ask whether she could come in. Neena was sponging the grime off the sleeping face.
“When will he wake up?” said Nicky.
“Quite soon, perhaps,” said Cousin Punam.
“It sounds awful,” said Nicky, “but he’ll be terrified if he sees you. Let me wait, and I’ll find out where he lives. Then we can take him back.”
Cousin Punam sighed and shrugged, just as Gopal had done down at Swayne’s.
“Have you had your supper, Nicky?” said Neena.
“Not yet.”
“I’ll send you some.”
“Thank you,” said Nicky. “And thank you, Punam, for . . . for everything.”
She stumbled over the words, half conscious that she was speaking for the boy and his mother and the whole village words that they would never learn to say. The women left. Ajeet came back with a chapati — the heavy, sconelike bread which the Sikhs made — and mutton curry. Nicky was just learning to like the taste now that the Sikhs were beginning to run out of curry powder.
Perhaps it was the smell of food which woke the boy, because he tried to sit up when Ajeet was hardly out of the stall. Nicky rose from the floor, her mouth crammed with bread and curry.
“Don't try to move,” she mumbled. “How does your leg feel?”
He looked at it as though he’d forgotten how it hurt, then at her, then, wide eyed, round the dim unfamiliar stall.
“Where’s the rest of them?” he whispered.
“Having their supper. You’re all right. We’ll look after you.”
“I’m not telling you my name,” he whispered fiercely. “My mum says don’t you tell ’em your name if they catch you, and they’ve got no power on you, ’cause they don’t know what to call you in their spells.”
“If you’ll tell me where you live, we’ll carry you home as soon as it’s dark.”
“Oh,” he said with a note of surprise.
“I thought we could say you’d been looking for birds’ nests in that hedge below the bad wires, and one of us heard you calling and found you’d hurt your foot and brought you up here. Then nobody’d know you’d crossed the wires.”
“Much too late for birds’ nests,” he said. “Where you come from, if you don’t know that?”
“London,” said Nicky. “Well, you think of something you might have been looking for at this time of year.”
“Too early for crab apples or nuts,” said the boy. “Tell you what: I could have been looking for a rabbit run to put a snare in.”
“That’ll do,” said Nicky, thinking that she ought to tell the risaldar about rabbit snares. “Do you live in the village, or outside it?”
“Right agin the edge,” he said. “You can cut across to our back garden through Mr. Banstead’s paddock.”
“Good,” said Nicky. “We won’t go till it’s nearly dark. I’m afraid your mother will be worrying for you.”
“That she will,” said the boy.
“Are you hungry?”
Suspicion tightened the lines of his face again.
“I’m not eating the Queer Folk’s food,” he muttered.
“I could bring you water from the well,” Nicky suggested. “That was here before us. And there’s a bag of apples which came up from the village only yesterday morning.”
He thought for a few seconds, hunger and terror fighting.
“All right,” he said at last.
After supper they lifted him gently back on to his hurdle and four of the uncles carried him down the lane. He stared at his bearers in mute fear until, between step and step, he fell deep asleep. Nicky had to shake him awake at the edge of the village so that he could tell them their way through the dusk.