No one from nowhere, born nobodies

Bol

Aldous Harrow has been twenty-three years in India. East India Company first, then private work for a warlord in the western Chambal once he understood where the money actually was. He is professional. He is patient. He sends twenty-two of his men into a village one night to do the kind of work warlords' men do in villages, and he does not think about it again because work like that does not require thinking about. The men do not come back. He files it. Raiding parties fail sometimes. He continues his work. Then the second report. Then the third. A sardar dead. Another. Twelve men in a fortified compound, killed inside twenty minutes by something the warlord's wife described in language that did not fit any category Harrow had a name for. By the time the fifth report reaches him, Harrow has stopped trying to explain what is doing this and has started trying to stop it. He has eighty-three Company-trained muskets. He has a stretch of road he has prepared with a professional's patience. He has a killing ground that should be more than enough for any one man. It is not for any one man. Somewhere east, a quiet farmer with laugh lines at his eyes is walking toward Harrow's prepared ground. He has done this before, in other valleys, in other centuries, under other names. The grandmothers in this country tell a story about him. The adults dismiss it as a story. The adults are wrong.

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Pagina's: 218, Paperback, Independently published