The Damascened Blade Read Online Free Page A

own largely now civilized country. She tells me she can “shoot like Wyatt Earp and ride like an Apache” – I wonder where she read that? – so I think it will be a sound idea to keep her well away from both guns and horses. As far as that’s possible in a frontier fort, of course.’
    Dumb with horror, Joe slumped on the edge of the tank, a towel round his shoulders and this terrible document in his hand, and here he was joined by James Lindsay who eyed him with curiosity.
    ‘What’s the matter, Joe? A further round of dizzying promotion? Knight Commander of the Star of the Indian Empire?’
    It had been three years since they had last met but time had changed neither man and they had picked up their easy friendship without the slightest hesitation, a friendship based not only on shared memory and shared background but on something less overt, less explainable, amounting perhaps to an ability to catch each other’s thoughts and moods with ease. It had not been a friendship either had expected or worked towards; it seemed to have announced itself from their first meeting.
    They had met on the Western Front. James’s mind went back to that pit of horror under the ridge at Passchendaele and his commanding officer’s words: ‘Royal Scots Fusiliers should be coming into the line on your right. Your first job is to get in touch with them . I can’t give you any more men, you’ll have to do the best you can with what you have. Don’t know anything about these chaps . . . Borderers . . . Lowlanders . . . Sweepings of Glasgow . . . But they’re probably all right. Look, lead this yourself. Leave Bill in command and work your way over to the right until you hit something solid. I can’t say more than that but – good luck! Here – before you go, have a swig of this!’ And he passed across probably the most welcome drink in James’s life. A silver flask in a leather case from – he noticed – Swaine, Adeney & Briggs of London but now filled with Glenfiddich, a touch of reassuring London elegance in the mud and stink.
    Thus reinforced, at the head of a section, slipping, swearing and wading through the mud, he had set off into the darkness into the shower of mortar bombs and, leprously lit by flares, hoping as he turned each corner in the traverse to encounter the relieving Fusiliers, he saw at last the stolid figure of a sentry standing on the fire step. James greeted him as he turned the corner. ‘Are you the Scots?’ But there was no reply. He went forward and shook the man by the elbow. Faithful unto death, perhaps, but dead. James’s torch illuminated a haggard face, dead for some time. But at this unpropitious moment there was at last the sound of fresh voices, there was the sticky tramp of muddy boots, and a man came into view.
    James’s torch caught a familiar cap badge and dwelt for a second on the identifying thistle and the swaggering motto – Nemo me impune lacessit . ‘No one provokes me and gets away with it!’ James translated and smiled as, below the cap, the light picked up black curling hair, dazzled dark eyes in a lean and smoke-blackened face, the flash of white teeth bared in a grimace against the glare of the torch. ‘Can’t say I haven’t been warned!’ James thought.
    What do you say to a total stranger in a place like this? What James did say, extending a dirty hand was, ‘You’re a long way from the Borders?’
    ‘Bugger the Borders!’ came the reply. ‘And put that bloody torch down!’
    That was all they had time to say because at that moment a German mortar bomb came lumbering over the line, ricocheted from the parapet and fell straight into the trench some yards away. They dug each other out and spent the rest of that campaign fighting shoulder to shoulder and sometimes back to back, both amazed to have survived. James, the bolder of the two, came through the war unscathed. Joe, the more calculating and more careful of life whether his own or that of his men, did not. A