The Year of Rice and Salt

They advanced towards Delhi all at once, more or less, and they fell on the Muslim army retreating up the Ganges on both sides of the river, as soon as the Chinese were in position at the foot of the Nepali hills.

Of course the right flank extended up into the hills, each army trying to outflank the other. Bai and Iwa's squad was counted among the mountain troops now because of their experiences in the Dudh Kosi, and so orders came to seize and hold the hills up to the first ridge at least, which entailed taking some higher points on ridges even farther north. They moved by night, learning to climb in the dark along trails found and marked by Gurkha scouts. Bai too became a day scout, and as he crawled up brush choked ravines he worried not that he would be discovered by any Muslims, for they stuck to their trails and encampments without fail, but whether or not a mass of hundreds of men could follow the tortuous monkey routes he was forced to use in some places. 'That's why they send you, Bai,' Iwa explained. 'If you can do it, anyone can.' He smiled and added, 'That's what Kuo would say.'

Each night Bai went up and down the line guiding and checking to see if routes went as he had expected, learning and studying, and only going to sleep after observing the sunrise from some new hideaway.

They were still doing that when the Indians broke through on the south flank. They heard the distant artillery and then saw smoke pluming into the white skies of a hazy morning, the haze a possible mark of the monsoon's arrival. To make a full breakout assault with the monsoon coming passed all understanding, it seemed possible it would go right to the head of the list of the recently augmented Seven Great Errors, and as the afternoon's clouds bloomed, and built, and dropped black on them, blasting foothills and plain with volleys of thick lightning which struck the metal in several gun emplacements on ridges, it was amazing to hear that the Indians were pressing on unimpeded. They had, among all their other accomplishments, perfected war in the rain. These were not Chinese Daoist Buddhist rationalists, Bai and Iwa agreed, not the Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent, but wild men of all manner of religion, even more spiritual than the Muslims, as the Muslims' religion seemed all bluster and wish fulfilment and support of tyranny with its Father God. The Indians had a myriad of gods, some elephant headed or six armed, even death was a god, both female and male life, nobility, there were gods for each, each human quality deified. Which made for a motley, godly people, very ferocious in war, among many other things – great cooks, very sensual people, scents, tastes, music, colour in their uniforms, detailed art, it was all right there in their camps to be seen, men and women standing around a drummer singing, the women tall and big breasted, big eyed and thick eyebrowed, awesome women really, arms like a woodsman's and filling all the sharpshooter regiments of the Indians. 'Yes,' one Indian adjutant had said in Tibetan, 'women are better shots, women from Travancore especially. They start when they are five, that may be all there is to it. Start boys at five and they would do as well.'

Now the rains were full of black ash, falling in a watery mud. Black rain. The call came for Bai and Iwa's squad to hurry down to the plain and join the general assault as soon as they could. They ran down the trails and assembled some twenty li behind the front line of the battle, and started marching. They were to hit at the very end of the flank, on the plain itself but right at the foot of the foothills, ready to scale the first rise of the hills if there was any resistance to their charge.

That was the plan, but as they came up to the front word came that the Muslims had broken and were in full retreat, and they joined the chase.