The coincidence of the device on his banner and the friendly reception I had met with from his landholders, who officered the levies which he sent to the war, clinched the matter, and so you see me with thirty mail-clad mounted men and four companies of stout bowmen, each eighty or ninety strong, riding into Aornos near the head of Kyrlos’s army.
I had spent very near a fortnight with Paulos, getting to know the officers and the levies and picking up details about their methods. They were stout fighting material—sturdy peasantry, ready at all costs to defend their homes and their women from the Shaman menace. I have gone to war with many worse, but never, I think, with any better, and I have led good men upon occasion.
Looking back, I called up Payindah.
“We be back in the days of the Emperors,” said I, pointing to the men behind us. “Bows and arrows, men in mail, just the same as thy folk when first they came over the passes into the Punjab.”
“And good days to be in, sahib. This is a man’s war—man to man—not a killing by guns a day’s march away, or fighting like rats in a hole underground. These men of the old sick chief’s are good fighting stuff, too. I know such when I see them.”
Payindah first, last, and all the time is a fighting man, and like all his folk of the Salt Range will be so as long as his finger can press trigger or his arm retain strength to drive a bayonet home. At his belt hung a new possession which he fondled now and then. It was a bayonet made under Wrexham’s supervision by Kyrlos’s smiths, rather more ornate than the ordinary G.S. pattern, but none the less a serviceable piece of steel. There are good armourers among the Sakae. Payindah is a believer in the cold steel, and the idea of going out to war without a bayonet—a weapon he had used notably well more than once in France—was heavy upon his soul, and he had gone to Wrexham begging him to have one made. His first appearance with it on his rifle had caused quite an excitement among his friends of Kyrlos’s guard when he gave them a little demonstration of its use.
“You will be fortunate in this war,” he went on, “since you ride with the banner of your own folk, just the same as over the gate of your house in England, which I saw when I was at the convalescent hospital at Berighton, and you took me to your home one day in a motor when you came on leave.”
“Why shall I be fortunate?”
“Because the bear shows that you must be in some way the same folk as the old chief, and he has no son and much rich land. He will be glad to find a son in his old age. And also”—very deliberately—“a daughter-in-law like the Shahzadi.”
I think Payindah only escaped a sudden violent death after that remark by his falling back to make place for Philos, my second in command, who came up to tell me about quartering arrangements in Aornos. A little way back he had fallen out at a side road, where his wife—a very pretty girl on a handsome black mare—was waiting to bid him good-bye. A mounted servant beside her carried, on his saddle bow, the bonniest blue-eyed flaxen-haired boy of about three that I have ever seen. As I had ridden on after a word with the girl, whom I had met while staying with Paulos, I had felt very, very lonely. And yet I have gone to war two or three times before and never felt lonely at going.