He felt for the sword, which he’d laid among the cushions at his feet – the sword his father had given him on reaching baaligh, the age of maturity.

But it wasn’t there.

Two of the Khan’s men had picked it up and were loudly admiring its workmanship – the jade on the pommel and the amber peen, the skin of the shark that bound the grip, the chasing on the blade …

Now alarmed, Bunda Ali stumbled to his feet and called for his servants. Someone shouted ‘Tumbakoo lao’ (‘Bring tobacco’) – the signal.

At the stream it was all confusion: Essuree had loosed the horses.

Bunda Ali felt the scarf brush his forehead. He grasped at it and tried to turn as Bhawanee, the ‘jemadar’, the leader, yanked it tight round his throat, but a second gripped his arms from behind, while yet another kicked his legs from under him.

Bunda Ali was a big man; he fell heavily as the roomal, the scarf, gouged into his throat. The ‘jemadar’ crouched over him with one knee in the small of his back, gripping the two ends of the killing cloth, hands crossed. ‘Accha,’ he hissed, jerking them apart with all the strength of the lohaar (blacksmith) that was his other trade.

Legs and arms flailed, then twitched feebly, and then fell still as Bunda Ali gave up the ghost.

The commotion brought the moonshee’s wife to the flap of her tent, child in arms. She saw, cried out and turned, but the ‘jemadar’ was too quick. The same yellow scarf that had sent her husband to his maker was round her neck in a trice, and she too was sent to eternity – and the infant into the hands of the jemadar’s second.

Another, Bazeed, lean and hungry looking, pushed past to finish the work. The promised bride was already on her feet, woken by her mother’s cry. He seized her nightgown at the neck, rending the silk with such force that she fell back, exposed as never before to any man.

The back of the jemadar’s hand struck Bazeed’s cheek hard. ‘No time!’

Bazeed staggered, then threw himself at the terrified girl as she tried to cover herself, fastened his hands on her throat and squeezed the life from her.

At the running-line Bunda Ali’s syces, who seconds before had been squatting on their haunches, chewing betel nut and sharing thoughts of the day, looked up to see faces hitherto friendly but now homicidal. Two were dead before they could rise, but a third sprang free, making for the river, crying blue murder. Others of Essuree’s who’d loosed the horses made greater racket, however. The plaintive cry of a single syce amid the stampede was not going to bring the soldiers running. Besides, he too was soon pulled down and the life squeezed out of him.

Murder, fast and efficient, and with a relish that was more than necessity – pure evil to any who could have observed. Eight men, a nursing mother and a girl who might still be thought a child had died like hens in a coop when the fox breaks in.