The Road to Samarcand. Patrick O’Brian

harshly.’

      ‘But why –’ began Derrick.

      ‘You’ll certainly end on the gallows,’ said Ross. ‘Now it is past midnight, and if you are going out after partridge with Chingiz at dawn you had better turn in.’

      ‘And if you see Li Han before we are up in the morning,’ added Sullivan, ‘tell him that if he serves up boiled badger again for breakfast I’ll rub it in his hair. He bought seven of them cheap in Peking, and I know there are still three more uneaten. I can’t bear it any longer. Do your best with the partridges, Derrick. There is nothing so good as a cold roast bird – and after these eternal badgers …’

      It seemed to Derrick that he had only just closed his eyes when Chingiz was beside him, shaking him awake: the first white streak showed in the eastern sky, and there was hoarfrost on the ground. Their ponies danced in the cold, and Derrick’s chestnut, always a handful, came near to unseating him before he had sent his feet home in the deep, shoe-like Mongol stirrups. He clutched the pommel, felt Chingiz’s eye upon him, and gave the pony a cut with his whip. Away they went, at a full stretching gallop over the smooth, rolling plain, and there was no sound anywhere under the sky but the drumming of hooves. Derrick turned in his saddle and saw Chingiz just behind him, sitting his pony as if he were in an armchair, with his falcon on his wrist. They reined in to a canter, and rode side by side until they flushed a covey of partridges. They stopped and listened: over to the right another covey was calling. Derrick dismounted, slung his weighted reins over his pony’s head, and loaded his gun, a beautifully balanced sixteen-bore that Sullivan had given him.

      ‘Let’s walk them up,’ he said.

      Chingiz looked puzzled; he shook his head and said, ‘You go. I have another way.’

      Derrick nodded and began to walk over the thin grass towards the sound; presently he caught sight of the covey, walking about slowly and feeding. They saw him and started to run; he walked more quickly, and flushed them at about fifty yards. He picked two birds on the outside of the covey and cracked right and left at them. He could have sworn that he had hit one at least, but they flew on untouched. On the way back to the ponies he put up another covey. ‘This time I’ll make sure,’ he thought, firing into the brown. A single feather floated down, but the birds whirred on. He was not in the best of tempers when he rejoined Chingiz, and he thought he detected a smile on the Mongol’s face.