THE WEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH
The hot but humid south-Indian air tormented Sgt. Malcolm’s existence when he tried to put off the hard days toil by simply laying in his hammock. He was in hell. Deep into this green and never-silent maddens of jungle, screaming monkeys and screeching birds; while the bloom after the rain season was more painful to the mind than the feverish deliriums which almost took him back when He had arrived to India… there were many diseases for white man to pick for their last experience as abroad, and Malcolm was pretty sure he had tried them all.
It had been three years now. His rank as sergeant in the East-Asian company was little bit above of the one of a trusted-inmate in those penal colonies far away in Canada. He had used to hunt those… or the defectors and runaways. Far there in the northern wilderness, man had to fear only animals that were bigger than him and had plenty of fur. Down here, snakes and insects, worms …worms had eaten brains of one of his men… the danger were hiding and stealth like the redskins of America. In contrary, the human resistance… the enemy, those turban-figured heathens here… at least they knew about warfare. …Or something at least resembling one. They didn’t hide in the woods like cowards and bandits. Oh no sir! They engaged the Europeans in open field with their antiqued tactics and rusty spears; it always ended up in bloodshed but there where honor in dying such way. …being slaughtered by a superior race. But they didn’t hide in the woods. They didn’t sneak in the darkness to cut the throats of sleeping men and raping their wife’s and steeling their children into slavery…
And the innovative’s in London dared to speak about recruiting native regiments to defend the crown colonies to save expenses! Those vermins! They had no concept what it were to be a soldier of the crown, far away the seas. To defend people who thought themselves almost free from the duty to the crown, acting cocky and respecting none of the noble kin and the crown! Those ungrateful bastards!
The good thing in India, that there weren’t such people flocking away from the Europe. There were no peasant’s. Only the few of the Indian Company and the congregation of adventure-lust merchants, explorers, mercenaries, plain old crooks and other assorted fifth sons of some Swedish Barons. None of them had ever seen a living Dôn and none of them care less about the fortunes of the crown, aside the over-exaggerated charade that everyone appeared to put up, like it was some common joke everyone should take part in.
Malcolm didn’t. But in sense, that sort of false impression of loyalty was better than the open hostility of the peasant in the Americas. And the Qupeckians! Malcolm spit on the ground from his hammock that set him in slightly rolling motion. He was too worn out to try to stop it so he just rocked there like infant with his bitter thoughts of the Native Americans. There were vassals in Europe, but such noble houses had been loyal to the Dôn throne for centuries since the beginning of the days! And these London’s innovative new thinker’s thought the savages were equal in respect to them. Those fools! Soon they would start postulate how Madras should become independent fife to the King! … and appoint some heathen scum into the office…
oh dear!… was the world inherited by the meek and weaklings?
Fools!