The Man Who Would Be King

Back at his desk, the narrator settles into the grind of an Anglo-Indian newspaper: cranks, missionaries and would-be proof-readers by day, and in the hot season, friends’ deaths reported in careful euphemism while the thermometer climbs and the presses burn to the touch. Months later, in the worst of that weather, he is alone at three in the morning, waiting on a telegram before he can put the paper to bed. As the presses finally roar, two men in white step out of the dark: the man from the train, Peachey Carnehan, whose eyebrows meet in a black bar over his nose, and the red-bearded Daniel Dravot. They don’t want money. They want maps, books, and to be told they are fools.

India, they explain, is too governed for men like them—you can’t dig, prospect or grab anything without some official telling you to leave it alone. So they are going somewhere nobody governs: Kafiristan, a blank corner of the map in the mountains of north-eastern Afghanistan, where the tribes fight constantly and a man who can drill soldiers can make himself king. They have been soldiers, sailors, compositors, engine-drivers and proof-readers. They marched to Afghanistan with the army. Tonight, for once, they are perfectly sober.

The narrator tells them they’ll be cut to pieces within fifty miles of the border. They pore over the Encyclopædia anyway, and Carnehan proudly produces their “Contrack”: a greasy half-sheet in which two “Gentlemen at Large” swear to become Kings of Kafiristan together, to touch neither liquor nor any woman until the job is done, and to stand by each other if either gets into trouble.

The next afternoon, at the teeming Kumharsen Serai where caravans from Central Asia load and unload, a raving holy man in ribbons and rags is delighting the crowd, twirling a child’s paper whirligig and promising to sell magic charms to the Amir. His servant staggers under a crate of mud toys. The priest is Dravot; the servant is Carnehan, who can’t manage the local patter. Hidden under the toys are twenty Martini rifles and ammunition, bought with every rupee they could beg, borrow or steal.

The narrator gives Dravot the little compass charm from his watch-chain, shakes hands with both, and watches the camels plod off toward the Khyber, privately sure they are walking to “certain and awful death.” A letter from Peshawar later reports a mad priest joining the caravan for Kabul. The narrator might have prayed for them, but that night a real king dies in Europe, and there is an obituary to write.

Two summers later—same hour, same heat, same press-room—something crawls to the narrator’s chair: a bent, grey, rag-wrapped cripple begging for a drink. It is Carnehan. He was King of Kafiristan, he says, “crowned Kings we was!” Clutching the narrator’s gaze as if it’s the only thing holding his mind together, he tells the tale, slipping now and then into calling himself “old Peachey” in the third person, as though that man had died out there.

They left the caravan, shaved their heads into heathen patterns, swapped their camels for mules (Dravot broke the owner’s neck across his knee) and climbed into the snow. In a high valley they found ten men fleeing twenty, shot down the twenty, and were greeted as if they’d dropped from the sky. Dravot strolled up to the biggest idol, a figure called Imbra, and treated it like an old friend. Village after village followed: rifles for the stubborn, settled feuds for the grateful, ploughing, drilling, and Dravot judging disputes beside the idol. “They think we’re gods,” he said. Peachey stayed behind to train troops—he won over one fierce chief by winging a man at half a mile and then offering a handshake, and sent news to Dravot in a knotted-string code learned from a blind beggar in the Punjab. Months later Dravot came back at the head of hundreds of men, wearing a heavy crown of hammered gold—and carrying a second one for his partner.

Then came the master-stroke. A chief they nicknamed Billy Fish gave Peachey a Masonic grip. The mountain priests, it seemed, knew something like the first two degrees of Freemasonry, but not the third. Dravot, who had never held office in any lodge, promptly opened one, with aprons stitched by the village women and Imbra’s temple for a lodge-room. When an old priest overturned Dravot’s stone seat and scraped away the dirt to reveal the Master’s Mark—the very sign on Dravot’s apron—carved underneath, the matter was settled. Dravot declared himself Grand-Master of all Freemasonry in Kafiristan, a god and a son of Alexander the Great; Peachey was his fellow king and fellow god.

For a season it works brilliantly. Peachey ploughs, drills and throws rope-bridges across the ravines, and trades turquoises for a hundred rough Afghan-made rifles. Dravot learns the language, hears every complaint fairly, and is genuinely loved. But he also paces the pine wood chewing his beard, dreaming bigger. The fair-skinned Kafirs, he has decided, are practically English—lost tribes, sons of Alexander. He’ll take a census, raise a quarter of a million fighting men to guard India’s flank against Russia, ask the Viceroy for twelve picked Englishmen to help him govern, and one day kneel to hand his crown to Queen Victoria and hear her say, “Rise up, Sir Daniel Dravot.” When he tells Peachey, kindly, that he can’t help him in the way he now needs, it’s the first crack between them.

The second is a woman. Winter is coming and Dravot wants a queen—not a woman, he insists, a wife, a matter of state. Peachey begs him to remember the Contrack. Dravot answers that the Contrack only lasted until they were kings. The council goes silent, until Billy Fish explains that daughters of men can’t marry gods; a girl who does is expected to die. All night a girl weeps in a little temple down the hill. In the morning, before the assembled chiefs, priests and soldiers, she is led up, “white as death.” Dravot puts his arm round her—and she bites him in the neck. His hand comes away bloody, and the priests howl what they now know: “Neither god nor devil but a man!”

The kingdom comes apart in minutes. The army Peachey drilled turns its rifles on Billy Fish’s loyal men, and Dravot, Peachey and Billy Fish flee down the valley under a rain of stones. Dravot rages and blames Peachey, then sobers when a bullet catches his leg and he sees his own imported rifles pointed at him. “It’s me that did it. Me, the King!” He tells the others to save themselves. Peachey won’t go, and Billy Fish says quietly that he is a chief and will stay too. Their captors take them without a sound. They cut Billy Fish’s throat. They march Dravot onto a rope-bridge over a gorge, where he asks Peachey’s forgiveness, receives it “fully and freely,” and, halfway across, tells them to cut. He falls, crown and all.

Peachey is crucified between two pine trees with wooden pegs, and survives the night. Deciding that makes him more of a god than Dravot ever was, the priests feed him, turn him out to go home, and give him a souvenir to remind him never to come back. It takes him about a year to beg his way to India. Now, as dawn pales the office lamps, he shakes it out of a horsehair bag onto the desk: Dravot’s withered head, red beard and all. He sets the gold crown on its temples.

Then he shuffles off, refusing a carriage: he has urgent private affairs, he says, “in the south—at Marwar,” as if he were still carrying that first message down the line. At noon the narrator finds him crawling bareheaded along the white-hot Mall, singing a hymn about the Son of Man going forth to win a golden crown. He delivers him to a missionary for transfer to the asylum. Two days later Carnehan is dead of sunstroke. Was anything found on him? Not that anyone knows. And there, as Kipling says, the matter rests.

Two years later a crippled, grey wreck crawls into the office. It is Carnehan. Over whiskey, gripping the narrator’s gaze to stay sane, he tells what happened. In the high valleys they shot their way into a tribal war, picked the winning side, and were treated as gods. Village after village submitted; they drilled an army, settled feuds and judged disputes beside the idol Imbra. Dravot came back from one campaign wearing a gold crown, with another for Peachey. Then the jackpot: the local priests turned out to know a kind of Freemasonry, and when an old priest found the Master’s Mark carved under Dravot’s seat, Dravot was hailed as Grand-Master, god and son of Alexander the Great. Peachey did much of the hard work—drilling troops, building bridges, buying guns—while Dravot charmed, judged and ruled. He ruled fairly and was loved—but he started dreaming of an empire, a census, a knighthood from Queen Victoria.

With winter coming, Dravot demands a wife. Peachey reminds him of the Contrack; Dravot says it ended when they became kings. The terrified bride believes marrying a god means death, and at the ceremony she bites him. Blood flows, and the priests cry, “Neither god nor devil but a man!” The army turns on them. Dravot rages and blames Peachey, then owns his folly and begs his friends to save themselves; they won’t. Fleeing with the loyal chief Billy Fish, they are captured in the snow. Billy Fish is killed. Dravot, forgiven by Peachey on a rope-bridge, tells his executioners to cut and falls to his death. Peachey is crucified, survives, and is sent home with a souvenir. Now he empties it onto the desk: Dravot’s withered head, crowned in gold. That noon he’s found singing a hymn bareheaded in the blazing sun, and two days later he dies in the asylum. The head and crown are never found.