A Thorn for Miss R.: Book I: The Night Watchman

by Sakiv Koch

  Firstly, I had to stem the bleeding in my arm. Secondly, I had to have a light if I were to cross the forest that lay between Trumpet Hill and my hamlet.

  I found what I needed quickly – a lantern and a strip of cloth. I didn’t stop to bind my wound inside the house. It was only outside that I placed the lantern on the ground, sat down beside it, and did the best job I could to bind my wound with one hand and my mouth.

  Someone stood nearby, watching me. I turned quickly, but there were only the endless waves of darkness crashing upon my small circle of light. I picked up the lantern and started running down the hill, toward the columns of trees marking the start of the forest.

  I went into the trees at a run. Countless shadows came into being. They would spring, quiver, grow monstrous and then shrink again. I wanted nothing more than to rush through and be out of that zone of fear. The sensation that someone was watching me, following me had grown into a prickling tingle at the back of my neck.

  I slowed down to a stumbling, halting walk to find the pathway upon which I had followed Sohan Singh across the forest. I would swing suddenly to this side or that in the hopes of catching sight of whoever was behind me. Every time, it appeared that there was not just one man or one beast, but a throng of them stalking me, peering from behind every tree trunk, crouching savagely in the undergrowth.

  And then, as though not content with being just a passive observer of my unending terror, the sky let forth a bolt of lightning and rumbled with a heart-stopping peal of thunder.

  Trees started to roar and writhe. Dark masses hurtled out of the foliage with a frantic beat of wings. The croak of the frogs changed its note, spreading higher and wider. Leaves began to chant plop, plop as fat gobs of water met them and bent them on their stalks. The water then slid down to the floor of the jungle and cracked the spines of dried leaves with thin, sharp rasps.

  The sudden eruption of cloudbanks panicked me as though it wasn’t just a rain drenching the jungle, but a fire burning it on all sides. The light in my hand became useless in a minute as sheets of water cascaded from branches and hemmed me in like layers of curtains.

  My shoulders hunched up to the level of my ears. I shivered like a sodden dog, stumbling on with my back bent, searching about for the footpath in the tangle of brush and wild grass on the ground.

  There was a sound of movement somewhere to my left. It was distinct enough to reach me through the din of the wind and the rain. I put out my light in a new thrust of panic, which made me panic more as total darkness leaped upon me and struck me blind.

  But now that I had broken the one aid to my bewildered senses, I had to move away as stealthily as I could. I began to walk, taking care not to let my heels press fully against the ground, in the most zigzag way I could manage to make for myself.

  Just when I thought that I was far enough away from the spot I had been at when the lantern was marking my position like a beacon, I heard that patter of soft movement again. Whoever was moving with me was not far off now. He was drawing nearer steadily. I ran again, jogging this way and that, with the watchman’s club raised in front of me like a blind man’s stick, hoping desperately to lose my follower.

  As though it were bound to my body by a string, the sound remained just behind me all the time. The darkness in the forest was still pitch and impenetrable. It was hard to believe that anyone could track me almost as swiftly as I could move. Incredulous, defeated, I stopped. I braced my club and panted like a spent dog.

  Thunder continued to boom in the skies, loosening torrents of rain. Lightning flashed with disconcerting regularity, giving rise to sudden cataclysms of shadows beneath the forest’s canopy.

  As soon as I stopped, two smoldering points of light sprang up in front of me – disembodied, hanging in midair, attached to nothing. They continued to hover there for a moment and then began moving toward me slowly.

  I lifted my club and brought it down with all my power. The blow glanced off something soft and struck the earth, jarring my arms, refilling my smoldering wound with hot lava. I moaned. The yellow fires leaped back from me with something like a yelp.

  It was a dog! A cur had been terrifying me all this while! Despite the place and the time, despite what I had seen and what I had lived through, I burst out laughing. The laughter, I admit, was hysterical. It was a thin guard of mirth circling a large trigger of tears, but it was laughter nonetheless.

  A plaintive sound joined my laughter, as though the dog were assuring me of its harmlessness. Relief flooded the gouged-out spaces of my being. I sank to my knees. A dark, wet mass hurled at me and nearly toppled me. It danced around in my arms, snout rubbing against my chin, tail lashing out crazily in the air. The dog began to entwine itself around the watchman’s club, licking it and whimpering piteously.

  We remained like that for a long time, celebrating that timeless meeting of man and dog. The wind shrieked around us. The rain pelted us with a million liquid blows. Our respective pains (the dog had his own wounds, his own torments) reasserted themselves gradually until they were too much to bear again.

  "Why couldn't you just bark to let me know you were a doggy and not a bloodthirsty ghost or a murderous goon, you naughty doggy?" I asked. There was no answering bark. There had not been a single bark from the animal so far.

  I rose to my feet wearily. “Who do you belong to?” I asked the dog. “Where have you come from? Why were you following me? Most importantly, why wouldn’t you bark? What’s wrong with you?”

  The dog rubbed its head against my legs and ran away. It stopped after covering a short distance and came back immediately to brush against my legs. By this system, it began to lead me slowly and awkwardly through the jungle. It would take the cloth of my pajamas between its teeth to steer me whenever I got off course.

  I learned later that the dog’s name was Sheru. A dog called ‘Lion’. I learned, too, that Sheru had not belonged to the Rani, but to the nightwatchman. He was a mute dog.

  A leopard had mauled him when Sheru was a puppy. His throat was still scarred beneath his fur. He was always with the night watchman on his patrols, but no one had ever heard him make a sound, apart from those low-volume, throaty yelps and whines.

  Sheru stopped every few minutes and shook himself, sending jets of water into the watery air. He tilted his head and listened intently. He would sniff the ground and then drive me on again, coming from the front, the sides, or from behind, as though I were a herd of wayward sheep.

  We finally exited the forest, but not at the place I was desperate to reach! I found myself at a point miles away from my hamlet, at the shore of a mountain-stream rushing furiously over the boulders lying in its bed.

  The gusty winds had wrought havoc amongst the thunderheads and were dragging their shreds away,

  clearing the skies for countless stars to peep down. The rain weakened to a drizzle and then died altogether, leaving its ghost behind in dripping trees.

  Getting out of the jungle felt like getting out of a dark, stifling cell. Starlight felt like dazzling sunlight to me. I once again had the use of my vision, but frustration, not relief, emerged as the paramount emotion in my ravaged heart-mind scape, followed closely by anger at the strange dog for having forcibly taken me so far away from my home.

  I could now see Sheru clearly – he was a big, furry, tan-and-black Gaddi, a Himalayan sheepdog. He looked completely friendly and harmless. Until I began to run in the general direction of my home, that is. He transformed into a formidable, snarling beast in an instant – hackles raised, terrifying ripper-teeth on display, a guttural growl emitting right from the belly.

  Sheru made it amply clear to me that he didn’t want me to go away, that I’d have to follow his lead, voluntarily or otherwise. I had my lathi in my hands – I could have theoretically fought the beast, but the conclusion of such a contest was pretty much a foregone one. I’d have hesitated in confronting an angry/determined Gaddi even if the weapon in my hand were a powerful firearm instead of a
wooden club.

  Sheru perceived my acceptance of defeat without a contest. His frightening aggression dissolved as quickly as it had materialized. He circled me once and went toward the water, dog-gesturing me to follow him onto the slim wooden-bridge spanning the stream.

  I kicked myself inwardly for my cowardice as I ran after the dog, doing its unspoken bidding, as though I had an invisible dog collar and leash around my throat. Talk about classical role reversal!

  The bridge was an arched one, sloping upward until its center from both the shores. It was after crossing the bridge’s apex that I saw a body lying sprawled out, facedown, at the foot of a hill on the other side of the stream. Sheru stood beside the corpse.

  I was bone-tired, terrified, baffled, and lost. The most terrible conviction of my life gripped me and ripped my heart to shreds. I screamed.

  “Father! Father!” I cried, stumbling and falling on my face, taking no heed as my wounded arm met with the hard ground. Sheru cocked his head and began running toward me.

  He wheeled around and took off back toward the body again. But he didn’t stop this time. He kept going up the hill, pausing and waiting with his head lifted toward me. The heartless brute wanted me to ignore my father’s mortal remains and continue to follow him up the hill!

  "Father, please, please, God, please…" I somehow got to my feet again, crying as I had never cried before. The body lay no more than fifty feet away from the shore. It might have been fifty miles for the slowness with which I covered the distance — feet leaden, eyes unseeing.

  I fell to my knees when I reached the flung-out feet. They – the feet, the footwear – didn’t belong to my father. Neither did the clothes and the shape and the size of the body. My relief was so sudden, so immense that I lifted my arms in the air and started laughing even before I had stopped crying fully.

  I forgot that I was in the presence of death. It didn’t occur to me that I might yet find another body lying somewhere amongst the rocks and that that body might not be a stranger’s. Unbeknownst to me at that time, another man indeed lay within a hundred yards of the bridge at that very moment. Unconscious, bleeding from a head wound.

  I had been searching for this man so desperately, with all the force of my being, for so long. He was so close. So close to me, but closer to death. Later, when the night and the nightmare were over (or deceived us into believing they were over), Father had walked home looking like a ghost – a bloodless ghost with a blood-sodden bandage on his head.

  The town clock struck either three or four o’clock in the morning while I knelt cry-laughing by the upside-down feet of some stranger’s body. The clang of the clock’s chimes eddied in the mountains. Echoes of echoes rose and faded like circles in water.

  The sounds jolted me back to my topsy-turvy senses. It had been just after ten o’clock that the night watchman had peered in at my window, but that span of four or five hours felt longer than the entire extent of the rest of my life.

  I looked at the dead man. His head was turned away from his body at an unnaturally obtuse angle. The turban on his head had turned askew with his fall, covering the upper half of his profile. Only his mouth, agape in a frozen agony, was visible to me. A precious stone, set in all of the Prince's guards’ turbans, gleamed above the open mouth.

  I shuddered as I rose to my feet. Sheru ran at me, baring his fangs halfheartedly to get me moving again. I knew then that he wouldn’t really attack me if I were to turn around and leave.

  He just wanted to take me somewhere as intently and as urgently as I wanted to be back with my mother. There was a quality of intelligent appeal in his dignified-dog expression that I couldn’t overlook any more than I had been able to ignore his terrifying hostility earlier.

  I began to stumble up the hill after the dog, going faster because I was now progressing under my own steam. He trotted ahead until he reached the ruins of an ancient Shiv Temple perched on the brow of the hill. I caught up with him after a couple of minutes. He and I stood side by side at the crumbling entrance to the temple, staring at the cube of blackness that lay inside.

  This was the place, the final destination Sheru had been driving/leading me to. He had to have a purpose in undergoing and giving so much trouble, and I was about to find out that purpose. I shifted my grip on my lathi as we stepped in. My feet slipped out of my slippers of their own accord at the temple’s threshold. I didn’t realize that I was bare-feet until my toes stubbed in one of the myriads of cracks in the stone floor.

  A courtyard lay beyond the entranceway. Gnarled trees and plants grew at awkward angles everywhere, hugging the fractured masonry. Sheru stopped in the middle of the yard and sniffed the air. We moved again. An acrid smell met and repulsed my sense of smell. Gray tendrils of smoke were rising from the main structure of the temple.

  Sheru trotted ahead, going toward the unseen fire producing all that smell and smoke. I followed as quickly as I dared. Walking between knots of roots and piles of rubble is not an easy thing without shoes and light.

  Sheru whined and scraped the floor with a forepaw. I started coughing and my eyes began to water within seconds of my joining him at the entrance to the sacred chamber, the sanctum sanctorum of the temple. The smoke seeped out from under the chamber’s door.

  There were many powerful legends associated with this centuries-old temple. A fortress adjoined it eighty or ninety years ago. An earthquake had razed the fortress to the ground without inflicting any remarkable damage on the temple. It had similarly withstood a colossal landslide half a century ago.

  After the landslide, a revered sage had decreed that no structural maintenance would be carried out on the building henceforth, allowing it to crumble down into dust naturally – representing the demise of the body and the rebirth of the soul – before erecting a new one at some undefinable point in distant future.

  I heard the patter of paws as Sheru withdrew, going back into the open, smokeless area of the courtyard. My lungs were beginning to burn. I shut my watering eyes and pushed the sacred chamber’s door with one hand. It was bolted from the inside.

  My heart began to beat faster. There was someone inside the chamber, certainly unconscious and dying in that smoke, if not already dead. Tremors of suppressed coughing shook my body. As though in sympathetic detonation, a bout of coughing sounded from inside.

  I put my shoulder against the door. Both the hinges and the bolt on the other side were rusted. The door squealed and gave way fractionally under my (puny) weight, but the heavy panel had seasoned into a steely hardness over the years. I gave up after a few seconds, ran out to the courtyard, and sobbed for breath, gulping fresh air as though it were water and I had passed several drink-less days in a desert.

  Sheru whimpered as I waded back into that billowing sea of smoke. My breath rasped and my eyes pained acutely. I pushed the door panel as far back as it would go, jammed one end of my club between the doorjamb and the door at the point where the chain-bolt on the inside linked the two together, and heaved with all my might.

  The door shook, the chain-bolt rattled, but the club hummed and leaped from my hands, stressing the knife wound on my arm yet again. My endurance burnt out, my eyes streamed, my throat constricted. Coughing uncontrollably, defeated once more, hands limp, heart crying, and soul wearied, I backed away from the door.

  As I staggered out into the courtyard, the thought of leaving whoever it was inside the chamber to die felt utterly, undeniably, inexorably, infinitely unacceptable to me. Its sheer unacceptableness glued together the torn-up fabric of my willpower in a flash. I flew back toward the chamber. Some part of me met with some part of the door.

  The impact hurt me. Quite a bit. To the extent that I reeled and fell. The bolt-plate on the inside of the door had come loose. The panel swung open and the pent-up smoke rushed out, passing above my prostrate form.

  I was exhausted beyond conception. I lay without feeling or thought. Sheru advanced and licked my face. Dawn parted the pall of darkness with i
ts small, radiant fingers and looked down at the recumbent world. I sat up with a superhuman effort after a minute, rose to my feet, and entered the temple’s sanctum-sanctorum.

  I could see the remains of the fire in a corner behind the sacred Shiv Ling. Several old, moist burlap sacks smoldered on top of burning pinewood logs, producing all that smoke.

  In the murkiness of the other corner lay a huddled figure, motionless and silent.

  Chapter 12: The Delicacy of Tough Things

  There’s no smoke left in the chamber now, so your eyes won’t sting if you lean against the door and peer in. It’s important that you see this yourself because lying in that dark corner, appearing dead but clinging to life, is the cause of all the horror life flung at me so suddenly. That sooty figure behind the sacred stone is the reason for my becoming what I became.

  That you be here is also important because it requires more than the reach of my arms to grasp the injustice, the irony of it all — alone, I have only one mind and two hands. Together, we have countless. A shaft of sunlight, weak and small like a fledgling bird, alights in the middle of the courtyard and crawls toward God’s chamber.

  The light gathers power and speed as it cuts across the chamber and lights up the figure lying in the shadows. You see that it is Prince Sanjay.

  I saw that it was Prince Sanjay. And I saw that he was alive. The nightwatchman had taken Sanjay to the temple, deeming it to be a reasonably safe hiding place. It was the watchman who had got the fire going for the prince, although the idea of throwing those rotten burlap sacks on the fire was the prince’s own.

  He had used the sacks as supplemental fuel after the pine logs had burnt down to coals. The prince never said it, but I’m sure he had been afraid of being left in the dark if his fire were to run out. Who wouldn’t be scared? Absolute darkness, mated with absolute silence, is a thing terrifying beyond comprehension for people who have not experienced this combination first hand.