But the fatal shot never came. The soldier suddenly threw his arms out. His mouth framed a startled gasp that never escaped his throat, and then he toppled, already lifeless, into the ravine. Standing in his place atop the embankment was Murray, a bloody Khyber knife in his hand. I gestured to him, called out weakly, anything to let him know I still lived. To my horror, he hurtled forward and tumbled down as if he, too, had been stabbed in the back. But it was haste that drove him on, not steel, and he quickly made his way to my side.
“Don’t try to move,” he said, taking in my condition at a glance. “Keep your hand in place on the wound. Stay still.”
Without another word, he lay down beside me, the Khyber knife clutched to his chest, then pulled the corpse of a Ghazi so that it rested atop us both. “Only until the stragglers pass,” he said, by way of an explanation.
I soon understood the meaning of that cryptic comment. From the din on the plain, it sounded as if the fighting had moved to the southwest. The Afghans were hard on the heels of our troops, even as they fell back upon the little villages of Mundabad and Khig to make their final stand. This left us rather far behind the enemy line.
From time to time a scavenging tribesman picked his way across the corpse river. The body of the Afghan atop us shielded us from the blows these savages sometimes dealt the British dead they encountered. So long as we remained still, the stragglers passed us by. Eventually we could hear shouting up on the plain, and then that, too, receded, until it became quiet enough for me to hear the steady buzzing of the sand flies over the distant clash of arms.
“Someone’s put them to collecting their dead farther up the riverbed,” Murray whispered. “Organizing them for burial.”
He shrugged off our fleshy shield and placed strong hands on me. “This will hurt, I’m afraid, but we’d best move. I’ll find someplace for us to hide. We’ll keep to the riverbed, head northeast—”
“Away from the regiment?” I asked weakly.
“It’s our only chance, sir,” he said as he did his best to secure a bandage in place over my shattered shoulder. Then he heaved me onto his back, adding, “I suspect that there’s little enough left of the Sixty-sixth for us to rejoin anyway.”
I recall only parts of our journey along the ravine. By then I was delirious from the pain and loss of blood. The hours passed as a series of half-understood incidents, dream melding with reality. The dead seemed to reach for us. Gray hands snatched at Murray’s boots until they tripped him, and we both fell onto the corpse river. Later, a shrouded figure rose up from the rest. Gore stained his clothes so completely that they might as well have been dyed crimson. His face, too, was smeared with it. And as I watched, that face contorted, mouth stretching impossibly wide to loose a shriek of alarm. Murray let me fall and, drawing his Khyber knife, buried the blade in the man’s throat. But that did not silence the cry, at least to my addled brain. The wound on his neck opened and, like a second mouth, added to the alarm. Even after the Afghan collapsed, his cry continued—only now from the lips of my orderly.
At last Murray let that wailing end. “I’ve countermanded that fellow’s alarm,” he said as he approached me. I shrank back, and received in return a kind, weary smile. “It helps to know a little of the enemy’s tongue, sir, but that doesn’t make me one of them.”
My head cleared enough then for me to recognize my friend. “Of course not,” I said. “Sorry. I thought I saw—thought that you—”
“No need to explain,” Murray interrupted. “The mind plays tricks under these circumstances.” Before he lifted me again, he removed a thin chain from his pocket and wrapped it around my right hand. In my palm rested the silver disk of a Saint Christopher medal. “If it’s not imposing, perhaps you might find this of help . . .”
“ ‘Marvel thou nothing, for thou hast borne all the world upon thee,’ ” I quoted, hearing the voice of my father as he told the story of the saint carrying the child Jesus safely across the brook. I closed my eyes and tried to hold on to that memory, long forgotten until that moment. I must have passed out then, for the next thing I knew a trio of Afghan villagers was hauling me into a barren orchard, the parched trees looking dead and withered. I struggled for a moment, until Murray laid a calming hand on me.
“Where—?” I croaked
“Safe,” he said. “I left the watercourse when it reached the foothills, and came across these fellows searching for some goats that had wandered off. Their headman fought on our side in the last war.”
“You help our sick,” one of the tribesmen interrupted in heavily accented, but comprehensible English. “No more weep.”
Murray nodded and said something in Persian. Then he turned to me and explained: “When we first met up, I managed to get them to understand we’re medical staff. They’ll hide us from Ayub Khan’s followers, if we help them with some sickness that’s got their families by the throat. I can’t quite understand what he means by ‘weep,’ though. Tears for the dead, perhaps. Or running sores. It’s a symptom common to a half-dozen native maladies.”
I marveled at the equanimity my friend displayed in discussing this unpleasantness, even as I wondered at his strength and stamina. He had carried me for miles in that unbearable heat, yet walked beside me then as if it were still the calm hours before the battle. His military experience, or his faith, or a combination of the two had so well prepared him that no trial seemed beyond his capabilities. I would learn how wrong I was about that later, but at that moment, as we made our way to the largest of the grim, mud-walled houses in that Afghan village, I believed Murray a match for anything we might encounter.
A wizened old man met us at the door. He was clad in typical native dress, save for his ancient Western-style boots, which looked as if they had not left his feet since they were issued to him during the last war. At his side was a small boy, who snapped Murray a salute. The elder slapped the boy’s arm down and growled something in Persian.
“You are right to correct him,” Murray said. “We come as guests, not conquerors.”
The old man eyed Murray, as if he could discern the sincerity of a stranger by look alone. Finally he nodded. “As guests be welcome, then.”
He directed the villagers to carry me to a communal sickroom at the back of the house. The long, low-ceilinged room stank of disease and despair. Two men occupied mats on the floor. Despite the stifling heat, they were wrapped in blankets. Places for three more lay ready for the newly afflicted or abandoned by the recently dead. It was hard to tell which.
They placed me at the opposite end of the room from the door and, at the prompting of the old man, hung a ragged, gauzy sheet to separate me from the others. Murray immediately stripped away the makeshift bandage from my shoulder. Jezail bullets are often composed of bent nails, bits of silver, and any other metal scrap to hand, so that the wounds they create fester quickly. Such was the case with my shoulder. Though the bullet had passed right through my collarbone and out my back, infection had already set in.
Murray had managed somehow to hold on to his field medical kit, and he attended to the wound and the infection as best he could. “You’re going to have to carry on the fight from here, sir,” he said after he had finished his work.
I nodded and let him guide a cup to my lips. After a swallow of tepid water, I opened my right hand. The Saint Christopher medal shone dimly in the light of the candle by my sleeping mat, for night had come while Murray bled away what he could of the infection and closed as much of the gash as he dared. “You can carry me no farther,” I whispered. “Take it, in case you need someone to shoulder your burdens awhile.”
He took the chain from my hand. “If you want it back, just say the word. In the meantime, try to get some rest.” After one final check on the new bandage, Murray carefully lifted the candle and pushed through the curtain.
Several times that night I awoke to find my friend close by, either at my side or tending to the others in the room. Even when he was kneeling by the native
s, his shadow on the curtain seemed to be ministering to me, a hunched and wavering form that hovered like some guardian angel. His voice filled the dead hours of the night as he offered gentle words to quiet the ranting of the sick men. I heard the old Afghan in the gray time before dawn, too. He spoke with Murray about the nature of the disease that had swept through the village, all the time using English. He hoped, no doubt, to keep the gravity of the situation from his people.
My fever rallied with the sun, and by noon I became as incoherent as the shivering natives. As with our trek from the corpse river, the days and nights that followed reside in my memory as fragments only: Murray as shadowy protector; the awful heat that washed over me, wave upon wave; the moans and shrieks of the sick Afghans. The latter remain especially vivid, as the incessant chattering of their teeth gave their cries an inhuman, almost insectlike quality.
It was that eerie sound which woke me on the night I first saw the masked priests.
I came awake slowly, but soon realized that my fever had broken. The throbbing ache in my shoulder had lessened, and I could actually feel the chill of the evening air on my sweat-soaked skin. The respite from the fever heat was most welcome, but any relief I felt turned to panic after I thought to call out to Murray and found myself unable to speak or move. I could only stare at the curtain, now a sickly yellow green from some strange light on the other side, and at the tall, unfamiliar shadow that loomed, dark as a mine pit, at its center.
The figure was certainly not Murray. It was taller and thinner, with a vague outline that suggested robes, not a British uniform. Where my friend had knelt close to the sick men, this visitor stood with a straight back, aloof and disdainful. Where Murray had answered their cries with kind words, the stranger remained silent as he stood near first one bawling invalid, then the other. Over each he leaned forward slightly and bowed his head, as if in prayer, all the while keeping his arms rigid at his side.
Finally the shadow on the curtain grew larger, and I knew that the silent visitor was coming for me. Again I tried to call out. Again my shout died, stillborn, in my throat. The shadow now filled the curtain. A hand gloved in bleached leather drew back the ragged cloth, revealing a tall, solemn figure dressed in white robes and a turban. I assumed him to be male from his build, for his dress concealed his gender utterly, just as a porcelain mask hid his features. The mask was plain, the nose and mouth suggested by curves, not revealed by details. A small arcane symbol, yellow against the winter white of the porcelain, lay upon each cheek. Of human features, only his eyes were visible.
Those dark orbs seemed lifeless at first, as if they, too, were part of the mask. The illusion fell away when the silent stranger tilted his head. Only then did I see the tears. So copious were they that the liquid welled up at the bottom of each eyehole until it was ready to spill over the rim. Then, as he had done with the two natives, the masked priest leaned forward. I braced inwardly for those tears to fall on me. Somehow I knew even then to dread their touch.
“Get away from him!”
Murray followed this shout with words in Persian. The first command had been enough to startle the priest, though. The silent figure straightened and turned away, so that his tears spattered the yellow sigils upon his mask and not me. I found myself able to move, too. A long-suppressed cry of horror escaped my lips as I sat up and pushed the curtain aside.
A second masked priest stood near the door. He held an oddly shaped lantern, the source of the weird yellow-green light that suffused the room. Murray strode past him, toward the priest who had loomed over me. He got halfway to his goal when he noticed that the two natives had fallen silent. The men lay still upon their mats, staring up at the ceiling, eyes fixed upon something we could not see.
Murray pointed to the sick men, then asked the priest a question. The masked figure remained silent, but an answer came nonetheless: “What have they done? They’ve prayed for these men to be cured by sunset tomorrow or released from their suffering,” growled the village elder, now standing framed by the doorway. “I welcomed you as guests, even tolerated your failure to help our sons. But I will not allow you to insult these holy men.”
Murray apologized, but the priests did not respond. Still silent, they crossed to the door. There, each took one of the old man’s hands in his own, then bowed over it. Though he tried, the elder could not hide his discomfort. Again, the priests appeared not to notice. They passed from the sickroom, the old man trailing in their wake, surreptitiously wiping his hands on his cotton trousers.
“The villagers fear the priests,” Murray noted as he cleaned my wound and set a new bandage. “ ‘The Weeping Ones,’ they’re called. The natives think of them as harbingers of bad luck. But their own mullah was one of the first carried off by the plague, so—”
“Plague? Is it that serious?”
“It’s claimed at least three nearby villages in the past year or so.”
I glanced in the direction of the two natives. Murray had thrown the curtain back; we could see the two men shivering under their heavy blankets and staring up at the ceiling. “What of them?”
Murray rubbed his eyes, red-rimmed from lack of sleep. “Dead before morning,” he said. “At least, that’s been the pattern every other time the priests have come. I would suspect them of poisoning the poor fellows, but their presence alone seems sufficient to frighten them over the brink.” He settled me back on my sleeping mat. “We’ll need to move on tomorrow, sir. You should get as much rest as you can tonight.”
“And you?”
“No rest for me.” That familiar, kind smile flashed across his face. “If those poor souls are going to die, they should pass their last hours without pests hovering about.”
“Those priests aren’t sand flies,” I said. “You can’t just brush them away. Besides, there’s something uncanny about them. Something . . . unnatural.”
The dismissive laugh that comment elicited from Murray, gentle though it was, alarmed me. I could not put into words the specific cause of my unease, but I knew better than to deny so cavalierly what I had just witnessed. Yet Murray would not admit even the genuine weirdness of the priests. He cast them as unsavory mystics or dubious fakirs, as common in the East as fleas on a camel. He could not imagine the Weeping Ones as anything more sinister. His view of the world simply did not admit such possibilities. While I took some comfort from his certainty, I drifted off to sleep that night troubled by more than my wound or our immediate plight.
The sun was well up in the sky when I awoke the next day. Murray was gone, and in his place a pair of women tended to the natives. The two men lay uncovered, still staring heavenward. Dead, I realized. The women sobbed quietly beneath their veils, while outside, the more traditional keening for the departed could be heard in the distance. The smell of rosewater permeated the room.
I wanted to help them, but knew so little of their rituals that I feared offending them. The villagers were already angry with us for failing to save the young men. So I simply watched as the women first bathed the dead men, then, with heavily scented water, anointed the welts and oozing sores that covered the bodies. What I had taken for sobbing was, in fact, a prayer for the dead. They repeated the words over and over as first they cleansed the corpses, then dressed them from head to foot in new white clothes.
No sooner had they finished dressing the second figure than one of the masked priests entered. The village elder followed a few paces behind, the distance not born of respect, but exhaustion. As the priest signaled for the women to depart, the old man slouched against the wall. He shivered, despite the heavy winter clothes he wore. Now and then, the sudden chattering of his teeth interrupted his recitation of the simple prayer for the dead. I knew then that he would soon be confined to the sickroom himself, awaiting with dread the final visit of the Weeping Ones.
A full dozen more of the masked priests came in to retrieve the bodies. They hoisted the corpses onto litters and carried them from the room with the same cold effici
ency displayed by the priest visiting the sick men the night before. For all their silent tears, they did not act like sorrowful men. If the weight of those deaths pressed heavy upon their hearts, it did not show in their bearing. They were interchangeable in appearance save for the yellow symbols upon the mask of their leader and the silver chain he now wore wrapped around his wrist. I thought nothing of that detail then, though its significance came clear to me soon after the Weeping Ones departed with the dead and someone finally answered my calls for Murray.
“The other soldier left?” I repeated, incredulous. The elder was even then being made comfortable in one of the sickroom beds, his thin form so racked with shivering that he could not speak to me. That left the villager who, in his broken English, had asked Murray that first day to stop the weeping. The meaning of that phrase was chillingly clear to me now.
“He go last night,” the young man said. “Not come back.”
I could not imagine Murray deserting me. Neither would he leave without some explanation. I remembered his comments about keeping the pests from bothering the dying men. Had he gone to the Weeping Ones to convince them to stay away? It seemed a foolhardy thing to do, but on reflection, so did carrying a wounded and possibly dying comrade along the corpse river after Maiwand.
It was at that moment I recalled the silver chain. It had not been there the previous night, and seemed out of place on the priest’s person. Even so, it looked familiar.
The Saint Christopher medal. If Murray had left to confront the Weeping Ones, he would have taken it with him . . .
The natives looked on in puzzled amusement when I pushed myself out of bed and struggled into my clothes. It proved a difficult task, my left arm still all but useless to me. But I managed somehow to dress, rig a sling, and check to see that my service revolver was fully loaded. If the priests held Murray hostage, I would free him. If they had murdered him, I would recover his body for Christian burial. I never bothered to consider how either task might be accomplished by one man with an Adams .450 and a wound that threatened to reopen at any moment. After all that Murray had done, the obligation was upon me to do for him anything, everything that I could.
Shadows over Baker Street Page 11
