Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘Do they really?’ William asked, raising both eyebrows with genuine surprise. ‘I mean, I just wrote wha’ I felt about you, in, er, in the kind ay language tha’ I thought you’d enjoy. I wouldnae call it true poetry, as such, I’m just a—’

  She pressed a finger against his lips, silencing him.

  ‘Hush, my warrior poet. I’ll not have any more of this “I’m nothing but a stable boy” talk. You are what you make yourself, and you’ll remain a stable boy forever if you convince yourself of it in your mind, but by the same token you can walk as an emperor among men … if you will it.’

  ‘I can only hope and pray fir such loftiness, Aurora. Tae be sure, it’d be a good sight easier fir us if I was an actual emperor. Your father, why, he’d be mighty well impressed wi’ me, no?’

  Attired in the finery of his navy blue and white 17th Lancers dress uniform, William certainly did look a lot more dashing and dapper than he had as a stable hand. However, despite appearances, he was still a mere private in rank, and this, combined with the reputation of enlisted soldiers as being uncouth ruffians, would have done nothing to endear him to Aurora’s father. Neither of them wished to dwell too long on this unfortunate truth.

  ‘William the Magnificent, they would call you,’ Aurora cried with a bell-like laugh. ‘You’re halfway there, dressed in that fancy uniform.’

  William guessed that she was exaggerating to placate his feelings of inadequacy. While he did cut a fine figure in his uniform, even the dress uniform of a private was a far cry from the extravagance of an officer’s getup, replete with epaulettes, gold piping, lampasses, lanyards, and rows of medals. An officer’s commission remained William’s goal, although after the first few months of training, that prize seemed to have become infinitely more difficult to attain, and this had caused a certain creeping, insidious hopelessness to slither through the pillars of William’s mind, haunting both his dreams and waking hours. He dared not reveal this pessimism and dread to Aurora, though. He smiled, a little too broadly, and squeezed her hand before he replied, hoping that she would not notice the glinting specks of dismay and worry rolling pinball-like around his eyes.

  ‘Aye, William the Magnificent!’ he exclaimed, his put-on ebullience perhaps a tad too enthusiastic. ‘Emperor ay all four corners ay the Earth, wi’ the most beautiful, magnanimous an’ intelligent Empress Aurora at his side. Together we’d rule the length an’ breadth ay the known world, an’ heal all ills, an’ make right all wrongs, would we no’?’

  She stopped and turned to face him, wrapping her arms around his neck and gazing with blazing intensity into his eyes.

  ‘Do you really mean that, William? If you were to be emperor of the entire earth, you would have me as your queen?’

  ‘You an’ only you, m’lady,’ he answered without hesitation, with the absolute conviction in his words crystallised in his piercing stare.

  ‘And for my emperor, I would have no other,’ she murmured, leaning in to kiss him.

  He pulled away before her lips reached his, darting uneasy glances to his left and right.

  ‘Aurora! There are people around, we cannae—’

  ‘Oh come on, it’s a Wednesday afternoon! There’s hardly anyone around. That family over there is entirely focused on the sandcastles their children are building, and I doubt the old dames behind us in their heavy frocks can even see us at this distance.’

  ‘I just dunnae want you tae get in trouble, m’lady. If someone were tae see you, you know, um, er, kissing a lowly trooper in public, wi’ your hair all loose an’ unbound, as it is, an—’

  She leaned in quickly, silencing his protests with a languid, smouldering kiss that left them both gasping and tingling with sizzling delight.

  ‘Aurora, lass,’ he panted, ‘you cannae just dae tha’! What if someone—’

  His protesting only encouraged her to do it again, giggling with sultry glee into his mouth as their tongues danced a hidden, sensual tango.

  ‘I begged father to allow me to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in London,’ she said after they disengaged from the kiss, ‘when I found out you were to be stationed here at Brighton, because it is a short train ride of a few hours. Now here we are, on the opposite end of the island to my father. I highly doubt that he has spies following me around, and furthermore, I also doubt that any of these people on this mostly empty beach have any idea of who either of us are. Stop fretting so, William! If I want to kiss you, I’ll do so. And I want to, right now!’

  Once more she wrapped her arms around William’s neck, and pulled him in close to kiss him with drawn-out, knee-weakening, heart-thundering bliss in the chill of the late spring afternoon. The instant her hungry lips met his, all resistance on his part crumbled, and it was all he could do to not collapse to the ground in a stupor, so exquisite was the sensation.

  ‘Aurora,’ he managed to utter after they were done, ‘I understand what you you’re sayin’, but we dunnae know who’s watching. Perhaps one ay these people will be so offended by the sight that they’ll call a bobby over, you know. I’ll get a hefty floggin’ back at the barracks if it was found out that I was, you know, kissing a lady in public. I love you madly, but we’ve got tae be more careful. I couldnae bear fir anything tae happen that would tear us apart.’

  Aurora sighed, her countenance crumpling into a frown.

  ‘You’re no fun, William. You’re always so serious these days! What happened to the carefree stable boy I used to know?’

  ‘He’s still here,’ said William, who couldn’t help but smile. ‘He’s just a wee bit more cautious, is all. Say, you havenae shown me your sketch book this week. Let’s have a gander at your newest works, then.’

  With a shy smile Aurora took her sketch book out of her bag and handed it to William.

  ‘I’ve done a number of new ones this past week,’ she said with a glimmer of pride dancing in her eyes. ‘I hope you like them.’

  William flipped through the book slowly, taking his time to analyse and appreciate each and every drawing as they continued their stroll along the beach. He gazed up at her with unabashed wonder in his eyes.

  ‘These drawings, Aurora … why, they’re utterly, incredibly, amazingly, er, eh, amazing! By Jove, these are bloody fantastic!’

  ‘William!’ she laughed. ‘Such language in the presence of a lady!’

  ‘I cannae help it, Aurora! Your drawings have impressed me so much, that there’s no way fir me tae exercise restraint in my praises for you.’

  She squeezed his hand and gave him a peck on the cheek.

  ‘You’re so sweet, William. I can tell that you honestly do mean that, and that means the world to me.’

  ‘I dae, m’lady. The quality of your artwork is truly astounding.’

  ‘Thank you, my warrior poet. Let’s get off the beach and have a wander through the town, shall we?’

  Half an hour later, during their exploration of the town, they came across a book shop.

  ‘Let’s go and have a look inside,’ Aurora suggested.

  ‘All right. Let’s have a quick look at the newspapers out there at the front first. They’re too expensive tae buy, but we can have a look at what’s on the front page.’

  They strolled over to where the handful of newspapers was stacked, and William stopped dead when he saw the headline splayed across the newspaper. All of the blood drained from his face, and, at the realisation of what the words he was staring at meant for him, his heart started thumping with the dread-laden resonance of a doom drum resounding through the darkness of a cannibal-infested jungle.

  ‘Aurora,’ he uttered, pointing a quivering finger at the front page.

  She sucked in a sharp gasp of horror the moment she read the headline.

  ‘No,’ she whispered, choking on the word as if it was a splintered bone in her throat. ‘No, no, no…’

  The words tore like malevolent, sharp-clawed beetle mandibles through the young lovers’ eyes and squirted noxious spurts of crushing des
pair and corrosive fear into their very brains, for it was stated, in ominous starkness, that Britain had just declared war on Russia.

  PART SEVEN

  25

  MARGARET

  5th October 2020. T’Kalanjathu

  ‘Ting…’

  The whisper drifted from Margaret’s lips as she awoke from a fitful slumber. For a few moments panic blared its clamorous howl in her ears, and her heart boosted her pulse into turbo-drive as she tried to figure out exactly where she was; it felt as if she had merely pushed through a membrane that divided one nightmare from the next.

  It all came rushing back as consciousness came into being. The teen soldiers who could assume the form of animals, the ancient African city, and the General. Could it all be real? If so, how? Margaret gripped her wrist and squeezed it hard, digging her nails into her freckled white flesh.

  Pain.

  She let go and ran her fingertips along the stone wall next to her. It was there all right, undeniably present in its cold, unmoving solidity. There was no doubt about it; this was all too real, too detailed, too insane, even, to be a hallucination or conjuration. Somehow, she was here, now, in this situation, as utterly surreal as it was. A knock at her door jarred her from her semi-trance, and she sat bolt upright on the bed. Glancing down at her torso, she noticed only now that she was naked.

  ‘Uh, hold on,’ she called out. ‘Give me a minute!’

  ‘Yes Doctor,’ came a muffled voice from the other side of the door.

  Margaret peered across the room and saw the iron bathtub, and memories of the previous evening started to meld together into some sort of vaguely coherent sequence of events. She remembered the General speaking to her, and four of his soldiers heating up the tub with propane torches. In her there was a recollection of him leaving her a towel and clothes – military fatigues, yes. She had gotten undressed, climbed into the water, heated to a near-perfect temperature, and as soon as she had immersed herself, the weariness had hit her. That was about all she could remember: a wall of exhaustion, crashing into her.

  ‘Snap out of it, Margaret,’ she said loudly to herself. ‘Figure it out later. The clothes, get yourself dressed!’

  Neatly folded in a pile on a shelf were the military fatigues. All her other clothes, and everything she had been carrying with her, had been removed. Panic prickled its nettle-thorns along her skin; what about the phone? Where was it?

  My only pictures of Ting are on it! How could he have taken it?! He knew, with that awful, mind-reading trick, he knew how much Ting meant to me! How could he have done that?! That monster … that absolute monster! Why, he is the—

  ‘Dr Green? May I come in now?’

  The voice on the other side of the door forced her to gather her fear-scattered thoughts together.

  ‘Uh, just hold on, gimme thirty seconds,’ she yelled as she hurriedly pulled on the military fatigues.

  There were also some sturdy canvas army boots at the foot of her bed, along with a clean pair of socks. Margaret put the socks on and squeezed her feet into the boots, which, once laced up, seemed to fit quite comfortably. She then glanced at her reflection in a polished bronze mirror. Never before had she dressed in any clothing that had had any sort of militaristic connotations, not even in childhood, for games or dress-up parties; devout Jehovah’s Witness parents had seen to that. However, something about how she now looked in the camouflage gear appealed to a deeply repressed part of her subconscious, despite her overt anti-war leanings. Perhaps, she surmised, it was yet another embodiment of rebellion against her parents and their religion, both of which she had turned her back on over three decades ago.

  It felt good to be in clean, crisp clothes again, even if their cut and style happened to represent everything that she stood against in the world. She ran her fingers through her hair, which, for the first time in months, was silky and grease-free. Her skin felt soft again; scrubbing it with a pumice stone in the bath had seen to that. Despite the circumstances, she allowed herself a quick smile.

  ‘I’m ready, you can come in,’ she announced.

  The door opened, and a thin teenage boy attired in one of the ornate Victorian-style uniforms entered the room, his steps measured with brisk precision. He stared straight ahead and, it would seem, refused to make eye contact with Margaret, his face a mask of false serenity, bronze-cast in its immovability. He performed a stiff military salute with his right hand.

  ‘Dr Green, the General has sent me to escort you to the dining hall,’ he said in his freshly broken voice; he seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the still-alien baritone notes that emerged from his larynx.

  ‘I, er, thank you,’ she stammered.

  She noticed that the teen had a pistol holstered on his left hip, while a machete was sheathed on his right, and a number of throwing knives in bands were strapped around both thighs. The boy’s frame was willowy and insubstantial, but there was nonetheless a powerful solidity to his wiriness. Margaret immediately noticed that the deep ebony skin of half of his face and most of his right arm was a molten-looking ooze of horrendous burn scars. She couldn’t help herself – she had seen so many similar wounds and scars – so she turned to face the teen directly and spoke to him.

  ‘What happened to your arm and face? Those are war wounds, aren’t they?’

  The youth’s blank expression did not waver.

  ‘Yes. The Lord’s Resistance Army did this to me,’ he answered calmly. ‘They came to my village, raped and murdered my mother, sisters and cousins, beheaded my father and older brother, and then poured petrol on me and set me alight. I was six years old.’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ Margaret gasped, her jaw slack and her voice hoarse with genuine pathos and sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry, kiddo, I really am.’

  The boy shrugged, his expression as coolly neutral as ever.

  ‘I try not to think too much about it. It was in the past … and it is best to let go of the past.’

  She thought it odd that this child soldier’s English was so good, even down to his accent, which was a reasonable simulacrum of that of a British public schoolboy, and thus far more intelligible to her than those of most of the Congolese she had encountered in her time here. Again, she couldn’t resist the desire to satiate her curiosity.

  ‘How did you learn to speak such good English?’

  ‘All of us can speak many languages fluently. We are taught here in the city, at a school that we attend six days a week. We have teachers from Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Norway, Russia, Brazil, The UAE, Japan, India and China.’

  Margaret raised an eyebrow and took a few moments to digest this surprising information. She stared again at the boy’s scars.

  ‘Would you mind telling me a little about your experiences prior to coming here?’ she asked. ‘If you don’t mind, of course.’

  The boy continued to stare straight ahead, still avoiding eye contact. He spoke calmly and fluently as he answered her question, but no emotion whatsoever seemed to colour his speech.

  ‘The LRA came to my village late at night, a few hours after dinner, when we were all preparing to sleep. My parents tried to hide us children under the bed and in the closet of our hut, but the LRA soldiers who broke the door down found us anyway. Then … then they did all of the things I told you about.’

  Such stories had become all too familiar to Margaret in her time spent working here, and at this stage all she could do in response was to sigh and shake her head.

  ‘The General saved me,’ the youth suddenly announced, unprompted.

  ‘He did?’

  ‘The LRA soldiers left me to die in the jungle after they massacred my village and burned me. I lay in the bush for two days and nights, trapped between this world and the next. A great elephant came to me. I thought that he was a spirit from the afterlife, coming to escort me through the doorway called Death, into the life that comes after this one. But he wasn’t … and he didn’t. He sniffed at me with his trunk for a long time, and the
n he gored me with his tusk.’

  Margaret’s eyes widened with shock at this revelation, and her jaw dropped.

  ‘But, but, how the heck did he save you?! It sounds as if he was trying to kill you! Trying to murder a wounded six-year-old child!’

  For the first time, unbridled emotion lit up in the boy’s eyes, like a match struck in the dark. It was obvious that he was trying very hard to conceal it, but a warmth nonetheless began to glow beneath his skin, crackling like burning coals in the night behind the shine of his eyes; it was there, and it was undeniable. Admiration? Certainly. Love? Quite likely. Margaret didn’t know how to feel at this observation. She wanted to feel rage, to feel disgust, to conclude that what this child felt for the General was either Stockholm Syndrome or the result of a form of brainwashing or mind control … but she could not deny that, at least in terms of what her intuition was telling her, it was simpler, or, perhaps, a lot more complex than that. Whatever it was, though, it was genuine, and in addition it seemed quite unshakeable. A shudder of unease passed through Margaret’s body at this particular realisation.

  The boy soldier, meanwhile, smiled while he talked about the General, and now all the carefully constructed restraint he seemed to have worked so hard to maintain crumbled away, and unbridled emotion shone through.

  ‘To reach salvation one must pass through the trial of pain. If he had not gored me with his tusk, I would have died in that forest. After he gored me, he picked my body up with his trunk and took me away. I don’t remember the journey. The goring made me very sick, but after a lot of pain and fevers and nightmares, it eventually healed me. It gave me strength, energy, health … it gave me life … new life. And he didn’t only heal my body, he also healed my mind. The General used his power to purge the evil of corrupt human nature from my mind, and instead he replaced it with justness, with empathy, with compassion, with kindness. He turned me into the being I am now. I am beyond human, like him.’