The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  It was unbearable. Howard reached over and took the Snider-Enfield rifle from one of Hamilton’s sappers crouching next to him. It had a repair behind the receiver, a darker piece of wood, but it was sound. He pulled the hammer to half-cock, flipped open the breechblock with a sharp turn of his right hand, pulled back the ejector and tipped out the spent cartridge case. He spat on his finger, pushed it into the chamber and wiped out the fouling, then smeared the stinking black residue on the railing. He reached over to the leather case on the sapper’s belt and took out the last remaining cartridge. He was acting without thought now, his whole being focused on the mechanical acts of the drill. He dropped the cartridge into the breech and pushed it home, then snapped shut the block. He brought the rifle to his shoulder, pointing the muzzle a few inches below his target. With his right thumb he pulled back the hammer to full-cock, and he hooked his forefinger around the trigger. He closed his left eye, and raised the muzzle steadily until the foresight was in line with the notch of the backsight. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he pressed the trigger, without the least motion elsewhere, his eye on the object in his sights.

  It was a target, nothing more.

  The rifle kicked against his shoulder, but he seemed to hear no sound, as if his senses had frozen the moment before, sealing the image on his retina like a photographic negative. All he felt was a dizzying speed, as if he himself were hurtling at twelve hundred feet per second toward his target. He blinked, and the image was gone. His ears were ringing, and all he could see was a cloud of smoke from the muzzle, and then a swirling maelstrom on the foreshore. He let the rifle fall on its butt and lurched heavily forward on one knee, desperately trying to stop retching. He heard a bellow from Sergeant O’Connell and then the immense crack of a volley from the line of riflemen beside him. He turned and saw O’Connell’s face bearing down on him, flushed, eyes red-rimmed, the very image of Fury unleashed. He saw the lips move, then heard the voice. “That should do it for you, sir. Fucking cannibals.” Howard looked around and saw Wauchope staring at him, and he breathed hard. He must stay in control. He straightened up and looked at O’Connell. “There will be hell to pay if we cause a massacre, Sergeant. The civil authorities will send us out of here in chains. We can only shoot if we’re fired on. I’m trusting you to exercise restraint.”

  “You put that boy out of his misery, sir,” O’Connell said. “That took uncommon courage, sir. God bless you.”

  Howard felt faint, and turned quickly back to the rail, holding it tight. Wauchope took out his revolver, spinning the cylinder to check that the chambers were loaded. He shoved it back in his holster and put his hand on Howard’s shoulder. “Now’s the time to go and find our sappers and Bebbie,” he said quietly. “O’Connell’s volley dropped the devils who had been tormenting that little boy, but the rebel leader and the rest had already moved to the other two victims. I fear the sacrifice has taken place. But the rebels are too far gone with toddy to see us go. They’re perfectly besotted.”

  Walker came up from where he had been operating on the wounded sapper, wiping his hands on his apron. “Those who aren’t dead drunk will be going home with their pound of flesh,” he said. “They have to bury their offering in their own plot of land before nightfall, to ensure the efficacy of the sacrifice. They will be dispersing far and wide to their villages.”

  Hamilton looked at Howard. “Well?” Howard fingered his own holster, and looked again across the river. His mouth felt dry, and his heart was fluttering. He was not sure what he had just done, or if it was a horrible dream. He took a deep breath and nodded. “Very well. The jemadar and Sergeant O’Connell can look after things here.” He glanced up the deck to the muttadar, who was cowering beside the seven-pounder gun, clutching his bamboo tube. “And the muttadar can come with us. He can bring his precious cargo. Even if Bebbie’s beyond our help, at least we can uphold our end of the bargain.” He looked up at the wall of black cloud that was now towering over them, and felt the drops of rain on his face. “It’s time we got his sacred idol back where it belongs. And got our sappers the hell out of there.”

  LIEUTENANT JOHN HOWARD HITCHED UP HIS SWORD and eased himself back against the burnt stump of a tamarind tree, then drained the last of his water bottle. He had watched the dozen Madrasi sappers take up position around the edge of the jungle clearing, and now he could relax for a moment. He swatted at a mosquito that had bitten through the thin cotton of his uniform, which was soaked with sweat and clinging to him like a second skin. The smear of blood on his leg could have come from the mosquito or from the myriad small cuts where the jungle grass had slashed his face and arms as if with knives. He was grateful to Surgeon Walker for insisting that he bind his calves and ankles with puttees of coarse cloth. Even so he knew that any open wound out here could be bad news, and he hoped they were back on board the river steamer under Walker’s watchful eye before any virulence set in. He pulled out his fob watch. Four hours to sundown. Another hour and they would turn back. He knew with utter conviction that they could not survive the night out here.

  He put away the watch. His right hand was still shaking, the hand that had pulled the trigger less than an hour before, and he clenched it into a fist, willing it to stop. With his other hand he unfastened his holster flap and extracted his Colt revolver, checking the cylinder to see that the percussion caps were still firmly lodged on each chamber.

  “You ought to get yourself a cartridge revolver, you know.” The officer squatting alongside had been eyeing him with concern, and Howard realized that Wauchope must have seen his shaking hand.

  “My father used this to defend us during the mutiny. It worked then. Call it superstition.”

  “If it wasn’t for the noise giving us away, I’d be sorely tempted to use mine on those dogs,” Wauchope said. “In Afghanistan I saw a pack of wild hounds rip a wounded man to pieces in seconds.”

  Howard holstered the revolver, then looked around the clearing. They were in a patch of tangled thorn and scrub that had once been a native Kóya clearing, abandoned after the soil had become exhausted and now reverting to jungle. At intervals half a dozen dogs sat silently watching them, long, lean beasts like the dogs the regiment kept for shirkar, for hunting fowl and small game in the hills around the cantonment at Bangalore. These were hunting dogs too, and had paced silently alongside them as they made their way up from the riverbank along the jungle path, through dense groves of tamarind eighty, even ninety feet high, festooned with huge creepers and vines dripping with condensation. It had been eerily quiet all the way, as if the beasts and birds of the jungle were in limbo, uncertain whether the monsoon was about to break over them, whether to cower down or to burst out in their usual deafening cacophony. Or perhaps they were fearful of another presence, the evil spirits the muttadar said lurked in the jungle after a sacrifice, waiting while the natives returned to their villages with their bloody strips of flesh—spirits that would only be sated when the offerings were buried.

  Howard felt he was in the grip of an overactive imagination, tipped into some kind of unreason he could scarcely control, and he closed his eyes. It was the first glimmerings of fever, perhaps, an unfamiliar state for him. He looked at the dogs again, and felt his bile rise. Hunting dogs, but gorged on carrion of the most bestial kind, their maws still glistening red and dripping. The shrieking mob had left them the bones and gristle by the riverbank, and the dogs had remained behind, lapping at the bloody mire in the pit. For a dreadful moment Howard felt as if the dogs were here for him, as if his act in pulling the trigger had not dispelled the awful ritual but made him part of it, as if he had become a sacrificial priest who might provide another ghastly feast before the day was done.

  “It’s hopeless,” Wauchope said. “I fancied I saw a heliograph flash a moment ago, but it must have been a trick of the eye, a brief ray of sunlight on wet vegetation. There’s no chance now.” He began folding away the instrument in front of him, a wooden tripod with a small mirror on top and a lever
for tilting it to flash Morse code. Howard snapped back to reality, and opened his compass. He took a bearing, then shook his head. The champagne quality of the jungle air recorded by Lieutenant Everest sixty years before only came after the deluge, and that had yet to happen. When they had halted in the clearing ten minutes earlier, an attempt at heliograph signaling had seemed possible, with the jungle-shrouded hilltops still visible through the mist in the valleys. But now a heavy fog had descended and the damp penetrated everywhere, even condensing in the bores of the sappers’ rifles. He glanced at Wauchope. “Were it not for the prodigious vegetation the Shamrock should still be within our line of sight,” he said. “But according to Hamilton, from now on we drop down into the jungle beside a stream until we reach the village. You may as well stash the heliograph here. It’s no use to us now.”

  Another figure in khaki and a pith helmet came up through the tangled vegetation, then stooped over at the edge of the clearing to pick up something from the ground. His eyes were ringed with exhaustion, and Howard wondered if he had been right to let Hamilton lead them back to this place so soon after his arduous escape from the rebels. Once again he let his anger with Assistant Commissioner Bebbie course through him, the sustaining emotion that seemed to keep him level. If it had only been Beddie who had needed saving, they would have left him to the tigers and hyenas, but the fact that he had four sappers guarding him made it imperative that they do all they could to mount a rescue.

  Hamilton slumped beside them and tossed out a handful of spent Snider cartridges. “This is the place all right. This is where we stopped and gave them a volley,” he panted, his voice dry and hoarse. “We dropped three, maybe four, but they took their fallen and bolted into the jungle.” He looked intently at Howard, his eyes strange, burning, the beginnings of fever. “We use rifles and bayonets the length of halberds, deploying infantry tactics designed for the field of Waterloo. We need smoothbore carbines, buckshot, revolvers, knives. We need to follow them into the jungle, track them down, kill them as a beast kills its prey. We need to play their game but get better at it, let animal instinct take over from decency. We need to become savages.”

  Howard looked at him. “Most of all, we need to find the wretched Bebbie and get out of here. You say you can’t choose between the trails ahead?”

  “We were being pressed back. Only now do I realize there are three trails up the valley out of this clearing. We’ll have to trust the muttadar” He jerked his head toward the semi-naked figure squatting by himself on the edge of the clearing, his head swathed in the maroon turban Beddie had given him as a sign of government authority, his hands clutching his precious length of bamboo. Howard took a deep breath, and looked hard at Hamilton. Perhaps they were all becoming unhinged. Per haps it was the fever. He saw the yellow eyeballs, the blanched cheeks. He remembered Surgeon Walker’s words. A low fever of the malignant, lingering type. He felt a sudden chill, and a shiver ran through him. His hand was still shaking. He hoped to God it was just his nerves. He looked at Wauchope. “All right. Tell the havildar to keep the men five paces apart. Rifles at half-cock. And remember, these people can track us like tigers.”

  Half an hour later they squatted down beside a trickling stream deep in the jungle. Since leaving the clearing they had descended into a dark tunnel of foliage, all sense of the sky blotted out by the thick canopy. It was a pestilential place, infested with clouds of mosquitoes that seemed to rise from every stagnant pool, bird-sized spiders that leapt into the men’s hair every time a helmet was removed, and leeches that lurked in every damp spot and attached themselves without the slightest provocation. Now it was as if they had come up for air, the sky visible above them in patches of dark cloud lit up with distant flashes of sheet lightning. Howard wiped his dripping face and pushed his water bottle into a brackish pool in the stream. Suddenly a shot rang out. Howard dropped the flask and unholstered his revolver, jerking upright. Hamilton was standing a few yards ahead with his own revolver leveled at the ground. A giant cobra had slid across the path, and Hamilton had foolishly shot it. Howard cursed him under his breath for the noise. And it was only wounded. The cobra leapt up, bouncing and writhing around like a demented dancer, and attached itself to the leg of one of the sappers. The man shrieked and fell insensible to the ground. Hamilton unsheathed his sword and decapitated the snake. The muttadar gestured wildly, then vanished into the jungle and quickly reappeared chewing a ball of green matter, which he forced into the sapper’s mouth. Within seconds the sapper opened his eyes, sat bolt upright and began hyperventilating, his breathing calming down as he was held by two other soldiers.

  Howard looked in some astonishment at the scene, reassured himself that the sapper truly was recovering, then reholstered his revolver and began filling up his bottle again. The muttadar watched him do it and then bounded up and pushed his hand away, and pointed at the khukri knife in the belt of one of the sappers. Howard looked at him quizzically, then nodded at the havildar, who leveled his big percussion pistol at the muttadar and gestured for him to go ahead. The muttadar took the khukri and went over to a grove of thick-stemmed bamboo growing on the stream bank. He tapped the nearest one just above a knot with the back side of the khukri, and they heard a dull sloshing sound. He stood back and swung the khukri at the bamboo, slashing it sideways to avoid creating splinters. A cupful of clear sparkling water gushed out onto the ground. The sappers quickly came up behind him, holding out their empty canteens as he went from trunk to trunk, expertly slashing with the razor-sharp blade.

  “Give the water first to Sapper Narrainsamy,” Howard said in Hindi. “We need him to be able to walk.”

  He watched the sapper who was leaning against a tamarind root, being passed a water flask by the havildar. Now Howard looked around apprehensively. The sound of the gunshot and the shriek had ignited the jungle, and the few cautious chatters and peeps had become an explosive cacophony of screeches and yelps and howls. Somewhere in the background came the throaty rumble of a tiger, rising to a mighty roar that shook the ground. The dogs that had been with them all along suddenly bolted, yipping frantically and disappearing into the jungle. The sappers all dropped their canteens and grasped their weapons. The muttadar fell to the ground in a ball, shaking and moaning and chanting a mantra to himself, words that Howard had heard him say before.

  “He says it’s a konda devata, a possessed female in the shape of a tiger,” Howard murmured to Wauchope. “She’ll devour anyone staying in the forest at the time of a sacrifice. It’s she who should lick the blood of the sacrificial victims, not the dogs.”

  “A real tiger is enough for me,” Wauchope muttered, revolver in hand.

  “Sorcery and superstition,” Howard said in Hindi, nodding sternly at the havildar and speaking a few words of reassurance to the sappers who had taken fright. He remembered his own nervous imagination in the jungle clearing, but he steeled himself to dispel it. They were all depending on him. He looked at the streambed, and then at Hamilton. “Do you recognize this?”

  Hamilton nodded. “We left Bebbie and the sappers about half a mile upstream from here. The stream was nearly dry when we came down, but it’s a narrow defile and will become a torrent with the rain. The jungle on either side is impenetrable. You can see the sky through the canopy. It’s nearly black. We need to move.”

  Howard led them forward. At first the gradient was tolerably level, and the streambed was firm sand and stones. Here and there outcrops of deep red sandstone broke through the bank on either side, and giant moss-and fern-covered boulders forced them to struggle up the bank and back down again to the streambed. As the gradient increased the streambed narrowed into a small ravine, the eroded sandstone banks on either side rising twenty feet or more above their heads. They could now see evidence of the previous monsoon, where the river had threshed over the rock in a raging torrent, leaving uprooted trees and rolling rocks down the bed. The banks were too high to climb now, and Howard knew they stood no chance if the monsoon brok
e. Already there were flashes of forked lightning and distant peals of thunder. The wild beasts seemed to be howling in concert with the elements, sometimes jarringly discordant, sometimes to the same beat, like a devilish orchestra tuning up, a preamble to the unleashing of the heavens that would surely come.

  Howard tried to ignore his fear and struggled on, a few yards ahead of the others. As he rounded a boulder, something rolled down the muddy bank just in front of him. It was a red gourd the size of a human head, and he kicked it forward unthinkingly. As he did so he saw a marking. He sloshed ahead, turned it over then quickly stamped his foot into it before the sappers could see. It had been a crude representation of a man hanging on a gallows. The muttadar had told him about these. They were more than just a warning. They were beacons to the konda devata, meant to attract the evil spirit like the smell of dead meat to a hyena. Howard’s heart was pounding, and he looked up at the impenetrable wall of the jungle above the riverbank, blinking away the drops of rain. He could see nothing. But it was not only a tiger that was stalking them. They were close to the village, and there were others in the jungle, flitting forms. He looked ahead along the boulders to where the streambed rose into a tumbling rapids, and he fancied he saw a child, a form in a shawl with arms outstretched, beckoning him. He caught his breath. He must be hallucinating. He remembered the riverside scene, what he had done, and the image was gone. He struggled forward until he reached the base of the rapids. The stream was already rising against them, a red-brown torrent where it cut through the sandstone. Two freshly felled trees on either side were exuding dark-red sap that stained the banks. It was as if he were walking into a gush of blood. He wondered if he was being drawn into a world of sorcery and horror that he had made his own when he pulled that trigger. He half-fell forward, then suddenly sank up to his waist. He was caught just in time by Wauchope and Hamilton, who had come up behind him.