The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  “You’re welcome at the IMU engineering lab anytime,” Costas said enthusiastically, handing the peridot back to Rebecca and pocketing the lapis lazuli. “But you’d soon get bored with gemstones. There’s some incredible underwater robotic stuff I’ve just been working on. A lot of military applications, right up your street I’d imagine.”

  “Really?” Pradesh said. “Tell me more.”

  “Plenty of time for that later,” Jack said, shielding his eyes and spying the Lynx helicopter coming in low over the shoreline from Seaquest II He felt the excitement well up inside him. “Are we ready?”

  Pradesh nodded, and pointed at two men in jeans and T-shirts with rucksacks and G3 automatic rifles. “A couple of my sappers,” he said. “I don’t want to aggravate the tribals by showing up in the jungle with soldiers, but there’s a very real threat from Maoist insurgents. I don’t want to be responsible for the disappearance of the world’s most famous underwater archaeologist.”

  “And his sidekick,” Costas added.

  Rebecca looked dolefully at Jack, holding up the peridot. “If I’ve earned my credentials like Hiemy says, does that mean I can come along now too?”

  “Not this time.” Jack eyed Hiebermeyer. “But Hiemy might let you drive the Zodiac back. Slowly.”

  “Oh, cool.” She put the stone back in the finds tray and clapped her hands.

  Jack grinned, and made a whirling motion with his fingers to Costas. “Good to go?”

  “Good to go.”

  THREE HOURS AFTER LEAVING THE ROMAN SITE AT Arikamedu, Jack sat beside Costas and Pradesh on the foredeck of a pontoon boat as it chugged west up the broad expanse of the Godavari River, its bow wave cresting against the current. Jack was riding his own personal wave of excitement. This was his chance to fulfill a dream, to tread the same path as his ancestor, to discover what Lieutenant John Howard had seen in the jungle that day in 1879. Jack grasped the rail and looked out, preparing himself They had flown by helicopter north from Arikamedu along the coast of India to the port of Cocanada, and then veered inland up the delta of the river. They had swept low over a million acres of paddy and sugar cane, flying through billowing clouds of sweet ferment where the sugar was being processed into jaggery. At Dowlaiswaram, some thirty miles from the coast, they had landed on the great dam that was responsible for the fertility of the delta, and Pradesh had shown them where the Madras Sappers had been based while they built the dam in the 1860s. The figures were still reeling through Jack’s mind as they transferred to the Godavari Steam Navigation Company pontoon boat above the dam for the trip into the jungle. Two thousand miles of irrigation channels, a five times increase in the acreage under cultivation. It had been one of the enduring achievements of British rule in India, yet as they went upstream, evidence of human mastery over nature diminished, and they saw only adaptation, acceptance, just as they had seen on the coast at Arikamedu. Like all great rivers that swelled with floodwaters, like the Nile or the Mississippi, all attempts to harness the water of the Godavari presented only an illusion of success, ephemeral bastions against an overwhelming force that could sweep away the grandest human achievements in a mere instant.

  “The Godavari is the second holiest river in India, after the Ganges,” Pradesh said, as he steered the boat into the central channel. “I wanted you to experience the final fifteen miles of our trip by river so you could empathize with those soldiers in 1879, going up into the unknown on their paddle steamer, with no idea of what lay ahead.”

  “Except mosquitoes,” Costas said, slapping his leg.

  Pradesh nodded. “By the end of the Rampa campaign, four-fifths of the troops had been laid low by malaria, and many had died. The Kóya people of the jungle have some degree of immunity. They believed the fever was the vengeance of their most dreaded demon, their konda devata, the tiger spirit.”

  Costas peered dubiously into the haze ahead, at the shapes of low-lying hills just discernible to the east. “Is the source of the river up there?”

  Pradesh shook his head. “Much farther west. Some say it pours from the mouth of a holy idol near Bombay. Some even say it’s joined by a subterranean channel to the Ganges, linking the great waterways of India together.”

  “Sounds like wishful thinking,” Jack said.

  “The engineer in me agrees, but it’s still an attractive concept. In India, everything from the north seems to flow down, to trickle to the south. Invaders like the Mongols, religions like Buddhism. But hardly any of it permeated the hill tracts, the jungle. Rampa district, where we’re going, wasn’t even surveyed until 1928. At the time of the 1879 rebellion, it was a big blank on the map. Even now there are hundreds of square miles which have only ever been visited by Kóya and other tribal hunters. Even the missionaries won’t go there.”

  For almost half an hour they carried on upstream without talking, watching the muddy banks as the river gradually constricted from over a mile in width to only a few hundred yards. They glimpsed oxen plowing paddies between lines of coconut palms. They passed women in wet saris bathing in the river, and others thrashing the rocks with washing, risking being swept away in the current. Men in loincloths hung low in the water against the gunwales of their boats, cooling off Everywhere they saw signs of decay or repair, it was hard to tell which. Jack realized that the tranquility of the scene belied the violence of the coming monsoon season, when the floodwaters would sweep away everything on the riverbanks before them.

  They passed a line of wooden posts in mid-stream, with the tattered remains of fishing nets bowed out in the current between them. To Jack it was as if the nets were there to catch history, fragments of the past dislodged from the jungle ahead. Since leaving Arikamedu, he had been trying to attune himself to the archaeology of rivers, places which could hold treasures, like the fleeces used to catch gold in mountain streams, but at other times were void, swept clear of anything tangible. It was a different kind of archaeology here, more elusive, with none of the certainties of a shipwreck.

  Like the coast at Arikamedu the human imprint on the riverbank seemed ephemeral, constantly reforming. The only permanent structure they saw was a beautiful white temple on a rocky island in the river, its roof a swirl of sculpted snakes above painted tiers of gold. Pradesh slowed the boat down, reached into a bowl and tossed a handful of flower petals into the water. “That’s Vishnu, asleep under the coiled snake Sesha, the five-headed one,” he said. “The deep blue, the blue of lapis lazuli, the color of Vishnu, is the color of eternity, of immortality.”

  “Are the jungle people Hindu?” Costas asked.

  Pradesh shook his head and opened up the throttle again, raising his voice above the noise. “Up ahead there’s a hill called Shiva, on the edge of the jungle. Naming it Shiva is a bit like putting a Christian cross on an old Roman temple, only here there was no attempt at proselytizing, no attempt to suppress the old beliefs. Hinduism’s like an archaeological site. Strip away the upper layers, and the old gods, the old religions, are all still there. Only where we’re going, there’s nothing to strip away. That temple’s the last bastion of the lowland people against the looming jungle ahead, a place where even their gods fear to go.”

  After that they saw fewer people along the shore, and then none. The open paddies gave way to scrub and then jungle, a dense green foliage that reached down the slopes and enveloped the shoreline, fringing the river with palmyra and coconut palms that hung over silvery stretches of beach. Mist rose off the trees and tumbled down the riverbanks, leaving a narrow passage in the center of the river where their vision was clear. Soon the jungle-shrouded hills rose three hundred meters or more on either side of the river, the upper reaches barely visible in foggy blue-green silhouette.

  A long, flat boat came into view around a bend, drifting with the current, its engine thudding in idle. It was laden with piles of coconuts and lengths of tree trunk, tamarind and mahogany. A policeman in a shabby khaki uniform lounged in the stern, holding an old Lee-Enfield rifle and eyeing t
hem suspiciously as the boat slid past. Pradesh waved at him cheerfully. “The police have always been an issue up here,” he said. “The hill people see them as protectors of the lowlanders who are given forestry concessions, people who come and cut down their precious hardwoods. And you can hardly imagine that chap standing up to Maoist terrorists, can you? But that opens up a whole other problem. If you militarize the police, you antagonize the hill people more, and if you send in the army to confront the Maoists, you risk a return to the situation in 1879. Sappers are the best option, because the hill people can see them doing useful things, building roads, clinics, school-houses. Sappers are soldiers too, but they are a different breed of men.”

  “So I can see,” Jack said, smiling.

  Pradesh throttled back and steered the boat out of the main current and into the eddy waters along the left bank, where the gentle puttering of the motor was drowned out by the screeches and chattering of a band of white-faced langur monkeys who leered at them from the treetops. The boat rounded a bend, and they saw paths leading up from a beach to low-set houses in a jungle clearing, the palm-frond roofs overshadowed by mango and gnarled tamarind trees. For the first time they saw the Kóya, dark, finely muscled men wearing only loincloths, standing under the fronds watching them. One of them sported a leopard skin with a peacock feather pendant hanging from his neck.

  “That’s the village of Puliramanaguden,” Pradesh said quietly. “It means ‘Place of the Tiger God.’”

  “Tigers,” Costas murmured. “Any elephants?”

  “Rarely, but plenty of gaur, the local bison. The Kóya call this stretch of jungle Pappikondalu, the Bison Hills. The bison are about the size of small elephants. I’ve heard them at night, thundering together through the jungle, roaring and panting like creatures from mythology. All you can see is the whites of their eyes. Even the tigers steer clear of them.”

  Costas grunted. “Another choice IMU holiday destination.”

  They went on farther, still enveloped by the mist along the bank, and reached another bend, the flow of the central channel now visible in the water ahead. Pradesh kept in the lee of the shore until they were only a few yards from the point of the bend, holding the boat almost at a standstill as he waited for the current to pull them out into mid-stream. Jack saw a woman sitting on the tangled roots of a banyan tree. She was very old, and blind. Her eyes were like those of an ancient statue, the paint gone and only the white remaining, yet Jack felt that she was staring directly at him, holding him fast. She seemed like a pietà, a mother anguished, mourning a lost child. Jack remembered the Victorian photo of the mother and child above the old chest in his cabin, his great-great grandmother and her baby. He looked up at the forest canopy above the woman, and through a break in the mist he saw the hills dark against the sky. He felt an intense sense of familiarity, and then it was gone. From around the point a water buffalo lurched into view, lunging on a halter tied to a stake, a sudden, violent movement that set Jack’s pulse racing. The current caught the boat and Pradesh gunned the engine, bringing them out into the central channel, away from the woman and around the point, until she was lost in the haze. The river widened and the mist lifted, and Jack knew they were there. The place exactly matched the description in his great-great-grandfather’s diary. Pradesh steered the boat back into the still water beside the left bank, and nudged the prow into the beach until it stuck fast. Jack gazed at the opposite shore, a sandbar extending several hundred meters along another bend in the river where sediment had been pushed by the current. The sandbar was cut by a dry streambed he could just make out coming through the jungle. “Over there,” Pradesh said, pointing. “That’s where it happened.”

  “I know,” Jack replied quietly. “It’s just as I imagined it.”

  “Don’t expect to find anything from 1879 on the riverbank,” Pradesh said. “That sandbar’s swept away every year by the monsoon floodwater, and then reformed anew. We need to go to the riverside village you can just make out higher up, on the fringe of the jungle.”

  “We’re in your hands,” Jack said.

  Pradesh looked at his watch. “The helicopter’s due in an hour. It’ll fly us deeper into the jungle. My two sappers will be on board. I didn’t want to excite any hostility by having them with us on the river, but I don’t want to go into the jungle without them, meaning no disrespect to your nine-millimeter Beretta, Jack.”

  “You spotted it,” Jack said.

  “Just keep it out of sight. It’s a tinderbox up here. If any of the hill people who don’t know me suspect we’re government officials, then the game’s over. They’ll clam up completely. We’ll stop here for a break before going over to the village. It may seem odd in this heat, but I’m thirsty for tea.”

  Pradesh busied himself with the battered old kettle and Primus stove from the boat’s store box, and Costas disappeared discreetly ashore. Jack sat alone, looking around. They had left the mist in the narrows behind them and entered an oasis of light, as if the air had been cleansed. The beach opposite swept around in the shape of a sword, the sand a dazzling gold. Behind it rose shimmering tree trunks and great boulders of sandstone that had been scoured clean by the floods. Above that was the jungle canopy, myriad shades of green climbing the steep sides of the cliffs as they converged upstream in the great gorge of the Godavari.

  “Ahead of us, where the gorge narrows, the river’s only two hundred meters wide,” Pradesh said, handing him a glass of tea. “The hills on either side rise to over eight hundred meters, and the river’s very deep, almost a hundred meters.”

  Jack looked at the jungle-clad walls of the gorge. It was enticing, yet forbidding, like a high mountain pass that promised a lush valley beyond, but threatened grave peril in the crossing. To the few lowlanders who ventured here the promise was the Abode of the Immortals, the Heavenly City. To the first Europeans it was the fabled kingdom of Golconda, the Mountain of Light, where the Koh-i-noor diamond had been mined, somewhere beyond the gorge ahead. Yet before the arrival of steamboats this was the end of the river journey, and most who came here turned back, powerless to resist the current as it tumbled through the gorge, pushing their boats back and letting the river return them downstream to civilization. Jack peered into the water. It was murky, not with mud but with some other darkness, and the sunlight seemed to vanish into it. The canyon walls should have been reflected in the water, but instead he saw nothing. It was disconcerting, as if the river were a black hole that swallowed up reality, leaving him wondering whether the mist-shrouded shoreline was some kind of phantasm, almost too close to his boyhood image of this place to be real. He snapped out of his reverie as Costas came crashing back through the undergrowth and leapt onto the bow of the boat, a picture of dishevelment with his shorts barely on.

  “Something threaten your manhood?” Jack said.

  “Spiders,” Costas panted, sitting back, checking his legs anxiously. “Giant hairy spiders the size of saucers.”

  “The spiders are harmless, unless you provoke them,” Pradesh said, handing him a tea glass. “Just keep an eye out for the cobras. The Kóya use a root as an anti-venom, but I’ve never been able to find it.”

  “There’s always Jack’s Beretta,” Costas said.

  “Bad karma to shoot snakes,” Pradesh replied, wagging his finger. “Anyway, don’t worry. We’re not going trekking through the jungle. Jack wanted to retrace his ancestor’s footsteps, but I convinced him that we should go by helicopter. Jack agreed. He was concerned for your safety.”

  “My safety? Jack? Yeah, right, that would be a first,” Costas grumbled, wiping the sweat off his face and swatting a mosquito. “At least we’ve all taken our anti-malarials.”

  “That’s another thing,” Pradesh said hastily. “They don’t always work out here. But I know someone who can give us a little booster in the village.”

  Jack looked again at the scene, imagining it one hundred and thirty years before. “So what do you know about August the twentieth 1879?
”

  Pradesh eyed him keenly. “Well, you were right about what happened.”

  “Human sacrifice?”

  Pradesh looked at the riverbank. “I told you I was brought up near the Godavari River, in Dowlaiswaram. Well, my grandfather was actually a Kóya, from this place. The story of that day in 1879 became a kind of legend, kept secret, even from the anthropologists who occasionally came up here asking questions. As far as I know, what I’m about to tell you has never been told to any other outsiders.”

  “Go on,” Jack said.

  “The rebels put on a spectacular show. They executed their police captives on that beach, in full view of the sappers on the river steamer trapped on the sandbank. But they also stirred the rest of the Kóya into a frenzy, feeding them alcohol and god knows what else. The tribals carried out three sacrifices that day, the full meriah. A man, a woman and a child.”

  “A child too?” Jack murmured.

  “Later, the authorities in the lowlands refused to believe it was a sacrifice, and thought the rebels had given their executions the guise of meriah to make them seem more terrifying, as if they were reviving a dread practice the British thought they’d stamped out years before. But the authorities were wrong. That scene on the riverbank was the real thing. Even today, sacrifices are still performed using langur monkeys and chickens, but the meriah ritual is still here, lurking just under the surface, and it would take little provocation, the re-lighting of that tinderbox, for it to be revived.”

  “But what happened?” Jack persisted. “What made my great-great-grandfather end his diary that day?”

  Pradesh pursed his lips. “I don’t know. Something traumatized him. It would have been a dreadful sight, the child especially, the flesh ripped from them while they were still alive. Maybe he felt impotent, unable to help. You say he was the father of a young child himself? You told me he was in India as a boy during the mutiny, when there were terrible scenes of slaughter. Maybe some latent memory of that horror resurfaced as he watched the sacrifice. By all accounts he was an excellent officer, a tough soldier, so whatever he saw or did, it must have been pretty bad.”