The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  “So where do we go from here?” Jack asked quietly.

  Pradesh paused. “I know where he and Lieutenant Wauchope went that day.”

  “Go on.”

  Pradesh reached into the front of his shirt and took out a pendant hanging on an old leather necklace. “It’s a tiger’s claw,” he said. “The tiger was killed by my grandfather, who was a muttadar. That’s a village chief, but also a kind of priest. The tiger was attacking a boy playing by the river, and my grandfather shot it with an old East India Company musket the Kóya had stolen years before from the native police. But the tiger is sacred here, and by killing it my grandfather became an outcast, forced to leave the jungle. He met my grandmother, a lowlander, and they lived in Dowlaishweram. But their son, my father, became the district forest officer, and he used to bring me up here. I was adopted by the villagers of Rampa and learned to speak the Kóya dialect. The tribal people revered my father because the officials posted up here are usually lowlanders, and traditionally the lowlanders were seen as corrupt moneylenders who treated the hill people with contempt. My father actually went to Delhi to fight their case for forest rights. He was a great man.”

  “He must be proud of you.”

  Pradesh looked downcast. “He might have been. I’ll never know. Ever since the time of the British Raj, the cause of the forest people has been hijacked by others. A hundred years ago it was the Indian nationalist movement, who claimed that the tribal uprisings were somehow part of an independence struggle against the British. And now it’s the Maoists, the so-called People’s War Group. The tribals are angry again because the government has been selling mining concessions, and the PWG have taken the tribals’ side. In reality the PWG couldn’t care less. It was just a way to get the tribals to leave them alone in their jungle bases where they plan terrorist attacks around India. My father confronted them and was murdered for it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said.

  “It’s why I’ve never been posted up here,” Pradesh replied ruefully. My colonel knows my family history. I was too close.”

  “You don’t look the vengeance type,” Costas murmured.

  “Try me,” Pradesh said quietly.

  Costas pointed at the claw hanging from Pradesh’s neck. “Isn’t that going to get us into trouble with any Kóya we come across? I mean, if the tiger’s sacred?”

  Pradesh shook his head. “Once a tiger’s dead and the spirit has left, the skin and claws have great value. The skin is worn by a muttadar for dancing and ceremonies, and the claws are distributed among the young men of the village. They’re good-luck charms, to ward off the angry spirits when the men are hunting deep in the jungle.”

  Costas downed his tea in one gulp. “I think I’d opt for an assault rifle.”

  Pradesh grinned. “That would help too.”

  “Let’s have your story,” Jack said. “What the Kóya remember about that day.”

  Pradesh paused. “It was told to me by my grand father when I was a boy. For the hill people here it has become part of their lore, shrouded in legend like the foundation myths of the gods. But it concerns your great-great-grandfather.”

  “Go on.”

  “The most sacred objects of the Kóya were vélpus, a word meaning idols or gods,” Pradesh said. “Each family had one, each clan. They were usually small objects that would seem commonplace to us but were exotic to the Kóya, like a piece of wrought iron. Each vélpu was kept inside a length of hollow bamboo about a foot long. They were guarded with great secrecy, only brought out on rare occasions to be worshipped. The greatest of them all, the supreme vélpu, was called the Lakka Ramu. It was kept in a cave shrine deep in the jungle, and was never opened. It was said that the god inside was too dazzling, and would blind anyone who gazed on it. Perhaps it was glass, maybe a gem-stone, something exotic that had reached the Kóya from the outside world countless generations ago. The supreme vélpu held the soul of the Kóya people. Without it, they would be living in a shadowland, at the whim of the malign spirits who haunted the jungle, especially the dreaded konda devata, the spirit of the tiger. And they have been in that shadowland since 1879.”

  “What happened?” Costas asked.

  Pradesh glanced around and lowered his voice. “My grandfather, the village chief, was a hereditary muttadar. By ancient tradition the chiefs of Rampa village had been guardians of the jungle shrine where the sacred Lakka Ramu was hidden. My grandfather’s grandfather was the muttadar in 1879, but he didn’t survive the rebellion. I know what happened to him from the rebels who watched the events of that day unfold from the jungle, men of my own clan who slunk back to their villages after the revolt was over and passed the story down to their children. You showed me Howard’s diary, Jack, the final entry. On that day the muttadar was surrounded by the rebels and shot full of arrows. They knew what he’d done.”

  “Which was?” Costas said.

  “The muttadar feared that Chendrayya, the rebel leader, would come to the shrine and take the Lakka Ramu, and use it to control all the hill people for his own purposes. Chendrayya came from another clan, one that had been locked in a feud for generations with the muttadar’s clan, an ancient dispute over which family should control the shrine. The British officers knew all about tribal feuds from their experiences on the north-west frontier of India, and they used it to their advantage.”

  “The muttadar came over to the British,” Jack murmured.

  “He took the vélpu from the shrine for safekeeping, then he took a huge chance and volunteered himself as a guide and interpreter,” Pradesh said. “His condition was that the British officers allow him to return the vélpu to the shrine when it was all over. He was on the river steamer with the sappers on that final day in Howard’s diary, 20 August 1879. It’s in the pages you emailed me, Jack. It fits with what I knew exactly. There was a big firefight that day with the rebels in the jungle, dozens killed and wounded. Then Howard and the others on the steamer must have witnessed that sacrificial scene by the river. The muttadar saw it too, and got jittery, went to pieces. It would have seemed as if all the malign spirits of the jungle were converging on him, taunting him for taking the vélpu. There’s no record in Howard’s diary of what happened next, and nothing more in the regimental records at Bangalore. Most of the officers who returned from Rampa just wanted to forget about it. But there’s a story told to me by my grandfather. A British official with the sappers, a man called Bebbie, had been taken ill, and was still in the jungle. Howard and Wauchope set off with a rescue party. Bebbie was laid up near the shrine, already dead. The muttadar had volunteered to lead them to the spot, providing he could take the idol with him. The British officers probably felt they had no choice. Even with their superior weapons it would have been suicidal to venture into the jungle, a small force of a dozen against hundreds of rebels. They gambled that the presence of the idol would keep the rebels from attacking them. The muttadar backed off from the shrine at the last minute, terrified that the god would wreak vengeance on him, and then he was murdered. Howard himself took the idol into the cave.”

  “And afterward Chendrayya stole it?” Jack said.

  Pradesh shook his head. “No. Howard kept his word to the muttadar. But then he and Wauchope must have realized that their only chance of escape was to take the idol back with them, to use it as a safeguard just as the muttadar had done on the way in. There was a firefight as they emerged from the cave, but when the rebels saw they still had the bamboo vélpu they backed off The two officers retreated through the jungle to the river, with the sappers. And they took something else out of the shrine, another sacred relic. It was a broken sword, attached to a golden gauntlet in the shape of a tiger’s head. The Kóya believed it had been worn by the great god Rama himself.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Jack murmured.

  “You know this?”

  “Something I haven’t shown you yet. A family heirloom.”

  “You have it?” Pradesh gasped.

 
“It’s brass, not gold, but it must be the same,” Jack replied excitedly. “Howard gave it to his daughter, my great-grandmother, and I’ve inherited it.” Jack sat back, exalted. He had known the gauntlet had come from the jungle, but nothing more. This was extraordinary. Then he remembered Katya, her reaction when he had told her about it. And he remembered Katya’s uncle, Hai Chen, the anthropologist who had disappeared in the jungle over four months ago. That was the other reason Jack was here. He stared out into the jungle canopy. Maybe Hai Chen had simply walked away. Maybe there had been an accident. Solitary anthropologists had disappeared in jungles before. Then Jack thought of the Maoists, the dangers that lurked out here. He pursed his lips. Something more was going on. The pointers were there, but it still didn’t add up. He turned back to Pradesh, who said something under his breath, not in English or Hindi but in another language, a soft clicking sound. He looked at Jack, his eyes alight. “The recovery of this object would mean everything to the Kóya,” Pradesh murmured. “I hardly dare ask. Do you have the vélpu too?”

  Jack shook his head. “I’d never heard of that before now.”

  Pradesh closed his eyes for a moment, and exhaled hard. “What we know is this. The Rampa Rebellion continued for months more, but that day was a turning point. Never again was there a rebel force of that size, and afterward Chendrayya was only able to muster loyal bands of a few dozen, the hard core, many of them already outcasts and criminals. Most of the rebels in the early months had been honest forest men, Kóya and Reddis. Once they saw the murder of the muttadar and saw how much Chendrayya coveted their sacred vélpu, they lost their ardor for the rebellion. And knowing that the British had the idol—and realised its power over them—would have weakened their resolve still further. They knew they would only ever get it back when the rebellion was finished.”

  “But you’re saying they never did get it back,” Costas commented.

  “That shrine,” Jack said. “It’s near a Rampa village?”

  Pradesh nodded. “About eight miles north-east of here, through dense jungle. It’s named after the god Rama.”

  “Rama,” Jack repeated softly, his mind racing.

  “Wasn’t Rama a Hindu god?” Costas said.

  Pradesh nodded again. “The image of the perfect man, raised to godhead, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu. But it’s as I said before—he’s an upstart here. The beliefs of the Kóya have virtually nothing else in common with Hindu religion. The legend of Prince Rama, his wanderings and his search for spiritual redemption, is found all over southern India. The Kóya believe this was where he ended up, finding his rightful kingdom in the heart of the jungle.”

  “Heart of darkness, more like,” Costas said, looking at the dense green slopes on the opposite shore, swatting at a cloud of mosquitoes that had enveloped him.

  “Is that where you’re taking us?” Jack said. “To the shrine?”

  Pradesh took a deep breath and nodded, fingering the tiger pendant. “I went there when I was a boy. It was forbidden, but as a lowlander by upbringing I didn’t believe in the superstition. No Kóya had visited it since that day in 1879. My grandfather said there was a terrible storm that night, thunder and lightning. An earthquake sealed up the entrance after the two officers had left. To the Kóya that was an absolute sign that the worst horror would befall them if they went anywhere near the place. And now there’s another reason for staying away. The shrine’s next to a stream in a jungle clearing, and it’s been used by the Maoist guerrillas as a base. They caught me once and let me into their camp, and they played with me. That was before they murdered my father. I’ve been wanting to go back ever since.”

  “It sounds as if both you and Jack are on a mission,” Costas said.

  “Your ancestor the muttadar also wanted to get to the shrine when he stood beside Lieutenant Howard on the river steamer at this spot all those years ago,” Jack added.

  “I’d never try to put myself in the mind of a Kóya holy man. He may have been my ancestor, but that’s one place I definitely don’t want to go.” Pradesh looked at Jack, his expression steely. “And my mission’s not about ancient gods and spirits and idols. It’s about the present day. It’s about the duty of a son to the memory of a murdered father.”

  Jack nodded, then swung his legs out over the bow of the boat, ready to push off Pradesh sat down and turned on the ignition. “We’ve got about five hours of daylight left. The chopper should be here in forty-five minutes. That gives us time to visit the village on the opposite shore. There’s something I want you to see.”

  “Let’s move,” Jack said. “From what you say, we don’t want to be out here after dark.”

  Costas slapped a mosquito on his neck, leaving a bloody smudge. “Roger that.”

  JACK KNELT IN THE BOW OF THE PONTOON BOAT, holding the painter line in readiness as Pradesh swung the tiller and nosed the boat out of the river current into a backwater by the shore. At the last moment he gunned the engine and rammed the keel up onto the sandy beach that fronted the jungle. Jack leapt out with the line, ran a few paces across the hot packed sand and tied it to the stump of a tamarind tree. Pradesh killed the engine and tilted it, then he and Costas jumped out on either side and pulled the boat up as far as they could. Jack tightened the line and looked around. The sand was pristine, as white as he had seen anywhere. He had half-hoped to find something straightaway, some evidence of that fateful day in 1879, but he also half-feared it, as if he were apprehensive of awakening some atavistic trauma inherited from his ancestor. But the sand was spotless, and there was no ancient stain of sacrifice. He saw where the monsoon flood had swept around the curve of the river, churning up the sand and re-creating the beach every year. He looked up to where the gorge narrowed, and remembered the words of a Victorian engineer who had seen the Godavari in full spate: It foams past its obstructions with a velocity and turbulence which no craft that ever floated could stem. They had only come a few hundred meters from the opposite shore, but it was as if they had crossed some kind of sacred boundary into another world. Even the air smelled different—tangier, organic— and the light above the fringe of the jungle had a peculiar aura, as if the air itself were stained green and blue at the interface between the canopy and the sky.

  “Come on.” Pradesh walked across the sand to an opening in the jungle between two trees, a well-worn path up the slope that led to the reed and bamboo houses they had spied from the opposite shore, built above the level of the flood. “This is one of the track-ways traced by the sappers in the wake of the 1879 rebellion, but it was neglected after they left. They weren’t given the resources to put anything permanent into the jungle, and things haven’t changed much since.” Costas trudged behind him, and Jack brought up the rear. Costas took out a can of insect repellant from his bag and liberally sprayed his exposed parts, passing it to Jack. “One small step for mankind since 1879,” Costas muttered, slapping a blood-filled mosquito that had bitten through his shirt. Pradesh turned around and watched. “It’s about the only thing that has changed,” he said. “Prepare to walk back in time.” A huge spider scurried over the rocky path between them, and Jack froze, catching his breath. Pradesh saw him. “Normal animal reaction,” he said. “It’s the first thing we were taught in jungle warfare training school. You step under the canopy, you instantly lose the veneer of civilization, you become an animal again, feral. You use it to your advantage, the heightened awareness. But it also reawakens primal fear, the survival instinct. Spiders can do it, and snakes.”

  “And tigers,” Costas muttered. “I think I need a drink.”

  “That’s another way of dealing with this place, unfortunately a little too tempting for the Kóya people.” Pradesh turned and led them up the path, across gigantic roots of tamarind and teak that had twisted over each other, enveloping the clearance made in 1879. There was a rustling overhead like wind in the leaves, and a troop of monkeys screeched. They reached a level patch and walked past several houses, each a modest affair of
bamboo uprights with a roof of overlapping palmyra leaves, surrounded by a narrow verandah fronted by a trellis of bamboo and palmyra leaf stalks interwoven with sprouting bean shoots. Costas pointed at a fresh red mark on the wall. “That symbol looks strangely out of place.”

  “A hammer and sickle,” Jack murmured.

  Pradesh glanced back, his lip curled in disgust. “The Maoist guerrillas. They see the Kóya as their allies, but you don’t curry favor by desecrating the buildings of your friends. When they’re sober the Kóya are pretty contemptuous of them, but the hill tribes have been driven into a corner and are desperate for some backing against the mining companies. The ideology of the Maoists means nothing to them, though, and this will be daubed over soon enough.”

  Jack and Costas followed him toward the end of the level ground where the jungle closed around the village and began to climb in tangled profusion up the slope. There were signs of life all around, wisps of smoke from fires, half-stacked wood, carved wooden toys, but they could see no one. “Where are the people?” Costas murmured.

  “Watching us,” Pradesh said. “For them, being invisible is second nature. It’s something else you learn in the jungle, how to meld in. They know who I am, but they’ve had other outsiders here recently, mining prospectors, and they’ve got reason to be suspicious.” He led them into a small clearing beyond the village, hemmed in by soaring trunks of rosewood, satinwood, palm, teak. He squatted by the base of a hoary old tamarind and pointed to a slab of ochre-red sandstone about half a meter across that had become embedded in the trunk, rising up as the tree grew. Costas knelt beside him. “One of those sacred stones you were talking about?”