Valley of Death

by Scott Mariani

  Giving up on the idea he returned to join Amal, who hadn’t moved and was still sitting clutching his arm, gazing mournfully up at the cliff face that loomed overhead. Hard to believe they’d climbed all that way down unscathed. But that wasn’t what was on Amal’s mind. He muttered, ‘You should have let me go. I nearly got you killed up there. I’m not worth that.’

  Ben looked at him. ‘That thing you said to me before, about Brooke. You’re wrong, Amal. You couldn’t be more wrong.’

  Amal shook his head sadly. ‘No, I’m not wrong. You know what I was thinking about as I was hanging from that branch? That if I’d let go, you’d have had to go home to her without me, and then the two of you could have got back together. Because deep down, that’s what she wants. She always has. I’m just the guy that got in the middle. We should never have got together.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  Amal went on shaking his head, utterly miserable. ‘I’ve known it from the beginning. I could never offer her what you could. I’m second best, always was, always will be.’

  If Amal hadn’t already suffered enough, Ben would have wanted to slap him. Instead he put a hand on his good shoulder and said, ‘Don’t you ever say that to me again, you understand?’

  Amal shrugged Ben’s hand away and winced at the pain the movement cost him. ‘Why not, if it’s the truth?’

  ‘Because the past is the past. Because Brooke loves you and wants to get you home safely more than anything in the world. Forget about me. You’re the man she’s chosen to be with now. So act like it, and stop talking like a fucking idiot.’

  Amal hung his head and said nothing more. Ben moved away from him. He found his cigarette pack in his pocket, crumpled and nearly empty. He lit up and smoked in silence. He regretted the surge of anger that had made him speak so harshly to his friend. The reality was that Ben couldn’t stand to hear such painful words. It was like having his heart ripped out all over again.

  When they’d rested a while, they set off. The arid valley stretched out seemingly to infinity, a barren desert of scratchy soil, bleached rock and prickly vegetation that snagged their clothing and wore them down. Death by ten thousand tiny cuts. Ben had to believe that if they kept moving, sooner or later they would surely find food, shelter, water, maybe even some basic medical assistance for Amal’s injuries. He still had his wallet, with some cash in it. Nowhere near enough to procure transportation, but he’d steal a car or truck if he had to. It wouldn’t be the first time, for sure.

  The first hour of walking was slow. The second hour, it felt like they were going backwards. Four, five, and then six times Ben had to stop and wait for the seriously flagging, pale and weak Amal to catch up. The seventh time, he looked back and saw that Amal had collapsed. He hurried back to where he’d fallen. Amal’s pulse was fluttery and shallow. Dehydration, hunger, pain and stress. Even the strongest man would cave in sooner or later, and Amal wasn’t that guy. Ben gathered him up, the same way he’d done for Prem back in Delhi. Come on, Amal, don’t give up on me now. You’re tougher than you think.

  Another hour passed. Amal was still so deeply unconscious that Ben got worried enough to stop twice and check his pulse. Hang in there, Amal. Ben kept going. He felt functional enough for now, but as the morning wore on towards midday and the sun beat relentlessly down from near its zenith, its heat seeming to suck the moisture out of every cell in his body and barely a tree or a tall rock anywhere to offer shade, he knew his strength wouldn’t hold out forever.

  If he hadn’t been so weary, he might have heard the man coming before he stepped out into their path from the bushes.

  Ben stopped. The man stopped too. They stared at one another, each equally surprised to have bumped into another human being in the middle of the wilderness. The Indian was bareheaded and wearing a long, white robe-like smock, and he was carrying a rifle on a sling over his shoulder, a battered old bolt-action thing dating back to a world war. Ben’s first thought was that he was a member of one of the dacoit gangs that Jabbar Dada had told him infested these parts. Maybe even the same gang that had clashed with Takshak’s crew. But then he realised his mistake. The guy wasn’t dressed like a bandit, and he showed more fear than aggression. Bandits didn’t go around with flocks of goats, either. Ben heard a ragged bleating sound from the bushes, and looked to see a dozen or so of the scraggy, curly-horned animals milling around back there, obviously a little agitated by the sight of a stranger. That was when Ben understood that the rifle was only there for protection against wolves, jackals or leopards, or whatever other nonhuman predators roamed the wilderness.

  Ben knelt and gently laid Amal down on the ground. He stood slowly up, holding up his open palms to show the goat herder that he was no threat. He said, ‘My friend needs help. I have money.’

  The goat herder’s name was Rishabh, and he spoke a little English. He was reluctant and suspicious at first, but then Ben showed him a sheaf of rupees from his wallet and Rishabh agreed to lead him and his sick friend to his village, which he managed to communicate in a combination of broken English and sign language was over that way – pointing south-east – and not too far. As a gesture of goodwill Rishabh reached into the folds of his smock and pulled out a small water bottle, which Ben gratefully accepted. He used most of it to moisten Amal’s cracked lips and get him to drink, saving just a little for himself before offering it back to Rishabh. Then the goat herder beckoned them on and started off at a long stride through the bushes. The goats flocked after him, and Ben tagged along in their wake with the now semi-conscious Amal over his shoulder.

  It was a longer hike than Rishabh had let on, and Ben was mightily thankful when the first dwellings came into view at the end of a narrow dirt road. The tiny village consisted of a few clusters of basic homes encircled within a rickety fence perimeter and looked unchanged for centuries, apart from a few strangely incongruous modern features like TV aerials. Some women in saris came out to meet them, and seemed more worried about the state of the injured man than the goat herder had been. One of the older women introduced herself to Ben as Ganika. She spoke good English and said she had been a teacher in Jind before her husband had died and she had returned to the village of her birth to care for her ageing mother.

  ‘We have a small clinic, with some medical supplies,’ Ganika explained. ‘It is not much, but we can provide your friend with what he needs until you can get him to the civic hospital in Jind, to have his arm mended. Do you have a car?’ Ben thanked her and said that no, he didn’t, but that he’d manage to find a way.

  ‘That is a shame. Because if you had had a car, you could have taken our other patient with you. He needs to get to the city as soon as possible.’

  Ben was too tired and relieved to express much interest in the other patient. He followed her to the little adobe hut at the heart of the village that served as the medical clinic, and carried Amal inside. Ganika showed them into a minuscule sick bay with whitewashed walls and a pair of rudimentary but well-made wooden bunks, a table with a jug of water and some fruit, and a first-aid box with bandages and medicines. Then she hurried off, saying she’d go and find Pihu, the village nurse.

  The sick bay wasn’t unoccupied. Sitting on the other bunk was an Indian man, thirty-something in age, unkempt in a grubby T-shirt with a dark growth of beard. He was clearly the other patient Ganika had mentioned, and looked as though he might have been here for some time. He seemed very tired and thin, and his hollow cheeks and the shadows around his eyes gave the impression that he was recuperating from a long and debilitating illness. The man glanced up as they entered the room, unfocused and distracted, as if he’d been lost in a lot of glum thoughts.

  Ben laid Amal, still half-unconscious, on the second bunk, then looked at the stranger, thinking he seemed oddly familiar. The man looked back at him, then turned his listless gaze on Amal, and his eyes suddenly opened wide. He rose up with a shout of joy and amazement and came rushing across the room, which was only a few short steps.


  ‘Amal! Amal! It’s me, Kabir!’

  Chapter 65

  Ben’s own amazement wasn’t lagging too far behind. All this time he’d been prepared to give Kabir Ray up for dead, and now here he was. Maybe not in the peak of health, but most definitely alive. ‘Careful,’ Ben warned as Kabir went to grasp his brother’s hand. ‘His arm’s broken.’

  Kabir backed away a step, stood over the bunk where Amal lay and stared down in horror, taking in the bruises, the swellings, the blood. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I might ask you the same thing,’ Ben said. ‘There are a few people back in Delhi wondering what became of you. You’re pretty much officially deceased, as far as most folks are concerned. Me included, until now.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Just a friend of the family,’ Ben replied. His feet were aching from walking all that distance with Amal’s weight on him. He sat on the edge of Kabir’s bunk and bent down to unlace his boots.

  ‘What’s my brother doing here?’

  ‘Looking for you,’ Ben said. Which technically was oversimplifying, but he didn’t feel like getting into the whole story just yet. He took off his right boot and rubbed his foot.

  ‘Why’s he all bruised up like this? Why’s his arm broken?’

  ‘Let’s just say we ran into a little trouble on the way,’ Ben said. He took off his left boot and rubbed that foot too. Feeling better already. He arranged his boots neatly side by side at the end of the bunk, soldier-fashion.

  The sound of his brother’s voice seemed to have stirred Amal awake. Suddenly alert, he sat bolt upright on his bunk. He blinked several times with his one good eye and his mouth fell open. He seemed to have forgotten all about his injuries. ‘Am I dreaming? Kabir? Holy shit, it is you!’

  The reunion of the brothers was an emotional scene that Ben watched from the background, full of questions but patient enough to wait. Amal was crying with happiness as Kabir embraced him. When all the hugging and joyful tears were done with, the village nurse called Pihu arrived to attend to Amal’s cuts and bruises.

  Her presence in the room hushed the conversation to a respectful silence. Ben watched as she opened up the medical kit, laid out her tools and efficiently got to work. She injected Amal with painkiller and antibiotics, then spent a few minutes cleaning up his face and examining his eye while the analgesic took effect. Then she stitched the cuts in his lips and the gash on his cheekbone and dabbed everything with antiseptic cream. She said she wasn’t too worried about his eye, which would heal up fine. But she was more concerned about his arm, admitting that setting bones was beyond her skills. All she could do for the moment was splint the limb and exchange Ben’s improvised leather belt sling for a proper one made of bandages. She did a fine job of wrapping up the arm and trimming the supportive dressing to a razor-straight edge with a pair of small, sharp surgical scissors. Never once while she worked did she enquire what had happened to Amal, or what he was doing in this remote area. If she had questions, she kept them to herself as she went about her duties with a kind of tight-lipped acceptance. Ben didn’t know whether he was supposed to offer her money for her services. He chose just to say nothing for the moment.

  Pihu finished up and then left. Then, at last, the three men were free to resume their discussion. Amal seemed more comfortable, though he was still very thirsty, pouring cup after cup of water from the jug and trying to drink as best he could with his stitched lips.

  Kabir asked, ‘Who did this to you, Amal? Was it the same bastard bandits who killed Manish and Sai?’

  ‘They aren’t bandits,’ Ben said, mainly just to spare Amal from having to do too much talking.

  Kabir looked at him. ‘Tell me again who you are, exactly?’

  ‘I told you, I’m a friend of the family.’

  ‘Ben’s a little more than that,’ Amal said. His voice was slurry from the numbing effect of the drugs. ‘He rescued me. Saved my life.’

  ‘Rescued you from who?’

  ‘The leader’s name is Takshak,’ Ben said. ‘He’s a killer and a kidnapper from Delhi. He and his men were holding Amal. They knocked him around quite a bit.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because,’ Ben said, ‘when you start talking about giant fortunes of buried treasure sitting there ripe for the picking, you tend to attract that sort of bad company.’

  Kabir’s eyebrows furrowed. ‘You know about the treasure?’

  ‘I know all about your work. Haani Bhandarkar was able to tell me a lot more than your Professor Gupta. Though I’m sorry to have to tell you that Haani’s dead too. Takshak’s people got to him, by way of tying up loose ends back in Delhi.’

  Kabir’s face fell. ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Takshak found out that you let Amal in on the secret. He believed Amal could find it for him.’

  ‘I don’t understand. How could this guy have known what was said in confidence to my brother?’

  ‘You know what they say,’ Ben said. ‘The walls have ears.’

  Kabir looked baffled. ‘You mean someone spied on me? Tapped my phone? How could they have figured out—?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll fill you in on the way home. Which is where we’re headed asap. We can stop off en route to get Amal’s arm patched up. Then you’re going to have some explaining to do to your family and the cops in Delhi who’ll be wondering how you suddenly managed to come back from the dead, and where you’ve been hiding all this time.’

  Kabir motioned at the whitewashed walls of the tiny sick bay. ‘Right here in this room is where I’ve been. And for most of the time I was asleep. In a coma, or the nearest thing to it. Pihu said it was a miracle I survived. Septicaemia is no joke.’ He lifted the hem of his shirt to show them the ugly scar of a bullet wound in his right side, the edges of the flesh all puckered and discoloured. ‘See what those bastards did to me? The gunshot missed my kidney by a hair’s breadth. By good fortune it went right through me and clean out the other side.’

  ‘Lucky,’ Ben said.

  ‘Luckier than my poor friends, anyhow. I only got away by throwing myself down that damn hillside. Dislocated my ankle in the fall. Those men came down the hill looking for me, but I managed to crawl away. I crawled for days. I don’t even know how far. It was some children from this village who found me. By then I was very sick from the infection. I don’t remember much about being brought here, or about the weeks I drifted in and out of consciousness. Just flashes of memory, like dreams. Sometimes it was Pihu who tended to me, sometimes Ganika. I’d be dead if it hadn’t been for their kindness. It’s only in the last few days that I could even get my head off the pillow, never mind stand up and walk around.’

  ‘A few days is a long time,’ Ben said. ‘You couldn’t have picked up a phone to let your folks know you were alive?’

  ‘Easy for a Westerner to say,’ Kabir replied. ‘You obviously don’t know a lot about our country. The telecommunications industry might do its best to look all modern and progressive to the outside world, but on the inside it’s a shambles. Thousands of remote rural communities are still without internet or phone signal, and this is one of them. As soon as I was strong enough, I was planning to find some way out of here and get to the nearest town where I could call home. But this is a very poor village. The only motor vehicle I might have been able to beg, borrow or steal is sitting on bricks with a hole where its engine used to be.’

  Ben said, ‘Then maybe someone could have ridden their mule, or whatever, to the nearest town and alerted the authorities that you’d been found.’

  Kabir shook his head. ‘Again, you don’t understand this country. These people live in constant terror of the dacoits. Bandit gangs pretty much rule this whole area. It’s like the Wild West. They come into the villages whenever they please and help themselves to food, supplies, whatever money they can get their hands on, not to mention any young girl who catches their eye. Anyone who tries to oppose them is in serious trouble. When I was br
ought here with a bullet hole in me, the general consensus was that I must be just another victim of the dacoits, or maybe even one of them. There are turf wars all the time between rival factions. So not everyone in the village was too pleased about giving me shelter. There was a lot of worry about repercussions, if the dacoits found out the villagers were harbouring a member of an enemy gang. Or a potential witness to one of their attacks, who might go to the police with information. The last thing anybody wanted was to draw attention to my being here. They’ll be very relieved when I’m gone.’

  Now Ben understood why Pihu had acted so strangely tight-lipped and not asked any questions about the sudden arrival of a second battered and bruised newcomer to the village. And why Ganika had seemed anxious for their other patient to be driven to the nearest city as soon as possible. Whatever care and hospitality these good folks might be only too willing to offer strangers in need of help, they wanted no part of the trouble that had brought them here.

  ‘Then their wish is about to come true,’ Ben said. ‘Because we’re getting out of here, as soon as we’ve had some rest and food.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You let me worry about how.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ Kabir said. ‘I can’t wait to get back to civilisation. But I won’t be staying there long. As soon as I’ve got everything straightened out, it’s my intention to come straight back here. I have unfinished business to take care of.’

  ‘What?’ Ben said. ‘To repay Pihu and Ganika for helping you?’

  ‘It would take more than money to reward them for their kindness,’ Kabir said. ‘I’ll do everything I can for them, certainly. But that’s not all I had in mind.’

  ‘If you’re planning on resuming the search for this great lost treasure of the Indus Valley People,’ Ben said, ‘I’d advise you forget about it and stay at home. You’ve got competition now, and not the kind that you want to tangle with.’