David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

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 broke. 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.