David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

Howard looked down at the wound, and swallowed hard. He looked at his right hand. It was still shaking. He thought for a moment and then turned to address the havildar in Hindi. “An unfortunate business. He would not have lasted with the cholera anyway. Have them bury him on the spot. And reassure our sappers that they will not be required to parley with the enemy.”

“Sahib.” The havildar addressed the four men, who nodded at Howard and reached for the collapsible shovels on their haversacks. Howard looked back at the body with contempt. “If he’d done his job this rebellion would never have happened.”

“Word will get out that he was shot,” Hamilton murmured.

“A musket ball. It is as the sappers describe. They were attacked. That goes in the report,” Howard said determinedly.

“If you ever get a chance to make one,” Wauchope said. “What do we do now?”

Howard suddenly felt tired, deathly tired, and he took off his helmet and rubbed his stubble. He put it on again, and peered at the lowering sky. “We leave in twenty minutes. The sappers have that much time to finish up here. Hamilton, be so good as to egg them on. Robert, you and I are going to visit that shrine. You said you might have seen shapes in there, Hamilton? Carvings, inscriptions? At the moment all I want to do is get that wretched velpu in there and be out of here. I don’t think the muttadar is going to let us leave unless we keep our side of the bargain.”

– -

The two men left Hamilton and the sappers behind in the mist, and approached the north side of the clearing where the stream curved around below another waterfall. Through the sheen of spray they could make out three huge boulders, one of which formed a kind of roof over the other two, with a vertical slab of rock blocking the space in between. The muttadar had been following them, but as the shrine came into view he pulled off his turban and squatted on the ground, muttering and chanting to himself in the Koya language, his eyes wide with terror. Howard turned and knelt beside him, trying to coax out some sense. “He has the most intense horror of this place. Nothing will induce him to go any farther.”

“I thought this was his temple,” Wauchope said.

“He knows he must return the idol, but he dreads the wrath of the konda devata, the tiger spirit. He says we must take the idol inside for him.”

“But without it, he’s defenseless. Surely the rebels will kill him.”

“He evidently fears the spirits more than he fears death.”

Howard spoke urgently to the muttadar, gesturing back in the direction of the sappers, but the man remained immobile, staring ahead as if in a trance. He suddenly reached down with trembling hands and brought a gourd he had been carrying to his mouth, gulping down palm liquor as if it were water. Howard reached over and grasped the bamboo tube from the man’s other hand, pulling it until he released it. The container was sealed at both ends with a hard resinous material over a wooden plug. He stood and carried it toward Wauchope, who looked at it with curiosity. “Shall we open it up?” Wauchope said. “He’ll soon be too besotted to care.”

Howard looked toward the shrine. He thought he could see the shape of a tiger’s face in the boulders, the eyes and ears formed by undulations in the rock. He shook his head. “Let’s be done with it. I made him a promise. I will not treat these people like savages.”

They started forward. A rocky alcove to the left of the shrine entrance came into view. Two thick bamboo trunks formed a kind of verandah, holding up a roof of poles and palm leaves. In front was a line of posts capped with bleached skulls, some of them of prodigious size-elephants, tigers, wild boar. Behind them were two taller poles, festooned with bedraggled feathers. Hanging halfway down the poles were two blackened masses, dripping and suppurating. Howard had noticed a smell, but thought it was Bebbie. Now he realized it was the sickly-sweet stench of older putre faction, and he remembered what the sappers had said. The two other police constables. He forced himself to look. Knives were suspended from cords beneath the corpses, slowly spinning around. The heads were smashed and scalped, the eyes gouged out. There was movement on the ground. He spied a gorged rat scurrying away, dragging an indescribable lump from below one of the poles. He turned quickly away, swallowing hard to avoid retching, and joined Wauchope at the vertical slab between the boulders. “We need to get away from this place,” he said hoarsely, holding himself against the wet rock, his head throbbing.

“We need to finish here first,” Wauchope murmured. He was running his finger down the crack on one side of the slab. “It’s cut stone. Incredible workmanship. Who made this?”

“Try pushing it,” Howard said. Wauchope put his hands on the slab, and it immediately pivoted inward. Inside was a passage large enough for them to stoop through side-by-side, but beyond was pitch blackness. The two men cautiously entered. Howard took out a brass container from his belt pouch and extracted a flint and steel, sparking a length of paraffin-soaked cord and using it to light a small candle. He lifted it up, and was immediately confronted by a crude etching of a lingam, a phallus. He raised the candle higher. All around them were other emblems, crude carvings, stick figures like the one he had seen on the gourd in the ravine. They edged forward. Ahead they could hear the rushing sound of the waterfall through the rocks. Wauchope suddenly tripped and Howard reached out to catch him, dropping the bamboo container with a clatter as he did so. Once Wauchope was upright he picked up the bamboo. One side had splintered, and he could feel something like paper inside. Crouching down, he saw what Wauchope had tripped over, a shallow stone basin full of liquid, still and dark, with a faint metallic tang. He raised the candle over it, and saw his face reflected, as if it were glowing with a deep red aura. Then he remembered what the muttadar had told him. The priest augurs the future in a bowl of blood. He looked again, but saw only the yellow flicker of the candle. He shifted slightly, then he saw something, gasped, dropped the cylinder again and let his right hand fall heavily into the liquid. It was thick, congealing, warm. He pulled his hand out and shook it hard, splattering gobs of red over the walls of the tunnel, then wiped it on his uniform. “I just saw the most ghastly apparitions,” he said hoarsely. “Tigers, devils, scorpions.”

“They’re on the ceiling above you,” Wauchope said.

Howard raised the candle and looked up. Of course. There were more etchings on the rock. He had seen reflections. He took a deep breath, and peered ahead. “That must be it. The shrine itself There seems to be some kind of altar in the center.” He picked up the bamboo tube again, and stepped carefully over the basin. Through the flickering candlelight he saw figures that were more rounded, sculptures in relief, front-facing masks and dancing limbs. “I recognize these,” he murmured. “My ayah used to take me to cave temples like this when I was a child in Bihar. That’s Parvati, wife of Shiva. And Vishnu, striding across the wall, vanquishing a demon.” He moved forward into the main chamber, where the walls were barely discernible in the candlelight. “But these ones are different. They look like warriors. I need to inspect them more closely.”

“Pass me the candle, would you?” Wauchope had crouched down beside the altar-like structure in the middle, a raised rectilinear shape that had clearly been sculpted out of the living rock. Howard carefully handed over the stub of candle. Wauchope held it close to one side of the stone.

“Good God.”

“What is it?”