The Tiger Warrior (17 page)

“Chendrayya,” Howard muttered. “Just as the
muttadar
described him.”

“He’s got a
tulwar,”
Wauchope murmured.

The man in the pantaloons raised his right hand, revealing the curved sword feared above all others by British soldiers in India, able to cut a man in two in a single stroke. In a flash the sword came down one way and then the other behind the buffalo, cleaving the air. For a split second there was silence, and then a terrible bellow as the calf fell backward off its legs, leaving the feet stuck grotesquely in the sand. Blood spurted from the severed limbs into the pit. The dancers leapt on the calf like a pack of frenzied hyenas, tearing the flesh off with knives and their bare hands. Blood spurted and flowed into the pit, the animal’s heart still pulsing even as it was torn from beneath the rib cage. Then the drumbeat began again, slow, insistent. The dancers drew back from the carnage, their heads and arms drenched in blood, and carrying their dripping trophies, slowly circling around. The
muttadar
on the foredeck began babbling incomprehensibly, then said the same words over and over again in the Kóya language, all the time drooling and beating his head, averting his eyes from the scene on the foreshore.

“What on earth is he on about?” Wauchope said.

“Meriah.”
Howard spoke in little more than a whisper.

“Meriah? You
mean human sacrifice? Good God.”

Three men were thrust forward to the edge of the pit. They were darker-skinned, wearing the tattered remains of lowland pantaloons, their hands tied behind their backs. They seemed stupefied, unable to stand upright, and were kicked to their knees by the man in body paint. Howard watched in horrified fascination.
The captured police constables
. There was nothing he could do.

“Sir!” O’Connell bellowed.

Howard suddenly saw something else. “Wait!” he shouted. “There are women and children there! Hold your fire!”

In an instant the
tulwar
flashed again. Two heads flew off, and blood gushed into the pit. The third constable fell forward, shrieking. The painted man pounced on him and pulled him into the pit, holding the struggling form down in the bloody mire until it was still. For a moment there was silence. Then the man stood up, his back to them, facing Chendrayya, and raised his arms outward, blood and mucus falling from his arms in a diaphanous sheen of red.

“That was for our benefit,” Howard murmured to Wauchope. “For it to be a true
meriah
sacrifice, the victim has to be ritually prepared. Those constables were executed. What they did to the buffalo was sacrifice.”

“You mean they do that to humans too?” Wauchope said, aghast, his composure gone.

“They supposedly tear their victims to pieces with knives, leaving the head suspended from a pole. No European has ever seen it.”

The drumbeat began again. The painted man in the pit pulled a heavy dripping garment over his shoulders. Howard could see it was a tiger skin, sodden with blood. The first drops of rain were spattering against the deck of the steamer, and steam from the fires mingled with an efflorescence that seemed to rise from the mangled carcass of the bull and the bloody pit beside it. Chendrayya looked across at the steamer, seeming to stare directly at Howard, then turned and made his way up the sandbar to the place where the three poles had been erected earlier. The frenzied dancers in front of him parted, revealing a group of white-clad women around one of the poles. Howard squinted against the mist that swirled over the river. The women were flourishing boughs, and the pole had the effigy of a bird suspended from it, a cock. Howard swallowed hard. With a sickening feeling, he realised there was more to come. Three victims, one to each pole, west, middle, east-sunset, noon, sunrise.

“This will not be quick,” he murmured to Wauchope.

A man was led out in front of the women, his hair shorn, garlanded with flowers, wearing a clean white garment. His neck was held between a cleft bamboo and he already seemed half-dead, whether from slow strangulation or toddy was impossible to tell. Eager hands reached out to catch the saliva that was drooling from his mouth, smearing it into the red turmeric on their own faces. He was dragged toward the far pole, out of sight in the crowd. The incessant slow drumbeat suddenly rose in a frenzied crescendo, and the group of women around the central pole parted. Howard looked, and nearly retched.

It was a child
.

A boy, not much older than his own son, was tied to the pole. His head was lolling like the man’s, but his body shuddered, still alive. Four of the women held out his little arms and legs. The man in the tiger skin approached, and picked up a pole, like the handle of an axe. He tapped the boy on the head with it, and then tapped each of the boy’s limbs. Only they were not taps. Howard had been seeing everything in slow motion, and as his mind replayed it he saw the little limbs each crack and flop away, broken like boughs of dry wood. The women let go, and the small body flopped like a rag doll from the chain that held his neck. A rope tied to the top of the pole was pulled, and the cock began to whirl around and around, followed by the women who circled it. Among the swirling robes there were flashes of blades held in readiness, glinting. The boy raised his head, and Howard was sure he heard crying, the helpless crying of a child, that seemed to reach out to him, that seemed to come from a child of his own.

It was unbearable. Howard reached over and took the Snider-Enfield rifle from one of Hamilton’s sappers crouching next to him. It had a repair behind the receiver, a darker piece of wood, but it was sound. He pulled the hammer to half-cock, flipped open the breechblock with a sharp turn of his right hand, pulled back the ejector and tipped out the spent cartridge case. He spat on his finger, pushed it into the chamber and wiped out the fouling, then smeared the stinking black residue on the railing. He reached over to the leather case on the sapper’s belt and took out the last remaining cartridge. He was acting without thought now, his whole being focused on the mechanical acts of the drill. He dropped the cartridge into the breech and pushed it home, then snapped shut the block. He brought the rifle to his shoulder, pointing the muzzle a few inches below his target. With his right thumb he pulled back the hammer to full-cock, and he hooked his forefinger around the trigger. He closed his left eye, and raised the muzzle steadily until the foresight was in line with the notch of the backsight. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he pressed the trigger, without the least motion elsewhere, his eye on the object in his sights.

It was a target, nothing more
.

The rifle kicked against his shoulder, but he seemed to hear no sound, as if his senses had frozen the moment before, sealing the image on his retina like a photographic negative. All he felt was a dizzying speed, as if he himself were hurtling at twelve hundred feet per second toward his target. He blinked, and the image was gone. His ears were ringing, and all he could see was a cloud of smoke from the muzzle, and then a swirling maelstrom on the foreshore. He let the rifle fall on its butt and lurched heavily forward on one knee, desperately trying to stop retching. He heard a bellow from Sergeant O’Connell and then the immense crack of a volley from the line of riflemen beside him. He turned and saw O’Connell’s face bearing down on him, flushed, eyes red-rimmed, the very image of Fury unleashed. He saw the lips move, then heard the voice. “That should do it for you, sir. Fucking cannibals.” Howard looked around and saw Wauchope staring at him, and he breathed hard.
He must stay in control
. He straightened up and looked at O’Connell. “There will be hell to pay if we cause a massacre, Sergeant. The civil authorities will send us out of here in chains. We can only shoot if we’re fired on. I’m trusting you to exercise restraint.”

“You put that boy out of his misery, sir,” O’Connell said. “That took uncommon courage, sir. God bless you.”

Howard felt faint, and turned quickly back to the rail, holding it tight. Wauchope took out his revolver, spinning the cylinder to check that the chambers were loaded. He shoved it back in his holster and put his hand on Howard’s shoulder. “Now’s the time to go and find our sappers and Bebbie,” he said quietly. “O’Connell’s volley dropped the devils who had been tormenting that little boy, but the rebel leader and the rest had already moved to the other two victims. I fear the sacrifice has taken place. But the rebels are too far gone with toddy to see us go. They’re perfectly besotted.”

Walker came up from where he had been operating on the wounded sapper, wiping his hands on his apron. “Those who aren’t dead drunk will be going home with their pound of flesh,” he said. “They have to bury their offering in their own plot of land before nightfall, to ensure the efficacy of the sacrifice. They will be dispersing far and wide to their villages.”

Hamilton looked at Howard. “Well?” Howard fingered his own holster, and looked again across the river. His mouth felt dry, and his heart was fluttering. He was not sure what he had just done, or if it was a horrible dream. He took a deep breath and nodded. “Very well. The jemadar and Sergeant O’Connell can look after things here.” He glanced up the deck to the
muttadar
, who was cowering beside the seven-pounder gun, clutching his bamboo tube. “And the
muttadar
can come with us. He can bring his precious cargo. Even if Bebbie’s beyond our help, at least we can uphold our end of the bargain.” He looked up at the wall of black cloud that was now towering over them, and felt the drops of rain on his face. “It’s time we got his sacred idol back where it belongs. And got our sappers the hell out of there.”

L
IEUTENANT JOHN HOWARD HITCHED UP HIS SWORD
and eased himself back against the burnt stump of a tamarind tree, then drained the last of his water bottle. He had watched the dozen Madrasi sappers take up position around the edge of the jungle clearing, and now he could relax for a moment. He swatted at a mosquito that had bitten through the thin cotton of his uniform, which was soaked with sweat and clinging to him like a second skin. The smear of blood on his leg could have come from the mosquito or from the myriad small cuts where the jungle grass had slashed his face and arms as if with knives. He was grateful to Surgeon Walker for insisting that he bind his calves and ankles with puttees of coarse cloth. Even so he knew that any open wound out here could be bad news, and he hoped they were back on board the river steamer under Walker’s watchful eye before any virulence set in. He pulled out his fob watch. Four hours to sundown. Another hour and they would turn back. He knew with utter conviction that they could not survive the night out here.

He put away the watch. His right hand was still shaking, the hand that had pulled the trigger less than an hour before, and he clenched it into a fist, willing it to stop. With his other hand he unfastened his holster flap and extracted his Colt revolver, checking the cylinder to see that the percussion caps were still firmly lodged on each chamber.

“You ought to get yourself a cartridge revolver, you know.” The officer squatting alongside had been eyeing him with concern, and Howard realized that Wauchope must have seen his shaking hand.

“My father used this to defend us during the mutiny. It worked then. Call it superstition.”

“If it wasn’t for the noise giving us away, I’d be sorely tempted to use mine on those dogs,” Wauchope said. “In Afghanistan I saw a pack of wild hounds rip a wounded man to pieces in seconds.”

Howard holstered the revolver, then looked around the clearing. They were in a patch of tangled thorn and scrub that had once been a native Kóya clearing, abandoned after the soil had become exhausted and now reverting to jungle. At intervals half a dozen dogs sat silently watching them, long, lean beasts like the dogs the regiment kept for
shirkar
, for hunting fowl and small game in the hills around the cantonment at Bangalore. These were hunting dogs too, and had paced silently alongside them as they made their way up from the riverbank along the jungle path, through dense groves of tamarind eighty, even ninety feet high, festooned with huge creepers and vines dripping with condensation. It had been eerily quiet all the way, as if the beasts and birds of the jungle were in limbo, uncertain whether the monsoon was about to break over them, whether to cower down or to burst out in their usual deafening cacophony. Or perhaps they were fearful of another presence, the evil spirits the
muttadar
said lurked in the jungle after a sacrifice, waiting while the natives returned to their villages with their bloody strips of flesh—spirits that would only be sated when the offerings were buried.

Howard felt he was in the grip of an overactive imagination, tipped into some kind of unreason he could scarcely control, and he closed his eyes. It was the first glimmerings of fever, perhaps, an unfamiliar state for him. He looked at the dogs again, and felt his bile rise. Hunting dogs, but gorged on carrion of the most bestial kind, their maws still glistening red and dripping. The shrieking mob had left them the bones and gristle by the riverbank, and the dogs had remained behind, lapping at the bloody mire in the pit. For a dreadful moment Howard felt as if the dogs were here for him, as if his act in pulling the trigger had not dispelled the awful ritual but made him part of it, as if he had become a sacrificial priest who might provide another ghastly feast before the day was done.