The Tiger Warrior (22 page)

A long, flat boat came into view around a bend, drifting with the current, its engine thudding in idle. It was laden with piles of coconuts and lengths of tree trunk, tamarind and mahogany. A policeman in a shabby khaki uniform lounged in the stern, holding an old Lee-Enfield rifle and eyeing them suspiciously as the boat slid past. Pradesh waved at him cheerfully. “The police have always been an issue up here,” he said. “The hill people see them as protectors of the lowlanders who are given forestry concessions, people who come and cut down their precious hardwoods. And you can hardly imagine that chap standing up to Maoist terrorists, can you? But that opens up a whole other problem. If you militarize the police, you antagonize the hill people more, and if you send in the army to confront the Maoists, you risk a return to the situation in 1879. Sappers are the best option, because the hill people can see them doing useful things, building roads, clinics, school-houses. Sappers are soldiers too, but they are a different breed of men.”

“So I can see,” Jack said, smiling.

Pradesh throttled back and steered the boat out of the main current and into the eddy waters along the left bank, where the gentle puttering of the motor was drowned out by the screeches and chattering of a band of white-faced langur monkeys who leered at them from the treetops. The boat rounded a bend, and they saw paths leading up from a beach to low-set houses in a jungle clearing, the palm-frond roofs overshadowed by mango and gnarled tamarind trees. For the first time they saw the Kóya, dark, finely muscled men wearing only loincloths, standing under the fronds watching them. One of them sported a leopard skin with a peacock feather pendant hanging from his neck.

“That’s the village of Puliramanaguden,” Pradesh said quietly. “It means ‘Place of the Tiger God.’”

“Tigers,” Costas murmured. “Any elephants?”

“Rarely, but plenty
of gaur
, the local bison. The Kóya call this stretch of jungle Pappikondalu, the Bison Hills. The bison are about the size of small elephants. I’ve heard them at night, thundering together through the jungle, roaring and panting like creatures from mythology. All you can see is the whites of their eyes. Even the tigers steer clear of them.”

Costas grunted. “Another choice IMU holiday destination.”

They went on farther, still enveloped by the mist along the bank, and reached another bend, the flow of the central channel now visible in the water ahead. Pradesh kept in the lee of the shore until they were only a few yards from the point of the bend, holding the boat almost at a standstill as he waited for the current to pull them out into mid-stream. Jack saw a woman sitting on the tangled roots of a banyan tree. She was very old, and blind. Her eyes were like those of an ancient statue, the paint gone and only the white remaining, yet Jack felt that she was staring directly at him, holding him fast. She seemed like a pietà, a mother anguished, mourning a lost child. Jack remembered the Victorian photo of the mother and child above the old chest in his cabin, his great-great grandmother and her baby. He looked up at the forest canopy above the woman, and through a break in the mist he saw the hills dark against the sky. He felt an intense sense of familiarity, and then it was gone. From around the point a water buffalo lurched into view, lunging on a halter tied to a stake, a sudden, violent movement that set Jack’s pulse racing. The current caught the boat and Pradesh gunned the engine, bringing them out into the central channel, away from the woman and around the point, until she was lost in the haze. The river widened and the mist lifted, and Jack knew they were there. The place exactly matched the description in his great-great-grandfather’s diary. Pradesh steered the boat back into the still water beside the left bank, and nudged the prow into the beach until it stuck fast. Jack gazed at the opposite shore, a sandbar extending several hundred meters along another bend in the river where sediment had been pushed by the current. The sandbar was cut by a dry streambed he could just make out coming through the jungle. “Over there,” Pradesh said, pointing. “That’s where it happened.”

“I know,” Jack replied quietly. “It’s just as I imagined it.”

“Don’t expect to find anything from 1879 on the riverbank,” Pradesh said. “That sandbar’s swept away every year by the monsoon floodwater, and then reformed anew. We need to go to the riverside village you can just make out higher up, on the fringe of the jungle.”

“We’re in your hands,” Jack said.

Pradesh looked at his watch. “The helicopter’s due in an hour. It’ll fly us deeper into the jungle. My two sappers will be on board. I didn’t want to excite any hostility by having them with us on the river, but I don’t want to go into the jungle without them, meaning no disrespect to your nine-millimeter Beretta, Jack.”

“You spotted it,” Jack said.

“Just keep it out of sight. It’s a tinderbox up here. If any of the hill people who don’t know me suspect we’re government officials, then the game’s over. They’ll clam up completely. We’ll stop here for a break before going over to the village. It may seem odd in this heat, but I’m thirsty for tea.”

Pradesh busied himself with the battered old kettle and Primus stove from the boat’s store box, and Costas disappeared discreetly ashore. Jack sat alone, looking around. They had left the mist in the narrows behind them and entered an oasis of light, as if the air had been cleansed. The beach opposite swept around in the shape of a sword, the sand a dazzling gold. Behind it rose shimmering tree trunks and great boulders of sandstone that had been scoured clean by the floods. Above that was the jungle canopy, myriad shades of green climbing the steep sides of the cliffs as they converged upstream in the great gorge of the Godavari.

“Ahead of us, where the gorge narrows, the river’s only two hundred meters wide,” Pradesh said, handing him a glass of tea. “The hills on either side rise to over eight hundred meters, and the river’s very deep, almost a hundred meters.”

Jack looked at the jungle-clad walls of the gorge. It was enticing, yet forbidding, like a high mountain pass that promised a lush valley beyond, but threatened grave peril in the crossing. To the few lowlanders who ventured here the promise was the Abode of the Immortals, the Heavenly City. To the first Europeans it was the fabled kingdom of Golconda, the Mountain of Light, where the Koh-i-noor diamond had been mined, somewhere beyond the gorge ahead. Yet before the arrival of steamboats this was the end of the river journey, and most who came here turned back, powerless to resist the current as it tumbled through the gorge, pushing their boats back and letting the river return them downstream to civilization. Jack peered into the water. It was murky, not with mud but with some other darkness, and the sunlight seemed to vanish into it. The canyon walls should have been reflected in the water, but instead he saw nothing. It was disconcerting, as if the river were a black hole that swallowed up reality, leaving him wondering whether the mist-shrouded shoreline was some kind of phantasm, almost too close to his boyhood image of this place to be real. He snapped out of his reverie as Costas came crashing back through the undergrowth and leapt onto the bow of the boat, a picture of dishevelment with his shorts barely on.

“Something threaten your manhood?” Jack said.

“Spiders,” Costas panted, sitting back, checking his legs anxiously. “Giant hairy spiders the size of saucers.”

“The spiders are harmless, unless you provoke them,” Pradesh said, handing him a tea glass. “Just keep an eye out for the cobras. The Kóya use a root as an anti-venom, but I’ve never been able to find it.”

“There’s always Jack’s Beretta,” Costas said.

“Bad karma to shoot snakes,” Pradesh replied, wagging his finger. “Anyway, don’t worry. We’re not going trekking through the jungle. Jack wanted to retrace his ancestor’s footsteps, but I convinced him that we should go by helicopter. Jack agreed. He was concerned for your safety.”

“My safety? Jack? Yeah, right, that would be a first,” Costas grumbled, wiping the sweat off his face and swatting a mosquito. “At least we’ve all taken our anti-malarials.”

“That’s another thing,” Pradesh said hastily. “They don’t always work out here. But I know someone who can give us a little booster in the village.”

Jack looked again at the scene, imagining it one hundred and thirty years before. “So what do you know about August the twentieth 1879?”

Pradesh eyed him keenly. “Well, you were right about what happened.”

“Human sacrifice?”

Pradesh looked at the riverbank. “I told you I was brought up near the Godavari River, in Dowlaiswaram. Well, my grandfather was actually a Kóya, from this place. The story of that day in 1879 became a kind of legend, kept secret, even from the anthropologists who occasionally came up here asking questions. As far as I know, what I’m about to tell you has never been told to any other outsiders.”

“Go on,” Jack said.

“The rebels put on a spectacular show. They executed their police captives on that beach, in full view of the sappers on the river steamer trapped on the sandbank. But they also stirred the rest of the Kóya into a frenzy, feeding them alcohol and god knows what else. The tribals carried out three sacrifices that day, the full
meriah
. A man, a woman and a child.”

“A child too?” Jack murmured.

“Later, the authorities in the lowlands refused to believe it was a sacrifice, and thought the rebels had given their executions the guise
of meriah
to make them seem more terrifying, as if they were reviving a dread practice the British thought they’d stamped out years before. But the authorities were wrong. That scene on the riverbank was the real thing. Even today, sacrifices are still performed using langur monkeys and chickens, but the
meriah
ritual is still here, lurking just under the surface, and it would take little provocation, the re-lighting of that tinderbox, for it to be revived.”

“But what happened?” Jack persisted. “What made my great-great-grandfather end his diary that day?”

Pradesh pursed his lips. “I don’t know. Something traumatized him. It would have been a dreadful sight, the child especially, the flesh ripped from them while they were still alive. Maybe he felt impotent, unable to help. You say he was the father of a young child himself? You told me he was in India as a boy during the mutiny, when there were terrible scenes of slaughter. Maybe some latent memory of that horror resurfaced as he watched the sacrifice. By all accounts he was an excellent officer, a tough soldier, so whatever he saw or did, it must have been pretty bad.”

“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.”