The Tiger Warrior (25 page)

A noise made them turn toward the jungle. It was a new sound, like chimes or distant gongs. It was hard to tell if it was the breeze through the trees, or real. Then it began in earnest, a drumbeat from the direction of the village, three deep beats, a silence, three more beats, intensifying as more drums joined in. Then they saw them, men in loincloths carrying long, double-ended drums, coming out of the jungle on either side of the path, then stepping back, then coming out again with each set of beats. Women appeared between them, wearing bells in their ears, shaking their heads vigorously. They stamped the earth in unison, gathering force with the drumbeat, swelling in numbers, going in and out in line between the drummers. Voices began rising and falling in a plaintive chant. Then the line parted and a man appeared wearing a bison skull on his head, wrapped around with a red sari and mounted with peacock feathers, the horns arching high and dripping red. More men with horns followed, forming a circle on the sand, stamping in and out in unison and chanting.

“Horns of the gaur,” Jack murmured. “The other dreaded beast of the jungle. Looks like they’ve bloodied them already.”

“Just with chickens, I hope,” Costas said. “But it’s still pretty damn terrifying. Add human sacrifice, and put yourself in the mind of a British soldier watching this from that river steamer in 1879. This would have looked like the vision of hell that all those Victorian pastors would have drummed into them as kids. These were heathen savages, and those horned men are a vision of the devil himself.”

Pradesh came down the path through the line of drummers and strode toward them. The toddy-tapper had been with him, but stayed behind at the edge of the jungle. Pradesh glanced at his watch, then peered up at the sky, scanning the eastern horizon. “The bison dance,” he said. “The first act of the festival. The toddy’s flowing freely now. It’s a good time for us to leave.”

“Before they strip me and send me on a little hike in the jungle, you mean,” Costas said.

“Any luck?” Jack asked.

“You saw what the toddy-tapper did with his hands, in the jungle clearing? He pulled the skin of his face to make his eyes slant. He said a man came here before the monsoon broke, about four months ago. He had eyes like that.”

“Katya’s uncle?” Costas said.

“Could be,” Jack murmured. “Hai Chen was Mongolian Chinese. Anything else?”

“The man told the Kóya he was a friend of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf He was an anthropologist who came here with his wife in the 1930s, during the final years of British rule. They stayed in the jungle for several months, and championed the tribals’ cause. Christoph befriended my father as a boy, and was always spoken of by the Kóya with great reverence.”

“The tribals remember a visitor from almost eighty years ago?” Costas asked.

“Absolutely,” Pradesh replied. “And they remember Lieutenant Howard, Jack’s great-great-grandfather. In the months after the rebels had been defeated and the main Rampa Field Force had been withdrawn, Howard and his sappers remained behind to clean up and begin road building. Apparently, Howard went out of his way to help the villagers, improving water supply and sanitation, showing them tricks of construction. He was unlike the missionaries who occasionally came up the river. He told them the only gods they should worship were their own. They remembered that. He became ill with exhaustion, and they looked after him here, in this village. He was especially solicitous of the children, and made them toys while he was convalescing. And they remember the day the steamer came to take him away, the day he was told that his own son had died. He was inconsolable, and came out to this riverbank by himself, to the place where the rebels had cajoled the Kóya into carrying out the sacrificial ceremony that day in 1879. It was where they sacrificed the child. Perhaps the sight of that had most affected Howard.

Jack swallowed hard. “That sounds like him,” he murmured. “He was devoted to his own children, the ones he had in the following years.”

“But he never returned the sacred
vélpu
or the tiger gauntlet,” Costas said.

“For some reason he and Wauchope decided to keep them,” Jack replied. “Howard may have intended to go back to the jungle shrine and try to find a way back in, but after he was struck down by illness he never returned to the jungle.”

Pradesh turned to Costas. “You asked about how the Kóya remember. Because they have no timeline, visitors of a hundred or a thousand years ago are described in the same terms, as ‘in the time of their forefathers.’ Eventually, those most distant take on the mantle of mythology, and some of them become gods.”

“By claiming friendship with von Fürer-Haimendorf Hai Chen was deploying the oldest technique in the anthropologists’ book,” Jack murmured. “Gain your subjects’ confidence by claiming friendship with a revered visitor from the past. Hai Chen would have known that.”

“Apparently, he spoke to them in the Khond language of the northern jungle, well enough for them to understand,” Pradesh said. “The Kóya language is a dialect of Khond.”

“That clinches it,” Jack exclaimed. “Katya said her uncle was an accomplished linguist, and had made a study of the tribal languages when he first began exploring the jungle peoples of India. What else can they tell us?”

“He was interested in their mythology, in ancient traditions, their artifacts. The toddy-tapper told him about the
vélpus
, and the man pressed him to see one. Eventually the toddy-tapper produced his family
vélpu
, already removed from its bamboo container. Ever since the most sacred
vélpu
, the Lakkála Rámu, disappeared in 1879, the
vélpus
have lost a lot of their power, and the family
vélpu
is the least powerful. Even so, the other villagers disapproved, and that’s why you saw them backing off in the jungle clearing just now when he produced this.” Pradesh held up the object the toddy-tapper had given him, a coin. They peered at it, and Costas whistled. “I’ve seen those before. Our shipwreck in the Red Sea. It’s Roman.”

“An early Imperial denarius,” Jack said, taking the coin and looking at it closely. “Not gold like the wreck coins, but silver. It’s very worn, but the portrait’s early Augustus, no doubt about it. Amazing.”

“They’re found all across southern India,” Pradesh said. “We have a numismatist at Arikamedu who’s making an exhaustive study of them. She knew about John Howard, as his boyhood collection of Roman coins from India was bequeathed to the Survey of India by his daughter. The coins are usually mint, uncirculated. They were exported by the Romans as bullion. This one was worn because it must have been handled for generations by the Kóya, probably as an ornament, before it gained sacred status and was hidden away as a
vélpu
. The toddy-tapper said that portrait was an image of Rama. He’s watching us with eagle eyes over there. I’ve got to return it before we go.”

“Rama,”
Jack mused. “Anything else?”

Pradesh squatted down. “There is something else. And it’s disturbing.” He paused. “The man, Hai Chen, arrived here just before the monsoon broke, and wanted to cover as much ground as he could before the jungle became impassable. They sent him with a guide to Rampa village, and from there he went on alone to see the shrine. None of the Kóya would go there with him.”

“The cave you were talking about?” Costas said.

Pradesh nodded. “And then a few days later, others came, also like this.” Pradesh drew his eyes back with his fingers.

“More Chinese,” Jack said.

Pradesh nodded. “But they were different. There were seven of them, and they came by helicopter. They said they were mining prospectors. They were aggressive. The villagers were very apprehensive. They’d had prospectors out here before from the mining companies, and the Kóya hate them. The hills around here are rich in bauxite and the whole area is under threat. But there was something that especially terrified them. The men had tattoos on their forearms, all identical—it was an image of a tiger.”

“A tiger,”
Jack repeated.

“The toddy-tapper was petrified. He thought the
konda devata
had come to punish him for revealing his
vélpu
to Hai Chen. He still thinks they’re lurking in the jungle around the village, waiting for the moment to strike. And he has good reason to be apprehensive.”

Jack felt suddenly uneasy. “Go on.”

“These prospectors’ approach to information gathering was slightly different. They grabbed one of the children, a little girl, and held a gun to her head. They wanted to know where the other Chinese man had gone. The anthropologist.”

“And the toddy-tapper told them.”

Pradesh nodded. “That was over three months ago. The Maoists came here and told them not to go near the shrine. They’re used to the Maoists telling them to stay away from their camps, and the shrine’s pretty well taboo for the Kóya anyway. But this time it was different. After the disappearance of the Chinese anthropologist, the toddy-tapper knew something else had gone on. Evil spirits had been awakened.”

“What’s the problem with sending in police troops?” Costas said. “Sounds like enough justification now.”

Pradesh shook his head. “Nobody in government’s going to buy this story. There’s still an ingrained contempt for the tribals among the lowlanders who make up most of the regional government and judiciary, and if any word leaked out that they’d been harassing prospectors solely on the basis of a story from the Kóya there’d be hell to pay. There are powerful elements in government who would happily see the tribals dispossessed and these hills turned into a gigantic strip mine. The financial stakes are huge. Military intervention could only come on the back of Maoist violence in the jungle, and the Maoists are usually careful to avoid that. The jungle is their safe house. My father was murdered by the Maoists in Dowlaiswaram, not up here. If the Maoists shoot at troops it becomes a federal matter, and the next thing you know there would be helicopter gunships hosing down the jungle. Turning this place into a version of the Vietnam War will not help the tribal peoples. You have to tread very carefully. Officially, I’m here on holiday and the two chaps from our assault company who will be with us in the chopper are private bodyguards, employed by you.”

“And what you really want to do is kill the Maoists yourself, in your own time,” Costas said quietly. “For your father.”

Jack glanced at Pradesh, who looked at the ground, saying nothing.

“And what about the anthropologist, Hai Chen?” Costas said.

Pradesh shook his head. “Not a sign of him since then.”

The thudding of a helicopter filled the air, drowning out the drumbeat from the edge of the jungle. Pradesh took out his radio receiver and spoke rapidly in Hindi. The helicopter reared up over the river and backed off, dropping down on the opposite sandbank. Pradesh waved at the toddy-tapper, who was gesticulating at the helicopter. “I told them to land on the other side of the river. The Kóya deserve some leeway after the last time one of these landed here. And we don’t want them losing control and rushing us.”

Jack peered at the dancers. “They look a little too far gone to notice.” He stood up and walked back across the sand to where he had tied the painter line. Costas marched off, gourd in hand, to where the toddy-tapper was standing. “I’m just going to say good-bye to my new friend.”

“Don’t let him whisk you off into the jungle,” Jack said. “If you’ve got that tiger magic in you, we may need it too.”

Costas shook hands with the man, pointing at the gourd approvingly. Jack followed, holding the line to the boat, and Pradesh joined them, handing the toddy-tapper the Roman coin. The man packaged it carefully in his little leather pouch, and tied it to his loincloth. “He doesn’t seem to be fazed by the chopper,” Costas said.

“Some of them are used to it. The Chinese aren’t the first prospecting team to come up here. There have been others, multinationals. Sometimes the Kóya are contracted to work as guides. The prospectors pay them in bricks of hashish—it’s the mining companies’ way of giving something back, showing they really care.”

Jack turned toward the toddy-tapper, thought for a moment then took off the Nikon binoculars he had slung around his neck. He had seen several of the Kóya eyeing them with curiosity earlier on. They would be of little use on the trip into the confines of the jungle. He passed them over. The man took them, handling them with care, looked closely at the lenses and the mechanism, then handed them back. He bowed his head to Jack, and spoke a few words to Pradesh.

“He said, if you have no need of them, then neither does he. He said he can see as far as he needs to.”

Jack looked hard at the man, and slowly nodded. “Fair enough.”

“Anthropology 101, Jack,” Costas murmured.

Jack raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”

“Don’t mess with the natives.”

“Thanks, engineer.”

Pradesh pointed at the helicopter. They hurried back down to the boat. He and Costas stood on either side, and Jack threw the painter line over the bow.

“Okay,” Pradesh said. “Good to go?”

Costas stared at him, then at Jack. “You said it.”

Jack slung his old khaki bag over his shoulder, reaching in to feel the Beretta in its holster. Something was going on, something bigger than he had imagined. He thought of Katya, and suddenly needed to talk to her. He glanced at his watch. Only four hours before the Lynx was due to pick them up from Rajahmundry and take them back to
Seaquest II
.

Costas glanced into the darkness of the jungle, then pointed at the pendant around Pradesh’s neck. “I was wondering,” he said. “Got any more of those tiger claws?”

Pradesh glanced at him, and began heaving at the boat. “You don’t need one, remember? You’ve eaten tiger food. But don’t worry. I won’t walk you into a fire-fight. If there’s any sign of trouble, my two sappers will shoot to kill.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Costas said. “Jack?”

“Let’s do it.”