The Man-Kzin Wars 07

THE COLONEL'S TIGER
Hal Colebatch

India, Northwest Frontier, 1878

"Lie still. Rest," the doctor told him. "You're not recovered yet."

"Lie still? And listen to that?"

The wind brought to the field hospital the sounds of an intermittent drumfire from the barren, snow-topped hills to the north, the flat thud-thud of screw-guns and the thorns-in-fire crackle of distant musketry.

"Rest, I say. You're out of this one, Captain Vaughn."

"I've had enough. Dreams. Sickness. Delirium."

The sick man swung his legs to the floor and rose to his feet. He took a half dozen steps, and the doctor caught him as he fell.

A punkah coolie took part of the emaciated soldier's weight and they helped him back to the bed.

"I'll make a bargain with you: When you can get as far as the latrine without help you can try leading your squadrons in the mountains. Not before."

"I just feel so… useless lying here. Those are my men."

"If it's any consolation to you, the cavalry have been resting for the last week: It's work for mules and infantry up there. And if it's any further consolation, I had you marked off for dead a week ago. You and your friends."

The sick man smiled weakly. "I don't suppose my kit would have fetched much. There must have been a few auctions in the mess lately."

"It hasn't been too bad. Old Bindon's cautious with men's lives on punitive expeditions. Your tigerskin would have fetched something though… here, steady on!"

The doctor held the sick man's head as a violent retching shook him. Then, as he recovered, Vaughn raised his hand to the part of his scalp the doctor had held and gasped, "My head! What's happened?"

"I suppose I can show you." The doctor held up a mirror.

"Oh, my God!"

"Curlewis and Maclean are the same. And that Afridi devil of yours. But you're all alive. It was blood you were spewing a week ago, though you were in no condition to notice." The doctor held a glass of water to the captain's lips, steadying his trembling as he drank. "I must go. Rest, I say."

"Where is the skin?”

"Salted. The gomashta's got it. I advanced him a couple of rupees." He rose at the sounds he had been waiting for: hooves and the approaching wheels of ambulance carts from the direction of Dirragha.

Captain Vaughn sank back exhausted. He closed his eyes and saw again, hanging in blackness, the great cat's head with its blazing gold and violet eyes and batwing ears, the interlocking fangs protruding beyond the lips, the great cat they called his tiger-man. The dark cave, the rockets…

The wounded were being brought from the carts. The unmistakable sounds recalled him from his own visions to reality, and the work that had been done that day. At the tail end of the Afghan Campaign, a force of no less than five thousand men was fighting to pacify these barren hills with all that that implied in terms of death and wounds. Besides that, his own recent moment was nothing at all. But he was not fully clearheaded yet. The doctor could say what he liked, but at that moment the feeling of his weakness and uselessness oppressed him. He felt ashamed.

"They will forget you and me," he whispered to the image of his enemy. "But they will not forget the Dirragha Expeditionary Force.”

Adding these statements together he was, at best, only partly correct.