The Tiger Warrior

7

Lieutenant 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 Koya 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.

“It’s hopeless,” Wauchope said. “I fancied I saw a heliograph flash a moment ago, but it must have been a trick of the eye, a brief ray of sunlight on wet vegetation. There’s no chance now.” He began folding away the instrument in front of him, a wooden tripod with a small mirror on top and a lever for tilting it to flash Morse code. Howard snapped back to reality, and opened his compass. He took a bearing, then shook his head. The champagne quality of the jungle air recorded by Lieutenant Everest sixty years before only came after the deluge, and that had yet to happen. When they had halted in the clearing ten minutes earlier, an attempt at heliograph signaling had seemed possible, with the jungle-shrouded hilltops still visible through the mist in the valleys. But now a heavy fog had descended and the damp penetrated everywhere, even condensing in the bores of the sappers’ rifles. He glanced at Wauchope. “Were it not for the prodigious vegetation the Shamrock should still be within our line of sight,” he said. “But according to Hamilton, from now on we drop down into the jungle beside a stream until we reach the village. You may as well stash the heliograph here. It’s no use to us now.”

Another figure in khaki and a pith helmet came up through the tangled vegetation, then stooped over at the edge of the clearing to pick up something from the ground. His eyes were ringed with exhaustion, and Howard wondered if he had been right to let Hamilton lead them back to this place so soon after his arduous escape from the rebels. Once again he let his anger with Assistant Commissioner Bebbie course through him, the sustaining emotion that seemed to keep him level. If it had only been Beddie who had needed saving, they would have left him to the tigers and hyenas, but the fact that he had four sappers guarding him made it imperative that they do all they could to mount a rescue.

Hamilton slumped beside them and tossed out a handful of spent Snider cartridges. “This is the place all right. This is where we stopped and gave them a volley,” he panted, his voice dry and hoarse. “We dropped three, maybe four, but they took their fallen and bolted into the jungle.” He looked intently at Howard, his eyes strange, burning, the beginnings of fever. “We use rifles and bayonets the length of halberds, deploying infantry tactics designed for the field of Waterloo. We need smoothbore carbines, buckshot, revolvers, knives. We need to follow them into the jungle, track them down, kill them as a beast kills its prey. We need to play their game but get better at it, let animal instinct take over from decency. We need to become savages.”

Howard looked at him. “Most of all, we need to find the wretched Bebbie and get out of here. You say you can’t choose between the trails ahead?”

“We were being pressed back. Only now do I realize there are three trails up the valley out of this clearing. We’ll have to trust the muttadar” He jerked his head toward the semi-naked figure squatting by himself on the edge of the clearing, his head swathed in the maroon turban Beddie had given him as a sign of government authority, his hands clutching his precious length of bamboo. Howard took a deep breath, and looked hard at Hamilton. Perhaps they were all becoming unhinged. Per haps it was the fever. He saw the yellow eyeballs, the blanched cheeks. He remembered Surgeon Walker’s words. A low fever of the malignant, lingering type. He felt a sudden chill, and a shiver ran through him. His hand was still shaking. He hoped to God it was just his nerves. He looked at Wauchope. “All right. Tell the havildar to keep the men five paces apart. Rifles at half-cock. And remember, these people can track us like tigers.”

Half an hour later they squatted down beside a trickling stream deep in the jungle. Since leaving the clearing they had descended into a dark tunnel of foliage, all sense of the sky blotted out by the thick canopy. It was a pestilential place, infested with clouds of mosquitoes that seemed to rise from every stagnant pool, bird-sized spiders that leapt into the men’s hair every time a helmet was removed, and leeches that lurked in every damp spot and attached themselves without the slightest provocation. Now it was as if they had come up for air, the sky visible above them in patches of dark cloud lit up with distant flashes of sheet lightning. Howard wiped his dripping face and pushed his water bottle into a brackish pool in the stream. Suddenly a shot rang out. Howard dropped the flask and unholstered his revolver, jerking upright. Hamilton was standing a few yards ahead with his own revolver leveled at the ground. A giant cobra had slid across the path, and Hamilton had foolishly shot it. Howard cursed him under his breath for the noise. And it was only wounded. The cobra leapt up, bouncing and writhing around like a demented dancer, and attached itself to the leg of one of the sappers. The man shrieked and fell insensible to the ground. Hamilton unsheathed his sword and decapitated the snake. The muttadar gestured wildly, then vanished into the jungle and quickly reappeared chewing a ball of green matter, which he forced into the sapper’s mouth. Within seconds the sapper opened his eyes, sat bolt upright and began hyperventilating, his breathing calming down as he was held by two other soldiers.

Howard looked in some astonishment at the scene, reassured himself that the sapper truly was recovering, then reholstered his revolver and began filling up his bottle again. The muttadar watched him do it and then bounded up and pushed his hand away, and pointed at the khukri knife in the belt of one of the sappers. Howard looked at him quizzically, then nodded at the havildar, who leveled his big percussion pistol at the muttadar and gestured for him to go ahead. The muttadar took the khukri and went over to a grove of thick-stemmed bamboo growing on the stream bank. He tapped the nearest one just above a knot with the back side of the khukri, and they heard a dull sloshing sound. He stood back and swung the khukri at the bamboo, slashing it sideways to avoid creating splinters. A cupful of clear sparkling water gushed out onto the ground. The sappers quickly came up behind him, holding out their empty canteens as he went from trunk to trunk, expertly slashing with the razor-sharp blade.

“Give the water first to Sapper Narrainsamy,” Howard said in Hindi. “We need him to be able to walk.”

He watched the sapper who was leaning against a tamarind root, being passed a water flask by the havildar. Now Howard looked around apprehensively. The sound of the gunshot and the shriek had ignited the jungle, and the few cautious chatters and peeps had become an explosive cacophony of screeches and yelps and howls. Somewhere in the background came the throaty rumble of a tiger, rising to a mighty roar that shook the ground. The dogs that had been with them all along suddenly bolted, yipping frantically and disappearing into the jungle. The sappers all dropped their canteens and grasped their weapons. The muttadar fell to the ground in a ball, shaking and moaning and chanting a mantra to himself, words that Howard had heard him say before.

“He says it’s a konda devata, a possessed female in the shape of a tiger,” Howard murmured to Wauchope. “She’ll devour anyone staying in the forest at the time of a sacrifice. It’s she who should lick the blood of the sacrificial victims, not the dogs.”

“A real tiger is enough for me,” Wauchope muttered, revolver in hand.

“Sorcery and superstition,” Howard said in Hindi, nodding sternly at the havildar and speaking a few words of reassurance to the sappers who had taken fright. He remembered his own nervous imagination in the jungle clearing, but he steeled himself to dispel it. They were all depending on him. He looked at the streambed, and then at Hamilton. “Do you recognize this?”

Hamilton nodded. “We left Bebbie and the sappers about half a mile upstream from here. The stream was nearly dry when we came down, but it’s a narrow defile and will become a torrent with the rain. The jungle on either side is impenetrable. You can see the sky through the canopy. It’s nearly black. We need to move.”

Howard led them forward. At first the gradient was tolerably level, and the streambed was firm sand and stones. Here and there outcrops of deep red sandstone broke through the bank on either side, and giant moss-and fern-covered boulders forced them to struggle up the bank and back down again to the streambed. As the gradient increased the streambed narrowed into a small ravine, the eroded sandstone banks on either side rising twenty feet or more above their heads. They could now see evidence of the previous monsoon, where the river had threshed over the rock in a raging torrent, leaving uprooted trees and rolling rocks down the bed. The banks were too high to climb now, and Howard knew they stood no chance if the monsoon broke. Already there were flashes of forked lightning and distant peals of thunder. The wild beasts seemed to be howling in concert with the elements, sometimes jarringly discordant, sometimes to the same beat, like a devilish orchestra tuning up, a preamble to the unleashing of the heavens that would surely come.

Howard tried to ignore his fear and struggled on, a few yards ahead of the others. As he rounded a boulder, something rolled down the muddy bank just in front of him. It was a red gourd the size of a human head, and he kicked it forward unthinkingly. As he did so he saw a marking. He sloshed ahead, turned it over then quickly stamped his foot into it before the sappers could see. It had been a crude representation of a man hanging on a gallows. The muttadar had told him about these. They were more than just a warning. They were beacons to the konda devata, meant to attract the evil spirit like the smell of dead meat to a hyena. Howard’s heart was pounding, and he looked up at the impenetrable wall of the jungle above the riverbank, blinking away the drops of rain. He could see nothing. But it was not only a tiger that was stalking them. They were close to the village, and there were others in the jungle, flitting forms. He looked ahead along the boulders to where the streambed rose into a tumbling rapids, and he fancied he saw a child, a form in a shawl with arms outstretched, beckoning him. He caught his breath. He must be hallucinating. He remembered the riverside scene, what he had done, and the image was gone. He struggled forward until he reached the base of the rapids. The stream was already rising against them, a red-brown torrent where it cut through the sandstone. Two freshly felled trees on either side were exuding dark-red sap that stained the banks. It was as if he were walking into a gush of blood. He wondered if he was being drawn into a world of sorcery and horror that he had made his own when he pulled that trigger. He half-fell forward, then suddenly sank up to his waist. He was caught just in time by Wauchope and Hamilton, who had come up behind him.

“I should have remarked on it,” Hamilton gasped breathlessly. “The waterfall had liquefied the streambed and it’s like quicksand. We had the devil’s own time getting down here. Under those choked-up leaves and ash it’s a death trap.”

“How close are we now?” Howard said, struggling to keep collected.

“Just over the waterfall. There’s a bridge, and then we’re on the trail from the village to the shrine. We left Bebbie and the sappers in a clearing just in front of it.”

“We’re being followed,” Howard said.

“That gourd? I saw you look at it,” Wauchope said.

“Why don’t they kill us?” Hamilton said. “They could shoot us like pigs in a slaughterhouse.”

Howard looked at the muttadar, who had been scampering over the boulders with natural agility and had materialized silently beside them, his precious bamboo container held tight. “I think it’s the muttadar. He’s a sorcerer and even though the rebels know he’s betrayed them, perhaps there’s some kind of spell that prevents them from harming him.”

“His idol?” Wauchope said.

Howard nodded. “That’s the only reason he’s here with us, and has led us this far. He’s as terrified as all these people are of the jungle demons, the konda devata, but I believe he knows he will be allowed safe passage back to the shrine to replace what he had taken. And because we’ve dared to go into the jungle among the spirits that haunt it after the festival, they might think we have some kind of supernatural power ourselves.”

“They are utterly irreclaimable savages,” Hamilton muttered, his face now flushed with the fever. “The only supernatural power they’ll get out of me is a volley of lead from our Sniders.”

“Hold this.” Wauchope handed Howard the end of a rope he had taken from the haversack of one of the sappers, and leapt up onto the boulder at the base of the waterfall. He held his sword out of the way and climbed nimbly from rock to rock, paying out the rope. He stopped at the top, some thirty feet above them, just visible in the mist, and gestured with his free arm for them to follow. Over the next ten minutes they all clambered up after him one by one, the sappers with their rifles slung over their backs and going barefoot. At the top was a small bamboo bridge over the shingly steambed, and they trooped across it into a clearing surrounded by patches of feathering reed. About fifty yards ahead the jungle began again, rising high over another rocky hillock. The havildar suddenly gesticulated and one of the sappers ran forward, toward a small cluster of fellow sappers with bayonets fixed, visible below a boulder on the far side of the clearing. There was a sudden scream of warning in Hindi from one of them, but it was too late. The sapper had disappeared without a sound. The others cautiously went forward, Hamilton and Howard in the lead, and they peered down.

“Good God, no,” Hamilton whispered. “I knew this was here. I should have warned them. I am not in my right mind.”

A horrible gurgling sound came from below, then stopped. Howard leaned over, feeling nauseous. A tiger trap. The hole was deep, at least ten feet, and stakes of fire-hardened bamboo rose out of the ground. The sapper had fallen in a seated position, and a stake had caught him in the nape of his neck and driven right through his skull, a bloody spike that thrust a foot or more above his turban. The force of the impact had nearly decapitated him, and his neck was stretched out grotesquely, the rest of his body skewered on the bed of spikes in front. Howard swallowed hard, then stood back to let the other sappers see. He took the havildar aside and had a quiet word with him in Hindi before turning to Wauchope and Hamilton.

“I asked him to recover the rifle and ammunition,” he said. “They’ll want to take him out and bury him.”

“That will be an odious task,” Wauchope murmured.

“They will not leave him here like this,” Howard said. He turned and walked toward the other side of the clearing, his anger rising. Bebbie now had even more to account for. But he saw that they were too late. The four sappers of the detachment, those Hamilton had left to guard Bebbie, were kneeling, with bayonets pointing outward, around a crude bamboo palanquin. On it was a sweat-drenched, half-covered body very far from being alive. Howard knew how cruelly the cholera could ravage a person’s appearance, but this was ghoulish in the extreme. The face was gray and the mouth was lolling, full of congealed blood. He came closer. It was not quite right. Bebbie’s eyes had clearly come out, only to be pushed crudely back in. As Howard approached, holding his nose against the smell of feces, he saw the explanation. A large hole perforated the middle of Beddie’s forehead.

The havildar followed and spoke rapidly to the four sappers, passing them his water bottle, then let them speak in turn. Howard listened, then turned to Hamilton and Wauchope, his anger still palpable despite the grim finality of the scene. He jerked his thumb at the corpse. “That fool ordered the sappers into Rampa village to parley with the rebels. Their native guide had told him the rebel leader Chendrayya was there. One of the sappers went through the jungle to the edge of the village for a reconnaissance. He saw at least four hundred rebels massed, maybe more. I believe they were the party we saw join the throng by the river. The sapper returned and reported to Bebbie. The sappers had seen what the rebels had done to the captured police constables. The ones we saw executed by the river are not the only victims. Two more were murdered here in full view of the sappers last night, just outside the shrine. But Bebbie still ordered the sappers to go back to the village.”

“He must have been delirious,” Wauchope said.

“You didn’t know this man,” Howard said, gritting his teeth. “But before they could go, they were attacked. Shots were exchanged. Bebbie was hit and killed.”

Wauchope knelt close to the corpse, and peered at the gaping blue hole in the forehead. He lifted up the head, raising a swarm of black flies from the sticky mess below. The back of the head was blown off, and fragments of skull were stuck to the ground. He looked up at the other two officers. “That’s no musket ball,” he said quietly. “That’s a Snider bullet. I’ve seen what our rifles do in Afghanistan.”

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?”

“It’s an inscription. I can read it.”

“What language?”

Wauchope did not reply. Howard watched the yellow orb of light move quickly along the side of the rock, and then back again. He could just make out shapes, carved lettering. Halfway along the fourth row the candle sputtered and went out. They were in near darkness, the only light a dull gray coming through the passage from the entrance. “Quick,” Wauchope said excitedly. “Strike a light. I think I can read one of the lines.” Howard put down the bamboo tube by the altar and hurriedly took out his flint and steel, striking over and over again in the damp air until a spark lit the cord. He cupped his hand over it until there was a flame, and passed it carefully over. Wauchope dangled the flame close to the rock and moved it along. The flame reached his fingers and he dropped it, gasping in pain. There was a hiss as the cord hit the wet floor and they were in near darkness again.

“That’s it,” Howard said. “Well?”

Wauchope was silent. Howard saw the silhouette of his form, nursing his hand, stock-still and staring blindly at the stone. Then Wauchope swiveled toward him, and Howard could just make out his bearded face in the pale illumination from the entranceway.

“It’s Latin. Sacra iulium sacularia. Guardian of the celestial jewel. There’s more, but that’s all I could make out.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Howard whispered. “Some memory from my childhood, from my ayah. The celestial jewel. The jewel of immortality.”

There was an immense rumble outside, then a clap of thunder. Lightning lit up the interior of the shrine like a flash of gunpowder, revealing for an instant a surging mass of forms that seemed to be crowding in on them, gods and goddesses and demons and glowering tigers, faces contorted in agony and fear, terrifying riders looming above them like the horsemen of the apocalypse. Howard thought he saw Romans. Roman legionaries. He felt as he had in the jungle when the noise of the beasts erupted. He put a hand to his forehead. It was burning, and his hand was shaking. He crouched beside Wauchope and they made their way back toward the entrance. The pounding of the waterfall behind the boulders had increased, and they could see the rain lashing down now, giant droplets that spattered into the passageway. Howard realized he was hearing something else, the insistent sound of drumbeats, coming from all sides, sometimes discordant but then steady and rhythmic, just as he had heard that morning from the riverbank. Fear rose in him. He peered into the downpour, searching for the muttadar, and then saw a crumpled form, a forest of arrows sticking out of it and a dark stain seeping over the mud. The rain was pulverizing his body, and it seemed to be disappearing before their very eyes. The two men crawled back into the main chamber. Howard pulled out his revolver, and Wauchope did the same. They knelt up in the confined space and shook hands.

“God be with you,” Howard said.

“If we ever make it out of here, this place is our secret,” Wauchope replied. “I saw something more in that inscription.”

“If we rush toward the boulder where we left the sappers, we could make it.”

They turned back toward the entrance. Howard reached into the darkness on top of the altar slab and lifted something he had seen earlier, a brass gauntlet with a fist in the shape of a tiger’s head, a rusted blade protruding from the tiger’s mouth. He felt his own sword pommel, then thought better of it and slipped his right hand into the gauntlet, curling his fingers round the crossbar inside. The head of the tiger looked like the image he had seen on the boulders of the shrine, with a grimacing mouth and slanted eyes. “Tigers seem to be the one thing they’re afraid of,” he said. “If it’s in the shrine, this thing must be some kind of sacred object. Might put the fear of God into them.”

“I’ve got an even better idea.” Wauchope picked up the bamboo tube and held it in front of him. “You kept your side of the bargain. You brought the muttadar’s precious idol back to the shrine. But I think now that he’s past caring, we can borrow it for a little longer. If they see that we still have it, the rebels might hold off as they did before.”

Through the pounding rain and drumbeats they heard the sharp crack of Snider rounds, then screams. Howard took a deep breath. At least the rebels would not be able to use their matchlocks in the rain. An immense crash suddenly shook them, not thunder this time but the reverberations of an earthquake. They braced themselves. Somewhere behind them was the sound of falling rock, and the boulder above them seemed to shift. Howard remembered the roar of the tiger, and wondered whether it was out there, waiting. He remembered his son. He remembered what he had done. He cocked his revolver and held the sword at the ready. For a split second he felt detached from his own body, as if he were standing back and watching the two of them go forward, disappearing through the veil of rain into history. He took a deep breath, and glanced at Wauchope. “Let’s do it.”