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,
