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
