aware than ever of just how vulnerable was the troop. The jungle offered cover from view, but at a price. Once discovered, the troop would be an unwieldy body, overwhelmed in an instant. They had practised a little in the time they had had between the warning order and leaving Chittagong, but it had not been much more than picketing front and rear. If they were assailed from a flank there was little they could do — nothing, indeed, but draw sabres and fight.
Hervey signalled the others to follow. They trod slowly and carefully, eyes searching left and right into the thickening undergrowth. It took a full ten minutes to come up to Corporal McCarthy. He looked relieved to see them. It could not have been more than half an hour since Ashbolt had left him, but the forest had a way of stretching time.
‘Well?’ said Hervey, voice lowered, gesturing for him not to stand up as he approached.
‘Voices went about five minutes ago, sor,’ replied McCarthy, rising to a crouch. ‘They didn’t stop sudden, though. Just trailed off.’
An intelligent observation, thought Hervey. ‘Have you been forward to look again?’
‘No, sor. I was going to give it a few minutes more in case they were coming back.’
Hervey nodded, approving.
‘But another thing, sor,’ he added, sounding puzzled. ‘The river doesn’t run as you’d expect it to.’
Hervey narrowed his eyes.
‘Well, sor, I expected it would run from our right to our left. But it runs the other way.’
Hervey was astonished. He looked at his watch: there was but two hours’ light left. ‘We’d better take another look.’
They rose and began to advance, half-crouching.
After fifty yards they heard voices, angry ones. Hervey looked at McCarthy and Ashbolt. They nodded. ‘Same ones, sir,’ whispered Ashbolt.
Hervey dropped to one knee and motioned the others to do the same. He listened intently, not knowing for what, only for some clue to inform his next move. Then the voices sounded closer. He strained every nerve to hear. There was no doubt: the voices were coming towards them. He waved his hand at the others to get into cover on the left, then he himself backed a couple of yards into the undergrowth, all that was needed to conceal them.
He had less than a minute to calculate. He had no idea if the voices were hostile. He could let them pass and rely on the pointmen, but they might have no warning. He dared not draw his sword for fear of being heard; how many times in the past had he lamented the steel scabbard? He could not risk a shot.
Suddenly there were men in coloured shirts on the track in front of him, and a woman with a rope around her neck. In that instant he judged them to be false. He leapt forward with his carbine at the port. The others followed, drawing swords as best they could. The woman screamed and dropped to her knees. One of the men drew a knife, but Collins gave him the point under the breastbone and the man fell, squealing like stuck pig. Another lunged at the woman, his eyes wild. Corporal Ashbolt cut the knife from his hand with a deft flex of the wrist, then drove the point into his side. The man fell without a sound, eyes even wilder, legs and arms thrashing. The third took off back down the track. Collins and Hervey gave chase, but he was too fleet.
‘Shoot!’ bellowed Hervey.
Collins dropped to a knee, took aim with his carbine and fired. The shot felled the man and at once set the forest alive with noise.
‘Christ!’ hissed Hervey. But what choice had he?
They ran to the body and Collins began searching. ‘I reckon this is probably ill-gotten, sir,’ he said, holding out a bag of gold coin.
‘You’d better put him in the undergrowth, Sar’nt Collins,’ said Hervey, shaking his head. ‘I’ll go and see how the others are.’
The other two men were dead, and their bodies too had yielded up gold. The girl was now silent, though she looked fearful. Her features were not those of the men, which were the same as any about the bazaars in Chittagong. Hers was a face of some refinement, the nose smaller than the Chittagong women and her eyes turned up a little. Her salwar kameez, a deep blue silk, was quite unsuited to the forest. Hervey tried his Urdu, but to no avail.
Seton Canning and Armstrong arrived breathless, with the guides in tow. ‘Was that your shot, Hervey?’
Hervey nodded. ‘It will have put every man on his guard for miles. What can the guides tell us about these two, I wonder?’ He gestured at the bloody bodies.
The guides did not need long. ‘
Seton Canning looked at Hervey for enlightenment.
‘Bandits and gypsies.’ Hervey thought it some relief, at least, to know they had not despatched innocent men.
‘And the girl?’ added Seton Canning. She was, indeed, not long out of her teens, if at all.
Hervey asked the guides, but they couldn’t speak to her either. He cursed to himself. ‘You’d better get the surgeon up.’
‘Pretty little thing,’ said Armstrong approvingly. ‘I’ll get the daffadar to try talking. Just stepped out of a pallerquin by the looks of her. I wonder how.’
‘That’s not the half of it, Sar’nt-Major.’ Hervey told them about the river. ‘I’m going to take a good look. We’d better expect the worst, too. Keep the troop stood to till I return.’
‘What about burying these, sir?’ asked Armstrong.
‘Shallow graves only,’ was the reply, almost casually.
*
Hervey groaned as he saw for himself the worst. The river looked the same as before, but it flowed the wrong way. He took out his compass and laid it on the ground. A carbine Daniel Coates had given him had once been his saving; Coates’s compass might yet prove as valuable. The needle settled in a direction he had not expected, indicating north much further to the left. The track had evidently been veering, and so gradually he hadn’t noticed. He cursed for not having checked in more than an hour.
‘What do you reckon, sir?’ asked Serjeant Collins.
‘We’ve come more to the east than we ought. That’s all I know. Those guides … I’m just not sure.’
‘All we’ve done is follow the same track, sir.’
It was true. The guides had led them nowhere but along the same well-trodden track. ‘I wonder then what the Chakma would have done. I suppose they would have led us off the track; there was no undergrowth to speak of for a lot of the way.’
Collins looked at him for the next move.
It was at such a moment that the privilege of command could almost be measured by weight. Hervey was thinking for all he was worth. ‘I’m trying to picture the country without the trees, Sar’nt Collins. But it’s strange for all that. This river can’t join the Karnaphuli: there isn’t any junction between where we crossed and Chittagong.’ He picked up a stick and started to draw in the earth. ‘It must mean there’s high ground between here and where we should be. Do you see?’
‘Ay, sir.’
‘So if we follow the needle due north, and the ground rises, we should recover ourselves.’
‘There’s no chance your compass is false, sir?’
The thought had occurred to Hervey too. ‘Well, I can’t picture the ground any other way. The river can’t be the Karnaphuli; we can’t have crossed it without noticing.’
‘We bivouac here, then, sir?’
‘I think we’d better.’
A strict rule of silence was the order of the bivouac that evening. Hervey posted sentries well forward, towards the river, and he allowed cooking fires only in pits. The tethering lines were cramped, the track being so narrow, but the horses were quiet enough. Indeed, it seemed to Hervey that they had taken to the forest extraordinarily well, unmoved by its strange noises, and content to chew its green shoots whenever there was a halt. His admiration for the Marwaris grew daily, not least for what fine doers they were, seeming happy with a few handfuls of gram of a morning and evening — rations on which an English trooper would soon have lost condition. In the case of the dragoons, their appetites were not in the least diminished. Hervey had gone to some trouble to find
