‘Just short of the river. We can water and then retire a furlong or so to bivouac.’
‘You’ll be wanting to push out scouts, then.’
‘I think I’d better. Is all well with you?’
‘Ay, sir. Them packers have been struggling a bit of late, but they’re sticking with it.’
‘The gun-horses or the quartermaster’s?’
‘Both. But them Skinner’s men are good.’
Hervey nodded. A cheering report was ever welcome. The struggle past the column was worth it for that alone. He replaced his shako and made to turn. ‘Well, the river will be a fine thing again. The canteens are getting empty.’
It was fortunate that the third saj had lain where it had, for within half an hour the scouts signalled alarm. Corporal Ashbolt, first scout, hurried back to report, finding Hervey now at the front of the column, just behind the pointmen.
‘T’river’s ahead, sir, three hundred yards. But there are voices.’
‘What sort of voices?’ asked Hervey, his unease at once apparent to the guides beside him.
‘Difficult to tell, sir,’ replied Ashbolt. ‘High-pitched, like women, but they might not be. Corporal McCarthy reckons there are three different ones at least.’
Hervey was even more dismayed. Women meant a village. The guides had said they would encounter no settlement. He decided he would tell them nothing for the moment. ‘Mr Seton Canning and the serjeant-major, please,’ he said to his trumpeter. ‘And Serjeant Collins.’
It took a full five minutes to assemble them.
‘The scouts have come on the river and heard voices which might be female,’ said Hervey, as matter-of-fact as he could. ‘I want to take a look for myself, with you, Serjeant Collins.’
Collins nodded.
‘Mr Seton Canning to have the troop stand to, if you please.’
His lieutenant nodded likewise.
‘How are the packhorses, Serjeant-Major?’
‘They’re managing all right, sir.’
‘Good. Well, let’s make a start. Storrs will come as relay. And, Sar’nt-Major, I want a close eye on the guides.’
‘Ay, sir. Mine it’ll be an’ all.’
Hervey took his carbine from the saddle bucket. A sudden thought of the repeater falling from Henrietta’s hands made him hesitate, the first thought of her in days. He recovered himself quickly by shaking his head at Private Johnson. Johnson didn’t need to ask aloud if he could come. He always wanted to, and the answer was always ‘no’. Stent did not even look; his duty it was to go with him.
They had gone not more than a few dozen yards when a noisy flock of lorikeets took off from a tree to their left, a whistling whirl of red and blue and bright green. Hervey swung round, carbine raised, to face whatever would be the manifestation of the enemy. Just as suddenly, all was stillness again. They waited a while, Hervey now more 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. ‘Dacoiti, badhja.’
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 the
m 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 good salt beef before they left, and it boiled up well in the surprisingly sweet river water of which they had had ample since leaving Chittagong. Only the Skinner’s sowars were less than content, for no amount of salt mutton could altogether replace the live goats. Even so, the instinct for fresh rations remained strong with the dragoons, for Hervey watched with admiration as one of the Warminster pals plucked a coucal which had fallen to the slingshot as it clambered too sluggishly in the branches above.
After he had looked at every horse with the farrier, Hervey called together Seton Canning, Vanneck and Armstrong and told them his intentions for the morning. He began with his assessment of how they had come too far to the east, and what action they must take to remedy it. He confessed freely that the absence of the Chakma guides now worried him, for whereas the Chittagong guides had previously given him confidence that they could proceed without them, he was no longer so sure — not least because he wondered if he could trust them. But, he declared resolutely, the Avan war barges, astride a river such as the Karnaphuli, could not be concealed from those determined to find them, even in jungle like this. Seton Canning asked what should be done about the woman — little more than a girl, indeed — to which Hervey confessed also that he neither knew what to do with her, beyond entrusting her to the surgeon, nor what her presence signified. The daffadar had been able to have but few words with her, concluding that she was as respectable as her rich silks suggested. Beyond the general intelligence that her people were Avan, there was little more he could discover.
Hervey saw no necessity to deviate from his course, however, especially since Collins had scouted some way along the river and found no sign of habitation. But he wanted the dragoons to know what difficulties lay ahead, and he said he would be obliged if they, his officers, would be as candid with the men as he had been with them. In Spain once, he told them, after a day in which everything that might go wrong had, Joseph Edmonds, then captain, had spoken frankly with his troop. The men, cast down by the events, had been visibly stiffened by their captain’s confidences, and their spirits restored on hearing what was his plan for the morning. As a consequence, added Hervey, he himself had come to trust more than many in the innate good sense of the private dragoon, even when his instincts sometimes told him otherwise.
As ever, theory was not wholly justified by practice. At stand-to in the morning, Armstrong was beside himself with anger as he reported to the troop lieutenant.
Hervey, standing close by, could scarcely believe what he heard. ‘Absent, Sar’nt-Major?’
‘Ay, sir, absent — gone.’
Hervey felt a wrench at his gut. ‘When? How?’
‘He’s been gone since before midnight, that’s all I can tell. Mossop couldn’t find him for the sentry change then, but he supposed he was bedded down somewhere else. It was as black as pitch last night.’
‘Damned fool Mossop!’
Armstrong did not at heart disagree. ‘There’s not much we could have done about it, even so.’
‘There’s no fear he’s lost himself in the thick of all this?’
‘I couldn’t say for certain, sir, but the orders were that no one was to leave the lines, even to ease himself. If it were anybody but Dodds I might be inclined to give it a thought.’
There was no rebuke in Armstrong’s voice, but Hervey presumed there was one in his mind. ‘The bad character is out at last, Sar’nt-Major?’
‘I fear so, sir.’
Hervey fell silent for a moment. ‘I shall see him hanged.’ He almost spat the words.
He pronounced sentence so very determinedly, indeed, that Seton Canning shivered.
Armstrong stood, silent, awaiting orders.
‘Very well, Mr Seton Canning, Sar’nt-Major: stand down. Rounds in five minutes if you please.’
*
A morning round should not have been necessary after the inspection the night before, but Hervey wanted to look each man in the eye. In truth, he doubted them less than he doubted his own judgement, and that indeed was the reason for the rounds — to restore his own pride, and his authority perhaps, for it was well known that it had been he who had championed the reform of a known bad character, against all the usages of the service and the instincts of his NCOs. He need not have troubled, though. There was not a man who appeared in the slightest degree dismayed by Dodds’s desertion. Dodds’s flight earned the contempt of the bold, and showed to the most timid that they possessed more courage than did another, whereas before they might have thought that none could be possessed of less — a discovery to fortify their own resolve, indeed.
Hervey was much brightened by the round. He wished he could get the whole troop back into the saddle now, to parade in threes and have them in a brisk trot to put the swing into them again, rather than another morning’s plodding as yesterday. But that would have to wait. If his calculations were right it would be a day before they broke cover. Then they could go at it with a swing all right! He felt his hand twitch to be at the sabre. But for now, he could not even give an animating word of command to advance, let alone sound the trumpet.
Only a hand signal, a wave to have the troop set off in single file. And it could not be a wave that set them off as one, as on parade; rather it had to be the French way, each man in turn, so displeasing to an English eye. If Hervey disliked the jungle as much as did his men, it was for different reasons.
In an hour, to his immense relief, the ground began to rise as he had calculated, and with that change in inclination he felt a general rise in spirits. The pace was slower, the sweating — men and horses — even more prodigious, but with each step came the satisfaction of nearing the quarry. If any dragoon were anxious of what was to come, his fear was dulled by the anticipation of at last being able to swing his sabre to a purpose, and to discharge his carbine at more than a roundel. That, and the standing he knew it would bring when they returned to Calcutta.
A fearful cry broke the toiling silence. Hervey swung round. ‘Who in God’s name is that?’ he cursed, reaching for his sword as if he would inflict his own punishment. The column faltered for an instant then struggled on, with anxious glances over shoulders.
A short while later, garbled word reached Hervey that Private French had been attacked by something and could not move. He halted the column and pushed his way back roughly, past two dozen dragoons and more, until he came to the unfortunate French lying motionless, his face swollen beyond recognition, his arms across his chest and his fingers puffed up like cucumbers. ‘What in God’s name—?’
‘Snake, sir. It must have been,’ suggested Corporal Mossop, the NCO nearest.
‘Beggin’ yer pardon, sir,’ piped Private Rudd, the rank behind. ‘It were bees.’
‘Bees?’ Hervey knelt to feel for French’s pulse — he could see the rise and fall of his chest well enough.
‘Ay sir. I’m sure of it. They just seemed to be rushing at him.’
‘That’s not bees,’ said Mossop, certain of the symptoms plain to see. ‘Bees don’t do that.’
Hervey shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure. English bees perhaps not. But here …’
French remained silent and immobile.
Hervey searched for the obvious clues. ‘Well, there’s no sign of any bite. And I can’t see how a snake could have bit through those overalls.’
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