by J M Hemmings
The youth still seemed sceptical of William’s claim, and he raised an eyebrow and sneered as he spoke.
‘And who did you kill then? Some other dirty thief in a back alley, fighting over your stolen plunder?’
‘A Russian artillery officer, at Balaclava,’ William said. ‘I drove my lance right through his throat while charging at full tilt. Ever heard of the “Battle of Balaclava”? Or “Russia”, even, for that matter?’
William had to speak half of these words in English, as he didn’t know how to say them in Bengali.
‘Ruh-shh-ya? Balla- … balla- what? I’ve never heard these English words. I think you’re making them up, and I think that you’ve never been in a battle.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know to say them in Bengali. But I do still carry the souvenirs of my time as a soldier, if that’s what you’re after.’
William pulled off his shirt to reveal his leanly muscled torso, crisscrossed all over with the scars of the sabre cuts and other wounds he had received at Balaclava. The porters stared with surprise at William’s scars, their eyes suddenly bright in the thickness of the forest night.
‘You drove a lance through a man’s throat?!’ the skinnier porter asked. ‘Ayi! Tell me more about this battle!’
‘You want to know about battle, little brother?’ William asked, stretching his arms and lacing his fingers behind his head. ‘You think it’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s an adventure?’
The teenager nodded enthusiastically, the sarcasm in William’s tone sailing over his head.
William sighed, shook his head and then took the chillum pipe from the other porter. He toked deeply on it, and the wide opening of the conical pipe glowed luminous orange in the darkness, a single comet in this tree-thick vertical sky. He held the hot smoke in his lungs for a while, savouring its strange aftertaste as he exhaled.
‘I was once a cavalry soldier in the British Army,’ he said as he passed the pipe on. ‘I only fought in one battle though, and that was enough for me.’
‘Ha. Some soldier you were,’ the cockier porter smirked.
‘You’re right,’ William said, causing the lad, who was expecting a more confrontational response, to look up in surprise. ‘I was not cut out for soldiering, as much as I’d hoped to make a career of it.’
‘Why did you do it then?’ the wiry youth asked, now adopting a more respectful tone.
‘You’ll understand, both of you. You see, here in India you have a “caste”, hmm, how do I say this? A “separation” system in your culture. Did I use the right word there?’
‘Oh, you mean “jātis”. That’s the word you mean. “Jātis”.’
‘Yes, it’s about how people, depending on the family they are born into, can or cannot interact with people born into higher or lower “jātis” positions. Do you know what I’m talking about?’
‘Yes, yes, everyone knows that.’
‘So imagine if one of you fell in love with a princess, the daughter of a king. Would either of you really have any chance, any hope at all with a girl like that?’
Both of the lads laughed at this and shook their heads.
‘Of course not,’ the wiry one said, grinning broadly, his teeth almost glowing in the gloom. ‘You’d do better to try and, and … and fly an elephant to the moon!’
All of them laughed uproariously at this, prompting an annoyed ‘shut up!’ from Bingham’s bedroll.
‘Sorry sir!’ William called out in English, before he hushed his voice and switched back to Bengali to resume conversing with the porters.
‘Well as funny as that was, that’s exactly what happened to me.’
‘You fell in love with a king’s daughter?’
‘Not quite a king, but similar, yes. And I, in my country, I was born into a class like yours.’
‘Simple people who work the land. Farmers,’ the boy said, nodding his head knowingly.
‘Yes. That class.’
The wiry lad toked deeply on the chillum, exhaled, and then stared intently at William before firing off a question at him.
‘But why even bother with this love? It seems like it would be a hopeless dream from the outset.’
The low glow from the pipe briefly illuminated a slickness of tears welling at the edges of William’s eyes. Despite his sadness, he smiled at them before answering.
‘I couldn’t help it. I had no choice in the matter, you see. Have either of you ever been in love?’
Both boys shook their heads. William sighed slowly before continuing.
‘It’s both the most beautiful and the most terrible thing you can ever experience in this lifetime, lads. A wise old friend, a man who was like a father to me, told me that … and I know that it’s true, trust me on that. I’m sure it’s probably the same in your culture, but certainly in mine, most of the greatest poetry, art, music and literature is based on the theme of love. It drives people to madness, to despair, to suicide even. Once it has you in its grips, it doesn’t let go. And then you’re powerless to resist, powerless to think of anything else.’
‘I can’t read,’ the wiry porter muttered, ‘so I don’t know about poems and literature, but in the village we’re from they sing many songs about love, and the old folk tell us many stories about great loves of legend.’
‘It doesn’t matter where you’re born,’ William said, ‘or what culture you grow up in, I’m quite sure love is just as powerful a force anywhere you go.’
‘So, you became a soldier because of love?’
‘Yes,’ William said, the corners of his mouth crinkling into a sad smile, and a tear escaping his eye to inch a passage down his cheek. ‘I had this foolish idea that I could rise above my station in life, that I could become an officer.’
‘Officer? What’s that?’
‘A commander, someone who gives orders in the army.’
‘Oh yes, I know what you mean. Is that easy to do in your country?’
William laughed, half-sadly and half-bitterly.
‘I had hoped it would be. Actually though, it almost happened for me.’
‘But…’
‘Oh yes,’ he said grimly. ‘There was definitely a “but”. A huge “but” indeed.’
‘What was it?’
William slumped his shoulders and expelled all the air from his lungs, and then tilted his face up to stare at the night sky.
‘There are too many “buts” to talk about, lads,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll tell you this much though: two of my very best friends, two men who were like brothers to me, who I had grown up with, who had been there for me at every turn … they are dead now, dead and rotting under the ground, because of me. And my other best friend, my other brother, he hates me and will never speak to me again because of what I did.’
The porters both masticated for a while on this information in silence.
‘That is why you chase the dragon,’ the gangly one eventually said.
William nodded.
‘It’s one of many things I need to forget. Many things I can’t forget.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the wiry one murmured. ‘Maybe one day you’ll find what you’re looking for.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know … I just don’t want to live with this constant pain anymore. My love, she’s the only thing that keeps me alive. She’s the one last hope I still cling to, the dream that one day, one day we just might have the chance to be together again. But with every day that passes, that hope grows smaller and smaller. Truth be told, it is almost gone. Death … I long ago stopped fearing it. Now, I think that if it should come to me … should death come to me … I might welcome it with open arms.’
The wiry one frowned as he took the chillum from his friend.
‘You shouldn’t say that. You’re young; you don’t look that much older than us. A young man shouldn’t be seeking out death in the prime of his life. It’s not right.’
‘I feel like I’ve lived through more than enough pain now. That is, if the word “li
ve” can describe the hell I’ve existed in for these past few years.’
‘Don’t give up hope,’ the wiry one said as he took one final hit of the chillum pipe. ‘Don’t give up just yet, Englishman. You never know what’s around the corner. You never know…’
***
Three Days Later
‘How much longer are we going to keep going?’ the wiry porter whispered to his long-limbed friend as they brought up the rear of the group.
‘I’m not sure, but I’m getting scared,’ the other one murmured. ‘We’ve seen no signs of any other people for seven days, and—’
‘There’s your sign of people, lads,’ interjected William, who was trotting just ahead of them on River King. ‘You’ll see when you crest the rise.’
The two youths hurried over the top of the rise, and both gasped in awe as they saw what lay before them in the valley below: the crumbling stone ruins of what had once been a great city. A semi-collapsed temple stood at its centre, its heavily leaning conical spire jutting out of the forest at a bizarre angle. Up at the head of the train, Ajit turned and grinned smugly at the others.
‘I told you it was here, Bingham. Now are you satisfied?’
‘I’ll be satisfied when we’ve bagged the lion and his friends,’ Bingham replied sourly from atop his horse. Then, however, his tone became more cautionary. ‘We’re in their territory now, and from this point on we must exercise extreme caution. We are dealing with some very potent foes here.’
‘What’s he saying?’ the wiry porter whispered to William. ‘He looks worried.’
William frowned and raised an eyebrow as he replied in Bengali.
‘He says that we’ve come to the place where we’ll find our quarry. I thought we were going after a tiger though … but anyway, Bingham’s sounding a bit strange. He’s talking about this animal as if it’s a person, an enemy soldier.’
‘I’ve heard the old men in my village tell stories about the animals deep in the heart of this forest,’ muttered the thin porter, wearing an expression of poorly masked fear as he spoke. ‘They say … they say that out here, there are wild beasts who can take the form of a person.’
‘Nonsense,’ William scoffed. ‘We have the same sorts of folk tales in my land – “werewolves”, we call them in English – but that’s all they are, nothing but folk tales. I’ve seen stranger things than I thought imaginable here in India over the past few years, but I still know that no human can change their form into that of an animal. It’s impossible.’
The wiry lad crossed his arms defiantly across his chest.
‘I’ve seen holy men walk through fire unscathed, raise the dead back to life, and levitate above the ground as if they were hummingbirds. Nothing is impossible, Englishman.’
The lanky porter’s eyes, meanwhile, were shifting nervously from side to side.
‘I don’t like the look of this place,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s cursed. There is an evil lurking here … I can feel it.’
A chill rippled down William’s spine as he heard these words, and he felt suddenly cold, as if he had just been doused unexpectedly with icy water. He tried to shake off the feeling and curled the fingers of his right hand around the grip of Captain Liversage’s sabre, which was sheathed in its scabbard on his hip. In addition to the sword and two lances, he also carried a Winchester repeating rifle, in the use of which he had been intensively trained by the American hunter Milton.
‘There’s no “evil” that this can’t defeat,’ William declared confidently, patting the butt of the Winchester rifle, which was secured in a long rifle holster attached to River King’s saddle. He hoped that the bravado of his words adequately concealed the undercurrent of fear in his voice.
‘The sun is low in the sky, gentlemen,’ Bingham announced. ‘We’ll make camp here tonight, and then we’ll descend into the valley tomorrow. We do not want to be down there in the dark, trust me. Porters, you lot clear a section of undergrowth there and set up camp. No fires at all tonight – that is an order – and we’ll double the watch. We set off at first light tomorrow, so get a good night’s rest.’
As the porters went about setting up camp, William trotted over to Kelly, who was looking rather haggard after the weeks of travelling through the forest and mountains. His golden locks hung limp and greasy around his sloped shoulders, and his acne had gotten markedly worse.
‘What the hell do you want?’ Kelly snapped harshly as William approached. ‘If you’ve come to beg for more opium, you can turn that goddamned horse of yours right back around! You aren’t getting any more until we’ve completed this mission. It’s your dang fault we’re out here in this godforsaken wilderness in the first place!’
‘But master,’ William protested, ‘it was you who convinced me that it would be a good idea to take on this job, you said it’d go a good way toward paying off my debt, and—’
‘You’re lying! You’re a goddamned filthy liar, Gisborne! It was all your idea to come out here on this hare-brained fiasco! I only agreed to it out of pity for you, and out of the kindness of my too-soft heart! I’ll have you know that by doing this, by forcing me into agreeing to let you come here, your debt to me has tripled! That’s right you stupid ingrate, it’s tripled! Do you have any idea how much money I’m losing every day just by being here and not engaging in my … my business activities back in Calcutta?! You’re costing me my goddamned livelihood, you wretched sum’bitch! Now I don’t want to be a harsh man, and God knows it hurts my heart to do so, but Jesus H. Christ Gisborne, this is how the world works, I say! I’m continually sticking my neck out for you, yet you just keep on getting me into situations like this!’
‘I’m … I’m sorry master,’ William murmured, crestfallen and hanging his head with shame. ‘You’re right … it is my fault.’
‘Go back to your damned wog porters and smoke that dirty pipe with them if you want something to do! But don’t you dare talk to me, I say, and don’t even damn well come near me until we’re on our way out of this hellhole!’
‘I’m sorry master.’
‘GO AWAY NOW!’ Kelly shrieked, his shrill voice cracking with rage. ‘You stupid, insipient half-wit! Get the hell away from me!’
William turned River King about and slunk away, stinging from Kelly’s barrage of harsh words. Bingham, however, had been observing this whole exchange, and he trotted over on his horse to William, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that Kelly wasn’t watching as he spoke to him.
‘I heard what Kelly said to you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Come and take a walk in the forest with me. I need to explain a few things to you.’
‘About Niall, sir? Why, he’s a benevolent an’ kind man, but I just keep on disappointing him an’ letting him down. I’m—’
‘Enough of that hogwash,’ Bingham said sharply. ‘Get your horse tied up and meet me by that stream we just crossed in five minutes.’
‘Very well, sir.’
William strolled through the jungle to the burbling stream where Bingham was waiting for him, arriving there after precisely five minutes.
‘Do you have your Winchester with you, Gisborne?’ Bingham asked as he heard William approaching through the dense foliage. ‘We are … vulnerable … out here, away from the group,’ he continued, speaking in a low voice. ‘There is great danger in these forests.’
William held out his Winchester rifle before him as he pushed through the bushes, showing Bingham that he was armed. Bingham, who himself was armed with two revolvers, one holstered on each hip, nodded sombrely. He then turned and started hiking up along the course of the stream.
‘Follow me,’ he said, ‘and keep your damned eyes and ears open. As I said, we’re in dangerous territory here. If you see anything suspicious, and I mean anything at all, shoot first and don’t stop shooting until whatever it is is dead. That’s an order.’
‘Aye sir, I’ll dae tha’.’
‘Good. Then cock that firearm and keep it shouldered and ready to fire.�
��
William cocked the rifle and raised the butt to his shoulder, and through the sights he peered all around at the looming forest, searching for the unknown enemy. Despite Bingham’s words and attitude, the truth was that William actually felt quite at peace out here in the wilds. This jungle, although rather different in appearance to the Scottish Highland forests, did not fail to remind him of the soul-filling contentment he had always felt in the woods. He found his mind drifting back to boyhood times of quiet solitude, alone save for his horse and a book, surrounded by the ancient, slow-growing trees and their vast menagerie of life, with all sorts of beings who sang and danced and snaked through the eternally rotating birth, growth, reproduction and death cycles of Nature.
The memories, of course, were now inextricably intertwined with other recollections, most specifically that of his own forest goddess, who he had first met all those years ago when she had appeared before him, as dazzling and beguiling as a woodland sylph taken human form. Did those same forest deities who dwelled in the woods of the Scottish Highlands inhabit this place? Did the roots of these ancient, rough-skinned trees, whose slow language oozed out single syllables over countless cycles of seasons and lifetimes of men, reach right through the core of this spherical planet to interlink with those of their brethren across the seas? It certainly felt like that to William. He could not bring himself to regard the forest as his enemy, despite the undercurrent of fear and unease that seemed to be rippling through everyone else in his camp.
He peered through the sights of the Winchester rifle at the gnarled trunks and sky-reaching limbs of the trees, draped as they were with mossy beards of earth-seeking roots and snaking webs of vines – and he saw nothing but quiet, harmonious life. A bird cawed nearby, and its mate answered from across the stream, and insects hummed their droning undertone while a plethora of small birds warbled their poly-symphonic chorus above the gentle trills of insects. Below William, the sliver of clear water contentedly burbled its way along a rocky course.