Jack cursed under his breath. What was Kanvar up to? They’d given the village a wide berth, but they couldn’t risk going any closer. And they needed to get into the cover of the trees as soon as they could. They were completely exposed in the open ground.
Kanvar reined his horse in. ‘Jack, you’d better come and have a look at this.’
Jack shot a look at the village. The huts remained dark. For the moment, he and Kanvar were safe. But for how long?
Still muttering to himself, he rode over to Kanvar, the mud sucking at his horse’s legs. The Sikh was staring down at a pool. The reflection of the moon hung in the black water, but it shattered into pieces as ripples moved across it.
At first, Jack couldn’t see what Kanvar was staring at. But then he noticed a pale shape draped across one side of the pool.
He felt a tremor of nerves. Was that what he thought it was?
He leapt off his horse, splashing in a puddle, and floundered across the boggy ground, holding his arms out to steady himself. He heard Kanvar dismount and wade after him.
As he reached the edge of the pool, he saw that he’d guessed correctly.
The shape was a corpse.
‘Waheguru,’ Kanvar whispered.
The body lay partially on the bank and partially in the water, held in place by clumps of reeds. It was a man, perhaps in his twenties or thirties, with chalky white skin and eyes that seemed to stare in terror at the heavens. Jack couldn’t tell how the man had died, but one of his arms had been cut off at the shoulder, leaving only a bloody stump behind.
Jack crossed himself and crouched down for a closer look. The body hadn’t begun rotting yet. The muscles hadn’t even gone stiff. The man must have died only a few hours earlier.
‘There is something not right about that village.’ Kanvar was standing and gazing at the darkened huts.
Jack stood up quickly. ‘What?’
Kanvar pointed. ‘That cottage there appears to have collapsed.’
Jack followed Kanvar’s finger. Now he noticed that the roof of one of the closer huts appeared to have caved in and one wall had crumbled. He rubbed his eyes and stared harder. To the left of the damaged hut, he spotted another that had been half reduced to rubble. Further off, he saw more huts in a similar state of disrepair.
That was odd. Very odd.
‘The village has been attacked,’ Kanvar said.
‘Maybe.’
‘What else could have caused all that?’
Jack sucked on his teeth. Kanvar had a point. Why would several huts have collapsed in the village? Why was there a body floating in a pond nearby? ‘We’d better take a look. But we’ll go on foot. We’ll make less noise that way.’
They hitched their horses to a twisted willow tree that sprouted like a scarecrow from the swamp. Jack plucked a cartridge from a pouch on his belt and loaded his musket. Although Kanvar carried a rotary pistol in a holster, he didn’t draw it. No doubt he preferred to fight with his formidable powers.
They crept towards the village, doing their best to avoid slipping into the deep pools and sinkholes. Jack’s whole leg shot down into the mud at one point and Kanvar rushed across to help him out.
The huts drew closer. Now Jack could see that about a third had either been partially or wholly destroyed. He gripped the musket more tightly. He didn’t like the look of this.
They clambered over a low embankment, reached dry land again and scurried across to the rear of the closest hut. They both stood with their backs to the wall, breathing heavily. Jack flexed his fingers about the musket and listened for any sign that anyone had heard them. But the only sound was the endless creaking of the frogs and the sizzle of the night insects in the forest along the side of the village.
The cottage behind them appeared to be undamaged. At least, the back wall and the roof were still intact. The thatching on the neighbouring hut, however, had fallen in, and one of the walls had been ripped apart, leaving only parts of the timber frame and a mound of wattle and daub.
Jack glanced at Kanvar. The Sikh’s eyes were wide and shone in the moonlight.
Jack gestured towards the smashed hut and whispered, ‘Let’s take a look.’
They stole to the edge of the wall and Jack poked his head round the side. He saw nothing, save for the silent cottages and the stone church on the far side of the village. Still no light. Still no sign of people.
He waited for a moment, weighing the musket in his hand, then scurried across to the neighbouring hut. He skidded to a halt beside the shattered wall and Kanvar ran up beside him. They both peered into the shadowy interior and Kanvar caught his breath.
Lying just inside the hut were two dead bodies. One, a woman, lay face down on the ground, both her arms and legs torn off. The other, an elderly man, was draped across the remains of the wall and had been sliced in half just above his waist. Congealed blood and entrails disgorged from his abdomen and drooled over the daub.
Jack hissed and made the sign of the cross.
Kanvar looked up and around at the edge of the hole in the side of the cottage. ‘Whoever did this came through the wall. But why not the door?’
Jack mulled this over. Kanvar was right. It was hardly an impossible task to rip your way through a wattle-and-daub wall. But why bother, when even a locked door was easier to kick in?
He shot a look over his shoulder. The village remained silent, still and washed with moonlight. The hair crawled up the back of his neck.
Something was very wrong here.
They crept across to another of the broken huts. Here they found two walls had been smashed and a whole family lay slaughtered inside. Jack squeezed the musket hard when he saw three children, all hacked into bloody pieces.
Who would do something like this?
They slipped across to another hut, which had been reduced to little more than a mound of timber, daub and thatching. A man lay nearby in the grass. He’d been chopped in two, his top half dragged a couple of yards away from his bottom half. Sticky blood and gore formed a puddle about him.
Further off, towards the centre of the village, Jack saw more smashed buildings and more corpses.
His throat went dry. ‘They’re all dead. The whole village.’
‘It appears so,’ Kanvar said softly.
‘I can’t think who would do this. It makes no sense. It can’t be the army. They’re nowhere near here yet.’
Kanvar gazed into the darkness. ‘Perhaps this explains why that lord was fleeing.’
‘The Devil? You think the Devil did this?’
‘Not necessarily the Devil, but at least someone those people believed was the Devil.’
‘Who?’
‘I have no idea.’
Jack felt a chill pass over him. The shrilling of the crickets beat in his ears and the trees lining the side of the village swayed and shuffled. These people had all died only hours earlier and he couldn’t get the nagging thought out of his head that whoever had caused all this carnage was still around … waiting.
He did his best to push the idea aside.
‘We should make sure there’s no one still alive,’ he said, ‘then get out of here.’
Kanvar nodded.
They ran from cottage to cottage checking, as best they could, that there was no one still around. A few times, Jack risked calling out, but no one replied. They found further corpses, but not a single person appeared to have survived.
Finally, they reached the small stone church. The building seemed entirely intact, except for the entrance, where the double doors had been thrown aside and the stonework around the edge smashed. Jack approached the opening and peered inside. The interior was pitch black, all the shutters closed.
‘Anyone in there?’ he called out.
Thick silence was the only response.
He didn’t want to go in, but he had to.
He clicked the musket’s latch and the knife clacked out at the end, just below the barrel. He steeled himself, stepped over th
e broken doors and rubble, then strode into the darkness. He heard Kanvar follow behind him.
After a few paces, he stopped and waited for his eyes to adjust. But even when they did, the gloom was so complete that he could barely see a foot in front of him.
‘I’ll get a shutter open,’ he said.
He plunged further into the darkness, striking off towards the wall to his left. The stone floor was sticky. Twice, his foot struck something lying on the ground, but both times he couldn’t make out what it was.
He smelt salt and iron – the scent of freshly butchered meat. He had a bad feeling about this church now.
When he gauged he’d gone far enough, he waved one of his hands before him, groping for the wall. He stumbled forward a few more steps and then his fingers touched stone. He felt his way along the wall until his hand struck a window frame. He found the latch and drew the shutter open.
Moonlight fell across the floor.
And then he saw what was spread out on the paving stones in front of him.
8
The mutilated body of a woman lay sprawled across the floor. All her limbs had been lopped off, her torso had been slashed open and her head had been severed and lay about a foot away from her body. Her eyes stared lifelessly at Jack and her mouth hung open in a scream. Dry blood and entrails smeared the ground about her.
Jack had seen countless soldiers dead on the battlefield, but it was still hard to see an innocent civilian slaughtered so brutally.
‘What is it?’ Kanvar was still standing in the middle of the church, although Jack could now see his outline in the moonlight.
‘More dead,’ Jack mumbled.
He strode along the wall and swung open the next shutter. As the light dropped into the chamber, he saw further dismembered corpses dotted across the floor. He walked to the next shutter and opened that. At the same time, Kanvar opened several shutters on the far side of the church.
A scene of grotesque carnage was revealed piece by piece. Scores of smashed bodies lay scattered over the paving stones. In some places they were piled several feet high. Jack saw men, women and children, all hacked apart. Blood covered the ground and clung to Jack’s boots as he walked.
‘They took refuge here.’ Kanvar’s voice rang in the silence.
‘They must have thought God would protect them,’ Jack said. ‘God and the stone walls.’
Kanvar paused for a moment, then said, ‘We must go. There is nothing more we can do here.’
Jack nodded. There was no point staying. And whoever had killed these people might still return.
They strode out of the church, began walking across the village and then jogged. Neither of them wanted to spend another moment in that cursed place.
They stumbled and slipped across the marsh, unhitched the horses and rode towards the trees. The animals continued to slide in the mud, but they finally reached the line of the forest.
Jack and Kanvar directed their horses through the woods, heading back towards the road. The ground was still boggy here and the trees formed islands that twisted up out of the water. Sinewy roots clutched at slime-covered ponds. The sound of the frogs and night insects was a dense wall of clicking and sawing.
After ten minutes, they finally reached the road and then headed east, away from the village. After they’d ridden for about a mile, the forest fell away from either side of the road and they found themselves travelling across open marshland interspersed with fields. A few cottages were dotted about the plains and Jack spotted lights twinkling from some of them, along with smoke coiling from roofs.
He relaxed his shoulders. He was back amongst the living, it seemed.
He glanced across at Kanvar. The Sikh looked the same as ever and was seemingly untroubled by what they’d just witnessed in the village. Once again, Jack found it impossible to know what Kanvar was really thinking. Did Kanvar care about the dead villagers? Did he care about the English in any way at all? Was he helping Jack out of friendship, or was it simply to further the Sikhs’ struggle against the Rajthanans?
They rode in silence for a further two miles and then entered another stretch of forest. Trees and shadow knotted together next to the path, and heavily wooded hills swept upwards to the left. A pale building appeared at the top of one of the slopes, encircling the summit.
Kanvar frowned. ‘What is it?’
Jack squinted up. He made out walls, arched entryways and thin turrets that looked like minarets. In many places the stonework had crumbled, leaving large gaps in the outer wall. ‘Must be a ruin left over from the days of the Mad Sultan.’
‘The Mad Sultan?’
‘A Moor. He used to rule parts of Shropshire a few hundred years ago.’ Jack tried to recall what little he knew about this period of history. There were plenty of legends in Shropshire about the Sultan, but Jack doubted many of them were true. ‘The English Caliphate never reached this far. But a sultan did rule this place for a while. You can see some of the buildings he left, here and there. That thing up there will have been one of his fortresses.’
‘And this Sultan was mad?’
Jack shrugged. ‘So the legends say. Who knows what the truth is?’
‘I did not realise Shropshire had never been within the Caliphate.’
‘No. Too far away. Too wild, I guess. That’s why this place is more like the England of ancient times. You won’t see many Mohammedans around here.’
They were interrupted by a deep roar that seemed to emanate from the earth itself. The sound coursed through the forest and bounced between the hills. Jack’s horse whinnied and reared up on her hind legs, although he quickly got her under control again.
The roar came again, so loud it shook the trees and sent stones trickling down a bank beside the road.
Jack glanced across at Kanvar. ‘You have any idea what that is?’
Kanvar stared ahead without blinking at all. ‘No. I do not.’
Jack leapt off his horse, crouched down and placed his ear to the ground. At first, he heard nothing. But then the roar sounded again, this time trailing off into a shriek. The noise vibrated through the soil and tickled his ear. It was coming from somewhere up ahead, to the north-east.
He stood again. ‘Whatever’s making that noise, it’s directly ahead of us.’
‘It is very strange …’ Kanvar’s voice trailed off and he gazed into the distance, as if he were in a trance.
‘Reckon we should get off the road,’ Jack said.
Kanvar shivered and seemed to wake from a dream. ‘Indeed. That would be wise.’
They rode down the bank to their left and slipped into the cover of the trees. They tethered their horses and stood watching the road. Jack became more aware of the musket hanging across his back. The firearm was still loaded – he would be able to sling it from his shoulder in a second, should he need it in a hurry.
The crickets trilled and the leaves hissed in the wind, but otherwise there were no sounds. Jack kept expecting to hear the roar again, or to see people moving along the road, but nothing happened.
After around five minutes, Kanvar said, ‘How long shall we wait here?’
‘What time is it?’ Jack asked.
Kanvar drew out his pocket watch. ‘It is nearly two o’clock by European reckoning.’
‘Two o’clock. We’re still miles from the border. We’d better keep moving.’
But as Jack turned to mount his horse, the roar came again – except this time it was more of a growl, which then contorted into a screech.
It sounded closer than before.
Jack scanned the surroundings and spied an animal track leading off into the woods, running parallel to the road. ‘We’ll go along that. We’ll be out of sight of the road, and we should be able to hear anyone coming.’
They swung themselves into their saddles and guided their horses down the path, with Jack leading the way. The trees and the branches arching overhead formed a colonnaded tunnel. The moon peeked through the foliage at times, but
often the shadows were so thick that Jack could see no more than five feet in front of him.
He kept glancing to his right, to make sure he could still see the bank that led up to the road. So long as he could make it out, he knew he wouldn’t get lost. But after ten minutes, the path curved away to the left and headed towards the hills. He pressed on, hoping the track would loop back to the road eventually. But after around five minutes, he stopped his horse. The woods were a dense tangle all about him. If he and Kanvar continued along the path, they were bound to lose their way in the dark.
He looked back at Kanvar. ‘Wait here a moment. I need to check the way ahead.’
He leapt to the ground and scrambled up the largest tree he could see. It was a difficult climb in the dark. Twigs scratched his face and arms, and he had to keep groping up blindly in order to find a purchase amongst the branches. Finally, he was high enough to see over the surrounding trees. He sat astride a branch and gazed out over the moonlit sea of foliage. The woods were so thick he could barely make out the path he’d just travelled along. Looking closely, he noticed a slight gap in the trees that showed where the track was. But when he followed the line, it bent away towards the hills and disappeared into the night.
Damn. The path was leading them in the wrong direction and there was no sign that it arced back at any point. They would have to return to the road.
He was about to climb down when the growling started up again, so loud he could feel it shivering through the branch beneath him. He noticed movement out of the corner of his eye. When he swivelled round, he spotted a patch of trees about a hundred yards away thrashing from side to side.
His heart lurched. Something large was shaking the trees. Something powerful.
His mouth went dry as he clambered down. He could hear his heart pulsing in his ears. He jumped the last few feet and almost toppled over when he hit the ground.
He caught his breath and looked up at Kanvar. ‘There’s something in the forest just ahead.’
Kanvar sniffed. ‘Can you smell it?’
‘What?’
‘Sattva.’
Jack frowned. They weren’t in a strong stream at the moment. There was no reason for him to be able to—
The War of the Grail Page 9