The Tiger's Prey

by Wilbur Smith

  The caravan came around a bend and stopped with cries of dismay. A tree had fallen across the road, blocking it completely. The guards formed a defensive circle, facing outwards around the litter and the mule. Christopher saw the captain check the base of the tree. He knew his business. If the trunk bore the marks of an axe, he would know it had been deliberately felled.

  There were no axe-marks. That was intentional. Christopher’s men had spent hours digging out the roots until the tree fell of its own weight, spreading the earth so it would look like natural erosion.

  It deceived the captain. While the men with matchlocks kept guard, the others put aside their weapons so they could drag the tree out of the way. They worked quickly, spurred by fear for their lives as much as their captain’s barked orders. In minutes, they had rolled the heavy tree away, and with it the weight of their anxiety. The road stood clear. Christopher saw smiles and heard the laughter, the relief of men embarrassed by their own fears. A hand extended from the curtained palanquin, waving them forward.

  The first arrow hit the captain through the throat. The second hit the mule. Tamaana’s men had guns, but they always used bows for the first assault. It left the victims disoriented, with no tell-tale puff of smoke to mark from which direction the attack had come.

  Without their captain, the guards’ discipline dissolved. They fired blindly, wasting precious shots and blinding themselves with their own gun smoke. Before they could reload, Tamaana and her men charged down the slope. Christopher uncoiled his urumi and joined them. Through the smoke that filled the ravine, he saw one guard frantically trying to reload his matchlock. The urumi sang through the air and opened his chest. With practised motions, Christopher drew it back, twitched the handle and caught another guard on the back of his knees, severing the tendons. He went down screaming.

  Not long ago, Christopher might have been one of those guards. Now, he was the hunter. He strode through the smoke, barely needing to raise his sword as his men finished off the surviving guards. Soon, the only men from the caravan left standing were the litter bearers: eight broad-shouldered men, naked to their waists. In the speed and brutality of the attack, they had not even moved.

  Armed, they would have made formidable opponents. But if Christopher had learned one thing about India, it was that the caste system was absolute. A litter-carrier would not fight, any more than a warrior would milk a cow. A man’s birth was his destiny.

  So Christopher felt no surprise when the bearers dropped the litter and fled. It was expected of them. Christopher let them go and approached the fallen palanquin.

  The curtains parted. A short, fat man in a green silk robe stuck his head out. The anger on his face melted to abject terror as he took in the scene – and Christopher, standing over him with drawn sword.

  The man started pulling off his rings and throwing them at Christopher’s feet. Christopher enjoyed seeing him struggle to squeeze the tight bands over his plump fingers.

  ‘It would be faster if I cut them off,’ he suggested helpfully.

  The man squealed and redoubled his efforts. A golden ring set with carnelian and rubies was so tight, it tore off a strip of skin when he removed it. Blood welled from the wound.

  Christopher touched the blade of his sword to the man’s throat. He went very still.

  ‘Save your energy. I will take them when you’re dead.’

  The man cowered back into his litter. Christopher ripped the curtains away, exposing a sanctum of sumptuously embroidered pillows that smelled of perfume. He wondered how much they would fetch. He should avoid getting blood on them.

  ‘Please,’ begged his prisoner. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘No,’ said Christopher.

  With his eyes calculating the man’s wealth, he did not see the shrewd look that crossed the merchant’s eyes.

  ‘My name is Mahendra Poola. My brothers are all prosperous merchants: they will pay a handsome price if you free me.’

  ‘We do not take prisoners,’ Christopher explained gently.

  ‘My brothers live not far from here. It would be a matter of a few days to arrange the payment.’ The man dropped onto his knees and grovelled. ‘The rains will start soon, and there will be no more caravans for you to plunder. Would you not benefit from a last coup to cushion you through the monsoon?’

  ‘I will live quite comfortably on the gold you are carrying on that mule.’

  The merchant’s eyes widened. ‘That is why you killed my men? For that?’

  ‘Why else?’ Christopher raised his sword for the kill, savouring the terror on his victim’s face. Never mind the pillows. He would sell them to some scavenging peasant, who would not care about the bloodstains. He brought the sword down—

  ‘Wait.’

  Tamaana’s voice halted the blade an inch from the merchant’s neck. The only voice that could have checked Christopher. He turned, and saw Tamaana hurrying towards him holding a bulging saddle bag. The merchant burst into tears.

  ‘What?’

  Without answering, she hauled the merchant to his feet and put her pistol against his skull. ‘Where is your gold?’

  ‘Was it not on the mule?’ said Christopher.

  Left-handed, Tamaana upended the saddle bag. A small bottle of cherry brandy fell out and smashed on the ground, followed by a bundle wrapped in paper that landed with a heavy thud. Christopher slit the paper with his sword revealing flat, black ingots stacked crosswise. He picked one up. When he tested it between his hands, it bent.

  ‘Lead?’

  The merchant put up his hands to ward off the expected blow. Christopher tossed the ingot away. ‘Where is the gold?’

  ‘There is none.’

  ‘Then what happened to the cotton you took to Brinjoan three days ago?’ Tamaana demanded.

  ‘The English agent at Brinjoan is a thief. He takes my wares but does not pay me for them. He traded me this lead as part payment. Alas, I must wait until the dry season for what he owes me in gold.’

  ‘You lie,’ said Tamaana coldly. ‘Strip him. And if we do not find the gold under his clothes, we will open him up and see what he has inside him.’

  ‘No,’ squealed the merchant. ‘I am worth nothing to you dead. Alive, I could be valuable.’

  ‘He wants us to ransom him,’ said Christopher.

  ‘We do not take prisoners,’ Tamaana said flatly. ‘And how would we collect a ransom without exposing ourselves? Your family would seek to negotiate a better price, and each time we exchanged messages we would risk being discovered.’

  ‘No negotiation,’ promised the merchant. ‘Name your figure. I will send a message to my brothers and tell them to pay without question. They can leave it in a safe place, wherever you choose.’

  ‘And why would they do that if they were not certain of getting you back alive?’

  ‘Because otherwise, they would be certain of not getting me back alive.’ The merchant seemed to have recovered some of his composure. He twisted the last of the rings off his finger and held them out to Tamaana. ‘I am a simple merchant. Why can we not strike a bargain to benefit us both?’

  ‘I don’t trust him,’ said Tamaana.

  They crouched behind a rock, talking in whispers. The night was dark, with a sliver of moon that gave the mere suggestion of light. That was no coincidence. Every detail of this meeting had been planned and argued over: the place, the time, the instructions to be given. They had considered and rejected a dozen options. More than once, Christopher had thought Tamaana would simply end the debate by killing their prisoner, Poola. She still might do so.

  A low hoot sounded in the night air. It might have been an owl, but it was not quite like any owl that ever existed. Christopher stiffened.

  ‘That is the signal.’

  They had chosen a rocky hollow in the mountains, far from any village and the main roads. They had posted sentries along the path, watching for any sign of trickery or bad faith. Now they would find out if Poola was a man of his word
.

  ‘We should kill him anyway,’ Tamaana fretted. ‘He knows our faces and our names. As soon as he returns home, he will petition the queen and she will send out squadrons of her guards. Then we will have to move again.’

  ‘He’s a harmless fool,’ Christopher countered. ‘He will thank his gods he escaped with his life, and be content enough. Besides, if we kill him after taking the ransom, it will become known. Next time we take a hostage, the family will not pay the ransom.’

  Tamaana shrugged. ‘We have enough gold already.’

  ‘There is no such thing as “enough gold”.’

  They fell silent as footsteps crunched the stone ground. Two porters came out into the hollow, almost damaging their backs under the weight of the chest they carried between them. They put it down, rubbing their aching arms and scanning the darkness.

  ‘We have come for Lord Poola,’ one said.

  Beside him, Christopher felt Tamaana reaching for her pistol. He put his hand on her arm. ‘There may be an explanation.’

  ‘We said to only send one man,’ Tamaana called. Her voice echoed off the stones, disguising her location. The porters looked around wildly. Even in the dark, Christopher could see they were terrified.

  ‘The chest is too heavy for a single man to carry,’ one of the porters pleaded in a high-pitched voice.

  ‘Then we will relieve you of your burden.’

  ‘What of our master?’

  ‘We will release him when we have counted the money. Now go.’ Tamaana raised her pistol and fired into the air. The echo made it sound like the volley from an entire company of fusiliers. The porters fled back the way they had come.

  Christopher and Tamaana waited. The chest sat alone in the hollow like a pagan altar. Christopher scratched his palms with his nails, itching to open it, but he did not move until their watchman emerged from the path and signalled all was clear.

  ‘They came alone,’ he confirmed, ‘and ran away as if a tiger was on their heels.’

  Christopher went to the chest. It was extravagantly carved from heavy mahogany; it must have been used to store spices or medicines, for it smelled strongly of aniseed. He lifted the lid, and even in the feeble moonlight he saw the glint of gold.

  He scooped a handful of the coins, enjoying the feel of the metal slipping through his fingers. Tamaana knocked them out of his hand and slammed the chest shut.

  ‘Later. We must be away from here, before those messengers gather their wits and return in strength.’

  ‘And Poola?’

  From the glint in her eyes, he knew what she was thinking. She tested the edge of her curved dagger with her thumb.

  Christopher kicked the chest. ‘There is more money here than we would ever have taken from one caravan.’

  ‘We could cut out his tongue to stop him describing us,’ Tamaana murmured reflectively.

  ‘He could still write.’ Christopher pointed out.

  ‘Then we could cut off his hands to prevent that.’

  ‘His family might feel we had cheated on our bargain,’ Christopher demurred. In this brittle mood, he could not tell if Tamaana was teasing him or giving it serious thought.

  Without answering, Tamaana whistled to her men. They dragged Poola stumbling and tripping into the hollow. He was blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back. Even in the warm pre-monsoon night, he was shivering and shaking.

  Christopher studied Tamaana’s face, trying to guess what she intended to do with him.

  ‘Why are we doing this, if not for money?’ he asked quietly.

  Tamaana nodded slowly. She pushed the dagger back into the sheath on her belt. Christopher breathed out carefully. He cared nothing for Poola; he would happily have inflicted any torture on him if he thought he could profit from it. But this was better business.

  ‘You will stay here,’ Tamaana told Poola. ‘And pray someone finds you before the hyenas and snakes do.’

  ‘Untie me and leave me a weapon to defend myself,’ he begged.

  ‘You will work those ropes loose eventually,’ she told him. ‘And I think your friends will soon come looking for you.’

  She turned to go.

  ‘Should we not count the ransom first?’ Christopher asked. ‘What if they cheated us?’

  ‘Then we will find out where they live and kill them. We will kill their wives, their children, their brothers and sisters and their servants. Last of all, we will kill him.’ She kicked Poola. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Poola whimpered. ‘They would not cheat you, I swear it.’

  ‘Every second we delay here we risk capture – and we cannot take the prisoner. He will only slow us down. Since you are so keen to leave him alive …’ She nodded to the wooden chest. ‘You can carry that.’

  When Christopher tried to lift it, he discovered the porters had not exaggerated its weight. Strong as he was, he could barely lift it to his shoulder. He shouted at two of the men to help him. Each of them seized a handle but they staggered over the uneven terrain. Tamaana strode ahead of them, chiding them angrily to keep up.

  They came down off the mountain and into the thick jungle on the lower slopes. Here there were few paths, used only by wild animals and bandits. The pain in Christopher’s arms was excruciating. It made him hate Poola. He distracted himself from the pain by concocting fantasies of the ways he could kill him.

  At last Tamaana called a halt in a jungle clearing. The pain in Christopher’s arms faded miraculously as he opened the chest and started counting the gold coins. It took almost half an hour to count them, and by the time he had finished everyone was smiling or laughing. It was all there. Even Tamaana relented and came to sit beside him, resting her hand on his leg and stroking his thigh.

  ‘But we cannot rest long,’ she warned him. ‘We must reach a town – a large town, where we will not be noticed or remembered. There we will buy supplies to last us through the monsoon. Then we find a secure place to wait it out, until the travellers and caravans take to the roads again.’

  Christopher thought of the long, wet afternoons ahead of them, imaging how he and Tamaana might make good use of them. He felt a stirring under his tunic, and he took her hand and guided it downwards. She smiled and nodded coyly. She stood up and opened one of the packs and from it distributed a bottle of arak to each of the men. Then she took Christopher by the hand and led him to a grassy hollow a little deeper in the jungle. She stamped her feet and beat the grass with her staff to frighten away the snakes.

  Then suddenly and unexpectedly she dropped to her knees facing away from him. She bent over and with both hands pulled her skirts up under her armpits. Then she looked back over her shoulder at him and laughed to see the expression on his face turn from astonishment to rampant lust. She was naked from the waist downwards. Her buttocks were full and magnificently rounded. The skin was tinted the colour of ripe mangoes. Between them the dense curls of her pubic hair parted, and her vagina pouted out at him. Its opening was glossy with the love juice that oozed from the depths of her womb.

  He dropped his trousers around his ankles and then fell to his knees behind her. She humped her back and reached behind with both hands to seize his rampant penis. It leaped and quivered in her grip like a creature with a life of its own. Her thumbs and fingers were only just able to encompass its girth, and it took all the strength of her wrists to direct the engorged head up between her brimming lips. She cried out with sweet agony as he forced the full length of it into her, and almost immediately she screamed again in ecstasy as she felt it pressing imperiously against the very mouth of her womb.

  They awakened together and lay in each other’s arms, uncertain as to what had disturbed them. The night around them was strangely silent, but the silence was menacing; fraught and terrifying.

  ‘What is it—?’ Tamaana started and then broke off as they both heard the dogs. They scrambled to their feet, reaching for their clothing to cover their nudity.

  Christopher seized her hand, ‘They
are hunting, and we are the prey.’

  ‘We must go back and get the gold.’

  ‘We have to leave the bulk of it. It will weigh us down. We would not cover a mile before the dogs caught us. Come on!’ They ran back to where they had left their comrades and the treasure chest.

  The men lay sprawled around the clearing, all of them fast asleep. Most of them were still clutching an arak bottle. Christopher swore, and kicked the nearest of them.

  ‘Get up, you drunken pigs.’

  ‘Leave them, they deserve what is coming to them,’ Tamaana ordered Christopher. ‘Fill your pockets with as much of the gold as you can carry. Then we must run.’

  The chest still stood in the middle of the clearing. They hurried to it. Christopher flung the lid back and they stuffed their pockets with gold pagodas.

  ‘That’s enough!’ Tamaana slammed the lid of the chest, and they both paused to listen to the night. The baying of the dogs was louder and now Christopher thought he could detect the soft trembling of the earth beneath his feet.

  ‘Horses!’ he exclaimed. ‘That makes it certain: they are after us.’ In all the months that they had travelled these roads, they had not encountered more than five or six horsemen. Any man who could afford to own one was powerful enough to be feared. He cocked his head again to listen. It sounded like a squadron of cavalry was hunting them.

  He grabbed Tamaana’s arm and steered her into the jungle. The undergrowth was dense and many of the plants were armed with hooked thorns. Before they had covered half a mile they were both bleeding from lacerations to their arms and legs. Behind he heard the whinnying and neighing of horses being reined in, and the shouts of their pursuers as they discovered the drunken men and the treasure chest that they had abandoned.