Path of the Tiger, стр. 454

PART TWENTY-ONE

70

WILLIAM

November 1856. Darjeeling Himalayas

The new dawn brought with it heavy rain, and the charging sheet of water rapidly roused the sleeping camp. Kelly, as usual, was the first to whine and complain about the situation, with as much vociferousness as he could manage while soaked to the skin, but the others all went about the business of striking camp and readying their weapons and packs in stoic silence. Bingham strutted around the campsite, having already risen and packed an hour before dawn, chastising and praising people alternately, depending on their rate of progress and the enthusiasm with which they went about their tasks.

William was slow to rise as he had stayed up late, smoking his chillum pipe and contemplating the stars and the multifaceted intensity of the night forest. Bingham stopped as he passed by William’s prostrate form to jab a sharp kick into his ribs.

‘Get up, man!’ he chided. ‘Everyone else is nearly packed and ready to go, and you’re still half asleep in your damned bedroll! Come on!’

‘Sorry sir,’ William grunted, forcing himself to push through the woolly haze of semi-consciousness.

Bingham checked that nobody was paying particular attention to the pair of them, and then he squatted surreptitiously down next to William and spoke in a hushed voice.

‘Remember what your primary orders are, Gisborne. You do remember them, yes?’

‘Tae keep you alive by any means necessary, sir. Flight being the preferable method, sir.’

Bingham looked pleased, and he brushed his neatly trimmed nails against the front of his khaki hunter’s jacket as he stood up.

‘Remember the reward,’ he said softly. ‘I hold the key to your future, but that key will disappear forever should I die.’

William watched him stroll away, and then began packing his things, bolstering his will with as much grit and determination as he could muster.

Around an hour later, the expedition had eaten a hasty breakfast and were ready to set off. The rain, however, showed no signs of letting up, and was, in fact, steadily worsening; William peered up through the forest canopy and saw that the sky seemed to be darkening rather than growing brighter as the day advanced. Massive, bulbous banks of clouds the colour of soot were tumbling like packed lemmings over the jutting peaks of the Himalayas, and flickers of dazzling lightning ripped between the towers of storm clouds, split-second bridges of power and light for vengeful, forgotten sky deities to traverse.

‘It’s good weather for a tiger hunt,’ Ajit remarked in his gruff voice. ‘With this rain, both the sound of our approach and our scent will be disguised.’

‘Good luck seeing any damn tigers in this gloom,’ Kelly countered with a scowl. ‘It’s almost as dark as night in this forest, I say! I honestly don’t know how—’

‘How about you just quit your goddamned bellyachin’, and let us professionals get on with our jobs, ya stupid damned Mary-Anne!’ Milton snapped. ‘How many goddamned tigers have you shot anyway?’

Kelly parted his lips to say something, but then decided against it, and instead he merely muttered an insult under his breath and scowled. Out here, where these people were the key to his own survival, he could not afford to indulge in any of his usual malicious joy by antagonising and insulting them.

After around an hour of edging their way along a steep track down the almost-sheer valley sides, the group had descended to a point at which the crumbling ruins of the ancient temple were no longer visible above the trees. Bringing up the rear of the single-file line, William could not help but feel a certain cloying fear worming its way into his mind. The previous night he had felt at one with this forest, as if its twigs and branches were the nurturing limbs of benevolent gods and goddesses, but now it seemed as if those same boughs were the grasping arms of monstrous demons of the underworld, straining to reach him with their oaken talons. He shuddered, and then almost jumped out of his saddle as a cannon-boom of abrupt thunder clapped its explosive power across the landscape. It felt as if this forest had eyes, and that those eyes were following his every step – watching, watching and waiting.

In front of him, it was plain to see that the porters were in thrall to the same fear. They were talking in hushed tones in Bengali, flitting their eyes around them in directions, and jumping at any twig crack or bird call that managed to cut through the relentless stampede of rain. William could not make out the details of their conversation above the noise, but the words ‘monsters’, ‘devils, ‘cursed’ and ‘evil’ kept reaching his ears.

It was a few moments after the thunderclap that a strange yet undeniably potent sense of realisation, almost déjàvu-like, dawned on William: by the end of this day his life would be irrevocably altered. In what exact way he could not be sure, but he did somehow understand that something of enormous consequence was about to happen.

At the head of the train, Ajit turned around and started to announce something.

‘Right everyone, over here I think—’

‘TURN BACK, HUNTSMEN! TURN BACK NOW AND WE WILL SPARE YOUR LIVES!’

Everyone froze in their tracks at the vociferousness of this booming voice, tearing through the storm and rain as if it were a terrestrial retort to the thunder rumbling from the sky. The voice, bizarrely, had seemed to come from nowhere – and everywhere. Everyone started looking around them with frantic urgency.

‘Gentlemen, ready your weapons!’ Bingham yelled from the centre of the train as he drew one of his revolvers and cocked the weapon’s hammer.

‘Tha’ wasnae no bleedin’ tiger,’ William stammered to nobody in particular as he unslung his Winchester rifle and shouldered it, peering with fear-wide eyes down the sights at the darkness of the forest.

‘WE DO NOT WANT TO RESORT TO VIOLENCE, BUT IF