The Place of Dead Kings (19 page)

Jack heard a shout of surprise, glanced up and saw a strange sight. One of Robert’s gang had let go of the statue and now stood with his hand on the side of his head. The shaft of an arrow poked out of his ear. He looked almost comical for a moment, a jester performing an act, but then blood pulsed between his fingers and drooled down his neck. He staggered, toppled into an awkward sitting position and gave a long moan.

Another arrow hissed through the rain and disappeared overhead.

‘Savages!’ Wulfric shouted.

A swarm of arrows now flickered about them, bouncing off rocks, impaling the ground and hammering into the sides of the carts. It was as though the sky were raining sticks. Missiles thudded into several more men. One porter, with an arrow in his chest, stumbled into the gloom, crying out for the Lord to save him. Other men lay writhing and moaning on the ground.

Jack glanced down at Andrew, who was still and pale.

Was he alive? There was no time to check.

‘Move this bloody statue!’ Jack rammed his body into the side of the huge figure. The others joined him, despite the arrows dancing around them.

Blood roared in Jack’s ears and his heart bashed in his chest. He wouldn’t let Andrew die. They had to move the statue. Had to. He’d allowed the young man to come on this journey and it was his responsibility to keep him safe. And it would be wrong, unjust, for anything to happen to Andrew.

An arrow slapped the canvas and bounced over Jack’s head. Barnabas, one of the Shropshire lads, gasped and fell back with a missile in his mouth.

Christ. They had to move that statue quickly.

‘He’s dead,’ Saleem shouted.

Jack looked down. Saleem was crouching, his finger pressed to Andrew’s neck. Andrew lay still, eyes wide and mouth open, as if he were staring at something in horror.

Jack squatted, pushed aside Saleem’s finger and felt for a pulse. Nothing. The lad was gone. There was no doubt.

Damn it.

An arrow whispered between Jack and Saleem’s faces.

Saleem froze for a moment, but Jack grasped him and yanked him over to a small hollow beside a boulder. Robert crashed down next to them and the other men scrambled to find what little cover they could.

‘Over here!’ Wulfric blew a whistle. ‘Two lines!’

About fifty soldiers had scrambled to the back of the column and now arranged themselves into two rows facing out towards either side of the track. At Wulfric’s command, they loaded and fired. The weapons crackled, flame and white smoke jetting from the barrels. Arrows still hailed down. A couple of soldiers lurched back with shafts in their chests.

A horn blower somewhere further up the hill sounded the alarm, although it was hardly necessary.

Jack grasped the satchel still hanging at his side. Should he draw his pistol and help? If the situation got worse, he would, but at the moment he didn’t want to reveal to Wulfric and the Rajthanans that he had a weapon.

An arrow struck the ground nearby, slithered along the stones and stopped near his feet. Another speared a puddle and stood there quivering.

Wulfric blasted his whistle several times and barked the commands to reload.

In unison, the soldiers placed their muskets butt-down on the ground, plucked cartridges from their ammunition pouches, bit them open, poured the powder down the barrels and stuffed in the balls. They then rammed down the bullets with their rods, retrieved percussion caps from their pockets and pressed these on to their weapons’ nipples. They moved fluidly, oblivious to the noise and confusion about them, even when three of their number fell to arrows.

Finally, they raised their muskets and blasted into the drifts of rain, the clouds of smoke blurring them completely for a moment.

Rao, Parihar and Atri came skidding down the track, their scimitars swinging wildly at their hips.

‘Can’t see them, sir,’ Wulfric said. ‘They’re hiding all around us.’

Rao and Parihar snapped open spyglasses and stared through them. An arrow hopped along the ground and struck the side of Rao’s boot. The Captain jumped in fright, but the missile hadn’t harmed him.

‘We can’t shoot them like this,’ Parihar said in Rajthani to Rao. ‘We’ll have to get the men up there.’

Rao nodded and ducked as an arrow whizzed overhead, although it was far too high to hit him.

‘Sergeant,’ Parihar said to Wulfric. ‘Split the men up. Deploy knives. Get up there and sort these savages out.’

Wulfric blew his whistle and barked at his men, waving also to those who were still further up the slope. He grasped his musket and slipped out the catch so that the knife clacked into place. ‘Allah is great!’

‘Allah is great!’ the soldiers repeated.

With a roar, Wulfric charged up the slope to the right of the track, about half the men following, all of them snarling and shouting in Saxon.

Parihar drew his blade, which flickered in the dim light, and held it above his head. He bellowed and sprinted up the incline to the left, the remaining soldiers scrambling after him.

Clouds of arrows continued to batter the party. One plunged into a mule, which brayed and ran off between the rocks, its load spilling off. Several wounded porters crawled across the ground. Others fled down the track, most of them picked off by the savages’ missiles.

An arrow struck the rock above Jack’s head and snapped in half. He glanced around for somewhere better to hide, but there was nowhere nearby.

Rao and Atri scuttled under a mule cart. Arrows bounced off the vehicle and jammed into the wood. The mule bucked and stomped, but a driver crouching beside it held it in place.

An eerie wail drifted across the valley. At first it seemed like the cry of some strange bird, but as it grew louder Jack recognised it – pipes. The minstrels in England had a variety of different pipes, but none made a sound quite like this. It was harsh and discordant, and set the hairs on the back of his neck quivering.

Jack glanced at Saleem – his eyes were wide and his skin was grey. Jack put his hand gently on the lad’s shoulder for a moment.

Then he caught the sound of chanting, just audible over the skirl of the pipes and the cries of the Saxons. The savages were shouting in their strange tongue.

‘It’s a war cry,’ Robert said. ‘Can’t understand it all, but I can catch a few words.’

Jack listened carefully. How many savages were there? It was hard to tell. The cries bounced around the mountains and valleys. Was it a few hundred? A few thousand?

The mule driver collapsed to the ground, an arrow in his neck, and the mule squealed and scrambled up the slope, the cart clattering behind. Rao and Atri, still lying on the ground, were suddenly exposed. Rao flung his hand over his turban, as if that would somehow protect him. Atri swung up into a crouch, but an arrow slammed into his chest. The siddha tried to stand up, slipped back to his knees, and then fell forward until he was on all fours.

‘Use a power!’ Rao screamed in Rajthani.

‘No,’ Atri shouted back.

Rao grabbed Atri beneath the arms and began dragging him to the side of the track. Arrows pierced the ground all around them and smacked against the rocks.

‘Use a power,’ Rao shouted again.

Atri grunted. ‘Must stay pure. The Brahmastra—’

An arrow thudded into Atri’s stomach and he groaned.

Rao glanced at the wound and pulled more frantically.

Atri’s eyes rolled white. He began mouthing words silently. Feebly, he raised one arm and a bulb of blue, translucent flame flickered around his hand and trickled down his wrist.

The men crouching beside Jack all gasped.

‘Black magic.’ Robert crossed himself.

It looked as though Atri were about to summon a ball of sattva-fire. But then he shut his eyes, dropped his arm and slumped forward.

Rao shouted, dragged more urgently and finally got the limp siddha over to a boulder beside the track. He shook Atri, as if he could wake him, but it was obvious the siddha was dead.

What had Atri said?

Must stay pure.

Jack understood. Atri must have been a pure siddha, one who’d never used a power and so remained unblocked. Atri had stopped himself from becoming impure even when he’d been hit by an arrow.

He must have been saving himself for something.

And what was that Rajthani word?
Brahmastra
. Jack had never heard that before and had no idea what it meant.

Suddenly the arrows stopped. The chanting and the pipes vanished. Robert, Saleem and the others looked about in surprise.

Then Jack heard shouts and screams. A couple of muskets cracked. Clearly, the Saxons had found the Scots and attacked.

Jack risked standing and looking gingerly over the top of the boulder. He couldn’t see far through the drizzle, but he made out the dark smudge of a forest further up the slope and, before that, figures running about in the open ground. He couldn’t tell who were Saxons and who were Scots, nor who had the upper hand. But he guessed the Scots were fleeing, as the shouting was subsiding already and no further shots were fired.

Robert stood beside him. ‘Looks like it might all be over soon.’

Jack nodded. Then he spotted Gareth, one of his comrades from Shropshire, sitting next to a rock less than ten feet away. The lad’s head lolled to one side and there were five arrow shafts sticking out of his torso.

Jack scrambled to Gareth’s side. But of course he was dead.

Another comrade down.

Andrew, Gareth and Barnabas. Gone.

‘I
don’t know the right words . . . what the priest would say.’ The old porter removed his woollen hat and fiddled with it. ‘All I know is they were our comrades and now they’re gone and all of us here, I’m sure, hope they’re smiling down at us from heaven.’

The man paused, then began saying the Our Father in Latin. The other porters, who’d congregated around the mass grave, mumbled along to the prayer.

Jack looked down into the pit. The twenty-one porters who’d died in the attack lay draped over each other like fish dumped on the deck of a boat. His three dead colleagues were somewhere in the pile, but they must have been near the bottom as he couldn’t see them.

Porters began shovelling dirt into the hole. The earth dashed over the dead men’s faces and bodies and limbs, and gradually the corpses were covered over.

Jack crossed himself. It was inevitable that some of his group would die on this journey, but that didn’t make it any easier. Was there anything he could have done to save them? Was there something he could have done better?

No, he was sure he’d done his best.

Saleem stood nearby, his eyes red and watery. Next to him, the five remaining lads from Shropshire all stared solemnly into the grave.

Jack crossed himself again and looked up the hill. The drizzle had cleared, but the light remained dim and silver. All colour was bleached from the grass, the mud, the lifeless trees.

The bodies of hundreds of natives lay scattered across the slope. According to Wulfric, the Saxons had faced up to a thousand savages, although most had fled as soon as the soldiers charged at them. Judging by the number of arrows that had been fired at the party, a thousand was probably an accurate estimate.

About a hundred yards away, the Saxons had congregated around a cluster of graves – twenty soldiers had perished in the fighting. To the left of the Mohammedans, on the track, around fifteen soldiers and ten porters who’d been badly injured were being helped on to mule carts. The wounded faced a long journey back to civilisation. They would have to pass through dangerous territory, with no more than a handful of porters to accompany them. It was unlikely many would make it.

Jack’s gaze drifted further up the hill to where three funeral pyres blazed. The yellow flames were brilliant in the midst of the drab landscape. The smoke from the damp wood trailed off to the right and blended into the ash-coloured clouds. Within the fires, invisible from this distance, lay the bodies of Siddha Atri and two batmen.

The remaining Rajthanans stood silhouetted before the fires. There were now only six of them left: Rao, Parihar, two lieutenants and two batmen.

Jack could just make out the red blot of the Captain’s turban and he found himself clenching his jaw. Andrew had died because Rao had insisted on dragging a giant statue through the wilds. The Captain was a fool and had no idea how to command an expedition.

And what about Barnabas and Gareth? They’d been killed by savages, but why had the Scots attacked? Probably because Parihar and Wulfric had destroyed their shrine. Those two should have shown some respect for a sacred place. Their actions had cost the party dearly.

He wanted to leave the expedition, taking his men with him. But if they did that, the savages would slaughter them within hours. They would never make it to Mar on their own.

For the time being, they had to stick with the party.

But once they got to Mar, they would break away as soon as they could.