Land of Hope and Glory (46 page)

A team of soldiers wheeled over a spherical wicker cage, inside which squirmed hundreds of avatar snakes, their metal bodies squealing as they scraped against each other. The creatures appeared excited, sticking their heads out of the cage and hissing through steel fangs.

‘Release them,’ the siddha barked down from the elephant.

The soldiers opened a door on the side of the cage and the snakes spilt out like entrails from a freshly slit carcass. The creatures slithered around the legs of the elephant, antennae flicking.

The siddha held up his hand and spoke words in a language Jack didn’t understand. The snakes stopped moving and raised their heads, poised and swaying. Then the siddha spoke a single command and pointed towards the Tower. The creatures hissed and shot off across the square. Jack watched as they reached the far side and slipped into the moat. Soon they were oozing up the remains of the outer wall, pelted by rebel musket fire. Then they disappeared into the chaos of dust and smoke about the Tower.

The Rajthanan artillery stopped completely and the sudden quiet was a shock. Battle smoke clogged the square, but was slowly clearing. The few remaining rebel guns still flashed and sent round shot whistling, but there was no return fire from the Rajthanans.

A horn blared, followed by a second, then a third. The cries were eerie, like wolves baying. Kettledrums pulsed. The sound was familiar to Jack and he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. He was about to go into battle once again, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

The captain drew his scimitar, the metal chiming against the scabbard and the blade shining faintly in the dim light.

The rain streamed down at an angle and hit Jack on the side of the face. He slipped his hand into his pocket, took out the bottle of jatamansi, paused, then swallowed the last few drops.

He said a quick Hail Mary under his breath, then silently prayed to God to let him live, let him survive to save his daughter.

An Andalusian sergeant stepped forward and raised a brass horn moulded into the likeness of a conch shell – the curious design represented the ancient horns carried by the warriors of Rajthana. The horn blower gave a single, clear note to sound the attack.

‘Charge!’ the captain roared and ran out into the square.

The soldiers shouted and followed their commander. Jack was forced forward. He ran with the men, reluctant, but unable to avoid it . . . And now he was out in the square, racing ahead with a wave of bellowing soldiers who coursed out of the neighbouring streets. Horns blasted and drums grumbled. Standards swished.

Musket fire crackled across the remains of the Tower’s walls, where many rebels were still standing. Bullets whined and sizzled through the rain. Bones cracked, skulls popped and men fell, shouting in Arabic, French or Andalusian. Rain and blood splattered Jack in the face. He tried to slow his pace – he had no desire to be near the front of the assault – but the soldiers were a solid wall behind him. He realised that as he couldn’t ease himself back, his only hope, in fact, was to press on as quickly as possible, to get in amongst the walls of the Tower. There at least he would be able to find cover, hide, look for William.

His breathing was shallow and uneven as he gasped down acrid smoke.

A man beside him roared, the cry fading to a gargle. He’d been hit in the mouth and a mess of teeth and blood now rolled down his chin. But he still ran on, a crazed smile on his lips and eyes hungry for the fight. Then he fell, as though sucked up by the ground, and Jack was running on without him.

The moat and the shattered wall were close now. Teams of scalers rushed forward with wooden ramps more than 100 feet long. They leapt into the moat and swam across, floating the ramps beside them. The water boiled with bullets and blood. Soon corpses bobbed everywhere.

Jack reached the edge of the moat. Four ramps had already been laid across, leading to the bank of rubble that had previously been the wall. Soldiers were charging across, spattered by musket fire. Many were hit and tumbled off into the moat. A section of one ramp had caught fire and the flames glinted on the choppy water.

Jack paused for breath, but bullets scythed past him, one tugging at his sleeve. Soldiers were elbowing him out of the way in their rush to get across the moat. He slipped on the muddy bank, struggled back to his feet and joined the mob rushing across one of the ramps.

His feet battered the wooden boards and the storm of bullets shrieked around him and the air burnt his throat. He glanced up and saw the rebels across the top of the broken wall, blasting with their muskets through a mist of rain and smoke. He had to get over that wall, get out of the line of fire. That was the single thought that occupied his mind.

He reached the far side of the ramp and clambered up. The broken stonework was slick from the rain and he slipped numerous times, scraping his knees and hands until they were bleeding. Bullets screamed on the stones about him. The rain pounded down.

The first wave of the attackers was nearing the summit, but the rebels had set up their remaining guns on unbroken sections of wall and now fired grape down the slope. The muzzles flamed, jolted and disgorged hails of balls and metal fragments that flayed the stone. Soldiers fell in groups, as if dropping to their knees in worship before the retching beasts. Jack saw one man race straight at a gun as it fired – his body flew apart in a puff of red.

But the attackers poured on to the summit and hand-to-hand fighting broke out. Men scrambled up to the guns and spiked them, jamming their ramrods into the vents and snapping them off to prevent the weapons being fired.

The rebels were pushed back. As Jack reached the top of the bank, there was no one to oppose him. The attackers were now scuttling down the far side of the shattered wall, where they swarmed up the grassy incline towards the collection of walls and buildings about the White Tower. Puffs of musket smoke revealed that the rebels had regrouped and were defending themselves.

Jack was out of breath and his chest bloomed with pain. He stopped running but a soldier slammed into him and knocked him to his knees. More soldiers bumped into him as they ran past – he was going to be crushed.

He managed to get up again and staggered down the rubble slope. He slipped on the wet stone, fell on his back, slid down a few feet and struck a corpse. Someone trod on his hand and pain shot up his arm.

He got up again and stumbled down the remainder of the rubble, reaching the muddy grass. Instead of running straight up the slope, he managed to dodge his way to the right to where there were fewer soldiers and the wall was less damaged. He got out of the way of the main mass of men and tried to make it over to a stand of trees beside the wall. He felt he was going to pass out and he needed cover. Pools of blackness spread before his eyes. He slipped on the mud, fell and hit his head on one of the tree trunks.

He lay on the ground just within the trees. He was too weak to stand. He heard shouting and the crackle of muskets around him, but it was distant, as if echoing from the far end of a long tunnel. Pain jolted his chest, then flickered down his left arm. He grimaced, gritted his teeth.

Then it got worse. A shaft of fire slammed into his body.

He tried to move and found he couldn’t.

Everything went silent.

He realised he’d stopped breathing. He was floating in darkness, drifting away.

He fought for air but no air would come. He tried to shout for help but he couldn’t make a sound.

Katelin appeared before him, lying on her deathbed, covered in sweat, looking at him with glazed eyes. She reached up to touch him and her fingers on his cheek were like a wisp of smoke . . .

The darkness thickened.

‘This world is an illusion.’ Jhala’s words. ‘Let go of your will and you’ll break through the illusion and then you’ll see that you are, have always been, free.’

Perhaps if he let go now he could slip over completely to the spirit realm and be free. He’d been hovering between the spirit and material worlds for so many years. On the trail in Dorsetshire he’d momentarily been whisked outside himself several times, his whole ‘self’ vanishing for a while.

Perhaps now it was time to give up and vanish completely.

But he couldn’t do that. He had to hold on. Elizabeth was depending on him.

He tried to prise open his lungs, but nothing happened. He tried again. The struggle seemed to go on for hours. He was teetering on the edge of a pit of darkness. Just holding on.

But it was no good. He couldn’t hold on. He was slipping down. For some reason, he thought of the yantra he’d stolen from Jhala’s office. It quivered and circled and glowed on a black background. It would be the last thing he ever saw . . .

Then it flared brilliant white, blinding him.

And warmth suddenly flooded his chest.

He stopped slipping down.

He took a deep, ragged gasp and air plunged into his lungs, so cold it seemed to burn inside him. He took another breath, and then another.

He was alive.

He sat up with a start, rasping and coughing. The vice constricting his lungs eased and the pain slipped back from his arm, although it still bubbled and churned in his chest. The sound of the battle grew louder and sharper. He lay back, opened his eyes and stared up at the shifting leaves of the trees.

He knew instantly what had happened.

The stolen yantra had worked – finally – and the power was holding back the sattva-fire injury.

He flexed his fingers as if feeling them for the first time. He now knew everything about the power – the information appeared in his head as if it had always been there. Although he felt far stronger than before, he understood that the power hadn’t completely cured him and he would have to keep reusing it to stay alive. The sattva-fire would remain in his chest, and would always weaken him to a degree, but at least he had something to fight it with now.

But something else gnawed at the back of his mind. Some sort of question. It was as though he were trying to solve a puzzle without even knowing what it was.

Memories tumbled through his head . . .

Jhala had said he’d used a power to save his own life, which was why he was unable to learn new yantras. He’d never said what that power was, though.

Another time, Jhala had said he’d been badly injured in battle, although he’d never said what the injury was.

And now Jack remembered finding Jhala collapsed in his office. Jhala’s skin had been like ice, even though he was supposedly suffering from fever. After that, Jack had found the yantra under a cushion – the yantra he now knew healed sattva-fire injuries.

The pieces all came together in his head.

Jhala had never suffered from fever. He’d made that up. His illness was from a sattva-fire wound, which he’d tried to keep secret, perhaps out of shame. He’d had to use the yantra to save his life, and he’d had to keep on using that yantra to stay alive. He must have been using it for decades. He must still be using it.

Jack blinked. Perhaps he should have seen all this before. But how could he have? He’d never known what the power of the stolen yantra was.

And now, a further realisation filtered into his head.

Jhala had told him Europeans couldn’t learn the higher powers. He’d also said that once you used a power you could never learn another. And yet Jack was living proof that neither of these were true.

Had Jhala lied to him about all of this?

A bullet shredded the leaves above him, snatching him back to the present. Musket fire. Screams. Shouts. The scent of sulphur and woodsmoke.

He sat up, wincing at the ache that still rolled across his chest. His limbs felt stiff, as if he hadn’t used them in days. The world around him was blurry at first, but then, as he rubbed his eyes, it became clearer.

Through the trees he could see up the gradual incline to the main keep, the White Tower, which was now surrounded by attackers. The rebels fired down from loophole windows and from the tops of the surrounding walls, their muskets spluttering and popping. A wooden building away to the left had been set on fire and the flames roared despite the rain.

No one seemed to have noticed him lying near the wall.

He grasped a tree, dragged himself upright and stood leaning against the trunk. He had to find William. And quickly. But how was he going to do that in the chaos, amongst the thousands of men fighting? His friend could be anywhere, might already be dead. He rubbed his face with his hand. There had to be a way.

He spotted the body of an officer lying nearby, green turban stained red. The man’s hand still clutched a spyglass. He ran across to the corpse, picked up the glass, then slipped back to the cover of the trees. The attackers still surged up the slope and no one paid him the slightest attention.

He gazed at the battle again. Even with the glass, it would be impossible to spot William amidst the fighting. He would have to use his power . . . his
power
. He was so accustomed to thinking he had just one.

He took a deep breath. He was a siddha now. A proper siddha. As far as he knew the first European to ever learn this much. So he would have to use his
sattva-tracking
power. The first power he’d learnt.

Of course, he couldn’t actually track William about the Tower, but going into the trance would at least sharpen his eyesight and hopefully reveal details that he might otherwise miss. He had to try.

He closed his eyes and tried to block out the sound of fighting. After a few minutes he sensed the sattva about him – he was in a weak stream. He concentrated on the yantra and, as usual, it glimmered white on black.

Nothing happened.

It had been strangely easy to meditate as he’d lain dying. Perhaps any distractions had been blotted out.

He tried again, and this time his thoughts skipped and jumped. He saw Elizabeth in the cell at Poole, Jhala sitting in his office and waving the pardon before putting it in the top drawer of his desk, William bursting out of the smoke at the Battle of Ragusa.

He tried to break free of these memories, but they kept building in his mind, as if he were rushing through a dense passage of recollections and images and flashes of sensation.