Pinned like a beetle in a museum drawer, the knife-blade pressing yet more firmly against his neck, Peach lay rigid, unmoving. Fingers tugged at his belt, removing his own knife and the grenades, knotting his hands behind his back. A man whispered, ‘Shhh!’ into his ear and he found himself dragged upright and led off into the jungle. Close by, he heard a scuffle and a dull thud but it was too dark to see how Eric was faring. He stumbled on a stray liana and went flying face down, cutting his face above his eye on a jagged edge of rock. The blood streamed down from the cut, half-blinding him in his right eye, and tasting sickly as it wet his lips. In the green-black darkness, he could only make out a blur of shapes picking him up, and dragging him, hurriedly, away from the Japanese elephant camp. Stumbling, half-falling, they led him staggering through the jungle until the sound of the river grew noisier and noisier, and they pushed him down on his knees.
Are they going to drown me? The thought of being thrown in the water with his hands tied behind his back made him feel as helpless as an infant. They shoved his head down into the freezing torrent – and he felt his courage drain from him.
Chaos, utter chaos. Mother stared transfixed at the river bend where her baby had vanished. Head down, trumpeting thunderously loud, she smashed into the thick undergrowth at the top of the bank, following the route high above the swollen river. Po Net and three other oozies ran after the mother elephant, thrashing at the jungle with their dahs to carve a way through it. The remaining mother elephants grizzled and moaned and formed a tight circle, keeping their young inside, tightly guarded, their ears-flaps wide out– a danger sign.
The sun was falling fast in the sky, a red tinge to the west. The smooth logic of the previous camps, the site carefully selected after the best scouts in High Burma had considered all the options, had gone to pot. There was no time to cut a proper clearing, carving room enough for elephants and people to have some space. Instead, they had to make do with a makeshift nest in the foliage– elephants, men and children next to other, cheek by jowl, the animals churning up the mud underfoot, the edge of the ravine and the closeness of the jungle cramping them in.
On a vast exotic fern by Grace, a spider’s web shimmered in the crimson light, its lacework the colour of blood.
‘Miss, Miss, look.’
Grace walked over and crouched down next to the little girl who was staring motionless at something in a patch of mud on the jungle floor. Marks in the mud, as if left by the hand of a giant, all thumbs, no fingers. The schoolteacher called Po Ling, one of the senior oozies, over, and he confirmed her worst fears: ‘Tiger.’
The prints were deep and fresh, the mud not yet dry. Half an hour old, if that. Huge printmarks, too.
‘Tiger, eh?’ It was Sergeant Gregory. ‘I’m buggered if I’m going to be dinner for Mister Stripes.’ Coolly, he walked over to the pannier containing the elephant men’s armoury.
He was about to help himself to a rifle when the Havildar called out: ‘Don’t touch that. Sam’s orders.’
‘Bugger that.’
The contempt for the Havildar’s authority was clear. Gregory made to fetch the rifle, but his arm was gripped by the Havildar.
‘Get your cripple fingers off me.’
‘Leave that alone.’
‘Listen, mate, I ain’t done nothing wrong. I don’t want to get eaten by a tiger, do I?’
‘Leave that alone.’ The Havildar towered over Gregory. For any other man, the message would have been absolutely clear.
‘Listen, mate, you don’t seem to be understanding the English bloody language. That’s tiger prints over there. I have got a right to protect myself. So you’re out of order. Right?’
‘Leave that alone.’
The Englishman raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘Like a bloody gramophone record that’s got stuck, you are. I ain’t done anything, so shut it. Stop telling me off for something I ain’t done. Let me go. Get your crippled hands off me.’
The Havildar released him, but placed his bulk between him and the rifles.
‘Just a big bag of wind, aren’t you? A nigger and a coward, that’s all.’ Gregory turned his back on him and walked off.
The Havildar, breathing heavily, leant his back against a Y-shaped tree, watching the man with the bandaged head walk away, downhill, into the jungle.
‘Havildar, you shouldn’t have allowed him to talk to you like that,’ said Grace, keeping her voice down so that none of the children or the oozies could hear her.
‘Nobody has talked to me like that for a long time.’ A silence followed, the Havildar studying the ground. Then: ‘I’ve never spoken about this. After the Great War, I was at Amritsar. No warning was given. Just the shout of command, “Open fire!” A sepoy of the British Indian Army obeys orders.’
Through his gun-sight he had killed, killed without number.
‘Three hundred and seventy-nine people were posted killed that day. It was more.’
How many times had he relived that moment, when sweat trickled down from his forehead and he blinked and he stopped firing to wipe his eye and he became aware that his finger was on the trigger of his rifle, that he was one of the soldiers making faces splatter red, making bodies jerk. He had wiped the sweat from his murderous eye and stopped firing. An officer spotted him and berated him for his cowardice, but he suffered the abuse in silence. From that day on, he had done his duty as bravely as he could, patrolling the north-west frontier, driving supply convoys through the Pathan-controlled wild country, surviving countless ambushes where several of his friends got killed. Promoted through the ranks until he became Havildar.
‘Since that day in Amritsar,’ he told Grace, ‘I have never harmed a soul, never fired a bullet at anyone, never struck anyone. The more bad-tempered I have pretended to be, the more I showed off my crippled hands, offering no proper explanation, the less likely that anyone would find me out. Find out that on the very day of the terrible killing at Amritsar I made a vow to myself, never to take life again, ever. And I don’t know how, but in some way he’ – he gestured to Gregory’s retreating figure – ‘he knows that. He can smell my fear, my fear of killing.’
Calling out from a ridge above them, Molly had made a new find. Grace struggled uphill on all fours and when she got to the flat peak she stood up. They’d made it to the top of a spine of jungle, far higher than anything they’d climbed before, and before them was a great hole in the forest canopy, the trees thinning out, the undergrowth only a few feet high. Grace wondered to herself whether the ridge had been hit by lightning, and a fire had scoured out a clearing in the jungle. Whatever the cause, the consequence was spectacular. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity they could see all around them, as far as the eye could see. Behind them, to the east, ridges of green forest descended to a great plain and there, to the south-east, the Chindwin snaked its way through a gorge, molten silver, glittering in the late-afternoon sun. Ahead, to the west, a great drop, every inch covered by forest canopy, but then the next ridge was only spotted with trees and beyond that just grass, like a meadow in Scotland, rising, rising, until it reached the sky. They were close to the edge of the jungle. And to the north?
Above the jungle canopy, the day was dying but the air was clear, free of low cloud, and they could see an incredible distance. Far, far away, beyond the smudge of green, immense mountains papered the sky brilliant white.
‘Look, Miss, is that snow?’ asked Molly.
‘Yes, Molly, they’re the Himalayas, the highest mountains in the whole world. And that, unless I am very much mistaken, is Thibet.’
‘Does anyone live there?’
‘Why yes, people do live there. They are called Thibetans and their leader is a God-King. They call him the Dalai Lama and he is two thousand years old.’
Immediately below them was a flattish bluff of land, the earth in places bare, populated by wooden huts on spindly stilts. They looked out for strangers, for the hill villagers, but no one seemed to be around. The first sign of humanity Grace saw was a white bandage, bobbing up and down as its wearer walked away from them, hopping over a small stream.
Gregory knelt, scooped water over his face, then looked back at her, stared, and walked off into the bush.
‘What is this place?’ asked Ruby.
‘It looks like a village that’s been abandoned.’
‘Like a ghost village, Miss?’
‘No, dear, not like that all.’ But even as she denied it, she could feel her flesh goose-pimple.
They made their beds out in the open, tying their hammocks to the stilts of the abandoned homes. Exhausted by the events of the day, fatigued by the endless questions – ‘when will Oomy and Mother come back?’ – she worked hard to ensure that the children were fed. The elephant men seemed tense. They dropped off the children’s hammocks and elephant baskets and hurried back towards the riverside, some unspoken anxiety troubling them.
To the west, a memory of light. Strange, how the human animal craved the sun’s glow, how just a blur of red in the sky warmed the heart. One day their ordeal would end, one day they could snuggle into real beds and wake up in the morning and not have to march another yard. And into this waking idyll entered a face, one that had seldom troubled her day-dreams before, that of Mr Peach.
Damn fool that he was, she knew that he would have seen through Gregory, that his very presence here now would have made her feel safe, secure. She cursed their misfortune, how the elephants had pushed the tree-bridge into the ravine just as they were about to unite. Peach was a silly thing. No, that wasn’t right. Before, he had been silly – a damned fool – and melancholic and drunk and unpleasant. But she’d seen him grow, to become an officer with the balls to ignore a foolish order, one that would have caused great suffering to a busload of refugees, one who had the courage to run towards gunfire to try and save his men. She re-read the Japanese poem he had written out for her. Fool that he was, there was something about him, the romance of sending a love poem by paper plane, that made her heart lift.
‘Good luck, Mr Peach,’ she whispered into the dark.
He came up gasping for air, inhaling oxygen and the gift of life. Peach’s brain worked feverishly. If they had meant to kill him, they could have done so far more easily by slitting his throat by the Japanese elephant camp, not go to the bother of dragging him through the countryside. If they meant to interrogate him, where were the Japanese officers? Something else was going on, but what?
Peach felt hands wipe the blood from his face, and a movement behind him in the dark.
By the dim phosphorescent glow from the torrent he saw a man approach him – then, all but lost in the gloom, the outlines of a face. Peach said, ‘Hello’ in Burmese, the national idiom as spoken in Rangoon, but the man shook his head and gabbled something utterly beyond his comprehension. Clearly, he spoke an impenetrable dialect from this part of High Burma.
No way through this, no way to communicate.
The man offered him a cigarette. One of Peach’s many idiosyncrasies was that he couldn’t abide smoking. He said, ‘No, thank you’ in English, then Burmese, then Urdu, and then, just for a laugh, in Japanese.
His captor snapped back in the same tongue: ‘How does an Englishman speak Japanese?’
‘Badly,’ said Peach, and the man laughed.
Peach pressed home his advantage. ‘I learnt from a book. And how may I ask, did a Burman learn Japanese?’
‘From a whip.’
‘Japanese is a beautiful language,’ said Peach, ‘but the ways of the Imperial Japanese Army are less so.’
‘They treat us like slaves. They have been bad to us, and bad to the elephants,’ said the Burman.
‘You are the leader of the oozies? Yes?’
‘No. I am not the leader. But many of us are unhappy with the Japanese. We want to run away.’
‘How many are you?’
Peach did a quick calculation in his head. ‘If you help us reach India, I will pay you one hundred thousand rupees for each elephant, one million rupees in total.’
It was a king’s ransom. At that moment, Peach’s belongings amounted to the clothes he was wearing and a pair of water-logged army boots.
‘You promise?’
‘On my life.’
‘When do we leave?’
‘Tonight.’
‘Very well. But first we must kill our leader.’
Before the war, Peach would have been greatly troubled at the thought of taking any man’s life without a fair trial. Now he did not give the fate of the pro-Japanese oozie a moment’s thought.
‘The rest of my men, they are hiding by the river,’ he told the Burman.
‘Yes, we know where they are. In the jungle, they make too much noise. They sound like a herd of love-sick cats.’
‘Will the elephants be able to take us across the river at dawn?’
‘The river is too strong. But we must. Otherwise, the Japanese will kill us all.’
In his excitement at making a deal with the rebel oozies, Peach had forgotten Eric. Cursing himself for his selfishness, he asked: ‘Where is my friend, the other Englishman?’
‘He fought too much. We had to knock him on the head. Maybe he is dead, maybe not.’
‘Where is he?’
‘We left him behind.’
‘Bring him to me. Bring him to me now.’
He could sense the oozie hesitate, perhaps at Peach’s imperious tone. He tried to think how the other man would react, how his request could make more sense.
‘He is my friend. If I do not know for certain that he is dead, then his spirit will trouble me for the rest of my life.’
‘We will try. But we need to do many things tonight. To kill our leader, to steal the elephants away from the Japanese.’
‘Please…’
‘We will try.’
The thought of abandoning Eric in the jungle made Peach sick at heart, but on this, like so much else, he had no choice but to trust the stranger.
A presence loomed in the gathering darkness, the Havildar.
‘Miss Grace,’ he said, ‘the elephants won’t move. They are still down by the river. We’ve tried everything but they won’t go anywhere until we find the baby who fell back into the river and the mother who has chased after her calf.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I must take some men and go back, and help find them. Without the missing two, the rest of them will not move. They are like that – they are very loyal to each other. Do you mind staying here, looking after the children, while I find the missing elephants?’
Grace could read the anxiety on his face. He had been placed in charge, and everything had gone wrong. She said yes straightaway, adding: ‘Havildar, without you and Sam, the children would have had nothing to eat days ago. Come back soon.’
The Havildar disappeared. She was about to fall into her hammock when, out of the corner of her eye, she sensed something not quite right about Mother’s basket. In the darkness it was hard to tell. But she walked over to the basket and was able to make out that the lid of the box was not flat down, not securely fastened. It had been days since she had last peeped inside to check whether everything in the Jemadar’s satchel was safe. Hesitantly, kneeling down by the box, she undid the half-locked hasp and opened the lid.
The Jemadar’s satchel had gone.