The Strangler Vine (27 page)

‘Ah, the joys of firm ground,’ said Mountstuart. The grey early-morning light was creeping in through an opening a hundred yards away, half hidden by what appeared to be thick foliage.

Above us, I could just about make out the shape of Blake working his way through the hole with little difficulty, though I had fancied myself somewhat thinner than him. Then he was splayed against the rock wall like nothing so much as a spider on its web, and he began to descend. His feet found holds where I had seen none, and his fingers stuck to the stone as if glued there. Mountstuart applauded soundlessly as he reached the ground.

‘My dear Jem, any circus would still find a niche for you.’

Blake frowned, raised his fingers to his lips and pointed to the opening. He pointed at himself and began to slide soundlessly towards it.

At the cave entrance he paused, moved out into the greenery and was gone. We waited for some minutes. He reappeared and beckoned to us. Looking out, I could see we were high up and the landscape was mostly scrub. Twenty yards below us there was a copse of trees. Blake pointed. I bolted for it. In the grass to my left I saw a prone figure – a dead man, a scout or watchman, I suppose. I remember little of that run. We continued for as long as we could: headlong through tearing undergrowth, past screaming birds and monkeys, as far as we were able. On and on we went, through our strength and beyond, as if we were being chased by all the hounds
of hell. At length, I heard Mountstuart stumble and fall on to the damp red ground. I stopped. He was gasping and looked at the end of his strength. My chest felt near rupture. Blake threw himself against a tree and gulped for air. The stone dust had left us looking like pale, bedraggled ghosts.

‘We must press on,’ he said. He took the water skin and drank. Then from under his arm he removed a bundle of cloth and a knife. I realized he had taken them from the fallen native. A knife, some cloth, blankets, water and a little food: all our possessions. I thought fleetingly of my books and the lengths I had gone to preserve them. Now I truly had nothing in all the world. From round his neck Blake fished out a small damp leather purse. In his hands were the remains of the opium ball. He pulled three small pieces from it, each the size of a pea. Mountstuart picked himself up and saw my doubtful look. In daylight I could see for the first time the famous brooding dark eyes, rather sunken in his face but still as powerful as I had seen described.

‘Eat it, young man. It relieves pain, it soothes coughs, it calms an unruly gut, makes weariness disappear, and conjures renewal from nowhere,’ he said, and put his in his mouth and began to chew on it.

I obeyed. I had forgotten the strangeness of the opium: the bitter taste, the texture of beeswax.

‘But where are we? Where can we go?’

‘It is all one. We must remove ourselves as far as possible, as swiftly as possible,’ Mountstuart said.

‘East lies that way,’ Blake said. I wondered how he knew; the sky was grey and I could not gauge the compass points, but I wanted him to be right.

‘Look, Avery, we’re at a high altitude. We must be somewhere in the Vindhya mountains. If we walk parallel to them, keeping them to our left, we’ll eventually get to the Ganges and Mizapore.’

Remarkably quickly, the opium began to take effect, a knot of warmth beginning in my chest and working outwards, soothing my pains, and my legs were able to work again. Even Mountstuart slowly regained a little colour and began to breathe more easily.

For hour after hour we stumbled on, fear and opium lending
power to our limbs. Past sal tree after sal tree, past strangler vines, past shrilling birds and inscrutable monkeys, over twisting roots, broken creepers, through clouds of quiet yellow butterflies, on small paths worn by the feet of animals that led nowhere. Blake would fall back occasionally to obscure our tracks with a leafy branch, but he could not hide the broken grasses that advertised our presence so thoroughly. Several times he took us across small streams and pools, and each time we filled the water skin and drank. After a while the trees seemed to swell into one curtain of punishing green, and the strangler vines seemed like nooses, and the noise of the jangal became one long screech. The glow of the opium began to recede, and an anxious fretfulness took its place. The thought of our pursuers weighed upon me. I expected to hear their cries at any moment. With the fear came the crushing thoughts. They could not afford to let us escape; they would pursue us for ever. We had no idea where we were; we might wander in this wilderness until we starved. Calcutta was 600 miles away. The thoughts sucked at me, and beneath them was a more yawningly awful thought: that such evil could exist where I had been so persuaded there was good, and that I had played a shameful part in our discovery. My strength failed, even as my companions, so much older than I, persisted. I was so ashamed – especially before Mountstuart – but I found I could not place one foot ahead of the other.

Blake came to stand beside me. ‘Come, Avery, we must go on.’

‘I am sorry, but I cannot. You must leave me here.’

‘Come on, William.’ He put my arm across his shoulder and took my weight. ‘We can go a little further. You have to get back to Calcutta, if only for that girl. The fair one at the levee. She liked you. Well, better than she liked the others, for all the good it may do you.’

‘She did?’ I said doubtfully.

‘She did. Now, I have come up with a foolproof plan to return us to Calcutta, but it relies upon you playing the role of a mute native woman.’

Despite myself, I managed a choking laugh.

‘There. Another step, and another. I don’t joke, William. Xavier and I have returned from worse spots than this, have we not?’

‘Most assuredly,’ Mountstuart said, panting. Blake had found him a stick, and it was clear he needed it.

‘We … once … escaped … from … Karachi,’ Blake said, breathing heavily, ‘disguised as a nautch and her ugly girl servant. The Company wanted – still wants – a route into Central Asia. We made a survey of the port and the city. But the
Talpurs
do not like European spies. Mountstuart made a lovely nautch, but he was younger and prettier then. I had to pluck his eyebrows. The cries of pain were something to hear. I was a most credible sullen servant, fluent in Pashto. We ran across Sindh with nothing to eat save what I could steal for a week.’

I laughed a little again.

‘That’s the ticket, William. Just a little further. You should know that your hero’s books are compendiums of fabrication and falsity.’

There came a breathless ‘Huh!’ of outrage from Mountstuart.

‘A mountain of falsity. This man is not the elevated being you think him, Avery – but then, to be fair, no one is. To paraphrase Montaigne,’ he glanced back at Mountstuart, who gave a cross grunt, ‘even when you’re sitting on the highest throne in the world, you’re still sitting on your arse. I’ve found that a very useful maxim. As I was saying, all those daring escapes: one man and his noble steed pursued by thirty angry hill-tribesmen. Nonsense. He escaped from every one dressed as a woman. I was there, arranging his skirts. I was always on foot; he rode the donkey. For three years I had blisters and he had no eyebrows. Just a little further, and I will tell you the truth. You will never see Xavier in the same light again.’

We went on. Blake told a story about Mountstuart attempting to break into a
nawab’s
harem, and being saved by himself and an elephant. Mountstuart said it was a damned lie, though it was true that the Mahommedan ladies were very voluptuous, even if the opium they ate left them full of lassitude. I found that I had walked another five miles quite absorbed with their bantering.

The light began to go, and we looked for somewhere to bed down, eventually hiding ourselves in the deepest undergrowth we
could find. ‘They will not be able to follow our tracks in the dark,’ Blake said. I was not sure I believed him. Mountstuart, who was almost too fatigued to eat, uttered a sceptical ‘Ha!’

Blake brought out the last of our food and shared it between us. He opened the small pot of ghee and we rubbed it over our blistered hands and feet. Thus fortified, we lay down to sleep.

I expected to slide immediately into unconsciousness, but though I was as utterly exhausted as I had ever been, dark thoughts surged upon me: Macpherson dead, Nungoo dead, Mir Aziz dead, the Company full of ugly secrets.

When I woke, my head was groggy and throbbing, my feet and hands were raw, my stomach painfully empty, and my ears ringing with the sounds of daybreak. Overlaying all was a lurking sense that our pursuers might not be far. Blake was bending over Mountstuart, his hand inside the neck of the other’s shirt. I watched, Mountstuart fast asleep, while Blake pulled out a purse much like his own and from it produced another small brown ball of opium, which he then slipped into his own.

He broke off a thin twig from a neem tree and handed it to me. ‘Go and wash yourself, you’ll feel better,’ he said. ‘There’s a stream over there, you can hear it. We must be off soon.’

When I returned, Mountstuart was awake and dusting himself off. He looked exhausted, inclined his head regally at my morning greeting without a word, and stalked off to the stream. He was no better humoured when he came back. Blake gave us both a piece of the opium.

‘It’ll get us through another few days if we cannot find food,’ he said. Mountstuart stared at him hard, but said nothing.

It seemed as if there was a drill pressing upon my forehead. ‘Where will we go?

‘We can’t go back to Doora. They may have someone watching the roads.’

‘But Calcutta is 600 miles away.’

‘We need simply to get far enough so that our captors’ – I noted he did not say ‘Thugs’ – ‘will give up their pursuit. We’ll make for
Mirzapore,’ he said firmly. ‘It is not quite ten days since Mrs Parkes said she was meeting the Governor General’s party in Mirzapore. She will only just have arrived. We will catch the Governor General at Mirzapore before he goes north. Put Mountstuart’s findings before him. Add mine. I judge the distance to be around eighty miles. We can certainly do it.’

‘A mere eighty miles,’ I said. ‘And in which direction?’

‘This way.’ He set off briskly. Mountstuart picked up his stick, gave a sigh and followed.

The opium did its work. We ran through jangal, sometimes thicker, sometimes sparser, with never more than an animal track to guide us. There were streams everywhere and we drank often to fill our bellies. Gradually, the fear of capture subsided. What remained racing round my head was the thought that we might roam this featureless jangal for ever and never strike humanity. But when my pace slowed, Blake would fall back to walk beside me. Sometimes he told me stories – how they delivered horses to some grandee in the Punjab, while fulfilling some secret spying mission – or he described the views from the hills near Thibet. Sometimes he asked me to describe scenes from home, what I admired about my sister, what I remembered of my mother. I even spoke of my father – though all my recollections seemed to me very dull by comparison. His words distracted me, and my trying thoughts slipped away, until all that was left was the need to place one foot in front of the other. The pace, however, was clearly telling on Mountstuart. He looked pale and ill, and he said not a word. Towards late afternoon, as we came once more to the end of our strength, Blake began to talk about his exploits with Mountstuart.

‘The things we did for the Company,’ he said. Mountstuart had slowed down, and his face was pale and streaked with perspiration. He did not answer. ‘Do you recall Burmah?’ Blake went on.

‘Burmah?’ said Mountstuart, visibly drawing himself together. ‘How could I forget Burmah?’

A few minutes passed. ‘Absurd, risible episode. Preposterous,’ said Mountstuart. Blake began to walk a little faster, and we tried our best to keep up.

‘It was ’24, young man. The Company had its eye on Burmah. Disastrous campaign, though the Company did end up with Assam and Manipore and what have you. They sent us ahead of the army into the jangal. Someone at the Political Department had heard the Burmese set great store by a white elephant whose coming would foretell the return of the Buddha. If we had the elephant, they reasoned, the people would welcome our army. And so we were sent to find it.’

‘A mythical white elephant?’ I said.

‘That is correct, young man. Strangely, though we looked high and low, we could not find it anywhere, could we, Jem? In the meantime, we learnt the dialects of some of the forest tribes, the Kayin and the Mon, who did not overly love their overlords. They hid us from the Burmese, who would have happily disembowelled us. We advised the Company that the tribes would rise for us if we could offer them the chance of a small independent state under Company rule. But naturally it did not listen. The familiar story. The tribes rose on their own, and the Burmese slaughtered them in great numbers.

‘That was in those first years, when Jem was a shrimp of a thing. The first time I saw him I knew immediately that I could use his unique talents. He could pass himself off as anything, Bengal street child, Pathan goat herd. He was usefully small and could climb up and through everything. I trained him, and when he was ready I took him off with me to Punjab and Kashmir. Such a shame he grew.’

Mountstuart stopped, and took several deep unsteady breaths.

‘Now, Jem,’ he said, and it seemed to cost him something to speak. ‘Have I sung sufficiently for my supper? I need my piece. I cannot walk on without it.’

Blake stopped. Slowly he brought out the purse around his neck. He pulled off a small piece and held it out.

‘Is that all?’ said Mountstuart.

‘It will have to last until we reach Mirzapore,’ Blake said. ‘You know that.’

‘Let us hope we find it,’ said Mountstuart, but he took it. We
tramped a few more hours in silence until the light failed, and then stopped. I slept almost where I fell.

In the morning, Mountstuart had stomach pains, but Blake coaxed him up and handed us both a small piece of the opium. I hesitated.

‘Take it,’ said Mountstuart with a thin smile. ‘It takes years to become as I am.’ I pretended not to have heard, but put the morsel in my mouth, noting with mild alarm that it seemed less unpleasant than before.