* * *
They found the camp at sunset, through a hazy glare of red already half-deepening to grey as twilight retook its nightly portion, adapting all it touched to darkness. Insects still hung thick around the ash-heap of a dampened fire, on which a brass pot full of half-cooked rice sat abandoned. Further still, a few hastily-improvised huts of mud and fallen wood vomited scraps of clothing or the odd rusty weapon, spoiled supplies and broken crockery. Detritus lay everywhere, the spoor of retreat, scattered and rank. Grammar’s party—the bulk of them barefoot, and thus more likely to consider where they chose to step—picked their way carefully through it, stabbing at every heap and corner with their bayonets. Except themselves, nothing moved but those few small creatures one occasionally heard rustle in the grass, and—just above—three lone kites (barely visible, through a bald patch in the jungle’s roof) which dipped and cawed in a slice of red-grey sky.
At the crotch of one overhanging tree’s trunk, a wet, red, knotted rag of some not easily identifiable substance glittered. Under the tree was something else, equally red, but moaning; this proved—after Romesh Singh was so good as to kick it gingerly over—to be what remained of a man who had been partially flayed. It was a portion of his forcibly donated hide, apparently, that gave the tree its surreal extra coat.
“How long since is he dead?” Grammar called across the clearing, idly running his sword through a sack of dried beans that soon proved both soaked enough to rot, and full of maggots.
“He lives yet, sahib,” Romesh Singh replied.
Mildly impressed by such resilience, Grammar stooped to examine the man, who lay gasping—long, low, shallow gulps of liquid air, the humid foretaste of approaching rainfall—but inert, a thin line of bloodshot ivory just showing under each eyelid. Using the flat of his blade, Grammar scraped lightly over the man’s denuded chest, flicking the bright half-circle of raw flesh where his right nipple had once been back to full, painful life.
The man reared up with a scream, then back again. His eyes, all white around their irises, fell on Grammar—and immediately widened further in horrified recognition.
“Where are thy fellows, offal?” Grammar asked him.
The man coughed, wetly. At Grammar’s nod, Romesh Singh kicked him lightly in the head, forcing him further sidelong into the mud. The man doubled up, vomiting earth mixed with blood on Grammar’s boots. With a little moue of disgust, Grammar put one shiny black heel to the back of the man’s neck, pinning him down, and leant again to rephrase his initial request, this time a bit more insistently. Adding:
“It will do thee no good to lie. Remember, thou hast some skin yet left to lose.”
The man drew a fresh gulp of air, mixed with a fair chunk of his own waste.
“Thou . . . knowest,” he managed, at last.
Grammar frowned.
“I fear,” he said, “that thou art mistaken.”
Even he, however, could see that the man was clearly far beyond dissembling.
Grammar looked to Romesh Singh. Behind them, someone gave a nervous little step backwards, crushing something not particularly loud, but obviously breakable.
“Thou knowest,” the man repeated, dully.
“Then it can do no harm to tell me again.”
The man spit, a weak, retching stream of pink, which Grammar easily avoided. His dying eyes took on a blank gleam of unsatisfied malice.
“Human tiger,” he said. “Blood-drinker. Evil thing. Why dost thou return? Why bring thy lackeys, when you needed none upon thy first visit? We were many; now my fellows are gone I know not where. And it was thee that brought us to this pass, white corpse-eating dog, thou mocking horror. It was thee.”
(And here occurs a mystery you city-dwellers cannot hope to know, o my beloved, especially without the benefit of personal experience: The sheer, shocking speed with which light drains away when sunset has ended, here in the jungle’s heart—in one bright gush, like blood from a slashed throat, leaving nothing behind but a certain stillness; the hush of drawn breath, or the barest of unvoiced sighs.)
On Grammar’s deaf side, one of the company blurted, all unthinking: “Rhakshasa!”
Grammar did not hear it, of course—but caught Romesh Singh’s brief little jerk of reaction from the corner of one eye, and whipped quickly around, following it to its trembling, rooted source. His pistol had already appeared in one hand, amusingly enough; primed, aimed and ready, almost before he had consciously thought to draw it.
“Who said that?” he asked.
No one answered. Undeterred, Grammar shifted only slightly, sighting down the barrel at the soldier he judged most clearly in range.
“You, I think,” he said, coolly. And pulled the trigger.
Romesh Singh shut his eyes. There had been a bazaar boy the company had adopted, not long since—silent and tensile with near-starvation, good mainly for scouring pots, packing kits (but only when there was time to watch him do it, for he had never quite gotten over his early habits of casual thievery), and running those few small errands his shaky command of English would allow for. Grammar—stalking restlessly around camp, quietly ablaze with his usual nimbus of potential lunacy, as everyone took care to stay out of his way—had not even seemed to notice his existence, until the child made the understandable mistake of laughing at a whispered joke while still within Grammar’s eyeshot. Without breaking stride, Grammar had swerved to scoop the boy up and carried him into the cooking tent, where he ground him face-first into an open cask of chili powder for some long moments, then dropped him. To stand, watching patiently, as the boy thrashed and huffed awhile at his feet—nose, eyes and throat all swollen shut, the rest a tight, red mask of burns—before suffocating on what later proved to be a flood of his own shocked mucus.
And he, Romesh Singh, had shut his eyes then as well, so as not to have to see Grammar’s scarlet-coated back draw up all at once like a shaken snake, straightening with pleased arousal at the spectacle of his own cruelty.
(Thinking: Oh. Like a bell. Oh, a heart-beat’s sharp-soft squeeze between rib and gut, tolling. This is so wrong. I am so very wrong to even be here, with him.)
Gunshot and thunder blended, signalling the torrent’s arrival. And before this one (now forever nameless) soldier’s corpse had fallen to earth, the rest of Grammar’s company simply broke and ran in the face of Grammar’s insanity—always no more than a reputable quirk, until it had finally turned their way.