Land of Hope and Glory (12 page)

Sattva-fire. Jack was sure.

Sengar bellowed something, opened his hand and the flaming ball flew straight at the slope, slashed through the trees and exploded with a peal that flung Jack back against the cutting. Branches, clods of earth, soot and sparks shot upwards. Trees cracked open and shrivelled with flame. Black smoke billowed and swayed and soon hid most of the slope.

Jack blinked dust from his eyes. The explosion had been as powerful as ten shells going off at once. Only a siddha could do something like that.

‘It must be the rebels. After them!’ Sengar leapt from his horse, drew his scimitar and charged into the smoke, his green turban bobbing for a second, then vanishing.

The French gave a joint cry of ‘Allah is great!’, jumped to the ground and raced after the Captain, leaving behind a couple of men to guard the horses. Kansal followed, struggling to draw his scimitar, which seemed to have caught on something.

Jack lurched up and stumbled across to the other side of the gully. His heart pulsed in his ears. He couldn’t see much through the smoke, but he could hear shouts and the crackle of muskets. He started up the tree-shrouded slope – he didn’t know why. Did he want to see if William was there? Did he think there was something he could do to save his friend?

The smoke coiled thick within the forest and he couldn’t see more than a few feet before him. He had to cling to branches and bushes as he clambered up the steep incline. He slipped at one point and slid down a short distance on his knees before he got up and carried on. His chest was taut and the smoke was bitter in his throat. He could hear his own breathing, loud and ragged.

He passed the edge of the smouldering crater left by the explosion. Trees lay dashed to the ground, their charred limbs stretching up like the masts of a shipwreck. Flames crackled and slithered about the perimeter.

His wound quivered. He remembered the sattva-fire striking him in the chest and he hesitated for a second. Was he afraid?

Then he heard shouting and shooting further up the scarp, and he took a breath and pressed on. A memory wasn’t going to stop him.

A bullet smacked into a tree trunk next to him, ripping a hole in the bark. He dived behind some brambles and waited for a moment, listening. Nothing. Shocks of pain coursed across his chest. Darkness welled before his eyes and he fought to stop himself from passing out.

Damn his injury.

He coughed violently, wiped the dribble away from his mouth. He had to pull himself together.

After a few minutes he climbed to his feet and peered over the brambles. The smoke had cleared a little and he could see the shifting lace of the undergrowth spread out across the forest floor. He waited for a minute more, and when nothing happened he stood up straight.

There was a crunch nearby, a step on fallen leaves. He froze. Barely thirty feet away stood a man with a musket pointed straight at him. His heart juddered. The man wasn’t a Frenchman or a Rajthanan – no uniform.

Jack prepared to jump for cover. But then – like a punch in the chest – he recognised the figure.

It was William. A little older, of course, and with his head shaved, but unmistakeable.

William’s face creased as he stared along the musket’s sights. Then he frowned and lowered the weapon. Puzzlement snaked across his forehead. He went to call out something, but was interrupted by a couple of pistol shots that sent bullets whistling through the woods to the left. He slid behind a tree.

More pistol shots. Jack saw two Frenchmen leaping over shrubbery as they ran across the slope towards him.

William stepped back further, looked at Jack, frowned again, then slipped into a patch of dense bushes and vines. In a second he’d vanished.

‘Where’d he go?’ one of the Frenchmen shouted.

‘That way.’ Jack pointed up the slope in a different direction from the one William had taken – he didn’t know why. It was instinctive. He couldn’t help but try to protect his friend, even as he was betraying him.

As the French charged off in the wrong direction, Jack scrambled over to where William had disappeared. He spotted a set of broken twigs. Just beyond them was a footprint in the damp ground and then the obvious sign of brambles pushed aside. He started along the trail. Maybe if he could talk to William and explain, then . . .

Then what?

The firing stopped and the quiet was strange after the sound of the battle. Birds started chirping again high in the trees. He jogged along, keeping an eye out for signs and trying to make as little sound as possible. He could have called out to his friend, but then that would have alerted the French.

William’s trail was clear – he’d been moving quickly, with no time to cover his tracks. Jack recognised the telltale inward turn of his friend’s right foot. The smoke had largely faded now and Jack scanned the trees ahead. But he saw nothing, not even a branch left swinging.

He remembered all those times he’d tracked enemies while he was in the army. But back then William had been beside him, encouraging him on, and Jhala had been there too, and the other men from the company, and they’d been on the side of dharma, and their enemies had been on the side of chaos and ruin, and they’d all been part of the most powerful army in the world.

He came out of the trees and found himself blinking in the sunshine – the light had returned to normal after the strange darkness that had come across the gully. Above him rose a grassy slope, at the top of which stood Sengar, Kansal and half of the French. They were all looking down the far side of the hill.

‘Up here, Casey,’ Sengar shouted.

Jack hesitated for a second. He could see William’s footprints leading straight up the slope. Had his friend been captured by Sengar? His heart drummed.

He clambered up the incline, pain weighing on his chest and black welts expanding before his eyes. He was rasping fiercely by the time he reached the summit. Lefevre looked at him with an eyebrow raised and a trace of a smile on his lips, seemingly pleased to note Jack’s weakness.

‘Down there.’ Sengar pointed to the steep, barren slope on the far side of the hill.

A group of men were scrambling down the last stretch of the slope and jumping on to horses that had been picketed at the bottom. William was amongst them, his shaven head rising well above those of his comrades.

‘Can you see Merton?’ Sengar asked.

Jack tried to regain his breath. He couldn’t bring himself to speak. He wouldn’t betray William. ‘Yes, he’s with them,’ he said hoarsely.

Sengar slammed his scimitar back into its scabbard. ‘Right. We’ll soon have the bastard. I’ll teach him to take on the Maharaja’s Army.’ He turned to his men. ‘To the horses – quickly. And check for survivors as you go.’

Jack was the last back down to the rail line. He’d gone as quickly as he could, but he was still fighting for air and there was a constant throb in the centre of his chest.

‘No rebel survivors,’ Kansal reported to Sengar. ‘The wounded all shot themselves before they could be captured.’

Sengar’s eyes narrowed and he gripped the pommel of his scimitar. ‘No matter. We’ll track them. It’s up to you now, Casey.’

Jack glared back at the Captain. The top button of Sengar’s tunic had come undone during the fray, revealing a purple thread that hung from his left shoulder and across his chest – the mark of a siddha. Just as Jack had suspected, the Captain had been given the secret training.

The rebels wouldn’t stand a chance against Sengar. No European, let alone an Englishman, had ever trained to become a true siddha.

There was a groan nearby. The guide was still alive and trapped beneath his fallen mule. He was frail from blood loss, but he still fought to pull himself free.

Sengar sucked on his teeth, strode over to the guide and stood with his legs apart and arms folded. ‘Where will the rebels go?’

‘I-I don’t know what you mean,’ the guide said.

Sengar frowned and drew a dagger. He crouched with his knee on the guide’s chest and raised the dagger to the man’s throat. ‘The rebels must have a camp. Where is it?’

‘I had nothing to do with—’

‘I’ve no time to waste.’ Sengar pressed his knee harder into the guide’s chest.

The guide grimaced from his wounds, then stared back at Sengar and spat. Sengar shifted his grip on the dagger and stabbed the guide hard in the mouth. The guide jolted and his eyes widened. Sengar stabbed again, smashing at the man’s teeth and then driving into the back of his throat. Then he hammered at the man’s eyes, pounding in a mad fury. Blood splashed his hands and tunic. The guide’s face was mangled and shattered, but somehow he was still alive, his chest rising and falling. Sengar stabbed over and over again at the man’s throat until it was a bloody, open mass. Finally, the guide lay still.

Sengar stood. There was a splatter of blood on one of his cheeks. His eyes blazed.

Jack stared at the blood-soaked corpse. There’d been no need for the Captain to kill the man that way. He could have just shot him in the head. Any other officer would have. Jhala would have.

‘How many have we lost?’ Sengar barked at Kansal.

‘Five dead and seven wounded, sir.’

Sengar looked over to where five French bodies had been laid side by side on the grass. Nearby, the seven wounded men sat propped against the cutting. Some had relatively minor wounds, having been shot in the leg or arm. But others had been hit in the torso and were pale and almost unconscious. Sengar stood over them and surveyed their wounds. He commanded those who were least injured to help the others on to horses. They were to ride back to Pentridge as best they could to seek treatment. No one could be spared to go with them.

‘You others, follow me,’ Sengar shouted to the remainder of his troops. ‘We’ll pick up the trail on the other side of the hill.’

They charged along the train tracks and within fifteen minutes reached the end of the gully. The forest thinned to a few twisted trees and it was easy to follow the base of the hill around to the point where the rebels had mounted their horses.

Sengar halted the party with his hand and looked at Jack. ‘Get on with it, Casey.’

Jack nudged his mare forward. The pain in his chest had faded and he was breathing relatively easily again.

He dismounted and studied the ground. The trail was clear and simple – thankfully there was no need for him to use his power. He saw the sliding boot prints of the rebels as they came down the slope, the stamped cups left by the hooves of the waiting horses, the churned earth where the animals had raced away down the valley.

He noted the hoof prints, each one unique. You could tell a lot about a horse just from its prints: size, speed, age, health, which legs it favoured, the weight it was carrying. He took a moment to memorise the most distinctive markings: the horseshoe that was worn steeply on the left side; the shoe with the missing nail; the deep prints of the animal carrying a heavy load.

But he took longer than he needed. Even when he was sure he would be able to follow the tracks, whatever the terrain, he still delayed. He knew he should get back on his horse, get on with it, but the reluctance dragged at him. He thought for a second about refusing to track William – he would have liked to have seen the look on Sengar’s face when he said it. But, of course, he couldn’t do that.

Finally, he climbed back on his horse and led the group off along the trail, with Sengar riding beside him.

The ground flattened into a wide, open valley and they spurred into a gallop, the horses’ hooves pummelling the soft earth.

Jack kept an eye on the rebels’ tracks, looking out for fresh signs, the places where stones had been scattered or grasses parted. Sometimes he had to slow down, and at one point he stopped completely and dismounted to examine the terrain more carefully.

Sengar clenched and unclenched his reins as he waited. He snapped open his spyglass and gazed at the hills.

The trail took them west across open ground, then north between a row of hills, then west again through a rocky ravine and over a saddle. William appeared to be weaving across the downs in an attempt to lose them, plunging ever deeper into the area known as Cranborne Chase.

Jack wished there was some way he could get a message to his friend, to explain himself. But it was pointless to wish for something like that.

After about two hours they came to a shallow river surrounded by willows. Before them lay a well-used ford and the tracks of numerous animals and people criss-crossed the nearby bank.

Jack leapt from his horse, crouched and searched the beaten soil. Amidst the other tracks, he could see the fresh marks of the rebels’ horses leading straight into the ford.

He stepped into the water; it was shallow, no higher than his knees. He walked across to the far bank, where he found dozens of trails again, but no sign of the rebels. He frowned and gazed along the bank, looking for any sign of the horses leaving the river. But there was nothing.

He walked back to the middle of the river. Sengar scowled at him, while Kansal and the others watched intently.

He knew the rebels must have travelled either upstream or downstream, but it was impossible to tell which way. He looked down, but the water was murky and the river bed stony. Any mark the horses might have made would have been washed away within seconds. He would either have to conduct a long search over both banks, or—