The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [27]
His name was Hindip Roon and he had followed his father and grandfather into the Gurkha Rifles. He was no more than five feet tall and, wet through, wouldn’t have weighed above fifty kilos. Mason watched the trooper walk away, becoming as light and insubstantial as a ghost, until he disappeared completely into the foliage skirting the perimeter of the village. There was a sort of fog, a vapour that glazed the soldiers’ skin and smelled sulphurous and made the branches of the trees and hanging vines gluey against clothing and kit. On the grass, its residue dragged at boots as sticky as the slime that trails a snail. But it was useful, this mist that made phantoms of men and coated the jungle in its suffocating hush. It made concealment easier. According to the priest, the chief of the Tengwai wore an emerald-studded collar as his badge of office. It was not something he would be likely to relinquish willingly. Mason had ordered trooper Roon to bring back the collar when he returned as physical proof of the deed done. Roon might feel compelled, he knew, to take other trophies. It was a grisly and long-cherished custom among the Gurkhas. But he’d volunteered for the task and what he did with the bastard’s extremities was, to Mason’s mind, entirely his own prerogative.
Except that, by midnight, Roon had not returned. Through the weeping mist, through his night-vision binoculars, Mason could discern no movement in the village. But then, since his unit’s arrival and careful disposition around it there had been no sound or visible sign of life in the village at all. The jungle was quiet, too. But that had been a feature of their mission, when he thought about it. They had heard no birds singing or earthbound beasts crashing, startled, through foliage. There were no monkeys capering and calling up above in the trees. They hadn’t seen so much as a squirrel or a bat up there in the canopy. There’d just been biting insects and the odd distant bark of a scavenging jackal and, a couple of hours earlier, the coils of a fat snake wound indolent around a heavy branch a few metres to the left of the path the priest had put them on.
He sent a two-man scout party to assess the level of defensive fortification and sentry disposition at the two entrances to the village compound marked on the Jesuit’s map. And they returned after an hour to report that there were no sentries. There were no defences. The village gave the appearance of being entirely uninhabited.
As commander of the mission, Mason knew he had to go in after their man. Their belief in their own invulnerability could just about explain the defensive laxness of the Tengwai fighters. But Mason’s men were not Kesabi, hampered by bad magic, crippled by juju terror. They’d go in hard and fast and it wouldn’t be subtle or diplomatic and the Tengwai wouldn’t know what had fucking hit them. They’d only hope to Christ trooper Hindip Roon was still in one piece and, if he was, they’d get him out and fuck the French and their fucking colonial games, Mason thought, as he gave the signal to attack.
They found only two men in the village. Both of them were dead. The Tengwai chief lay, headless, in his hut. Hindip Roon sat cross-legged outside the hut with the severed head facing away from him on the ground between his knees. In the grip of Roon’s right fist, the chief’s collar of office glinted green and gold in the darkness in thin beams from the torches screwed to the assault party’s rifles. Roon had a slacker grip in death on the handle of his kukri knife, which he had used left-handed to slice open his carotid artery before bleeding to death in apparent repose.
The chief had not died in repose. Mason settled on his haunches and examined the face of the dead man by torchlight. The sides of the head were dark and bloody and the hair there matted with gore where Roon had sliced off his ears. But you only noticed that after taking in the raw, red nakedness of his skull. Because Roon had scalped him, too. His lips were drawn back in a snarl of agony from his teeth.