She Hunts Tigers
A Tale of Eastern Adventure
By Talbot Pratt
India, 1913. The begum's words were spoken with such
casual ease
that at first Jonathan barely noticed them. So many other matters
vied for his attention — the begum herself, for example. Together they perched in a gilded, rocking howdah
mounted precariously atop the mountainous spine of an elephant.
There was barely room for the two of them in the swaying contraption,
and Jonathan was intensely aware of her lithe brown body pressing close
through the whispering folds of her sari. A filmy yashmaq
veil
covered her head and face, revealing only the startlingly vivid
emeralds of her kohl-lined eyes. When she spoke, the veil
floated
dreamily, riding on the sensuous waves of her strawberry-scented breath.
He recalled the night he had set out from Bombay to
spend a month in the Sher Mahal at the begum's
invitation. The
wizened owner of the dak bungalow where he was then staying
took him
quietly aside, clearly troubled. "Sahib, there is one thing you should know of
Panna
begum," the man explained, wringing his bony hands and casting
furtive
glances through the open windows. "She enjoys shikar,
sahib. She hunts tigers."
Jonathan had thought he understood the man's meaning
plainly enough. It was unusual for women to take part in shikar,
the tiger hunt; the man was warning him that the begum was
perhaps
independently minded, even willful. Hardly a reason for such
concern, however; she was a begum after all — wife of the nawab
of
Samudra.
In fact, in practical terms, she was virtually an
independent monarch herself, living alone as she did in the nawab's
summer residence for much of the year. She commanded an army of
ayahs — serving girls — and a lesser platoon of eunuchs whose
supposed
duty was to ensure her continued fidelity in the absence of her
husband, but who more properly performed the chores of servants,
whether it be keeping the punkah fans stirring the sultry
Indian air or
ensuring her jewelled carafes of quenching arrack punch
remained
eternally filled to their silver brims.
But now, poised dizzily atop an elephant, in the
very midst of a tiger hunt, he was no longer certain. The begum
was so near her sandalwood perfume mingled subtly with the more pungent
scent of her sweat — a strangely arousing combination, Jonathan
found. Her fiery emerald eyes, for which she was named, flashed
with eager vibrancy, her long jezail musket raised to her
shoulder, all
her supple body throbbing with an almost orgasmic thirst for the hunt,
for the kill. She seemed less a human hunter than a tiger
stalking its own kind and, in spite of the oval shade cast by their
swaying, fringed parasol, Jonathan found himself perspiring unnaturally
in his khaki attire and sun pith helmet.
He glanced at her, a frown pressing on his gleaming
brows. "Pardon, begum? I'm not sure I caught that."
Her attention turned to the mechanism of her
jezail. Her response was given absently, as if placidly
discussing the advantages of the ancient weapon over the modern
Lee-Enfield. "I put poison in the Shiraz wine you drank at
tiffin. I would expect you to begin feeling the first
effects by
now. Are you?"
For a moment, he was too stunned to speak. His
eyes travelled to the gaunt, near-naked mahout riding the knife
edge of
the elephant's wrinkled neck, driving the beast with jabs of his iron
hook. The situation seemed surreal; surely this was some sort of
game, one more amusement for the thrill-seeking begum.
But, then, he noticed the perspiration soaking his
jodhpurs to his legs, his jacket to his spine. It was true he had
been feeling queerly for some time now; feeling more and more ghastly
by the second, now that he... reflected... on it...
With a sudden frigid rush of horror, he realized she
was telling the truth. He had been poisoned. She had poisoned him!
"But...but why?" he blurted out, swallowing past the sudden
constriction in his throat.
The fear in his voice turned her to him reluctantly,
her breath stirring her veil, her lashes black and lush. "You
recall the conversation we had during your first week in my
palace?" He shook his head, bewildered as much by her casual
manner as by her words. "You spoke of religion, do you
recall? We discussed the difference between Hinduism and
Christianity."
Though her husband, the nawab, was a Moslem,
the
begum had been born and raised to the Hindu faith. Her
husband
had agreed to allow her her beliefs so long as she consented to live in
purdah, wearing her yashmaq veil in public.
"You said you thought the major difference lay in
each religion's view of death. Because we Hindus see death only
as a part of life, as a transition between one life and the next, death
to us is merely an event, a process."
His thoughts were confused, an unruly jostle in his
head, though whether this was the shock of the thing, or the poison's
lethal progress, he could not be sure. He found her words
difficult to follow, his vision as unsteady as the cushion beneath him.
"But to the western mind, death is something more...
frightening. We Hindus have gods for everything, the sun, the
wind, the mountains. It is said there are 330 million Hindu gods."
Her voice was throaty and sensual, and he recalled
how mysterious and alluring he had found it before. But now there
was a childish discord, a strange naive innocence. She spoke as
if wanting him to understand as she thought she understood.
"But you Christians... you have a god who is good
and you have a devil who is bad. Two principle gods who answer
all your questions and meet all your needs. And then — and this
is the part which intrigued me — then there is a third deity. In
fact, you said no feringee would even call it a god, though in
every
way it would seem to be one. It is neither good nor evil, but
simply..." She dropped her dark eyes, searching her memory for
the word; with a mounting sense of dizzy dislocation, Jonathan numbly
obliged.
"Inexorable."
Her eyes returned to his face, squinting as she
smiled. "That was the word you used, yes, thank you.
Inexorable. It is because it must be, not through any malice nor
even any divine will. It is inevitable, even necessary. And
you call it... 'death'."
As the final word passed her lips, her eyes suddenly
closed and a strange convulsion shook her slender frame, her sleek body
momentarily straining as if an electric current was surging through her
flesh. Then, just as suddenly, the fit passed away.
"This is insane," Jonathan gasped, clutching at the
rocking rim of the howdah. In the distant wilderness of deodar
trees arose the din of beaters slowly approaching, methodically forcing
the great cat from its ancient lair. "What does any of this have
to do with... with... poison!"
"Don't you see? This creature you spoke of —
this 'death' — it is completely new to me. It is fascinating;
more deadly than sher, the tiger, more powerful than hathi,
the
elephant, more patient than the python. Such a beast — to have it
in my sights, to bring it down as I have brought down so many
creatures, to place its regal head amongst my trophies, to skin it and
to wear that cold, black hide draped luxuriously against my naked
flesh..."
Her lean body convulsed again, all her supple
muscles straining in concert, her eyes rolling up beneath their
trembling lids, a breath of rigid ecstacy stirring her veil.
Jonathan had seen similar fits among Quakers during a visit to America
some years before and in Haiti among practitioners of the voodoo
faith. He felt a chill having nothing to do with the venom
coursing in his veins.
"That's insane," he gasped, his vision swimming, his
bowels clenching. "You can't hunt death like some bloody
tiger! I was just being figurative — death isn't really a beast
to be caught and skinned. Death is...is...death is death!"
Slowly the begum's vision cleared, the fit
passing
from her like a fever, leaving her breathless, her slim brow
glistening. She frowned, not angrily, but hurt, wounded.
Dimly Jonathan detected the dry rustle of something bounding through
the greenery ahead. The cacophony of the beaters was stifling
now, nearly drowning out her voice.
"Why do you say it is impossible?" she asked,
petulance catching the words in her throat. "Merely because it
has never been tried? I have killed many tigers, many
maneaters. Surely this is but the greatest maneater of
all." Her small hands closed on the jezail, her tapering
fingers
gently stroking the brass-banded barrel. "I have a fine weapon,"
she said proudly. "I have my experience. I have a plan."
His spinning gaze was fixed on her emerald stare, a
dangerous lassitude stealing over him, robbing him of strength, of
will. As if in a dream, out of the corner of his eyes he caught a
flash of orange and black, a sheen of glossy pelt. He felt the
elephant rock suddenly beneath them, trumpeting in primordial alarm;
heard the mahout gasp in surprise.
"And I have bait," she finished, even as she
shrugged the jezail fluidly to one brown shoulder and spat
ivory fire
from the end. Then the world gyrated wildly and the tiger's
deathscream followed Jonathon into merciful night.
When he awoke it was through a clinging web,
fighting every inch, like a man rising with heavy strokes through a
viscous pool.
He lay on a lavish four poster bed, violet silk
sheets gathered in shimmering folds around him. His limbs were
leaden and numb, his head pounding and bathed in running sweat.
Fighting to raise his head, he surveyed a vast chamber festooned with
engrailed arches, stretched gilded mirrors and grim, furious tapestries
depicting the bloody tiger hunt over and over again — as if reflections
in other darker mirrors.
With a start, he realized this must be the begum's
bedchamber, that he must be lying on the begum's bed, and he
felt a
momentary flush of embarrassment — until his memories returned in a
sudden pulse and he recalled the circumstances which had brought him
here.
"Don't try to move." A filmy curtain parted
beside the bed and Panna begum looked down on him, her body
draped in a
diaphanous sari, her yashmaq discarded revealing her face to
him for
the first time. Her dark beauty nearly drove him to forget the
nightmare horror of his situation.
She was much younger than he had thought, perhaps
only seventeen or eighteen. Her features were delicately
sculpted, her skin almond brown and glossy as polished
sandalwood. Her lips were startlingly full, but narrow, like two
ripe orange slices and painted in a pale pink hue that was vivid
against the dark of her skin. A gold ring glittered, piercing her
nose, a delicate chain looping to the lobe of her ear. Yet, in
spite of all this, it was still her emerald eyes that won his gaze,
nearly hypnotic in their scintillance. "It won't be much
longer. The poison will do its job soon."
"Please," he croaked, straining to rise, then
falling back with a hopeless groan. "Please, bring a
doctor. There is still time. There must be an
antidote. You don't want to be a murderer. They will hang
you, do you understand? They will hang you if I die."
"Shhh." She touched a finger to her satiny
lips, then gently stroked the damp hair from his eyes with her other
hand. "It won't hurt — I made sure the poison would not cause
pain. And don't worry for me. They won't hang me because
you won't die. I will be here with you all night." She
reached down and raised up her long jezail musket, the brass
bands
glinting in the hazy ghost-light of hanging ghee lamps.
"When
death comes for you, I will be ready. I will not let it take you."
Jonathan shook his head in an anguish of
frustration, his fists balled against the rich silk at his
thighs. "How can I make you understand? You can't shoot
death. You can't—"
He paused, a sudden desperate idea taking
form. "How will you see to shoot? Surely even you can't
kill something you can't see?
It's not your fault; I should have told you that death is
invisible. But, you must see, if you can't see it you can't shoot
it."
A faint smile turned the corners of her lips, a
light flashing like green fire in her eyes. "Don't worry about
that," she assured him. "When death comes, we will both see it —
I promise you that."
As the night wore on, a storm broke. There
were no windows in the bedroom, but Jonathan could hear each savage
clap of thunder as it smashed the air like shivering gongs beyond the
marble walls. He could detect the whispering rush of torrential
rains washing the orange groves and banana plants and he could imagine
the peepul trees whipped to a dancing frenzy by the howling winds of
the rising monsoon.
But in the begum's bedchamber the atmosphere was
still as the air in the mouth of a corpse.
It took all his energy to remain conscious, but at
least she had spoken the truth: there was no pain. But there was
suffering just the same. His futile pleas had given way to a
hollow silence, hopeless and spent. It was not for himself that
he suffered now; rather it was for this poor deluded creature, doomed
to die miserably in a noose for a madness which he had helped fashion —
if however unwittingly.
The begum sat on the floor beside the bed, the long
jezail perched on her knee, her flashing eyes staring unwavering at the
shadowed archway to the hall. Her patience, her stamina was
astonishing. Then, quite suddenly, she broke the breathless
silence in a voice husky and contained.
"It was a night much like this," she said.
"The monsoon was raging outside. I was barely fourteen but my
breasts were swollen with milk and my belly glistened with the sweat of
my labours. For nine months I had dreamed of the child growing
within me, imagined how it would feel, her body against mine, her lips
suckling."
Suddenly her voice caught in her throat; a fierce
tremor shook her narrow shoulders and her teeth clenched until the
spasm reluctantly passed. Then she licked her dry lips and
resumed in an unsteady cadence.
"It was a difficult birth, very long and
painful. It had begun at noon as we sat to tiffin and continued
far, far into the night — so long I thought perhaps it would never
end. The midwife was nearly as exhausted as I, and my husband,
the nawab, fainted through worry — so they told me. But finally
the child came and her cries fell on my ears like the most melodious
raga ever composed. Tears ran in my eyes and I begged to hold
her, all my body afire with the need to feel her, to know she was
mine. But the midwife...the midwife insisted she must clean her,
wash her first."
The begum swallowed, tears tracing glistening
threads on her dusky cheeks, glittering like diamonds on the rim of her
lips. She stared at the archway unblinking as if in a sort of
trance. Jonathan too found her words hypnotic, his eyes fixed on
her young tortured features, his breathing shallow with failing
strength.
"She placed my child on a table and then...
the crying stopped." Her dark head shook slowly, as if negating
the evidence of her memories. "They told me it was her
heart. They said it must have been weak. But they didn't
see. None of them saw what I saw."
Jonathan felt a cold breath whispering across his
skin. "I saw the thing that gathered over her even as the crying
stopped; I saw it as I see you — the darkness, the terrible, ravenous
darkness. I saw how it moved; I saw the claws, the teeth, the
eyes. I did not know what it was. My world was a world of
rebirth, reincarnation, of dancing gods and karma. But this was
not rebirth; this was something loathsome and shambling; something
fierce and stalking; something come crawling out of the howling
wilderness on padding paws to devour my child, my baby, without reason,
without justice, without remorse. A maneater. A terrible
incessant maneater."
For a moment, silence held the chamber in caressing
hands. Her sari had fallen from her soft shoulders and they shook
in concert with her ragged sobs. Her dark head was pressed to the
long gun perched on her knee, silver tears spilling from beneath the
wings of her ebony lashes. Jonathan knew the end was very
near. It was only through a sustained effort that he marshalled
the strength to speak.
"Panna." It was the first time he had used her
name without the honorific. "Panna, you must listen to me.
I'm sorry for you, for your child, but this won't bring her back.
You can't kill death. It simply isn't poss—"
Her breath sucked through her teeth, her green eyes
dilating, all her frame suddenly stiffening. "There," she
gasped. "In the archway, do you see it? There."
Startled, he followed her stricken stare. For
just a moment, he really did find himself half-expecting to
see... something... beneath the engrailed arch. But there
was no one there. Then, before he could speak, she twisted to her
knees and drew lithely back behind the filmy curtains.
"Jaldi!" she hissed, and he knew it must be a
command to a hidden servant for she never spoke to him in Hindi.
Almost on the instant, a cloud of soft whiteness
burst in a roiling swirl from the chamber's honeycombed ceiling.
It drifted downward, spreading and diffusing in the still air, tiny
rocking flakes like the finest snow.
"It is kapok," she explained in a shivering
whisper. "The most delicate of kapok, more light than the softest
down."
There was again that strange orgasmic tension in her
voice, but he no longer mistook it for simple passion. It was
passion of a sort, to be sure, but a dark passion, a terrible hungry
lust grown of pain and loss; a ruthless need sated only through the
lovemaking of the hunt and the climax of the kill. "There?"
She could barely speak through her excitement. "There — do you see it now?"
His eyes could barely focus. A weight seemed
pressing on his ribs, each breath a battle. But suddenly a cool
prickling worked along his scalp. His eyes grew wide.
Something
was moving in the suffused haze of drifting kapok. Not something
he could see, but rather something which disturbed the white tufts
around it, conforming the suspension to its shape.
Jonathan swallowed drily. An hallucination,
surely. The final stages of madness brought on by the
poison. And yet — the thing moved. Slowly it approached
through the ivory fog — with an easy grace, padding without
hurry. Dimly he sensed the long barrel of the jezail piercing the
slit in the soft curtain near his head, levelling, taking aim.
"Now," he croaked, his voice sounding alien to his
ears. The swirling shape loomed massive and slouched, striding
ever closer. He noticed how the lamp flames danced in its passing
and wondered how often before he had witnessed the same, ignorant of
its significance.
"Now." His voice was stronger, grated between
clenched jaws, his eyes starting. Sweat blurred his vision; his
heart thundered in the cage of his chest. The sculpted shape
seemed to fill the chamber beyond the bed, seemed to reach out with
heavy arms, closer and closer and clo—
"Now!" he screamed, shrill with terror.
The jezail exploded like a stunning clap of thunder
in his ears.
On the heels of the concussion a terrible wail rent
the air, a hideous, wounded shriek that cut Jonathan's brain like
daggers. In a titanic whirlwind of white, the shape rushed
screaming from the chamber. The begum tore away the curtains, the
jezail still curling smoke, her breath panting and furious.
"It's only wounded!" she exclaimed, her voice
breaking with the anguish of her failure. "I have to finish it!"
"Wait!" he cried, grabbing for her. But she
slipped easily away, chasing after her prey on bare, flashing feet.
Suddenly he found his strength returned, his vision
clear, as if the poison had been purged from his veins in an
instant. He tumbled off the bed, weaving drunkenly a moment, then
sprang after.
He followed her out into the crashing rain, only the
scent of her perfume to guide him. Then the wind swept even this
away and he could only blunder blindly through the orange groves,
screaming her name in the hollow echoes of the storm. Suddenly he
paused as a frightened cry pierced the night. He sped after it,
skidding in splashing puddles, one hand raised against the driving
spray.
Abruptly the trees parted before him and he stumbled
to a halt, a shard of ice exploding in his chest. It wasn't
possible, he knew it wasn't — but he saw it with his own eyes.
A vast monstrous shadow was outlined in the storm's
wash, shaping the sheets of rain as it had shaped the drifting
kapok. In its arms, the begum writhed and twisted, her terrible
screams heaving from her lungs in shuddering sobs of horror. With
a single wrench, the shadow tore the sari from her throbbing body,
casting it to the howling gale. For a moment Jonathan saw her
brown form struggle frantically, her naked limbs flashing with
glistening rain, her emerald eyes wide and stricken with the
realization that she was at last living her most dreaded
nightmare. Then the shadow reached forth a vast paw, laying it
almost lovingly over her mouth.
For a long moment, even the thunder quieted and the
begum grew passive, as if stunned, unable to comprehend what was being
done to her. Then, suddenly, her lean body arched with a final
frenzy of horrid realization and a strangled shriek, tinged with a
reeling madness, found its way past the cold, insistent thing reaching
deep inside her.
A second later, she fell limply to the shining earth
and the rain-shadow slouched silently away into the flashing Indian
night.
On his return to London, Jonathan told no one.
The nawab's doctors had insisted her death was a heart attack — like
her child, she must have had a weak constitution. In keeping with
her Hindu faith, they placed her body on a burning ghat and sent her
soul to be reborn in another form, another place — whatever her karma
might decree.
But though he told no one, he could not forget that
night and the horrors it had brought. Was it all some strange
hallucination brought on by the poison given him? But why then
had the poison not killed him?
Now this.
The London papers were filled with the news of a
man's death in Europe, an Archduke of some sort. He had been
assassinated and there was talk of reprisals, even war. As
Jonathan read those words, a strange chill had touched his shoulders, a
premonition. He had thought back to that night — and wondered.
Only wounded,
the begum had said. Only
wounded.
Somewhere in the dark of the world, Death stalked the
earth on silent, invisible paws — incessant, implacable...but wounded. And he knew what men said of a wounded maneater....
"You may have noticed the Shiraz wine you drank was poisoned."