They turned back at last. Romesh was just bringing the boat about in a long, sweeping curve, the water hissing along its side, when they all heard a distant, muffled report, not at all loud, but borne across the mirror of lake as though it came from everywhere at once, or from nowhere.
‘What was that?’ Larry demanded. ‘I thought there was no shooting here. It isn’t a hunting reserve, it’s a wild life sanctuary.’
‘That is right, sahib,’ Romesh confirmed. ‘But sometimes wardens must shoot injured animal, or rogue animal.’
‘But it didn’t sound like a gun to me,’ Dominic said. ‘More like what you hear at a good distance when they’re blasting in a quarry. But I don’t suppose there such a thing for a hundred miles around here.’
They listened, straining their ears, but the sound was not repeated. They had the broadest expanse of the lake to themselves, and the silvery hush of the hour was like a glass bell enclosing them.
‘Ah, we’re dreaming!’
But they had not been dreaming. Looking ahead as they sped towards the narrows, they saw a tiny puff of iridescent cloud rise and assemble in the sky far before them, and there hang shimmering like gilded dust for some four or five minutes before it disintegrated. In a countryside almost without aerial pollution, even a shot in a quarry would have produced little more than that. And before the arms of forest rose on either side to shut them in, it was gone.
The successive bends of lake became surfaces of steel mirror, reflecting pastel channels of sky, and shut in by black walls of forest. But wherever a wider bay opened the light took heart and returned. It was well after six o’clock when they came back to the place where they had seen the elephants cross, and instinctively looked again at the shore from which they had set out, where a few dead trees provided scratching posts in the shallows, and man-tall reeds grew, a paler patch in the dusk.
‘What’s that?’ Larry asked, pointing. ‘There in the reeds, look – something white… ’ Reddish elephants they had seen, but a white elephant would be too much to ask. Deer, perhaps? Anything pale would look white at this hour.
They peered, and caught the gleam he had been the first to see. Too white for deer, and too motionless; something low in the water, half obscured by the vertical stems of the reeds. ‘Wait!’ said Dominic sharply. ‘Ease up, Romesh, there’s something queer there— Take us in towards it a bit.’
Romesh slowed down, and obediently turned the boat’s nose into the bay. They drew nearer to the pale patch, and it took on shape, veiled as it was, the curve of a white hull, a tarter of canvas trailing overside into the water.
‘It’s a boat – but it’s foundered – it’s filling!—’ Dominic leaned over the side, and caught the quicksilver gleam of water inside the settling hull, and something else, pale wisps and bulges of cloth, awash among the bilge and hanging limply over the distant side. ‘Something’s happened— Closer, Romesh, get us alongside. My God, there’s someone in her!’
They were all braced intently at his back as he kneeled on the seat and leaned far over to get a hand on the gunwale of the other boat. Patti’s voice said, in tones of stunned and frozen unbelief: ‘There can’t be! It’s only old rags – it’s an old boat, it must have been abandoned here long ago…’
‘Impossible, we couldn’t have missed seeing it.’
The reeds rustled, brushing their hair and sleeves. Dominic got a hand on the rail and steadied them alongside; and now they could all see down into the unmistakable shell of Mahendralal Bakhle’s smart white launch, awash from end to end with sluggish water.
All its seating nearest the engine was torn and splintered, and the motor itself hung drunkenly forward into the wash, a mass of twisted and fused metal. Every seam had been started, and oozed water and slime. The boat-boy lay with one arm trailing over the side, gashed by flying splinters and raked raw by blast, a few rags of his clothing dangling. And in the bottom, the water whispering from side to side over his shattered face as the boat swayed, lay what was left of Mahendralal Bakhle, in the muddy shreds of his tussore suiting. His chest was pitted with shrapnel wounds, and his gold-rimmed glasses, disintegrated into lethal slivers of metal and glass, had obliterated his eyes more thoroughly than the reflected light of the sun had hidden them at noon, and penetrated beyond into his brain. No bubbles arose through the water that covered his mouth and nostrils. The arms that lolled on either side his body terminated in the mangled shreds of hands.
Suddenly Patti uttered the most frightful sound Dominic had ever heard, a long, rending, horrified scream that rasped her throat and scarred their ears. And having once begun, she screamed and screamed, and could not stop.
Three
Thekady: Sunday Evening
« ^ »
They reacted after their kind, Lakshman caught the hysterical girl in his arms, turned her forcibly away from the horror and shook her until her broken cries gave place to blessedly subdued weeping. Priya, the nurse, kilted her sari to the knees, and was over the side as nimbly as a cat, standing on the broken stern seat of the other boat, with the water lapping her ankles. She leaned down to the lolling boatman, slid her arm under his shoulders, and turned up his head and face to what was left of the light. He was clear of the water, at least he had not drowned. But one arm was raw meat from the elbow, and he was bleeding fast into the debris of the boat.
‘He is not dead – yet…’
Dominic climbed over into the hull to help her, knee-deep, and straddling Bakhle’s body with one foot braced on either side.
‘If we can get him into our boat, I might be able to stop the bleeding.’
Dominic got his arms round the man’s thighs, and Larry came out of his daze with a shudder and a lurch, and leaned over to take from Priya the burden of the head and shoulders. It was astonishing what a weight this fragile-looking girl could lift, with one arm hooked expertly into the victim’s surviving arm, the other hand steadying his rolling head. The white turban was a trailing rag, dirty and stained, but she did not discard it; it would serve as a tourniquet. They got the limp burden over the side and stretched out on a seat. She looked down briefly at Bakhle’s body, and the green water lay motionless over the ruined face.
She looked up into Dominic’s eyes. All the delicate lines of her features had sharpened and paled; she was a different girl. ‘We can’t do anything for him – he’s dead.’ And she turned to the one who was not dead – yet. On her knees beside him, blood and slime fouling the skirts of her sari, she rolled up the wet turban into a tight ball, and wedged it under the injured man’s armpit; and the rags of his forearm smeared her breast as she did it, and she did not even notice. ‘Romesh, give me your turban – quickly!’
He stripped it off with trembling hands, the whites of his eyes shining in the dusk, and long curls of black hair fell about his ears. She took it without so much as looking at him and bound her pad into place, securing the upper arm tightly over it. She knew how to handle a weight greater than her own, and what she was doing she did with all the concentration and passion that was in her.