The Worm in Every Heart by Gemma Files Read Free Book Online Page B

light, or an equal and engulfing darkness. Romesh Singh still quietly offered him the former, which he spurned; it hurt Grammar’s terrible British pride, I venture, to think the solution for his many sins could have been something so simple as love.
    So he remained alone: a promise of sport, on my part.
    And a possibility—however scant—of danger.
    * * *
    August, 1857:
    â€œSome unidentifiably rancid stink seems to hang over everything I touch these days, always rising, though already thick enough to swim in. This morning I woke feverish as ever, boots on and my clothes stuck fast to me, my own sweat so hot against my skin it made me wonder whether I had slept in blood. I am also running out of usable paper, a fact which does not disturb me overmuch, since I no longer know who I might possibly be writing this for.”
    * * *
    Amsore had been one of the last places to succumb to the Mutiny, long after the boats at Cawnpore had drifted away on a bloody tide, and the well of the Bibighar was stopped with the beaten corpses of British women and children. But even as Amsore’s settlers dithered in their punkah-shaded homes, a preparatory whisper had nevertheless gone up and down the nearby river’s banks, borne on the dust from Meerut and running deeper than its own mud-sluggish current: A promise of support, of like-mindedness; of loyalty kept carefully unvoiced, and weapons kept hidden but ready. It was the old, old cry of the surreptitious sepoy-sympathizer, soon to become Grammar’s adopted mantra: Sub lal hogea hai—“Everything has become red.“
    In this particular case, however, the signal had never been given time enough to go any further than that first glad acknowledgement. The Mutiny was a failure, a frenzied knot of rage without the necessary guidance to keep it from strangling itself in its haste to stem the “White Plague”’s spread. Calcutta fell again, its Black Hole found and emptied, and the few stragglers remaining fled—most straight into the British army’s vengeful hands, some of them to Amsore . . . and beyond.
    Into the jungle.
    Outside of Amsore’s limits, everything familiar falls abruptly away into a green abyss: Screaming monkeys, unseen eyes, filtered rays of feeble, leaf-washed sun. Snakes hang dappled and silent as vines, sectioned by their most muscular areas, and here and there—stumbling half-blind through an endless funnel of foliage—one trips headlong across knots of roots from which erupt bright, fleshy flowers, big enough to drink from. The Ramayana calls forests home to wind, darkness, hunger and great terrors—a poetic description, but not entirely inaccurate. Jungle-swallowed, one must eke out direction; one finds one’s way with senses other than those most usually given or employed.
    Outside Amsore, the trees hide miles of ripe, interlocking tracklessness: Verdant ventriculation, sap-fed growth, a living maze. A wholly fitting provenance for lovers, or for madmen.
    * * *
    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