Murray pointed to the sick men, then asked the priest a question. The masked figure remained silent, but an answer came nonetheless: “What have they done? They’ve prayed for these men to be cured by sunset tomorrow or released from their suffering,” growled the village elder, now standing framed by the doorway. “I welcomed you as guests, even tolerated your failure to help our sons. But I will not allow you to insult these holy men.”
Murray apologized, but the priests did not respond. Still silent, they crossed to the door. There, each took one of the old man’s hands in his own, then bowed over it. Though he tried, the elder could not hide his discomfort. Again, the priests appeared not to notice. They passed from the sickroom, the old man trailing in their wake, surreptitiously wiping his hands on his cotton trousers.
“The villagers fear the priests,” Murray noted as he cleaned my wound and set a new bandage. “ ‘The Weeping Ones,’ they’re called. The natives think of them as harbingers of bad luck. But their own mullah was one of the first carried off by the plague, so—”
“Plague? Is it that serious?”
“It’s claimed at least three nearby villages in the past year or so.”
I glanced in the direction of the two natives. Murray had thrown the curtain back; we could see the two men shivering under their heavy blankets and staring up at the ceiling. “What of them?”
Murray rubbed his eyes, red-rimmed from lack of sleep. “Dead before morning,” he said. “At least, that’s been the pattern every other time the priests have come. I would suspect them of poisoning the poor fellows, but their presence alone seems sufficient to frighten them over the brink.” He settled me back on my sleeping mat. “We’ll need to move on tomorrow, sir. You should get as much rest as you can tonight.”
“And you?”
“No rest for me.” That familiar, kind smile flashed across his face. “If those poor souls are going to die, they should pass their last hours without pests hovering about.”
“Those priests aren’t sand flies,” I said. “You can’t just brush them away. Besides, there’s something uncanny about them. Something . . . unnatural.”
The dismissive laugh that comment elicited from Murray, gentle though it was, alarmed me. I could not put into words the specific cause of my unease, but I knew better than to deny so cavalierly what I had just witnessed. Yet Murray would not admit even the genuine weirdness of the priests. He cast them as unsavory mystics or dubious fakirs, as common in the East as fleas on a camel. He could not imagine the Weeping Ones as anything more sinister. His view of the world simply did not admit such possibilities. While I took some comfort from his certainty, I drifted off to sleep that night troubled by more than my wound or our immediate plight.
The sun was well up in the sky when I awoke the next day. Murray was gone, and in his place a pair of women tended to the natives. The two men lay uncovered, still staring heavenward. Dead, I realized. The women sobbed quietly beneath their veils, while outside, the more traditional keening for the departed could be heard in the distance. The smell of rosewater permeated the room.
I wanted to help them, but knew so little of their rituals that I feared offending them. The villagers were already angry with us for failing to save the young men. So I simply watched as the women first bathed the dead men, then, with heavily scented water, anointed the welts and oozing sores that covered the bodies. What I had taken for sobbing was, in fact, a prayer for the dead. They repeated the words over and over as first they cleansed the corpses, then dressed them from head to foot in new white clothes.
No sooner had they finished dressing the second figure than one of the masked priests entered. The village elder followed a few paces behind, the distance not born of respect, but exhaustion. As the priest signaled for the women to depart, the old man slouched against the wall. He shivered, despite the heavy winter clothes he wore. Now and then, the sudden chattering of his teeth interrupted his recitation of the simple prayer for the dead. I knew then that he would soon be confined to the sickroom himself, awaiting with dread the final visit of the Weeping Ones.
A full dozen more of the masked priests came in to retrieve the bodies. They hoisted the corpses onto litters and carried them from the room with the same cold efficiency displayed by the priest visiting the sick men the night before. For all their silent tears, they did not act like sorrowful men. If the weight of those deaths pressed heavy upon their hearts, it did not show in their bearing. They were interchangeable in appearance save for the yellow symbols upon the mask of their leader and the silver chain he now wore wrapped around his wrist. I thought nothing of that detail then, though its significance came clear to me soon after the Weeping Ones departed with the dead and someone finally answered my calls for Murray.
“The other soldier left?” I repeated, incredulous. The elder was even then being made comfortable in one of the sickroom beds, his thin form so racked with shivering that he could not speak to me. That left the villager who, in his broken English, had asked Murray that first day to stop the weeping. The meaning of that phrase was chillingly clear to me now.
“He go last night,” the young man said. “Not come back.”
I could not imagine Murray deserting me. Neither would he leave without some explanation. I remembered his comments about keeping the pests from bothering the dying men. Had he gone to the Weeping Ones to convince them to stay away? It seemed a foolhardy thing to do, but on reflection, so did carrying a wounded and possibly dying comrade along the corpse river after Maiwand.
It was at that moment I recalled the silver chain. It had not been there the previous night, and seemed out of place on the priest’s person. Even so, it looked familiar.
The Saint Christopher medal. If Murray had left to confront the Weeping Ones, he would have taken it with him . . .
The natives looked on in puzzled amusement when I pushed myself out of bed and struggled into my clothes. It proved a difficult task, my left arm still all but useless to me. But I managed somehow to dress, rig a sling, and check to see that my service revolver was fully loaded. If the priests held Murray hostage, I would free him. If they had murdered him, I would recover his body for Christian burial. I never bothered to consider how either task might be accomplished by one man with an Adams .450 and a wound that threatened to reopen at any moment. After all that Murray had done, the obligation was upon me to do for him anything, everything that I could.
The only directions I could extract from the young man were rudimentary. He pointed down a path that led toward the mountains, and said only “cave” and “golden sign.” I secured a torch, which I carried as a cudgel during my long walk, and hoped to catch up with the Weeping Ones on the road.
Despite the burdens in their care, the priests managed to stay so far ahead of me that I never caught them. Fortunately, the road proved easy to follow. Even the weather cooperated, with a thick, steel-gray blanket of clouds covering the sky from horizon to horizon. The heat remained oppressive, of course, but without the lash of the sun, it was almost bearable.
Full dark was upon the world when I found the entrance to the cave. I knew it to be the correct one by the yellow sigil engraved in the stone to either side. I lingered at the mouth, staring into the maw and squinting at the gloom within. Oddly, the darkness of the cavern was less absolute than that of the land beneath the moonless, cloud-choked night sky. Far into the mountain, at the limits of my vision, a faint luminescence lit the interior. This was not the wavering light of torches, but a steady glow. Still, I set fire to my torch before venturing inside, and felt the more secure for doing so.