The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

around him. He heard voices. Whispering. But he couldn’t make out what they said. He wanted to call out, but when he opened his mouth no sound came. A body lay in the swamp beside him, blood running rich and dark in the mud. He was scared. He knew they were all around, and when they found him he would be killed. A shadow loomed out of the mist, a dark figure towering over him. It leaned in and he saw its eyes, eyes without pupils or irises, just whites, shot with red veins. At last he found his voice, as terror dissolved control, and he cried out. An arm reached towards him and he grabbed the wrist.

He opened his eyes wide, the cry still on his lips, and saw Ny’s pain. He let go her arm and lay breathing heavily. Light burned through the chinks all around them. The air was hot and humid and fetid, and he was covered with a fine film of sweat. ‘I’m sorry.’

She rubbed her wrist. ‘You have bad dream.’

‘Yes. Bad dream.’

‘I change your dressing now.’

He watched and winced as she removed the dressing. There was an area of bruising all around, and it was red raw where the dead flesh had been cut away. From the smell and the colour in the centre he knew it was still infected, but it was not as ugly as he’d been expecting. He drew his breath in sharply as she took a small bowl of yellowish liquid and began gently swabbing it clean from the inside out. Even as he wrestled with the urge to yell with pain, he thought how absurd it was that he should feel the need to disguise it. Would she think him any less a man? Should he care? He gasped and tried to speak. A distraction. ‘What are you cleaning it with?’

‘Piss,’ she said.

‘Jesus Christ!’ He tried to jerk himself away.

‘Please stay still, Mistah Elliot. Mistah McCue, he say it . . .’ she searched for the word. ‘Sterile.’

‘Yeah, he would.’ He paused for a moment, then, ‘Whose piss?’ he asked.

She smiled, a coy little smile, keeping her eyes lowered. ‘Mine.’

He lay back and closed his eyes, wondering what further indignities life could heap upon him.

‘Mistah McCue drain wound for couple of days. Lot of pus. Smelled real bad.’

‘Didn’t feel too good, either.’

‘Much better now, but infection still there. We make – poultice.’ She pronounced the word carefully, proud of her new vocabulary. She lifted his arm with great care and washed out the wound in his armpit where the bullet had come out. He clenched his teeth and breathed stertorously through his nose. ‘It hurt bad?’

‘Yeah, it hurt bad. Jesus—!’

The cloth partition was drawn aside and Hau crouched down to enter, carrying a bowl from which steam rose like smoke. He looked anxiously at Elliot for a moment, then grinned.

‘What the hell’s this?’

‘Poultice,’ Ny said.

‘What’s in it?’

‘Rice. We boil rice and mash it and wrap in cloth. Mistah McCue say very good to draw infection.’

‘Seems to me Mr McCue’s been saying a lot of things.’

‘Lot of thing,’ Ny repeated seriously. ‘Very smart man, Mistah McCue.’

‘Yeah, very smart. I’ll bet that’s hot.’

‘Very hot. It hurt, maybe.’

‘No doubt Mister McCue told you that.’

‘No, Mamma say. She know ’bout poultice, too.’ She gently pressed the first steaming bundle into his shoulder, and it hurt like hell.

Later, both wounds freshly dressed, he was able to sit up a little, propped against his backpack, while Ny fed him rice and fish from a bowl. Hau squatted in silence by the partition, watching gravely. Their sampan put-putted through the water, making steady progress. The chinks in the matting gave him a splintered view of the river. It was busy, small boats plying wares up and down between villages in the delta. The wash from a laden ferry boat, sitting very low in the water, rocked their little craft from side to side, the deep throb of its engines receding north.

‘How come we haven’t been stopped?’ he asked.

Ny shrugged. ‘Many Cambodian here. Refugee.’

On the far bank he saw the rusting hulks of American patrol boats blown asunder by the Viet Cong, epitaphs for a high-tech superpower defeated by a people in black pyjamas.

Hau’s voice broke into his thoughts and he turned to find the boy’s eyes on him. He spoke haltingly, with the embarrassed reticence of a child confessing to some dreadful misdemeanour. Elliot looked at Ny. ‘What’s he saying?’

There was the faintest smile on Ny’s lips, as if she were secretly amused. ‘He apologize for what happen to you.’

‘It wasn’t his fault.’

‘You give him your charm. He believe he take your luck.’

Elliot smiled and shook his head. ‘No, no. I gave him my luck. My fault.’

‘He give it back to make you well.’

‘Tell him to keep it. I’m doing alright without it.’

‘No, you no understand. He already give it back. The night you shot.’

His hand reached to his neck and found the familiar St Christopher there, and for some reason he felt tears rise in his eyes. He looked away. ‘Tell him, then, that he saved my life. Tell him – tell him I owe him.’

Ny spoke quickly, softly, to her brother. Elliot watched him as, initially, the boy frowned, before grinning broadly. His eyes blurred, and a large tear rolled down his cheek. Elliot grinned back at him. He turned to Ny. ‘Tell him big boys don’t cry.’

Ny returned a quizzical look. ‘Don’ they?’

Elliot closed his eyes to shut out the world, but found it was still there, in the dark. And he wondered how it was that vice could succumb so easily to virtue.

It was night when he woke, startled to discover that he had slept at all. Time had passed, with the shutting and opening of his eyes, in a dreamless slumber. He felt the gentle sway of the sampan as it lay in some secret mooring. The air was filled with the sawing of the cicadas. He was still propped, semi-seated, against