The Deceivers (33 page)

Mr Wilson said, ‘I have ordered the arrest and search of every traveller found within fifty miles of here. Several seemingly innocent parties have already become desperate and resisted arrest. A few men are dead, including some of ours. The amount of jewellery found is staggering. Most of the regiment is out at work.’

William nodded. Mr Wilson said energetically, ‘Now, young lady, we must take you back to Sagthali. A palanquin is waiting, and the cavalry surgeon.’

They reached the road at the foot of Jarod. Hand lanterns on the grass showed men lying anyhow, fully accoutred, asleep beside their horses, and fires twinkling, and mounted sentries with swords drawn, and huddles of prisoners. A flag bearing the Honourable East India Company’s crest hung from a short staff stuck into the earth beside the stream, and near it was the cavalry’s regimental guidon.

The surgeon ran up, and Mary slipped down on blankets spread beside a fire. Sher Dil brought chicken-broth to her. William shook his servant’s hand and smiled wearily. Mary sipped the broth. The surgeon knelt at her side and cleared his throat impatiently.

She said, ‘I’m not going to Sagthali, Daddy. My son is going to be born in Madhya.’

On the hillside Mr Wilson had been pale, wet-eyed. Now he swelled up, turned red, and stuttered incoherently.

She laughed and held out her hand to him. ‘Careful, Daddy, or you’ll break a blood vessel. Madhya is no farther from here than Sagthali. What better place is there for me than my own room in my own bungalow?’

‘That’s true, ma’am,’ the surgeon said. ‘But I think -- ’

‘I’m going back to Madhya. William has to go there, anyway.’

‘Yes,’ William said abruptly. ‘I have to go to Madhya. I must have control of these operations. No one else really knows what to do. Now is the time, not next week. We have to seize every Deceiver we can, try some, get others to turn informer, then move again, keep on moving. We have to act now, hard, and show we are in earnest. Later it will be like a snowball. It will get bigger and easier every year.’

He fell silent. Mary’s proposal was best. He too wanted his daughter to be born in Madhya. And he had to see the woman of Kahari. There could be no absolution, no rest, until he had faced her.

Mr Wilson recovered himself and said sternly, ‘Very well, sir, have it your way. But if it were
my
wife, I would --’

‘No, you wouldn’t, Daddy.’ Mary squeezed his hand, and he coughed and did not finish his sentence. She went on, ‘I want to start at once, now. I don’t think I have much time.’

Mr Wilson swelled up again, but the surgeon sent them all away and hung blankets from the swords stuck in the ground, and began to examine Mary. When he came over to them he said, ‘We’d better move, sir. She’s in good shape, and should have no trouble, but I don’t think there’s much time.’ Mr Wilson spoke to the cavalry colonel and in a minute the trumpeter blew
Boots and Saddles
.

The stars flared in a clear sky, the moon was rising. The cavalcade moved down the road north-westward and wound under the black loom of Jarod, a hundred and twenty horsemen with drawn swords resting on their shoulders. The leading men carried lanterns in their hands. Twelve Deceiver prisoners bore Mary’s litter in turns. Behind it rode Mr Wilson, all in black, with a wide-brimmed hat and a handkerchief to protect the back of his neck from the daytime sun. William gnawed meat off a chicken bone as he rode.

William threw the bone into the darkness and said, ‘We’ve got to form a new organization to deal with the Deceivers, sir. No one can do it and administer a district too. The Deceivers extend all over India. I’ll have to have jurisdiction over them -- wherever they are found -- regardless of where they have done their murders.’

Mr Wilson thought before replying. ‘That will involve legislation in Council and a large appropriation of funds. For how long, do you think?’

‘Ten, fifteen years.’

‘Hmm! I have not heard all the details yet, but I assure you that you will have my support in obtaining all that you need. I must -- He swallowed and struggled to get the words out.

William knew what he was going to say, and knew that probably he had never used the words before, except to his wife.

‘I apologize, both personally and on behalf of -- ’

William cut in, ‘There’s no need to apologize, sir. None of us has acted quite sensibly. The biggest danger now is that these people from Parsola will scatter -- we’ll never catch them all, of course -- and take the cult to places it’s never been before, if there are any such places. It’s the story of the Demon of Blood and Seed. It’s happened before. The Deceivers were not altogether unknown. I’ve found out that our people would get an inkling about them, at different times, in different parts of India. Then perhaps they’d write a report, perhaps go out after the Deceivers. Always the same result: the report pigeonholed, the band chased away to flourish in new localities. There had not been enough co-ordination of information or of action. We’ve got to get that first, all over India.’

Mr Wilson said, ‘It will be difficult to persuade the Presidencies to believe it, Savage, and agree to surrender some of their powers to a central organization such as you propose.’

‘They’ve got to!’ William said forcefully. ‘The rajahs too! The Governor-General’s got to do it. I’ll tell him. He’ll see.’

Mr Wilson looked sideways at him thoughtfully and said nothing.

William, glanced up and saw the cavalry’s device of a running black horse on a background of woven silver thread. The guidon fluttered in the dawn breeze on top of its staff, and the first light touched it. Ahead, all the swords twinkled and like a river of silver fire poured on into the north-west. In the palanquin Mary called out, and the surgeon jumped down from his horse. The column halted, and the chargers champed and tossed their heads.

The surgeon looked up. ‘Better hurry, sir. We won’t get to Madhya, but I’d like to reach water at any rate.’

‘Bhadora, about half a mile,’ William said shortly. Here, at the top of this shallow rise, they had waited for George to catch up on that honeymoon journey. Here the man on the bullock cart had passed, and the child absorbed in watching the dust. The flame-of-the-forest again sparkled about him.

Mr Wilson, who had been about to speak, closed his mouth and looked almost nervously at William. The colonel nodded, and the column moved on.

At the river the ferrymen had vanished. The barge lay moored at the near bank, and several early travellers waited there in a frightened huddle beside it. From downstream the breeze brought the faint clash of arms and distant shouting. Mary insisted on crossing, and at the colonel’s order some of the escorting cavalrymen dismounted and with laughing, childlike excitement clambered into the barge and poled it erratically across the river. Once on the far bank, the surgeon hung up blankets and Sher Dil boiled water. William talked with the cavalry colonel and tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but he could not because of Mary’s low, regular moans. He sat down and pulled to pieces a cheroot the colonel gave him.

The surgeon said, ‘Captain Savage, go away, please. Come back in an hour.’

‘I’ll stay here.’

‘Go away, sir.’

William got up, rubbing his hands together, for they were cold. He had with these hands made a noose that lay around the neck of the Deceivers of India, and would in the end hang them. With these hands, too, with the mind that guided them, with the heat that should have stayed them, he had done great wrong that could not be mended. With these hands -- he looked at them, and they were strong and sure, though cold, and he had been proud of the skill in them -- he had strangled three men: Gopal the weaver, the sepoy at the ford, the Rajah of Padampur.

Gopal had been a Deceiver and a murderer; if William had not killed him he would have killed William. The sepoy at the ford had done William no harm, but he had been going to; surely, Forgiver above, that was self-defence -- when the man sprang at me through the bushes there, his musket in his hand and crazed panic in his eyes? The Rajah of Padampur -- a robber bandit, a deceiver linked with Deceivers; did not he deserve death?

Perhaps he could forgive himself for those. But he had stood aside and directed the murder of -- how many? He could not remember. All those were innocent. He had allowed them to die that, in the end, other innocents might live. For them he could not forgive himself.

There were too many of them to be remembered distinctly and carried as separate crosses. From the beginning all the wrong he had done -- that right should result -- had gathered to increase. He had deceived her, so that she thought her husband lived. But he did not live. William had killed him. Whatever punishment God inflicted would come to him through the woman at the pyre.

William, stood awhile, expressionless, preparing himself to face what he had to face. He started to walk away up the river bank.

Mr Wilson called, ‘Come over here and keep me company, Savage.’

William looked at him. ‘I have to see the woman of Kahari, the wife of Gopal the weaver.’

Mr Wilson made to speak, but after three attempts, with William’s burning deep-sunken eyes fixed on his, he said only, ‘God rest her soul.’

William walked slowly. Mr Wilson had said, ‘God rest her soul,’ but he had meant, ‘God rest your soul.’ Mr Wilson understood at last.

William came to the pyre. A leaf shelter stood beside it. The woman sat in the open, not squatting but sitting on the grass. Her white dress, the same one, was still torn. It was ragged now, and grimed, and showed her skin through great holes. She sat with head bowed, and her hair hung in matted filth about her face and neck. The witch locks reached her waist and hid her nakedness.

Hearing him, she looked up. She had become an old woman in the year of waiting -- almost toothless, with cracked lips, ringed haggard eyes, dirt-scored skin. She saw him where he came on, and could not move, but her eyes widened. He stopped three paces from her, and she lifted her arms to him.

‘My darling, my darling, my lover, you have come!’

He said, ‘I am not Gopal. I am William Savage. It was I who came last time, to deceive you.’

She looked at his head, into his eyes, at the line of his jaw. Her arms sank and her fingers lay crumpled on the grass. She bent her head and tears ran down in the dirt on her face. She had no strength to sob. Her tears flowed silently, like little rivers.

He said, ‘Gopal is dead. I killed him.’

After a minute she said, not asking a question, ‘Another woman was there.’ She continued, ‘Was she -- his? That, my dream did not tell me, and tormented me with not knowing.’

‘Another woman?’ The stableyard in Manikwal had been here, and Hussein there, and the wall there, and there the stable roof and the horses in a row. The harlot girls had not come out. No woman had stood beside him to watch Gopal die.

It was a vivid memory. Now almost he felt the heat of Kali’s desire as it had pulsed through him that day. So he said slowly, ‘There was a woman. She was mine, not his. Her, too, I have mortally wounded.’

All the strength she needed came to her in a flood. She rose to her feet and hurried close to him. She said, ‘You are my darling, and I your lover, because you have been Gopal.’ She smiled at him with a luminous, secret brilliance and whispered, ‘No man dies by the hand of man. I am going to my husband.’ She kissed his fingers and stroked them against her cheek.

William’s fingers were warm where they had touched her skin. He had been crouching before God, awaiting the lash, and received instead a kiss.

The girl hastened to the pyre, singing softly a cradle song, and walked three times around it. In the east the sun cast up a fan of golden bars from below the hills, and the Seonath became a river of dull gold.

She said, ‘You have flint and tinder? Light it.’

He stepped forward and struck steel to flint, touched the tinder, held the tiny bundle in his hand, and waved it about in the warm air. The little flames snapped. On his left the river whispered, flowing north to the Ken, and the Ken to the Jumna, and the Jumna to the Ganges, where the ashes must at last rest. The woman emptied jars of ghi on to the pyre, and still sang.

The flames in the tinder bunch touched his fingers, and did not hurt. He pushed the tinder into the pyre. The butter streams crackled, thick smoke curled out, the fire caught hold and sprang high, twenty feet into the air, jumped through between the logs laid longwise and crosswise, reached out from side to side of the pyre, and made a shouting noise.

The woman knelt, facing the east. She cried out with lyrical passion, her voice strong and sure. ‘I see you in your place beside the sun, my darling and my lover. They have kept me from you where you sit in majesty and honour. I love you, my lord, I worship you with my body and spirit. I am your wife and your servant. I come to our bridal bed, to lie with you in the sun.’

The sun sprang over the eastern rim of the world, and the woman stepped into the flames and lay down and held out her open arms. In a flash the fire ripped her clothes off her, and the marks of age, and her long hair, and for a blinding second she lay naked, golden, again young, on the cushion of flames, her arms out to William, her eyes on him and the sun in him and Gopal in him. The fire roared up and the yellow and red spires leaned back against the trees, and he could not see her.

After thirty minutes the priest came running from Kahari. He stopped short when he saw William standing motionless at the fire. William turned, and walked a pace away, and turned again, and took out the pick-axe from his waistband, and threw it into the flames.

At the ferry Mr Wilson ran towards him. ‘William, William, you are a father! A fine boy, half an hour ago!’ He pump-handled William’s arm. His strong face was alight, as the woman’s had been, from a lamp behind the skin which softened his strength and made it love. William did not speak, and Mr Wilson said, ‘Mary is well. She wants you now. Come.’

Still William did not move. Mr Wilson glanced upriver to the smoke drifting over the trees. He said, suddenly firm and gentle, ‘God give that love to him, your son.’