The Splendor Of Silence (37 page)

A fissure of uncertainty crept up Sam's spine. He looked back over the sand and dirt to the stout outline of Chetak's tomb. "Will they be all right?" he asked, his voice rife with worry.

Vimal laughed. "So you believe me now, do you?"

Sam rubbed his hand over the stones on the wall that went up twenty feet into the sky. "There is no way up. We will have to get in through the gate somehow."

"Wait," Vimal said. He untied the varan and pulled it from Sam's back to set it on the ground. Sam massaged his neck and reached down to peel his shirt from his skin where it was glued with sweat. A rank odor of fish and rotting offal pervaded the space around him. The varan was not particular about its personal hygiene, or it had emptied its bowels upon his back as he had carried it. He cringed at the thought, but did not even bother to shrug his wet and stinking shirt from his back, so spellbound was he by Vimal's actions. The boy unwound the length of rope he had carried looped around his arm and fashioned a halter on one end. He slipped this halter over the varan's neck and threaded its short arms through. The other end of the rope he coiled loosely and flung on the ground. Vimal hefted the varan into his arms and laid his head close to the gigantic head of the lizard. He crooned to it, sang to it in Hindustani, called it "darling." The animal began to shift its fluid neck, its tongue slicking out into the air. "He will get you up the walls, Captain Hawthorne," Vimal said, his eyes luminous. His face was drenched with sweat, the stench emanating from him matched the one from Sam, his hair stuck to his head in unruly

Only Vimal was unaffected. At the first signs of the quarrel, he had risen, taken himself to the other end of the tomb, and only returned to hear Mila giving orders to the servants about the sleeping arrangements. Ashok and Mila lay down almost immediately and held hands, the ankles of their opposing feet looped around each other. At one point, well after Sam had thought her asleep, Mila had turned to her side, toward him, her face cushioned under her left hand. She opened her eyes and looked at Sam for a long time, as though she was memorizing the features of his face. Neither of them spoke, and this was what Sam remembered the most--the lingering scrutiny from Mila, filled with an intensity, a yearning, even a want, and behind it all an aching sadness. Why? Sam wanted to ask, but he had been too mesmerized by the flicker of the fire's gold over her smooth cheek, the length of iridescent hair along her chin. The linen of her pants was stretched tight over the bow shape of her hips. She had taken off her boots and her feet were long and narrow, her toenails painted with a clear varnish. Her hair flowed behind her. Sam's hands hankered for a touch of that hair, of that skin, but he did not make a move. His gaze kept returning to hers and he tried to seek out what she would not tell him in words. Finally, Mila slept.

Sam reached Vimal easily, even without lengthening his stride, and saw that the boy had begun to slow his steps to a crawl.

"I'll carry that monster on your back," he said in a whisper.

Vimal nodded gratefully and unslung the vapid varan from his back and helped Sam tie him on. The varan's skin was cold and a little slippery, and its feet and hands came to clench at Sam's shoulders and back with a surprisingly puissant hold. Sam almost shouted from that sudden pain and Vimal quickly peeled the varan's fingers from Sam. He spoke to the animal softly, his voice breaking into song, and the animal quietened. It relaxed and laid its head against Sam's neck.

"You experienced his hold on you, Captain Hawthorne," Vimal said as they moved on. "That is why we need him."

They reached the outside of the field punishment center thirty minutes later. The sandstone walls loomed before them whittled and chiseled into a smoothness by twelve years of ferocious Lus. It looked as though the building had been there for centuries, embedded in the ground, beate
n i
nto the earth by the sun and the winds, glossed to a shine by the stars in the sky. Sam put his hand on the stone. It bore some traces of roughness, of nicks and slips from the stonemason's chisel, but the mortar used to bind the stones together was thin and hardened to a shiny patina. There were no footholds on these walls; it was an effective prison. Even if it had not been birthed in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a desert, miles from any vestiges of civilization, the field punishment center would have been a formidable fortress.

Sam put his ear to the stone and coolness seeped into his skin.

"They all sleep," Vimal said. He glanced up at the moon, which had risen to a quarter of the sky and was now the gleaming white of seashells. "Twelve o'clock. The witching hour in your literature, Captain Hawthorne. In our legends, the ghost of a horse will walk now."

A fissure of uncertainty crept up Sam's spine. He looked back over the sand and dirt to the stout outline of Chetak's tomb. "Will they be all right?" he asked, his voice rife with worry.

Vimal laughed. "So you believe me now, do you?"

Sam rubbed his hand over the stones on the wall that went up twenty feet into the sky. "There is no way up. We will have to get in through the gate somehow."

"Wait," Vimal said. He untied the varan and pulled it from Sam's back to set it on the ground. Sam massaged his neck and reached down to peel his shirt from his skin where it was glued with sweat. A rank odor of fish and rotting offal pervaded the space around him. The varan was not particular about its personal hygiene, or it had emptied its bowels upon his back as he had carried it. He cringed at the thought, but did not even bother to shrug his wet and stinking shirt from his back, so spellbound was he by Vimal's actions. The boy unwound the length of rope he had carried looped around his arm and fashioned a halter on one end. He slipped this halter over the varan's neck and threaded its short arms through. The other end of the rope he coiled loosely and flung on the ground. Vimal hefted the varan into his arms and laid his head close to the gigantic head of the lizard. He crooned to it, sang to it in Hindustani, called it "darling." The animal began to shift its fluid neck, its tongue slicking out into the air.

"He will get you up the walls, Captain Hawthorne," Vimal said, his eyes luminous. His face was drenched with sweat, the stench emanating from him matched the one from Sam, his hair stuck to his head in unrul
y c
urls, and yet Vimal possessed an undeniable beauty. The giant lizard licked at his arms with its thin, liquid tongue.

"How?" Sam asked, enthralled by the sight of the varan twisting its weight in Vimal's arms.

In response, Vimal bent low to the ground with his knees and heaved the lizard on the wall. It slammed against the stone, moved its arms and legs about and slid down the wall into a flaccid heap.

"It is too heavy to carry its own weight," Sam whispered.

"No." Vimal picked up the varan again and threw it upon the wall, and again it slipped down. "You try, Captain Hawthorne," Vimal said, "I am not able to throw him high enough; he's too big for me."

With a thudding heart, Sam bent to pick up the animal and cradled it in his arms. On the second try, it had flailed about as though it finally knew what was expected of it. Could it really scale these walls? They were immense and so sheer. No human could climb them, surely. What harm was there in trying? Sam only hoped they were not making too much of a ruckus on the outside walls but did not realize that the walls were five feet deep all around the perimeter of the field punishment center; a cannon blast would, perhaps, wake the inmates and the sentries, nothing less than that.

He slid one hand under the varan's neck and the other under the root of its enormous tail and stepped back a few paces from the wall. The animal began to squeal, its throat undulating unpleasantly under Sam's hand, and before it could protest anymore, Sam leaned back and threw it as hard as he could against the wall. His shoulder screamed with pain and he waited, panting from the effort. The varan scrambled fervently as it hit the wall, slid down a few yards, and then its tail snaked out to catch a slender gap in the mortar and simultaneously its fingers and toes burrowed into the stone. It started to climb.

Sam and Vimal stood on the ground, their mouths open with wonder at the speed with which the black figure of the varan moved up the wall. The rope began to unravel on the ground. Vimal bent to pick up the other end and loop it around his wrist.

"You must follow him quickly, Captain Hawthorne," he said. "When you get to the top, reel him in. He will stay where you leave him; when you return you can climb down the rope again."

Sam flexed his hands and clasped them around the fast-slithering jute rope. As he started to climb, entrusting most of his weight to his left arm
,
he looked down at Vimal, who stood with a faint smile on his handsome face. "Will he hold me, Vimal?"

"I don't know. I have only read of a great hero in Indian history who did this once to scale the walls of a fort, but I've never tried it before myself." The boy chuckled. "Good luck, Captain Hawthorne."

The top of the wall was built similarly to a fort's rampart, with a slender pathway from one end to the other, leading to the guard towers and to four sets of steep stairs down to the ground. Sam crawled on his belly along the path until he found the varan half-dangling over the other edge of the rampart, its breathing harsh and uneven. It shuddered when he touched it and then turned its huge head to run its tongue over his hand and his face. He dragged the lizard to the place where he had ascended the wall, moving laboriously on his knees so that his figure would not be outlined against the starry sky to anyone looking up from below. At the wall, he put his head over the rampart cautiously, and thought he saw the murky white of Vimal's kurta and pajamas against the impenetrable black of the earth. But he was too far away and Sam had climbed a very high wall.

Sam unbuttoned his holster and took out his Colt. Patting the varan once to reassure it, he crouched down on his knees again and crept to the staircase along this wall. The moon was still low in the sky behind him and its light along the far side threw this set of stairs in shadow. Still, Sam did not dare to stand as he went down. He found himself in a deserted square courtyard. On every wall were tiny cells fronted by iron bars that gleamed dully in the starlight. A well covered with wooden planks dominated the center of the yard. There were no trees, nowhere to take shelter from the sun, no verandahs even. There was also no sign at all of human presence. If there were men in the cells, they slept, drugged or tired. No snores cleaved through the still air. The inside of the lone gate leading into this prison was unguarded, as were the guard towers.

The fetid odor though was a living presence. It seemed to permeate the air, clot it, and hang over the chunk of sky over the field punishment center. It was the smell of unwashed human bodies, the stink of excrement, and the acrid tang of cigarette butts.

Sam stifled a cough, leaned back into the shadow, and waited, the Colt held ready. His own breathing slowed until he could barely hear it, and finally he could no longer smell anything, his nose charred and deadened to the stink. A faint roar swept over the field punishment center and goose bumps ran up his back. What was that? The roar came again, bigger now, the sound cutting over the flat earth and meeting the walls of the prison. A tiger, Sam thought. There was a tiger on the prowl outside. As he began to move, a door was pitched open to the right of the gate and a rectangle of light threw itself upon the dirt in front of the doorway.

"Damn lions!" a man shouted from the inside. His figure appeared in the opening, framed by the kerosene lantern's glow, and he stood there with his legs apart and his hands placed on his hips. He was wearing shorts and no shirt and was barefoot.

"Come back inside, you old mutt," another man drawled. "You are begging for a bloody krait to bite you in the bum."

The first man reached inside the doorway and pulled something out. He threw it against the far wall a few feet from where Sam stood. The beer bottle crashed on the stone and split into a hundred tiny pieces, and one of the glass shards nicked Sam in the arm. But he did not move, his pistol still held steadily at the man's figure. He knew he could not be seen in the shadow, that the white light of the moon probably blinded the man, but he had sensed Sam's presence somehow. The guard still lingered in the doorway, and then, with one last, hard look at the staircase near Sam, he backed into the room and slammed the door shut.

All at once, a series of moans rose to rend the air around Sam. The noises came from everywhere. There were groans of pain, the scratching of uncut nails along the sandstone floors of the cells, the thumping of feet against the walls, yelps that sounded unreal, inhuman.

The guard threw his door open and stepped out, a rifle in his hand. He had pulled on his boots by now, the laces untied. Striding out to the center of the yard, he aimed the rifle into the sky and pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot exploded in the courtyard and ricocheted from one wall to another, its last echoes taking a painfully long rime to die away. Sam's ears rang. He pushed his shoulders into the wall behind him, but did not take his eyes away from the guard, who was shouting now. "Shut up, shut up, shut up, or one of you bastards is going to take the next bullet. Get it?"

The moans died into silence. The guard remained where he was for a while and then went back into the room and shut the door.

Sam began to shake. Mike was here. He knew Mike was here. He coul
d f
eel it, he could smell him, he could sense his presence. His gaze began to whiten with anger when he realized that this was how Mike had lived for the last two months, since he had supposedly gone AWOL. That no one had attempted to find him, that everyone had taken him for dead. That bloody Sims had somehow used Mike's involvement in the bombing of the British woman as an excuse to send him to this piece of hell. But how did that bastard possess so much influence?