Far Pavilions (121 page)

No one stirred. The bound woman was breathing noisily with an odd bubbling sound, and a wandering breath of wind shook the curtains and set the scraps of looking-glass that decorated them glinting and winking like watching eyes. Down below on the terrace and the burning-ground, the waiting crowds were comparatively silent as they listened to the distant tumult that accompanied the approaching cortege. But in the curtained enclosure no one moved.

‘Well, come on,’ said Ash, the curtness of his voice betraying the extent of his inner tensions. ‘We cannot afford to wait. The head of the procession will be here any moment now and raising enough noise to cover any moaning these creatures in here will make. Besides, we must be well clear of the valley before dark, and the later we leave the sooner someone is going to come in here and find the Rani gone. We must go at once.’

But still no one moved, and he glanced quickly from one face to the next, and was baffled by the mixture of exasperation, embarrassment and unease that he saw there: and the fact that they were not looking at him,, but at Anjuli. He turned swiftly to follow the direction of their gaze, and saw that her back was still towards them and that she too had not moved. She could not have avoided hearing those last words he had spoken, for he had not lowered his voice. Yet she had not even turned her head.

He said sharply: ‘What is it? What is the matter?’

His question had been addressed to Anjuli rather than to the three men, but it was Sarji who answered it:

‘The Rani-Sahiba will not leave,’ said Sarji, exasperated. ‘We had decided that if our plan succeeded, the Hakim-Sahib and Manilal would take her away as soon as she had donned the disguise, leaving me to find you and follow after them. That would have been best for us all, and at first she agreed to it. But then suddenly she said she must wait and see her sister become suttee, and that she would not leave before then. See if you can make her change her mind. We cannot – though the gods know we have tried hard enough.’

Anger blazed up in Ash, and heedless of the watching eyes, he strode across the room, and grasping Anjuli's shoulders, jerked her round to face him:

‘Is this true?’

The harshness in his voice was only a small measure of the fury that possessed him, and when she did not answer he shook her savagely: ‘
Answer me
!’

‘She… Shushila… does not understand,’ whispered Anjuli, her eyes still frozen with horror. ‘She does not realize what… what it will be like. And when she does –’

‘
Shushila!
’ Ash spat out the name as though it were an obscenity. ‘Always Shushila – and selfish to the end. I suppose she made you promise to do this? She would! Oh, I know she saved you from burning with her, but if she'd really wanted to repay you for all you have done for her, she could have saved you from reprisals at the hands of the Diwan by having you smuggled out of the state, instead of begging you to come here and watch her die.’

‘You don't understand,’ whispered Anjuli numbly.

‘Oh, yes I do. That's where you are wrong. I understand only too well. You are still hypnotized by that selfish, hysterical little egotist, and you are perfectly prepared to jeopardize your chances of escaping from Bhithor and a horrible form of mutilation – and risk all our lives into the bargain, Gobind's, Sarji's, Manilal's and my own, just so that you can carry out your darling little sister's last wishes and watch her commit suicide. Well, I don't care what she made you promise. You are not keeping it. You are going to leave now if I have to carry you.’

His rage was real; yet even as he spoke, a part of his brain was saying, ‘This is Juli, whom I love more than anything else in the world, and who I was afraid I should never see again. She is here at last – and all I can do is to be angry with her…’ It didn't make sense. But then nor did his threat to carry her, for if anything were to draw attention to them, that would. He could not do it, and she would have to walk; and to go with them willingly. There was no other way. But if she would not…?

The funeral cortège must be very near by now. The discordant braying of the conches and the shouts of ‘
Khaman Kher
!’ and ‘
Hari-bol
!’ were growing louder every minute, and already isolated voices in the crowd below had begun to take up the cries.

Anjuli turned her head to listen, and the movement was so slow and vague that Ash recognized suddenly that in her present state of shock, his anger had not reached her. He drew a long breath and steadied himself, and his hands on her shoulders relaxed to tenderness. He said gently, coaxing her as though she were a child: ‘Don't you see, dear, as long as Shu-shu thinks you are here, watching her and praying for her, she will be satisfied. Listen to me, Juli. She will never know that you are not, for though you and I can see out through this
chik,
no one out there can see us, so you cannot even signal to her. And if you called out to her, she could not possibly hear you.’

‘Yes, I know. But…’

‘Juli, all you can do is to hurt yourself cruelly by watching a sight that may haunt you for the rest of your life; and that is not going to help her.’

‘Yes, I know… but you could.
You
could help her.’

‘I? No, dear. There is nothing that I or any of us can do for her now. I'm sorry Juli, but that is the truth and you must face it.’

‘It isn't. It isn't true.’ Anjuli's hands came up to his wrists, and her eyes were no longer frozen but wide and imploring, and at last he saw her face, for the turban-end had become loose when he shook her, and now it fell down about her throat.

The change in that face was like a knife in Ash's heart, because it was terribly altered – more so than he could have dreamed possible. The flesh had wasted from it leaving it thin and drawn and desperate, and as drained of colour as though she had spent the last two years penned up in a dungeon where no gleam of light ever penetrated. There were lines and deep hollows in it that had not been there before, and the dark shadows that circled her eyes owed nothing to the artful use of
kohl
or antimony, but told of fear and intolerable strain; and tears – an ocean of tears…

There were tears in her eyes now, and in her breathless, pleading voice, and Ash would have given anything in the world to take her in his arms and kiss them away. But he knew that he must not.

‘I
would
have left,’ sobbed Anjuli. ‘I would have gone at once with your friends, for I could not bear to see what I had been brought here to see, and had they not come I would have shut my eyes and ears to it. But then they – the Hakim-Sahib and your friend – told me why you were not with them, and what you had meant to do for me so that I should not burn to death but die quickly and without pain. You can do that for her.’

Ash took a quick step back and would have snatched his hands away, but now it was Anjuli who held him by the wrists and would not let him go.

‘Please –
please,
Ashok! It is not much to ask – only that you will do for her what you would have done for me. She could never endure pain, and when… when the flames… I cannot bear to think of it. You can save her from that, and then I will go with you gladly – gladly.’

Her voice broke on the word and Ash said huskily: ‘You don't know what you are asking. It isn't as easy as that. It would have been different with you, because – because I had meant to go with you; and Sarji and Gobind and Manilal would all have got safely away, for they would have been a long way from here when our time came. But now it would mean that we would all be here; and if the shot were heard and anyone saw where it had come from, we should all die a far worse death than Shushila's.’

‘But it will not be heard. Not above all that noise outside. And who will be looking this way? No one – no one, I tell you. Do this for me. On my knees, I beg of you –’

She let go his wrists, and before he could prevent it she was at his feet with the orange and scarlet turban that she wore touching the ground. Ash bent quickly and pulled her upright, and Sarji, from behind them, said tersely: ‘Let her have her way. We cannot carry her, so if she will not come with us unless you do as she asks, you have no choice.’

‘None,’ agreed Ash. ‘Very well, since I must, I will do it. But only if you four will go now. I will follow later, when it is done, and meet you in the valley.’

‘
No
!’ There was pure panic in Anjuli's voice, and she brushed past him and addressed Gobind, who averted his eyes from her unveiled face: ‘Hakim-Sahib, tell him that he must not stay here alone – it is madness. There would be no one to watch for other men who may come up here, or help to overpower them as you three did to these others. Tell him we must stay together.’

Gobind was silent for a moment. Then he nodded, though with obvious reluctance, and said to Ash: ‘I fear that the Rani-Sahiba is right. We must stay together, for one man alone, looking out through the
chik
into the sunlight and choosing his moment, could not guard his back or listen for steps on the stair at the same time.’

Sarji and Manilal murmured agreement, and Ash shrugged and capitulated. It was, after all, the least he could do for poor little Shu-shu, whom he had brought from her home in the north to this remote and medieval backwater among the arid hills and scorching sands of Rajputana, and handed over to an evil and dissolute husband whose unlamented end had proved to be her death-warrant. And perhaps the least that Juli too could do for her, because although it was only Shu-shu's hysterical refusal to be parted from her half-sister that had brought her to this pass, at the end the little Rani had done what she could to make amends. But for her intervention, Juli would even now be out there in the dust and the glare, walking behind her husband's bier towards the moment when a bullet from her lover's revolver would give her a swift and merciful death: and if he had been prepared to do that for Juli, it was not fair to refuse the same mercy to her little sister… Yet the very idea of doing so appalled him.

Because he loved Juli – because he loved her more than life and because she was so much a part of him that without her life would have no meaning – he could have shot her without a tremor, and never felt that her blood was upon his head; but to put a bullet through Shushila's head was a very different matter, because pity, however strong, did not provide the terrible incentive that love had done. And then, too, his own life would not be involved. The next bullet would not be for himself, and that alone would make him feel like a murderer – or at best, an executioner, which was absurd when he knew that Juli would have faced the flames with far less terror and endured the pain with more fortitude than poor Shu-shu would ever do, and yet he had resolved to save her from that agony… and was now sickened by the thought of doing the same for Shu-shu.

Sarji broke in on the confusion of his thoughts by remarking in a matter-of-fact voice that the range would be greater from up here than it had been from the edge of the terrace below, and that as Ash would be aiming downwards, and from at least twelve to fifteen feet higher, it was not going to be easy. He might have been discussing a difficult shot from a
machan
on one of their hunting trips in the Gir Forest, and strangely enough it seemed to take some of the horror out of this supremely horrible situation. For he was talking sense.

If the thing must be done, it must be done well; and at the last possible moment, so that it might be thought that Shushila, having taken her place on the pyre, had fainted. To bungle it would be a disaster, not only for Shushila, but for them all; because though there was every chance that the crack of a single shot would be lost in the noise of the crowd, a second or third could not fail to attract attention, or to pin-point the spot from where it had been fired.

‘Do you think you can do it?’ asked Sarji, coming to stand beside him.

‘I must. I can't afford not to. Have you a knife?’

‘You mean for the
chik
. No, but I can cut you a gap in it with this thing –’ Sarji set to work with the short spear that all members of the Rana's body-gguard carried, and sliced a small oblong out of the split cane. ‘There. That should serve. I do not think the cane would deflect a shot, but it might; and there is no need to take chances.’

He watched Ash take out the service revolver and sight along the barrel, and said in an undertone: ‘It is all of forty paces. I have never handled one of those things. Will it reach as far?’

‘Yes. But I don't know how accurately. It was never intended for such distances, and I -’ He swung round abruptly: ‘It's no good, Sarji. I daren't risk it from here. I shall have to get closer. Listen, if I go down there again, will you and the others – Yes, that's it. Why didn't we think of it before? We will all leave now, at once, and when we reach the terrace you three can go on ahead with the Rani-Sahiba, and I will get back to my place near the parapet and -’

Sarji cut brusquely across the sentence: ‘You could not get there. The crowds are too thick. It was all I could do to get to you before; and even wearing this livery they would never make room for you now. Besides, it is too late. Listen – they come.’

The conches sounded again. But now the mournful and discordant bray was deafeningly loud, while the roar that followed it came from the crowd lining the last short stretch of pathway that lay within the grove itself. In another minute or so the funeral cortège would be here, and there was no longer time to make for the terrace and try to force a way to the front of the close-packed and half-hysterical multitude that thronged it. It was too late for that.

The crowds on the ground below were swaying backwards and forwards as a flood-tide surges between the supports of a pier, pushing, jostling, craning to see over the heads of those in front, or striving to dodge the indiscriminate blows of men who laid about them with
lathis
in order to keep a way clear for the slow-moving procession. And now the advance guard were emerging from the tree shadows into the golden blaze of the afternoon sun, a phalanx of shaven-headed Brahmins from the city's temples, clad in white loin-cloths, with ropes of
tulsi
beads adorning their naked chests and the trident mark that is the fork of Vishnu splashed upon their foreheads.