The Far Pavilions (96 page)

He did not realize that he had spoken those last few words aloud until Sarji said: ‘Her? Do you think then that it is planned that only one will follow her husband's body to the burning ground, and the other be permitted to live?’

The blind look left Ash's eyes and two spots of colour showed darkly on his cheeks. He said confusedly: ‘No, I didn't mean… I suppose they will both go. But we must not let it come to that. I have been thinking –’

He propounded his plan and the two men listened to it: Gobind impassively and the more volatile Sarji occasionally nodding approval and some-times shaking his head. When he finished it was Sarji who spoke first: ‘It could succeed. But to win free of the palace would not be enough, as the city gates are closed and barred at nightfall. We should still be trapped, for even if we tied up every woman in the Zenana so that the alarm would not be given until after dawn, we could not ride out unseen and unremarked.’

Ash said: ‘We would have to leave the horses outside the walls, and as for getting out of the city, we can do that in the same way as we shall get out of the palace – over the wall with ropes; and if all goes well we should join Bukta and be out of the valley before the sky begins to lighten. I know it will be difficult and dangerous. I know there will be a great many risks and that things may go wrong. But it is a chance.’

‘It is not one that we can afford to take,’ said Gobind flatly.

‘But –’

‘No, Sahib. Let me speak. Perhaps I should have told you earlier that I can no longer return to the Rung Mahal. When I left today, it was for the last time.’

According to Gobind, the Rana's councillors had been urging him to adopt an heir ever since it was learned that the Senior Rani's child was another daughter, and when he had fallen ill they had redoubled their pleas, but to no avail. He would not believe that his sickness was mortal: he would recover and sire other children, sons who would grow up to be strong men – they would see. Meanwhile, as he had no near relations apart from a pair of sickly daughters (who had failed to give him grandsons and whose husbands he despised) he refused to jeopardize the future of his line by adopting some other man's brat. His mind was made up.

Nothing that anyone could say had changed that… until this morning. Today, some time during the small hours, he had recognized at last that he was dying; and appalled by the prospect of descending to that hell called
Pât,
to which men who have no son to light their pyre are doomed, he had agreed to adopt an heir – though not, as had been feared, a child from the family of the Diwan, or one or other of his current favourites.

His choice had fallen instead upon the youngest grandchild of a distant relative on his mother's side – that same semi-royal relative who had been sent to greet the brides from Karidkote on their arrival in Bhithor. The boy had been sent for in haste and such ceremonies as were necessary had been rushed through, because though the choice might be a disappointment to many, even those who had cherished hopes on behalf of their own sons preferred that it should be an unimportant six-year-old rather than the child of some rival. The Rana, in fact, had remained shrewd to the end; but the effort involved had drained the last of his strength, and the affair being concluded he had collapsed and passed into a coma.

‘He no longer knows me,’ said Gobind. ‘Or anyone else. Wherefore his priests and his own physicians, who have always deeply resented me, have seized their opportunity and had me expelled from his sick-room. They have also prevailed upon the Diwan, who has no love for Karidkote, to forbid me to set foot again in the palace. Believe me, they will see to it that I do not return, so you cannot use me as a cover for any attempt to enter the Rung Mahal yourself. And if you think to shoot your way in you are mad; kings are not permitted to die alone and in peace, and tonight there will be more guards and many more wakeful people in the palace than ever before, since all now know that the Rana is dying. Every passage-way and courtyard will be thronged with men who wait to hear that he has drawn his last breath, and because there is much of value in the palace, the Diwan has ordered extra guards on every door of every room – fearing, so it is said, that various trifles such as jade vases and ornaments made of gold and ivory might vanish before he himself has had time to abstract them. That last may be only slander, but I can tell you that any attempt to enter the palace by force of arms will fail.’

Ash said nothing but his face spoke for him, and Gobind said gently: ‘Sahib, I am not so wedded to my life that I would hesitate to risk losing it if I thought that there was even the smallest chance that your plan would succeed. It is because I know there is not that I would restrain you from it. And also because if it fails, as it must, the very ones whom you hoped to save may be suspected of complicity in the plot and condemned to an even worse death than the fire. Whereas if you wait and do nothing rash, it is possible that even at the eleventh hour the Sirkar may move to prevent the burning – Yes, yes, Sahib! I know that it does not appear likely. But how do we know that they too have not laid their plans? We cannot be sure, and if we throw away our lives needlessly – killing many in that fight, as we should do, and further endangering the Ranis – it may well prove we have, as they say, “lost Delhi for the sake of a fish”.’

‘He is right,’ affirmed Sarji abruptly. ‘If he can no longer enter the palace there is no hope of our being admitted, and to attempt to force our way in would be madness. I may be foolish, but I am not mad – nor, I hope, are you.’

Ash's mouth twitched in a parody of a smile, and he said: ‘Not yet, but – but I still cannot bring myself to believe that there is nothing I can do, and that I must resign myself to seeing…’

He stopped with a shudder and fell silent again, and Gobind, observing him with a professional eye, decided that madness might not be so very far off. The Sahib, it was plain, had endured much during the past week or two, and the accumulated effects of strain, fear and anxiety – and a stubborn refusal to despair contending with the gradual death of hope – had stretched his nerves almost to breaking point. In his present mood he was a danger to them all, and the next thing he would suggest was sure to be some wild scheme for snatching the Ranis as they walked through the crowds on their way to the burning ground, relying on surprise, and hoping to escape under cover of the uproar and confusion that such an act would create among a milling and unmanageable mass of sightseeers.

Gobind himself had, in fact, already given some thought to this particular line of action; but on consideration he had been forced to reject it, realizing that the crowd itself would wreck any such enterprise, for the people of Bhithor would be worked up to a high pitch of excitement and anticipation, and the threat of being robbed of the spectacle they had gathered to see would turn them in an instant into a raving mob. They would tear the impious intruders to pieces, and there would be no hope of escaping from them. Gobind knew this even if the Sahib did not, and he could only hope that he would be able to convince him that any such attempt would be worse than useless. But he was not called upon to do so, though he had been right in supposing that Ash was bound to think of it.

Ash had done so; but only to come to the same conclusion as Gobind. He too was aware that a crowd keyed to a high pitch of excitement can be more dangerous than a wounded leopard or a charging elephant – and that a mob is hydra-headed. If there was a way of saving Juli, it was not that one.

He rose to his feet stiffly, as though it was an effort to move, and said in a flat, formal voice: ‘There does not seem to be anything else to say. If either you or Manilal can think of any plan that might succeed, I would be grateful if you would let me know. I will do the same for you. We still have a few more hours of daylight and the whole of the coming night in which to think of one, and if the Rana's hold on life is stronger than you suppose, we may even have another day and another night as well; who knows?’

‘Only the gods,’ said Gobind soberly. ‘Let us pray to them that tomorrow the Sirkar will send us a regiment, or at least a Political-Sahib from Ajmer. If you will take my advice, Sahib, you will try to sleep tonight. A tired man is apt to make errors of judgement and you may have need of all your wits and your strength. Be assured that I will send Manilal to you if there is any news, or if I should see any way out of this tangle.’

He bowed gravely above his lifted hands, palms pressed together, and Manilal saw them out and barred the door behind them.

‘Where are you going?’ demanded Sarji suspiciously, as Ash turned left into an alleyway that led in the opposite direction to the quarter of the town where they lodged.

‘To the Suttee Gate. I must see the way that they will come, and the road they will take. I would have done so before if I had not been so sure that the Sirkar would step in before it was too late.’

The alleyway skirted that side of the Rung Mahal where the Zenana Quarter lay, and presently they came to a narrow gateway cut through the thickness of the palace wall. It was an unobtrusive gate, barely wide enough to take two people walking abreast, and decorated with a curious formal pattern that on closer inspection proved to be made up of the prints of innumerable slender hands, the hands of queens and concubines who down the long centuries had walked through that gate on their way to the fire and to sanctification.

Ash had seen and noted it on his previous visit to Bhithor, and now he did no more than glance at it as they passed. His interest was not in the gate but the route that the procession would take from there to the pyre. The burning-ground lay some distance from the city, and as the city gates would be closed within an hour of sundown there was no time to waste, and he hurried Sarji forward, taking note as they went of every turn and twist and alleyway between the Suttee Gate of the Rung Mahal and the
Mori
Gate, which was the nearest of the city gates.

Ten minutes saw them out in the open country and walking along a dusty road that led straight as an arrow towards the hills. There were no houses here, and no cover, but there was a good deal of traffic on the road, mostly pedestrian and all of it moving towards the city. Presently Ash said: ‘There should be a path leading off to the right somewhere here. I used to ride across this bit of country, but I never actually visited the memorial
chattris
and the burning-ground. I did not think then that…’ He left the sentence unfinished to stop a herd-boy who was driving his cattle back to the city, and inquire the way to the burning-ground.

‘You mean Govidan? Are you strangers that you do not know where the burning-ground of the Ranas lies?’ asked the boy, staring. ‘It is over there – where the
chattris
are. You can see them above the trees. The path is no more than a stone's throw ahead of you. Are you holy men, or do you go to make arrangements for the Rana's burning? Ah, that will be a great
tamarsha
. But he is not dead yet, for when he dies the gongs will beat, and my father says they can be heard as far as the Ram Bagh, so that all…’

Ash thrust an anna into the boy's hand and left him, and a few minutes later they came to the spot where a side path led right-handed out of the main road towards the lake. The path, like the road, was deep in dust, but here there were no cartwheel tracks and few traces of cattle or goats. But a party of horsemen had obviously ridden down it and returned again fairly recently, for the least breath of wind would have smoothed away those hoof-prints.

‘They came to select a site for the funeral pyre,’ said Sarji.

Ash nodded without speaking, his gaze on the dark patch of greenery ahead. Behind him the evening was full of sounds: the bleating of goats and the lowing of cattle, the shrill cries of herd-boys and the soft cooing of doves, the clamorous call of a partridge and from somewhere on the road the squeak and squeal of cart-wheels rumbling homeward to the city. Comfortable, every-day sounds; pleasantly familiar and very different from the deafening babble of the peering, jostling, wailing crowd that would gather here only too soon, jammed together shoulder to shoulder and pressing in on either side of this same dusty path that he was walking along now…

If he rode here he would have to leave Dagobaz tethered somewhere well beyond the crowds, for apart from the multitudes who would flock here to watch the cremation, thousands more would accompany the bier and its escort, milling about it and moving slowly forward in a rolling tide of humanity, resistless and terrifying. Visualizing the scene, Ash realized that the only advantage to be gained from it would be anonymity. No one was going to pay the least attention to him if he joined that crowd. He would merely be one of them, another onlooker, unremarkable and unremarked provided he came on foot. A mounted man would be far too conspicuous; and in any case, Dagobaz was unused to such crowds and there was no knowing how he would react to one.

‘It would not be possible,’ muttered Sarji, whose mind had evidently been moving on similar lines. ‘Had this place only been on the other side of the city, there might have been a chance. But we could never get away from here even if we could cut our way through the crowd at our backs, since those hills there hem us in on one side and the lake on the other, while over there –’ he jerked his chin to the eastward ‘– there is no way out, so we should have to ride back towards the city and everyone here would know it.’

‘Yes, I realized that.’

‘Then why are we here?’ There was more than a trace of uneasiness in Sarji's voice.

‘Because I wanted to see the place for myself before I made up my mind. I thought perhaps that there might turn out to be some… some feature of it that could be turned to advantage, or that might suggest something to me. There may yet be. If there is not, we shall be no worse off.’

The hoof-prints stopped within the fringe of a dense grove of trees, and it was easy to see where the riders had dismounted and left their horses before entering the grove on foot. Ash and Sarji, following the same path between avenues of tree-trunks and out into the open again, found themselves in a large clearing in the centre of what appeared to be a deserted city: a city of palaces or temples, set among the trees.