The Linnet Bird: A Novel (55 page)

“What’s beyond them?” I asked, wondering at her fascination.

“Nothing. There’s a sheer drop over the edge. Nothing at all,” she repeated.

I shrugged and lay back in the sweet-smelling flowers, looking at the blue sky and listening to the steady tearing rasp of the grazing horses. I felt a slight tremor under me, and as I sat up to ask Faith if she had felt it, a high whinny broke the stillness. It was Uta. She bolted toward the rocks at the far end of the field. Rami trotted anxiously in a small circle.

“Uta!” I shouted, jumping up. Faith had grabbed Rami’s reins, and pulled herself into the saddle. “What’s scaring them?” I called to her.

But Faith took off, first at just a trot, but then the pony was galloping. She lost her bonnet; it swirled in an updraft and disappeared.

Something made me turn away from the puzzling vision of her, galloping toward the rocks. A man on a horse rode up the field from the dip of the valley on the far end. The ground shook with the heavy pounding of hooves. He stood in his stirrups every few seconds to look behind him. In a shock of recognition I realized it was the Pathan. I looked back to Faith, her skirt billowing out behind like a ship’s sail.

I was in the middle. The Pathan rode toward me, Faith away. Uta veered suddenly—was it because of the sudden ringing explosions somewhere behind me?—but Faith didn’t follow. Instead, she rose in her saddle in a parody of what I’d just seen the Pathan do. But Faith did not look behind. She appeared fixed in a straight line, heading toward the rocks she had ridden out to earlier. And then she urged Rami on with her crop. Rami tried to turn aside as they neared the rock outcropping, but Faith must have held his lead. I saw her, saw her forcing him toward the outcrop. I didn’t understand. And then she let go of the reins—I saw them drop as she raised her hands in the air, and Rami tried to stop before the edge of the outcrop, skidding, tipping sideways, and Faith went over his head in a graceful arc as if pushed by an unseen hand. But she hadn’t been pushed. She had thrown herself from the saddle. My mind couldn’t comprehend what I’d just witnessed. Faith had flung herself over the rocks.

Her full skirt wafted, and I saw a slice of the white of her petticoats and then the scissoring of her legs. The whole image of her flying into open air was like a pantomime, a yellow and white spinning disk, and then she was gone from my sight. I closed my eyes in horror, and in the same instant a terrible pain exploded in my shoulder.

The Pathan thundered down upon me, my legs gave way, and I fell like a broken doll in that meadow, an odd screaming echoing in my head. In the next instant I realized the scream came from my own mouth, a long and terrible cry, because I knew that something disastrous had just occurred, and whatever happened next could only be worse.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I
WAS ON THE SHIP THAT HAD BROUGHT ME TO
I
NDIA, IN MY SLING
bed, being tossed in a storm. All my bones ached. From the passageway outside our cabin I heard voices calling something unintelligible. There was a pounding from under me as if great boulders were hitting the hull; I feared they would break through and I would be drowned. I tried to hang on to my bed, but my left arm was somehow pinned; it wouldn’t work. The waves were relentless in their rocking rhythm, and my ribs banged painfully, driving the pain back to my left arm and up to my shoulder. It was difficult to breathe; my face pushed against the unyielding surface of the bed. I struggled to lift my head and fresh cool air stung my cheeks. I opened my eyes, seeing my left arm hanging oddly above my head as if I were suspended.

And then it grew clear. The pounding rhythm was the beating of horse hooves; I was thrown over a horse’s back and saw the ground rushing by. There was nausea from the sight and from the growing intensity of the pain in my shoulder; I turned my head to the side, and my nose pressed against something warm and hard, moving with the rise and fall of the giant animal. It was a leg.

I looked up at the broad chest and carved face of the Pathan and the last terrifying image of Faith flying out into the air came back to me. Faith. Perhaps my eyes had tricked me. Perhaps she landed before the rocks, on the grass of the meadow. Perhaps she hadn’t intentionally committed the act I thought I saw, perhaps she wasn’t . . . 

I couldn’t even think the word. I had to go back and find her. I struggled, kicking my legs, and there was a stinging lash against my calves. And that made me more distressed and furious; I must get away, must go to find Faith. I lifted my chest, pushing under me with my right hand, but the Pathan lifted his own hands—which I saw were bound together with thick, frayed rope—and slapped my head down as effortlessly as one swats absently at a mosquito, and I heard a popping noise as my nose smashed against the horse in a shocking burst of pain. And then something warm and sticky ran into my mouth. I felt I would smother; I couldn’t breathe, my nose and mouth filled with blood, and once again, I fell into rocking blackness.

I
WAS SHAKEN
into consciousness as I was dragged off the horse. I opened my eyes but all was dark, not even the hint of a shadow. The Pathan held me against him, his tied hands in front of my face, one arm over my mouth. His body was so still and hard that if it hadn’t been for his heat and his heavy breathing in my ear I might have been leaning against stone. I heard the horse beside us, its own breath whistling and wet. As we stood there, I eventually made out a thin strip of faint light far ahead of us; from the smell and dankness I knew we were in a cave. The filtered light came from an opening in what must have been heavy bushes that hid the high entrance. The horse let out a low whinny, and the Pathan took his arm from my mouth—to soothe the horse, I suppose—and I took the opportunity to try to struggle free. I know I shouted. But the Pathan yanked me back against him, his arms crushing my ribs, and then he slapped his joined hands over my mouth, bumping my throbbing nose, and there came a rush of fresh blood. The horse now wheezed softly, and the Pathan quietly hissed; it fell silent. I breathed through bubbles of blood in my nostrils.

Hoofbeats thundered by, and that bit of light at the entrance was cut off abruptly. There was a second of light, then another shadow. I counted seven shadows; there were seven men after the Pathan. I made a growling, deep in my throat, as if trying to call out, knowing, as I did, that it was as useless as the buzz of a fly. Finally there were no more hoofbeats, no shadows.

We continued to stand motionless for so long that I lost track of time. And then the Pathan took his hands from my mouth and I slid through the circle of his arms, to the ground, my legs useless as pieces of stretched India rubber.

W
HEN A DIM LIGHT
hit my face, I sat up, shakily, the moving of my left shoulder making me cry out. The Pathan, who was standing so that his body held back the bushes that covered the doorway, gnawed at the knotted rope that held his wrists together. He looked at me and uttered a few terse words.

“I can’t understand you,” I said. Then I repeated it in Hindi, and he responded in kind.

“Come here.”

“No.”

He stormed toward me and pulled me up by my hair.

“Let me go. Take me back to the meadow. I need to find my friend.” I twisted under his grip, my scalp burning.

“Untie this rope,” he said, taking his fingers from my hair and holding his joined hands toward me.

I looked at them and saw that his wrists were chafed and bleeding.

“Untie it,” he said again. When I still stood, unmoving, in front of him, he said it a third time.

His voice was not the voice of a madman, a murderer or rapist. It did not carry the superiority of Somers’s voice or the threatening tone of Ram’s growl. It was simply a man’s voice, raspy with exhaustion. Besides, did I have a choice? I worked at the knots, although my left hand refused to obey properly. Finally the rope pulled free.

He breathed deeply, rubbing his wrists, then led the black horse to the entrance. He pulled out long handfuls of the grass that grew there, and rubbed down the horse with them.

“My friend,” I said. “My friend . . . I must go to see what happened. Just let me go now.”

“We cannot go now. The
ferenghi
still search for me.”

“But I’m no use to you. Let me go,” I begged.

“You would lead them to this spot.”

“I wouldn’t.” I grimaced and looked at my shoulder, and in the light saw blood, too much blood, both dried and fresh, covering the blue calico of my dress.

“Their bullet hit you,” he said, glancing at me, his hand, filled with the sweat-soaked grass, still for a moment. “They shot at me but hit you.”

I looked at him. “Why did you take me? Why didn’t you just leave me there, in the meadow?”

He rubbed again. “I thought you might be of use to me.”

“Use?”

“For a bargain. If they caught up with me. And your friend is dead.” He murmured to the horse, and it stamped its front foot.

“Dead?” Why did my voice shake with such horror, such surprise? I think I had known, from the minute I saw Faith heading toward that rocky outcrop, rising in her saddle, what she was about to do. Perhaps I had known, for an even longer time, that what Faith suffered from had no cure. “But are you sure?”

“I am sure. There is only rock there. It is a long drop to the stones below, an empty riverbed.”

“Let me go now, then.” My voice was weaker than I wished it.
Faith. Why didn’t I tell you I had begun to think of you as a sister? Why didn’t I do more to comfort you?

“Not yet. When I know they have returned to Simla, then you can go. It will take you most of a day to walk back. I will be too far by then for you to help them.” Dried blood flaked around his ear and down his neck. His earlobe was torn where there had been an earring.

How had he escaped, I wondered. “I told you. I wouldn’t help them. I know you didn’t do it. What they said you did.”

He turned and we looked at each other for the first time. He had been beaten; one eye was swollen shut in a puffy purple pouch and his bottom lip was split. His shirt was torn down the front, and there was a cluster of dark bruises on his chest. I saw the glint of the gold hoop, still in his other ear, through his hair.

“I know you didn’t do it,” I repeated. “I know.” Why was it so important to me that he understood this?

“How do you know what I have done or not done?”