INCARNATION
FICTION
The Last Assassin: The Seventh Sanctuary
Brotherhood of the Tomb
The Jaguar Mask
Night of the Seventh Darkness
Name of the Beast
The Judas Testament
Day of Wrath: The Final Judgement
The Ninth Buddha
K
NON-FICTION
New Jemsalems: Reflections on Islam, fundamentalism and the Rushdie affair
AS JONATHAN AYCLIFFE
Naomi’s Room
Whispers in the Dark
The Vanishment
The Matrix
The Lost
A Shadow on the Wall
The Talisman
HarperCollinsPublishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Daniel Easterman 1998
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-002-25610-0
PROLOGUE
Srinagar, Kashmir, Northern India
June
T
he sun lay across the city like a copper charing dish, baking everything in sight with its dull, oppressive warmth. It was the hottest summer in living memory, perhaps the hottest since time began. The sky was empty of clouds and birds. Today, not even the orioles were in flight. On Dal Lake, abandoned houseboats lay strewn like broken flowers, and the floating gardens wilted and died. To the east, the blue foothills of the Himalayas rose up behind a ragged haze. In the city, people looked up at them from time to time, thinking how cool it must be up there.
A woman’s voice rose in song from the lake’s southern shore, light and easy, a hymn to Shiva. First from the Jami Masjid, then from the mosques of Hazratbal and Rosahbal and Shah Hamdan and Pathar and Dastgir, the voices of the city’s muezzins rose in the call to the noon prayer. A very different god, and a very different love.
As the worshippers made their way on foot to their places of prayer, clutches of soldiers watched suspiciously from their bunkers. No one walked easily in Srinagar, no one went anywhere unobserved.
Two men stepped down from a four-wheel-drive vehicle that had just drawn up in front of the General Post Office on Guptar Road. They’d scarcely set foot on the parched earth before a chirruping bevy of would-be porters and guides swallowed them whole. V. S. Mukerji’s Top Number One Taxi Service’ was always the choice of rich foreigners coming in on the morning flight from Delhi. Except that nowadays foreigners in Kashmir were as rare as teeth in an old man’s gums.
The guides and porters vanished back into the lanes near the Post Office as quickly as they had come. A small Indian wearing cream-coloured kurta-pyjamas and impenetrable dark glasses had emerged from the Post Office and was greeting the newcomers, hands folded in the namaste, bobbing, smirking, and apologizing for the undignified confusion that had welcomed them to the jewel of the north.
His greetings over, the Indian hurried them past a heap of sandbags topped by a light machine-gun, down narrow steps to the river. The Jhelum was low, its normally muddy brown water stinking and putrid now, as it moved sluggishly between the tall houses that crowded in upon it from either bank.
A shikara was waiting, tied up to a wooden pole whose lower half was seeing daylight for the first time in over two hundred years. The boatman, an old man with grizzled hair, helped them into the narrow vessel, as he had helped thousands of tourists in his day, and pushed off towards midstream. But today’s passengers were not tourists. They did not carry cameras, and they did not stare at the sights of Old Srinagar as the little boat weaved its way between a clutter of barges and floating shops. Their only luggage was a large, heavy-looking briefcase.
The two foreigners made a curious sight, if anyone had been willing to pay more than passing attention. The Indian sat up front, whispering directions to the boatman as he steered. Behind him sat the visitors, one old, one young. Bewildered by the heat that pervaded its smallest crevices, the city seemed to sigh as they passed, recognizing in them descendants of a vanished Raj. No one would have turned a hair if a band had appeared out of nowhere and struck up ‘God Save the Queen’.