The Weeping Ash (10 page)

But outside the town—which ended very abruptly, one bowshot from the palace walls—the endless plain stretched far into the distance, a featureless, dun waste of sand, cactus, a few prickly bushes, with only an occasional banyan or mango tree casting its tiny shadow under the huge sun. Southward the plain appeared to continue forever; but, looking northwest, Scylla could just make out, through the heat haze, the distant blue line of the Sangur Hills, which were foothills of the faraway Hindu Kush. Among these foothills lay the ancient tomb which she was curious to visit, four or five hours' ride to the north, in a deep gully full of jungle grass. It was just the kind of place, she had thought, to stimulate Cal's enthusiasm and perhaps inspire one of his poems—but if the wretched boy were not interested, let him sleep all day! She would visit the tomb by herself.

This resolve formed, she moved on to join the impatient Abdul.

The wooden palace gate, between high crenellated red rock towers, was massively reinforced with iron bolts and bars, also with ferocious-looking spikes, a defense against elephants and battering rams; this was the only way into the citadel, which otherwise overhung a semicircular precipice. The town of Ziatur occupied its own little outcrop of hill, a toe that had become separated from the northern foothills and had, in many Muslim wars, served as an outpost and advanced warning station against invasion from the south. Now, with the Sikh states on the point of confederation, nearly all in subsidiary alliance with Britain, the threat of Muslim attack had receded, but never entirely. In this slow-moving land memories were long, the atrocities perpetuated by Jehangir and Aurangzeb seemed no longer ago than yesterday. The hinges of the gate were kept oiled and the spikes sharpened. Besides, what if the British were driven out in their turn?

Today all was peaceful. A magician with an earthenware teapot was demonstrating his magic in the gateway, passing a stick through the spout of the pot so that both ends remained visible; and a fortune-teller with a large cage containing a parrot and a sparrow was urging the passers-by to spend five annas and discover the future.

Resisting these temptations, Scylla passed through. “
Sat Sri Akal
[God is truth],” she greeted Saroop Singh, the gatekeeper, whom she knew well. He, replying in kind, greeted her with a flood of local information; some travelers had arrived, Feringi, though not Angrezi or Yagistani; and they were even now with the young Maharajah. No, not with the old one; the latter was not well, not well at all, his despondency of the spirit had come on him once again. He would probably be pleased to see the Mem Periseela, who always cheered him up.

Scylla thanked Abdul for his escort, instructed him to return for her in two hours' time, and walked into the first courtyard, pulling her veil well down over her face as a concession to local mores.

The first courtyard was bare and sandy; in it, a number of soldiers in red tunics and baggy pink trousers were lolling about on straw mattresses. An elephant was being washed, stamping and trumpeting with pleasure while its mahouts scurried around it with pails of water and long straw brushes. In this court, also, the Maharajah kept his menagerie; chained and collared hunting leopards reclined with bored expressions on rope beds, tigers paced to and fro behind bars.

The next court held the stables, where some of the Maharajah's eight hundred horses were housed. There were carriages as well—a curricle with ivory fittings, a perch phaeton brought from Calcutta, a chaise with gold lamps, and a landaulet. To a Londoner, it would have seemed strange to see these elegant European conveyances gathering dust amid such surroundings, but Scylla had never been to England and passed them without regard, as she did the palanquins with lacquered panels of cedar and silver fittings and gold brocade cushions, the silver elephant howdahs, and the jeweled, velvet-lined saddles, hanging rack on rack in open-fronted sheds.

The next court, paved all over with white marble slabs, had a central fountain and a pair of hoopoes admiring their reflections. Fifty or so of the horses were being led slowly around and around, so that their paces could be inspected by the Maharajah, who reclined near the fountain on a charpoy with a frame of silver and straps of woven elephant hair. He was not paying a great deal of attention to the horses, though; he looked sick, hollow-eyed, and preoccupied. A faint spark of pleasure came into his eyes when he noticed Scylla crossing the court.

“Aha, it is Mademoiselle Periseela, come to batter a little learning into my wayward sons!” He spoke in French, of which he had acquired a fluent command, in days gone by, at the princes' school in Ajmer.

“Good morning, Excellency. How do you find yourself today?”

Scylla curtsied but did not approach him too closely, remembering how he had flinched away when once, absentmindedly, she had extended a hand to help him out of his chair. Enjoy her company he might, but she was still unclean, untouchable, so far as he was concerned.

“I am not well,” he said irritably. “This accursed pain—distracts me from business, from pleasure, even from my horses.” He clapped his hands. “Take them away, Umr Singh.”

The horses were led clattering through the gate.

“Now sit down a moment, mademoiselle, and tell me something amusing.”

A couple of barefoot servants in knee breeches and turbans ran forward to shift the cushions under the Maharajah and set a chair for Scylla—it was made of deer's antlers and was very uncomfortable. She politely declined a bowl of sherbet, but the Maharajah thirstily drank down a silver mug of opium and water, after which he looked a little more cheerful and a tinge of color came into his wax-yellow cheeks. He was a tall, thin man with a grizzled, bushy beard; his long, uncut hair was wound up into a turban stuck about with aigrettes of diamonds, and the knee-length tunic he wore was stiff with gold embroidery and jewels. His hands and feet were tiny, proof of his ancient—and inbred—Rajput descent.

“Amuse me!” he said again hopefully. “How are the wars going now, in Feringistan?”

“I daresay your news is more recent than mine, Excellency,” said Scylla, “for our last Calcutta
Gazette
came three weeks ago and took two months reaching us. There had been a great battle off Cape St. Vincent, and Admiral Nelson blockaded the Spanish in Cadiz.”

“Where is Cape St. Vincent?”

“Well—if I had something to draw with—”

A boy servant brought a stick of kajal—lampblack used for painting eyes—and Scylla drew a rough map on the marble flagstone.

“Here is Spain, see—and this is the Mediterranean—the French were here—Admiral Jervis was here, based on a Portuguese river, the Tagus—”

“And where, from there, is Angrezi?”

“Up here.” Scylla rapidly sketched in England, adding Ireland off to the left. “The French also tried to invade Ireland, up here, in Bantry Bay, but something went wrong and they sailed home again.”

“The French are not good fighters?” he rapped out. “The English are better?”

“
I think so
,” answered Scylla cautiously. “But that French General Buonaparte seems to be a very clever soldier. I read that he said he would like to take his armies eastward, like Alexander the Great.”

“Aha, Iskander Bey—another great Feringi general. One of my ancestors, without doubt.” The Maharajah's eyes flashed, and Scylla was reminded that he came of dedicated fighting stock; ever since the first day of spring in 1699, almost a hundred years' ago, the Sikhs had designated themselves a warrior clan and had sworn adherence to the five
K
s—Kanga, the comb, for cleanliness; Kara, the steel bracelet, symbolizing contentment; Kesh, unshorn hair, for strength; Kachh, the divided undergarment, for chastity; and Kirpan, the sword, to slay the enemies of righteousness. The word “Singh”—lion—formed part of every Sikh name. The Maharajah's full name, beginning with Mansur-i-Zaman Amirul-Umra Mohinder Singh went on for at least five lines of text, but he preferred to be known as Bhupindra Bahadur—Bhupindra the great fighter—despite the fact that he personally had never been in a battle.

“And do you really think, then, that the French plan to invade our country?”

“They would have a long way to march from the Mediterranean,” Scylla replied, laughing.

“So? Where is the Punjab on this map of yours? Where is Kafiristan, and the Khaiber Pass?”

Rather hastily and sketchily she filled in the eastern end of the Mediterranean. “Now, see, here is Istanbul, here is Baghdad. All this is Persia. Up to the north—Turkmenistan and Russia. Here, farther east, Afghanistan.”

“Put in Kabul,” he ordered, and she placed a dot to the west of the Khaiber Pass. “Now, Peshawur.” She put another dot, to the east.

“How many parasangs from Istanbul to Peshawur?”

“I should think it would be about six thousand miles—four miles to a parasang.” She calculated. “Perhaps fifteen hundred parasangs.”

“It takes a camel caravan forty days to cross from Persia to Herat in Afghanistan, it would take twice as long to reach the Khaiber Pass. We would know, from our spies in Afghanistan, many weeks before the armies were halfway here. They will never attempt it.”

“But horsemen could do it in a much shorter time—ten to twelve days,” objected Scylla.

“Aha! You should have been a soldier, mademoiselle! Do not forget though, they have to drag the guns with them—big guns, much heavier than these.”

The fountain was embellished, at its four corners, by amazing old brass cannon, whose muzzles consisted of elaborately ornamented lions' heads.

“Also,” said the Maharajah, “the road from Baghdad here is impassable in the winter, because of snow and, in summer, because of drought. I do not think they will come.”

He sounded disappointed; Scylla could not be sure whether he regretted the lost opportunity for a battle or whether he had hoped that the French might expel the English, who now had virtually undisputed dominion over a large part of southern India.

A servant came up, bowed low, and said, “The Shahzada Mihal Singh asks when you will be ready to receive the Feringi emissaries?”

“Mihal is always troubling me to see somebody,” grumbled the Maharajah fretfully. “Now it is these French.” He shot a sly glance at Scylla. “You see, mademoiselle, the French are closer than you think!”

He stood up with difficulty, and Scylla, knowing better than to offer assistance, curtsied again and went off toward the women's regions.

When she first entered the purdah quarters of Ziatur palace, with Miss Musson, she had found it unbearably depressing. By now time had acclimatized her, but even so she never passed in without a shiver, remembering that, while she could come and go freely, many of the inhabitants of this place would spend the rest of their lives there and never set foot outside. Cal had once estimated that the palace might easily have a population of four thousand, of whom at least two thirds were women. There was a larger population unseen, for the dead were all buried underneath, and had been for hundreds of years past.

The women's quarters, occupying a natural spur of the hilltop on which the palace perched, were isolated from the rest of the apartments and were labyrinthine in their complexity. Staircases wound and twisted up and down, passages ended abruptly in openings on the cliff, hundreds of empty rooms remained dark and unused, their silk and cedarwood furnishings moldering quietly behind fretted marble screens. There were dwelling chambers on all levels—some of them sixty feet below ground, for the sake of coolness in the raging summer, others opening onto roof gardens two hundred feet up, unguessed at from ground level. Windowless inner rooms and passages were somberly lit by blazing rags soaked in linseed or mustard oil and placed on pronged holders or in cups. Here and there oil lamps with colored glass chimneys were placed on brackets so as to illuminate huge paintings—many of them hideously obscene—on walls and ceilings. Miss Musson, on her first visits, had sternly instructed Scylla to avert her eyes from these, but by now, as with so much else, custom had habituated her to them, and she passed with but a perfunctory glance at the intricately writhing limbs. On other walls, hundreds of portraits of bygone maharajahs hung in disregarded ranks; nobody glanced at their swords, turbans, or dangling mustaches. Along some passages, cows roamed; smells of cooking, incense, and garbage issued from dim, shuttered rooms, or sweeter scents of musk and jasmine. Distant music could always be heard—sitars, flutes, and finger drums. Occasionally, glancing through a doorway, Scylla would see a juggler, storyteller, or group of dancing girls who had been asked in to entertain the bored inmates. The Maharajah was no longer interested in his women—not even the youngest of them, the beautiful, wily Rani Sada, who had been the daughter of his subadar, had been treated as a daughter, as a pet, by the Maharajah when she was a child, allowed to ride with him in his palki when he went out; then, when she was thirteen, he had her sent to school in Amritsar and given an allowance of five thousand rupees a month. And at fifteen she had returned to Ziatur and wasted no time in ousting Mahtab Kour, the true Maharani, from favor, and establishing herself as first lady in the palace. For three years her reign had been supreme; but now it was said that she, too, was neglected, that the Maharajah never bothered to visit her apartments. The boredom of
her
empty days, Scylla thought with a shiver, would be even worse than for the others, because she had been away into the world, been to school, and knew something about the life that went on outside Ziatur…

However, attempting to alleviate Sada's boredom was not Scylla's business, and she now climbed a great many stairs and then turned left into the chamber that had been allocated to her as a schoolroom in which to instruct the young princes Amur and Ranji.

Nobody was occupying it at the moment, and Scylla, walking over to the screened window, looked down through an exotic profusion of dangling vines with scarlet, white, and crimson blossoms to a little courtyard cut into the face of the cliff. Beyond, the great plain stretched away southward and the sun beat down mercilessly.