Nightrunners of Bengal (6 page)

Yet the fort slept a last sleep; for all its mass it was a ghost. Rodney paced slowly round the walk, and stopped again on the south face, over the zenana. The fountains were dry which had once played for waiting women. No one sat on the marble benches under the grottoes which the builders had imitated from Al Kadhimain. The kings were dead and the disputes settled. The dispossessed crowded round him, changeless, drowned in tides of history. What a wonder of silk and steel this must have been!

He stirred, the unease of death in his bones, remembering the tree roots that pushed apart the stones of the lower wall, the lily pads and water weeds that grew along the river front at the foot of the red masonry cliff. It must be fifty years since canopied barges carried the prince and his court out on the water. Now mangy dogs wandered in and out of the wicket in the main gate and lifted their legs against the cloisters, and a pile of ordure stank against the outside of the north wall. The uniforms of the Bodyguard hung in yellow tatters from their bodies; they had been rich and splendid once.

The shape of the land showed only in a blacker blackness against the horizon. He saw the quarter-guard lights in his camp by the river, a mile upstream.

He had never talked with her here at night, and did not know why he expected her. Leaning on the parapet, he turned his head. She was a pale oval face, a vague spread of gold and silver. The sari lay back in a sweep on her shoulders, the stars gleamed on the central parting down her black hair, and her eyes were on him—they had never been so huge and moving-black. Her lips were painted dark. She had a round red caste mark between her eyebrows; a ruby ring on a finger of her right hand made a spark of fire. He knew that she was not surprised to see him.

She leaned against the parapet beside him, and after a minute asked softly, “What are you looking at?”

“That light. It’s in my camp.” He pointed with his chin. She put her hand on his sleeve in a natural gesture.

“Why will you not let me come and see it? It is my land. I wish to know what a sepoy’s camp is like. Show it to me tomorrow—please.”

He smiled and drew smoke into his lungs. “No, ma’am. I will not.”

He felt her stiffen, then at once relax. She left the hand resting on his arm and sighed. “I am sorry. I forget sometimes that I am not the queen of your English Company. But I wish to know. I have never been in any camp;
they
would not let me. When I go out to Kishan Falls on Monday, it will be the first time. Tell me about it.”

The single light by the river filled the darkness, and he was there, standing beside it. The tents were ranged in a single row, facing the water; the sentries strode their posts; monkeys chattered suddenly by the Monkeys’ Well behind; a leopard’s sawing cough boomed across the river in front; the soldiers slept. She didn’t want to know about all that. He answered her, pausing between his sentences. She spoke English well, if a little formally, and understood it without effort, but he had to speak slowly.

“You won’t see the best part—choosing the place and pitching camp. With us the sepoys put up the tents on a bugle call, all together, and the men of each tent try to get it done first. Next, they dig drainage cuts round, and they’re always very cheerful then—I don’t know why. I have one tent to sleep in, and one as an office, and that’s where I rest and read too. I eat outside unless it rains. The sepoys make a fireplace of mud for me in one wall of the tent. The orderly and the bearer spread my mats on the grass inside. The day we pitched camp down there, Rambir was imitating a Pathan carpet pedlar—you may not have seen one, but plenty of them come down from the north every cold weather. Rambir waved the mats about and made plocking noises, like boots
being pulled out of wet mud. That’s the way they imitate the Pathans’ language, and it always amuses them; all the sepoys in earshot were chuckling as they worked. But Rambir’s a great buffoon, and that wasn’t enough for him. In the middle of all this gibberish he made one phrase come out clearly enough: ‘Beautiful carpets—eight annas to you, eight rupees to a sahib!’ Then everyone looked at me out of the corner of his eye to see if I had taken the point.

He laughed, warm with the memory.

“Then we clear the camp of stones, and settle down and make ourselves comfortable. Some officers have glass doors to their tents, you know. I like to clean my guns when there is nothing else to do. In the evening the Native Officers come to my tent and I sit there with my shirt unbuttoned and my legs stretched out, and we talk about the next day’s work and so on. Sometimes I have to wear my greatcoat because it’s chilly.”

“What time do you start work?”

“Not very early yet. No one’s heard the coppersmith bird or the brainfever bird, and we don’t count the hot weather as really begun until we do. Reveille’s still at six, first parade, seven—but I’ll put them forward an hour soon. By eleven o’clock these days the sun is hot on your back. Those tunics are thick, and we perspire right through them. It’s a good life; the best. The bats fly about under the trees. After dark I listen to the river—this fort stands up very big and square and black from there. I like that better than being in it, I’m afraid.”

She put up the hand that had rested on his arm and adjusted her sari so that it hid the side of her face nearest him. “It is cold. You see my India as the men who paint pictures see it, yet you are a soldier. The greatest hero of our family was like that—Rudraparsad Rawan. You know, I too am a Rawan, of another branch? But you are a foreigner—oh, it is not true! None of you English are quite foreigners, or ever will be. I wish I did not think so.”

Her low worried voice stopped. When she continued a minute later, she spoke lightly. “I should have been born a man. The outside smells better than those women in the zenana—phooh! Do you remember the hunting with the cheetah? Was it not beautiful, Rodney?”

He nodded. That had been at the end of January. The party had gathered in the courtyard at six in the morning; he remembered the cold tinkle of the fountain, the three monstrous, vague elephants soundlessly shifting their feet and waving their trunks. The fields on the way to the hunting ground were quiet, and the elephants pitched and rolled in a shallow sea of mist The first light painted the fort behind them with a luminous pallor. The howdahs creaked, huts and trees drifted past, and no one spoke. Sumitra had gripped the basketwork rim and opened her nostrils to the sharpness of the morning.

A mile out they rode through the grove of seven tall trees and seven smaller ones which lay just behind his camp and was called Monkeys’ Well. Slabs from the coping of a ruined well were scattered there on both sides of the trail. A band of long-tailed grey langur monkeys chattered and shrieked among the branches; their ancestors had given the place its name. She had pointed silently at the well; there a deep orange-black head rocked from side to side three feet above the ground. The hamadryad’s throat shaded down to golden yellow, and its olive-green white-chevroned back curled out of sight between the stones. With hood fully expanded it watched them pass. Rodney looked back as the elephants strode on, and saw the snake uncoil and slither like a green hawser through the dust, while the monkeys chattered louder.

Did he remember all that? When she called him “Rodney” it was a code and meant she was trying to stand outside herself, to see as he, an Englishman, saw.

He nodded again. “I remember. Sumitra, do you know what that hunt reminds me of? Those tapestries in the audience chamber.”

Through his telescope he had watched a tapestry hunt that day. The blackbuck ran, the cheetah ran—and the cheetah ran the fastest of all the animals. It was not sport, but it was beautiful. Its symmetry had surrendered the quality of motion; only the posed formality remained now in his memory. There had been not terror, but representation of terror in the morning sun; not movement, but a weft of running in a warp of earth. The figures would be embroidered on that valley still, and the buck would still be running, still alive.

He said, “It’s nearly over now. I must go back. Bhowani will seem flat after this. You’ve made it for me, ma’am. I have no way to thank you.”

She did not answer.

It was not “nearly over”; it was quite over. It had finished when the rajahs began to arrive for the hunt. For days past they had been coming, with their horses, elephants, and ornate carriages. Great Jamalpur from the far south had come; Gangoh, Tikri, Gohana, Kiloi, Mamakhera, and Ganeshghar from the east; the Sikhs, Phillora and Tarn Taran, from the Punjab, the land of the five northern rivers; the Mohammedan Nawabs of Jalalabad and Purkhas; Lalkot in force—they did not have far to travel, for only the leased territory of Bhowani lay between Kishanpur and Lalkot; once the two states had adjoined.

In his father’s time such a gathering of princes would never have been permitted. It could have meant only intrigue or war. Now—the Company was strong, and the princes had to amuse themselves with mass tiger-hunting.

The Rani said abruptly, “The English party—they are all arriving tomorrow. The Lieutenant Governor from Agra I have met, and of course Mr. Dellamain. I think I have seen the fat colonel—Bull-estrode? The others I do not know. There will be a major general from Gondwara. What is he like?”

Rodney studied the long ash on his cheroot He wished he knew what she was thinking about; it would be something
unpredictable—perhaps it was better not to know. He supposed she was giving him a chance to hide his sadness, stifle his emotion, and be flippant He answered her lightly and quickly.

“Sir Hector Pierce? He’s only been in command at Gondwara since November last Queen’s service. Infantry, I believe. He stands as high as your knee, ma’am, and he has several nicknames—the Baronet, Napoleon the Noughth…”

“Is he a good general?”

He glanced up in surprise at the half-hidden intensity of her question. He had no idea what sort of general Pierce was. He didn’t seem to have been in the Crimea and, in India at least, had no reputation of any kind. He said, “I don’t know, but he’s deceptive, I can tell you that. I’ve only seen him once. I was drilling some men on the square in Bhowani and didn’t even know the general had come up from Gondwara. Then I saw this little square man, about five foot one, in a plain brown suit and a tall black hat He was standing on a portable mounting block which I suppose his groom has to carry about everywhere. He held a rolled umbrella like a sword on one shoulder; his other hand was tucked into his breast and his head stuck forward a little—just like the pictures of Napoleon. The groom stood behind him, holding his horse—a grey stallion at least seventeen and a half hands high. A couple of my sepoys off duty were squatting in front of him, eyeing him nervously—and I don’t blame them—but he took no notice. He has a pasty face, a hook nose, and a square beard. Of course I knew at once who it must be because all sorts of jokes were being made up about him even then. I wanted to laugh.”

He turned, threw the stub of his cheroot over the parapet, and watched the falling point of light until it disappeared under the wall.

“I marched up to report myself. Then I didn’t want to laugh. He has eyes like stones; he’s very polite—never raises his voice above a whisper—smiles primly but with a sort of reserve you can’t fathom. We talked a bit, then he scrambled
on to the colossal horse and rode away up the Pike with the rolled umbrella on his shoulder. I watched him go. I still don’t know whether I want very much to see more of him, or whether I never want to meet him again.”

He couldn’t manage any more; at this moment Sir Hector did not really interest him. He’d have to break off, say good night, ride back to camp. Sumitra’s presence was warm and familiar beside him, and all their hours together had led naturally to this place and time. He knew her, and they were friends within the agreed, unspoken limits.

He did not care now whether she had murdered her husband. Here in Kishanpur the idea of murder did not seem to outrage him. Then, he thought, the old Rajah might have tried to degrade her in some beastly way, and only she could know it. Certainly she was resolute enough to kill—but surely only in anger, or perhaps for love, or for this soil of Kishanpur. She could not be a selfish killer.

There were barriers between them, defining their friendship. On her side, she would not discuss the real problems of the state with him, and he would have liked to talk to her about something so close to her heart; he had seen her absently caressing the rough wall of the fort as though it were her child’s skin. But that was her barrier; she’d built it. He put it down to fear of British interference and kept away from the forbidden subjects.

On the other side there was a fence too, around the difference in their sexes. That one he had built himself, but he was not sure now who was keeping it so carefully intact. In the beginning she had flaunted her sex at him, loading her slightest gesture with invitation, letting her body touch him on-purpose-by-accident. It had amazed and alarmed him. When he knew her better, he concluded that she was goading herself to wipe out a sense of race superiority she presumed him to have; that she wanted to force him to acknowledge beauty in an Indian woman, and desire it. If he had been another kind of Englishman, he would have felt degraded by such desire, and she had intended to degrade him. There
had been a wall of nothing behind her eyes in those days—like the nautch girl just now.

It was as well. His little fence was weak; he had a passionate love of women’s bodies, and Joanna would not—could not?—give it release, Oh, such embarrassment! He frowned. Recently Sumitra had turned shy and hardly let him see her eyes.

He braced himself to say goodbye and cut off this moment of intimacy in the high air. The magic ended here, and he could not find the right word. He searched in his mind for something casual, but he said only, “Sumitra!”

She started up and interrupted him with sudden harshness. “Captain Savage, I want to free my Dewan for his other duties. I want you to command my army, instead of him. I have decided that no one but a British officer can make it efficient, and I want it to be.”