Soul of Fire (39 page)

They came through the forest at a gallop, following
some ill-defined path that Bhishma clearly knew quite well.

Among the trees, breathing in the smell of leaves and dried grass—feeling the warmth of the sun come and go on his back, as light and shadow succeeded each other on their ride—William started coming out of his despondent state. Oh, it might all be true that he was attracted to members of his own sex, but what did it matter? How could anyone else penetrate into his mind and soul and see what was there?

Other men, he dared say, had faced this and bullied through it, by pretending—no, by convincing themselves—that they were something they were not. He was not a warm person. He’d never been. All his passion, his intemperate feelings, manifested only in his prophetic dreams. In his waking life, he was viewed as cold and correct, he knew. But none of these said anything of what he felt inside.

Before he’d realized this, he’d been afraid that he was never going to fall in love with anyone—that he never would know the companionship his parents enjoyed. Nothing had changed, or nothing much. He would never have that. At least he hoped he wouldn’t, for it would be more difficult—painful—if he did fall in love with someone desperately, a feeling that must never be shown.

But he didn’t think this likely. It was simply not in his nature. He suspected he was very much like his father—a conventional man with conventional thoughts. If he’d been normal, then his wife might well have become the love of his life, because it was expected. And over time and her retelling, he might even convince himself he’d not married the second daughter of a well-to-do man who could further his church career, but a blond beauty with whom he’d fallen in love at first sight by a flowering yellow rosebush.

Things being as they were, he might now and then feel a wild attraction, but he was unlikely to fall in love. Providing he could control his lust—and he felt as though he’d trained all his life to do that—no one would ever know, and the course of his life need not be altered. He would get promoted once the queen’s minister forgave him his unwillingness to marry Sofie Warington. He would then marry a well-to-do girl of decent background. In the course of time there would be children, and quiet teas by the fireplace on a winter evening, with the English rain pattering against the conventional windows.

Having thought himself through this labyrinth, he felt more like himself as Bhishma slowed, then stopped and dismounted.

“Are we near?” William asked.

Bhishma put his finger to his lips, commanding silence, and spoke back in a quiet whisper as he tied his horse to a tree. “Not that near,” he said. “But as near as I dare go with a horse, and in any state that might look like we’re doing more than strolling the forest and talking of something relating to the garrison.”

“Oh,” William said, dismounting and tying his own horse beside Bhishma’s, then proceeding afoot on a meandering forest path ahead.

It wasn’t so much a path as a tunnel, William thought—with leaves ahead and leaves to the side, and light filtering greenly through to cast an enchantment upon the area.

Bhishma turned back and whispered, “This passage will keep us from being seen by the sentinels in the camp. They patrol this area routinely, but tigers are . . .” He shrugged. “They prefer to look down and keep sentinel from the top of trees. A virtue, of course, for tigers, who can then drop upon the unsuspecting prey. But also an advantage for us, if we are willing to be humble and follow a forest path with plenty of covering.”

“And that was why we left our horses so far back,” William said.

“Of course. We couldn’t risk their being seen.”

“You’ve spent a lot of time watching the tigers, haven’t you?”

Bhishma nodded. The look he threw William over his shoulder showed a face knit in concentrated worry. “I’ve been watching them a long time. I don’t like talks of mutiny, of destroying all the Englishmen . . . of sending them all from India.”

“And you don’t agree with them?”

Bhishma turned around, his eyes dancing with some sort of amusement, his face wreathed in smiles. “Sahib,” he said, “I’ve answered this before. Are you arguing for Indian independence or are you testing me?”

“Neither,” William said, mildly surprised. “I’m simply curious. I guess I’ve been curious since I arrived. You—all of you, though I suspect there is as much difference between you and my sweeper as there is between you and Englishmen—”

“May it please heaven,” Bhishma said, still in a tone of great amusement.

“Well, yes, but all the same, you know, it has been working at my mind. I’m not of the school—I think very few people of my generation truly are—that thinks all natives are stupid or somehow incapable. You clearly are not. Or no more so than many Englishmen.”

“Thank you,” Bhishma said, with a slight bow, and an unmistakable impression of sarcasm.

“No, what I mean is, I don’t know you very well, to know exactly how intelligent or . . . or accomplished you are, but what I’ve seen of you seems perfectly sensible, perfectly capable of rational behavior. I don’t . . . I don’t mean you are in any way inferior. That was exactly my point, and that being my point, it makes me wonder why you wouldn’t desire independence or work toward it. It would seem foolish to me,” he said, with sudden, startling realization, “if I were Indian, to submit to Englishmen sent from abroad simply because they were sent from an empress, who actually never set foot in the country.”

Bhishma smiled a broad smile. “Admirable, Sahib. But truly, listen to what I said. I did not say that I wouldn’t embrace independence, that I’m not proud of my own country, or that I think it right we should be ruled from abroad by another people. What I said, Sahib, is that I don’t want a mutiny, a rebellion like the one of 1857.”

His face went suddenly very serious. “My grandfather was one of mutinying sepoys in 1857. He was also one of those killed—horribly—in the retaliation. Cut to pieces in front of his wife and children.”

“Oh,” William exclaimed. And to Bhishma’s curious look, he added, “My grandfather died in the mutiny. He was one of the men shot down by the boats, after being told he’d be allowed to embark.”

Bhishma shook his head, his brow knit in an odd expression. “My grandfather was probably one of the shooters,” he said, as though it were marvelous. “But,” he went on with renewed vigor, “that’s the whole point. You really can’t go on making the same mistakes. The rebellion might have looked to my grandfather and his compatriots like a brilliant, daring feat. To the rest of the world, though, the massacre of innocent women and children only showed them as barbarians who should never be allowed to rule themselves. And to ourselves, too, I think, as time went on. And the reprisals . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t suppose you have any idea of the reprisals—of men cut to pieces in front of their families, of . . .” He shook his head again. “You don’t want to know.”

“I can imagine,” William said, more drily than he meant to. Partly because, of course, he
could
imagine it, all too vividly. It was of a piece with the images of the massacre—the gruesome woodcuts in period books, the story of the murdered English ladies thrown down a well and the two little English boys, whose ghosts are said to still appear, thrown in alive after them. Men in regiments coming in right after the massacres—what would they not do? They would, of course, do the same as they’d heard, only from the other side. And then both stories would get exaggerated, handed down the generations, perpetuating the hatred and injury.

“Yes, perhaps you can,” Bhishma said, very quietly. “You see, then . . . you see how very important it is that I should not allow this to happen again?”

“I suppose I do, yes.” And both men resumed walking in silence.

They walked what seemed to William a long time. Here and there, growls erupted, making William shudder. But Bhishma seemed unconcerned, only pausing occasionally to listen to the growls—trying to analyze them, William thought.

They emerged into a small clearing that was likewise covered from above with vines and foliage. It occurred to William that the tunnel and the clearing looked as though they’d been encouraged to grow that way. Bhishma said he’d been watching the tigers a long time. William wondered what he meant by that. A weaving of a vine here, a twisting of two branches together, and it would probably be less than three seasons in the sweltering climate of India for the covering to grow this way. Probably. Bhishma now appeared to him far more calculating than William had thought when he’d first met him.

Bhishma put his finger to his lips again, as though thinking that William might ask questions, then, half-hunched to avoid touching the canopy above, he led William to the edge of what turned out to be a small rise.

From there, they could look down on a city. It seemed ancient and magnificent at the same time. From their vantage, they could see past the walls that encircled it and into the main street, lined by tall buildings in golden stone. They were more elaborate than any William had seen elsewhere in India. They had the traditional verandas of Indian homes, but each of them was hung with either a bright and expensive-looking tapestry, or with what seemed to be the same tapestries woven of flowers. Everyone on the streets was dressed in what must be the equivalent of their Sunday best. And as William watched, the streets themselves were being decked in flowers—different colors of flowers weaving different patterns upon the yellowish dirt.

Bhishma said something under his breath that had the feel of an imprecation, and though William could hardly understand the word, he understood the tone of it all too well.

He looked sharply at Bhishma, and the man turned to whisper in William’s ear, his breath hot and vaguely curry-scented—a spicy, not unpleasant smell. “They are preparing for some ritual ceremony. As they would if they are going on what they’d consider a holy war against the occupiers.”

William turned and tried to whisper just as low. Bhishma’s ear was surprisingly small and well formed, and the same bronze color as the rest of his skin. “This is the city of the tigers, then?”

“What we can see of it,” Bhishma said. And then, shaking his head, as if in impatience at himself, or perhaps afraid of what William might ask next, “You see, every one of the were cities and towns has a . . . a veil that only the magic of their members can penetrate—something that doesn’t allow anyone not of the same . . . magic stripe to see all of it. What we see here is part of their capital city, the part where they remain human. The rest . . .” He shrugged. “The rest of their kingdom has been magicked so that it folds upon itself.” He looked at William, and must have read perfect incomprehension in his eyes. “There is . . . a portal and an illusion, so that if you step over the border of the Kingdom of the Tigers on the north, you will find yourself suddenly on the south side without realizing that you have transversed any great distance. All these magics have been perfected by the weres from the dawn of time, to keep themselves safe from humankind.”

William digested this and nodded, wondering why British weres didn’t have the same contrivance. Or did they? Had Charlemagne, by concentrating the magics in Europe to himself, denied most of the Europeans enough magic to be truly dimorphic? Or did St. Maur have a secret dragon king to whom he owed allegiance? Somehow, William couldn’t imagine that.

Aloud he said, “Are you sure it is not just one of their holy days, or one of the festivals they observe?”

Bhishma nodded. “I know all their festivals and everything they observe, Sahib. This is not one of them. Besides . . . I have some capacity to understand their language—their signals spoken in roads—and what I’ve been hearing all morning . . .”

“Yes?”

“They expect their king to return triumphant soon, with the restored jewel that will allow them to reclaim control of their kingdom. And control over India.”

SHADES OF MADNESS; WHOM TO SUSPECT; THE MOST DARING OF SOLUTIONS