Far Pavilions (120 page)

The shadowy enclosure was roughly fifteen foot square and it appeared to be full of people, some of whom were seated. But Ash saw only one. A slim figure standing a little apart from the rest in an attitude that was curiously rigid, and that suggested, starkly, a captive wild animal immobilized by terror.

Juli
…

He had not really believed it until then. Even after those hasty explanations, and though he held the proof in his hand, he had not been sure that it was not some trick on the part of Sarji and Gobind to lure him away and keep him prisoner until it was all over and too late for him to intervene.

She was standing in front of the unlined
chik
, so that at first he only saw her as a dark figure outlined against the oblong of light: a faceless figure dressed like the others in the garments of a palace servant. Because of those clothes, a stranger entering the room would have taken her for a man. Yet Ash had known her instantly. He would, he thought, have known her even if he had been blind, because the tie between them was stronger than sight and went deeper than externals.

He pulled away the folds of orange and red muslin that had been wrapped about his face, and they looked at each other across the width of that shadowed room. But though Ash had put aside the loose end of his turban, Anjuli did not follow his example, and her face remained hidden except for her eyes.

The beautiful, gold-flecked eyes that he remembered so well were still beautiful – they could never be anything else. But as his own became accustomed to the subdued light he realized that there was neither gladness nor welcome in them, but such a look as might have belonged to the child Kay in Hans Andersen's fairy-story
The Snow Queen,
whose heart had been pierced by a sliver of glass: a blank, frozen look that appalled him.

He started forward to go to her, but was prevented by someone who moved quickly between them and laid a restraining hand on his arm: Gobind, unfamiliar in the same disguise as Juli wore, but with his face uncovered.

‘Ashok,’ said Gobind. He had not raised his voice, but both tone and touch conveyed a warning so vividly that Ash checked, remembering just in time that except for Sarji, and Juli herself, no one present knew that there was anything between the widowed Rani and himself – and must not know it; especially at this juncture, since there was not one of them who would not be as shocked by it as Sarji or Kaka-ji had been, and the situation was dangerous enough already without his making it worse by alienating his allies.

He forced his gaze from Anjuli though it was an effort to do so, and looked instead at Gobind, who permitted himself to draw a deep breath of relief – he had feared that the Sahib was about to shame the Rani and embarrass them all by some open demonstration of feeling. That danger at least had been averted, and he withdrew his hand and said: ‘I thank the gods that you have come; there is much to do, and these here will need watching. The woman most of all, for she would scream if she could, and there are a score of guards within hearing – in the pavilion above us, as well as below.’

‘What woman?’ said Ash, who had seen only one.

Gobind gestured with a slim hand and for the first time Ash became aware of the others in the curtained room. There were seven of them, not counting Manilal, and only one of these was a woman – presumably a waiting-woman of Juli's. The obese, slug-like man whose pallid cheeks and numerous chins were as smooth as a baby's could only be one of the Zenana eunuchs, and for the rest, two from their dress were palace servants, another two troopers of the State Forces, and one a member of the Rana's bodyguard. All of them were seated on the floor, and all had been gagged and trussed up like fowls – except the last, who was dead. He had been stabbed through the left eye, and the handle of the stiletto-like knife that had been driven into his brain still protruded from the wound.

Gobind's work, thought Ash. No one else would have known how to strike with such deadly accuracy, and it was the only vulnerable spot. The surcoat of chain-mail and the heavy leather helmet with its deep fringe of linked metal would have deflected any attack on the wearer's head, throat or body. There had been only one chance…

‘Yes,’ said Gobind, answering the unspoken question. ‘We could not stun him with a blow on the head as we had done with the others, so it was necessary to kill him. Besides, he spoke through the curtain to the eunuch, not knowing that we had the creature safely tied, and from what he said, it became plain that there are those who mean to see that Anjuli-Bai is punished for escaping the fire and thereby failing to do her duty as a Rani of Bhithor. She is not to be allowed to return to Karidkote or retire to one of the smaller palaces, but will go back to the Women's Quarters of the Rung Mahal, where she will spend the rest of her life. And lest she should find that life too pleasant, it has been arranged that as soon as her sister, the Senior Rani, is dead and can no longer intervene to save her, her eyes are to be put out.’

Ash caught his breath in a choking gasp as though the air had been driven from his lungs, and Gobind said grimly: ‘Yes, you may well stare. But that is what was planned. The brazier is out there in readiness, and the irons too; and once the pyre was well alight the thing would have been done – here, in this place and by those two, the eunuch and that carrion who lies there with my knife in his brain, the woman and these others helping. When I think of it I am sorry that I did not kill them all.’

‘That can be remedied,’ said Ash between his teeth. He was shaken by a cold, killing rage that made him long to get his hands on the fat eunuch's throat, and the woman's too, and choke the life out of them – they and the four others, bound and helpless as they were – because of the inhuman thing they had planned to do to Juli. But Gobind's quiet, commanding voice cut through the murderous fog that filled his brain, and brought him back to sanity.

‘Let them be,’ said Gobind. ‘They are only tools. Those who ordered or bribed them to do this thing will be walking in the funeral procession and beyond the reach of our vengeance. It is not justice to kill the slave who does as he is bid, while the master he obeys goes free. Besides, we have no time for vengeance. If we are to leave here alive we shall need that man's gear, and one of the servants' also. Manilal and I will see to that if you and your friend will watch the prisoners.’

He did not wait for an answer, but turned away and began to remove the dead man' accoutrements, starting with the padded leather helmet that was as yet comparatively free from blood, for he had been careful not to withdraw the knife and the wound had bled very little.

Ash allowed himself a brief glance at Juli, but she was still gazing out at the burning-ground and the waiting multitudes; and with her back towards him she was once again only a dark figure silhouetted against the light. He looked away again, and taking out his revolver, stood guard over the prisoners while Sarji watched the entrance and Gobind and Manilal worked swiftly and methodically, unfastening buckles and stripping off the surcoat, which for all their care was not a silent process.

The chain-mail clashed and clinked against the marble floor and jingled as they handled it, and the noise it made seemed very loud in that constricted space. But the surrounding curtains shut it in, and the sound of the enormous crowd outside was more than enough to cover anything less than a scream – or a shot; it would take a considerable commotion to cover that last, and Ash was well aware that the revolver was useless, for if he fired it the guards and servants on the floors above and below them would come running.

Fortunately the captives did not appear to realize this. The mere sight of it had proved enough to make them stop straining at their bonds and sit very still, their eyes above the clumsy gags white-rimmed with terror and staring fixedly at the unfamiliar weapon in his hand.

Gobind and Manilal finished disrobing the corpse and began to help Sarji remove his palace livery and replace it with the dead man's. ‘It is fortunate that you are of a size in the matter of height,’ observed Gobind, slipping the chain surcoat over his head, ‘though I could wish you were stouter, for that thing there was more heavily built than you. Well, it cannot be helped, and luckily those outside will be too interested in the funeral ceremonies to notice small details.’

‘– we hope,’ amended Sarji with a curt laugh. ‘But what if they do?’

‘If they do, we die,’ said Gobind unemotionally. ‘But I think that we shall live. Now let us see to these –’ he turned his attention to the bound captives and looked them over critically.

The woman's dark-skinned face was green with fear and the eunuch's pallid one twitched and trembled uncontrollably. Neither expected any mercy (and with good reason, since they themselves would have shown none to the widowed Rani), and having seen their fellow-torturer killed, they probably imagined that the manner of it – the swift upward stab through the eye – had been in retaliation for the injury he himself had intended to inflict on the Junior Rani, and that they, as his partners in guilt, would be dealt with in the same way.

They could well have been had it not been for Gobind – and for something that Manilal found hidden among the women's clothing – for neither Sarji nor Ash would have had the least compunction in putting an end to them by that or any other method, if their continued existence in any way threatened Anjuli's safety, or their own. Both were in agreement with Manilal, who said flatly: ‘We had best kill them all: it is no more than they deserve, and no more than they would do to us if they stood in our place. Let us kill them now and thus make certain that they cannot raise an alarm.’

But Gobind had been trained to save life and not to take it, and he would not agree. He had killed the helmeted guard because there had been no other way of silencing him; it had been necessary and he did not regret it. But to kill the others in cold blood would serve no useful purpose (provided that they were secured so that they could not summon help) and would only rank as murder. At this point Manilal, stooping to tighten the woman's bonds, had discovered that she had something hard and bulky hidden in a fold of cloth wrapped about her waist, and removing it, found it to be a necklace of raw gold set with pearls and carved emeralds: a thing of such magnificence that no waiting-woman could possibly have come by it honestly.

Manilal handed it to Gobind with the comment that the she-devil was clearly also a thief, but the woman shook her head in frantic denial, and Gobind said shortly that it was more likely to be a bribe. ‘Look at her’ – she had cringed in her bonds and was staring at him as though hypnotized – ‘this was blood-money, paid in advance for the foul work she had agreed to do.
Pah!
’

He dropped the necklace as though it had been a poisonous snake, and Ash stooped quickly and picked it up. Neither Gobind nor Manilal could possibly have recognized that fabulous jewel, but Ash had seen it twice before: once when the more valuable items listed in the dowries of the brides from Karidkote had been checked in his presence, and again when Anjuli had worn it at the formal departure from the Pearl Palace. He said harshly: ‘There should be two bracelets also. See if the eunuch has them. Quickly.’

The eunuch had not (they were found on the two palace servants) but he had something else that Ash had no difficulty in recognizing: a collar of table-cut diamonds fringed with pearls.

He stood looking at it with unseeing eyes. So the vultures were already dividing the spoils! – the Rana had only died last night, but Juli's enemies had wasted no time in seizing her personal possessions, and had actually used some of her own jewels to bribe her would-be torturers. The irony of that would appeal to someone like the Diwan, who had once hoped to retain her dowry while at the same repudiating her bridal contract and having her returned in disgrace to Karidkote. And from his knowledge of the man and his devious mind, Ash did not believe for a moment that the Diwan would pay such lavish bribes in return for something that he could order to be done for nothing.

It was far more likely that the choice of those jewels had been deliberate, for once the appalling deed had been done, the Diwan would be able to deny all knowledge of it and have the woman and her accomplices arrested. Then, when the jewels were found on them, they could be accused of having blinded the Rani so that she would not discover that they had been stealing her belongings, and they would be condemned to death and garotted. After which he would have nothing to fear, and with his cat's-paws dead, could safely take back the jewels. ‘A neat, Machiavellian piece of treachery in fact,’ thought Ash cynically.

He looked down at the gagged and bound creatures that only a minute ago he had wanted to murder, and thought: ‘No. It's not fair.’ And with that old, familiar protest of his childhood, a large part of his rage against them died. They were vile and venial, but Gobind was right; it was not fair to take revenge upon a mere instrument while the hand and brain that guided it escaped scot-free.

He bent above the eunuch and the man's eyes bulged with terror, expecting that the end had come; but Ash had only wanted a piece of muslin. He ripped it from the man's clothes, and knotting the jewels in it, stowed them away in the bosom of his robe, and said curtly: ‘It is time we went. But we had better see to it first that these vermin do not raise an alarm too soon. There is nothing to stop them rolling over to the curtains and wriggling out from underneath them the moment we have gone. They should be tied together and then lashed to one of those pillars. Have you any more rope?’

‘No, we have used all that we brought with us,’ said Gobind. ‘But there is plenty of cloth.’

He stooped for Sarji's discarded turban, and using that and the turbans of the prisoners, who were already gagged with their waist-cloths, they lashed the six side by side in a circle with their backs to one of the central pillars, and bound them to it in a cocoon of vividly coloured muslin.

‘There. That should keep them safe enough,’ said Ash, tying a final reef-knot and jerking it tight. ‘And now for God's sake, let us go. We've wasted too much time already, and the sooner we get out of here the better.’