Far Pavilions (76 page)

Still talking he continued to back away, and having edged crab-wise past a clump of grass and put at least ten paces between himself and Ash, he paused and said with a shrug of the shoulders: ‘But of what use are words? I am the
Huzoor's
servant, and I will obey his orders and go. Farewell, Sahib –’ He bowed deeply, bringing his hands together in the traditional manner.

The gesture was so familiar that the fact that he still held the stick appeared unimportant, and for the second time that night Ash was caught off guard. For the stick was not all it seemed: it happened to be the work of a gunsmith who specialized in lethal toys for the rich, and it had been acquired by the late ruler of Karidkote, whose widow, shortly before her death, had given it to Biju Ram as a reward for unspecified services. But as Ash did not know this he was unprepared for what followed.

Biju Ram had been holding the stick in his left hand, and as he brought his two hands together the right twisted the silver-mounted top; and when he straightened up from his bow he held a slim-barrelled pistol.

The explosion shattered the moonlit silence with a brilliant flash of orange and a crack of sound, but though the range was a mere matter of six or seven yards, the events of the past quarter of an hour had so shaken Biju Ram that not only were his hands unsteady, but in the agitation of the moment he had forgotten that this particular weapon tended to throw to the left, and omitted to make allowances for it. As a result, the bullet that had been intended for Ash's heart did no more than scorch his shirtsleeve and flick a fragment of skin from his arm as it passed harmlessly by to be lost on the plain.

‘
You bastard!
’ said Ash viciously and in English; and flung the knife.

Rage does not make for good marksmanship and Ash's aim was no better than Biju Ram's had been – the knife point missed the throat and grazed a collar bone that was so well protected by fat that the blade came nowhere near reaching it. But as the knife fell to the ground and a small trickle of blood ran down from the wound, Biju Ram dropped the pistol and began to scream on a thin high-pitched note of pure terror.

There was something inhuman in the sound of that screaming, while the spectacle of a grown man reduced to a frenzy of fear by the sight of his own blood trickling from a cut that would hardly have discommoded a child was so nauseating that Ash's rage turned to scorn, and instead of leaping at Biju Ram to knock him down and beat him to a pulp with his own stick, he stayed where he was and began to laugh – not at the absurdity of the sight, but because it seemed incredible to him that this miserable craven should ever have been able to terrorize anyone. Seeing him now, it was difficult to believe that so lily-livered a thing could have murdered Hira Lal, and Ash's laughter was, in its way, as ugly a sound as those womanish screams.

The blood drew a thin dark line down Biju Ram's pale chest, and he stopped screaming and bent his head in a ludicrous attempt to suck the wound. But the cut was too high to allow his mouth to reach it, and when he realized this he shrieked again and began to run to and fro like a chicken that has had its head cut off, stumbling among the grass clumps and the scattered stones in an aimless frenzy of terror, until at last he tripped and fell, and once again lay writhing on the ground.

‘I die!’ wept Biju Ram. ‘I die…’

‘You deserve to,’ said Ash unfeelingly. ‘But I am afraid that scratch is unlikely to do more than give you a stiff shoulder for a day or two, and as I still dislike the idea of killing anyone as spineless as you in cold blood, you can stop play-acting and get up and start back to the camp. It's getting late. Stand up,
Bichchhu-baba
. No one is going to hurt you.’

He laughed again, but either Biju Ram did not trust him or the shock of that second failure had finally broken his nerve, for he continued to writhe and weep.

‘Help me!’ moaned Biju Ram. ‘
Marf karo
' (have mercy), ‘
Marf karo
…!’

His voice died on a curious gasping wail, and Ash walked over to him, still laughing but moving warily in case this was merely a trap designed to lure him within range of another unsuspected weapon. But a glance at Biju Ram's grey, contorted, sweat-drenched face checked his laughter. There was something here that he did not understand. He had heard that there are people who cannot endure the sight of their own blood and are literally overcome by it, but the man on the ground, while patently in the grip of fear, was also suffering from genuine physical agony. His body arched and twisted convulsively, and Ash bent down and said roughly: ‘What is it,
Bichchhu
?’

‘
Zahr
…’ (poison), whispered Biju Ram. ‘The knife…’

Ash straightened up with a jerk and took a quick step backwards, suddenly enlightened. So that was why the man had shrieked and cowered. He had misjudged Biju Ram: it was not fear of pain that had made him grovel on the ground, but the fear of death – swift and horrible death. Nor had he been afraid of Ash. His fear had been for the knife in Ash's hand – his own knife with a blade that was steeped in poison to ensure that any wound it inflicted would prove fatal. No wonder he had watched it with such hypnotized terror, and shrieked in panic when he saw that small bright trickle of blood. The wound was indeed a small one and ‘no more than a scratch’. But, like Mercutio's it was enough: it would serve.

Biju Ram had been hoist with his own petard and there was nothing that Ash could do. It was already too late to try and suck the poison from the wound, and he had no antidote or any knowledge of what poison had been used. The camp was over a mile away, and even if it had been half that distance he could not have reached it and got back again in time to offer any help – if help were possible, which he doubted, for it was plain that the poison was a deadly one.

Biju Ram deserved to pay with his own life for the lives he had taken, or helped to take, and the irreparable harm that he had done. But even those who had most cause to hate him might have pitied him now. Yet Ash, watching him die, remembered Lalji's young, frightened face and haunted eyes – and a slab of sandstone that moved and slid as a boy in a blue satin coat rode under the Charbagh Gate in Gulkote bazaar. There were other memories too. Several carp floating belly upwards among the lily pads in a palace pool; a king cobra that had somehow found its way into the bedroom of the Yuveraj; Sita, dying of exhaustion under the rocks by the Jhelum River; Hira Lal, who had vanished in the jungle, and Jhoti – Jhoti who but for the grace of God would have died weeks ago, the innocent victim of another ‘accident’ arranged by Biju Ram.

Remembering all the evil that this man had done it was difficult to feel anything except that his fate was richly earned. And it was one that he had brought on himself, for Ash had not spoken idly when he had told him that he could go free provided he left the camp and kept away from Bhithor and Karidkote. Had he gone then he might have lived to wreak more harm and plan other murders for many years to come; but he had chosen instead to fire that shot, and it was this last act of treachery that had killed him. He had lived like a mad dog and it was only right that he should die like one, thought Ash. But he wished that it could have been over sooner, for it was not pleasant to watch, and had there been a second bullet in that ingenious pistol he would have used it unhesitatingly to put Biju Ram out of his misery. As he could not do so, he stayed, resisting the urge to turn and walk away, because it appalled him to think that anyone should have to die in this manner alone. At least he was another human being; and perhaps the fact that he was – or had been – an enemy did not matter any more.

He stayed until it was over. It did not in fact take long. Afterwards he stooped and closed the staring, sightless eyes, and retrieving the knife, cleaned it very thoroughly in the earth to remove any trace of poison. The pistol had fallen into a clump of grass and he had some difficulty in finding it, but having done so he fitted it back into place and laid the walking-stick down within reach of one of the dead man's hands.

Biju Ram would not be missed for some hours yet; and long before there was any chance of his body being found, the dawn wind would have swept the dust clear of footprints. There was therefore no point in leaving evidence that might suggest a quarrel and lead to questions being asked, and as it would be obvious that the cause of death was poison, it would be better, from every point of view, if it were put down to snake-bite.

Ash picked up the knife and having stained it with the fast-congealing blood, dropped it again and went off to search for one of the long double-pronged thorns that grow on
kikar
trees. Returning with this, he jabbed it into the dead man's flesh just below the wound. The two small punctures were almost exactly the marks that a striking snake would have made, and he cut above it would be taken for a fruitless attempt by the victim to stop the venom from spreading upwards. The only mystery would be why Biju Ram should have left the camp alone and at night, and strayed so far. But he heat would probably be blamed for that. They would decide that he could not sleep and so had gone out to walk in the moonlight, and that feeling tired he must have sat down to rest, and been bitten by a snake, which, remembering that Hira Lal's death had been arranged to look like the work of a tiger, was singularly apt. ‘The gods, after all, are just,’ thought Ash, ‘for if it had been left to me, I would have been fool enough to let him go.’

There remained only Hira Lal's earring.

Ash took it out of his pocket and looked at it, and saw the black pearl gather and reflect the moonlight as it had done on that last, long-ago night in the Queen's balcony. And as he looked, the words that Hira Lal had spoken then came back to him, and it was almost as though the man himself was speaking to him again, very softly, and from very far away: ‘
Make haste, boy. It grows late and you have no time to waste. Go now – and may the gods go with you. Namaste
!’

Well, he – or perhaps the black pearl – had avenged Hira Lal. But the pearl held too many memories, and remembering how Biju Ram had come by it, it seemed to Ash a thing of ill-omen. Its possession could have brought little satisfaction to the thief, since to own it was proof of murder, so it had to be kept hidden away, with an ever-present risk of discovery, for as long as anyone remembered Hira Lal; and in the end it had brought only death. The pearl had done its work, and now Ash could not wait to be rid of it.

There was a rat hole near the clump of pampas grass in which he had lain in wait for Biju Ram, and judging from the lack of tracks about it, one that was no longer tenanted. Ash went back to it, and having dropped in the earring, filled it in with earth and small stones that he stamped hard down; and when he had scattered a handful of dust over the spot there was no longer any trace of the hole, or any indication that there had ever been one.

He stood for a moment or two looking down at the spot and thinking that perhaps, one day, someone as yet unborn would unearth the earring and wonder how it came there. But they would never know, and anyway, by then the thing would be almost valueless, for pearls too can die.

The dawn wind had begun to stir the grasses when Ash turned on his heel and started back to the camp. But the sun had been well above the horizon by the time that one of Biju Ram's servants (that same Karam who had been allotted the role of scapegoat) reported that his master was missing.

He would, explained Karam, have disclosed this much sooner had he not imagined that his master must have gone out unexpectedly early and would soon return. It was not his business to question his master's comings and goings, but he had become increasingly anxious when tent after tent came down and still his master had not returned to eat his morning meal or give any orders for the day. Tentative inquiries among the servants and the other members of the young prince's entourage having proved fruitless, Karam had finally reported the matter to an officer of the guard, who had raised the alarm.

The search for the missing man was complicated by the enormous size of the camp and the fact that it was by then on the move, and it is more than likely that Biju Ram's body would never have been found had it not been for the kites and the vultures. But the sun had not yet risen when the first winged scavenger dropped out of the skies, to be followed by another and another; and presently one of the searchers had seen them and ridden out to investigate.

The discovery had been made only just in time, for half an hour later there would have been nothing to show how Biju Ram had died, and there would have been talk of foul play and, inevitably, exhaustive inquiries. As it was, in spite of a good deal of damage from beak and claw it was still possible to see that his death was due to poison and that his body bore the mark of a snake's fangs – two small punctures near the collar bone. How or why he had come to be in that spot was less easy to explain, but as Ash had surmised, this was eventually put down to a combination of heat and insomnia, and this solution seemed to satisfy everyone.

Mulraj had sent word that the camp would halt until further orders, and later that day Biju Ram's remains were cremated with due ceremony on a pyre of
kikar
wood and dry grass, hastily collected from the surrounding country and drenched with
ghee
. Next morning, when the night wind had dispersed the ashes and the charred earth had cooled, the fragments of bone that remained were carefully collected in order that they could be taken to the Ganges and thrown into that sacred river. ‘And as there are none of his relatives here, it is only right that his friends should take it upon themselves to perform this pious duty,’ said Mulraj, straight-faced. ‘Therefore I have arranged that Pran and Mohan, and Sen Gupta, with their servants and those of Biju Ram's, shall leave at once for Benares. For saving only Allahabad, there is no more sacred spot at which a man's ashes may be consigned to the waters of Mother Gunga.’

Ash received this Machiavellian announcement with a respect that verged on awe, for with Biju Ram dead, there was still the problem of how to rid the camp of those who had been his closest associates, and Ash could see no way out of it that would not involve argument and uproar and a good deal of dangerous speculation. Mulraj's solution was an admirably simple one, though there could be a flaw in it –