The Far Pavilions (58 page)

There was not enough light to see how big the cave was, but judging by the hollow sound of the horses' hooves it was a large one; and they had reached it in time – but only just in time. The storm had been so close on their heels that even as they turned to face the entrance, a dark curtain appeared to be drawn across it and the daylight was blotted out as a churning, choking, maelstrom of dust whirled down the valley, driven by a wind that shrieked as though the Valkyries rode it, or witches from the Brocken.

The noise of the gale filled the quiet cave with sound and made the darkness reverberate with a hollow, high-pitched drone that seemed to come from all points of the compass at once, and dust poured in through the doorway until the close air within was suddenly so thick with it that breathing became difficult, and Anjuli began to cough and choke.

She heard Ash calling something, but the words were lost in the howl of the wind and the echoes that they awoke in the recesses of the cave. Then his hand closed upon her arm and he was shouting into her ear: ‘Take your coat off and put it over your head. And get back into the cave – as far as you can.’ He brushed away the silky hair that was getting into his mouth, and added: ‘Carefully now, Larla; don't go falling over anything.’

The old endearment had slipped out unconsciously, and he did not know that he had used it, for he had other things on his mind; notably the horses, who were backing and snorting in an effort to escape from the stifling dust, and might panic at any moment and lash out in the darkness, injuring each other if not Juli or himself. And if the horses went lame it was going to mean a long walk back to camp – if there was still a camp. He did not want to think of what might be happening there, and in any case there was no point in worrying about a situation that was completely beyond his control. But at least he should be able to do something about Baj Raj and the mare.

He had given his handkerchief to Juli, so there was nothing for it but to remove his shirt and tear it into strips; and he did so – using his teeth to start it tearing and tying the first strip over his nose and mouth as a filter. It was easier to breathe after that, and he kept his eyes shut against the dust and did the rest by touch, soothing the horses and knotting up their reins out of harm's way, and finally fastening a loop of cloth between each animal's forelegs, just above the fetlock, in the time-honoured fashion of the Indian villager who slips a similar loop of grass rope on his pony so that it can only hobble, and lets it out to graze in the sure knowledge that it cannot stray too far or come to much harm.

That done, he turned his attention to exploring the cave in order to see if it went far enough back to allow them all to get out of this stifling smother and into cleaner air.

The wind was blowing slantwise down the valley and slightly away from the cave, and the overhang of rock helped in some small way to deflect it. But there was no way of blocking the entrance, and the dust fumed in through it like steam from a boiling kettle. The further away they could get from it the better for all of them, and Ash moved back cautiously into the darkness, feeling his way along one wall.

He had gone perhaps twenty yards when his hand touched something that was unmistakably metal, and further investigation showed that someone, presumably the long-ago occupant who had closed in the cave mouth with those mud bricks, had driven several short iron staples into the rock wall; though for what purpose was not clear. The staples were spaced in a long slanting line, and there were five of them, and may well have been others higher up the wall and out of reach. But at least four were at a reasonable level, and Ash blessed the unknown man who had put them there, for though they were corroded by rust and one snapped off in his hand, the others would serve his purpose, as the air in this part of the cave was more breathable than that by the open doorway.

He groped his way back to the horses and returned with Baj Raj, who was jerking his head wildly from side to side in an effort to escape the dust, and had to be coaxed to follow. But once out of the worst of the smother, and with his reins hitched to a staple in the wall, he stopped shivering and stood quietly, and Ash went back for the mare, and having tethered her in the same manner, wiped the caked dust from his eyes and opened them a fraction to see if there were any signs that the storm was abating. But the doorway still showed barely lighter than the surrounding blackness of the cave, and outside the wind still howled past with the racket of an express train whistling in a tunnel.

It looked, thought Ash, as though it was going to be a long business, and he wished that he had paid more attention when the headmen of villages in their line of march had spoken of hot winds and dust-storms and other vagaries of the Rajputana weather. But having learned that the season of such storms was still well ahead, he had not troubled to ask questions about them, imagining that that was something that could safely be left until later and need not concern the Karidkote camp until the wedding ceremonies were over and they were free to start north again. But he regretted now that he had not asked them earlier, for he had no idea how long a dust-storm could be expected to last. Hours? – or only minutes?

It seemed to him that this one had been raging for close on an hour already, but on reflection he revised that estimate. He could not have taken more than ten minutes to tear up his shirt and find those providential staples, and to tether the horses. Say fifteen at most, and surely there could not be enough dust in all Rajputana, dry as it was, to sustain such a storm as this for more than a limited period? Unless, of course it was blowing in a circle – which was something else he did not know. But at least it could not last indefinitely; as soon as the wind expended its first violence and began to die down, the clouds of dust would sink back to earth and it would be over. Though not, at this rate, until the sun had set.

There was a watch in the pocket of Ash's riding breeches, but he had not looked at it since he left the camp, and as he could not see it now he had very little idea of what time it was. But it occurred to him that the storm alone might not account for the fact that he could barely make out the entrance to the cave. Once the sun had set, the interval of twilight was very short, for here night did not come slowly, as in the West, but hastily, on the heels of day. And if the sun was already down they were going to have to find their way back in the dark, across unfamiliar country and through a maze of hills.

‘Mulraj will send out men to search for us,’ thought Ash; though with more hope than confidence, because it seemed to him only too likely that the camp would have been thrown into such appalling chaos that Mulraj and the rest of them would have their hands full and be forced to wait until daylight before sending out search-parties, by which time, with any luck, he and Juli would have got back on their own. Meanwhile, for as long as the storm raged they would have to stay where they were and make the best of it.

He pulled down the strip of cambric that he had tied over his nose and mouth, and sniffing the air, found that it was a good deal better than he had expected. It would probably be better still further back in the cave – particularly if, as the echoes suggested, there were side caves leading out of this one, which the dust would not have entered – and at least it was pleasantly cool in here. The heat of the sun's rays had not been able to penetrate this far into the hillside, and after the burning heat outside, the drop in temperature was considerable; he hoped that Juli would not catch a chill, for she was wearing only a thin cotton
achkan
; and possibly nothing under it.

He called out to her, and once again the cave filled with echoes that fought with the weird drone of the wind as a dozen voices shouted from different points in the darkness, some close and some far away, their words lost in the clamour. The echoes faded but the noise of the wind remained, and Ash did not know if Juli had answered him or not, for her voice would have been drowned in the medley of sounds. But suddenly and unreasonably, half-a-dozen hideous possibilities sprang into his mind, and his heart contracted in a spasm of sheer terror. He had warned her to be careful, but suppose there was a pit in the floor of the cave? – a well, even? Or some deep fissure that went far down into the rock, into which she could have fallen? Or were there other caves heading out of this one in a chain of caverns and passages going back and back into the hillside, branching and twisting so that anyone groping through them would soon become hopelessly lost…? And supposing there were snakes…

Panic gripped him and he ran forward into the darkness, his hands outstretched, calling, ‘Juli, – Juli. Where are you? Are you all right? Answer me, Juli!’ And the echoes reverberated round him, mocking him; now fading, now rising above the deafening croon of the wind:
Juli
…
Juli
…
Juli
..

Once he thought he heard her answer; but he could not be sure where the sound had come from and he would, at that moment, have sold his soul for a light or a few seconds of silence. Straining to listen, he could hear nothing but the bagpipe drone of the wind and the maddening echoes of his own voice, and he stumbled on blindly, groping in the inky blackness and meeting only rock and rough earth, or emptiness.

He must have turned a corner into a side cave without knowing it, because all at once the volume of noise diminished as sharply as if a door had closed behind him, and the air was almost free from dust. He heard no new sound and the blackness was still as impenetrable; but suddenly he knew that it was from here that Juli had answered him, and that she was still here, for there was a faint fragrance of rose-petals in the stale, cool air. He turned towards it, and caught her in his arms.

Her arms and shoulders, her breasts and her slender waist were smooth and warm and naked against his own bare flesh, for having thrown the
achkan
over her head as a protection against the choking dust, she had pulled it away in order to call to him, and lost it somewhere in the darkness. The cheek that was pressed to his was wet with tears and she was breathing in hard gasps as though she had been running, for she had heard him shouting and had turned back to go to him, afraid that it had been a cry for help, because there had been so much urgency in the sound. But confused by the echoes she had lost her bearings and blundered round in the dark, bruising herself against unexpected outcrops of rock and sobbing and calling as she searched for him in the clamorous darkness.

They clung together for a long minute, not moving or speaking, and then Ash turned his head and kissed her.

24

If the dust-storm had not blown up so quickly… If they had noticed its approach earlier… If the cave had been smaller and they had been able to see; or hear…

Much later, Ash was to think of that and to wonder if it would have made any difference? Perhaps. Though not if old Uncle Akbar, after whom he had been named, had been right.

Uncle Akbar and Koda Dad had both assured him that all men are born into the world with their fate tied about their necks, and cannot escape it.

‘
What is written, is written.
’ How many times had he heard Koda Dad say that? And Akbar Khan had said it before him – once when Ash stood looking down at the dead body of a tiger, shot five minutes earlier from the machan where they had waited for hours; and again, on an equally memorable occasion, in the courtyard of Shah Jehan's great mosque in Delhi, where the crowd had been so great that two men had fallen from the gateway and been killed, and Ash had demanded explanations. But in the present instance, the question of predestination versus free-will was of purely academic interest; the fact remained that he had failed to notice the storm, and because the cave in which they had taken refuge had been very large and dark and full of noises, he had been seized by panic at the thought of Juli lost in it – breaking her neck by falling into some hideous underground cavern, or treading on a cobra in the dark.

Had he kept his head he would almost certainly have succeeded in keeping his good resolutions as well. In which case the two of them would have sat out the storm without touching each other, and set off for the camp the moment they heard the wind drop. Yet if they had done so they would have missed Kaka-ji and the
ruth,
and returned, innocent, to find themselves the centre of a major scandal and facing serious charges.

In the event, they had no idea of how long the storm lasted or when the wind dropped. It could have been an hour, or two hours, or ten. They had lost all count of time, and even the silence and the fact that they could hear each other's smallest whisper did not remind them of its passing.

‘I never meant this to happen,’ murmured Ash; which was true enough. But if there had been any hope at all of his making a last effort to avoid it, it was lost when Juli, found at last, had flung her arms about his neck and clung to him. And then he had kissed her –

There was nothing of tenderness in that kiss. It was hard and violent, but though it bruised her lips and took the breath from her body, she did not draw back from it but clung closer, and the moment was almost one of desperation, as though they strove against each other as enemies, intent on inflicting pain and careless of receiving it.

The brief frenzy ended, and Juli's taut body relaxed as the panic ebbed away from her, leaving her soft and supple in his arms. Desperation died and gave place to a slow delight that burned its way through every vein and nerve and fibre. Her tears were salt on Ash's tongue, and he could feel the ripple of her hair all about him: long, silky strands that smelt of roses and slid over his skin like a cloak of feathers, or caught and clung to him as though they had a life of their own. Her lips were no longer tense with terror, but warm and eager and sweet beyond relief, and he kissed them again and again until at last they opened under his own, and he felt her whole body shiver with desire.

He would have lifted her then and laid her down on the floor of the cave, but even as his arm tightened, he checked himself and broke off that kiss to ask what seemed, in the circumstances, a superfluous question. Yet he too had been panic-stricken in the inky darkness, and knowing that Juli had been equally frantic, he had to be sure that her passionate response to his kisses was not merely an emotional reaction from terror. Therefore he spoke harshly, forcing himself to say the words, because he was suddenly afraid of how she might reply. ‘Juli, do you love me?’

The cave, and caves beyond the cave, repeated it after him, again and again:
do you love me?
…
you love me
…
love me
… And Anjuli laughed very softly – but so lovingly that his heart seemed to turn over – and answered against his ear, too low for the echo to catch her voice: ‘How can you ask me that when you know I have loved you all my life? Yes, always! From the very beginning.’

Ash's hands went up to grip her smooth shoulders, and he shook her roughly and said: ‘As a brother. But that is no use to me. I want a lover – a wife. I want all of you – for my own, for always. Do you love me like that? Do you, Juli?’

She leaned her cheek against his left hand, rubbing it caressingly as it held her shoulder, and said slowly, as though she were reciting a poem or repeating a profession of faith: ‘I love you. I have always loved you. I have always been yours and I always will be; and if I loved you first as a brother, it was not a brother that I waited for as I grew up and became a woman, but a lover. And – and –’ She leaned forward to lay her cheek against his own and he felt the taut nipples touch his chest like light finger-tips: ‘– this you do not know: but when you returned again I loved you before ever I knew who you were, for when you lifted me out of the
ruth
that night in the river, and held me in your arms while we waited for my women, I could not breathe for the beating of my heart. And I was ashamed, because I thought you were a stranger. Yet something in my blood rejoiced to be held so, and would have had you hold me closer and closer. Like this –’ She tightened her arms about his neck and kissed the hollow below his cheek bone, and said in a shaken whisper: ‘Oh, my love! Love me – love me now, before it is too late for me.’

The whisper ended in a gasp as Ash's hands slid down from her shoulders to catch her again into a close embrace and pull her down with him onto the floor of the cave.

The dry, silver sand was cool and smooth and very soft, and Juli's black hair spread a silky coverlet over it as she lay in the darkness and felt Ash's hands strip away the only garment she still wore, and move up again slowly and caressingly: warm and firm and very sure. For a moment only she knew a pang of fear, but it passed as quickly as it had come, and when he said: ‘I' m going to hurt you,’ she tightened her arms about him, and did not cry out at the lovely cruelty that ended her girlhood.

‘I never meant this to happen,’ Ash had murmured. But that had been hours later – they did not know how many – and after it had happened again. And again…

‘I did,’ whispered Juli, lying quiet and relaxed in the curve of his arm, with her head pillowed on his shoulder.

‘When, Larla?’

Juli did not answer immediately, but Ash was already thinking of something else, and the question had been an idle one for his mind had turned to plans. He was trying to visualize the large-scale Ordnance Maps that he had studied almost daily as the camp moved down across India, and decide which route would be the safest to take. Because the sooner they quit Rajputana and the south, the better. They had their horses, but no money… They would need money, yet they could not go back to the camp. He felt Juli move her head, and the cool touch of the jewel in her ear reminded him that the stones she wore that day were pigeon's-blood rubies, set in gold, and not only in her ears, but as buttons on her
achkan.
If they were careful they should be able to get a good price for them, and they could dispose of them one by one as the need arose.

‘A long time ago,’ said Juli softly, answering his question at last. ‘A month or more; though I did not plan it this way. How could I know that the gods would be so good to me as to send a storm in which we two would be caught, and find refuge here, together? You will think me shameless, but I planned to come if I could to your tent, and if you would not take me willingly, to beg of you… because I was desperate, and I thought that if only –’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Ash, recalled abruptly from his own plans.

‘The Rana,’ whispered Juli, and shivered. ‘I –I could not endure to think that I must lose my maidenhead to another man, one whom I neither knew nor loved and who did not love me, yet who would use me, by right – for lust or to beget heirs from my body. An old man and a stranger…’

She shuddered convulsively and Ash tightened his arm about her, holding her hard against him, and said: ‘Don't, Larla. You don't have to think of it any more. Ever.’

‘But I must,’ insisted Juli, her voice shaking. ‘No – let me speak. I want you to understand. You see, I knew from the beginning that I must submit to him, and also that – that even if he did not find me desirable he would use me, because I was a woman and his wife, and he desires sons. That much I could not escape. But that he should be the first – and the last… That I must be taken without love and submit with loathing, and never, never know what it was to lie with a lover and rejoice in being a woman – It was this that I could not endure, and therefore, Heart's-heart, I planned that I would ask you, would beg of you if need be, to save me from it. Now you have done so, and I am content. No one can ever take these hours away from me, or spoil or defile them. And – who knows? – the gods may even add to their kindness and permit me to conceive from this night. I will pray to them that it may be so, and that my first-born will be yours. But even if that is not granted me, at least I have known love… and having known it I can endure the lust and the shame, and not mind it too much.’

‘You won't have to mind it at all!’ said Ash violently. He pressed his fingers through her hair and pulled her head back so that he could kiss her: her eyes, her forehead, her temples, her cheeks and chin and mouth. He kissed them in turn and spoke between the kisses: ‘My love… my foolish love. Do you really think I would let you go now? I might have done so before, but not now. In spite of everything, I couldn't now…’

He told her then how he had planned to ask her to run away with him and been forced to decide that he must not do so, because the danger was too great – for both of them, though for her most of all – but that the dust-storm had changed all that. It was the miracle that he had needed so badly and despaired of, since it gave them a way of escaping unsuspected – and without any fear of pursuit. They had horses with them, and if they set off as soon as the wind died down they should be able to cover a good many miles that night, and by sunrise be far beyond the reach of any search, for the confusion and havoc that the storm must have wrought in the camp would make it impossible to send out search parties to look for them before daylight. When they were not discovered it would be assumed that they had lost their lives in the storm, and were lying dead and buried in some sand drift among the hills; and the search for their bodies would soon be abandoned because the country for miles around would be changed by dust and blown sand, and too many gullies and hollows would be newly silted up withit.

‘They'll give up after a day or two, and go on to Bhithor,’ said Ash. ‘They'll have to, because of the heat if nothing else. And we don't even have to worry about money, for we can sell my watch and your rubies – those earrings and the buttons on your coat. We can live on those for months. Probably for years. Somewhere where no one knows us: in Oudh, or among the foothills in the north, or in Kulu Valley. And I can find work, and then when they have forgotten all about us -’

Anjuli shook her head. ‘They would not. Me they might forget, for I am of little worth to anyone. But with you it is different. You might hide for a year, or for ten years; but when you showed your face again, either here in Hind, or in
Belait
, and tried to claim your inheritance, you would still be an officer in the army of the Raj who had run away without leave; and for that they would catch you and punish you. And then all would become known.’

‘Yes,’ said Ash slowly. ‘Yes; that's true.’ There was a note of surprise in his voice as though he had made a new and disconcerting discovery. In the intoxication of the past hours he had genuinely forgotten about the Guides. ‘I could never go back. But – but we shall be together, and -’

He stopped, for Anjuli had laid a hand over his mouth.

‘No, Ashok.’ Her voice was a pleading whisper. ‘Do not say any more. Please, please do not, because I cannot go with you… I cannot. I could not leave Shushila… I promised her that I would stay with her. I gave her my word, and I cannot go back on that…’

For a while Ash had not believed her. But when he tried to speak, her fingers pressed tighter against his mouth and her voice hurried on in the darkness, explaining, pleading. Each word a hammer blow. Shu-shu loved her and depended upon her, and had only agreed to marry the Rana on condition that she, Anjuli, stayed with her. She could not possibly abandon her little sister now and leave her to face the terrors of a new life alone. Ashok did not understand how frightened and homesick and unhappy Shu-shu was. How terrified of the prospect of marriage to a middle-aged stranger and of living among people whose ways would be different from hers, in surroundings that were so unlike those she had hitherto known and loved. Shu-shu was only a child still. A frightened and bewildered child –