The Far Pavilions (67 page)

Mulraj acknowledged the justice of the reproof and complimented Kaka-ji on his charitable outlook and kindness of heart, and raising his voice began to admire the size of the gateway, the smartness of the guard and the arrangements that had been made for the comfort of the camp. He appeared to be enjoying himself, and the obvious discomfort of the guard, and those by-standers who had been near enough to overhear the preceding conversation, suggested that the Rana's slighting treatment of his guests – presumably designed to put them at a disadvantage and make them realize the weakness of their position – was proving a boomerang by making it appear instead that he and his courtiers and subjects were nothing but ignorant yokels, unversed in etiquette and lacking in courtesy.

Ash alone held his tongue, for he had no illusions as to their position. They might win a point by forcing the Rana to accord them an outward show of civility, but the victory would be a trivial one. The real struggle lay ahead, when the marriage settlements came to be discussed; and here the Rana held all the cards. It only remained to be seen if he would dare to play them – and how far he could be bluffed.

A clatter of hooves announced the arrival of the Rana's personal bodyguard with two senior ministers and an elderly royal relative, who was profuse in his apologies for having mistaken the hour of the guests' arrival and thereby failed to be on time to receive them. It was all due to a sad mishap (it seemed he had been misinformed by an officious secretary) and he assured them that the man responsible for it would be severely punished, as not for the world would anyone in Bhithor have inconvenienced such honoured guests.

The honoured guests accepted the apologies and permitted themselves to be escorted in state through a maze of narrow streets towards the city palace, where the Rana awaited them.

Ash had not forgotten the Gulkote of his childhood, and he had, at one time or another, seen many Indian cities. But none of them had been in the least like this one. The streets and bazaars of Gulkote had been clamorous and colourful, and as crowded with people and full of life as the teeming rabbit-warren that was Peshawar, or the old walled cities of Delhi and Lahore with their shops and street-merchants and jostling, chattering citizens. But Bhithor was like something out of another age. An older and more dangerous age, full of menace and mystery. Its pale sandstone walls had an oddly bleached look, as though the burning suns of centuries had drained them of colour, while the sharp-edged shadows were grey rather than blue or black. The planless labyrinth of streets, and the blank and virtually windowless faces of the houses that hemmed them in gave Ash an uncomfortable feeling of claustrophobia. It seemed impossible that sunlight could ever penetrate into those narrow, man-made canyons, or the winds blow through them, or that ordinary people could live behind those barred doors and closely shuttered windows. Yet he was aware of eyes peering down through those shutters – women's eyes, presumably, for all over India the upper storeys of houses are woman's territory.

There were surprisingly few women in the shadowed streets however, and those few kept their faces hidden, holding their cotton head-cloths close so that once again nothing could be seen but eyes; wary and suspicious eyes. And though they wore the traditional dress of Rajputana, full-skirted and boldly patterned in black, their preferences seemed to be for such colours as rust-red, ochre and burnt orange, and Ash saw none of the vivid blues and greens that flaunted so gaily through the bazaars and by-ways of neighbouring states. As for the men, a number of these too gave the impression of being veiled, since even here in the city streets there were many who kept one end of their turbans wrapped about the lower part of their faces; and judging by their narrow gaze, a European was a novelty in Bhithor – and not a popular one, either.

The citizens stared at Ash as though he were some form of freak, and the expressions of those whose faces were uncovered betrayed more hostility than interest. It was, he thought, as though he were a dog walking down an alley full of cats, and he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle in animal response to that silent antipathy – the enmity of closed minds towards all that is strange or new.

‘One would think, to look at them, that we have come here for some evil purpose instead of for a wedding,’ muttered Mulraj under his breath. ‘This is an ill place, and one does not need to be told that they worship the Drinker-of-Blood.
Phew
! Look there -’

He jerked his head in the direction of a shrine to Kali, who is also Sitala the goddess of smallpox, that stood at the junction of two streets; and as they rode past it Ash caught a glimpse of the frightful goddess in whose honour the Thugs had strangled thousands of victims, and whose temples had benefited by a tithe of their loot. The nightmare deity, with her multiplicity of arms, her glaring eyeballs, protruding tongue and long necklace of human skulls, is worshipped throughout India as the wife of Shiva the Destroyer. A singularly appropriate patroness, thought Ash, for this sinister city.

A strong stench of corruption and a buzzing cloud of flies showed that her devotees were not backward in satisfying her thirst for blood, and it was a measure of his unease that he actually caught himself wondering if it were only goats that were being sacrificed to appease that thirst. He shook the thought from him with impatience, but was nevertheless inordinately relieved when at last they left the streets behind them, and dismounting in the entrance courtyard of the city palace, the ‘Rung Mahal’, were conducted through a maze of dusty rooms and dark stone passageways to meet the Rana. Though here too there was the same claustrophobic atmosphere that had been so noticeable in the streets: the same stillness and stifling heat, the same haunting sense of an unforgotten past… of old times and old evil, and the unquiet ghosts of dead kings and murdered queens.

Compared to the Palace of the Winds, the Rung Mahal – the ‘Painted Palaced’ – was a modest building comprising half-a-dozen courtyards, a garden or two, and not more than sixty or seventy rooms (no one had ever counted those in the Palace of the Winds, though the number was believed to be in the region of six hundred). Possibly it was for this reason – among others – that its owner had begun by treating his guests in a manner calculated to damp any pretensions they might have, and now followed it up by simultaneously dazzling them with magnificence and chilling their blood with as barbaric a display of military strength as Ash, for one, had ever seen–imagined.

It had been no surprise to find that the outer courtyards bristled with armed men, but the sight of the Rana's personal bodyguards, who policed the inner ones and lined the long dark corridors, had startled Ash considerably, not on account of their numbers, though there must have been several hundred of them, but because of their weird attire, and because here, once again, were masked faces.

The officers wore helmets of a pattern that the Saracens must have worn in the days of the Crusades. Antique iron casques with long flat nose pieces, damascened in gold and silver and deeply fringed with chain mail that protected the wearer's jaw and neck and partially concealed his cheeks, leaving only the eyes visible. The helmets of the rank and file, though similar in style, were fashioned of leather, and the effect in that half light was oddly inhuman, as though the macabre figures who lined the corridors were masked headsmen or the mummified bodies of dead warriors. Their surcoats too were of chain mail, and instead of swords they carried short spears. ‘Like lictors,’ thought Ash with a shiver.

He regretted that he had not brought his revolver with him, for the sight of these mailed figures brought home to him, as nothing else had done, that this was a place in which no rules – and no law as the West understood law – held sway. Bhithor was of another age and another world: she stood outside of present Time, and was a law unto herself.

In a final ante-chamber at least fifty servants, dressed in the Rana's colours of scarlet, sulphur-yellow and orange, divided to let the visitors through, and preceded by the royal relative with the senior officials bringing up the rear, they were ushered into the
Diwan-i-Am
, the ‘Hall of Public Audience’, where the Rana and his Prime Minister the Diwan, together with the councillors and courtiers, waited to receive them.

The
Diwan-i-Am
was a beautiful building, though at that season of the year unsuited for a morning audience, as it consisted of an open-sided pavilion formed by a triple row of columns, and was closed only at each end. With the sun blazing down upon it and no breath of breeze, the heat under the pillared arches was considerable, but its beauty made amends for any deficiencies in the way of comfort; and certainly the temperature did not appear to trouble the serried ranks of courtiers and noblemen who sat cross-legged on the uncarpeted floor, packed as closely as sardines in a tin, and dressed in their festive best.

At the far end of the hall a shallow flight of steps led up to a raised platform on which a central dais served as a throne for the ruler when he gave audience, received distinguished visitors or dispensed justice, and behind this stretched a solid wall of black marble with a polished surface that reflected the assembly as though in a mirror. The sides of the platform were enclosed by screens of pierced marble through which the ladies of the Zenana could watch the proceedings, but elsewhere the stonework had been plastered over with polished
chunam
and decorated in low relief with formal designs of beasts, birds and flowers that had once been brightly coloured, but had faded in the course of the slow centuries to pale ghosts of their former glory. Yet the
Diwan-i-Am
did not lack colour, since the Rana's courtiers, unlike his humbler subjects, were so gaily attired that a foreigner entering the hall might well have thought for a dazzled moment that he had walked into a flower-garden – or a fairground.

Turbans of scarlet and cerise, sulphur-yellow, sugar-pink and purple vied with
achkans
of every shade of blue and violet, turquoise, vermilion, grass-green and orange; while to add to the mass of colour, the centre aisle was kept clear by a double rank of crimson-turbaned retainers, gaudily uniformed in yellow muslin sashed with orange, and carrying huge, plumed fly-whisks made of horsehair that had been dyed a vivid shade of magenta.

There were more retainers on the raised platform, two of them standing behind the dais and plying fans of peacock feathers, and the remainder armed with naked tulwars – the long curved swords of Rajputana. And on the dais itself, cross-legged on a carpet sewn with pearls, ablaze with jewels and clad from top to toe in gold, sat the focal point of all this splendour: the Rana of Bhithor.

The warrior races of Rajputana are famous for their good-looks, and it is doubtful if any similar assembly of Western men could have matched the present one in the matter of physical beauty, distinction and panache. Even the grey-beards among them retained traces of the hawk-faced handsomeness they had possessed in youth, and held themselves as erect as though they sat in a saddle instead of cross-legged upon the ground. The white, tightly fitting jodhpurs and the sleek lines of flared, brocaded coats showed off each lean, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped figure to perfection, while the crisp folds of their brilliant turbans added inches to their height and made every man seem a giant. There were, of course, exceptions to the rule. Scattered here and there under the arched roof of the
Diwan-i-Am
were men who were fat or withered or ill-favoured, the most noticeable of these being their ruler himself.

The Rana's dress, jewels and diamond-hilted sword were magnificent. But his person did not do them credit, and Ash, gazing up at him from the bottom step of the stairs, was conscious of a violent sense of shock.

This
– this misshapen baboon – was the bridegroom that Nandu had chosen for Juli. For Juli and Shushila… No, it could not be – there must be some mistake: the man on the dais could not possibly be in his late thirties. Why, he was
old
. Sixty, at least, if not seventy. Or if he was not, he certainly looked it, and Ash could only suppose that his way of life must have been singularly unsavoury to give him the appearance of old age before he was forty.

Discounting prejudice, the Rana was certainly an unprepossessing spectacle, and Ash could not have been the first person to be struck by his resemblance to a baboon. Anyone who had visited a zoo or been to Africa could hardly fail to notice it, and it was probably just as well that no citizens of Bhithor had ever done so and therefore did not realize how strikingly their ruler's facial structure, with its close-set eyes, abnormally long nose and wide, flaring nostrils, resembled a mandrill's an old, sly, vicious mandrill, with an evil temper. As if that were not enough, the thin, hatchet-shaped and almost chinless face was deeply scored with the tell-tale lines of debauchery and self-indulgence, and the close-set eyes were as watchful and unblinking as a cobra's their stillness in marked contrast to the ceaseless movement of the long, loose-lipped mouth; for the Rana was chewing
pan
. The betel-nut stained his lips and teeth and made small wet, red patches at the corners of his mouth, so that he might almost, like Kali, have been drinking blood.

In complexion he was fairer than most southern Europeans, for his lineage was impeccable (the royal house of Bhithor claimed descent from a god) but the pale golden tone of his skin was overlaid by an odd greyish tinge, and there were dark purple pouches, like bruises, under the cold, unblinking eyes. All in all, he presented a singularly unattractive picture, and the magnificence of his attire seemed to emphasize his physical shortcomings rather than detract from them.

Ash had been prepared for a good many things, but not this. The shock momentarily deprived him of words, and as the Rana remained silent it was left to Kaka-ji to step into the breach and fill the awkward pause with a graceful speech, to which the Rana replied a good deal less gracefully.