by Joan Aiken
Scylla thanked Abdul for his escort, instructed him to return for her in two hours’ time, and walked into the first courtyard, pulling her veil well down over her face as a concession to local mores.
The first courtyard was bare and sandy; in it, a number of soldiers in red tunics and baggy pink trousers were lolling about on straw mattresses. An elephant was being washed, stamping and trumpeting with pleasure while its mahouts scurried around it with pails of water and long straw brushes. In this court, also, the Maharajah kept his menagerie; chained and collared hunting leopards reclined with bored expressions on rope beds, tigers paced to and fro behind bars.
The next court held the stables, where some of the Maharajah’s eight hundred horses were housed. There were carriages as well—a curricle with ivory fittings, a perch phaeton brought from Calcutta, a chaise with gold lamps, and a landaulet. To a Londoner, it would have seemed strange to see these elegant European conveyances gathering dust amid such surroundings, but Scylla had never been to England and passed them without regard, as she did the palanquins with lacquered panels of cedar and silver fittings and gold brocade cushions, the silver elephant howdahs, and the jeweled, velvet-lined saddles, hanging rack on rack in open-fronted sheds.
The next court, paved all over with white marble slabs, had a central fountain and a pair of hoopoes admiring their reflections. Fifty or so of the horses were being led slowly around and around, so that their paces could be inspected by the Maharajah, who reclined near the fountain on a charpoy with a frame of silver and straps of woven elephant hair. He was not paying a great deal of attention to the horses, though; he looked sick, hollow-eyed, and preoccupied. A faint spark of pleasure came into his eyes when he noticed Scylla crossing the court.
“Aha, it is Mademoiselle Periseela, come to batter a little learning into my wayward sons!” He spoke in French, of which he had acquired a fluent command, in days gone by, at the princes’ school in Ajmer.
“Good morning, Excellency. How do you find yourself today?”
Scylla curtsied but did not approach him too closely, remembering how he had flinched away when once, absentmindedly, she had extended a hand to help him out of his chair. Enjoy her company he might, but she was still unclean, untouchable, so far as he was concerned.
“I am not well,” he said irritably. “This accursed pain—distracts me from business, from pleasure, even from my horses.” He clapped his hands. “Take them away, Umr Singh.”
The horses were led clattering through the gate.
“Now sit down a moment, mademoiselle, and tell me something amusing.”
A couple of barefoot servants in knee breeches and turbans ran forward to shift the cushions under the Maharajah and set a chair for Scylla—it was made of deer’s antlers and was very uncomfortable. She politely declined a bowl of sherbet, but the Maharajah thirstily drank down a silver mug of opium and water, after which he looked a little more cheerful and a tinge of color came into his wax-yellow cheeks. He was a tall, thin man with a grizzled, bushy beard; his long, uncut hair was wound up into a turban stuck about with aigrettes of diamonds, and the knee-length tunic he wore was stiff with gold embroidery and jewels. His hands and feet were tiny, proof of his ancient—and inbred—Rajput descent.
“Amuse me!” he said again hopefully. “How are the wars going now, in Feringistan?”
“I daresay your news is more recent than mine, Excellency,” said Scylla, “for our last Calcutta Gazette came three weeks ago and took two months reaching us. There had been a great battle off Cape St. Vincent, and Admiral Nelson blockaded the Spanish in Cadiz.”
“Where is Cape St. Vincent?”
“Well—if I had something to draw with—”
A boy servant brought a stick of kajal—lampblack used for painting eyes—and Scylla drew a rough map on the marble flagstone.
“Here is Spain, see—and this is the Mediterranean—the French were here—Admiral Jervis was here, based on a Portuguese river, the Tagus—”
“And where, from there, is Angrezi?”
“Up here.” Scylla rapidly sketched in England, adding Ireland off to the left. “The French also tried to invade Ireland, up here, in Bantry Bay, but something went wrong and they sailed home again.”
“The French are not good fighters?” he rapped out. “The English are better?”
“I think so,” answered Scylla cautiously. “But that French General Buonaparte seems to be a very clever soldier. I read that he said he would like to take his armies eastward, like Alexander the Great.”
“Aha, Iskander Bey—another great Feringi general. One of my ancestors, without doubt.” The Maharajah’s eyes flashed, and Scylla was reminded that he came of dedicated fighting stock; ever since the first day of spring in 1699, almost a hundred years’ ago, the Sikhs had designated themselves a warrior clan and had sworn adherence to the five Ks—Kanga, the comb, for cleanliness; Kara, the steel bracelet, symbolizing contentment; Kesh, unshorn hair, for strength; Kachh, the divided undergarment, for chastity; and Kirpan, the sword, to slay the enemies of righteousness. The word “Singh”—lion—formed part of every Sikh name. The Maharajah’s full name, beginning with Mansur-i-Zaman Amirul-Umra Mohinder Singh went on for at least five lines of text, but he preferred to be known as Bhupindra Bahadur—Bhupindra the great fighter—despite the fact that he personally had never been in a battle.
“And do you really think, then, that the French plan to invade our country?”
“They would have a long way to march from the Mediterranean,” Scylla replied, laughing.
“So? Where is the Punjab on this map of yours? Where is Kafiristan, and the Khaiber Pass?”
Rather hastily and sketchily she filled in the eastern end of the Mediterranean. “Now, see, here is Istanbul, here is Baghdad. All this is Persia. Up to the north—Turkmenistan and Russia. Here, farther east, Afghanistan.”
“Put in Kabul,” he ordered, and she placed a dot to the west of the Khaiber Pass. “Now, Peshawur.” She put another dot, to the east.
“How many parasangs from Istanbul to Peshawur?”
“I should think it would be about six thousand miles—four miles to a parasang.” She calculated. “Perhaps fifteen hundred parasangs.”
“It takes a camel caravan forty days to cross from Persia to Herat in Afghanistan, it would take twice as long to reach the Khaiber Pass. We would know, from our spies in Afghanistan, many weeks before the armies were halfway here. They will never attempt it.”
“But horsemen could do it in a much shorter time—ten to twelve days,” objected Scylla.
“Aha! You should have been a soldier, mademoiselle! Do not forget though, they have to drag the guns with them—big guns, much heavier than these.”
The fountain was embellished, at its four corners, by amazing old brass cannon, whose muzzles consisted of elaborately ornamented lions’ heads.
“Also,” said the Maharajah, “the road from Baghdad here is impassable in the winter, because of snow and, in summer, because of drought. I do not think they will come.”
He sounded disappointed; Scylla could not be sure whether he regretted the lost opportunity for a battle or whether he had hoped that the French might expel the English, who now had virtually undisputed dominion over a large part of southern India.
A servant came up, bowed low, and said, “The Shahzada Mihal Singh asks when you will be ready to receive the Feringi emissaries?”
“Mihal is always troubling me to see somebody,” grumbled the Maharajah fretfully. “Now it is these French.” He shot a sly glance at Scylla. “You see, mademoiselle, the French are closer than you think!”
He stood up with difficulty, and Scylla, knowing better than to offer assistance, curtsied again and went off toward the women’s regions.
When she first entered the purdah quarters of Ziatur palace, with Miss Musson, she had found it unbeara
bly depressing. By now time had acclimatized her, but even so she never passed in without a shiver, remembering that, while she could come and go freely, many of the inhabitants of this place would spend the rest of their lives there and never set foot outside. Cal had once estimated that the palace might easily have a population of four thousand, of whom at least two thirds were women. There was a larger population unseen, for the dead were all buried underneath, and had been for hundreds of years past.
The women’s quarters, occupying a natural spur of the hilltop on which the palace perched, were isolated from the rest of the apartments and were labyrinthine in their complexity. Staircases wound and twisted up and down, passages ended abruptly in openings on the cliff, hundreds of empty rooms remained dark and unused, their silk and cedarwood furnishings moldering quietly behind fretted marble screens. There were dwelling chambers on all levels—some of them sixty feet below ground, for the sake of coolness in the raging summer, others opening onto roof gardens two hundred feet up, unguessed at from ground level. Windowless inner rooms and passages were somberly lit by blazing rags soaked in linseed or mustard oil and placed on pronged holders or in cups. Here and there oil lamps with colored glass chimneys were placed on brackets so as to illuminate huge paintings—many of them hideously obscene—on walls and ceilings. Miss Musson, on her first visits, had sternly instructed Scylla to avert her eyes from these, but by now, as with so much else, custom had habituated her to them, and she passed with but a perfunctory glance at the intricately writhing limbs. On other walls, hundreds of portraits of bygone maharajahs hung in disregarded ranks; nobody glanced at their swords, turbans, or dangling mustaches. Along some passages, cows roamed; smells of cooking, incense, and garbage issued from dim, shuttered rooms, or sweeter scents of musk and jasmine. Distant music could always be heard—sitars, flutes, and finger drums. Occasionally, glancing through a doorway, Scylla would see a juggler, storyteller, or group of dancing girls who had been asked in to entertain the bored inmates. The Maharajah was no longer interested in his women—not even the youngest of them, the beautiful, wily Rani Sada, who had been the daughter of his subadar, had been treated as a daughter, as a pet, by the Maharajah when she was a child, allowed to ride with him in his palki when he went out; then, when she was thirteen, he had her sent to school in Amritsar and given an allowance of five thousand rupees a month. And at fifteen she had returned to Ziatur and wasted no time in ousting Mahtab Kour, the true Maharani, from favor, and establishing herself as first lady in the palace. For three years her reign had been supreme; but now it was said that she, too, was neglected, that the Maharajah never bothered to visit her apartments. The boredom of her empty days, Scylla thought with a shiver, would be even worse than for the others, because she had been away into the world, been to school, and knew something about the life that went on outside Ziatur…
However, attempting to alleviate Sada’s boredom was not Scylla’s business, and she now climbed a great many stairs and then turned left into the chamber that had been allocated to her as a schoolroom in which to instruct the young princes Amur and Ranji.
Nobody was occupying it at the moment, and Scylla, walking over to the screened window, looked down through an exotic profusion of dangling vines with scarlet, white, and crimson blossoms to a little courtyard cut into the face of the cliff. Beyond, the great plain stretched away southward and the sun beat down mercilessly.
Both princes were in the shaded courtyard, playing a game called bull and cows. Leaning out of the window, Scylla summoned them in a way that would have scandalized Miss Musson: placing two fingers in her mouth, she emitted an ear-piercing whistle. Cal had taught her this trick. Looking up, the boys saw her, laughed, and soon came clattering up the stone stairs. While they did so she had leisure to notice an open exercise book on the table with a drawing of a dragon, quite skillfully executed, and underneath the legend “Mademoiselle Paget est un bête féroce!”
Clever little monkey, she thought, studying it; I wonder what will become of him? Perhaps the Maharajah will make him into an ambassador. For Ranji, son of a minor wife, had no hope of succeeding to his father’s kingdom; that would go to Mihal Shahzada, the eldest son of Mahtab Kour. Unless, of course, the Rani Sada succeeded in regaining her power over Mihal’s father…But in either case Ranji would never succeed.
The two princes came bounding into the room, and Scylla said severely:
“You are late, both of you!”
“But you were late yourself, mademoiselle,” pointed out Amur with perfect truth.
Both boys were slender, dark, and extremely handsome, like graceful wild creatures, deer or gazelle, Scylla frequently thought. They wore uniforms which had been sent up from Calcutta, white doeskin breeches, gold-laced tunics, gold spurs, which scratched the furniture shockingly, and turbans set with clusters of jewels which were a perpetual nuisance, dangling in their eyes and impeding their vision.
“I was kept in conversation with your father,” Scylla said, “but you should have been getting on with your translation in the meantime. And, Ranji, bête is feminine—Mademoiselle Paget est UNE bête féroce! I have a mind to make you write it out fifty times.”
“Oh, pray do not, Mademoiselle Periseela! Look, we have got some sweets for you.” Ranji’s look of pleading, laughing dismay was irresistible, and the sweets in the palace were usually delicious—made from cream, sugar, fruit juices, and nuts—but Scylla said firmly that it was too soon after her breakfast for sweets and that the boys were to translate at least a chapter from English into French before anybody touched so much as a single nut.
After some sighing and expostulation the two princes set to work. Scylla was making them translate Tom Jones—which she had discovered among the books of Mr. Winthrop Musson—and fortunately they found it quite amusing, frequently bursting into peals of laughter as they collaborated on a rough rendering. Meanwhile Scylla corrected their English essays and collated a sheaf of geometry exercises to take home to Cal, who, in a rather lackadaisical way, took charge of this side of their education, since Scylla was not mathematically minded.
“There are some Frenchmen come here to see Taba yesterday night,” Ranji presently looked up from Tom Jones to say. “They are telling my father that he should have a Francese compo—a French division—in his army. Maybe so that he can fight the English like Tippoo Sahib!”
“There: you see now how useful it is to be able to speak French,” Scylla pointed out in a schoolmistressy voice, but then spoiled the effect by adding, “And will he do so, do you suppose?”
“Mihal would like him to,” Amur began, but Ranji interrupted:
“Taba will not let Mihal have any say in the matter.”
“But your father is not very well,” Scylla said involuntarily—indeed the Maharajah had looked to her like a dying man. “If he should become really ill, then perhaps Mihal might have to take charge of the army.”
“What Taba is hoping for is that Kamaran Sahib will return with all the guns that he promised to bring from Feringistan—”
“Yes, double-barrel muskets that will kill at a thousand paces, fuses, brass cannon—they are far better than matchlocks—carbines, pistols, and cuirasses,” put in Ranji eagerly.
“Bows and arrows are better for a true Sikh,” pronounced Amur firmly, but his brother said:
“There is not much sense in being armed with bows and arrows, if your enemy has guns that will kill at a thousand yards.”
“But do you suppose that Kamaran Sahib ever will come back?” said Scylla.
She had heard tell of this personage, but neither she nor Cal had ever met him, since he had left Ziatur three years ago, before they began to frequent the palace. The princes, who revered him, said that he was a Yagistani—American, like Miss Musson, who knew him somewhat but rather disapproved of him. For several years he had been in charge of the Maharajah’s armed forces. His real name, Scylla understood, was Ca
meron, Colonel Cameron. Nobody seemed to know about Kamaran Sahib’s origins, whether he had previously been an officer in the British, French, or Russian armies. He had traveled, Miss Musson reported, widely; he had sailed around the world; he seemed to have no wife, children, or attachments. He was a very frivolous man, she said severely. Winthrop Musson had been fond of him and thought him a clever, cultivated fellow; the princes revered him as a kind of demigod.
“But of course he will come back,” predicted Amur confidently, breaking in on Scylla’s train of thought, “for Kamaran Sahib always did what he promised; and furthermore Taba had a message last month from Karachi to say he had arrived there with a load of carbines.”
At this moment a messenger arrived to ask if the Mem Periseela would visit Mahtab Kour on her way out. Scylla, consulting the watch that hung on a ribbon around her neck, saw that the boys’ hour was up. Hastily setting them another assignment, she bade the relieved pair good-bye, urged them not to eat too many sweets, and followed her guide along a dark, narrow corridor, up and down innumerable stairways, and across several courtyards, until they came to the queen mother’s suite. Once, when halfway across a wide antechamber, feeling rather than observing a presence above her, Scylla paused momentarily and glanced up; a screened, curtained gallery ran transversely over the room she had just entered. Leaning over the fretted balustrade was a girl, richly dressed, hung with ropes of jewels, a girl whose extreme, indeed dazzling beauty did not in the least disguise a look of concentrated malignity on her face. The two pairs of eyes met for a moment; then, with a whisk of curtains, the angry beauty withdrew from view. It was the Rani Sada. But what in the world makes her so angry with me? thought Scylla, rather startled, since only an hour before she had been experiencing profound feelings of sympathy for the other girl. Possibly Sada had been expecting somebody else… Just the same, the odd little encounter left a shiver of unease in her bones, a sense of decided disquiet.