by Joan Aiken
Now she was older, Scylla guessed that, as well as being his form of escape from the unwanted complications of life, Cal’s ability to sleep for such lengthy periods had some connection with his poetic talent; he would surface from these long spells of oblivion crackling with new ideas and solutions to problems in his writing; often, indeed, after having woken up, he would be almost equally inaccessible because he would hurl himself into creation like a mongoose pursuing a cobra into a hole, feverishly anxious to capture all the elusive thoughts and images that had come to him in sleep, to pin them to ground before they could escape.
“Just a moment—pray don’t distract me until I have this down—there’s a love—” and then hours would go by while he rapidly scribbled down lines and then scratched them out again, his hand moving over the blotted page like a living entity with a mind and purpose of its own.
Adhering to Miss Musson’s precept that people had best be left to resolve their own affairs in their own way, Scylla had long ago given up any attempts to wake Cal from sleep or to entice him away from his frenzied bouts of writing.
But this was their birthday after all.
She went into his shaded room, and, leaning over the charpoy, said loudly in his ear:
“Cal! Fiend, devil that you are! Brother! Cal! Wake up, it’s your birthday!”
No response. She tried again, even louder. He moved a little, then his head flopped into the pillow, with a grunt of relief, as if he had encountered and dealt with some small, tiresome piece of business. She shook him vigorously; he smiled in his sleep and murmured, “Whoa, there, Kali! Gently, mare…”
Shrugging, Scylla let go her hold of his shoulders and walked back into the main room of the house, which ran clean through from front to back, so as to receive any breath of wind that blew.
“Missy and Cal Sahib go riding? Mem Musson left word to prepare a picnic. It is ready. I pack it up for Cal Sahib to carry?”
The khitmutgar indicated the birthday feast that Miss Musson had provided. Touched, Scylla regarded a cold chicken, a bottle of wine, a plate of fruit—shaddock, grapes, banana, pomegranate.
“Cal Sahib is fast asleep; I go by myself, Habib-ulla. Pack up the chicken and the fruit, but not the wine; it is too heavy for me; and order the syce to saddle Kali.”
“It is not correct—or at all wise—for Missy Sahib to go riding on her own,” objected the aged Habib-ulla. “And as for taking Kali—what will Cal Sahib say to that, when he wakes and finds out?”
“Cal Sahib can consider himself justly served for lying asleep when he had promised his sister to go riding with her,” Scylla retorted. “Tell Ibrahim to put my saddle on Kali and bring her around.”
Kali was her brother’s most cherished possession—apart from his manuscripts: a thin, high-bred little Kathiawar mare, supple as a shadow, obedient to every touch of the rein, yet full of spirit; she could travel all day at the native lope, between a trot and a canter, yet never tire; she was infinitely faster than Scylla’s bay, Tom Jones; she could, it was said, outrun even the Maharajah’s hunting leopards. She came from the royal stable; Cal had won her at cards from Mihal.
Since Miss Musson was not at home to disapprove, Scylla rapidly changed into a hill woman’s costume of loose black trousers and vest, with a burqa and wide-brimmed hat. She tied a veil over her hat and walked out to the front of the house where Ibrahim, muttering his opinion of young misses who rode out unescorted, had reluctantly attached the picnic bundle to the back of Kali’s saddle.
“Good; tell Cal Sahib, if he wakes and asks for me, that I will return a little after sunset,” ordered Scylla, and swung herself into the saddle. Kali, dancing with delight, was eager to be off; Scylla gave the mare a formal tap with her crop and, after one preliminary bound, she settled into the easy, deceptive lope that, while not appearing particularly fast, soon ate up the miles. Kali could cover sixty miles in ten hours, if she was required to, so she made nothing of a mere sixteen.
At the start they passed orchards and melon beds, fields of opium poppy and sugar cane, an occasional fig or banyan tree, or, in the distance, a dark green mango grove. The sound of cicadas rattled around them, loud as a drum; it seemed as if the hot dry earth itself were vibrating. Sometimes a porcupine scuttled across the road, or a wild pig could be heard rooting and grunting in a sugar-cane patch. Then, farther from the town, the cultivated areas dwindled and ceased; nothing grew here but cactus and huge dry-looking thistles; an occasional kite swung high in the pale sky. The distant white hills crept closer, and Scylla could distinguish granite outcrops on their bare crests, and sometimes a scrub of low bushes.
Not long after the hour of noon they reached Scylla’s destination: a narrow valley between two low, sandy spurs of rock-studded hill, outcrops from the foothills of the Sangur range. Skirting around a bluff, they came within sight of the ruined temple, which lay midway between the two spurs. The road had been climbing steadily for the last five miles, and the ground here was no longer bare but covered with high, silvery jungle grass, over Scylla’s head if she had been on foot, thick and impenetrable as a curtain on either side of the track. Scylla did own to herself a slight qualm as she passed between those living screens—anything, any marauder, might be lurking unseen in that cover—but Kali, she knew, would be lightning-quick to detect the presence of any beast of prey and could almost certainly outrun anything that might give chase to them; besides, it was midday, the hour of sleep, when beasts of prey are not abroad.
The temple itself lay mostly concealed behind a tangle of wild fig and other trees which had grown up in the centuries since it had been abandoned. A hundred-and-fifty-foot-high tower of rose-red stone, slender and still apparently in good repair, appeared above the growth of vegetation; here and there below it a portion of masonry could be seen, a section of marble dome, or a pillar, or a stretch of wall.
Dismounting, Scylla led Kali through what was left of the great gateway. Beyond it, the relics of a wide avenue, colonnaded with red marble pillars on either side, led forward to an entrance that was now choked with vegetation. Beyond the marble pillars there must once have been beautiful gardens; orange trees still grew there, wild and neglected; great screens of climbing rose battled with the wild fig and karela, the jungle creeper which formed a curtain over the cultivated trees. A gleam of water showed where a marble cistern still held some of its contents, half smothered in green slime and water plants.
Tethering Kali to the root of a banyan tree, Scylla decided to take her nuncheon before exploring farther. Sitting on a great block of marble which had fallen from the top of an arch, she opened the bundle Habib-ulla had provided and munched chicken, shaddock, and pomegranate. There was, of course, far too much food—she put most of it back.
“Now we had better find you some water, Light of My Eyes,” she said to the mare. “Or Cal will say I have neglected you, and it would be true.”
Exploring the overgrown purlieus of the temple, she found another cistern, a much larger one, evidently fed by a spring, for the water at one end of it was clear enough. The place was evidently a sanctuary for wild creatures and birds: a pair of cranes flapped heavily away from the cistern as Kali drank thirstily, cohorts of wild apes gamboled and chattered and chased each other in the tangled branches of the camphor trees, and on a stretch of unbroken pavement a wild peacock pecked and preened and gave out at regular intervals its keening cry.
Scylla, wandering about the empty courts, passing with difficulty through bramble-choked archways, peering through marble latticework inlaid with garnets, turquoise, agate, and lapis lazuli, venturing cautiously into great dim halls divided by rows and rows of fantastically carved pillars, inspecting countless statues of gods, known and unknown, portrayed in every conceivable posture—sitting, standing, dancing, grimacing or benign—could not withstand a deep regret that Cal had not accompanied her. I must bring him here another time, she resolved. It is exactly
the kind of place that would excite his imagination.
Aware that she ought to start for home, Scylla still lingered, reluctant to leave. It occurred to her that she had not yet located the Maharajah’s tomb itself; her informant had said this was not in the temple itself, but about a quarter of a mile away, at the foot of the nearby hill.
Untying Kali, she led the mare out of the temple precincts, following a small paved path which crossed the valley, running in between great clumps of bamboo. Stone gods frowned or smiled down from pillars at regular intervals; here and there one had fallen from his place and lay staring upward from the ground.
At the end of the path, a flight of steps led downward, under a low stone archway. Here Scylla did pause with some doubt and misgiving. The tomb entrance was set in the side of a hill, just where the ground began to rise. The hillside above was not firm but consisted of shifting, flowing sand, loosened and eroded by years of drought and hot winds. A two-foot parapet of masonry above the doorway arch had parted the streams of sand sliding down from above, so that they fell on either side of the entrance and had mounted up into high ramparts, while the doorway itself remained clear. But, looking up, Scylla could see that it was only a matter of time before a great dry outcrop of loose earth, not far above the doorway, became detached and slid down, which would almost certainly block the entrance altogether. Might the sound of her footsteps start it sliding? Dare she go in? Anything might set off a landslide: a sudden gust of wind, a wild pig running over the slope, even a kite landing on it. On the other hand, Scylla felt that she would hardly be able to forgive herself if, after having ridden so far, taken such pains to get here, she lacked the courage to carry out her final intention. She had brought lucifer matches and tapers with her, she could imagine Cal’s scornful voice: “You rode all the way to the temple but were too cowardly to go into the tomb? I have a faintheart for a sister! And I had thought you were pluck to the backbone!”
Gritting her teeth, Scylla flung Kali’s bridle rein over a loosely dangling bough on a fig tree at some distance from the doorway, so that, if her mistress were trapped by an avalanche, the mare would in time be able to pull herself free without too much difficulty. Then, having lit her taper, Scylla edged her way forward, slowly and with extreme caution, between the high ramparts of sand on either side of the doorway, and at last under the overhanging arch. Once down the steps and standing on a firm stone floor, she breathed a little more easily, though feeling tension inside her all the while, as her ears strained themselves to catch the least sound of rumbling or sliding up above. Perhaps even her presence in the vault would be enough to start a movement on the hillside up above? But she heard nothing and, when her eyes became accustomed to the dim candlelight, she plucked up courage to go forward. The tomb, she found, consisted of three chambers, one beyond the other, floored, walled, and roofed with marble. But this place, too, it was sadly evident, had been rifled, either by invading armies or local robbers; the plinth, in the last room, under a great fretted canopy of carved stone, where the coffin should have lain, stood empty, and there was no sign of the legendary treasure. Disappointed but also, in some way, relieved, Scylla retraced her steps toward the entrance and was about to extinguish her taper and carefully tiptoe up the stone stairway when, beyond the door, she heard a sound that terrified her: a low, rumbling, muttering growl. For a horrible moment she believed that it was the beginning of the landslide, but the reality was hardly less frightening; Scylla had walked past the Maharajah’s menagerie too often not to be familiar with the voice of a tiger. Why would a tiger be out hunting at this time of day? But the sound came again, followed by the mare’s whinny—a shrill, terrified appeal for help. Scylla had no weapon with her, but instinctively, dropping her taper, she snatched up a couple of stones and flew up the steps, without worrying as to whether her haste might start a landslide. If the tiger were to attack Kali—!
Emerging into the daylight, she was obliged to stop and blink for a moment while her eyes grew accustomed to the white glare of day; thus pausing, she heard the tiger’s yowling cry again, much closer; this time it was the eerie, ventriloquial, caterwauling whine, seeming to come from all around, with which the hunting tiger panics his prey, often into running straight toward him. And again came Kali’s stamp and shriek of alarm. In a moment she will drag herself loose and gallop away—I must get to her first, thought Scylla, and she began to run toward the mare, still clutching her pebbles. Panting, stumbling, she saw a flash of black and yellow—the tiger, emerging from a bamboo cover off to her right. He seemed unbelievably huge—far, far bigger than the cowed, mangy beasts in the menagerie. His great striped head was like some carved, cruel god’s face, heavy and powerful. Unexpectedly confronted with two objects—the running girl and the stamping, rearing horse—he stood for a moment, swinging his head, trying to decide which to make for; then began loping forward.
The pebbles fell from Scylla’s hand. Faced with the massive, formidable actuality of the tiger, she could see that, as ammunition, they were of no more use than grains of rice would have been. She flew to Kali—just in time, for the foaming, frothing, terrified mare had almost succeeded in dragging herself free—and grabbed at the reins. Mounting was another matter though.
“Steady—steady!” Scylla panted. “Keep still a moment, daughter of an idiot! How can I mount while you are dancing around like a dervish?”
She shouted, hoping to startle the tiger into pausing for a moment in its purposeful, stealthy, forward creep. It yowled again—and then, astonishingly, Scylla heard two sharp cracks, one quickly after the other, and a voice shouted:
“Keep still, woman! Hold that accursed horse quiet! We are going to shoot again!”
Dragging down with all her strength on Kali’s rein, Scylla turned in utter amazement to see that two men had run out of the bamboo clumps. One was reloading a musket at feverish speed, while the other knelt, aiming at the tiger, who, apparently confused by these new arrivals, had bounded off sideways and now crouched, with lashing tail, unable to decide which prey to attack first. But then Kali whinnied again and he began once more his low-bellied, creeping approach toward the girl and the horse that had been his original objective.
Crack! went the musket again, and the tiger leaped, snarling, into the air, then turned and galloped away in the direction from which Scylla had come, toward the tomb entrance.
“Got him!” shouted the kneeling man exultantly. To Scylla’s bewilderment, he spoke this time in English—before, he had addressed her in Punjabi. “After him, quick, Therbah!”
The two men began to race after the escaping tiger.
“He is wounded, lord—he is making for the cave,” panted the smaller man. “We can trap him there.”
Indeed, the tiger, leaving a trail of blood splashes behind him on the bare ground, was loping toward the tomb doorway. Both men fired again as he disappeared into the dark door hole. Both—Scylla thought—missed; small puffs of sand spurted up on either side of the doorway.
And then a portentous thing happened. Either because of the shouting, or the sound of shots, or the impact of the bullets on the sandy hillside, the portion of hill above the entrance that had been waiting to fall became loosened from its base and, with a strange, soft rushing roar, a huge mass of sand, stone, and grit came pouring over the archway and completely blocked the cave entrance. When the dust cloud had cleared, “God damn it, Therbah!” burst out the man who had shouted at Scylla, the taller of the two. “Look at that! We’ve lost him!”
“Alas! We have indeed; lord,” the little man agreed lugubriously, approaching the entrance and scratching his head with the hand that did not hold the musket. “The king of tigers has gone to his rest in a king’s tomb. It would take two weeks’ digging to get him out of there.”
“By which time, all his hide would be fit for would be to feed the jackals.”
The taller man turned furiously on Scylla, who, having suc
ceeded in calming the panic-stricken Kali, had pulled forward her bedraggled veil and now walked over to thank them, leading the mare.
“Why in the name of Eblis did you have to arrive on the scene just at this moment, woman? If it had not been for you and your thrice-accursed mare, the skin of that tiger, which we have been stalking for the past two weeks, would have made a highly acceptable present to take to the Maharajah of Ziatur. Now all we can take him is the information that the tiger is putrefying in his great-grandfather’s tomb.”
“The Maharajah is a very sick man,” Scylla replied composedly. “I do not think he would have been very interested in your tiger. And I do not at all see why you should blame me for the tiger’s having gone into the cave! There is no reason to suppose that he would not have done so whether I was there or not. However—and be that as it may—I am very grateful to you for saving my life. Though it is true,” she added reflectively, “if you had not been chasing the tiger, I daresay I would never have met him, so saving me was the least you could do.”
At the commencement of her speech the taller man had started; he now looked at her very attentively.
“Who are you, in the name of all the djinns?” he asked curiously. “You are no Sikh or Dogra woman? What are you doing here? And how do you come to know so much about the Maharajah?”