by Joan Aiken
The child’s head was speaking again in that eerie ventriloquial squeak.
“O thou descended from Baba Nanak…in whose veins the royal blood runs like a river of gold…son of a warrior clan… Your star is bright, you have far to go before its setting…mark well, though, the warning that comes from beyond the blind winds of desolation…the tree must be pruned before it will bear fruit…the old wood must be cut away, the unruly shoots must be lopped…an Akali, a warrior, must also be a martyr in the cause of strength…if thy leg be lame, strike it off at the knee!”
Dangerous stuff, thought Cameron rather uneasily; downright seditious, in fact. Mihal was listening with silent intensity; his knuckles gleamed white, gripping the handle of his pistol as he leaned forward to catch the batlike shrilling of the voice, which, Cameron observed, spoke the same hill dialect as the blind seer had used.
“And as for thee, warrior from afar, who bringest weapons for the sons of Nanak, the children of Gobind…beware lest the spear thou bearest should turn in thy hand and pierce thine own heart…meddle not in the strife of the holy contenders…except thou hand his weapon to the true Ruler, it were better to be gone…betake thee to thine own place, the river of crimson trees…
“Laughing youth, child of love, beware the lightning flash! Beware the black stroke that smites behind the eyes, bringing vision and forgetfulness!”
The brat in the basin is becoming rather overexcited, Cameron observed to himself lightly, to distract himself from the slight shudder he felt down his spine as the head bobbed and shrilled, seeming now to turn in Cal’s direction. Cal, on his cushion, was motionless, rapt, absorbed; the embroidered devils behind him could not have been more silent.
“Watch for the sacrifice by the weeping tree!” squalled the supernatural voice. “And look for my return! You cannot leave me behind; although you may cross water I shall accompany you; I shall be there before you. By the weeping tree you will see me again! I bring you what you ask for, and I take it again; while I am with you, men will hear your voice; when I am gone from you again, your lips will be dumb!”
The voice died away, as it seemed, to an immense distance. And then, as Mihal stood up with an abrupt movement, the bowl of water overturned; he had kicked it to one side and a black pool spread over the floor; next moment his pistol roared and blazed; with a groan the blind seer fell backward, blood flowing back from his mouth to cover his sightless eyes.
Wailing in terror, the veiled girl ran from the room.
“Mother of God!” Shocked out of his usual phlegm, Cameron turned on the prince. “What in the name of Eblis made you do that?”
Mihal was sweating profusely, and very pale, but quite calm; he replaced the pistol in its sheath and said matter-of-factly:
“It is always necessary to stop the mouths of those who prophesy to princes, lest, in their pride, they become dangerous, or boast to the multitude.”
Cameron had spent too long in the wilds to hold human life particularly dear; he had seen whole clans wiped out in Afghan blood feuds, or by the headhunters of Kafiristan; and he did not esteem the blind seer to be a particularly valuable citizen. Nonetheless there was something about this cold-blooded statement that struck him with peculiar force. He said, however, half admiringly:
“Well, you surely are a cool customer, Prince.—Does that mean, then, that you believed what the fellow told you?”
“Indeed yes,” replied Mihal. “And you, too, Kamaran Sahib, you would be wise to believe it! My star shines bright and I have many miles to go before its setting. Serve me, Sahib, and I will reward you. Be my daroga, Kamaran, and I will pay you well. I ask this of you! You shall have twenty-five hundred rupees a month, and many hectares of land.”
“What use is land to a man with a roving foot?” Cameron replied composedly. “You are very good, Mihal Shahzada; but I am in the employ of your royal father. A man cannot serve two masters.” And then he added, to cut short this difficult dialogue, which, he could not help feeling, should not have taken place at all:
“Had we not better do something about our young friend here? He appears to have been seized with some species of fit.”
In point of fact Cal had fallen sideways onto the floor and was lying flat, completely rigid; his eyes were turned upward so that only the whites showed. He looked almost as dead as the soothsayer, save that a trickle of frothy saliva ran from his mouth. Cameron’s investigating hand, however, found a slow but steady heartbeat and even slower breathing.
“Merciful gods! Is he poisoned, think you?” muttered Mihal, much more discomposed by this than by his dispatch of the fortune-teller. “Can that girl have thrown poisoned incense on the coals—?”
“No, no, set your mind at rest,” replied Cameron soothingly. “He has merely thrown an epileptic fit; I have seen several such seizures before, in men who were greatly stirred or overset by some portent. You need not be too concerned about him.” He gave a rather satirical glance at the prince and added, “I am afraid you will have to help me carry him down the stairs, though; he will probably sleep like this for many hours now, and we can hardly leave him here with the dead body; it would certainly be thought that he had—done the killing.”
Rather sulky at having to perform a service so out of keeping with his royal estate, Mihal complied. The old woman at the doorway was gone.
“Wait here, Colonel, with the boy, and I will have a tonga sent to carry him home,” ordered Mihal, and swiftly disappeared into the shadows. Cameron propped Cal’s inert body against the doorpost and waited for a few minutes.
Time passed and the promised tonga did not come. It occurred to Cameron that Mihal might equally well send somebody to knife or garrote him and young Paget, thus eliminating two more inconvenient witnesses to the seer’s prophecy.
Thus reflecting, he picked up Cal—who did not weigh so very much, after all—and began walking through the hot, dark streets in the direction of Miss Musson’s bungalow, with the unconscious boy dangling over his shoulder.
He chose a rather circuitous route.
* * *
Scylla made her way up to the palace early the next morning, for she considered that Amur and Ranji had been indulged long enough and should now return to lessons; accordingly she had sent a message on the previous evening that classes would recommence on the following day.
The first thing she saw, on gaining the inner courtyard, was Kamaran Sahib himself, demonstrating to the Maharajah the correct way of putting on a French-made steel cuirass faced with brass; it was a handsome piece of armor, fastened at the sides with buckled straps, ornamented with a laurel wreath and a Gallic crowing cock in brass inlay, and must have weighed sixteen to twenty pounds. The Maharajah, reclined on his charpoy, today wrapped in a blue, gold-embroidered dressing gown, was greatly taken with the cuirass; so was his youngest son, little Chet Singh, who was sitting on his father’s knee, clapping his small fat hands with enthusiasm as the early morning sun fetched sparks out of the steel and brass while Cameron, now buckled into the chestplate, drew himself upright and struck various dramatic military attitudes.
“Shabash, Sahib Bahadur!” shouted little Chet.
“That is a very fine piece of armor,” said the Maharajah. “Is it not, little prince of my heart? I only wish we had ten thousand of them.”
“I will wear it, I will wear it!” clamored the little boy. He jumped off his father’s knee and ran to clasp Cameron around the leg—he could only just walk, being aged a little over a year. He was the Maharajah’s favorite child, born of a young wife, Raj Kour, who had unfortunately contracted puerperal fever and died shortly after his birth. Some rumors in the palace had it that Raj Kour had been poisoned by her displaced rival, the Rani Sada, but Miss Musson contended crossly that it had been a straightforward case of fever—common enough, heaven knew!—and, if anybody had followed her instructions, need not have been fatal.
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sp; “Thou wear the armor, princeling?” said Cameron, picking up Chet, who immediately began hammering with his tiny fists on the bright steel, shouting, “Bang, bang, bang!”
“Thou couldst not even lift it off the ground! Wait till thou art a man grown, my lord—then it will be time enough to shoot off big guns and wear heavy armor.”
“Nay, Sahib, I have other plans for this prince,” said his father fondly, receiving Chet back as Colonel Cameron began to unbuckle the breastplate. “He is to go to school in England and learn to be a wise administrator, versed in the laws of the Feringi and cunning in their diplomacy. Yes, I have it all planned; he is to go to Eton, where they send their prime ministers to school, when he is of an age to travel.”
“Eton!” said Cameron, startled—he met Scylla’s eyes as she came up to curtsy to the Maharajah and exchanged a smile with her. “Will he be happy there, do you think, Excellency? At an English school? It is so cold in England, and it rains so often!”
“Happy? It is not for a prince to be happy,” replied the Maharajah severely. “It is for Chet Singh to acquire the white men’s cunning and skills, so that he can advise his brother Mihal.” The Maharajah’s tone confirmed a belief already entertained by Scylla that the father did not hold a particularly high opinion of his eldest son’s abilities. “This little one is to become a learned doctor in Belaiti law. It is all decided long since. That letter you carried for me, Kamaran Sahib, to my cousin Gobind Tegh Bahadur in London, was to make the necessary arrangements; the funds are now transferred, and my cousin will take charge of the boy when he is old enough to leave this place. But previous to that, I hope that the Mem Periseela—to whom I have discourteously not yet said good morning!—will teach him all that a Feringi boy may need to know before he attends a madrisseh—a school such as Eton.”
“Good morning to you, Excellency!” replied Scylla, curtsying and dimpling again. “Indeed I doubt if I am equipped to teach the little one all that he needs to know; but still, before the sad day comes when he has to go away, I feel sure that you will be able to secure some wise English tutor who can show him how to go on in a school such as Eton.”
Just the same, she could not help feeling sorry for little Chet, now happily pulling his father’s beard; it seemed a long, cold way to send him into exile, and she had heard that great severities were practiced in English schools. Cal had often congratulated himself that he had escaped such a fate.
“What do you think of the armor that Kamaran Sahib has brought me, mademoiselle?” inquired the Maharajah. “Will not my soldiers shine splendidly in these breastplates? And my friend here assures me that they will keep out a musket bullet at anything over one hundred yards and perhaps even closer.”
“It is certainly a very handsome article,” agreed Scylla, admiring the cuirass. “Only, I ask myself, will the Maharajah’s soldiers, who are used to lighter clothing, be able to stand the weight when fighting, especially in hilly ground, for instance, and under the hot sun of this country?”
The Maharajah looked affronted, but Cameron laughed.
“She has a head on her shoulders, this young lady,” he told the Maharajah. “You should employ her as your daroga, Excellency!”
“The soldiers will practice wearing the breastplates daily, until they are accustomed,” the Maharajah said testily.
Scylla, seeing that she had ruffled the royal sensibilities, was about to take her leave and go on, when the colonel drew her to one side, taking the opportunity of doing so as the Maharajah, first embracing him tenderly, handed over little Chet to an ayah who came salaaming to receive him.
“I hope that you are not too anxious about your brother, Miss Paget,” he said in a low voice. “I do not believe that the seizure was a bad one or need give you any particular concern—but of course I would not have encouraged his going to such an affair had I known that he was subject—”
“Seizure? What are you talking about, Colonel Cameron?”
Scylla had gone very pale and stared at him with enormous eyes.
A couple of questions by Cameron elicited from her the fact that Cal was still sleeping, and the servants, believing that he was in a state of stupor caused by drink or opium, had not mentioned that he had been carried home unconscious by Colonel Cameron in the small hours.
Cameron rapidly explained the situation.
“I am sure that your guardian will tell you there is no cause for alarm,” he ended reassuringly. “I have known highly strung young men like your brother occasionally taken with such spasms—ten to one he’ll grow out of the tendency in a few years—”
In spite of his assurances she still looked pale and startled, and murmured to herself, “Oh, I wish I could get him away from this place.” Then, recalling her whereabouts, she thanked Cameron very warmly and ingenuously. “I collect, sir, that you had considerable trouble escorting him home; we must be exceedingly thankful to you for that! Heaven knows what would have become of him otherwise—it does not bear thinking of—”
She was about to leave him when the Maharajah called to both of them.
“There is a thing that I would like to say to you both—my Yagistani friends,” he announced. Wondering what he had in mind—for he looked extremely serious—Scylla did not trouble to correct his error in making her into an honorary Yagistani but listened politely, as did Colonel Cameron.
“There is a charge I should like to lay on you,” the Maharajah continued, “for I am aware that you are both people of honor and responsibility—as also is my friend the Sahiba Musson, but she hardly ever comes to see me anymore.”
“Yes, Excellency? Whatever it is that you wish, you know we will gladly do it, if it is within our power,” Cameron said.
“Ah, but it may not be easy. That is why I ask you both together, so that you will be a reminder, one to the other.” The Maharajah’s river-brown eyes moved from Cameron to Scylla and back. “I ask you—if anything of an untoward nature should happen to me—as the gods in their wisdom know may happen to all mortals at all times—will you both promise to me that you will undertake to convey my little Chet Singh to my cousin in London, or see him conveyed there? Even if he is yet too young for the madrisseh? For although I may be with the gods, I think my heart would be anxious about him, and I shall rest more happily if I know that he is away in that foreign land with my cousin. The palace of Ziatur might not be safe for him if I am no longer here.”
“May Your Excellency live forever,” Scylla said promptly. “But let us hope that heaven allows you many more years yet, until your little son is old enough to order his own traveling arrangements—”
Her eyes met those of Cameron; she observed him to be as troubled as she was. Cameron, in fact, could not help uneasily remembering the soothsayer’s words of last night and Mihal’s look of total composure, surveying the dead body, as he said, “It is necessary to stop the mouths of those who prophesy to kings.”
“Nay, but promise!” the Maharajah insisted. “Swear on your Yagistani gods.”
So they both promised, and then Scylla hurried away, late again, to her other pair of princes, who were impatiently awaiting her, pulling straws, meanwhile, as to which was to have first dip into an enormous plate of sweetmeats, honey and curd nuggets, globes of sugar spun on a thread, and sugar-coated crystallized fruits, which had been sent to them by their stepmother the Rani Sada. Scylla forbade either of them to touch a single candy until lesson time was over; wondering, meanwhile, with one corner of her mind why Sada should trouble to send a gift to her stepsons, for whom she entertained the most profound indifference, concentrating, as she did, all her affections upon her own child, a fat spoiled little boy of three called Ajit, who was seldom seen outside of her apartments. But perhaps she, also, was looking ahead and cultivating possible friends all over the palace…
Scylla was too perturbed about her brother to have much attention to spare for palace polit
ics today, however. She could not wait to get away and study Cal for herself—ask him if this was the first such seizure he had suffered, or had there been others? Did Miss Musson know of this tendency? Did he remember last night’s attack, or was the occasion blanked out in his mind? Now, putting her own impressions together with facts gleaned from Miss Musson about other such cases, Scylla could see that everything about her brother’s temperament dovetailed with the likelihood of his having an epileptic tendency—his dreaminess, moodiness, fits of energy alternated with lethargy, his strange detachment from the world about him, his tendency for deep, deep sleep…
Never had two hours gone so slowly.
“Good-bye, boys,” she said at last, gathering up their geometry exercises to take to Cal. “Don’t eat yourselves sick, now. And I will see you tomorrow at the same time—”
“Au revoir, mademoiselle! Will you not take a bonbon, mademoiselle?”
“Thank you, no! I do not wish to become as plump as Mahtab Kour,” she said outrageously, and left them giggling at such an improbability.
On her way along one of the palace galleries, Scylla was intercepted by a servant with a message that the Mahtab Kour wished for her company, but she excused herself on the grounds that her brother was sick and that she must hurry home with all possible speed, promising, however, to call in the following day, and sending a message of extravagant thanks for the beautiful sari.
As on a previous visit she sensed, rather than heard, a presence overhead, and looked up in time to catch a twitch of a curtain in an upstairs gallery; the palace felt even more alive than usual with whispers and tiptoeings, unseen watchers and listeners. Scylla hurried out into the courtyard with relief, wondering absently why Mahtab Kour’s servant—the fat, surly Huneefa—had seemed so astonished to see her. But all other considerations were overborne by her anxiety about Cal as she summoned Abdul from his shady spot by the great gate and made her way homeward through the teeming streets.
Cal, when she reached the bungalow, had just sleepily strolled out onto the veranda and was attacking a large slice of watermelon. His only emotion, when Scylla burst out with solicitous inquires, seemed to be a mild impatience and disgruntlement.