Nightrunners of Bengal

by John Masters

  For Prithvi Chand he had begun to feel a genuine friendship. The fat captain seemed to be a court parasite, and if he owned a conscience of any kind he kept it concealed under a happy-go-lucky air and a flow of amusing stories. Rodney’s military ferocity terrified him, and it took the Indian two or three weeks to realize that the same man who flayed him so rigorously on parade would joke and drink with him off duty. He reminded Rodney of a gross butterfly, but no one could help liking him, and at parties such as this he was a pleasant companion. Airily drunk with sweet wine, he reclined now on a bank of cushions at Rodney’s elbow. The water bubbled in the silver bowl of his hookah; from time to time he belched explosively, for he too had eaten well and gave thanks therefor in the customary way.

  Rodney turned to him. “Prithvi, do you and your friends treat all English visitors so--easily? I expected you to be reserved, correct; you have no reason to like us. But it’s been more than that, especially in the last few weeks.”

  Prithvi Chand scratched his stomach and grinned slyly. “If you mean Her Highness, Captain, who am I to say? Now don’ be annoyed, I’m only joking--but you know she likes you. She’s very unusual lady.” He glanced round automatically to make sure no one was in earshot. “The old-fashioned dragons wan-wanted her shut herself up rest of her life when the Rajah died--even become suttee. You know most of the princes are here already for the hunt? With their ranis and girls? I’ve got a li’l piece upstairs, she says she--she can’t hear ‘self think for the ‘foreign’ women d’nouncing our Rani’s out-outrageous behaviour! Bzz, bzz, clatter, clatter--at it all day!” He hiccoughed and waved a plump hand in the air. “Waste of breath. Rani says, ever since she’s a li’l girl so high, she’s going to be different. ‘S not another woman of family in India dares do what she’s done. She’s wonderful--terrifies everyone. Woman like that’s like tigress with wings--a freak? I say, you won’ tell her this, will you? I’m drunk’s th’ Archer-God.”

  Rodney shook his head and sucked on the amber mouthpiece of his own hookah. It was all true enough; she was like a fire, or a steel spring, and terrifying in the force and range of her passions. Her rages struck like lightning; she even stood still with a sort of passionate realization of her stillness. He had not sought a meeting with her, partly because he was ashamed of his outburst that night in the courtyard. Dellamain had presented him at an informal audience, and after that the Rani took the initiative. Rodney had tried to remain cold and official; it was impossible, because the emotions she aroused were powerful ones--whether of contempt, dislike, distrust, fear, or admiration. Within ten days after Dellamain’s departure he had felt all those, in that order. She saw him two or three hours a day; never covered her face; cross-examined him on a thousand minutiae of his work and life; sometimes asked him to call her by her name, Sumitra, to help her “think English.” She thought that way she would understand better what he was getting at. It was an impossibility, of course; there was no Englishwoman in the world quite like Sumitra, Rani-Regent of Kishanpur.

  The music beat a louder tune; the dancers swung, their fingers gestured, their silver anklets clinked and crashed. Prithvi Chand raised his voice. “What a row! You know the miss sahib--Langford, wasn’t it?--who was here six months last year? She an’ the Rani hated each other, ‘cos they’re so much ‘like.” Rodney opened his mouth to protest. “Oh, yes, Captain. One’s Indian, one’s English--one has power do what she likes, other wants it. But why you find us easy-- tha’ss because you fit in, yet you’re still English as goddamn --’scuse me, Captain.”

  Rodney smiled. Perhaps it was true. Or perhaps they had some ulterior motive in view and wanted to make sure he would report favourably to the Commissioner. But it was a nice thing to hear. He said, “Thank you, Prithvi. You’ve all taken such a lot of trouble to see that I had a good time--all the shikar you’ve shown me . . .”

  Prithvi Chand giggled; Rodney frowned, then relaxed in a sheepish grin. In the beginning, Prithvi, Shivcharan, and even the golden youth, had indeed taken him out hunting. One of them always went along to show him where the wild fowl flighted and the red jungle cock fed. They clung close and never left him to do his own explorations; once, wanting to take the morning flight and not thinking it necessary to disturb anyone at four a.m., he had slipped out alone. The surly Shivcharan came running after, and later blurted out the reason for his haste. The Dewan feared Rodney might lose his way or come to some harm in the jungle. The Rani would hold the Dewan responsible; so one of the officers was always to accompany him when he left the fort. The Dewan himself seemed to be away a lot.

  All that was in the early weeks. For the last month it had been the Rani who came with him, talking without cease, demanding to be taught to shoot, asking his advice on the ordering of guns from England. She was a little over five feet in height, firmly built, and had big black moving eyes. It was she who sat over the kill with him when villagers brought in news of a leopard; she who shot the leopard and clapped her hands like a young girl.

  He wanted to thank Prithvi for other benefits besides good hunting. He swept his hand in a gesture embracing the dancers, the bottle of imported brandy on a table, the liveried servants behind him, the strewn cushions. “And then there’s all this . . .”

  Prithvi smiled happily. “We want you to see our life, Captain, what we are. This is the best tr-troupe dancers in the state. You still look’s if you’re on parade--jus’ happen to be reclining. Can you never relax? Try, jus’ thish once, feel like a prince--be Jonathan Savage.”

  “That was nearly eighty years ago, Prithvi.”

  “An’ now you’re not a’venturers any more? Jus’ bits great pomp-pompous machine? C’mon, try, jus’ please me.” He subsided with a belch and closed his eyes.

  Rodney thought perhaps he could afford to unbend a little; Dellamain and Julio gone, no other Englishman here to stand in judgment on his behaviour. He forced a small musical burp and giggled.

  In the Rani’s court there were old men, Oriental Minnesingers; at night they told tales of Rawan history--of the magnificence, of hawking and hunting, of war, torture, and single combat. Rodney no longer read Marco Polo, for the old men’s stories were as true and as thrilling. The Rani encouraged them to embroider the legendary splendour remembered of his great-grandfather, Jonathan Savage; of how he had lived like a prince, and gone away at last with presents and loot worth half a million rupees. Rodney wondered fretfully what in hades he’d done with it. He hadn’t got it.

  The room was warm; its luxury of gold and wine and music touched his jealousy. Four hundred rupees odd a month, Joanna’s pearls not paid for, Robin’s schooling to come--and there ought to be more children when she got over her fright or her pretended worry about her figure; or was it the fright that was pretence? Why did no one offer him a nice large bribe? What for? What reason on earth would anyone have to bribe a soldier these days? The civil, now! That was the place, and the middle of last century the time! India was a golden jungle then, and his own standards would have been different. Jonathan Savage took bribes and thought nothing of it. Even William, Rodney’s father, who had never taken one so far as he knew, had not regarded venality as a form of social leprosy; neither that, nor sexual immorality, nor drunkenness, nor anything--except lack of physical courage. That had been the eighteenth century’s code, the code of the Regency bucks. This damned Albert was the root of the trouble, imposing his stodgy German decorum on the Queen and through her on all her subjects. The English had been a riotous crew once; they were a damned dull lot now. It was too late; he’d been bred and raised in the new propriety. He couldn’t take a bribe, even if he wanted to and if someone were fool enough to offer him one.

  He brushed back the hair falling over his forehead and drank moodily. Prithvi Chand lolled on the scarlet silk covers, asleep now, his mouth open. Through drowsy eyes Rodney saw that only one lamp remained burning in a far corner. The few other guests, all men, had drifted away unnoticed, and the servants had gone. The weak glimmer
of the lamp contracted the room so that its gold and scarlet hangings blurred close over him. The curtains were drawn on the musicians’ balcony. An Indian violin etched arabesques on the night; a drummer beat with two hands on his drum; each hand beat a separate rhythm, each rhythm different from the violin’s. The three rhythms followed their paths, came together at a point of sound, paused, separated, and in due time again met. Six girls danced; their hands writhed, slowing as the music slowed. Each girl wore two anklets on her right ankle; the anklets chimed, chink-chink, chink-chink. Shields and swords gleamed like silver ciphers on the walls. The light dimmed.

  A brown girl trembled in the centre of the floor. She wore no anklets, or swinging skirt, or tight-drawn bodice. As her naked body moved, the glancing curves of light moved, and Prithvi Chand slept. The outer verges of darkness had swallowed the other dancers. Perhaps they lay beyond the light, locked with soldiers or courtiers, like the spread-eagled women of the temple carvings and the gods who grasped them with many hands--locked for ever, carved of one stone.

  The girl was an arrow, straight and taut. She arched her back and was a bow, bent, straining to let go. The bow released; she was a woman and twisted in slow ecstasy. Her breasts pointed the way for her seeking, hesitant feet; her mouth drooped slack and wet and her eyes were blind. She twined around him, her restless body so slight it could not escape. His hands went out and took hold of her buttocks. He dug his fingers into her flesh; the flesh yielded.

  He looked into her eyes, searching deep, his nostrils pinched and his breathing difficult. The keys lay there, not in him; a shameless splendour of desire would drive him on until her desire was peace. She moved, and his fingers tightened. She had brown eyes, and in their depths a flat wall of--nothing.

  He sighed softly and let his grip relax. Dear girl, dear lovely arrow girl. She had done her best. He caressed her bottom, smiled, and pushed her gently away. After a long wondering hesitation she smiled and stepped back, pace by slow pace, smiling, into the darkness. A moment longer she remained as an image held on the retina--big eyes, tight hair, a half-smile, and a whiteness of small teeth. Prithvi Chand slept.

  The violin crept down a stair of sound. At the foot the rhythms met for the last time, and silence joined them. The collar of his shirt constricted his breathing. He rose to his feet, walked carefully out of the room and along the passage, and climbed up through the fort towards the battlements.

  It was cold in the open air; the day’s clouds had passed and the sky hung low, a roof of twinkling fire. Leaning against the parapet, he lit a cheroot and saw the smoke drift north against the stars; nearly always, at night, a breeze blew down the river. He looked at the bulk of the fort, black and enormously crouched below him.

  A Rawan had built it on the site of a smaller house, in the sixteenth-century morning of the Mogul glory. The plan of the entry port showed the hand of a French engineer, and Prithvi Chand had confirmed that another Rawan had commissioned a student of Vauban’s to modernize the fort in 1710. Mahrattas, Rajputs, and Moguls had captured and recaptured it, and at last the British. For five hundred years the Rawans had ruled their lands from here. Their hold had been now tenuous, now firm, but they had never altogether relaxed their grip, whether as independent kings, as viceroys for the Mogul, as vassals of the Mahrattas, as caged pets of the British. The fort lived on with them. The Rani still held audience in the huge room on the ground floor; soldiers and servants moved up and down the passages; today no prisoners shared the dungeons with the bats, but there were signs--a smell of ammonia, a pile of calcined excrement in the corner of a cell--that there had been prisoners yesterday, or last month, and might be again tomorrow.

  Yet the fort slept a last sleep; for all its mass it was a ghost. Rodney paced slowly round the walk, and stopped again on the south face, over the zenana. The fountains were dry which had once played for waiting women. No one sat on the marble benches under the grottoes which the builders had imitated from Al Kadhimain. The kings were dead and the disputes settled. The dispossessed crowded round him, changeless, drowned in tides of history. What a wonder of silk and steel this must have been!

  He stirred, the unease of death in his bones, remembering the tree roots that pushed apart the stones of the lower wall, the lily pads and water weeds that grew along the river front at the foot of the red masonry cliff. It must be fifty years since canopied barges carried the prince and his court out on the water. Now mangy dogs wandered in and out of the wicket in the main gate and lifted their legs against the cloisters, and a pile of ordure stank against the outside of the north wall. The uniforms of the Bodyguard hung in yellow tatters from their bodies; they had been rich and splendid once.

  The shape of the land showed only in a blacker blackness against the horizon. He saw the quarter-guard lights in his camp by the river, a mile upstream.

  He had never talked with her here at night, and did not know why he expected her. Leaning on the parapet, he turned his head. She was a pale oval face, a vague spread of gold and silver. The sari lay back in a sweep on her shoulders, the stars gleamed on the central parting down her black hair, and her eyes were on him--they had never been so huge and moving-black. Her lips were painted dark. She had a round red caste mark between her eyebrows; a ruby ring on a finger of her right hand made a spark of fire. He knew that she was not surprised to see him.

  She leaned against the parapet beside him, and after a minute asked softly, “What are you looking at?”

  “That light. It’s in my camp.” He pointed with his chin. She put her hand on his sleeve in a natural gesture.

  “Why will you not let me come and see it? It is my land. I wish to know what a sepoy’s camp is like. Show it to me tomorrow--please.”

  He smiled and drew smoke into his lungs. “No, ma’am. I will not.”

  He felt her stiffen, then at once relax. She left the hand resting on his arm and sighed. “I am sorry. I forget sometimes that I am not the queen of your English Company. But I wish to know. I have never been in any camp; they would not let me. When I go out to Kishan Falls on Monday, it will be the first time. Tell me about it.”

  The single light by the river filled the darkness, and he was there, standing beside it. The tents were ranged in a single row, facing the water; the sentries strode their posts; monkeys chattered suddenly by the Monkeys’ Well behind; a leopard’s sawing cough boomed across the river in front; the soldiers slept. She didn’t want to know about all that. He answered her, pausing between his sentences. She spoke English well, if a little formally, and understood it without effort, but he had to speak slowly.

  “You won’t see the best part--choosing the place and pitching camp. With us the sepoys put up the tents on a bugle call, all together, and the men of each tent try to get it done first. Next, they dig drainage cuts round, and they’re always very cheerful then--I don’t know why. I have one tent to sleep in, and one as an office, and that’s where I rest and read too. I eat outside unless it rains. The sepoys make a fireplace of mud for me in one wall of the tent. The orderly and the bearer spread my mats on the grass inside. The day we pitched camp down there, Rambir was imitating a Pathan carpet pedlar--you may not have seen one, but plenty of them come down from the north every cold weather. Rambir waved the mats about and made plocking noises, like boots being pulled out of wet mud. That’s the way they imitate the Pathans’ language, and it always amuses them; all the sepoys in earshot were chuckling as they worked. But Rambir’s a great buffoon, and that wasn’t enough for him. In the middle of all this gibberish he made one phrase come out clearly enough: ‘Beautiful carpets--eight annas to you, eight rupees to a sahib!’ Then everyone looked at me out of the corner of his eye to see if I had taken the point.

  He laughed, warm with the memory.

  “Then we clear the camp of stones, and settle down and make ourselves comfortable. Some officers have glass doors to their tents, you know. I like to clean my guns when there is nothing else to do. In the evening the Native Offic
ers come to my tent and I sit there with my shirt unbuttoned and my legs stretched out, and we talk about the next day’s work and so on. Sometimes I have to wear my greatcoat because it’s chilly.”

  “What time do you start work?”

  “Not very early yet. No one’s heard the coppersmith bird or the brainfever bird, and we don’t count the hot weather as really begun until we do. Reveille’s still at six, first parade, seven--but I’ll put them forward an hour soon. By eleven o’clock these days the sun is hot on your back. Those tunics are thick, and we perspire right through them. It’s a good life; the best. The bats fly about under the trees. After dark I listen to the river--this fort stands up very big and square and black from there. I like that better than being in it, I’m afraid.”

  She put up the hand that had rested on his arm and adjusted her sari so that it hid the side of her face nearest him. “It is cold. You see my India as the men who paint pictures see it, yet you are a soldier. The greatest hero of our family was like that--Rudraparsad Rawan. You know, I too am a Rawan, of another branch? But you are a foreigner--oh, it is not true! None of you English are quite foreigners, or ever will be. I wish I did not think so.”

  Her low worried voice stopped. When she continued a minute later, she spoke lightly. “I should have been born a man. The outside smells better than those women in the zenana--phooh! Do you remember the hunting with the cheetah? Was it not beautiful, Rodney?”

  He nodded. That had been at the end of January. The party had gathered in the courtyard at six in the morning; he remembered the cold tinkle of the fountain, the three monstrous, vague elephants soundlessly shifting their feet and waving their trunks. The fields on the way to the hunting ground were quiet, and the elephants pitched and rolled in a shallow sea of mist. The first light painted the fort behind them with a luminous pallor. The howdahs creaked, huts and trees drifted past, and no one spoke. Sumitra had gripped the basketwork rim and opened her nostrils to the sharpness of the morning.