by John Masters
Mary reached for his hand, and took it, and held it to her breast with both her own. He whispered suddenly, ‘I didn’t know George had come to Madhya. He ought to have guessed what I was doing. He knew how I felt about these murders. I should have thought he could have found me if he’d tried.’
Her hands stiffened over his. ‘William, dearest, I had something—a little—to do with that. But really it was he himself. He was a—muddled man.’ She did not speak for a minute, then whispered, ‘Do you love me?’
‘Yes.’
‘He wanted to marry me if you didn’t come back. Rather, he wanted to marry Mr. Wilson’s daughter. Darling’—he thought she was looking at him—‘George was important only because he is the man you thought you wanted to be, once, didn’t you?’
He said, ‘Yes. What did Hussein say?’
‘He told me you were in all sorts of danger. His face was dreadful, terrified but somehow exalted too. I saw it just as he ran out. The hangman might have been waiting outside for him.’
‘He was.’
‘Oh, darling! I think he died happy, though.’ Her voice was hoarse from thirst, but calm and steady. ‘You must tell me more about him later. I don’t want to know everything.’
‘He wanted to be a chuprassi and was faithful.’
‘That’s it. William, have you got anything we can eat? My insides are rumbling.’
He said, ‘Nothing. There was some curry. Sher Dil threw it in George’s face.’
She giggled suddenly and moved his hand. ‘Put your hand—here. Feel? That’s your baby.’ Her voice was fond and warm. William felt the baby’s sudden kick lift her skin under his hand.
‘She!’ he said and kissed her ear. She wriggled her head in a tiny spurt of voluptuous abandon, and for him the sky roofed over and the hard stone became their bed in Madhya. He kissed her longingly. She broke away. ‘Oh, William! There’s a Peeping Tom.’ The moon climbed out of the hills and peered at them between the trees.
They walked on slowly and haltingly. They crossed jungle clearings washed by mysterious light, slipped down the banks of a small stream, drank, scrambled up the other side, and wound on in Indian file between the trunks of trees where the jungle grew thick. Twice every hour they lay down to rest.
After many hours, as they lay, he heard that Mary’s breath came in shallow gasps, and he did not get up to move on when the ten minutes were over. Half an hour later, breathing more easily, she fell into a doze. The first daylight began to etch a black horizon ahead. The contrasting grey pallor spread up and reached fingers round the eastern sky. He looked across a grassy upland, a mile and more wide between these trees and others on the farther side. He did not properly remember this country; he had traversed it only once; he did not know exactly where they were, but he knew that the far trees must crown a slope that led down to the Hiran River. Katangi Beacon reared up black to his left. The dawn came over the ridge and the blackness on the hill retreated downwards, leaving the trees green behind it. Away to his right, low blue smoke from Selwara tinted the air over the plateau. He saw five or six of the hamlet’s outlying houses, but no movement.
He touched Mary’s shoulder. ‘Wake up. Look.’ Her eyes fluttered, and her face in the cold light was like sweat-streaked marble. He said, ‘We’ve got to get across this plateau. Then we can rest.’ She gathered herself and was ready. For the last time he swept his field of view, from Katangi Beacon on the left to Selwara on the right, shading his eyes against the sunrays now flat in his face.
A brown animal moved out from a clump of trees in the centre of the plateau. He stared at it and frowned because he could not make out what it was. It was not a cow, or a fox, or a leopard, or a deer, or a pig.
It did not matter what it was. One animal could not hurt them. He rose up, still staring. The animal moved in an awkward swinging shamble, head down on the grass. It stopped slowly, then raised its head, higher and higher, and sat up on its haunches. A light wind blew from west to east. The animal moved on a pace, stopped short with a jerk, and shambled back into the copse.
It was a bear on a long chain. Someone out of sight had pulled the chain. The sap ran out of William’s knees and he sank down. After a minute, when he had mastered the trembling of his legs, he took Mary’s hand and led her back into the jungle.
He would have to go to Jarod and hide there with her—and hope. Mr. Wilson with the cavalry regiment from Sagthali might reach the area late tonight, by furious riding, but he could do nothing till the morning. He might not come at all. Like George Angelsmith, he might refuse to believe the whole fantastic story.
At all events, this day and this coming night belonged to the Deceivers, and to the sharp-nostrilled, lascivious, loving bear.
After an hour’s hurried scramble Mary groaned, and they sat down. She lay back against a tree. He said, ‘Can you go on? We can fight here. We have two pistols.’
‘I can go on, in a minute,’ she said. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Jarod.’
The heat of the day increased. Mary weaved between the trees and tripped over every twig and stone. They passed across the lower slopes of Katangi Beacon and came late in the afternoon to a shallow stream. The sticky phlegm clogged their mouths so that at first they could not drink. Then Mary lay down in the water, but he said, ‘Come on, come on.’ They walked in the stream bed, scrambling up the transverse rock faults which made little falls, and stooping to pass under the overhanging bushes. When they stepped out of the stream they heard a call on the hill behind them, not faint, not far, and it was answered from the right.
They crossed a rock slope where the sun poured down and the spare trees made lonely islands of shadow. Beyond, the land rose steadily. Now Mary moved one foot at a time and moaned at every step. Just before dark a straight line, straighter than any in nature, loomed horizontally among the trees ahead. They climbed a short, steep, evenly sloped bank. The top of it was twenty feet wide and level. Brown grass grew plentifully, and the trees were spaced even more thinly. They stood on the outer glacis of Jarod.
The glacis dropped twelve feet, a cliff made of stone blocks, to a wide dry ditch. Across the ditch rose a vertical face of earth and stone—the inner rampart. The whole—the outer glacis, the inner rampart, the ditch enclosed like a roofless corridor between them—ran up hill and down dale to right and left through the jungle, curving irregularly back on itself to form a complete circle of two miles’ circumference. They could see little enough of it, for the triple barrier soon disappeared among the trees and folds of land. But through her pain Mary gasped in admiration.
This he had spoken of on the bridal journey, and she remembered. This was the forgotten fortress of Jarod, built by the Gond aborigines in a time when they had had the power, against enemies not possessing firearms, to hold this pass through the hills. The glacis and ditch and rampart enclosed a section of the side of the mountain. There were no buildings, and never had been; nor had the Gonds levelled the ground. Inside the rampart, as outside, trees grew and spiny bushes ran across the earth, and there were small cliffs, a stream, clearings, flat ground, rock slides. Here the Gond tribes had once encamped against the Aryan invaders who pressed them back into their own jungles and made them savages. In this dusk of a later century William felt still the presence of the small black sentries, and saw them hurry together with their bows and poisoned arrows to the point of danger.
Many parts of the glacis and rampart had fallen down, pushed out by the roots of the trees that had grown on them. William and Mary scrambled down the glacis over a cascade of tumbled stones. They walked along the ditch and after a hundred yards found a breach in the inner rampart and climbed up on to it. Again William paused and looked about him.
Jarod was a good place for a last stand. Others had stood here before him, others who, like him, had wives and children beside them and death all round. This had been the majesty and the mighty work of a forgotten people, and lent him now a little of the hope that had gone to the
making of it.
Abruptly he led the way into the fortress. Voices called again on the hillsides. He did not know where sanctuary lay, but he knew he could not turn back. Forward, the ground fell away. Here, near its source, a stream ran in a steep small gorge. It had once given the Gonds of Jarod their water. He dragged Mary up the stream bed and hurried on, scanning the low cliffs on either hand. To the right he saw a dense luxuriance of stinging nettles. He left Mary and carefully pushed the nettles aside with his hand. There was no cave, but the stream had cut in under the basalt cliff and made an overhang.
He led Mary in, pulled the nettles over, and lay down. The stings burned his hands and legs, but hunger overcame all pain and he groaned softly, holding his stomach in both hands.
In the very last light he looked out between the nettles. They stung his face. He saw nothing and, listening, heard only the faint hum of bees. He saw their nests under the cliff across the gorge and thought of their honey.
A voice called on the left and was answered at once on the right. It was not honey, but sugar, that he seemed to taste.
Night came, and the darkness whispered up the hill. When the moon rose the night became alive. The murmuring took form and pattern; from an indistinguishable something it became men, known by the paces of several feet, walking, scrambling quickly. Mary began to cry softly, then stopped and squeezed his hand. Sticks snapped, water splashed, stones stirred. They fell asleep.
Down in the valley a trumpet called the Halt. Other trumpets answered it. The silver echoes broke on the hillside and ran splintered among the trees. William awoke, and heard, and shook so that his teeth rattled. The trumpet was so near, so far. Close at hand he heard a soft, choked wheezing, like a man with asthma; a pleased whine and a snuffle. The links of a chain were pulled taut, so that they clinked.
The bear-leader’s voice said, ‘Here.’
Chandra Sen answered from up the hill. ‘Stand away. Dawn is coming.’
The light came. The bear snuffled and moaned somewhere to the left. They listened and soon could not distinguish the sounds of their enemies from the undertones of day—the shaking of leaves, the hum of insects, the tinkle of the stream, the sighs as the earth breathed. William looked at his wife. She was pasty grey, and her skin flaccid. Dirt festered in her scratches and cuts, and never-ceasing pain cut deep lines into her young face.
Before they died, he had to tell her what he had been. He muttered in the way he had learned with the Deceivers. ‘I told you I could not kill. I promised. I broke my promise.’
She said gently, ‘I know. But you redeemed it somewhere, somehow, or you wouldn’t be here.’
What she said was true. He had redeemed his promise, and his soul, with the rumal and the sacred silver swinging in his hand and Hussein’s neck the token of self-sacrifice or self-destruction.
Chandra Sen’s voice called out quietly, echoing hollowly under the overhang. ‘Collector-sahib, come out.’
They did not answer. William pushed his pistol forward, and with his hand held back the nettles so that he could see a little, ready to shoot. Chandra Sen was standing out of sight, under the cliff to the right. The bees hummed, making a low sawing noise, as if there were many of them.
William said, and found his voice uncertain, ‘It is no use, Chandra Sen. I know you are a murderer. So does Mr. Wilson by now. You will have to come in and fetch us.’
‘About Mr. Wilson—I know, sahib. My life here is finished. There are other places, other bands. But the Deceivers will still be able to worship Kali in their appointed manner—if you die. It is not for myself that I am here to kill you, but for all Deceivers everywhere, for Kali. Come out.’
William did not answer. After a minute Chandra Sen said, ‘Come out quickly, sahib, or we will hurt you both very much.’
‘What if we do?’
‘The rumal, sahib. For you at once. For her, after she is delivered. The child will live, and will be a boy, and we will look after him, and he will become the greatest that ever tasted the sweetness of Kali.’ He spoke in halting English. He wanted Mary to understand what he was saying.
Mary caught her breath. William half crouched, ready to run out and fight. But he knew that Mary’s heart ached to shriek, ‘Yes, yes! Do anything, but let me bear my baby, let me see him!’ She did not fear death, but voices louder than fear, older than the first death of the first woman, shouted that she was the bearer of life, his and hers. If that life survived they would not die, but live on together in it.
He would surrender. Mary should live a few days more, and their child should live, even in Kali. In those few days anything might happen. He said in a firm voice, ‘We will come, Deceivers,’ and reached out his hand and pushed aside the nettles.
Again they stung his swollen hand. He remembered raiding old Farmer Taylor’s beehives when he was a boy. Those bees had stung like this, but worse. In the gorge the bees hummed, the bees that ruled the Bhanrer and the Kaimur and the Mahadeo hills. The gorge sides were black with their gigantic hanging nests. Even the sounds of men talking or the faint aroma of tobacco smoke offended their delicate senses and sometimes drove them to action. Their buzzing had increased and dropped in tone since Chandra Sen began to speak. They ruled the central hills of India, and were more feared than tigers or cobras, because they wanted peace to work and because they did not fear death. And because there were a quarter of a million of them in each place where they built their clustered nests.
He drew back, aimed his pistol carefully at the centre of a nest across the gorge, fired, and threw the smoking pistol over the nettles into the stream. Without hurrying, he took the other pistol from Mary’s hand, aimed, fired, and threw it after the first.
The heavy lead balls smashed into the nests and spattered against the rock face. Splinters of stone and lead droned along the cliff. He whispered, ‘Wrap up!’ and pulled in the nettles to block the overhang. They lay down together and she covered him with her sari.
A drone like the rising ocean drowned all other sounds. The bees came out. Their buzzing grew to the bellow of a giant organ, rising and falling in rhythmical waves. One bee came into the darkness under the cliff with them. William felt the tiny sting on his lip, and welcomed the pain, measuring it, and did not stir a muscle.
His mind ventured out of this refuge and saw the gorge and the hillside above. Out there the bees of Jarod swarmed in hundreds of thousands on their enemies, and died, and in dying killed—and saved. Out there it was black as midnight under them. Their drumming thunder swallowed the shrieks and scrambles and clattering of stones.
He closed his eyes and in that darkness saw the strong men outside, who now dragged themselves away step by slower faltering step, loaded down with the weight of bees. They would be found a hundred, two hundred yards from this place, no farther, black, contorted, swollen to twice their size, dead under dead armies of bees, their skins spotted grey-white where the bees’ entrails still clung to the embedded stings. It was not the Deceivers’ killing of men, but their despisal of man, that gave this punishment the majesty of justice.
The sound of the shots carried far, and the trumpets sounded from the valley. Mr. Wilson would come, and Sher Dil, and the cavalry, who wore uniforms and were ordinary men. There would be much to do. But Kali the Destroyer had been defeated, here and now, by the smallest servants of the Creator and Preserver. Pressed against Mary, he did not move, but lay still, and waited.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Twice during the day the cavalry came up the hill. They came prepared to fight, the trumpets screaming orders, the horses scrambling and slipping on the rocks; but when they saw the bees the trumpets said Retire, and they went away again. The bees had been quiet; as the cavalry approached, their noise dropped again to the organ note, and the trumpets shrieked Gallop!
But William knew they must have seen the dead men lying on the sides of the gorge and on the hillside above. He felt no hunger, only the lassitude of utter exhaustion, like a man at the end o
f a long race, who has won.
After dark the horsemen came again, twenty or thirty of them. On the hill Mr. Wilson said, ‘Dismount here, please. We will go on foot and search for their bodies.’ The familiar voice was firm, but slow and heavy.
Men moving with naked torches threw light into the gorge. The bees slept in their nests. William crawled out through the nettles, trying to shield his face, and wincing under the pain of the stings which had before been so unimportant.
He called feebly, ‘Here, in the gorge.’
A cavalryman on the top of the cliff cried out and ran round and down. Mr. Wilson shouted and scrambled after him. The soldier held up his torch, and Mr. Wilson dropped to his knees where William lay on his face in the stream, sucking up water. He helped William up, staring at his ragged loincloth and brown skin, and William said, ‘She’s all right. In there.’
They stumbled down the hill. A soldier held each of William’s arms. Mr. Wilson and a captain of cavalry—William remembered his broad, grinning face from the wedding—helped Mary. The horses slithered down behind. Noises reverberated in the darkness and echoed distantly from the road and the hills—horses trotting, vague crashes among far-off trees, a sudden shot, a fusillade from the open country to the west.
Mr. Wilson said, ‘I have ordered the arrest and search of every traveller found within fifty miles of here. Several seemingly innocent parties have already become desperate and resisted arrest. A few men are dead, including some of ours. The amount of jewellery found is staggering. Most of the regiment is out at work.’
William nodded. Mr. Wilson said energetically, ‘Now, young lady, we must take you back to Sagthali. A palanquin is waiting, and the cavalry surgeon.’