by John Masters
They reached the road at the foot of Jarod. Hand lanterns on the grass showed men lying anyhow, fully accoutred, asleep beside their horses, and fires twinkling, and mounted sentries with swords drawn, and huddles of prisoners. A flag bearing the Honourable East India Company’s crest hung from a short staff stuck into the earth beside the stream, and near it was the cavalry’s regimental guidon.
The surgeon ran up, and Mary slipped down on blankets spread beside a fire. Sher Dil brought chicken-broth to her. William shook his servant’s hand and smiled wearily. Mary sipped the broth. The surgeon knelt at her side and cleared his throat impatiently.
She said, ‘I’m not going to Sagthali, Daddy. My son is going to be born in Madhya.’
On the hillside Mr. Wilson had been pale, wet-eyed. Now he swelled up, turned red, and stuttered incoherently.
She laughed and held out her hand to him. ‘Careful, Daddy, or you’ll break a blood vessel. Madhya is no farther from here than Sagthali. What better place is there for me than my own room in my own bungalow?’
‘That’s true, ma’am,’ the surgeon said. ‘But I think——’
‘I’m going back to Madhya. William has to go there, anyway.’
‘Yes,’ William said abruptly. ‘I have to go to Madhya. I must have control of these operations. No one else really knows what to do. Now is the time, not next week. We have to seize every Deceiver we can, try some, get others to turn informer, then move again, keep on moving. We have to act now, hard, and show we are in earnest. Later it will be like a snowball. It will get bigger and easier every year.’
He fell silent. Mary’s proposal was best. He too wanted his daughter to be born in Madhya. And he had to see the woman of Kahari. There could be no absolution, no rest, until he had faced her.
Mr. Wilson recovered himself and said sternly, ‘Very well, sir, have it your way. But if it were my wife, I would——’
‘No, you wouldn’t Daddy.’ Mary squeezed his hand, and he coughed and did not finish his sentence. She went on, ‘I want to start at once, now. I don’t think I have much time.’
Mr. Wilson swelled up again, but the surgeon sent them all away and hung blankets from the swords stuck in the ground, and began to examine Mary. When he came over to them he said, ‘We’d better move, sir. She’s in good shape, and should have no trouble, but I don’t think there’s much time.’ Mr. Wilson spoke to the cavalry colonel and in a minute the trumpeter blew Boots and Saddles.
The stars flared in a clear sky, the moon was rising. The cavalcade moved down the road north-westward and wound under the black loom of Jarod, a hundred and twenty horsemen with drawn swords resting on their shoulders. The leading men carried lanterns in their hands. Twelve Deceiver prisoners bore Mary’s litter in turns. Behind it rode Mr. Wilson, all in black, with a wide brimmed hat and a handkerchief to protect the back of his neck from the daytime sun. William gnawed meat off a chicken bone as he rode.
William threw the bone into the darkness and said, ‘We’ve got to form a new organization to deal with the Deceivers, sir. No one can do it and administer a district too. The Deceivers extend all over India. I’ll have to have jurisdiction over them—wherever they are found—regardless of where they have done their murders.’
Mr. Wilson thought before replying. ‘That will involve legislation in Council and a large appropriation of funds. For how long, do you think?’
‘Ten, fifteen years.’
‘Hmm! I have not heard all the details yet, but I assure you that you will have my support in obtaining all that you need. I must——’ He swallowed and struggled to get the words out.
William knew what he was going to say, and knew that probably he had never used the words before, except to his wife.
‘I apologize, both personally and on behalf of——’
William cut in, ‘There’s no need to apologize, sir. None of us has acted quite sensibly. The biggest danger now is that these people from Parsola will scatter—we’ll never catch them all, of course—and take the cult to places it’s never been before, if there are any such places. It’s the story of the Demon of Blood and Seed. It’s happened before. The Deceivers were not altogether unknown. I’ve found out that our people would get an inkling about them, at different times, in different parts of India. Then perhaps they’d write a report, perhaps go out after the Deceivers. Always the same result: the report pigeon-holed, the band chased away to flourish in new localities. There had not been enough co-ordination of information or of action. We’ve got to get that first, all over India.’
Mr. Wilson said, ‘It will be difficult to persuade the Presidencies to believe it, Savage, and agree to surrender some of their powers to a central organization such as you propose.’
‘They’ve got to!’ William said forcefully. ‘The rajahs too! The Governor-General’s got to do it. I’ll tell him. He’ll see.’
Mr. Wilson looked sideways at him thoughtfully and said nothing.
William glanced up and saw the cavalry’s device of a running black horse on a background of woven silver thread. The guidon fluttered in the dawn breeze on top of its staff, and the first light touched it. Ahead, all the swords twinkled and like a river of silver fire poured on into the north-west. In the palanquin Mary called out, and the surgeon jumped down from his horse. The column halted, and the chargers champed and tossed their heads.
The surgeon looked up. ‘Better hurry, sir. We won’t get to Madhya, but I’d like to reach water at any rate.’
‘Bhadora, about half a mile,’ William said shortly. Here, at the top of this shallow rise, they had waited for George to catch up on that honeymoon journey. Here the man on the bullock cart had passed, and the child absorbed in watching the dust. The flame-of-the-forest again sparkled about him.
Mr. Wilson, who had been about to speak, closed his mouth and looked almost nervously at William. The colonel nodded, and the column moved on.
At the river the ferrymen had vanished. The barge lay moored at the near bank, and several early travellers waited there in a frightened huddle beside it. From downstream the breeze brought the faint clash of arms and distant shouting. Mary insisted on crossing, and at the colonel’s order some of the escorting cavalrymen dismounted and with laughing, childlike excitement clambered into the barge and poled it erratically across the river. Once on the far bank, the surgeon hung up blankets and Sher Dil boiled water. William talked with the cavalry colonel and tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but he could not because of Mary’s low, regular moans. He sat down and pulled to pieces a cheroot the colonel gave him.
The surgeon said, ‘Captain Savage, go away, please. Come back in an hour.’
‘I’ll stay here.’
‘Go away, sir.’
William got up, rubbing his hands together, for they were cold. He had with these hands made a noose that lay around the neck of the Deceivers of India, and would in the end hang them. With these hands, too, with the mind that guided them, with the heat that should have stayed them, he had done great wrong that could not be mended. With these hands—he looked at them, and they were strong and sure, though cold, and he had been proud of the skill in them—he had strangled three men: Gopal the weaver, the sepoy at the ford, the Rajah of Padampur.
Gopal had been a Deceiver and a murderer; if William had not killed him he would have killed William. The sepoy at the ford had done William no harm, but he had been going to; surely, Forgiver above, that was self-defence—when the man sprang at me through the bushes there, his musket in his hand and crazed panic in his eyes? The Rajah of Padampur—a robber bandit, a deceiver linked with Deceivers; did not he deserve death?
Perhaps he could forgive himself for those. But he had stood aside and directed the murder of—how many? He could not remember. All those were innocent. He had allowed them to die that, in the end, other innocents might live. For them he could not forgive himself.
There were too many of them to be remembered distinctly and carried as separate crosses
. From the beginning all the wrong he had done—that right should result—had gathered to increase. He had deceived her, so that she thought her husband lived. But he did not live. William had killed him. Whatever punishment God inflicted would come to him through the woman at the pyre.
William stood awhile, expressionless, preparing himself to face what he had to face. He started to walk away up the river bank.
Mr. Wilson called, ‘Come over here and keep me company, Savage.’
William looked at him. ‘I have to see the woman of Kahari, the wife of Gopal the weaver.’
Mr. Wilson made to speak, but after three attempts, with William’s burning deep-sunken eyes fixed on his, he said only, ‘God rest her soul.’
William walked slowly. Mr. Wilson had said, ‘God rest her soul,’ but he had meant, ‘God rest your soul.’ Mr. Wilson understood at last.
William came to the pyre. A leaf shelter stood beside it. The woman sat in the open, not squatting but sitting on the grass. Her white dress, the same one, was still torn. It was ragged now, and grimed, and showed her skin through great holes. She sat with head bowed, and her hair hung in matted filth about her face and neck. The witch locks reached her waist and hid her nakedness.
Hearing him, she looked up. She had become an old woman in the year of waiting—almost toothless, with cracked lips, ringed haggard eyes, dirt-scored skin. She saw him where he came on, and could not move, but her eyes widened. He stopped three paces from her, and she lifted her arms to him.
‘My darling, my darling, my lover, you have come!’
He said, ‘I am not Gopal. I am William Savage. It was I who came last time, to deceive you.’
She looked at his head, into his eyes, at the line of his jaw. Her arms sank and her fingers lay crumpled on the grass. She bent her head and tears ran down in the dirt on her face. She had no strength to sob. Her tears flowed silently, like little rivers.
He said, ‘Gopal is dead. I killed him.’
After a minute she said, not asking a question, ‘Another woman was there.’ She continued, ‘Was she—his? That, my dream did not tell me, and tormented me with not knowing.’
‘Another woman?’ The stableyard in Manikwal had been here, and Hussein there, and the wall there, and there the stable roof and the horses in a row. The harlot girls had not come out. No woman had stood beside him to watch Gopal die.
It was a vivid memory. Now almost he felt the heat of Kali’s desire as it had pulsed through him that day. So he said slowly, ‘There was a woman. She was mine, not his. Her, too, I have mortally wounded.’
All the strength she needed came to her in a flood. She rose to her feet and hurried close to him. She said, ‘You are my darling, and I your lover, because you have been Gopal.’ She smiled at him with a luminous, secret brilliance and whispered, ‘No man dies by the hand of man. I am going to my husband.’ She kissed his fingers and stroked them against her cheek.
William’s fingers were warm where they had touched her skin. He had been crouching before God, awaiting the lash, and received instead a kiss.
The girl hastened to the pyre, singing softly a cradle song, and walked three times around it. In the east the sun cast up a fan of golden bars from below the hills, and the Seonath became a river of dull gold.
She said, ‘You have flint and tinder? Light it.’
He stepped forward and struck steel to flint, touched the tinder, held the tiny bundle in his hand, and waved it about in the warm air. The little flames snapped. On his left the river whispered, flowing north to the Ken, and the Ken to the Jumna, and the Jumna to the Ganges, where the ashes must at last rest. The woman emptied jars of ghi on to the pyre, and still sang.
The flames in the tinder bunch touched his fingers, and did not hurt. He pushed the tinder into the pyre. The butter streams crackled, thick smoke curled out, the fire caught hold and sprang high, twenty feet into the air, jumped through between the logs laid longwise and crosswise, reached out from side to side of the pyre, and made a shouting noise.
The woman knelt, facing the east. She cried out with lyrical passion, her voice strong and sure. ‘I see you in your place beside the sun, my darling and my lover. They have kept me from you where you sit in majesty and honour. I love you, my lord, I worship you with my body and spirit. I am your wife and your servant. I come to our bridal bed, to lie with you in the sun.’
The sun sprang over the eastern rim of the world, and the woman stepped into the flames and lay down and held out her open arms. In a flash the fire ripped her clothes off her, and the marks of age, and her long hair, and for a blinding second she lay naked, golden, again young, on the cushion of flames, her arms out to William, her eyes on him and the sun in him and Gopal in him. The fire roared up and the yellow and red spires leaned back against the trees, and he could not see her.
After thirty minutes the priest came running from Kahari. He stopped short when he saw William standing motionless at the fire. William turned, and walked a pace away, and turned again, and took out the pick-axe from his waistband, and threw it into the flames.
At the ferry Mr. Wilson ran toward him. ‘William, William, you are a father! A fine boy, half an hour ago!’ He pump-handled William’s arm. His strong face was alight, as the woman’s had been, from a lamp behind the skin which softened his strength and made it love. William did not speak, and Mr. Wilson said, ‘Mary is well. She wants you now. Come.’
Still William did not move. Mr. Wilson glanced up-river to the smoke drifting over the trees. He said, suddenly firm and gentle, ‘God give that love to him, your son.’
William said, ‘God is love,’ and went to Mary and the baby.
Postscript
In a story of this sort the reader has a right to know how much was fact, how much fiction. My purpose in this book, as in Nightrunners of Bengal, was to re-create the ‘feel’ of a historical episode rather than write a minutely accurate report. To do this I had to use the novelist’s freedom to imagine people and create places for them to live in; but the times and circumstances of those people are fixed by history, and I believe this book gives a true picture of them.
In general, therefore, the facts about the Deceivers (the Thugs) and all the details of their cult and their operations (called collectively Thuggee) are accurate. They did flourish for many centuries, they did believe in their religious call, they did live by the omens and ceremonies described, they did kill travellers in the manner and the numbers suggested. It is thought that, first and last, Thuggee must have murdered well over a million people. Ironically enough, after existing hundreds of years, it was uncovered and uprooted shortly before the coming of railroads and telegraphs to India would in any case have destroyed it. Nonetheless, William Savage’s remark that it constituted the greatest criminal conspiracy of history was justified at the time he made it.
The setting of the story in time is correct within a year or two. The physical shape of the land we have travelled in (the area bounded by a line Jubbulpore-Nagpur-Jhansi-Allahabad-Jubbulpore) is correct, and it was in this area that Thuggee was first comprehensively discovered and attacked. Incidentally, the bees there are numerous and dangerous. Many a bather, hunter, and traveller has met the death which my Deceivers met.
All the incidents are imagined. All the characters are imagined, except a few bystanders. Please note particularly that if any one man can be credited with the real-life destruction of Thuggee, that man was William Henry Sleeman of the Indian Political Service, later Major-General Sir William Sleeman, K.C.B. Sleeman did not use the methods I have ascribed to William Savage; in fact, William Savage is in no sense a portrait of William Sleeman.
All places should be treated as imaginary, though in fact most of the rivers and hills and a few small villages are real. My reason for this is that it is not now feasible for me to find out what, say, Damoh looked like in 1825, and I do not think it is proper to invent ‘facts’ about real places; I must invent the whole town—and call it Madhya.
T
he glossary contains notes on the few real people mentioned in the story and translations of Indian words to amplify the meanings that I have always tried to make clear in the context.
There are not many source books about Thuggee. One of them is a novel, first published in 1839, by an officer who had taken part in operations against Thugs: Confessions of a Thug by Meadows Taylor. If my story of this terrible byway of man’s religious faith has interested you, you will find more details in three books by Sleeman himself: Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the peculiar language used by Thugs; Report on the depredations committed by the Thug gangs of upper and central India; The Thugs or Phansigars of India and in one by Sleeman’s grandson, Colonel James L. Sleeman—Thug, or A Million Murders.
Glossary
This glossary contains notes only on Hindustani words and on people who really lived. The meanings given for Hindustani words apply only to this story; other meanings and shades of meaning are not given. Pronunciations are given in parentheses.
achchi bat (utchy bat), very good!
a-jao, jaldi (ah-jow, juldy), come quickly!
Amherst, William Pitt Amherst, Earl Amherst of Arakan, 1773–1857; a nephew of Lord Jeffrey Amherst; Governor-General of India, 1823–1828.
ane wala hun (ahny wolla hoo), coming! (literally, ‘I am the coming one’).
arrack (urrack), palm toddy, or, among poorer people, spirit made from flowers of mahua tree.
bahut (bote), very much.
bajri (budjri), pearl millet (annisetum glaucum).
baksheesh (bucksheesh), tip, gratuity.
bannia (bun-ya), merchant.
bara-sahib (burra-sahb), the chief, the boss.
beetoo (beetoo), anyone not a Thug (Thug argot).
bhil (bheel), place selected for killing (Thug argot).
Bhonsla (Bhonsla), family name of Mahratta rulers of Nagpur.
bijasal (beeja-sahl), kino tree (pterocarpus marsupium),
bulbul (bull-bull), a bird, a species of nightingale (daulias philomela africana).