Sary and the Maharajah's Emeralds

by Sharon Shipley

  Oh, stop the maudlin drivel. Think!

  Jungle swept the animals’ broad sides as they pushed deeper in. We halted. The hunting party took it with mixed grace, forging after mahouts with baggy clothes wound between their legs, the ladies picking through in high strappy heels, until they stopped at a clearing of towering cork trees, one larger than most.

  A wooden box perched in branches, like a tree house, above me.

  I eyed the maharajah as he maneuvered from a palanquin to a chair/pulley arrangement. Onlookers looked too fierce not to be hiding grins as aides shoved and braced his bottom, enormous in pumpkin-colored hunting togs, and wedged him through a hole in the platform, monkeying themselves up after loading vintage matchlock muskets. One dropped a powder flask shaped like a brass fish.

  The rajah, dashing in hunting gear, climbed after, while aiding one of the giggly European-looking Indian women, destroying my last composure. Though I had no hold on him, it somehow seemed betrayal.

  I eyed the maharajah. His pudgy hands gripped a musket now too.

  Am I some form of entertainment? Are they hunting me? How could I have believed Preeta? I cannot blame any fool but myself—fool!

  Ashamed of my shred of stained sari, in which they had re-clothed me as some malicious gesture, I nevertheless hugged it as the only armor between me and the exquisite women smoking, chattering, waving lacquered nails, up in the royal viewing box, while the rajah laughed broadly, gesticulating, sharing whispered confidences. He did not spare a glance my way.

  I had never felt so alone.

  Two guards dragged me backward to a cork tree opposite the treehouse blind, yanked my arms apart, and shackled them to the tree behind me, while I fixed my gaze on the box. They drew the ropes tight, as if I, a bare hundred and eighteen pounds, could break tough sisal. It razored into my wrists.

  The maharajah looking down expectantly.

  I caught his eye. “Are you worried?” I yelled up, more of a croak. “Why not your heaviest chains? I might attack you! Do you grievous harm!” I spat, literally. Why not go out in a pathetic blaze of defiance? “Coward!”

  The maharajah narrowed his eyes into pillowy slits. His wet red mouth gaped. If he heard me or understood, it wasn’t certain. The rajah looked on, bemused, while a woman at his side in a fuchsia blouse sent forth a plume of smoke and slapped a bug, already bored.

  She would return. I would not.

  You could wriggle free if only they left you… My imp again.

  I froze at snapping brush behind me—somewhere. A wet swish of fronds. A whiff of animal pong.

  Handlers backed and climbed the ladder half way. Something large approached, something I could not see. I’d had enough wildlife. As I wriggled my hands, raw sisal like barbed wire cut my flesh. There was no give.

  The thrashing grew louder, accompanied by a harsh PURRRRRGgggHHHHHH…

  I will not flinch or cry out. I will not.

  I slanted my eyes sideways, compelled to see what stalked around the tree to which I was tied.

  A black shape, lithe and lethal as death, slunk past, lashing a plumy tail. It grunted, looking about, and started at seeing me. Crouching to its belly, the panther coldly viewed me through the gray-water eyes in its diamond-shaped head.

  Silver eyes narrowed.

  Velvety ears flattened.

  The muzzle pulled back in a snarl.

  Its triangular mouth, issuing phlegmy rumbles, opened to a wet red yawn. Ocher fangs curved. The panther’s rear end readied to spring, tail switching like a metronome.

  I tore my gaze from the beautiful deadly creature to stare stonily up at the blind.

  I won’t look at the beast. Won’t give them pleasure.

  The panther leapt.

  My heart thudded erratically in my throat. I twisted from my waist, turning my head, the only movement I could manage.

  The muscular, furry shape thudded into my shoulder, leaving a searing graze of claws. I felt animal breath of meat and blood, hot and dripping on my neck.

  I heard its snarl of confusion behind me, almost like that of an embarrassed housecat misjudging its spring.

  It scrambled up, circled, lashing its tail and growling promises, while it repositioned its claws, flexing and unflexing them, belly to the ground. This time, the flat deadly silver eyes promised. This time!

  I was aware of the maharajah’s squeals of encouragement, heard women’s shocked horror, fake sympathy, and nervous titters. I saw the howdah driver’s face. There, true empathy lay. I looked up for the rajah in last appeal; he was bent to the lovely ear of one of the spectators. I heard her chuckle low, guttural and sensual. I tore my gaze back to the panther. It was indeed lovely.

  A perfect machine of nature.

  Silvery gray, with darker spots.

  Four-inch fangs, claws unsheathed.

  It was leaping with unerring aim, red glints in its tarnished silver eyes.

  All this took mere seconds.

  The maharajah, pushing fatty folds wide to take in my slaughter, lips loose with excitement, nearly tipped from the box as I fixed my eyes on him. The beast angled for my neck with fangs the shade of old bone, claws curved as scimitars.

  He clapped and chuckled, slurping Champagne, eating sweets, all senses glutted for his sovereign pleasure.

  A gush of foulness washed my face. The panther’s huge head blotted everything.

  Past onrushing teeth, I saw the rajah loom behind the maharajah.

  I jerked my head. The panther’s fangs sank home where my neck met the shoulder. Through stinging vision I saw, high above, a blue-black rod thrust past the fat man’s heaving shoulders.

  A crack sent monkeys exploding from treetops and macaws shrieking complaint.

  The panther’s body arced as if flung.

  The black wraith hung an instant before dropping with a sprawling thud at my feet.

  I saw the maharajah jerk, holding his ears and swiveling to see who had committed the outrage.

  With my cheek, I smeared blood trickling from my shoulder. I searched the tree. After a blurred moment, I saw the stony rajah holding a carbine across his chest.

  Our eyes met.

  The women’s exclamations, the maharajah’s enraged face, jungle babble, my pain…all faded.

  A message passed between us. Mine was partially, Why did you wait?

  The potentate hurled the rajah’s handsome rifle from the blind, breaking the spell. I saw a flash of gold engraving as the stock shattered at my feet. I rubbed sisal on the bark, undoing the last of my abused, once-peach silk now hanging in rotten tatters, leaving me in filthy underclothes.

  The sisal held firm. The rajah stalked by his broken rifle, leaving me where I was without looking. My lips were open to speak. I snapped them shut.

  I whispered a prayer: I am still tied, feet bound. Don’t leave me here!

  Women tiptoed past in sharp-heeled shoes, casting nervous, curious glances and speeding on. One seemed to hesitate. Then, seeing there was little she could do, ducked her head and scurried after.

  The maharajah lumbered past, seated in his fancy gold howdah, aided by servants. The last arms bearers passed by, too. I heard elephants thrashing jungle growth and voices receding. I was alone. I tilted my head back. Apparently, this was my end, alone and helpless even as I chafed my wrists against the bark.

  ****

  Pungent fumes stoppered my nostrils. I squinted, reaching greedily with my eyes for the flask of spirits hovering before me. Hands doused my shoulder with it instead. The fiery stuff ran into the deepest claw punctures. My shoulder was on fire.

  “Good. No crying like a woman.”

  I turned to the voice with eyes that would burn ice. “Never mind that. Undo me!”

  I saw his shirt hanging loose, and nipples so dark they seemed black against his burnished skin aroused me even as I hated it, in my sad circumstances, observing muscles rippling like copper coils as he struggled with my ropes. I looked away.

  “Have you ha
d enough?” he whispered, with sympathy and not censure.

  “You came back,” I muttered stupidly, not answering. Then—“What do you think?” I hissed at him, rubbing my wrists.

  “I think you can withstand anything—and have done so—many…too many times, in your past.”

  My past? On my lips was the question—what do you know of it? Pride, obstinacy—I did not know which kept me silent. I glared at him instead.

  “Can you walk?”

  “Apparently, I can do anything.”

  He stared a full second before unbending with the grace of the panther lying at my feet. Even now, servants fixed the beast’s paws about a pole to cart it off. He cut my ankles free and tossed me the flask.

  “We will speak again,” he threw over his shoulder as he disappeared through fronds that whipped back drops of water sparkling in the green light.

  He looked back once, as if to say, Come on!

  I tried to sort numbed limbs.

  I passed bearers and a soldier, furiously conscious I must hold strips of my sari in strategic positions. I stared them down. I must walk with it bunched like a soiled bouquet in front, muttering swear words as I followed the rippling undergrowth.

  Have you had enough? perseverated. Oh, yes, and more. Oh, yes, I have had enough! I’d love to tie you to a tree. Stick you in a cell and watch… I would love…

  With these steamy notions boiling in a cauldron of hurt—ways I would like to annihilate the rajah—I resolutely pressed against the mental door at which other warmer thoughts knocked relentlessly.

  ****

  The rajah glowered at his servants as they lit the charcoal and laid sticky honeyed tobacco in the narghile tray, checked the water, and handed him the stem before bowing out. He sucked the fragrant vapor and exhaled slowly, seeing a face in the perfumed steam.

  He’d need to deal with the conundrum of that woman! Not with his brother, but within himself.

  “Why risk my brother’s wrath?” He voiced the thought to smoke as roiling as his thoughts. His brother was dangerous to all. His own status meant less than nothing. Did not their mother’s brother have a minor quarrel over land rights and subsequently was found mangled, hardly recognizable, in the elephant enclosure? His brother’s wife, the third one, had fallen from the parapet. No one questioned why she sat on the rim in the rain, and—more chilling—the maharajah’s most recent personal physician, who had the gall to order his brother to stop his gluttonous habits, was discovered stone dead with a large piece of pork stuffed down his throat.

  The rajah did not need to ponder what fate would befall the latest doctor, an earnest young man with modern teachings from Bengali, so far dazzled by his promotion into thinking his opinions had status.

  If his brother had not the notion, this woman, Sarabande—What sort of heathenish name is that?—held special gifts, she would be no more than a desiccated fly in a dusty web.

  Fortunately, for her, his brother was erratic as a weathercock in a chakravat and enjoyed long bouts of drug-induced “indisposition” in which he could pretend ill health and shirk responsibilities.

  The rajah held more vapor in his lungs, letting it out slowly…

  What was she to him? Should he leave her to his brother? Placate tempestuous moods and drug-induced manias until his rage ferreted out some unforgivable slight and he put her to death before he could be stopped? Would that not make him, the rajah, just as corrupt? No. His brother’s brain might crumble like castor sugar in chai, but not his.

  The rajah passed a hand over his forehead. His valet, daring to read his moods, had cheekily added a pinch of opium to the narghile. He detected it, grimacing a smile, and closed his eyes. Funny. Her strong beautiful face with the haunting green eyes was still there.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A Rajah’s Rage

  “The beast, the slime of the pond,” the rajah pontificated, “left a festering deep in the ankle laceration. The flesh healed over, but not the blood. The wound on your shoulder, fortunately, I was foresighted enough to disinfect with spirits. A panther’s claws hold all manner of resilient and poisonous contagions.”

  “It wasn’t precisely my idea,” I deadpanned.

  He continued, oblivious. “We in India are learned beyond the world. My personal physician prescribed a concoction of certain molds, plus a distillation of opium called morphia.”

  “Molds?” I raised my brows. “As in bread?”

  He glanced at me in a superior way. “Precisely.”

  I checked my ankle and peered at the shoulder wound, which had lost its angry puffiness.

  “I suppose I should thank you, who put me in such an impossible place.”

  The rajah turned dark granite, his scowl at the beautiful scene outside enough to turn it to blighted winter, if that had been possible.

  I studied his anthracite hair, curved nose, and luminous eyes beneath the fierce wings of his brows. The fevers had cooled, thanks to him. Not all fevers, but those harmful. Yet could these other fevers be any less?

  “My brother and I are of the same blood. No one would need to know! Ever—at least not officially,” he added cryptically in his pedantic English.

  “Know…what? Stop the riddles. I am not in the mood, nor am I a child.”

  He came close, beating his chest with a fist. His arm was well muscled, I mused, and the gold cuff looked particularly well on him… What he said filtered through. “What?”

  “You were to come to me!” He thumped his chest again. “To me! Not my brother! Not to the maha-ra—jah!” A barely concealed sneer was present. Against whom, I was unsure. Myself, him, or the—other.

  I stared, wondering if I heard rightly.

  He looked away, burnished skin now turning the shade of sumac, striding the room, hands behind his back. I would beg my general weakness made my mind weak, too, taken in by his appearance once again—perfectly groomed, in his favored cream or white satin, his fanciful beard, mustache, and fierce brows glossy as a grackle’s wings…

  “Only later would you approach him—lie with him…” The words floated into my range of hearing. “But for one time only, after—after…you…”

  I turned my face to stone and waited.

  “After I what?” I asked quietly.

  “After you came with child. My seed! Instead, you did this foolhardy thing! I was the one you were to come to that night, you foolish woman, when you ended up flirting with the blasted gharial!”

  Was he speaking any known language? I finally understood all. Ashamed, I allowed my mind to wander into forbidden territory. What would it be like to stroke that naked, warm, satiny, nutmeg skin? What would it be like—?

  While he took a dust broom to his thoughts, I said, playing for time, “Gharial?”

  He turned, smiling as if nothing untoward had been spoken.

  “Yes. Indeed. That cousin to ‘crocodiles’ as you most likely call them.” If you say so. He waved his hand negligently. On any other man, it would appear foppish.

  “Call them what you will. This entire godforsaken, bloody, hell-bound place is alive with things that bite, crawl, and…”

  He held up a hand. “Please. Cursing is not attractive, or womanly.”

  “I will bloody well curse if it bloody well pleases me! And I don’t care if I am—” I curled my lip. “Womanly enough for you.”

  “As you see fit,” he answered stiffly. “It does you no honor.”

  “But it damn well makes me feel better!”

  I hobbled out of bed. I needed to stand, fearful he would go on explaining.

  He gestured me to sit. I hobbled over, sitting balefully as a raven over a clutch of a sparrow’s eggs. There were tea and cakes. I took a bite of hot buttered crumpet, wanting to cry.

  “The same blood, he and I,” he explained as if to a child as he poured tea. “No one would dare speak of it if they did suspect. You would”—he looked off with a face like an approaching squall line—“as I stated before, stay with him another
night only. You wouldn’t even have to…have to…” He swirled his hand.

  “Another night! As I recall, I did not, the last time.” I gripped the chair, white-knuckled.

  “Of course, how could I forget that unfortunate encounter was not…consummated either?” He meant it as a joke, I saw, and matched it with a weak smile like watery sun peeping from a gray cloud. “You would have been rewarded munificently. An estate of your own. Money, servants, anything you wished.”

  “Except freedom? Perhaps my life? What if I talked?”

  Jet eyes flashed. Don’t push me. This is difficult for me also, they spoke.

  “Have a care, madam. You do not grasp the razor’s edge upon which you tread. My brother was enraged. He has men killed for turning their backs. It took all my persuasion to set you free—disarm him from your escape attempt—let alone allow you to live! This last act cost me and you dear. You will comply and obey—in time.”

  His heavy-lidded eyes were hot, black pools in which I saw myself reflected—pale, stormy-eyed, and very, very frightened. His wooing left a lot to be desired.

  “O-bey!” I sparked flint back. “It has been a while since I obeyed anyone!”

  “Attend carefully. You insult the maharajah; you insult the princely house of Bharatpur. Simple.”

  “Perhaps, if your brother weren’t so gluttonous, he might summon up a healthy male heir.” I could not stop. “I am certainly not interested in furthering the house of Bharatpur! Are you his lackey?”

  “Fortunately for you, at present my brother is not in a—shall we say—receptive mood. He is not always able to”—he swirled his elegant hand—“to…to…? Unless…perhaps you may find out his desires and that which pleasures him most—that which makes him more…more…open to, ah, physical contact.”

  He would not look at me.

  I gaped. I am to seduce him?

  If I had tried to talk, words would have jammed like tangled barbwire in their compulsion to spew cuttingly.

  I suspected he meant to goad me. Test me. Get back at me. We were getting far afield. He smarted at my rejection. Even now, I admitted, I allowed the possibility to creep in like the nose of a camel under the tent. Instead I asked, “Brothers? How are you ever—brothers?”