Through a haze, I saw the jumble of other snakes undulate swiftly around me as if as anxious to escape as I. Several looped about my leg and crawled over my feet even as I clawed at the strong muscle binding me, down to my hips now. My nails kept sliding off the slick, rubbery skin.
I barely felt the sharp needle in my foot where a small viper sank its fangs.
A swishing roared in my ears, along with singing blood—and there was old Padmavati, swinging the sharp-legged brass table first at the cobra like a cricket batter, then at the python. I heard a splintering sound like breaking toothpicks. She back-swung the table at one head and then the other. In her small island of space, Padmavati dropped the table and dug in her pocket. With one hand, she gripped behind the flaring cobra hood and plunged a wickedly sharp fruit knife deep into its neck. The snake spasmed once—twice—and slithered down into a heavy heap.
Immediately she began sawing at the python, still circling me from neck to hip, while the snake’s body lashed strongly about us, its grasp gradually loosening. When she had finally overcome it, it lay looking like nothing but a pile of thick cut rope. Clawing my throat and sucking in air, I stumbled out of the ring of coils. Padmavati kicked other snakes away and, twirling like a dervish, smashed down on the cobra’s head until it lay still. I pointed wordlessly to Asha.
The king cobra and the python were vanquished, but the other snakes were not.
Padmavati, using skinny but wiry arms, dragged me off, all the while kicking at furiously striking reptiles that hit only Padmavati’s heavy swirling cotton sari.
“Bacnā! Sahāytā karnā!” She yelled out.
Eunuchs poured in at her basso command. Where had they cowered until now?
My sight returned. Sinuous shapes wriggled up walls and into corners.
Padmavati, stern-faced, sought out Asha.
****
“Brother, good to see you—so well.”
Summoned, the rajah looked around. True, he had not seen his brother so alert in months. Bright-eyed, clean shaven, not still in stained night robes but smartly dressed for the day. Would wonders never cease?
His brother smirked as of old, however. “Is it? Or are you perplexed, perhaps? Dismayed? Perhaps you thought the throne was at hand and all you had to do was wait?”
“Brother, as I have assured you on many occasions, I have little desire for the duties and trappings the throne entails.” The rajah sighed inwardly. Even though I have performed those duties. “I am puzzled, Brother. What has changed?”
“Ah! But that did not stop you. You and your chinaal were plotting all along. You overstepped while I was—ill. They are shouting from the rooftops how brave, strong, and clever you are. They made idols of you. Why, you are practically a god. You!” He named the tiger-plagued village, although he got the name wrong.
It was on the rajah’s tongue to say somebody had to. He narrowly eyed his brother while pouring a whiskey.
“It will be a long while, in any case.” His brother snapped fingers. In place of a sharp crack, a thubbing sound ensued, but enough to summon someone the rajah only vaguely recognized.
Prita? Preeta?
Preeta emerged, sailing proudly into view with her slightly burgeoning belly thrust forward like a figurehead on the prow of a ship, from around the bed curtains. She stood preening, hands across her belly as if protecting a religious icon. Her self-satisfied glitter took his breath away.
The maharajah held out his pudgy hand. She took it, smiling triumphantly at the rajah over his head.
“One time was all it took, no matter your slander!” At the maharajah’s words, the rajah caught Preeta’s contradict-me-if-you-dare stare. “Brother, your days might be numbered, as well as those of my dear, loyal, faithful, simpering wife. Oh, yes, I failed to mention, I have already seen to your chinaal…even as we speak. It was my love’s idea.” He pawed at Preeta’s hand.
The rajah did not fail to see the unease or perhaps disgust flash across Preeta’s face. He narrowed his eyes, already backing to the archway.
His brother’s two slits glittered malice. The rajah wanted to wipe that look off his face with a fire ax.
Preeta, still clutching his hand, smoothed her belly.
“Let us say she is welcoming new pets in her bath.” The maharajah giggled. “Pets that crawl on their bellies!” He smirked up at Preeta.
The rajah’s face turned to ash beneath the walnut skin. Snakes! He strode from the room, and once out of sight ran, and the sound of his brother’s gurgling laughter followed him.
****
“Don’t Pyara me!” I hurled at him as legions of women around the world had since speech was invented. “Snakes in my bath! Not exceptionally original! Did you dream it up yesterday, when we were…when—we…?” I halted, losing my thoughts, venom, though I did not know it, raced to my heart. I stared stupidly at my veins as if I could see the poison, and old Padmavati kept tugging at me, urging me to do something.
The rajah had come running toward me, shouting something that reverberated strangely in my head.
“You are all mad in this backward land, keeping women in prison…then…then killing them…” My ears seemed stuffed with cotton, my own words far away. Rami would not stay still, and Padmavati was still pulling me, and my chest felt tied with iron bands.
Still I stood, weaving, striving to speak, but I could not get the words out. My throat closed.
I saw Rami brushing Padmavati aside, one hand out, the other on the hilt of his dirk. My eyes widened.
I backed into Padmavati.
“Sarabande! Enough!”
I looked down, bewildered. Then I saw what he saw—the punctures, and my ankle swelling like an eggplant.
The rajah dropped me to the floor. Padmavati held me down while he grabbed my foot and made slicing marks, vigorously sucking and calling out between spitting.
My leg seemed on fire.
“Asha…” I think I said…
Chapter Twenty-Five
Torrid Zones
His hand hovered an inch from her body. The woman he prized above all was too hot to touch. She thrashed, mumbling nonsense—something about a mountain and gold and Africa and diamonds…and names as if carved in rock, or written in blood or shooting stars….names called repeatedly, but he could not make out.
One exquisite white leg lay propped, puffed and angry about the ankle. Red streaks crawled up the calf. Two punctures resembled dying purple blossoms.
His own guards flanked the door. His own physician tended her.
He turned with a face grim as a tombstone.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Unveiled
The rajah thrust aside sentries, striding to the vast bed, roaring, “No more will I ignore your bungling, sick attempts at outright murder! You will cease now!”
“Or what?” The maharajah cast a sneering glance his way. His new status of impending fatherhood lent him a new confidence, his brother saw. It would do him no good. “You dare? You dare lecture me? Tell me what to do? Now my line is secure for generations to come! Preeta is lusty and strong, not like the weak-as-milk female you irrationally prize.” Spraying crumbs and plum-paste, the maharajah dropped his chunk of sticky pastry, eyeing it with regret. “You forget who you are—the younger brother! A nobody! The realm no longer needs you.”
“Cowardly! Underhanded! Evil! Childish!” The rajah hissed the words. “Even for repulsive wretches such as you.”
The rajah reeled from the mixture of odors emanating from the maharajah’s mouth. “No! Don’t look for comfort in your disgusting sweets!” With one hand, he swept the tray from the bed, trailing chai, jam, fish paste, and gravy in its wake. “Even as a boy it was no secret you had few chums, even when threatened or bribed by parents to be with you. You stole, cheated, hid things, and played these same gutless tricks, crueler, cruder, and even less justifiable over the years. This is the twentieth century, Brother!”
He faltered briefly, aware he himself had mana
ged to overlook his brother’s escalating excesses because he could not be bothered. Was not he at fault too, always playing the dilettante favorite?
He subsided, watching his brother’s mouth open and close, his brother’s body puffing up like a noxious fungus, and purple in the bargain. Could he be having a stroke? He studied him clinically. No, it wasn’t to be, unfortunately. Something lodged in his throat. He coughed and spat; a chunk of pastry flew across the room.
“Are you through insulting me?” the maharajah whined. “It is my divine right to do as I please. No matter what century.”
The maharajah smugly plopped another lump of Turkish delight, found sticking to the coverlet, into his maw. “She means that much to you?” He sniffed. “That you would go against your brother again?”
“No! Humanity means that much.”
“How lofty!” The maharajah’s hand strayed for another sweet. “You learn that in Oxford?”
“No, right here in blessed Mother India! We are better than that.”
The maharajah’s tiny eyes were slits full of calculation. “I like the old ways better,” he finally said. “You liked me better when we were boys.”
The rajah stared stonily back.
His brother pulled in his belly, raising a chin as far as a neck resembling an inner tube would allow and ticking off-on-off-on sticky fingers…
“She spurned the royal house not once but twice. She attacked me. The whore, the chinaal and you are traitors. I could have you beheaded along with your—whore. I did not know about the snakes until after it was done,” he admitted, looking regretful.
“And what, thenceforth? You might actually have to govern. Mollify foreign officials you insult daily. Lay down uprisings. Oh, you do not know about the poor’s bloody resistance to your yearly bleeding of rupees! Or, should I say, rubies? Moreover, you would have to appease the British Empire, while ignoring the growing popularity of a young hothead named Gandhi. In other words, rule, Brother, rule!”
“You’d never leave. You love India.” He whined.
“I would leave to save this piece of India. Outside of India, I could appeal to the British Empire.” Could he? He did not know, but it was effective.
“I forbid you to abscond! I forbid you to take that whore with you! I can arrest her as a spy and imprison you and your chinaal in the deepest part of the palace, never to see light again—unless it is the day you die!” He spied Preeta in the doorway. “In fact, I will!”
The maharajah, showing vindictiveness like bird-droppings in a pudding, narrowed his eyes in triumph. It appeared the notion simmering like a pot of poison for years had finally found the pot stirrer.
****
The physician gave what antidotes were on hand. Usually one built immunities in India. I had not that advantage. Fortunately, Old Neelam, who also tended the reptiles, kept private stocks of anti-venom. However, the zoo tender was busy capturing all the misplaced reptiles, which took up precious time while I lay in the midst of dying. And of course, by that time, they did not know which viper had bitten me.
The dying hour gave me back. Fever peaked, leaving me pale as cheese, and drenched as if in my own private monsoon, but releasing the last poisons.
When I opened them, my eyes were clear as stilled water, as was my crazed mind.
“Preeta. She meant me to die.”
“Yes, Preeta. Your Preeta has planned many things.”
He told me of Preeta’s elevated position, with a light sardonic wit, hiding his fear. I smiled but held my tongue regarding the involvement of the elephant tender’s boy. There had been too much malice and bloodshed already. Let the maharajah be cuckolded. “Now we are free,” I said simply.
The rajah grinned, showing all his beautiful white teeth. “Pyara. You raced in just as you were when you fled the bath.”
A change of subject hid behind his lighthearted banter. I knew him too well. “Rami? What are you saying?”
“Starkers, you were!”
“I scarce cared, at the moment.” I spoke calmly. “What is it, Rami? What is troubling you?”
Suddenly I was afraid. Unreasonably afraid. A fear made up of primitive instincts for survival made my insides quake. Something unspeakable was to happen. I knew it.
His handsome face turned grim, and I sat because my knees no longer supported me. “If you will forgive me, I waited until now, but I have unfinished business.” I had no hint that he had gone directly to the maharajah and that a crisis was not to be denied, after a lifetime of rivalry, covetousness, and hate came to a head. A bursting carbuncle, filled with murderous poison. That was the last lighthearted moment we were gifted.
We should have fled while we could.
****
They threw me into another dark place from my sickbed. I heard moans, muffled, as through stone. Still weak from poisons, I thought they were my own, initially. Then a rustling. Close by, it was. The thing, the unknown being, was in the cell with me, for I recognized the place, but it was not the same one as before. This was larger. I could tell from the echoes of my breathing and the clammy, stirring air. The space had a cavernous hollow feel, and no window. But I knew.
I had little resistance when the palace guards, not the gentle giants, morose as they were, yanked me from my cot and hustled me away in my sweaty bedclothes.
I shrank, banging my shoulder into a clammy wall. Moisture runneled down, wetting my arm. I jumped from the chill. My body could not respond to hot or cold properly, and simple wetness seemed frigid or hot, in contrast to the oily heat of the cell.
“Sarabande!” I heard a rough voice croak out in the dark.
I screamed silently. I would give no quarter, swinging out blindly but feebly.
“I never meant this—” The voice rasped as if the owner’s neck had been strangled. “He is beyond insane. I should not have…”
“Rami!” We clung to each other. He kissed my face in the dark, clumsy but passionate. I felt him wince. “Rami. What did they do to you?”
“Hardly matters, does it, my poor Sary?” he rasped. We sat against the stone, clasping each other and whispering.
“It finally happened.” His bitterness flooded the dark like acrid wine. “My fault, mine entirely. I pressed him. I never thought he had the—the balls of a lame donkey, to act against me. My friends, and I have many, would rise up, but they don’t know! He did it cleverly. By now, he has spread the word I am on a diplomatic mission. Later he will say thieves in wicked foreign parts or some such tale, attacked me, or I am suffering from yaksma—as you say, consumption—taking the cure in the Alps,” he muttered as if I were not present. “And finally, regretfully, he will announce my death. No one will dare question it. You, my darling one, I do not know.”
“Will your allies believe such nonsense?”
I felt him shrug. “By that time, it will be a fait accompli. Why risk it? If they still live.”
“But where are we? Exactly.” For a moment I hoped we were somewhere outside the palace grounds.
“An older prison not used much anymore. Except for the forgotten. The long-timers. I have not been out here in years, to my regret. Well, old girl”—he turned to me in the near dark—“I am making up for neglect now. We will disappear. Sary, love.”
Don’t be so truthful, I wanted to scream.
I pressed my hand over his mouth. “Shhh. We will find a way. You and I.” More bravado than reason cowered behind those words.
He held me in the felted light until I grew impatient. Apparently, he supposed he needed to comfort me, in place of finding a way out.
“Please, Rami.” I got up and began pacing to get my strength back. I thought of redoubtable Padmavati, and brave little Asha, thankfully recovered. Yet what could they do? Even if they had an inkling of where we were.
I strained to see something. As my sight adjusted, or the day shifted outside, wan light seeped through a grille in the door where I had clung so desperately when they threw me in.
The d
oor was old, wooden, and dry. I still mindlessly clutched a sliver in my hand that had splintered off as I hung onto it. Thick on one end, raggedly sharp on the other. A useless weapon. My hand hurt from gripping it.
“Rami, it will be lighter soon.”
“I do realize that,” he said with a hint of exasperation.
“We will find a way, if we have to claw with our fingernails.” Yet this was stone, not the crumbly brick as before.
He barked a laugh and paced, thinking deep thoughts, no doubt, as was I. I still clutched my useless trinket, the splinter of wood. What would that do? Stab the guard? Scratch our way out? Feeling along the wall, I attempted to wedge it between two stones. The tip promptly snapped off. I tossed it angrily toward the door.
“Perhaps his mood will change once the child arrives,” I said. If we live that long.
The rajah dashed those thoughts.
“Preeta is dead, you know.” His words hung in the dark like extinguished candle soot.
I felt my blood drain. My face must have glowed white in the dim light. “Dead! How? It is not her time! The maharajah would never—”
“He did,” he said simply.
I wondered what that portended, if even Preeta was not safe. The rajah’s eyes glinted in the dark.
“She lost the child. I heard it before the guards dragged me off. Gossip had it the maharani herself had something to do with it. Preeta was in her care. She was very ill, before…”
“Oh, Rami, no!” I exclaimed, thinking the maharani was in danger.
“My brother was enraged, hurling blame at Preeta for all manner of crimes. Not eating and…”
“I know. Morning sickness.” Poor Preeta.
“Indeed. Or she stayed too long in the sun…then, that she hid in the dark—that she willed the baby dead, when she complained overmuch. It did not matter. He had Preeta dragged out and destroyed. The maharani said the whole palace could hear her screams. He would have at any rate, if she had lost the babe on her own. I cannot believe the maharani had evil in her heart.”
Sary and the Maharajah's Emeralds Page 16