by Alyssa Deane
Roxane looked about her. “Let us bring the children to the fore,” she said, “to get a breath of air. Then we can take turns circulating about the room, so that no one suffers more than need be."
This plan was agreed upon with little argument, and the children, along with those few ladies who had been prostrate upon Roxane's entry, were brought forward to stand in the light. The smallest of the children blinked, glancing back with uncertainty toward their mothers. It was clear that they did not understand why, with the door standing wide, they were not being permitted to leave that frightening place.
“Very well,” said Roxane, standing close to the front, “let some others move forw—"
At that instant, one of the children wandered too close to the open door and was seized abruptly by the dark arm of one of the rebels outside. The child's screech of terror was echoed by that of his mother, struggling to come forward through the press. The mutineer crouched into the low doorway, effectively blocking most of the sunlight with his large shadow. His teeth gleamed, and the whites of his eyes, and the curving, vicious length of a tulwar in his hand. He shook the child with a whiplash intensity, staring at the other children, who stared back, wide-eyed and whimpering. Roxane ducked around them, snatching the child from his grasp and shoving the boy behind her back.
“If your intent,” she spat out, “is to frighten the children, you have accomplished your task. Your shame must run deep, for you are a man, and these are but babes."
Their tormentor rose up then, slowly, as much as the low lintel would allow. Grinning, he reached out and slapped Roxane in the face.
Roxane's hand sped to her mouth, for although the man had struck at her languidly, almost playfully, she had felt the sting of it, and knew he had opened her lip. When she pulled her hand away, blood, bright red, stained her fingers. Straightening her shoulders, she ushered the children back away from the door, casually and deliberately turning her back on the man to give him the message that he might frighten small children, but he would not frighten her. It took nearly all of her courage to do so, but it was a successful ploy. Grumbling, the fellow retreated.
He was not, however, the last to attempt to terrorize the occupants of the room. Whatever pleasure those men derived from their actions, they took it in turns, singly or in pairs, to enter the doorway brandishing their weapons and snarling obscenities, making feints with their long, arched swords at any who were near enough to the honed points. Each time this took place, the door was forced closed by those within, until it seemed they would all suffocate, at which time it was again opened, and the cycle repeated, throughout the night.
Exhausted, Roxane sat on the stone floor with her head against the wall. Her gown was soaked with perspiration and clinging to her flesh. More than anything else, she wanted a drink of water, and seemed unable to dissociate herself from that longing. Closing her eyes, she listened to the voices around her, once more entombed in darkness. There were those of mothers attempting to soothe their children to slumber in their laps, and sleepy children asking questions which could not be answered. The gentle monotony of prayer filtered through the room; nearby, a woman prayed with her four children, for forgiveness rather than deliverance, it seemed. Perhaps she understood as well as Roxane their chances of survival.
Toward morning, Roxane awoke from a fitful, nodding sleep to the sound of conversation. Shifting her hips on the hard floor, she looked toward the door, which was once again opened, showing a vague rectangle of golden light, as of torches at a distance, or fire. A woman was standing there, a Eurasian woman, speaking in a low, earnest voice to one of their captors, attempting, it sounded, to persuade the man that she and her family were Muslims, not Christians at all. After a few minutes, the woman returned across the floor, stepping carefully over sleeping bodies, and sat down not far from Roxane, where her four children were lying, curled on top of one another for comfort. For a brief moment, Roxane met the woman's dark gaze. Then the woman looked away, leaning her head against the wall. Her eyes closed. She did not speak to Roxane, nor did Roxane attempt to speak with her. In time, Roxane fell back asleep. She dreamed of rain.
Come morning, the propped door was thrown back with force against the wall, awakening any who might still have been sleeping. A baby, not much more than an infant, began to wail, and was stilled in the corner against its mother's breast. Those who were not already standing stood and stretched, and looked with renewed trepidation toward the open door. A man with a gun, with an Enfield rifle no doubt loaded with the hated cartridges, Roxane mused, was signaling them all to come outside. All, he said, except for the five Mohammedans, who were to remain inside.
Roxane was careful not to look at the woman beside her, leaning by the wall with her children hooked under her arms like a mother hen, sheltering them against her skirts. Roxane took the hand of a young girl, a child no more than Sera's age, who had somehow become separated from her mother, and followed the wandering course into the sunlight. Outside, they were herded as they had been the day before, with pokes and prods and words whose meanings were better left undelved, into the courtyard, beneath the shade of a vast pipal tree. Once there, their tormentors removed to a short distance, milling about with fierce looks but a strange lack of purpose. Finding her mother, the child pulled away from Roxane's grasp. Roxane opened her fingers and let the child go.
The sunlight through the leaves was green and gold and still only pleasantly warm. A small, startling breeze rattled the foliage and dried the perspiration on Roxane's brow and breast, and across her forearms. Her gown remained drenched, with no hope of redemption. She closed her eyes, lifting her face to the sun.
The voice of a man intruded into her thoughts, and she listened to him only vaguely as he harangued the prisoners. After a time, he announced that the privilege of killing them all had been reserved for the king's servants. This, it was explained with a sudden, inexplicable patience, was because the killing of an infidel assured those so privileged a place in paradise. It was truly quite simple reasoning. Even Roxane understood.
Nearer, Roxane could hear some of the women expressing disbelief, and that it was only a further attempt to frighten them all. Soon they would all be rescued, or set free, or locked up again, or the King of Delhi himself would come to their aid ... Roxane said nothing to them in return. She had witnessed enough of butchery in the city to know that what the man said was true. Very shortly, they were all to die.
She thought of Collier, then, sought his soul out with her own, like a kite on the wind with the string trailing, for his hand. She felt him there, felt the tug upon the string, a physical manifestation nearly in her womb, and she thought: he lives.
Do not avenge me, she prayed.
She had seen enough of killing. She wanted no more, for her sake.
The native men came at them, then, with a large rope to bind them together, like animals for slaughter. The other women screamed, some of them, and bunched together, pushing at the rope with their hands, pulling it away from the bodies of their children. Roxane watched them as if at a distance. She felt her heart break for them, for their fear and confusion, and for that of the children, who looked about them with eyes wide. At that point, she felt herself awakening with a sudden rush of energy, and she stepped back, turning toward the man who approached her and the two children who were near to her side. Without thinking, she lashed out, a lightning stroke that Harry Grovsner would have recognized felling the mutineer. She knocked the next man aside also, and pushed the two young boys behind her skirt. Yet, somehow, and without warning, she lost her footing. As she went down, falling earthward with the strangest sensation that she had been thrust there, she thought of her father, and wondered if he would know when she was gone that she had truly loved him still.
Chapter Twenty-One
There was a noise, as of someone being wretchedly ill. Not until Roxane had fully regained her senses and felt a pair of hands holding her head steady over the circular opening of a porcelain
pot, did she know that person to be herself.
“Better?"
It was a familiar voice, whispering of saner times, pleasantry and normalcy, and yet she did not answer him. He stood up from his position on the mattress beside her and walked to the window, where the sun was shining with a mockery of brightness, casting the shadowless glare of midday into the room. It hurt her eyes to look at the light, and the silhouette of the man in shapeless garments before the window, and she closed her lids, rolling over on the bed with an ineffectual swipe at her mouth before once more drifting away on a sea of dark motion and no sound.
Unlike the first time, when she awoke again she knew immediately that it was she who was weeping hot, salt tears in her sleep, and no other.
Dashing her hand across her eyes, Roxane struggled up from the bedstead, stumbling blindly toward the window. As she drew close, a hand shot out of a shadow cast by the angled light falling over the casement and encircled her arm.
“Do not,” said Ahmed, “venture near the window. You must not be seen."
Roxane halted without question, chin lifting toward the light as she stood an arm-span away. She swallowed over the harsh constriction in her throat. She felt as though she were choking.
“Are they all dead?” she managed to ask at last. “Are all those with whom I shared that dark place now dead?"
For a long time he did not reply, which was, in itself, enough of an answer. Roxane heard the shifting of his robes as he stood from the chair. He stepped into the sunlight beside her, staring out the empty casement into the garden below.
“Are they dead?” she persisted.
His profile, so like that of his great uncle, was immobile, as if carved of mahogany wood. When he turned to face her, she witnessed, for an instant, an expression in his eyes that made her want to shudder in fear. It was gone as quickly as it had been revealed, but not before she had stepped back in an instinctive movement of preservation.
If he noticed her action, or her trepidation, he made no comment upon either, but merely turned aside, striding back into the center of the room.
“They have died,” he said quietly, without looking back at her, “slain by the sword."
“Even the children?"
A brief pause, then, “Yes. Even the children."
Roxane did shudder then, moving unsteadily to sit in the chair he had vacated. She lowered her head into her hands, taking deep, quavering breaths. Her dress, she noticed for the first time, had been replaced by the richly colored silk of some native feminine apparel. She wondered who had performed this task, stripping her of her filthy, tattered gown while she lay insensible and dressing her in clean garments. She decided it did not matter.
“May I—may I have something to drink?"
Wordlessly, Ahmed pressed a goblet into her hands. She brought it to her lips, sipping at the cloying liquid, so sweet and thick she nearly gagged. She sat a moment with the cup between her palms, running her thumbs over the chased silver, fighting nausea.
“How was it,” she said, after a time, “that I was spared?"
“The man who struck you was paid well..."
There was an odd tone to Ahmed's voice, of cold and tight control. Not, Roxane thought, of anguish over the loss of the others, but perhaps because he had been forced, through a loyalty that strongly bound him, to save one? She shivered, clutching the goblet tighter in her hands. She did not want to view Ahmed in such prejudicial fashion, but the things she had recently witnessed so colored her manner of thinking that she found it hard to be objective, hard to remember that this man was her friend.
“What,” she asked, still looking down into the thick ruby-colored juice, “if that servant of your uncle should reveal I am here? Would that not be a danger to you?"
“He will reveal nothing,” answered Ahmed, flatly.
Slowly, Roxane raised her head and met Ahmed's dark eyes across the room. He stood very still and erect, his handsome head tipped slightly back on his shoulders. There was something defiant in this stance, and very frightening. She knew, in that instant, that the king's servant who had rescued her for pay from the massacre beneath the pipal tree was himself now dead. She did not ask Ahmed if this was true. Looking at him, she had no need.
With a shaking hand, she set the goblet down on the table to her left and stood. She smoothed the strange-feeling garments down over her body and took a turn toward the window, stopping just short of sight of anyone in the garden below, or in the windows across the courtyard. She thought, briefly, of the time she and Collier had spent here, and the blue bowl placed on the sill to ensure that they were undisturbed. How long ago that all seemed now, though it was barely a few months...
“I do not believe Collier is dead,” she said, without preamble. She heard the man stir behind her.
“Did you have cause,” asked Ahmed, softly, “to wonder if he were?"
Roxane nodded, closing her eyes in the warmth of the sun. She lifted her head to it.
“He was in Meerut. Yesterday, I found his horse in the possession of another man, here in Delhi. I took it back from that man, and then it was taken, once more, from me. I suppose, in the madness of these days, the loss of a horse is a small consideration, but I had hoped to return Adain to him if I could."
Ahmed was silent. Of what, if anything, he thought regarding her words, she could not speculate. He seemed to mean to keep his distance, and for that she could not blame him. She had always seen that he was a man torn between the two worlds in which he had been raised, and the righteous calling of his brothers to arms against the foreigners must have been a torment to him. He was, after all, still one with his country, based on blood, heritage, and religion, and all of his European education could not serve to erase that fact. He was very much like his great-uncle in terms of tolerance and belief, still as strong and fierce as the King of Delhi had been in his youth, and entrenched in the ancient culture of his people and of his country, which were, in the end, still his own.
“I am grateful to you for my life, Ahmed,” she said. He made no reply. Roxane ran the open flat of her palm down her abdomen, over the slick, cool surface of silk. Are you in there, little one? she called silently. Are you truly in there?
“Have you seen Sera? Did she come here yesterday? I have been searching since yesterday morning. I ... at least, I believe it was yesterday. How long was I unconscious?"
“Not very long,” Ahmed answered, moving about in the room. “A few hours only."
A small clock, a gift from her and Collier, chimed a small series of musical notes. Two-fifteen. Not that long at all, since her rescue from beneath the very swords of those who would have slain her along with the rest of the women and children with whom she had been imprisoned. The reprisals for that horrific act would be terrible and indiscriminate. Men who prided themselves on such concepts as clemency and honor would resort to an exercise which waived the former and distorted the latter. Their reaction to the deaths of innocent civilians, to the murder of the women and children whom they dearly loved, in reality or in theory, would be, fundamentally, one of revenge alone.
Roxane shuddered again, as the image of such an undertaking raced through her mind's eye. Lifting her hands, she rubbed them along her upper arms, feeling the tripping of horror's chill fingers along her skin.
“Sera is here,” said Ahmed suddenly, behind her. Roxane spun about to face him. He raised his hands, forestalling speech. “For fear that she would bring attention to this place, I gave her something to make her sleep. She should soon be awakening. If you will wait, I will bring her here to you."
Roxane followed him as he exited the room but, conscious of being discovered, she waited at a distance from the door. After a few minutes, she heard Sera's sleepy voice and Ahmed's deeper one, firmly assuring her that all was well. When they walked in, Ahmed was carrying her sister, who clung to him like a monkey, the child's small, pretty face buried deep in the folds of the garment against his neck. Roxane put her arms out.
<
br /> “Sera."
Depositing the girl into her embrace, Ahmed walked away, frowning, and stood with his back to them, his hands clasped behind his waist.
“Sera,” Roxane whispered against her sister's head, carrying her to the chair beside the window, where she sat down, the child in her lap. “I have been looking for you, you know. I was so worried...” Roxane rocked the tiny girl back and forth, her cheek pressed with desperate pressure against the oil-black hair.
Sera, dazed and not fully cognizant of her surroundings, asked, once, green eyes wide, after her dog. Roxane looked to Ahmed, who indicated with a nod of his head that Courage was safe.
“I dreamed of Colonel Max...” Sera muttered, “...of Papa. I dreamed ... I dreamed he was dead..."
Roxane hushed the child's small voice, kissing her lightly on the brow. This, too, had been much on her own mind, for she had heard talk among the mutineers of officers slain, “foolish” men who had counted on the loyalty of the men they commanded.
“Sera, why did you come into the city? Did I not tell you that our plans were cancelled? Did I not tell you to go nowhere without me?"
Sera whimpered, burrowing closer into her embrace.
“Ah, it is of no matter, Sera, for we are together now. Our friend Ahmed has saved us both, you see, and we will stay here until it is safe for us to leave,” Roxane whispered, stroking the length of Sera's silky hair. She noticed that it was matted at the back of the girl's neck, and she reached up distractedly to her own, to discover her unbrushed locks in a similar condition.
“When will it be safe? When can we leave?” Sera demanded lethargically.
“I don't know,” Roxane replied.
“It will be no time soon,” Ahmed stated from his position across the room.
“I want to go home,” Sera cried out plaintively.
Roxane lowered her head, gathering her sister against her breast. So, she thought, do I, but she would not, for Ahmed's sake, speak those words aloud.