Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  The great barge bore him one, Selena, drawn day after day by drudge elephants up the sluggish Narbada River, toward Jabalpur. The snub-nosed barge was easily as long as the Highlander had been, and a permanent shelter, like a fine-sized house, rested on the flat expanse of its massive deck. Within this shelter, Selena had been assigned a small chamber, all of bamboo. Bamboo comprised the walls, the ceiling, the floor. A curtain of delicate bamboo reeds slid across the door, to offer privacy. The pallet on which she slept by night, waited by day, was likewise of the same wood, and covered by the finest blankets Selena had ever seen, the silkworm’s masterpiece.

  She did not like the low, yellow country along the coast, and the heat kept her inside, but after several days—many people were aboard, including Ku-Fel and the black boy, but no one troubled her—Selena left her tiny chamber, made her way out onto the barge. To her surprise, the lowlying, tropical delta had been left behind, and she saw a luxuriant, hilly country of raw beauty. Along the shore of the river, six elephants plodded forward, eyes in the dust, attached to the barge by a complicated harness of leather, chains, and rope. Cursing drivers rode the great beasts, striking them ineffectually with short wands, which she later learned were used to guide them, and on the barge, sweating, loinclothed men with long poles kept the barge from going too close to shore. The sun was high, the weather warm and pleasant here in the hills. She removed the diaphanous rose-red shawl Ku-Fel had given her, with a gold-toothed grimace, when they set out from Daman. “It is the first of many beautiful things for you,” she had said. “If you were born to please.”

  “I am pleased to see you on deck this morning.” A low, formal voice spoke just behind her, interrupting her memory. She whirled in surprise, and found the black boy standing there.

  “I am sorry for startling you,” he said in perfectly modulated English. He smiled, to express further apology, but the tragic light never left his beautiful eyes.

  “It’s all right. I didn’t hear you approaching,” she said, and looked at him closely for the first time. The previous glimpses she had had of him left her with the impression that he was Negro, probably, and about ten or eleven years old. Now she saw that her original judgments were mistaken. His skin was as smooth and black as obsidian, true, which lent an appearance of youth, an appearance seemingly underscored by his small stature, but his features were more like those of the Indians she had seen. And, although he stood no more than five feet in height, his slight, wiry body was solid and sinewy, not that of a boy. She guessed that he might be twenty, perhaps, but otherwise he was a mystery to her. She tried, but could not feel with her mind the signals he had sent her on the day of the nawab’s feast. Or maybe she had imagined them, frightened and overwrought as she had been.

  “I am Davi,” he said, bowing slightly. “I shall serve you in all that you wish.”

  “Thank you. I’m not sure…” she began, momentarily nonplussed by the depth of his eyes, which never left her, which seemed to bore into her brain. She turned to the shore, the countryside.

  “When will we get there?” she asked.

  “Many weeks, many weeks,” he said, his voice still soft. “In our land one soon learns patience. The journey is of over five hundred of what you in your lands call ‘miles,’ and all the way it is by barge and elephant. But we will reach the palace in due course, as we always have, and there is much for you to learn.”

  He seemed sadder, saying that, but grave and, in an odd way, very wise and gentle for one so young.

  “This is the Satpura Range,” he told her, gesturing toward the hills. “The Narbada runs through it, all the way to Central India. When we reach the plateau of Chota Nagpur, you will see the lands of our master. Very rich lands, and very remote.”

  Again, she had the sense of extraordinary sadness when he spoke the word “remote,” as if somehow it bespoke a personal isolation that he could neither express nor abnegate.

  Silence came upon them. On the banks of the river, the drivers were cursing the beasts. Thousands of people were at work in the rich fields that stretched out as far as the eye could see, a quilted patchwork of colors and crops among the verdant hills. Far away, a group was chanting, perhaps a song to ease the labor, perhaps a prayer.

  Selena could not stop herself. Davi seemed to want to help her, and, anyway, he was the first person in whom she had sensed sympathy since Roxanne had been taken away. She had to find out some things.

  “What will it be like?” she asked. “Jabalpur? What is the maharajah like?”

  At that moment, almost as if summoned to intervene, Ku-Fel charged out of the shelter.

  “Davi! Davi!” she cried angrily, seeing him with Selena. “There you are, you worthless thing. Where is my herb tea? Why haven’t you brewed my morning tea?”

  Selena saw the sudden fright in Davi’s eyes, but also the quiet resolve. He had borne much suffering in his time, she decided.

  “Believe nothing!” he told her, quickly, quietly. “Even the obvious may be deceptive. And trust no one until you speak to me. I will help you. This is a land far more dangerous and arbitrary than…”

  Whatever it was, he didn’t get a chance to tell her. Ku-Fel, approaching almost at a run, struck out with one of her big, mannish hands, a chopping motion strange to Selena, at the side of Davi’s neck. He cried out in pain, and seemed to be stunned, or paralyzed.

  “Leave the concubine alone,” Ku-Fel warned. “You can’t do anything about it anyway. And I want my tea when I awaken, or you’ll be hanging by your thumbs until sundown. Do you understand?”

  Davi slunk away, leaning to one side, rubbing his wounded neck. Selena was acutely conscious of Ku-Fel’s anger and her strength.

  “What was he saying?” the woman asked, slitting her eyes.

  “I…I simply asked how far we had to…travel.” The ugly harem mistress did not entirely believe her, but decided to let it pass. “There is no use asking such questions,” she said, in a near snarl. “Time does not exist in India, not as you have known it. I see that you’re curious about Davi,” she added in the same breath.

  The sudden question, the slitted, suspicious eyes, unnerved Selena, and she nodded, even though afraid that her admission might bring grief down upon the black boy.

  “Then I’ll tell you all you need to know,” Ku-Fel offered, showing her teeth to signal that truth would be forthcoming. “You see, Davi is a Dravidian. Four thousand years ago, the Dravidians, small and dark like him, had India all to themselves. Then the Aryans came, howling down from the north. They were warriors, rapacious and fearless, and, although the process took centuries to complete, they had little trouble displacing Davi’s race. There are still some of them left, mostly in the south, or in the large cities, where they do work not allowed to those of the higher castes. Such as myself.”

  Selena recalled Captain Jack’s brief digressions regarding Hinduism, some long-buried fragments of her tutelage about castes.

  “Will I have a caste?” she asked.

  Ku-Fel burst into deep, roaring laughter. She was thoroughly, genuinely amused. “Well, you won’t be an Untouchable, I will grant you that, emptying slop jars and the like. And you won’t be a servant like Davi, although, in a sense, you Will be a servant. No, you have no caste. You are a concubine, fit to amuse the maharajah, and no more. Leave it at that, and ask no further questions. There is always the chance that you will please him greatly, and enjoy a measure of power thereby, but you may never bear his legitimate children. After all, you can never be a Brahman. You are not even Indian.”

  She paused, and her eyes glinted cruelly. “You are only a pretty whore with golden hair,” she snarled. “We’ve taken care of your like before.”

  Gayle, thought Selena.

  Then Ku-Fel was smiling again, as if the scorn and the anger had not been there at all. “One more thing,” she said, “you’d best be wary of Davi. Some of these Dravidians claim to have special powers, from their prehistory. Old secrets of knowledge and commun
ication. But don’t believe it.”

  “Why…why not?”

  “Because. Look at what’s happened to them. They were defeated. They have nothing. India is Aryan now, and Hindu. The gods have given us the rules of life, the keys to Nirvana.”

  Selena said nothing.

  “You will come to my chamber after the midday meal,” Ku-Fel ordered. “I believe it is time to begin your instruction.”

  She waddled off, ungainly but powerful beneath her sari, swinging those huge, hard-edged, chopping hands. Selena stood there on the barge, fighting the feelings of loneliness and distress that were blooming in her heart like evil flowers. The lack of certainty troubled her most, the lack of anyone to trust, to rely upon, to ask for help in time of need. Everything changed, shifted. Everyone to whom she spoke seemed—with the possible exception of Davi—to treat her with an amusement that was not even contemptuous. And all of them told her to beware. Of India. Of themselves. Of everything! Davi told her to beware of Ku-Fel. Ku-Fel told her to beware of Davi, hinting of preternatural powers.

  Was that what I felt with my mind? His power?

  But if he had such powers, why was he nothing but a servant, despised, humiliated, often beaten? No, there would be little help from him, in spite of his assurances. His own condition belied his words, belied even the mysterious tragedy in his eyes.

  Selena looked out across the great plains of Asia. Scotland, half a world away, came to her when she summoned it, and she set it, like a beautiful jewel, between her violet eyes and the hills of alien Sutpura. From the hard little village of Kinlochbervie, where Father lay buried beneath a hut of stone, to Mount Foinaven, weed-ridden where the lodge had been, to the dark, smoky lochs in the Highlands, where waited the wolf that was the mate of Royce Campbell’s soul, to the honey-drenched moors, to mighty Edinburgh, and finally south to Coldstream, she saw it all, embraced it, held it, loved it as you love for the first time, pure and forever and never to be tarnished. She was lost now. She had not seen a European, not one, and they told her the interior was too remote even to attract her countrymen. Plenty of money for them along the coasts, and in Bengal, especially. Sean Bloodwell might be there, if he was still alive. (Europeans die like flies here, they had told her.) And even if, somehow, he should learn of her presence in this vast land, what could he do? What could one man, a clerk with the government, or maybe the East India Company, do to free her from a great maharajah?

  So she was lost now.

  But still she carried Scotland in her soul, when the days beat down her spirit. When the nights were dark.

  “Pray, let us begin,” Ku-Fel said, motioning Selena to a low pallet. Her chamber was larger than Selena’s but otherwise identical. Selena sat, crossing her legs. The barge moved slowly, water washing easily against its hull. Ku-Fel studied Selena for a long time.

  “Disrobe,” she ordered curtly.

  Selena must have displayed her fear, because the harem mistress was slightly more gentle in her explanation.

  “It’s for your own good,” she said, “and for mine, as well. If you please our master, so do I. And if you please him, you please me. And,” she added obscurely, “we keep Rupal from our throats.”

  Rupal? Was Rupal another of the maharajah’s mistresses, or the maharajah himself?

  “Hurry, now,” Ku-Fel prodded.

  Self-consciously, barely containing a flash of anger, Selena slipped out of the sari of lavender silk, and stood naked in the bamboo chamber. In spite of the situation, she was proud of her body, and instinctively drew in her stomach and lifted her breasts.

  “Ah, yes,” breathed Ku-Fel. “Ah, yes, indeed. You will be most pleasing to his eyes. Perhaps if you ate a bit more heartily until we reach Jabalpur, however. Your breasts are splendid. How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” Selena said.

  “Well, no wonder. But your backside could use a few pounds. You will be most pleasing to his eyes,” she said again.

  Selena bent for the sari.

  “Yes, go on. Dress. Now our real work begins. We must make you exquisitely pleasing to his body, as well. How many lovers have you…had?”

  Selena balked, as perhaps Ku-Fel had guessed she would. Without heat, quite calmly, the big women pulled aside a piece of the bamboo floor mat and took out a long, thin piece of metal. There was a wooden handle on one end. At the other, Selena saw a tiny letter or symbol fashioned of iron, like a lopsided letter Z.

  “You will not, of course, endure this today, child, since your instruction is just beginning. And I would, with all my heart, prefer that you never face it. But there is sometimes need for discipline, and I urge you to understand most hastily my position as your superior. Outright disobedience to the harem mistress in the maharajah’s court will earn you this letter. In a tender place upon your flesh. The instrument, of course, will have been heated white-hot in a fire. Do you grasp my meaning?”

  Selena nodded, speechless.

  “It is merciful, I assure you. Girls who displease our master often…” She said no more.

  “I’ve had…one lover,” Selena confessed, hating herself for revealing it.

  “And other men?”

  “I have loved another man, but we did not. And once I was taken against my will.” (Or, of necessity, to get aboard the Meridian?) “And by Captain Jack.”

  Ku-Fel frowned. “That is not many. Your lover, did you please him?”

  “I think so. He said so.”

  “How? In what ways?”

  “As…as it is done.”

  “Child, I know how it is done. I must know the ways. With your body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hands? Mouth?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, thank God you have had some experience. Was it pleasurable to you?”

  Selena nodded and dropped her eyes. Blood rushed to her face.

  “Good.” Ku-Fel smiled. “I guessed as much when I first saw you. That is why I chose you, do you know? Your friend, the French girl, was obviously more experienced in technique, but she would be too studied, too mechanical, I’m afraid. I did not tell this to the nawab. Perhaps that is what he wishes. But you! No, you will feel passion in a good man’s arms, and you will show it, and that will please him as much as any technique.

  “Of course, we will now proceed to learn those,” she added.

  Selena was forced to listen, feeling cheap and tawdry. Yet, as she realized that concubinage was not just a dim possibility for her but an unalterable fate, she also knew that her very survival might be premised upon her success. I have to survive, she thought, even if, right now, there seems little to survive for. Having seen Marinda, forlorn and desolate, drop beneath the all-erasing sea, Selena knew that a death such as that would have no meaning for her. It would, in fact, be more obscene than mere vulnerability was. It would be giving in to vulnerability.

  She would not do that.

  She would survive by whatever means were at hand.

  “There are certain tubes or veins in the man’s sac,” Ku-Fel was lecturing, “which, when pressed persistently but gently during the spasms of his transport, will enhance his delight.”

  She described where they were, and how to apply the touch of the fingers.

  “And it is also most important, if one is to be called for again and again and again, to be able to prolong and extend the period of his pleasure…”

  She described such bodily grasps and squeezes, and how to train oneself to perform them. That afternoon, and on many subsequent days, as the great barge was dragged step by plodding, elephantine step up the waters of the endless river, Ku-Fel summoned Selena to her chamber, to instruct her in the sixty-four legendary positions of the Ananga Ranga, apotheosized in the Kama Sutra of Indian knowledge. She learned the avidarita, demonstrating for Ku-Fel’s edification that she had the agility to lift her legs high enough; she learned the venuvidarita, and opened herself so wide; and she learned the vinarditasana, which meant that the man, if sufficiently stro
ng, would lift her to himself, and, holding her the while, move her gently and forever from side to side, until…

  She looked up to find Ku-Fel giving her a knowing, gold-toothed smile.

  “Yes?” Selena asked.

  “I think you will do well indeed.”

  “I was just thinking…”

  “Good, good,” said Ku-Fel. “We need not fear Rupal, then.”

  “Who is Rupal?”

  “You will learn what you require at the proper time.”

  “But I need to know now. You implied that I should be afraid of this Rupal.”

  “Did I? No, child, I did not intend to.”

  There was little point in going on. Ku-Fel’s evasions were merely extensions of previous evasions, her words were as reliable and permanent as shifting sand. And yet, Selena thought, Ku-Fel was, if not afraid, at least cautious of this unidentified Rupal, and was that not unusual if Ku-Fel was the all-powerful harem mistress?

  “Go now and bathe yourself,” said Ku-Fel one after noon, after her instruction. “We have passed Narsinghpur, and tomorrow we shall disembark. You will not see the maharajah immediately upon our arrival, but you must be, from the start, as lovely a concubine as you can. Because it will not be easy for you, in the harem.”

  “What do you mean?” ask Selena, who had been almost lulled by the long, tedious, mesmerizing journey. “What do you mean, not easy?”

  “Jealousies, child. Jealousies. Gayle was as good a student as you, but in the end…”

  In the end…As always, Ku-Fel hinted, teased, warned, but did not explain. On her pallet that night, the air almost chilly, and the night starry on this High Central-Indian plateau—all the stars were different here! That unfamiliarity was as terrible as anything else—Selena could not sleep. Perhaps it was the lack of motion. Usually, the trudging pachyderms pulled them through the night, but now Ku-Fel had ordered a halt, in order to decorate the barge suitably for Selena’s arrival, and they anchored along the shore of the river. She had grown used to the midnight chattering of the drivers, the gentle sound of water.