Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  And love?

  Possibly, for him, if he could feel love in the manner she had learned of it, the European emotion.

  For her? She was attracted to him, took delight in pleasing him, and enjoyed the ministrations of delight he freely gave to her. But her life was not here, could not be here. At first, even after it was obvious that she had become his favorite, Selena was restricted. She could not speak with Davi, nor ask him of the child; she no longer felt his mind. It was as if their fragile union had been broken. Ku-Fel seemed to delight in Rupal’s jealous misery, but Ku-Fel, too, began to ask: “Of what do you speak when you are with him? Do you speak of me? Does he continue to brood over the other blond woman?” Gayle, who continued to preside over the main gate to the palace, grinning forever onto the plains of Pradesh, where she had last seen the light of day.

  “He speaks of little,” she always told Ku-Fel. “He does not confide in me.”

  In a sense, this was true, because the master always preserved a certain reserve, a distance from Selena even when they were together, ascending the slopes of passion. He kept asking her of the child, but all she could say was that she had learned nothing more, and did not wish to jeopardize another life until she was certain that searching for the girl and bringing her back to the palace would be safe. He accepted that, for a time, and they spoke of other things before and after he enjoyed her.

  Sometimes it was of Europe and the world, of which he believed he possessed great knowledge. “I do not understand,” he said once, “how it is possible for you Westerners to claim superiority. I know of Europe, and even of your precious Scotland. A rocky land roamed by goats, in which everyone lives in a tiny room filled with smoke, eating gristle during the winter and grass when the sun is warm.”

  Selena explained that Gayle’s experience in Scotland was not one shared by all, that, although no palace as beautiful as Jabal-Mahal rested on the moors, nonetheless great buildings, beautiful in a different way, attested to the culture of Europe. “And we have laws,” she said, “courts, and judges, which treat fairly the unfortunate brought before them. We do not have one man, locked inside a…” she almost said “harem,” “…system, ruling by wile and guess, ignor…”

  She had gone too far that time.

  “Ignorant, you say,” he snapped, with steely hostility. “Your laws! Fairness!”

  On and on he went, oblivious to the female prisoners in his own harem. But, as he spoke, she realized the partial truth of what he believed. She had only to look at her own situation, to see what had happened to her. Once more, her old passion flared, the desire to be what she had been, the desire to stand upon the battlements of Coldstream Castle and feel the ancient stones cold beneath her hand.

  He sent her away early that night, and Rupal looked pleased.

  “The master is tiring of his new toy,” she said, smirking, and passed on to her chamber. There was no more talk of Selena helping her in the constant war with Ku-Fel. But the next night, with Rupal dressed in her best sari, and ready for passion, the maharajah called on Selena again. Hatred gleamed, malevolent and palpable, in the sultry depths of Rupal’s eyes. Selena knew she had an enemy who would give no quarter, and, what was worse, an enemy whose plans were too obscure to her to decipher. Rupal smoldered, waiting.

  The business of the child was very much on everyone’s mind, but seemed to be held in abeyance. Ku-Fel cannily said no more, and Selena still did not know just to what extent the harem mistress had actually participated in the execution. Nor did she know if Davi had told her the truth.

  She made up her mind that she would have to see him.

  The following night, in the master’s bedchamber, she decided to be blunt.

  “Pleasure me now,” he ordered, reclining and moving his garments aside.

  She ignored his request. “Why did you marry Ku-Fel?” she asked.

  He sat up, looking as if he could not comprehend her temerity. Then he nodded. “It is a good question, is it not? I’m surprised you did not ask it sooner.”

  Saying nothing, he led her into a part of the palace she had never seen before. They entered one of these chambers, which was quite dark. Here and there, she saw light glint on metal, but it told her nothing. The maharajah drew aside what appeared to be heavy curtains, which obscured the night light of moon and stars. And what she saw then was breathtaking. It was a room of gold and silver, an entire chamber of costly metal and stone, and at its center rested a chest of mahogany, which he approached almost with reverence. He drew Selena with him, and forced her gently to her knees before the chest. And opened it. The breath caught in her throat, and she made a sound that was like a sob. The chest was filled with a colossal assortment of jewels: diamonds, rubies, sapphires, jade, opal, onyx, gold and silver necklaces and bracelets, spangled with intricate arrangements of more jewels.

  “That is why,” he said. “Ku-Fel is the daughter of a powerful caliph in Rajasthan. This chest is her dowry. My father arranged everything, when I was not yet ten. We were married shortly afterward.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “The caliph needed to marry off his daughter, and my father wished Jabalpur to be richer than it was.”

  Selena could not tear her eyes from the fortune in that mahogany vessel. It might mean the fulfillment of every dream to kings of great nations in Europe, but here it reposed, something to look at, something to admire.

  “Jabalpur is,” the maharajah concluded. “Come now, let us return. Tonight I wish to taste your essence as you taste mine.”

  She could not put the cache of stones out of her mind during the lovemaking. Not even the delicious touch of perversity in the pleasure he proffered could banish the glitter of indescribable wealth. And Selena realized, even as she drew from him the grateful sobs of his ecstasy, that the Indians, for all their subtlety and mastery of nuance, would fall before the commercial onslaughts of the Europeans, like sheep before the slaughter. They loved wealth and luxury as they enjoyed flesh—as now the maharajah enjoyed her own—but they had not yet seen, had never had to see, that wealth meant freedom, and power, of another, wilder kind.

  In a flash, she understood Royce Campbell more fully than she ever had.

  In an instant, she grasped what it was that Sean Bloodwell had sought.

  And, in a heartbeat, she realized all that Selena MacPherson no longer possessed.

  There upon the tender, velvet couch, the sensations of love crying out around them, candelabra gleaming, firelight dancing on their glistening bodies, Selena decided to be free. Somehow, sometime, but not here.

  She would have to escape this place to be free, but she would do it.

  There upon the couch, deep in his embrace, listening to the slowing beat of his heart, the calming of his breath, and smelling the smell, tasting the taste of spilled love, she knew it was time to begin. Giving him sexual pleasure of every conceivable variety had not won him to her, he took that as his due, would have had her punished for not offering it. No, in order to establish a hold over him that would advance her escape, she would have to discover something about which he felt uncommon passion. Therein lay vulnerability, the uses of which she already knew. The uses of which had laid her low, and left Father in a stone hut, and Brian dead on the sawdust floor of a bar.

  “If you ask Ku-Fel to loosen my restrictions,” she pleaded tenderly, stroking his chest, “I am ready to find Gayle’s child for you.”

  His glance was sleepy but suspicious. “You wish to travel about the countryside?”

  “No, merely to walk the grounds of Jabal-Mahal freely.”

  “Why will this gain you information you have not been able to acquire in the two weeks since your arrival here?”

  “I believe it will. That’s all I can say.”

  Selena was correct in her judgment. The maharajah’s remorse about the death of someone for whom he had felt an uncommon attachment, and his desire to see the child of her body, led him to order Ku-Fel to release Selena from constant attendance in the harem wing o
f the palace. But, once released, Selena had more misgivings.

  What if it was true that the master hated Gayle and actually had killed her? (Nothing is as it appears.) And now wished to kill the child as well! He was quite capable of it. On the previous week, a band of seven thieves had been brought to the castle, accused of poaching wild game in the forests to the north, the maharajah’s private hunting preserve. They admitted their crime, hoping to avoid the rigors of interrogation and to provoke a speedy execution. They were unsuccessful: He had ordered them roasted slowly over banked fires, and for a long day they turned on spits of agony over the coals, until they burst, swelling, juices running from them as from a piece of grilled meat.

  So Selena must be cautious, and deliberate. She wanted freedom, but not the freedom of death. Moreover, if the child did exist, and she was able to bring her back to Jabal-Mahal, many things would become clear. She would be able to judge the reactions of Ku-Fel and Rupal and the maharajah himself toward the child, and then she might know exactly what was happening here. And exactly what had happened.

  Maybe.

  But could she protect the child? And get her to Europeans in Calcutta?

  She delayed another day, undecided. The responsibility for the child was a burden greater than she had anticipated, and she shrank from bearing it.

  Davi came to her, instead, late that night. Danger made him tremble.

  “We must act,” he said. “The girl is ill.” She sensed his anxiety.

  Selena sat up on her pallet.

  “The girl-child is failing,” he whispered. “We must do something, or she may die.”

  “What is the matter?”

  “Shan-da does not know, but it seems her soul is sick from strangeness. There are none like her in India, and even young as she is, the child must sense it. Have you discussed this with our master?”

  “He says he loved the mother. He says he wishes to protect the child, to carry her to Calcutta and people like herself.”

  Davi was silent for a time. “Do you believe the master?” he asked. “That is not what Ku-Fel told me. She spoke of his rage.”

  It was Selena’s turn to consider, but she had already determined her answer. “More than Rupal and Ku-Fel,” she said, “do I trust the lord.”

  He actually laughed, this sad, black little man, for the first time since she had seen him. “You are doing very well,” he said, “for one whose skin has no color. All right act. Ask for horses. Say nothing of me. Simply explain that you have an intimation of the child’s presence. In India, such feelings are signs of divine intervention, and you will be indulged. I will arrange to be with the party that leaves here in search of the child, and I shall lead you to Shan-da.”

  It was done, and two days later, Selena passed through the white columns of Jabal-Mahal, where the black sockets of Gayle’s eyes held her in their gaze. She rode a black Arabian stallion, sidesaddle, and with her were half a dozen armed soldiers to protect them, and the maharajah, and Davi, who was to ride near Selena’s horse, and gentle it if necessary. And who would lead them to the child. She felt in him the need to hurry, and guessed that whatever plagued the little girl had increased in intensity, and danger.

  About the maharajah, however, she was satisfied. His excitement, his concern, seemed akin to that of a new father. He was indeed a man of many facets, and Gayle must have somehow awakened in him—or gifted to him outright—a strain of romantic love, to which his own culture was, if not immune, at least unaccustomed. She sensed no pretense in him now, only genuine desire to see and save all that remained of someone he had once loved, and who had been taken from him. Perhaps he even believed, as Selena did, that the secrets behind Gayle’s terrible death rested with a child who, as yet, possessed no tongue.

  Selena hoped it would all go well, too. In her renewed desire to steel herself for escape, to be once again someday all that she had been, she realized that, if the child were found and protected, it could not but stand her in good stead with the master. If, on the other hand, the child had already died…

  Too late to think of that. One thing at a time. And Davi had been right. Her confession of “intimations” had caused much uproar, even awe. Rupal paled slightly at mention of the child, and then retreated into a cold, watchful reserve. Ku-Fel said, “It cannot be! The child was born dead!” just as she had originally told Selena, and, almost hysterical, pulled Selena into a tiny wing of the palace, entered through a false doorway. Here were the punishment cells, where lovely young women—like Selena, but dark—who had been excessively willful, or disrespectful, or maladroit in pleasing the maharajah or Ku-Fel, previously whipped and branded, now hung for days, slowly twisting, bound at the wrists.

  “These are in Nirvana, compared to what you’ll receive if you prove me wrong!”

  Selena had quailed momentarily, then decided she could no longer retreat.

  “And if I’m right,” she said, in a tone of righteousness and defiance that stopped the moaning of the suffering girls, “you will be here yourself, and I guarantee it.”

  And she sensed—strong and raw and sweet to perceive—Ku-Fel’s genuine fear.

  “You do not know our ways, golden head,” the harem mistress grunted, recovering well. “You do not know our ways, and you have much to learn. I would put my brand upon you now, but for…”

  But for the well-known fact that Selena had already won the master’s support for her quest. This, it seemed, disturbed Rupal more than the maharajah’s constant choice of Selena as his partner during the nights. And disturbed Ku-Fel beyond all apparent reason. Selena sensed the proximity of answers, an end to mystery. But the fear of her rivals held a dark promise of violence, with herself as victim.

  Too late to change course now, she thought. Neither Sean nor Royce would think of it, and both of them would be proud of me.

  They set out to find the child. Jouncing along on the horse, Selena remembered that the end of the year was approaching. Almost a year ago, she and Father and Brian had set out for Edinburgh, and toward a future none of them could have imagined, not even in nightmare. Even the things that had not changed outright were subtly altered. Blossoms no longer sprang from roses, but from simple grass. And even the thorns of the roses were hidden within, and deadly when you touched them. The world, as always, was beautiful, but rock was flower and blossom itself became rock.

  Paradox did not elude Selena. In the preservation of his personal honor, her father had lost everything. Equally, in the willing loss of what she had long regarded as sexual honor—the withholding of her physical self—Selena had gained not the violation and debasement threatened by brimstone priests, but the love of Royce Campbell. Just as—she understood now—the gift of her self to Sean Bloodwell would have produced passionate love as well. And now, in India, where all the rules were indeterminate, wildly different, sexual honor did not even exist, at least, not for the maharajah’s concubines. Sexuality had become, for her, an instrument to be used in order to win back the personal honor, the family honor, the real honor. All that mattered. All that had been lost.

  She did not yet know how it would be done, but that it would be done she did not doubt.

  She understood something of politics now, however distasteful she might once have thought it. The mere fact that the maharajah was riding out with her, here on the high plains of Pradesh, proved something. It proved he was not plotting with Ku-Fel. It proved he was not in bed, enjoying the pleasures of Rupal. It proved that she had measured something in his emotions, in his needs, upon which she could build.

  That was what she had learned, and she would start with that.

  Now she knew India, and she knew Scotland.

  Make yourself the instrument of your own desire, Sean Bloodwell had told her once. You can have anything you want.

  FREEDOM! cried her heart. She rode out onto the flowering summer fields of Pradesh, in November.

  Trailed by six Sherpa warriors who would kill on command, with a grin.

&
nbsp; Once, along the road to Shan-da, one of them cried out in what seemed to be fear, and pointed to a strange cloud formation in the northern sky.

  “What is the matter?” Selena asked, unsettled by his nervous babbling.

  “Look,” the maharajah told her. “The clouds! It is the head of a wolf! In our land, that is an evil omen.”

  But not to Selena.

  The Trial

  Alone among the people of the village, the woman held her ground. The others, watching the maharajah approach with his guard of murderous Sherpas, slid or ducked or ran for hiding, inside or behind or beneath the square brown earthen huts of Katni.

  They rode into the village, the maharajah in the lead now. He looked upon the scene with mild, instinctive disdain. He was neither secure enough, in spite of his vast power, to disregard such fear as normal, nor corrupted enough by power to desire it. The woman standing in the road, however, stirred his curiosity.

  The Sherpas grimaced threateningly—one of them howled—and made their horses dance. These particular men had originally come to Jabal-Mahal from Rajasthan, when Ku-Fel had married the master. They were, if anything, more vicious than the local warriors. But they ceased their threatening gestures when he raised his hand to them.

  Through it all, the woman stood her ground, merely looking at them all, not disrespectfully, nor fearfully either. Just looked at them for a time, and then met Davi’s eyes.

  She was old, thin, but no longer lithe, with gray, straggly hair and skin just a shade darker than that of the rest of the villagers. Her black, luminous eyes were fixed on Davi, and glowed with knowledge. Selena understood at once. This was Shan-da, to whom the child had been given for protection. And she possessed the power.

  “Well, Selena,” prompted the maharajah, in a bored tone of voice, “is this the stable to which you have led us? What do your voices tell you now?”

  “The child is here,” Davi interrupted, getting in return an angry glance for his presumption.