Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  Shan-da said nothing, and gave no sign.

  “Alive?” Selena managed.

  Again, she heard nothing, saw no gesture. But, with her mind, she received the unmistakable impression of imminent tragedy.

  “Yes,” Davi said. “Barely.”

  “How do you know?” the maharajah asked suspiciously. “What do you know about it?” He motioned to one of the Sherpas, who helped him dismount. The warrior grinned horribly at Davi beneath the dangling ends of his black mustaches, greased to a sheen. He sensed an opportunity to spill blood.

  “It is a sense I have,” Davi answered truthfully. But the master snorted derisively. “People in your position, Davi,” he admonished, “know nothing until they are told something. Don’t be presumptuous, or it will go hard with you when we return to the palace.”

  Davi dropped his eyes, but Selena could see, by the way he gripped the reins of his horse, that he was determined to act as necessary.

  “Let us see about this ‘sensation’ of a child’s presence,” the Maharajah said, and started up the road toward the center of the village. “I am becoming impatient, and if the girl dies because of this delay …”

  He did not finish, but instead halted after several paces. Shan-da stood before him. She had not moved, and he could easily have passed around her, yet she seemed to Mock his path. For the first time, the master truly looked at her. He did not know what he felt, but he did feel something. It irritated him.

  “Selena,” he snapped, “is the child here in this village, or not?”

  She felt the words in her mind, Davi and his growing power. She could tell he was afraid. Yes, he told her, but accede to Shan-da.

  “The woman knows,” Selena told her lord.

  His glance was sharp, skeptical, as if he sensed some play of forces in which he did not believe but which he could not entirely dismiss.

  “Here? In these hovels? Let us get her out and take her …”

  Shan-da spoke for the first time, in a low, resonant, disturbing voice. It was particularly disturbing because she presumed authority over them all, the maharajah included.

  “I must have assurance that no-name will not be killed as her mother was. My karma must not be blemished, nor hers, before she is ready to die in her own time.”

  Even the Sherpas were stunned by her temerity, as they might have been in the presence of a guru, or wise teacher.

  “The death of the mother, Gayle,” she told the maharajah, “has sullied your karma incomparably. In the next life, you shall be as a dog with running wounds.”

  “I did not kill …” the master began, real fear in his voice. This woman might be mad, in which case he was confronted with evil forces. Or she might truly be a wise one, matriarch of the spirit of India. Then he recovered himself. He need give explanations to no one. “You have heard incorrectly,” he said.

  She did not yield. “Then why have you not sought out and punished those who are guilty?”

  “The things I do, I do in my own good time,” he snarled, but he was uncomfortable. Selena remembered the time in his bedchamber, when he had confessed to an inability to discern the truth about Gayle’s death. Now Selena suspected, too, that he might not want to know who had been responsible, because that would require him to act, and such action might only give rise to more chaos. Again, she thought of the vast difference between Eastern and Western traditions.

  “Now,” he said, addressing them all, “what is the meaning of this? Selena? Davi? Let’s go to the child. This … no-name. You haven’t even given her a …”

  Shan-da frowned. “I am but a temporary protector. The name is given by a child’s permanent guardian. Now, your promise of safety for the unfortunate baby?”

  The maharajah gave it.

  Good as her word, Shan-da turned and led them up the dusty road and into the center of the grouping of huts. Neither turning, nor stopping, she entered one of the huts. Several women wearing heavy shawls about their heads, dark marks in the center of their foreheads, dropped immediately to their knees, looked at the floor. There was no sign of a baby, nor any baby things.

  “If you’ve gone back on your word …”

  “I have not,” Shan-da said. Going over to the corner, she pressed a wooden rod half-buried in the mortarwork, and a panel of bricks slid aside, revealing a tiny chamber. Inside was a makeshift cradle, and in the cradle a dark child, wrapped in strips of cloth from head to foot.

  “What is this?” the maharajah cried. “That child is as Indian as any I’ve …”

  But Shan-da, undisturbed, lifted the child gently, wet her finger on her tongue, and drew it down across the child’s tiny face. A white mark appeared in the wake of her finger.

  “Soot,” she explained. “The child is thus hidden whenever strangers approach Katni.” One of the other women handed her a damp cloth, and she sponged the baby’s face, removing the camouflage. Then she unwrapped the strips of dark cloth from the child’s head, and wispy, golden hair appeared. The baby let out a tiny cry, weak and spiritless.

  “Oh, you poor, poor thing,” Selena cried, and without thinking, stepped up to Shan-da and took the child as if it were her own. The child was very pale and thin. She had been asleep, but now stirred and mewled again. And opened her eyes to see Selena holding her. What appeared in those eyes was something like surprise, and the eyes were very beautiful, large, and of darkest blue. Selena could see no part of Jack Randolph in this child; her mother’s blood must beat within her veins. Thank God for that. “We’ve come for you, little darling,” she cooed, and rocked the child gently in her arms. The maharajah, watching, now drew near, visibly affected.

  “What’s the matter with her? Why is she so weak?” he demanded of Shan-da.

  “I believe it is an illness of the spirit. She has been well-fed, with rich goat’s milk, and cereals of grain beaten soft. But we are all animals, master, and we crave those like ourselves.”

  “But she is alive …” he said, no longer interested in the woman’s explanations.

  Selena saw the moods reflected in his face. First, tenderness as he watched the child. Then sadness as he remembered its mother, along with that flash of unresolved anger. The mystery of who had killed his lover. His concern returned to the immediate situation.

  “Woman,” he told Shan-da, “we shall leave you now and take the child with us. She will have the best of care. In the morning, I will send a messenger with a gift for you. It will be of great value, and …”

  “I need no gift,” Shan-da said. “What I have humbly done will be reflected upon my karma, and I shall be rewarded in the next life.”

  Almost chastened by this object lesson in purity, and perhaps reflecting upon its divergence from the scheming and machinations of his court at Jabal-Mahal, the maharajah promised instead to send food for the people of Katni, and prime seed to yield them larger crops. This Shan-da would accept, and they prepared to leave. Selena carried the golden-haired girl-child out into the sun, and the Sherpas rolled up their eyes as they would have done in the presence of magic. One of them kept pointing from Selena to the child and back again, as if Selena had conjured her up.

  “What is he saying?” she asked Davi.

  “I do not know for certain. It is a tongue of the mountains. But he is afraid of something. ‘Soul of the dead one,’ he seems to say.”

  The maharajah was walking down toward the other end of the village with Shan-da, inspecting it as its rightful lord, and Selena was comparatively alone with Davi.

  “Davi,” she asked, “I know you saved the child and brought it here. But where were you on the day Gayle was executed?”

  “With the master,” he said immediately. “He was in a neighboring region, as you know, discussing what response he might make to the British merchants. …”

  “I know. But the execution itself. We do not know who ordered it, but who carried it out?” A plan was forming in her mind. “It must have been Warriors like these, ordered to do the job. Perhaps t
hese very same Sherpas from Rajasthan.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “But then why does the master not amply ask them, or,” she added, angrily, “put them to the torture. In that way, he will learn who gave the order….”

  Davi was shaking his head. “I do not believe the master wishes to know,” he said. “And besides, some of these soldiers belong to his father-in-law, in Rajasthan. It would not do to …”

  Now Selena was almost certain, but much remained to be done before she could move the maharajah to action. The strategy she would use was provided—although at first it hardly seemed so—by Davi himself. As the maharajah remounted and prepared to depart, taking care that Selena was safe and comfortable with the child aboard her own mount, Davi and Shan-da stood for a short time, saying nothing, merely gazing at each other. Then the little man turned away, a smile on his usually somber face, and swung up on his own horse. The maharajah noticed not only the smile but the long glance as well, but refrained from asking about it at the time.

  The ride back to Jabalpur took forever. Once, the child woke up crying, and they had to stop in order to allow Selena to feed it from a flask of goat’s milk Shan-da had given her. She used a tiny spoon made of the smoothest wood, and the child ate hungrily, her large curious eyes never leaving Selena’s. “Soon you shall have your own name, little one,” the maharajah promised, bending down and making playful faces. He was tender but proprietary, accepting the child as his own. Something flashed quickly in Selena’s mind, like a faint warning, dimly perceived. But there was a long way yet to travel. The horse’s gait soon soothed the little girl. It was almost dark when they rode up the white stone road into Jabal-Mahal.

  Gayle’s skull regarded them.

  “Have these taken down and properly buried in the Western way,” the maharajah ordered Davi, gesturing toward the bones, but not looking at them. Selena believed, then, that the master had decided to proceed against Gayle’s killers, but the next afternoon, when Davi called for her and led her out beyond the palace wall, on the eastern side where one could look out toward the high mountains of Chota Nagpur, no decision had been made. Nothing had transpired; she had not been sent for.

  The cross stood there, small and delicate and white above the green grass.

  “Did I do well?” Davi asked her.

  Selena looked at the tiny black letters printed on the crossarm:

  GAYLE

  Scotland-India

  “Long Live the King”

  “What? Who told you to put that?”

  “The master. Why, is something wrong?”

  “But ‘Long live the King!’” The mere expression once again stirred up bitter memories of what had happened to her, to the MacPhersons.

  “He said it was a prayer of your people,” Davi explained, looking worried. “Have I done something wrong?”

  Oh, let it go, she thought. Gayle was Gayle, not you. She knelt down then and made her promise. She made it directly to the girl who, from this quiet spot, had seen the rugged mountains to the east, whose heart might have been haunted by loneliness, whose memories cast back to the softer hills of home. It was the tie between the two of them, something sacred which they shared, and it was that as well as Selena’s concern for the little girl that made her say to the hills, and the grass, and the sweet flowers and the ibis and the wind, all Indian, and in each of whom God dwelled:

  “I will protect your child as if she were mine, and love her as best I can, and raise her in our traditions if I can. And …” one thing more, she thought,“… I will send her home, with honor, to Scotland, should the chance ever come.”

  I will send her home for both of us, she thought.

  “You pray far differently than it was taught by the black crows,” Davi observed.

  Selena stood up, brushed a few wisps of grass from her sari.

  “I hope so,” she said. “Do the gods of India answer the prayers of foreigners?”

  “It is strange, but I do not think I have ever heard the question before,” he mused. “Yes,” he said, after considering it, “if you pray where they are, they must hear you, for the soul of India beats even now in the earth beneath us, and the sky above us, and the river down there among the hills. So, if a prayer is made in India, and if it is genuine, they will answer it. I do not think they care who makes it.”

  “It is genuine,” Selena said quietly, turning, leaving Gayle of Greenlaw in that high, quiet place, where the wind rippled the grass, where the words of her prayer began the flight to heaven.

  In the palace, Selena had been lodged by herself in a suite of rooms, which she shared with the baby and a staff of nurses and maids. The maharajah was sparing no effort to ensure the child’s health, and, when not devoting himself to choosing the perfect name for her—something to combine her maternal heritage and her future as his daughter-in-fact, the living symbol of his dead beloved—he watched her in the cradle, eating, being bathed, playing with her toes. Selena, to him, was now a substitute mother, and, although he gave her everything she needed in her task, he no longer sent for her in the evenings to share his bed and pleasure his flesh.

  They talked now and then, of course. One day he was ready to move against those shadowy figures who had destroyed Gayle. But the following day he had decided he could not do it. Too much might come unloosed that had been successfully bound up already. Why take a chance? Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. He knew, because she had told him, that Davi himself had kept the child from death, but he did not ask who had given the order, and when she told him one afternoon in the nursery, “I can tell you who I think it was, but Davi can tell you who it was,” he took quick refuge in the prejudice of his caste.

  “In the first place, Dravidians are all liars,” he declared. “And, in the second, they are too incompetent to plan anything. If he did save the child, it was purely by accident. He forgot what he was supposed to be doing.”

  She told him about the power.

  “There is no such thing,” he pronounced. “After a time, those of the higher castes, if wise and disciplined enough, may be given certain wisdom that is withheld from lesser men. But a Dravidian? Never. No, Selena. Davi is no use to us … to me … when we seek information.”

  “But you’re not seeking information at all. You don’t want to know the truth.”

  This angered him, because he prided himself greatly on his knowledge and administrative skill.

  “Well, what about Shan-da? I think she had the power.”

  No, he remembered Davi’s silent exchange with the Shan-da, unnerving, but: “A shrewd village mystic with plenty of nerve and that is all,” he said. “Now, stop your imaginings and tend to the child. See, she is trying to sit up! Did you see it?”

  He was also preoccupied with a British commercial party that was rumored to have been in Jamshedpur, after having come out from the Bengal region. He was concerned about, what they would want, about how to deal with them.

  “Many of my fellows have been deceived by these connivers,” he worried, “but those who have ignored them, or tried to hinder them, have lost, too, by not sharing in the wealth they can bring.”

  “As I told you,” she explained respectfully, “Western ways of business could benefit you, and ease this worry in your mind. Davi knows some things which might be of help, and I myself know some …”

  He scoffed at this. Women knowing of business!

  “… and our way of law would readily rid your mind of the doubt about Gayle’s death …”

  “Silence! If I wish to know I will order everyone tortured!”

  “Yes, and everyone will confess. You will have them all executed, is that right? Everyone in your palace? Yes, and then the guilty one will have been punished, true, but no one will remain for you.”

  He stormed out of the nursery that time and did not return all day. Eventually, the little girl drew him back, but he discussed no more of his current problems with Selena.

  For he
r own part, Selena had fallen in love with the child. After much explanation, and several sketches by Davi, workmen at the palace were able to construct a serviceable rocking chair, and in this she fed and talked to the little girl, and rocked her to sleep sometimes in the night. Shan-da may have been right in her diagnosis of loneliness and spiritual torpor, because the child’s physical health was not especially deficient. And, after a few weeks at the palace, with Selena’s constant care, she became as bright and cheerful as any happy baby. Indeed, Selena watched over her with a passion. Thinking of her own future, she had begun to wonder if she herself would ever have a child. Previously, the thought had always been remote: something that would happen in due course. If the maharajah began calling for her again, regularly, she supposed that it would happen, as it did to the rest of the women in the harem. But this child, still unnamed, with her blond hair and blue eyes, reminded her of herself, of her own happy childhood. A child of Royce’s might not have been this blond, but if it had been by Sean Bloodwell, well, the likelihood was very great …

  Women of the harem, wives as well as concubines, came by to see the child, and the famous “chair that moves but does not move,” of which they had heard. Selena could tell that most of them were jealous of her arrangement, as they were automatically, reflexively, and quite harmlessly jealous of any small favor or perquisite granted any of their number. Ku-Fel herself never appeared. Indeed, because Selena took her meals in the nursery, the two had not met since Selena’s return from the visit to Shan-da. Once or twice, in the night, Selena awoke with the distinct feeling that Ku-Fel was present just outside the locked nursery doors, but she knew Davi had made it a point to sleep concealed close to the entrance, and she knew he could come to her aid should any threat arise.

  Rupal did not come either, until one afternoon in mid-January, when the child was about a half-year old. Then she appeared in all her soft, splendid beauty, her eyes and voice as tender and vicious as that of a velvet serpent.

  “You ought to have paid heed to me when first I asked you,” she said enigmatically. “Now, again each night. I give our master the pleasure that God placed between my legs.”