Anila's Journey (18 page)

We had already seen a bittern in those quiet parts, away from the boats and the shouting on the river. Bittern was Mr Walker's word, for I had never before seen this bird with a beak like a bayonet. Madan called it the veena bird, and its deep sad voice really did sound like the low notes a good player can pluck from his veena. But this bird was smaller than her kind, he said, and he had before never seen a veena bird with such short wings and a head that appeared to be dipped in honey. That had made Mr Walker very happy. He liked my sketches too.

“You have her sitting on her nest as if it were a throne. My Eveline would love this golden-feathered lady.”

Perhaps Mr Walker merely wanted to get away from the river for a while. For my part I loved the freedom I felt on the water, where the world changed by the moment and the people in it too.

Except for one. Silent as a cat, Carlen had come to stand beside me. I continued to stare outwards until my eyes ached to close but still I knew his gaze was only on me. He rested a knee against the gunwale and blew his breath towards me.

“So, here we are again, hinny.”

Hinny
.

Mr Walker had raised his eyebrows when I asked him what that word meant, a night or so ago.

“Hinny, Anila? Where on earth did you hear that good old English word? You get a hinny when you cross a donkey mare and a horse, a mule if it's the other way round. But most people say mule for either.”

Not Carlen the countryman of course. Now that I knew what he was calling me, I ignored him. But my heart raced. Benu and Hari were occupied up front and, in any case, Carlen was their senior. There was nobody else I might call on if he laid hands on me again. I felt the tip of my pencil and thought it was quite sharp enough to do damage to his fine face.

“You're looking for your father, hinny? The dark horse? Or maybe I should say the pale horse, considering everything. I know where he is.”

There
he was, with his sleek hair and his close-fitting clothes, moving now to stand beside me. He was so close I could smell the mint that he chewed every day, dried mint he kept in a neck bag just as poor Hari kept his precious betel. He held his arms behind his back as if there was something he was guarding from me. I had seen him a couple of times taking food in the cabin when nobody else did, rice and nuts that were already running low. Greedy guts. He was not fat, though, he was lean as a leopard.

Now I wanted to push him into the water. How dare this foul Englishman say he knew anything about my father when even the Company men claimed they had no knowledge of him?

“You're lying. You couldn't possibly know. You know nothing about him. He would never be around you. He'd know what you were like, a bully, a filthy bully.”

Carlen laughed.

“The kitten has a rough tongue too! But you see, my puss, I have a good memory for facts. I store the things I see as if they were hooks and ropes and shot powder. You never know when they'll be needed. One green eye and one blue? Yes, I know where your sire is though I didn't know that he was that the times I saw him. Let us say you're not all donkey, Miss Tandy, no matter what's on view in this pretty picture.”

“
Don't
do that! Please be careful!”

He was holding my mother's picture out over the river. If he had been nearer to Benu and Hari their oars would surely have splashed water onto the fine paper until it softened and the chalks ran. But they were up front and straining hard, the oars rasping in the oarlocks, and even my shout didn't reach them.

“Please give it to me.”

He took the drawing back out of danger and I reached for it. He shook his head. The only consolation was that he was holding it carefully, not bending or twisting the paper, not pressing his thumb down on my mother's innocent face. Then I saw where he was touching her. He knew I saw it too. He smiled his cat smile and caressed her as I turned my head, sickened. Then abruptly he spoke.

“I like ‘please'. It's good manners. But that's not enough for such news as I have, is it?”

“You can't have news! It's years since my father left the city and nobody has had any report of him. He would never stay away so long without a reason. So you could never have met him. You must have heard people talk of the way he looked, for everybody liked him, and you're trying to threaten me with what you've heard.”

“I'll say it once again, then. One green eye, the left, one blue eye, the right. Hair straight and thin. An Irish speech, rude as they come. But you know that, of course.”

I would not let him see what he had done to me. I would not. I stared hard at his neatly trimmed fingernails. They had huge crescent moons in their pits. Perhaps because of all the nuts he ate.

“So then, is the handsome hinny going to take a gamble on my news? And what about this precious picture of yours, what's that worth in a boat with such dirty wet water everywhere around? Or why not bid for picture and story together, like a wild pledge at Newmarket? Depending on your assets of course. Mine are here.”

He tapped the side of his head, as if to show me where he kept his image of my father. Then he raised up the drawing of my mother again and fanned himself with it. He was smiling.

“And yours are, where exactly, hinny?”

I looked at him miserably. Yes, he knew himself well, this man Carlen. He might store his information like knives but his real power was his silence. If I were to tell Mr Walker what he had done today, or before today, nothing would protect me from his silence. He knew I knew that.

“I'll give you this ring. But please, you must tell me what you know. Only tell me what is true. Tell me some other thing so I can believe you.”

“So small a ring? That gets only a paper mother, not a living father.”

He took Miss Hickey's tiny gold ring without a word and dropped it into one of his waistcoat pockets. The picture was safe in my hands when I thought how easily I might have arranged for Mr Walker to ask me to show it to him again, and have the theft discovered that way. But it is an easy thing to drop a paper, or tear it, perhaps, or step it underfoot into the mud and call it an accident. As Carlen had said, it was just a gamble, for him as well as for me. And, either way, the stakes were higher for me.

His eyes, so very blue, stayed on my face. Did he have the right way of it about my father's eyes – that the left one was the green? What a thing to be sure of! I had to close my own and picture how my father used to hold me before I could say the same thing with certainty.

He knew what I was doing with my eyes shut, I swear it. He decided to throw me another line.

“Your father used to draw too. But not birds. Ship's wheels and sails, roofs and riggings.”

Ship's wheels?

I suddenly thought of my gold mohurs, stored at the bottom of the leather case, and wondered if he'd already found them. My heart jumped and fell back down. What else might I bargain with if he had?

“Where did you see my father? When? Is he in good health? Please tell me.”

Up front Hari squawked suddenly as our boat bumped hard against the bank, and then swung its broadside out again into the flow where a large boat was coming fast downriver. Benu dived off with a rope and scrambled through the reeds until he could stand up on the bank and pull us alongside, hauling the lead rope taut round the trunk of a chopped tree.

The boat was full of red-coated soldiers. Most of them were standing but a few were leaning over the prow. These ones whooped when they saw Benu's brave jump and then, when they saw me, they shouted and pointed and called out like monkeys. I pulled my scarf up over my face and turned away and their noise passed downriver with them.

But in those few seconds Carlen was suddenly gone, as if he'd never been standing close beside me, never been dripping his poison into my ear, never defiling my poor dead mother.

Any other time his disappearance would have made me glad. That we could journey on without him, whatever it took, I'd begun to pray for that. But now! If what Carlen claimed was true, that he had seen my father, no matter when it was, or where, this was the only news anybody had ever brought of him.

I'd had two different lives since Papa had left us, one at Mr Bristol's house, one with the Hickeys. How many lives had he had? Was he really, truly, still alive? All along I'd beaten that question away because it could be answered in two ways and I would accept only one of these. I needed to believe my father was out there in the world, just separated from me by a spell that would be lifted when I could work out how to do it.

Perhaps I should have been more faithful to my little Durga, as my mother had been all her life. Now Durga was rewarding my neglect by sending me Carlen as a guide. He was the last person I would have chosen but I needed him.

CARLEN WASN'T IN THE CABIN
. He wasn't on the riverbank. Nor in the water anywhere near the boat, which was as well, because he did not swim. Not in our Ganga at any rate. He said it was dirty. I knew too that he laughed at the small offerings of rice and fruit that Madan and Benu cast into the waters each morning before we set out.

Yet my gold mohurs were safe, still wrapped in the purple scarf at the bottom of my case, along with the peacock locket. Perhaps he'd been too pleased with what he'd found to poke further. All the birds were there too, and my box of paints and pencils was untouched. But I guessed that Carlen would not dare harm anything that concerned Mr Walker's business.

Benu shouted that there was fish on the pan and he and Hari looked at me with surprise when I said I would prefer to take a walk instead, to look for birds. My mind couldn't rest and the thought of food made my throat close over. I packed my notebook and pencils into my bag and left my slippers on deck for I thought the paddy fields would be all a-squelch.

“Will you be safe, Miss Anila?” Hari asked anxiously. “Perhaps there are snakes.”

“You have your pencils today?” Benu held up his fingers and pretended to count all the items I should have. “Your notebook? Your chalks?”

“And my eyes, Benu, two of them in working order.” I smiled at them. But where was Carlen? They hadn't seen him go, they said.

The clay path was baked hard for the most part but at times my feet were sucked into patches of warm mud where water was coming through. Small brown frogs skipped out of danger as I put my toes down. I had never seen so many frogs but, for all the plenty, the paddy birds patrolling these muddy parts drew themselves up like temple guards as I passed. They saw only a robber.

I came level with a line of trees planted beside a little waterway. I was glad of the shade now for the sun was high, and even gladder to see that one of the trees had a clever arrangement of branches. It was a neem. Even here, away from Calcutta, there were friendly neems.

Climbing to the first fork was easy. On the next level of branches there was a hole in the trunk and outside it some soft tan downy feathers were sticking to the bark. I was tempted to put my hand inside but this winter season was the time for owl babies. Not even if these might be unknown owls for Mr Walker would I disturb them.

My tunic had streaks of green across it by the time I made it to the second lookout branch. I sat there with my right arm round the trunk and felt a little of what it must be to be a bird, cool, high up and scanning for its dinner.

Where were Madan and Mr Walker? I thought perhaps they had gone to look for a temple, one with the kind of paintings or statues Englishmen liked to look at. My mother told me that Mr Bristol's friends used to make up hateful stories about these temple works, even about the goddesses themselves, though of course they did not understand the first thing of what they saw. But surely Mr Walker was not of their kind.

There was no sign of a temple anyway, no matter what direction I looked, just narrow stripes of water picking their way in lines across the flat green fields. I decided I would climb a little higher.

It made a difference, that extra little trip up into the sky. What I could see now was a huge square dug out among the fields, quite close to the main waterway that drained into the river. It looked like one of the city water tanks, deep and sunken, but we were in the countryside where tanks were small, like ponds. Nor did it seem to hold any water, but it glinted all the same, all along its bottom. It sparkled.

There were people inside the tank. I could count ten or more. Some were walking around, tiny stick figures I could just make out by squinting. Others were bent over like bandicoots, lifting and hauling.

I turned to look back at the river. There it was brown and strong, stretching ahead of our tied up boat, beginning to curve like a dagger. I could see another boatful of soldiers coming along.

I took a deep breath, preparing myself to twist round and climb down the tree when the astonishing thing happened.

Great brown wings arrived underneath me, out of nowhere it seemed, without even a flap. They were sails, sails come out of the sky, sails of feather and muscles, with all their power spread along the delicate tracery. They brought a draught with them, and a sharp smell of blood and water that rose up beyond my nose and into my eyes.

Only afterwards did I think that what I saw was like a fairy tale, like my mother's kind of story, where a giant bird, brave as Jatayu, arrives to work magic, to rescue somebody. But when it actually happened, the magic was all in the suddenness, the hugeness of the bird, and the thrill I felt all along my skin.

She had such a fine balance. Her huge claws gripped the edges of the nest hole and she made little shifts to her back and her head when she needed to reach in to her babies. Her wide wings were as smartly folded up as an umbrella in a shop. I knew the babies were feeding on what she had brought them, fish chewed up and dripping.

She was there only minutes and then she rose up again and glided away.