The Holder of the World (21 page)

8

DAWN WAS
streaking the eastern sky behind them, but straight ahead where the path snaked upward into a rocky defile, the sky was a pure, lustrous, nighttime black. If they scaled the defile safely, the road to Devgad, their allied fort, was open, sanctuary was assured.

The Raja raised his sword, addressing his officers: “Today is but another death. Who frightens and who fears is irrelevant. A warrior faces death with cowardice or courage.” The words were no longer empty; the morning light revealed that all along the ridge, Morad Farah’s men squatted like birds of prey.

Jadav Singh lifted his shield, spurred his caparisoned
tattu
, and uttered a war cry. The Muslim warriors answered from atop the ridge. Like an upward-flowing river, the hundreds of Devgad soldiers stormed the escarpment. Thousands of the Emperor’s cavalrymen spilled down the defile, arrows flying, spears thrust forward. Hannah caught a glimpse of the Raja’s scarlet knuckle cloth. All around her she heard the chants of
Jai Ram! Jai Devgad! Jai Singh!

No sooner had the syllables escaped their lips than they fell. It was, as the Lion had said, the worst place on the journey to fight a battle. He had bet against an ambush, and he had lost; but if, in his strange battle logic, not to fight was some sort of peculiar dishonor, he had won. Unless any battle, no matter how one-sided, was preferable to peace. At the top of the ridge, illuminated in the full flat sunbeams of the eastern sky, she saw Morad Farah seated in the canopied howdah of his decorated, battle-clad elephant.

She smelled the blood, vomit and feces of men yielding to panic, or to death, and heard the enemies’ eerie whoops of hate. Bhagmati tugged at her sari and held out the Raja’s ceremonial dagger. “Use it,” she said, “he would want you to.” So remote was Hannah from the meaning of the words that she at first looked around her for a likely enemy to kill, but then Bhagmati took a smaller knife of her own and made a single sharp thrust to her own stomach, stopping just before slashing herself open.

“This time, death is better,” she said.

But Hannah had Tringham’s faith. Nothing could happen to her, not from alien enemies.

“No, you mustn’t,” said Hannah, and she suddenly seized her servant’s arm and threw her down into the tall grass at the edge of the trail, where the bodies of fallen Hindus and Muslims were strewn like rocks at the bottom of a cliff. Hannah lay with her; they did not move.

The battle, what there was of it, consisted of one charge, one volley of response, hand-to-hand combat, heavy losses and the survival of the Muslim General. The winning soldiers scattered immediately, freed for the day to take their pleasures in neighboring villages, to loot them, kill the infidels, rape the women, burn the evidence.

In battle as in chess, positioning and superior numbers lead to the checkmating, the killing, of the King.
King is fallen!
she heard, early in the battle, and after that, the rest was hate and instinct battling on until the immediate lust, or the concept of honor, was placated.

Amid the bodies, Hannah lay across Bhagmati, their saris giving away their religion and putting them both at risk. She lay helpless, afraid to move for what seemed like hours, not flinching when bullets passed all around her and thudded into the ground, or tore into another body. Random or deliberate, she didn’t know.

There is a sound associated with battle scenes in that time and place, one of the few sounds in human history that have no analog. It is the sound of the elephant walk, the prerogative of the winning General to survey the scene atop his battle elephant, protected under a silken canopy in his high, upholstered howdah, which rests upon the elephant’s broad, flat back and is cinched around its girth. It is the sound a trained elephant makes as it untangles bodies from protective piles, rolling them over with its pink-tipped, bristly trunk; then, once the enemy corpses or the still-living bodies are laid out straight, the sound it makes as it plants a broad front foot directly on the face of each stretched-out body, grinding the head into a featureless mash with a calm, almost gentle, ruthlessness.

It is the sound of skulls caving in, of air expelled, of the human body treated like coconuts or sugarcane, a sound no different, really, from any great force exerted against any soft resistance. And that is the surprise, for the very few who have ever heard it: the human body is nothing very special, or very different from any small obstruction. In the eye of Brahma, Bhagmati used to say, the world is less than a grain of sand, all human lives less than anything clinging to it. Hannah remembered the Brookfield stories, the sounds of scalps ripping, like pulling up roots. It pleased her that in these last minutes of her life, as the elephant made its implacable approach, these were the thoughts the Lord God had planted in her brain.

She clung tightly to Bhagmati, but there was no resisting the second insistent shove of the elephant’s stiffened trunk, which toppled her from the mound of her servant’s body. Suddenly, all fears vanished. She would agree to die, but not in the way of some simple ant, some worm on the ground. If I lie here it will crush me. And so she sat up, and then she stood; the only human left standing, the only human with a face not obliterated. Let the elephant, the soldiers, kill me now, she thought. But what few survivors who lingered were too busy looting corpses, dashing from body to body, pulling off rings and tugging daggers out of the folds of tunics, to waste a bullet on a woman. Jackals, human jackals. Humans are beasts, base-driven, venomous, unfeeling. She deserved this death, Lord knew, the way she’d lived for pleasure amid the sufferings of others, but at least she would not surrender. The General shouted orders, laughing. The beast maneuvered its head, feigned with its trunk, like some monstrous version of swordplay. The elephant’s trunk was just a bloated version of a pig’s snout, the sort of moist, smooth pink and bristly thing she’d fed as a child. She’d always thought of elephants as wise and slow and gentle beasts, comically jolly like the elephant-headed god, Ganesh, curiously tolerant of abuse and overwork, like the Indian coolies themselves. India seemed determined to teach her the cruel side of every pleasure, the evil behind every innocence.

The General gave a sharp new command, and the elephant raised its trunk and held it curled over her head, like a hammer ready to fall.

“The
firangi
lady,” the General shouted. “The English lady.”

“Not English,” she cried out.

The elephant’s trunk descended like a lightning bolt, knocking her to her knees, then curled about her, lifting her straight out, like a wooden log. She’d watched the work elephants do the same, lift the logs, hold them out, then drop them wherever their mahouts ordered. She’d heard stories from Gabriel and all the factors of mass executions in the hinterland—trampling by elephants, Roman circus carnage—where the laws of England or the more palatable trappings of Mughal justice were not observed.

She was conveyed upward, then turned to a sitting position and deposited on the elephant’s granite-hard hindquarters. General Morad Farah, a grizzled, fair-skinned Moor with a thick, short beard, gold earrings under his turban, turned in his howdah and asked, “Where is the Raja?”

Far below, Bhagmati took advantage of the moment of inattention and ran, diving into the taller grass.

“You have killed him.”

“He is wounded. He will die of his wounds, but that will deprive me of my mission.”

“He has suffered enough, then. Even for you.”

He laughed again, or at least bared his perfect teeth in a kind of victorious grimace out of which he might dispense the grace of survival or a blood burst of violence.

And so they began the tour of the battleground, the elephant’s feet thick with brown blood and with fresher blood from bodies still living when the foot had come down upon them, causing blood to spurt across the elephant’s chest, up to the level of its eyes, caking its gold-capped tusk stumps with gore. The beast looked like a victim of the battle rather than its finalizer. It had not rained, but blood, tankards of blood, had churned the ground to mud.

Where are the survivors? she wondered. No victors, no prisoners, just a ghoul here and there completing his rounds of looting. Overhead, buzzards were circling ever lower. That night, the fields of Devgad Defile would teem with hyenas and jackals.

“Now we find your Raja,” the General announced, giving the elephant a solid, reverberating whack with the decorated iron
ankus
, the elephant prod with a hawklike talon that could just as easily crush the skull of a man. The beast turned toward the steep ascent. Hannah moved slowly, inching her way from the great flat hipbones along the spine to the slight cavity between the mounds of hips and shoulders, where the canopied howdah swayed. From the great height, Hannah saw Bhagmati, a white ghost running low through the stalks of grass, keeping pace.

Ah … came the long, satisfied, victory sigh of General Morad Farah. Raja Jadav Singh lay beside his dead white horse, attended by a woman in a white sari.

The elephant raised its trunk to brush Bhagmati aside, but before the General could deliver his order, Hannah thrust the long dagger she’d hidden in the folds of her sari into the exposed flesh under Morad Farah’s battle tunic, through the muscle and organs, back across to the spine itself. Even his scream was cut short, barely an in-suck of breath, barely the registering of pain and death from an unexpected source. He lurched straight forward, Hannah pushed, then rolled him over the precipice of the elephant’s brow, still clutching his heavy metal
ankus
, landing with a metallic thud. Dutifully, the beast lifted its foot and drove it down upon its master.

And now Bhagmati stood. In the harsh, throaty voice of a street vendor, a tone and pitch Hannah had never heard from her servant, she commanded the beast. With immense slowness, it dropped to its rear knees, then its front knees, never tipping the howdah platform. The women lifted the dead weight of the unconscious Raja to the platform. He seemed to be breathing through the deep, ragged wound in his chest. Hannah put her hand over it and felt a faint tug, the suction of life. She knew that it must be cleaned and sealed, the blood loss stopped, but that even an expert surgeon with all the proper equipment would place more faith in Providence than in his skills to save a life so far gone.

They climbed back on the beast, and again it rose and, with Bhagmati’s guiding, made its way up the path to which the Raja had been leading them, up to the ridge where the General’s troops had waited in ambush but were now scattered in roving bands of looters, to the open plains of Devgad and the fort beyond.

9

HANNAH
, her red sari stained even redder, arrived in Devgad on the blood-encrusted, stolen elephant of the enemy General, bearing the wounded body of her warrior-lover.

The Queen Mother met the horses in the outermost courtyard of the complex. She seemed hardly a queen, a bent brown stick of a woman in a dingy white sari wrapped for mobility rather than grace. Her head was carelessly shaved, her eyes bleached gray by age, her lips browned by chewing tobacco. Her skin smelled of despair and sleeplessness,

“Carry him to my palace!” she commanded in a harsh, croupy voice. Burly servants lifted their wounded Raja from the blood-soaked floor of the howdah. Hannah walked between them, hand still cupped over the Raja’s breast. They laid him out on a litter. The Queen Mother lowered herself on her haunches and swabbed the Raja’s forehead.

“Take that away,” she ordered, meaning the white woman’s hand, which had already polluted her son’s caste, but Hannah refused, with a minimum of respect, in order to demonstrate her seriousness. To lift her hand would tear away the clotting that had already begun. The Queen Mother spoke the language of her western regions, unknown to Hannah, only roughly translatable by Bhagmati. Toothless, ancient, spirit dominated, perhaps demented, she communicated one idea: Hannah had brought bad luck. The Raja had left the fort healthy and ready for battle, he met the
firangi
and a spear had found his heart.

“Mataji,” Bhagmati began, “she has plucked him from the fields of the dead. She killed the General of the Grand Mughal. She has avenged this wounding.”

“She is a better raja than my son? The witch has weakened him? Now she even kills his enemies?” The old Queen spat a brown jet at Hannah’s feet. “Look at him. He is useless. He cannot fight.”

Behind her, her attendants formed a sullen semicircle. They swished the air with their ivory-handled flyswatters and peacock-feather fans. Litter bearers lifted the inert Raja shoulder-high, to the high-pitched lamentations of the women, who formed a corridor for his passage across the inner courtyard.

“Let him die in peace,” his mother cried. “This woman has taken his manhood. He has become a woman, so let him die in a woman’s palace.”

Hannah pushed through the cordon of attendants, then shouted back at her servant and the old Queen. “Tell her, Bhagmati, tell her I know magic. Tell her I can save him.”

She found her lover laid out as though already dead on a deathbed of hemp hammock and bamboo legs on the terrace of the Queen Mother’s palace. At least there was light. She cut away the blood-drenched undergarments, exposing a wound to his chest that flashed bone, pooled blood, and smelled already of death. Women tried to wash the wounds, but Hannah stopped them. Soak up the blood, she said, tearing strips off their saris, bring me only women who sew, bring me only the girls with thin fingers. Bhagmati used her sharp, querulous voice, and the women ran from the terrace to do her bidding. Out over the plains of Devgad, the skies were black with buzzards.

Those women, directed by the old Queen, would have decorated his wound, painted it, scented it, and prepared the fires to receive him. They would have lit lamps, called in the priests. The idea of cutting deeper, of pulling away the shards of bone, of connecting the blood vessels with the finest silk against his distant moans and the rattling in his chest, of keeping small bowls inverted over other wounds, were signs to them of
firangi
arrogance. Her white, casteless hands had touched him, touched his blood, her hands that had touched beef; even if she brought him back from Yama’s grip, what sort of half-human monster would he be?

The old woman stood over the bed, wailing, “He is a hawk. There is no more harm you can do!”

“Get her out of here!” Hannah commanded. His dagger, the sharpest, finest steel in all of India, became the extension of her fingers. She cut away the dying tissue, scooped out flecks of dirt, sutured the gelatinous tangle of muscle and nerves.

Women remembered old cures, cobwebs; roots to stanch the bleeding; leaves, which squeezed, slowed the heart rate, others that brought relief from pain. There would be delirium, for which crushed barks were known. The smaller girls were especially helpful, tying knots with the finest silk thread, even where they couldn’t see. The fastest and surest among them would grow up to tell this tale; nothing is ever lost. (Thank you, Venn.) They watched as Hannah kneaded together flaps of flesh as though she were sealing bread dough, and finally stitched together the outer flap. He looked intact.

The Queen Mother returned, informed of the miracle. She touched her hand to her son’s forehead. “May you take back your soul and fight the Grand Mughal,” she blessed him.

Eight servants hoisted their king and his deathbed high above their heads and, singing songs of praise to Vishnu and ballads of hate for Aurangzeb, they portered him out of the
firangi
witch’s gaze.

They sang the old song:
“The Lion will lead us into battle again!”

The old Queen stood her ground. Hannah, her hands, arms and sari nearly a solid coat of blood, would not be permitted to exercise her spells.

“I have restored your son. Now there will be no more carnage!” She did not save him to send him back into battle. Bhagmati translated:
no more blood
. She saved him in order to have him totally to herself.

Hannah saw the source of the war in the implacable hate of the fierce old woman. She saw that her native New World forgetfulness would be forever in conflict with Old World blood-memory. There was no great unutterable crime, no great analog to a lifetime’s single-minded dedication that had set Aurangzeb and Jadav Singh on their course—to believe in that had been naive. She had demanded something big to justify the insanity of a man so good and wise, and so she had overlooked something small. He was a king. They were kings. It was their duty to fight.

She thought of their nights in Panpur under the cupola, behind the gauzy curtains, when the Raja had been as devoted to love, and to her, as he now was to death. He’d read to her from the poets, he’d sung to her and played his music, he’d called in drummers who throbbed all night outside the curtains, and he’d read to her from the book he called, with a smile, the Gita, the Song of God, the Hindu Bible. He was a warrior, born to lead men into battle. There was no other calling for him. As Krishna had said to his prize bowman, Arjuna: “
There is no greater good for a warrior than to fight in a righteous war
.”

With serene fingers the Queen Mother folded a bloodied shred of her son’s battle vest. The blood of her son did not sadden her. She said, “A mother’s duty is to place the needs of her son above her fears. A wife’s duty is to walk through fire to please her husband. A king’s duty is to sacrifice himself for his subjects.”

When Bhagmati finished translating, she added: “You see why I prayed for a motherless husband?”

“I am neither wife nor queen,” Hannah retorted. A bibi had the right, the duty, to live for love. Gabriel’s black bibi had seized happiness for Gabriel and for herself; a bibi had the power to laugh in the face of a
firangi
wife.

She slept beside him on the terrace floor, changing the bandages, applying the cooling ointments, administering the barks and herbs. Five days later, the Raja awoke, spoke briefly, and fell back asleep. Ten days after the operation he awoke for good and discovered his right arm hung limp and could not be moved. Had he been stronger, he would have found his dagger and killed himself with a single blow of his weak left arm.

His grief set the palace to weeping. The helplessness of the King turned the whole palace barren. The old Queen called for the expulsion of the witch who had done the only thing worse than murdering him. She had dishonored him, made him unable to function, the way old Hasan Beg had taken a broom, and then a shoe, to her husband when he had refused to leave his palace. The old Shia King had been properly beheaded. Her husband had been laughed at and forced, ignominiously, to take his own life.

So now Hannah knew. The war of the broom. The war of the shoe.

She had him where she wanted him, on a bed, unable to move, ready at last to listen. She confessed her love for him, her wish to marry him in the eyes of whatever gods he proposed. The condition of his arm in no way disqualified him. It might even make him listen.

“What good am I to my people—a king who cannot raise his arm in battle? When a tiger grows old, the younger ones must drive him out,” he said. “I must die.”

“Leave this,” she said. “Come home with me.”

“Leave?” It was an obscene idea, to alter one’s fate, to abandon one’s duty. The Gita said the Spirit is not an old garment, changed at will. Only when life is over does the duty, the garment, change. All he said was, “Land of Higginbottham.”

“England is not my home. My home is America.”

“America, England. Fort St. George, Pondicherry.” He sighed. “Same.”

“My father was your age when he left England and came to America. He was a clerk, and he became a farmer. My stepfather was a farmer in the woods, and he became a carpenter in the city. My husband was a factor, and he became a pirate. I was once a respectable married English lady and look at me now—a bibi in a sari. We can all change.”

And she thought,
My mother, my mother
. I must see my mother.

“What change do you propose for a one-armed king?”

“He is going to become a one-armed father.”

He stared out at the high blue sky, with just its normal allotment of circling buzzards. “My mother had a premonition. She said you cast a spell—”

“I am with child for the usual reasons.”

The Raja slowly sat up at the side of the bed. Then he stood, plucked the sleeve of his right arm, lifted the dead weight inside and let it flop. She reached for him, but he sidestepped her.

“A very long time ago it now seems, when I was still a young man, you asked me how you would know when you were no longer welcome. I said when you were no longer fed the sweetest grass—”

“I remember,” she said.

He gathered himself up into the semblance of a raja, striking a pose with his left arm out. “The women’s rooms are attached to my mother’s palace. You … and your child will always have a place. As I promised. You will not need a personal servant, but she is a loyal worker, and there is a place for her as well.”

She did not see him again until the night of the fearful final panel in the Salem Bibi series.

I HAD NO
elephant for the climb to Devgad fort; I made do with a pair of Easy Spirit walking shoes.

What remains of the palace complex sits on a two-hundred-foot-high hillock.
Deccani Hill Fort, Devgad
, says the guidebook. Vandals and colonials have gouged the jewels from mosaic work; Victorian Englishmen whitewashed the murals, then plastered them over. Squatters have taken over this fort, and Aurangzeb’s forts as well.

The hillock’s sides are revetted with stones and bricks so that the fort appears massive, impregnable. In Hannah’s days the palace buildings were plastered a spectacular white and decorated with tiles the color of emeralds, sapphires and topaz. On the walls of Jadav Singh’s palace, tile lions prowled chartreuse forests, peacocks danced in amethyst rain, crocodiles bobbed in lapis lakes. Secret passages connected Hannah’s palace to the Queen Mother’s, to the Vishnu Temple, to a subterranean hideout lined with treasure chests. Even the courtyard where palace servants slept was longer and wider than the houses of Salem aristocrats.

The local equivalents of Mr. Abraham gather around me, offering their expert services. In their retelling, the great Raja Jadav Singh of Devgad was Peter the Great of India, the most advanced, most sensitive, most intelligent leader of his time. The Gandhi-Nehru-Reagan (they’ve spotted me for an American) of the seventeenth century.

“Please,” I say. Some concepts don’t translate.

“And one more informations, madam,” one man confides. “His rani was an American woman! A Salem witch—true! She had magical powers, killed whole armies, operated on everyone, transplanted body parts before Christiaan Barnard. True, true!”

“What happened to this Salem witch?” I ask.

“She went over to the Great Mughal,” one answers. A second, more scholarly: “The Great Mughal installed her in his harem. She was called Farah the Fair and is buried in Aurangabad.” Another shouts, “Rubbish! She was a spy! Mata Hari before Mata Hari. She killed the Hindu god!”

“Then all the books are wrong?” I ask. Most books take a racy interest in a white divorcée, more rumor than fact, who consorted with a Hindu noble. They call her an adventuress of obscure origins, a pirate’s wife who comes off less well than the socially prominent Sarah Bradley, widow of the hanged pirate William Kidd.
Tales from the Coromandel
, it’s called, and I’ve done some borrowing from it here. Higginbottham’s Guy Fawkes debacle, for example. The impaling of Two-Headed Ravanna, the Denosing of Thomas Tringham. A book of casual cruelties.

“She was after the diamond only.” This gets my interest.

“What diamond?”

“Most perfect diamond ever.”

“Bigger than Koh-i-Noor.”

Casually, I ask: “And what do you think happened to this so-called perfect diamond?”

A loud chorus breaks out—England, America, Japan, Paris. This is a convention that Bugs Kilken has not yet polled.

“I think,” says the articulate young man I’ve already picked as a guide, “that the Salem Bibi came to Devgad to steal the Emperor’s Tear. The war was fought over a diamond and the demands of an American lady.”