CHAPTER XL
Few slept in Rukh that night. Over every mountain path eager peasants came from outlying hamlets and solitary, scattered huts. The horn lanterns they swung as they walked, swarmed the hill-ways like fireflies.
The place of sacrifices was burnished and garnished by the light of great flaring torches that temple girls, stripped to their slim, brown waists, held up, while the priests chattered and chanted, shifting dirt heaps into less conspicuous coigns, dusting the rough-hewn carvings, oiling and sharpening a knife, taking dead garlands down, putting fresher garlands up—bringing the blood-bowls out of the rock-crevice cupboards, shaking vestments out of their creases. The whole great place reeked of marigolds, cocoanut oil and resined torches. To-morrow it would reek of human blood. Yazok rubbed his hips itchingly, and he licked his lips, as he spat in a blood-bowl and rubbed it with a dirty oil-soaked rag till it shone anew.
In every hut-home preparations were making—festival garments being mended and shaken, flowers and feathers and tufts of fur woven into long necklaces, bracelets, anklets and head bands. Nuts and seeds were roasted and chewed, the lewd love songs of the amorous gods were sung by men and maidens, old crones and toddling baby-nakeds.
The palace teemed and throbbed. Servants with rapt, exalted faces moved about on tireless feet. Priests and soldiers crowded corridor and stairs. Savory smells belched up from the kitchens—children, in soft skin sandals, their plump groins and their slim ones swathed in gold, white and green, carried fruit-heaped trays in slim young arms, and on sure-poised heads, from store-rooms to pantries. Musicians cleaned and tuned and fresh-strung their instruments. Accoutrements, carpets and drapery were cleaned, and shaken and scented. The palace was as thick with sandal-wood smell as the sacrificial cave was of the stench of rotting flowers and leaves. Long ropes of blossoms were hung from jut to jut of every high carving. Peacocks’ feathers (carefully garnered in chests and closets—for they’d come from afar, and had cost a great price) were taken out in their splendid, iridescent thousands to deck rooms and corridors; paints and perfumes in lacquered boxes, tinseled and jeweled tissues, rainbow-silk and crêpes from Japan, laces from Ceylon and Persia were heaped and tangled on every harem floor. The children, even the new-born girl baby, had their nails fresh-tinted, and the women’s hands were rouged up to their knuckles.
Every posture-girl had new gauzy, tinsel-weighted garments, and at least one new ornament—nose-jewel or anklet or hair-plaque—and swayed on dancing feet with delight as she tried them on. Of all the palace, perhaps old Ak-kok was happiest. Her wrinkled parchment face was radiant, and in honor of to-morrow’s greatness she herself wrung its head from a young pigeon, tore out its hot heart, still beating, and rammed it into La-swak’s gaping mouth. He made a sick face at first, but then he found he liked it better than he’d thought, sucked it consideringly, then gave a sudden sick gulp, and the bird’s still hot, pulsing heart was down, hot and pulsing in La-swak. And old Ak-kok hugged him to her bony breast in ecstasy; for that the new-slaughtered vital had gone intact into the intestinal keeping of La-swak was unquestionable augury that he would live to be a great ruler, a mighty warrior and a favored priest of the Green Goddess.
Out of their byres and steep pasture-nooks (all the pasture places that the rough-hilled place afforded) the drowsy humped cattle were roused from their sleep by the laughing, shouting children that came to hang blossoms on their wrinkled necks. Two great steers chafed and pawed as agile men gilded their horns, avoiding them, the lowered horns, meanwhile as well as they could. Each horn-gilder had two other men beside him, protecting him with long bamboo poles, cruelly sharpened at one end, with which they prodded and bled the beast’s sides as often as it seemed too inclined to charge. The steers bellowed and lurched and bled, the men gilded and pricked and ran sweat—it ran rapidly down their brown faces—and dodged as skilfully, but not as gracefully as Spanish matadors, and the rabble of children circled about them, waving deodar wands, and posies, screaming and clapping their thin olive hands, applauding and urging on quite impartially the angry bulls and the reeking men. These steers would have great pride of place in the morrow’s spectacle, for theirs the office to trample the still warm sacrifices that were to be laid at the Goddess’s feet, and to drag away between the cheering tight-packed ranks of the worshipers the de-severed trunks of the Feringhis. When the horns shone out through the night gilded and burnished, then the hoof-gilding came, more difficult still, and greatly more perilous; then when the infuriated, switching tails had been paint-coated carmine and blue, the last finishing touch was given—great circles of green on each white heaving side, and the toilet was done. The gilders squatted down with grunts of relief—not too near—and mopped their faces with their sleeves, which they unwound for the purpose, and fell to kernel chewing or the smoking of long, green, Burmese-like cheroots. But the sacrificial steers were not allowed so to rest. The sharp bamboo poles still relentlessly kept them upright and firm on all fours, for they must neither squat nor relax till their fresh finery of gold-leaf and thick paint was quite dry.
Pregnant women in hut and on hillside were drinking hot gingered drams, and praying clamorously: for any child born as the death-horn sounded would bring with it into life great god-promised good-luck and strength and health, endless endurance, assured advancement—even a girl-child; for on her some man of the royal house’s eyes would fall with pleasure one day.
The Great Horn of Rukh—after its temples and palace the Kingdom’s first and deepest pride—was being obsequiously tended. Priests squatted about it incanting and chanting, wine was spilled on the fruit-and-grain-and-flower-piled crag it stood on, its great brazen throat was scoured and cleaned, and immense tribute of incense was burned about it.
Basil Traherne heard the execrable hubbub, and writhed in his thongs. He was well bound now; but twice in the night they brought him cups of warmed, strong wine, and he gulped it down, when held to his lips: he too resolved to husband his strength. Would the aircraft come? Had their message gone through? He feared. At the worst and last, would the Raja spare Lucilla’s life? He feared that most. He had no sleep.
Lucilla Crespin had none. She heard less of the din without and the movement within the palace than any other did—the Raja had contrived that as well as he could—but she heard enough. And she heard her own heart beat, and the chokes that strangled her throat. She thought she heard her nerves crack; she feared she was losing her nerve, her resolution and grip. Twice she heard her children cry. Once she heard her father call. No thong bound her, hands and limbs were unfettered, her couch was soft. But she knew that unseen black eyes were watching her vigilantly through some crack or crevice, she could not see either, and now and then she heard the sentries move as they changed guard. She tried to pray. But no prayer would shape or word in her tortured, trembling soul. But she thought that God knew. She lay on her rugs and pillows as motionless as she could—and waited. But when day smote the night, and dawn banished the dark, the night had marked her—let death come now, or life last long, that night had branded her for all time.
And no sleep came to the Raja of Rukh. His vigil was not the pleasantest kept. No reproach of conscience tormented him. He deemed the cruelty he was doing, and that that he intended to do when the sun next set, justice. His soul had no qualms. His Oriental mind had no doubt—no doubt of his full justification. The King could do no wrong, the venger of blood commit no unhallowed excess. But his thoughts had sour, sick qualms. Had the English Major’s wireless gone through? Did Amil-Serai know? If so, Rukh knew. And his pride had a hurt. What he desired he intended to take (if Amil-Serai did not send!) as far as he could. But he was powerless to take all; for the English woman would not give. Would she ever come to give? He wondered. Could he win that? His absolutism could command and enforce. But could he win? And his hookah tasted foul and sour as he sucked it. His swarthy face grew gray. His blood hungered, and the fine blue veins in his temples swelled and throbbed.
The man was afraid—not of what might come from Amil-Serai. He should dislike dethronement and banishment; but they were ever present possibilities in the heave and sag of Asian dynasties, and, if they came to him, he could face them as well as another, better than most—for he knew his way about on the continent of Europe, and could amuse himself there vastly. He knew how to secure a vast horde of treasure and jewels, how to get away with much of the horde of coins grimed under the bastioned palace. And no doubt La-swak would reign in his stead. No—he hoped that nothing would come from Amil-Serai, but, if it did, he—the Raja—knew how to meet and accept it. But the man was afraid—afraid of a personal defeat—defeat of a personal wish—an injury to personal pride and to personal vanity. His vanity was almost inordinate, and as sensitive as it was big, for his mind was too acute, his intelligence too fine for his vanity to be the thick, hidebound, invulnerable thing that it is at its happiest. His self-confidence had wider areas of attack than the skin of Achilles had.
He took no part now in the preparations for the bloody morrow. He had given his orders. They would be obeyed. And for the rest, he but waited—alone, as little unserenely as he could. He had no sleep.
Of the palace servants there was one, only one, who took no part in those wild and elaborate preparations—for the motionless sentries who guarded the human objects of slaughter, and the young ayah, who salaamed as she proffered food to Lucilla Crespin, participated in it most importantly.
When the night time was thickest, a huddled thing rose from the floor in the room that had been slept in by Watkins, the Raja’s English valet, and stole through corridors, archways and silent apartments, out of the palace, out through the walls, over the moat, out to the jungle: a half-naked, bleak-eyed woman.
The Raja, standing restless at a casement, saw her go, and smiled not unkindly. She’d not get there, but if she chose to try—perhaps to give her life in attempting it, it was nothing to him. He watched a moment, or two, then, “East and West, again!” he said with a shrug and turned on his heel. He had given no order that the thing down there a hundred feet below his snuggery’s balcony should be fetched for burial, or given any obsequies, even the roughest, there where it was. The way was too perilous. He’d not risk one ankle of any soldier who was still his own living asset. He had had use for Watkins living, he had none for him dead. And he knew that without his command no one in Rukh—bar the ayah—would give the English satellite aught better than a curse or an expectoration of hate. “East and West,” he repeated with a hard mirthless laugh.
Up towards the snow, down towards the jungle, on through the jungle she tore and broke her way, now meshed in branches and bramble and cobra-like vines, now perched and scrambling goat-like on the edge of a precipice, the sandals ribboned and cut from her feet by stones, her one coarse garment ripped by thorns, her long black hair hanging unkempt about her naked shoulders. A vulture cried, jungle things growled and hissed, tom-toms crashed down below her, and then from above, but the ayah who had been Watkins’ took no heed. Blood ran on her breasts where her own finger-nails had clawed them, blood caked on her mouth where her teeth had chewed it. Up in the lower snow-line a rivulet ran angrily, icy cold; she walked through it, her bleeding feet not feeling or shrinking its bitter, intense cold, as they would not have felt or shrunk had it boiled with heat as intense. The sharp prong of a down-hanging branch caught her ear, she tore it away, and the cartilage with it. On she went, now up, now down, heeding lynx-like where, not heeding how—seeking her dead. A geyser spring boiled up from red-hot stones, she went straight through it—it was the shortest way—neither slower nor faster. Up again to the higher place where the only footholds led her, the snow clogged her skirt—all that she wore—and its rough, unhemmed edge froze to her flesh—but it did not matter, since she did not know. Her hair and her forehead were smeared thick with ashes horridly mixed. She wore only her own matted hair, above her waist, below it only the rag of sackcloth. Her breath came in short, hard pants. Her sunken eyes burned red.
At last she found him—all that was left of him.
How she had beaten and clutched her way down the footholdless sides of that high ravine was unthinkable. No man could have done it, no goat without snapping its legs, scarcely a snake without peeling off its skin and losing its sinuous balance.
But she had, and she crouched down, and moaned piteously over the broken, mangled remains—all that was left of him—left of a derelict cockney.
If England with her quiet waysides, her cowslip-flecked pastures, her gardens of roses, her fragrance of hop-vines, her red baubled cherry-trees, her flushed-face apples, her peaceful churchyards, her ivied gray village churches, her carol of cathedral bells, her emerald lawns, her oak-trees, her ribbon-hung May-poles with young health and happiness circling dance-steps about them, the ring of her playing fields, the sheen and the wealth of her rivers, her red-coats and her boys in blue, her clucking hens, and her sleek, lowing kine, her firesides and her castles, Oxford and Windermere, her sea-washed feet and her crown of fog—and her London slums—had shown him no womanliness, suckled him with no milk o’ human kindness, given him no love, Asia had.
Had he been kind to her, the native woman, tossed to him soul and body, by a despot carelessly?
It looked like it.
It looked like it, as she knelt there moaning beside him, whispering tenderness and love words to him between her sobs—straightening his broken twisted limbs as well as she could, lifting his one hand—the other was red pulp-stripped bone—to her forehead.
When she had stolen from the palace she had held in one hand a cluster of marigolds. All the way she had come she had carried them carefully. She had them still. She held them against her breast for a moment, then gently pushed them into his hand, and laid it down.
The birds had been there before her—but not many, it was too far down, palled in darkness by the high walls of rock between which the strip of ravine lay so narrow. One hand—had it ever struck her?—was beaked and defiled, but not much else. Most of the human body she had loved, caressed and served lay there, horrid now, but hers.
A vulture cawed high up in a cypress. The woman heard, and crouched lower, like a hen over her chicks.
Out from some crack in the great wall of rock a lithe white-marked gray leopard peered. She heard its sudden purr of delight, and looked up at it, and its great green eyes glared down at them, ravished and famished. She heard the vulture’s wings flap. She looked up—still higher, and saw the scavenger-bird’s bald head thrust out, a vicious, fleshless skull in the dear moonlight above.
She saw. But she didn’t care. As well one way as any other.
But nothing should harm him, nothing should touch a hair of that battered head—first.
She covered the thing beside her with her body, and waited.
The snow-leopard slunk, slowly, stealthily nearer.
The vulture craned its bleak bony head, and watched. It must wait—till the leopard had done.
And when day’s first apple-green slipped up from the East, the native woman slept on her last marriage bed.
It was very quiet.