"Daughter of the devil!" muttered Khodadâd succinctly.
Siyah Yamin's childish face grew hard and clear as if it were carved in crystal. "Bandy no names, O Gift of God," she said disdainfully, "Who made me, made thee. Are there not ever two splits in a pea? Yet would not I sit still with a firebrand in my face." She pointed at the red mark left by Akbar's polo stick.
"Neither do we!" broke in Ibrahîm angrily. "Leave us to our talk, fool. We will hit, this time, on some plan with which no woman's lack of good faith can interfere."
Siyah Yamin yawned imperturbably. "What would you?" she replied. "I am better as I am, as the rat said when the cat invited him out of his hole. Thy party purpose did not suit me. But blame me not with the luck that lies ever with the King."
"Curse him!" muttered Khodadâd sullenly, and the courtesan gave another evil little laugh.
"Yea! even at chaugan thou hast no chance," she went on maliciously. "'Tis a pity he was not killed. Lo! being so stunned thou couldst not realise what the mere rumour of his death meant, or thou wouldst regret thy failure still more. The bazaar rang with the news for half-an-hour, half groaning, half cheering. Then was the time for action, not now, when the blind giant of India, formed of fools like my friends here, is ready once more to drive home Akbar's javelin head where it lists to go! God! did you but hate him as I, Woman, hate him the Man!"
"What wouldst thou do, harlot?" asked Ibrahîm turning on her sharply. "What couldst thou do?"
She half-closed her sleepy-looking eyes, and stared out into the sunshine in which the lane below lay festering. Not a hundred yards away, in the sunshine also, lay the high road from the great stretches of fields where the peasants toiled uncomplainingly, to the palace where the King dreamt his dream that was born out of due time, and along it the workers were passing bringing in the fruits of their labour. Piled baskets of green-skinned melons, red earthenware pots of milk, creaking wains of corn. For them life was simple, untouched by the imagination of either evil or good. For them even the gossip of their town-bred neighbours was unreal, fantastic.
"What would I do, pandar," replied the courtesan slowly, her eyes brightening in measure with her words, her voice gaining strength from her evil fancies, "If I believed that the Luckstone of Akbar brought luck as thou dost, it should be mine! Stay! It should be mine and bring discredit on the beast Birbal to whose charge 'tis given. Hold! interrupt me not! I see further--such thoughts come with the thinking. Aye! I would make Prince Salîm the thief, and so force him to revolt! See you not? See you not? Akbar's every thought of empire is bound up in the boy--that would be revenge indeed! There is no tie so strong as the tie of blood; loose that and the ship of a man's mind may go adrift. Make his son the thief I say, by guile if thou willst; but make Salîm the thief!"
Her large eyes had grown larger with her evil dreamings. They sate and looked at her as the fascinated bird looks at the snake.