When she had wakened, servants had been ready to fly in lawful command, to temporise soothingly with unlawful ones, and she had smiled grimly, telling herself they were afraid of her, and that when the end came, she need only fear the violence of poison.
But that again was not yet.
Even after the Festival was over, after she had lied so calmly to save the King's honour, she had hours to spare. The Mirza would need darkness for his proposals; so she had quite smilingly put on the gorgeous dress of a court lady which on her return from the Audience was all she had found in the place of her own old red garments. What did it matter? The steel hauberk of her father's, the circlet, and the sword were still hers. These she had worshipped, these would look down on her death for honour. So if her white robe trailed on the ground and was sewn with stars, if her jewelled bodice flashed under the light folds of a saffron pearl-set veil, what was that to her, the King's Châran, who carried a death-dagger in her waistband?
Nothing mattered so long as her hardly-thought-out project for the delivery of the King's diamond could be brought about. If the message could be sent--if old Deena the drum-banger would take it, then the jeweller might come disguised as a Sufi in the Preacher's dhooli, and she could fulfil her promise; she could give it into his very hands--yea even if she had to yield, before that, to the Lord Chamberlain's desires.
Even this supreme sacrifice she was prepared to make if they failed to send Deena, or if the Feringhi failed to come. For she must have time.
She leant listlessly on the steps below the cupola toying idly with a scrap of silk-made writing paper and pen and ink. A slave-woman, gaoler, duenna--whom Âtma had sent from her very side on plea of chilliness, was standing a little way apart, making believe to drive away the sunset-time mosquitoes with a peacock's feather fan; in reality watching every movement of her charge.
Would Deena come? She had sent for him calmly to drum to her rhythm of pedigrees. That was her right, and he was so far a hanger on of the Mirza's that they might count him of themselves; yet he might be true to her also.
"The drumbanger waits," said a eunuch at the door, and her heart leapt to her mouth.
"Lo 'tis luscious as honey to a bee; lascivious to the liver, as saffron pillau to the stomach!" ejaculated the old man admiringly, In truth Âtma looked superlatively handsome amid the fine feathers of silken carpets and satin cushions.
"Thy liver, and thy stomach, sinner!" retorted Âtma carelessly, as she crumpled up the scrap of paper and flung it into the lacquered pen-tray. "But come! to work! Since I am here as King's woman I may be called on any moment to sing in the harem; and I sing few women's songs: none of the modern style."