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.