The air was rent by a burst of drumming, and the courtyard suddenly flared as servants threw oil on the smoldering torches around the balcony. At that instant, in a gesture of high drama, the women ripped away their turquoise veils and flung them skyward. The crowd erupted in a roar.
Hawksworth stared at the women in astonishment.
Their skirts, the skintight trousers beneath, and their short halters—were all gossamer, completely transparent.
The dance was underway. Hips jerked spasmodically, in perfect time with the drummer's accelerating, hypnotic rhythms—arching now to the side, now suggestively forward. Hawksworth found himself exploring the dancers' mask-like faces, all heavily painted and expressionless. Then he watched their hands, which moved in sculptural arcs through a kind of sign language certain Indians in the crowd seemed to know. Other hand messages were understood by all, as the women stroked themselves intimately, in what seemed almost a parody of sensuality. As the rhythm continued to intensify, they begap to rip away their garments one by one, beginning with their parted waist wraps. Next their halters were thrown to the crowd, though their breasts had long since found release from whatever minimal containment they might have known at the beginning of the dance. Their earth-brown skin now glistened bare in the perfumed torchlight.
The dance seemed to Hawksworth to go on and on, incredibly building to ever more frantic levels of intensity. The drunken crowd swayed with the women, its excitement and expectation swelling. Then at last the women's trousers also were ripped away, leaving them adorned with only bangles and reflecting jewels. Yet the dance continued still, as they writhed onto their knees at the edge of the platform. Then slowly, as though by some unseen hand, the platform lowered to the level of the courtyard and they glided into the drunken crowd, thrusting breasts, thighs, against the ecstatic onlookers. The cheers had grown deafening.
Hawksworth finally turned away and walked slowly down the embankment to the river. There, in the first hint of dawn, bathers had begun to assemble for Hindu prayers and a ritual morning bath. Among them were young village girls, swathed head to foot in bright-colored wraps, who descended one by one into the chilled water and began to modestly change garments while they bathed, chastely coiling a fresh cloth around themselves even as the other was removed.
They had never seemed more beautiful.
Hawksworth was standing on the steps of the maidan when the sail of the English longboat showed at the turn of the river. News of the shipwreck had reached Surat by village runner an hour after sunup, and barks had already been sent to try to recover the remaining silver before the ship broke apart. The frigate was reportedly no more than a thousand yards off the coast, and all the men, even Kerridge, the bosun, and the pilot, had been safely carried ashore by the current.
Hawksworth watched the longboat's sail being lowered in preparation for landing and tried to think over his next step, how to minimize the delay and loss.
We can't risk staying on past another day or two, not with only one vessel. If we're caught at anchor in the cove, there's nothing one ship can do. The Portugals can send in fireships and there'll be no way to sink them with crossfire. The Discovery has to sail immediately. We've enough cotton laded now to fill the hold with pepper in Java.