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.