Haunted Legends (6 page)

“Terry, I need to know,” she said, because she had questions. “I just . . .”

He opened a small velvet bag and her voice trailed off. Something fell into her hand. It was a ring. “I had this made for you today. Blue topaz.”

“Oh.” The stone caught the light. “Oh!”

“Happy anniversary.”

Ten years. There were still those questions. Safely enclosed, poised at the bottom of the four-story waterfall, she told herself they could wait. If the trip could end here and now, while she was so happy, the questions could wait forever. She and Terry would eat and play inside the vast hotel, riding out at dusk to see monuments through sealed car windows, marveling at the sights as they zipped by and heading home before anything too bad could happen, they . . .

“We’d better crash. Car’s coming at four a.m.”

“Car?” Her belly trembled.
I can’t.

“Girl.” Terry’s tone said
of course you will,
but he softened it, diverting her with another velvet bag. Blue topaz earrings spilled into her hand like promises. “This is India!”

They headed out at first light—before the heat, too early for most of the city’s millions. The streets were as empty as they’d ever be. As long as they were contained, Sara was OK: air-conditioning on full, hotel driver Ravi Singh nodding deferentially as he handed her into the car. Once they cleared the city their fierce, elegant Sikh driver turned into something else. He plunged through traffic like a warrior preparing to die in battle. He drove as if fixed on his place in the ranks of Sikh heroes.

Sara gasped as he swerved into the path of an oncoming semi to avoid a cow that had plopped down to rest on the tarmac. Shaken, she had to wonder what it all meant to Ravi Singh, how much hair he had—a lifetime’s worth, twined under that yellow turban, she had read. Do Sikhs expect God to grab them by the hair and yank them up to heaven, or did she make up that part?

Which god? She didn’t know. Driving, the Sikh presented a massive profile so stony that she was afraid to ask him.

Riding along in silence, she had time to wonder.

It was her fault she wasn’t clear where Terry was taking her. She’d been tied up at work; she let him research this trip and he did all the planning. She told him she wanted to be surprised, but she was afraid. India was too
big, rich with legends like kept secrets. People could be born here and spin out entire lifetimes in a place this rich and complicated without comprehending what it was. They could read and study, travel the length and breadth of their country and still not know any more than a fish knows about the ocean, so preparing, she’d just packed and walked out the door.

Now she was beggared by her ignorance. With Ravi closed and locked for the day, she touched her mate’s arm. “About this legend we’re living. Which one, Terry? Which one?” He never snored, so she knew he was pretending. They rode for hours. She gave in and slept until the car stopped and sudden stillness awoke her.

Ravi pulled the hand brake and got out to open the door for them. Heat rushed in. “From here, you walk. Where shall I wait?”

Like a seasoned tourist, Terry answered, “Jami Masjid. That’s big mosque to you,” he told her helpfully.

Don’t pretend to know places you’ve never seen.
If thoughts could kill. But why was she so angry? It didn’t matter. She could say it out loud and he wouldn’t hear her, not now that they were here. They spilled out on the scorching road like two peas dropped on a griddle. Because this was her last chance to find out, Sara turned to Ravi. “There is a legend about this place?”

He touched his joined hands to his forehead. “Salim Chisti.”

“Who?”

Damn Terry, why did he look so pleased? He tapped the guidebook with that hopeful grin. “It’s all in here.”

She grimaced. “I was asking Mr. Singh.”

“The emperor Akbar built this city to give thanks to the saint, and brought his people here.” The driver sighed. “It has been empty for many years.”

“Thanks for what?”

Anxious to get going, Terry preempted. “We have that, Sara. It’s in the book.”

“Sunset,” the Sikh said, as if the timing was a given.

•  •  •

The driver leaves them standing there in the strong sunlight, blinking. In the streets below, other tourists, vendors, beggars jostle—
all these people
—and Sara steps closer to Terry, as though to escape them; oddly, it’s like stepping into the iris of a camera’s eye just before it closes.

Something shifts. Time passes. Startled, Sara shakes herself, blinking. The light has changed.

“Terry, what are we doing here?”

“What do you think? Waiting in line for tickets.”

Want.

She whirls.
Who spoke?

The want.

“I don’t see any line.”

“Cool! We can just go in.” He tugs at her hand. “Come on!”

She wants to, but it is worrisome. For the first time there are no guides clamoring, there’s nobody begging, nobody selling curios or street food or—God!—water. Their car is gone, Ravi Singh is gone and the road that brought them to the ghost city is empty. For the first time since they landed on the teeming subcontinent they are alone. “Where is everybody?”

“Inside, I suppose.” For the first time Terry sounds uncertain. “Unless it’s some kind of holiday.”

After the bustle and outcry, it’s so eerily silent that Sara shudders. “Are we safe?” She is asking more than one question here, although Terry won’t notice.

“Sara, it’s a national monument! Don’t you think these places are protected?”

“How am I supposed to know! I don’t even know why we’re here!”

He wants.

What?
She turns to Terry. “Did you say something?”

“I said, this is it.” His tone speaks of more than the city. At the top of the ramp, the gate waits like an open mouth. He pulls her through the vaulted gate and out into the sun-blasted courtyard. “Downtown Oz.”

They always want.

Troubled, she turns to look at the ancient city. It is magnificent. Amazing. Deserted. Above the archway, outlining onion domes and minarets, fortress walls and the turrets, that wild blue sky is empty except for the white sun pasted overhead, blazing. What is it, noon? Later? “Oh.” Blinded in spite of the hat, Ray-Bans, everything she marshaled to protect her, Sara gulps scalding air. “Oh!”

“It’s . . .” Terry is trying to pick her up with his voice and put her down somewhere she never intended to be. “It’s like . . .”

Reflexively, she tilts her water bottle. “It’s hot.”

“I don’t know what it’s like,” he says happily, “it’s just so beautiful.”

She drinks and feels better. “It is.”

“Like the emperor’s wet dream of, I don’t know, it’s . . .” Then Terry goes that one step too far. “Oh Sara, let’s bring the kids some day.”

Dazzled by the light, momentarily seduced into dreaming, Sara comes back to herself with a jolt. “You promised,” she cries, and this is as far as the discussion goes.

Sara Kendall grew up motherless, and takes her own losses as proof that she could die the same way. She won’t die that way, not like her mother, not ever, but there is more. She can’t open herself up to that kind of grief and misery, never again.

She has survived since then by keeping her elbows close to her sides. Given their history, one extra person in her life is her limit and Terry knows it. “Now,” she says briskly because he still hasn’t explained, “about this legend.”

“The emperor Akbar made a pledge,” her man says so glibly that she knows he isn’t telling her everything. “
Sikri
means thanks, the emperor got what he wanted and that’s why he built this city.” Terry says all that and throws in a short history of the Moghul emperors, but doesn’t say what Akbar was giving thanks for. Like a pitchman for some product he isn’t ready to unveil, he retreats into the guidebook. “Says here it took years to build the fortress and the palaces, everything up here had to be hauled to the top of the ridge except the sandstone they carved out right here. I mean everything: marble and malachite, all the metal and rugs and furniture, tools and fuel, everything they needed. Bearers brought clothes and jewelry and weapons for the hundreds, everything it takes to run an empire, and when it was done all of Akbar’s people came up, and there were hundreds—warriors and courtiers, wives and concubines, the slaves, then there were the animals . . .”

The heat is making her dizzy but Terry drones on like an amateur hypnotist until she cries, “Oh, Terry. Don’t go all tour guide on me.”

Listen.

She shivers.
Oh, don’t!

“The emperor’s elephants,” he finishes anyway. “Ravi let us out on an elephant ramp, they had ramps for the elephants to enter,” he adds in a
scholarly tone that makes her want to smack him. “You may not care about this stuff but he was the greatest of the Moghul emperors after Babur, and he—Look at the place! Akbar thought of everything.”

“It’s been a while since Akbar,” Sara says. When he pitched this trip to her on a cool night in Providence, Terry never told her how hot it would be, or that she would be too limp and dehydrated and disoriented to enjoy it. She shuffles uneasily, stirring the red dust that blows across the courtyard and clings to the hairs on her bare arms, caking in her nostrils. “If he thought of everything, why is it so quiet?”

“It was amazing, it was beautiful, like some kind of heaven, with a water garden to cool it in the hot months. He had a system, but all those people, all those animals . . .” Terry sighs. “A few years up here and they just plain ran out of water.”

She sighs. “The city died.”

“Pretty much. It’s just tourists now.” He turns to face her, adding, “And pilgrims.”

Pilgrims, yes.
Sara twitches like a horse plagued by a bluefly, desperate to shake it off.
Pilgrims who want.
“What pilgrims?”

Instead of answering, Terry leads her out of the covered walkway, into the open. The light is blinding. White sunlight brings every outline into sharp relief—the cornices, domes and turrets, passages and intricately carved screens of red sandstone that set the margins of the emperor’s ghost city. The great courtyard is alarmingly still. Nothing moves; there are none of the expected tourists dutifully shuffling through the shady corridors or striking poses for point-and-shoots or digital cameras; there are no guides for hire struggling to be first, no hopeful little hangers-on smiling their hardest, and no vendors offering food or water; parched as she is, she won’t find either here in the deserted city. The silence is profoundly troubling. She touches his arm. “Terry, where is everybody?”

“What do you care? The place is ours!” With that laugh, he locks her fingers in his like a child begging her to come out and play. He leads her into another passageway screened by lacy red sandstone. “Look!”

When Terry finally lets go she steps back, studying the man who brought her to this beautiful, deserted place: familiar face, dark hair blowing, same Terry and yet she is thinking,
Do I know you?
They stand for a moment, looking out through stone fretwork at the surrounding desert.

“Everything Akbar had is ours!”

Her mouth is dry; her skin is dry. Even her eyeballs are drying out. “It is,” she says, because he is waiting.

She doesn’t know what the problem is yet, but there is a problem: Terry’s urgency, the bizarre sense that the stones or something trapped within the stones is speaking. She is listening hard, but Terry’s voice drowns out whatever she thought was speaking. “It says here that Akbar had five thousand concubines.” He points. “I think that’s the
zenana,
where he kept them all, but you know, of all those wives . . .” He considers. Decides it isn’t time yet and doesn’t finish.

He wants.

Alarmed, she looks here, there,
What could he want? I give him everything he wants.
She’d like to face the mysterious figure that seems to whisper but doesn’t have a voice. She needs to argue. If she could catch someone following, some helpful soul keeping pace behind one of the intricate sandstone screens, some living human who seems to be telling her things only she can hear, she would feel better. At this point she’d even take an enemy bent on her destruction. A person.
That,
she thinks,
I could handle.
But there is only Terry.

She puts it to him. “What do you want, Terry?”

He is running on ahead and doesn’t hear.

Weird,
she thinks.
This is so weird,
in spite of which she finishes, “Some kind of sacrifice?”

More.
Words float into her head—a warning.
They always want more.

“What?”

Typical Terry: he deflects questions with information. “See that platform out there in the water? That’s where Akbar sat when he was holding court outdoors. You had to go over the little bridges to talk to him. I bet it was hot!” Studying the book, he points.

“See those steps? Sometimes he sat up there, on that platform? And played games, using humans as pieces. We’re standing on his game board.” He leads her up the steps. “See the squares?” He turns her so they are side by side like a pair of dancers looking at the courtyard, where Akbar’s design is laid out in stone. On the downbeat, he will spin her out. “He moved people around like living chess pieces.”

Like the objects of his desires.

Terry finishes wistfully, “And he always won.”

What?
It isn’t the wind she hears and it is not a voice, exactly, but something bent on being acknowledged. Warning:

Like you.

Like me?
If this is a warning, what should she be afraid of? Their major issue is dead and Terry knows it. He promised, so what is this? Intent on their destination, he goes along reading entries on everything they pass like a teacher thrilled by the sound of his own voice. When she tries to slow him down, the man she thought she knew wields the book like a shield, deflecting questions.

As they go along for what seems like miles the sky overhead bleaches to the color of melting lead; she is exhausted and dying of thirst and yet Terry pulls her along on a string of words, reading like a believer mesmerized by the text. “The emperor brought craftsmen from all over the known world to build his city and the architecture is rich and varied, showing design elements drawn from every known religious building.”