Soul of Fire (44 page)

William was in the bath. To his carrier’s and his
sweeper’s chagrin, they’d both been commanded, three times now, to bring the water for fresh baths and then to empty the water again as he took yet another bath. It had started as an impulse, a feeling that he would like to be really clean—needed to be clean. And then it had . . .

He didn’t know what it had. By the third bath, he was starting to wonder why he had bathed. He’d thought . . . he’d thought so many things about himself that didn’t seem to be true. He’d thought he was a normal man, with normal wishes and normal intent, and that had vanished when the scales fell from his eyes on seeing the dragon.

He scrubbed his arms with the stiff-bristled bath brush, trying to figure out what exactly he was trying to wash away. His skin was wrinkled and waterlogged, and there could be no dirt remaining, no sweat—nothing that anyone could use to perceive what he’d been doing and thus recoil in horror from him. So what was he scrubbing?

It all revolved around his not being the man he’d thought he was. After he’d realized his fatal attention to his own sex, he’d thought he was strong enough to withstand it and that nothing in his external world—nothing outside his own mind and heart—would ever need give away what went on in his head and how he truly felt. But that had vanished in a moment, with Bhishma’s look at him, and then the touch of Bhishma’s hands. . . .

He rested his head on the edge of the tub and a dry sob tore through his throat, followed by just as dry a chuckle. It wasn’t Bhishma’s touch he was trying to wash from his skin. It wasn’t, as his father would doubtless say, his sin in having allowed such actions, such . . . pleasures. No, what William had been trying to wash away was . . . himself.

At the back of his mind—in that unthinking place where strange impulses hid—he’d been trying to scrub away who he was, in the vain hope that under it all would hide the William he’d always thought was there: the uninteresting, self-effacing young man who’d been a typical student at Eton, a quiet scholar and an unenthusiastic companion in rides and parties and hunts.

What a fool he’d been. He stood up and reached for his towel, which hung haphazardly from a nail on the wall. And at that moment he heard the door of his room burst open, and his sweeper yell, “No come in! Sahib bathing!”

And in response, a man’s voice, speaking with authority in an angry, irate tone, and in Indian. Fast Indian.
The tigers,
William thought, and then, not very coherently,
They’ve come. The mutiny has started.
He started out of his bath, holding the towel around his middle.

The sword. He must go for his sword.

He ran into his room, and stopped. Bhishma stood there, yelling at the carrier, his face distorted by rage, and something very much like tears shining in his eyes.
What is he telling the man? What is he saying?
Like a man caught in a nightmare, he thought that his actions were about to be exposed—that what he’d thought to keep so secret would now burst forth before all the world. To Bhishma, he shouted, “A moment. Please, give me a moment.” To his carrier, he ordered, full voice, “Go away, please. Leave us alone.”

The carrier fixed him with a foreboding, baleful gaze and said, “You sure, Sahib? He dangerous man.”

Oh, you have no idea how dangerous.
William nodded, briskly, as he tied his towel around his middle and reached for his cigarette case and lighter. This was going to necessitate cigarettes. To be honest, this necessitated some brandy, but William hadn’t been, up until now, the sort of man who carried a flask of spirits.
Perhaps I should change that.
Just an hour ago, he’d been wondering how he could ever face Bhishma again. That time had arrived far sooner than he’d expected. If he’d envisioned anything at all, it was seeing Bhishma out on parade, blushing to meet him. But instead he was meeting Bhishma here, in his room, in a state of undress.

In Bhishma’s defense, the man seemed to be in some kind of distress. He was wildly running his hands through his hair, which had once more slipped free of the bonds that kept it tidy normally. William had to repress a sudden desire to smooth that hair, and tamped it down firmly, even as he struggled with his lighter, trying to light the cigarette that trembled between his fingers.

Bhishma stared at him and let out a long exhalation, as though he’d been holding his breath all this time and had just now exhaled. “How could you?” he asked, in a tone of deep disbelief.

William dropped his lighter and stared. “How could I what?” he asked, with a total want of politeness. Through his mind, in a mad cavalcade, ran preposterous ideas.
What does he mean how could I? How could I what? Take a bath? Smoke? No. It can’t be that. Perhaps he heard of my visit to the general and thinks . . . But how can he think that? And even if he thinks it, how could he dare do something like this?

In no particular order, stories he’d heard from old Anglo-Indians at the dinner table, at his grandmother’s house, came dancing into his mind. Sepoys who found their wives with other men and shot both the guilty couple and all the children of the union, just in case. Sepoys who killed a girl who was betrothed to them because she smiled at another man. Indians who went on a rampage because of some perceived slight, some perceived betrayal.

But I’m not married to him. I’m not betrothed to him. Oh, he said things
—things lost in the frenzy that had left in William’s mind no more than a vague trail of promises and heated compliments. He’d said he’d wanted William from the first time he’d seen him. And he’d said words about their hearts and souls meeting, which sounded like lines cribbed from Sanskrit poetry.
And I wasn’t even standing by a yellow rosebush,
William though, madly.
And now he’ll make a scene—one of those scenes that I’ve heard about so often, one of those scenes Grandmama’s friends referred to as an evidence of the hot blood of people in these climes. And then . . . I’ll have to go away. Everyone will know. I’ll have to resign my commission. I’ll have to desert. I’ll have to—
The image of his parents receiving dire news in a letter, that he had seen in the crystal came back to him with the force of a gut-punch.

Bhishma was still staring at him, mouth half-open in surprise. “What do you mean, what? You don’t know?”

And now he’ll knife me for being admitted to the general’s room while he was shaving and in his robe.
Incongruously, William wanted to chuckle at the thought that the general’s splendid, silken dressing gown could have inspired lust in anyone, even in someone of his dubious self-control. He looked toward his sword, still propped up against the bedside. Could he retrieve it in time? A fine thing if he went down in dinnertime lore in English country houses for having been knifed to death by his Indian lover.

“What have you been doing these last four hours?” Bhishma asked.

“Bathing.”

“For four hours?”

“I . . . Look, this is not about my bathing habits, is it?”

Slowly, consideringly, Bhishma shook his head. “No. It’s about the Gold Coats.”

“What?”

Bhishma surged forward so suddenly that William, who held a cigarette in one hand and a lighter in the other, didn’t even have a chance to make a mock-dive for his sword. Which was just as well, because Bhishma wasn’t wielding a knife. He just extended his hand and grabbed William about the forearm and dragged him to the window, where he used his other hand to tear the drapes apart, flooding the room with the blinding noonday sun of Meerut. William, too stunned to protest, looked out. And dropped his cigarette and lighter again, this time onto the desk.

“What?” he said, unable to think of another word. Downstairs in the courtyard, natives were lined up, as though on parade, while fifty or so Gold Coats circulated among them, stopping at each man, presumably interrogating him. Another fifty or so Gold Coats had powersticks at the ready. Ready to do what? Shoot?

“What can I have to do with it?” he asked. “I didn’t know . . .” How could the Gold Coats be here? But his mind was working. In four hours the general could have sent for the Gold Coats from Bombay by fast carpetship.

William didn’t know for a fact that there were Gold Coats in Bombay, but he knew Gold Coats had been sent to Calcutta, and so it stood to reason they’d been sent to other major cities.

Bhishma let go of William’s arm. He made a sound that could be laughter—or a cry—intercut by a hiccup. “The general sent for them. Whatever you told him, what he understood was that there were were-tigers amid the sepoys here. He sent for the Gold Coats, to interrogate the sepoys. And to cage them for transport to execution.”

“But . . . I didn’t tell him that!” William said, indignantly. He thought of the general’s look. Was it possible that was what he understood? Very possible. After all, William had mentioned the uprising of 1857, when most of the deaths had been caused by were-sepoys.

“But this is the worst thing he could have done!” William said.

“Oh, you’ve noticed that, too?” Bhishma asked, and gave another hiccup-laugh. “Now he’s turning the sepoys against the English. The people who should guard you. He’s pushing them into deciding whether they’re loyal to the English, or loyal to their people and their religion. How do you think most of them will topple when they can no longer stand in the middle?”

“Are there . . . Are there weres amid the sepoys? Were-tigers?”

Bhishma looked confused for a moment, then shrugged. “What do you think?”

What do I think? Bhishma’s grandfather was a sepoy, in a contingent where most of them turned into elephants during the mutiny. But the were gene doesn’t work like that. At least, it doesn’t work like that in Europe. But Bhishma says that here it works differently. There’s more magic. And also, probably, a lot more were-children. Of course.

“Are you a were?” he asked, the words ripping out of his mouth before he could stop them.

Bhishma gave him a level look, as though trying to evaluate his ability to withstand an answer, then said, “Yes.”

“I see. A tiger?”

Hiccup-laugh. “No.”

“Oh.” And desperately, reaching for some form of sanity, some way out of this, “What did you think I could do now? Why did you come to me?”

Bhishma took in breath slowly, hissing between clenched teeth. “I didn’t think. I just thought . . . I wanted to know why you’d done it . . . I thought . . .” He shrugged. “I know you have no power. Only I thought you had—”

“You thought I had deliberately denounced were sepoys to the general? Deliberately denounced you?”

Bhishma’s sweaty hand ran back through his hair. “Something like that.”

“Shouldn’t you be outside, answering questions? Are they going to—”

“I’ll go,” Bhishma said, almost humbly. “I’ll go to the line. I’ll say . . . I didn’t hear.”

A sudden surge of fear seized William. “They’ll ask you more probing questions for coming in late. They’ll push you more.”

Bhishma sent him a strange look of disbelief and said, “Don’t worry, Sahib. I won’t say anything about . . . you.”

William shook his head forcefully, suddenly furious Bhishma could think that was his concern. “No, I don’t mean that. I mean they will push you harder. They will try to get you to change.”

“Oh, that.” He flashed a sudden, wild smile. “I won’t do that here.”

And he went away, leaving William holding his towel around his waist and thinking that things were, after all, far more complicated than he’d thought.

THE TIGERS’ FURY; ALL LOST; WINGS AT LAST