The Deceivers (21 page)

William salaamed again and walked to his blanket. As he prepared for sleep he muttered to Hussein, ‘Thanksgiving is the ceremony of communion with Kali, isn’t it, when we all take the sugar?’

Hussein said, ‘Yes. I don’t know what god to pray to but Kali, and she’s laughing at me. Please, Gopal, keep off the blanket tomorrow if you can. Don’t eat the consecrated sugar. Eat of the other, the part that is put aside before consecration . . . What’s the use? You’ll have to, or Piroo will get more suspicious than he is already. And he can ruin us if anything makes him try. We’re trapped.’ He looked up suddenly and said, ‘I know. You
want
to eat the consecrated sugar.’

William tried to laugh, but the laugh choked in his throat. At last, lying in his blanket and feeling hot and cold at once, he said, ‘I don’t want to, Hussein. I just don’t care. It is all superstition.’ Hussein did not answer, and William said
superstition, superstition
, over and over to himself, and went to sleep, and did not dream.

It was dark when William stepped shivering out of his blanket and stripped. He washed from head to foot in the stream, standing knee deep in the black rush of water. Afterwards, as the light spread and mist wraiths crept out from the river, he walked through the jungle to the clearing. A heavy dew weighted the stems of grass and pearled the red sandstone robes of the idol. All the band, except the mysterious group of diggers who had appeared during the burial, stood in an untidy huddle round the neem tree. The light filtered grey and unwilling between the interstices of the jungle wall. It was cold, and William trembled. Last night in the grove everything had taken colour from the fire -- the jewels catching it, the faces glowing from it, the blood brightened by it. This morning the world and the people in it were grey, dusty white, dull brown.

The Jemadar greeted him solemnly, looked about as though counting, and said, ‘One on sentry, three buying merchandise up the road, the rest all here. Are you ready Yasin?’

Yasin nodded and stepped out of the crowd. He spread his own and another blanket on the grass, side by side in front of the neem tree. He was carrying a brass lotah full of water in his right hand, holding it by the neck against the outside of his thigh. He set the lotah carefully down on the blankets and held out his hand imperiously. Piroo gave him a heavily filled cotton bag. Yasin held the bag upside down. A torrent of congealed lumps of coarse brown sugar poured out on to the blanket. He glanced over his shoulder. The Deceivers were separating into two groups: in one, the four or five men who William knew did not rank as stranglers; in the other, the rest -- the stranglers.

William tried to edge over to the smaller group, but the Jemadar held him back, whispering, ‘By
rank
. Stay here.’ William saw Piroo looking at him suspiciously, and Hussein’s worried eyes.

Yasin counted the smaller group, carried a part of the sugar over to them, and set it on the grass. They bowed and stood behind their portion, facing west.

Yasin returned to the blankets and placed a rupee from his scrip beside the sugar. He took the pick-axe from his waistband and dug a small hole in the earth just beyond the blankets. After cleaning the pick blade with his rumal, he laid the tool on the blanket beside the sugar and the rupee. He sat down at last on the forward edge of the blanket and crossed his legs.

The stranglers paced slowly forward and sat down in two tight rows on the blanket, to left and right of Yasin and behind him. All faced west. William hesitated again, but he had to go. He sat down on the left of the second row.

Yasin clasped his hands together, raised his eyes, and cried in a deep, thrilled chant, ‘Great goddess, as in old time thou vouchsafed one hundred and sixty-two thousand rupees to Jhora Naik and Koduk Bunwari in their need, so, we beseech thee, fulfil our desires.’

The stranglers clasped their hands and bent forward from the waist, and William imitated them. They muttered together, repeating the prayer, ‘Great goddess, as in old time thou vouchsafed . . .’ William heard the murmur of the little group on the grass behind.

All fell silent. No wind stirred the boughs of the neem. The mist had cleared, nothing blunted the hard edges of the dawn. Yasin picked up the rupee in his right hand and dropped it into the hole he had dug. He took a little sugar and crumbled it in his fingers over the hole, so that the sugar streamed down on the rupee. He took the lotah and sprinkled water into the hole. Lastly he put his rumal, folded, in his right hand, laid the pick-axe crosswise on the rumal, supported his right hand with his left, and raised the pick-axe level with his chest. He lifted his head once more.

‘O Kali, greatest Kali, thy servants thank thee for the magnificence of thy gift. We have done thy will, and wrought for thy glory. We pray now for thy further guidance and blessing. Guard us and keep us, as we guard thy memory among men, now and for evermore. Amen.’

He raised the pick-axe slightly on his hands, repeating the action three times. The echoes of his voice died.

A black crow descended squawking from the sky and settled on the neem tree, behind and a little to the left of the blankets. At once a shrike started out of the bushes to the right and flew like an arrow between the trees, its insect prey in its beak.

The Deceivers crooned in ecstasy. From the corner of his eye William saw the exaltation in the face of the man next to him.

Yasin Khan’s organ voice boomed, ‘Kali, mighty Kali, we obey, we praise thy name, we are thine!’

He stood up. With a whisper of cloth all the Deceivers stood. Yasin’s cupped right palm was full of the coarse sugar lumps, and his left hand supported his right. He turned and with slow steps approached the strangler who stood to the right of the front blanket. Yasin held out the sugar. The man took a piece, carried it to his mouth, bowed his head, and ate in silence.

Yasin murmured, ‘Take, eat, this is the sweetness of Kali. You are hers and she is yours.’

The strangler raised his head, and Yasin moved to the next man, always keeping his feet on the blankets. He held out the sugar. ‘Take, eat, this is the sweetness of Kali. You are hers and she is yours.’

Take, eat, this is the sweetness of Kali . . . Take, eat . . . You are hers and she is yours . . .

Icicles of sweat pierced William’s forehead and splintered between his shoulder blades. His mouth ached. He would not be able to touch the sugar when it came to him. He wished desperately that he had something wooden, hard, to hold in his hands -- a cross. Not silver, not sweet-smelling -- only wood, rough bitter wood, would serve. The feel of it might help him to face what he had to, or give him strength to break away, spring off the enchanted blanket, and run. Hussein had a cross.

He saw Yasin reach Hussein, in front of him. Yasin’s eyes were half closed and his prayer a litany. ‘Take, eat, this is the sweetness of Kali.’ Hussein held on to something at his waist, but he had to let go. Kali required both his hands. His fingers crawled out, so slowly that he seemed to be trying to pull them back against a force stronger than their own muscles. He took a piece of sugar at last, bowed, and swallowed. William closed his eyes.

When he opened them, Yasin’s luminous face swam into focus a foot away. Yasin was a saint, transported now into the arms of his goddess, and love ached in his voice.

Take, eat .
. . William put out his right hand.

This is the sweetness of Kali
. . . William bowed his head and touched his lips to the sugar. He picked it up with his tongue. His stomach rose to meet it. He had expected it to taste of the death that tainted it, and of silver, but he swallowed it -- it was just sugar. He ate it down.

You are hers and she is yours. Yasin moved on to the next man.

All his nausea gone, William glanced over his shoulder and saw that those on the grass were handing round their unconsecrated sugar and eating it. Yasin returned to his place, picked up the lotah, and began again, at the right of the blankets, offering each man water.

‘Take, drink, this is the milk of Kali. You are hers and she is yours.’

Each man held his right hand to his mouth and Yasin poured a little water on to his palm and so down his throat. William drank confidently. It was all rank superstition, and only the chill of the dawn and the remembered horrors of last night had upset his stomach.

When all had drunk, Yasin returned to his place, filled in the hole and covered it with leaves and twigs, and put the pick-axe back into his waistband. The Deceivers stood in silence and waited. Yasin stepped off the blankets.

The Deceivers relaxed, and moved away, and began to chatter excitedly. ‘Do you think the crow could see the stream from up there?’ ‘Of course it could! Look, over those bushes. We can almost see it from down here.’

The Jemadar seized William’s arm. ‘I don’t remember omens as good as that for -- oh, many, many years! The crow was on a tree’ -- he ticked off on his fingers -- ‘on our left, in sight of water. The omen on the right came within one second -- less!’ He smoothed down his moustache and beard. ‘Come on, let us ride to Manikwal, you and I. We’ve got some horses now. Yasin Khan and your friend Hussein can come with us, on foot. Everyone else knows what to do.’

‘All right. Give me a few minutes to get packed and saddled up.’

‘I’ll meet you in the grove.’

The walled town of Manikwal lay fifteen miles to the northeast. William had heard of it as a populous little place with the provincial reputation of a Gomorrah. Its ruler he had met once in Madhya, a bawdy old reprobate who ruled his people with an open but heavy hand. In this country, on the southern marches of Bandelkhand, a tangle of tiny states overlapped and interlaced; wars and marriages had given them the most unlikely geographies -- some were actually contained complete within others, and few were of any size.

William walked his horse at the Jemadar’s side. The November sun warmed them. They could see the town for two hours before they reached it in the afternoon. Like Jalpura, its houses stepped up, one behind the other, on the side of a hill. It, too, had a lake, but the rajah took little care of anything except his pleasures, and the townspeople had planted water chestnut, and the lake would soon be a clogged, noisome swamp. But the town wall was in good repair, and an armed man guarded the gate. They rode past him into the town.

A press of people filled the narrow street. William looked up the hill to see what excited them, for they were all peering in that direction. He heard distant, isolated shouts and the echoing boom of a cannon fired from the rajah’s fort at the crown of the slope. The Jemadar leaned down -- he was so trimly correct today, the ideal of a competent tradesman -- and said to a man at his stirrup, ‘What’s happening, friend?’

‘Don’t know. Someone being executed, I suppose.’

The Jemadar looked at William meaningfully. When on the road, the Deceivers counted it a good omen to see a man being taken to execution or a corpse on its way to the burning.

A camel lurched over the brow of the hill and walked down with short, rubbery strides between the heaving crowds. The man on its back jerked to its movements till William thought he must fall off. The camel strode closer, and William saw that the rider’s feet were roped together under its belly. He was a little rabbit of a man with protruding teeth and a mean, close face. His clothes were in the disarray of one already dead, torn down the front and hanging in tatters at his sides, and his head was bare. From the lonely height of the camel’s hump he looked about with lacklustre eyes, seeking escape but knowing there was none. The camel passed, and the horses stamped and snorted, backing away from its acrid-stale smell. The camel held its head high, its lips curled in the perpetual camel sneer.

Behind the camel an elephant paced gingerly down the steep. Two men in ragged uniform on its back shouted continually, ‘See the justice of our prince! A thief goes to execution! See the justice of our prince!’

The elephant passed, its ridiculously trousered backside clowning in the presence of death. The cries of the executioners passed. The people closed in across the street behind the elephant and followed. They were going to see the execution. Soon, after many ceremonies, the ragged soldiers would rope the thief to the elephant’s forefoot and make it run about on the flat earth beside the lake. The elephant would try to lift its feet and not tread on the man as he dragged along under his belly; but in the end it had to trample him.

The street was deserted. The Jemadar said softly, ‘Just an ordinary little thief. They always get caught -- and serves them right! They’re so weak.’

William did not know whether he agreed. Certainly the little thieves of the world led weak, ordinary lives.

The Jemadar continued, ‘I’m not sure that we won’t get like that soon. Things aren’t what they used to be in our brotherhood. Piroo’s very pessimistic. Of course, he’s jealous’ -- he smiled at William -- ‘he threatened to quit the road. Says he’s going to retire, buy some land, and take up his trade.’

‘What’s that?’ William asked idly, not really listening but waiting with painful expectancy for his inner ear to catch the elephant’s bewildered trumpeting and the scream of the crowd.

The Jemadar said, ‘He’s a carpenter.’

William said, ‘Oh, is he?’ and thought of Piroo afresh. Jealous, wanting to be strong, a little weak, a little stupid. He himself was a carpenter. They were not unlike.

The Jemadar said, ‘Here,’ and turned into a lane between tall houses. The boarded lower storeys facing the street showed that this was the harlots’ quarter of the town. The boards would be removed at dusk. The lane smelled of filth and human urine.

Behind the houses they entered a stable yard and dismounted. Hussein and Yasin stabled the horses.

An old woman stuck her head out of a glassless window opening. ‘Hey, what do you want?’

The Jemadar turned. ‘Travellers, princess. We would like to use your upper back room for a week or so.’

The old woman chuckled. ‘Princess, my arse! How many of you, haji?’