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By Root 958 0

worm on the ground. If I lie here it will crush me. And so she sat up, and then she stood; the only human left standing, the only human with a face not obliterated. Let the elephant, the soldiers, kill me now, she thought. But what few survivors who lingered were too busy looting corpses, dashing from body to body, pulling off rings and tugging daggers out of the folds of tunics, to waste a bullet on a woman. Jackals, human jackals. Humans are beasts, base-driven, venomous, unfeeling. She deserved this death, Lord knew, the way she’d lived for pleasure amid the sufferings of others, but at least she would not surrender. The General shouted orders, laughing. The beast maneuvered its head, feigned with its trunk, like some monstrous version of swordplay. The elephant’s trunk was just a bloated version of a pig’s snout, the sort of moist, smooth pink and bristly thing she’d fed as a child. She’d always thought of elephants as wise and slow and gentle beasts, comically jolly like the elephant-headed god, Ganesh, curiously tolerant of abuse and overwork, like the Indian coolies themselves. India seemed determined to teach her the cruel side of every pleasure, the evil behind every innocence.

The General gave a sharp new command, and the elephant raised its trunk and held it curled over her head, like a hammer ready to fall.

“The firangi lady,” the General shouted. “The English lady.”

“Not English,” she cried out.

The elephant’s trunk descended like a lightning bolt, knocking her to her knees, then curled about her, lifting her straight out, like a wooden log. She’d watched the work elephants do the same, lift the logs, hold them out, then drop them wherever their mahouts ordered. She’d heard stories from Gabriel and all the factors of mass executions in the hinterland—trampling by elephants, Roman circus carnage—where the laws of England or the more palatable trappings of Mughal justice were not observed.

She was conveyed upward, then turned to a sitting position and deposited on the elephant’s granite-hard hindquarters. General Morad Farah, a grizzled, fair-skinned Moor with a thick, short beard, gold earrings under his turban, turned in his howdah and asked, “Where is the Raja?”

Far below, Bhagmati took advantage of the moment of inattention and ran, diving into the taller grass.

“You have killed him.”

“He is wounded. He will die of his wounds, but that will deprive me of my mission.”

“He has suffered enough, then. Even for you.”

He laughed again, or at least bared his perfect teeth in a kind of victorious grimace out of which he might dispense the grace of survival or a blood burst of violence.

And so they began the tour of the battleground, the elephant’s feet thick with brown blood and with fresher blood from bodies still living when the foot had come down upon them, causing blood to spurt across the elephant’s chest, up to the level of its eyes, caking its gold-capped tusk stumps with gore. The beast looked like a victim of the battle rather than its finalizer. It had not rained, but blood, tankards of blood, had churned the ground to mud.

Where are the survivors? she wondered. No victors, no prisoners, just a ghoul here and there completing his rounds of looting. Overhead, buzzards were circling ever lower. That night, the fields of Devgad Defile would teem with hyenas and jackals.

“Now we find your Raja,” the General announced, giving the elephant a solid, reverberating whack with the decorated iron ankus, the elephant prod with a hawklike talon that could just as easily crush the skull of a man. The beast turned toward the steep ascent. Hannah moved slowly, inching her way from the great flat hipbones along the spine to the slight cavity between the mounds of hips and shoulders, where the canopied howdah swayed. From the great height, Hannah saw Bhagmati, a white ghost running low through the stalks of grass, keeping pace.

Ah … came the long, satisfied, victory sigh of General Morad Farah. Raja Jadav Singh lay beside his dead white horse, attended by a woman in a white sari.

The elephant raised its trunk