Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [97]
And now Bhagmati stood. In the harsh, throaty voice of a street vendor, a tone and pitch Hannah had never heard from her servant, she commanded the beast. With immense slowness, it dropped to its rear knees, then its front knees, never tipping the howdah platform. The women lifted the dead weight of the unconscious Raja to the platform. He seemed to be breathing through the deep, ragged wound in his chest. Hannah put her hand over it and felt a faint tug, the suction of life. She knew that it must be cleaned and sealed, the blood loss stopped, but that even an expert surgeon with all the proper equipment would place more faith in Providence than in his skills to save a life so far gone.
They climbed back on the beast, and again it rose and, with Bhagmati’s guiding, made its way up the path to which the Raja had been leading them, up to the ridge where the General’s troops had waited in ambush but were now scattered in roving bands of looters, to the open plains of Devgad and the fort beyond.
9
HANNAH, her red sari stained even redder, arrived in Devgad on the blood-encrusted, stolen elephant of the enemy General, bearing the wounded body of her warrior-lover.
The Queen Mother met the horses in the outermost courtyard of the complex. She seemed hardly a queen, a bent brown stick of a woman in a dingy white sari wrapped for mobility rather than grace. Her head was carelessly shaved, her eyes bleached gray by age, her lips browned by chewing tobacco. Her skin smelled of despair and sleeplessness,
“Carry him to my palace!” she commanded in a harsh, croupy voice. Burly servants lifted their wounded Raja from the blood-soaked floor of the howdah. Hannah walked between them, hand still cupped over the Raja’s breast. They laid him out on a litter. The Queen Mother lowered herself on her haunches and swabbed the Raja’s forehead.
“Take that away,” she ordered, meaning the white woman’s hand, which had already polluted her son’s caste, but Hannah refused, with a minimum of respect, in order to demonstrate her seriousness. To lift her hand would tear away the clotting that had already begun. The Queen Mother spoke the language of her western regions, unknown to Hannah, only roughly translatable by Bhagmati. Toothless, ancient, spirit dominated, perhaps demented, she communicated one idea: Hannah had brought bad luck. The Raja had left the fort healthy and ready for battle, he met the firangi and a spear had found his heart.
“Mataji,” Bhagmati began, “she has plucked him from the fields of the dead. She killed the General of the Grand Mughal. She has avenged this wounding.”
“She is a better raja than my son? The witch has weakened him? Now she even kills his enemies?” The old Queen spat a brown jet at Hannah’s feet. “Look at him. He is useless. He cannot fight.”
Behind her, her attendants formed a sullen semicircle. They swished the air with their ivory-handled flyswatters and peacock-feather fans. Litter bearers lifted the inert Raja shoulder-high, to the high-pitched lamentations of the women, who formed a corridor for his passage across the inner courtyard.
“Let him die in peace,” his mother cried. “This woman has taken his manhood. He has become a woman, so let him die in a woman’s palace.”
Hannah pushed through the cordon of attendants, then shouted back at her servant and the old Queen. “Tell her, Bhagmati, tell her I know magic. Tell her I can save him.”
She found her lover laid out as