The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [16]
The woman in the bushes lay in a curious attitude, as though she had crawled through the tangled undergrowth on hands and knees and had fallen asleep, exhausted. The red light of burning buildings, glinting through the leaves, showed her to be an excessively stout lady wearing a whalebone crinoline and a number of petticoats under a voluminous dress of grey and white striped bombazine which made her appear even stouter. But she was not asleep. She was dead. She must, thought Sita, shrinking back from that vast, silent shape, be one of the Sahib-log who had attempted to escape the massacre in the city and had died of terror or heart-failure, for she bore no sign of any wound. Perhaps she too had been trying to reach the cantonments, and perhaps there were other English fugitives hiding in the shadows – or mutineers, hunting them down.
The latter thought was an alarming one, but a moment's consideration convinced Sita that any sounds of pursuit would be clearly audible among the thickets of the ruined garden, and that no search would be undertaken without torches to light the way. The night was quiet and the only movements she could hear came from the direction of the road. They could safely wait here.
Tethering the donkey so that it could not wander away, she made a nest among the grasses for the child, and having fed him with the last hoarded fragments of a chuppatti, lulled him to sleep with the whispered story of the valley among the mountains where they would one day live in that flat-roofed house among the fruit trees, and keep a goat and a cow, a puppy and a kitten… ‘And the donkey,’ said Ash drowsily. ‘We must take the donkey.’
‘Assuredly we will take the donkey, he shall help us carry water jars from the river; and wood for our fire, for when night falls it is cool in the high valleys – cool and pleasant, and the wind that blows through the forests smells of pine-cones and snow and makes a sound that says “Hush – Hush –Hush”…’ Ash sighed happily and was asleep.
Sita waited patiently hour after hour until the glow in the sky died down and the stars began to pale, and then smelling the approach of dawn, she roused the sleeping child and stole out of the Kudsia Bagh to complete the last lap of their long journey to the cantonments of Delhi.
There was no one on the road now. It lay grey and empty and deep in dust, and though the air was cool from the river and the long reaches of wet sand, it was tainted with the smell of smoke and a faint reek of corruption, while the silence magnified every small sound: the snap of a dead twig underfoot, the click of a stone struck by the donkey's hooves and Sita's own short uneven breathing. It seemed to her that their progress must be audible a mile away, and she began to urge the donkey to greater speed, kicking its furry sides with her bare heels and exhorting it in a breathless whisper to hurry – hurry.
The last time she and the child had come this way they had driven in a carriage and the distance between the Kashmir Gate and the cantonments had seemed a very short one; but now it seemed endless, and long before they reached the crest of the ridge the sky was grey with the first hint of morning, and the black, shapeless masses to the left and right of the road had resolved themselves into rocks and stunted thorn trees. It was easier once the road began to descend; they made better time on the downward slope, and the silence reassured Sita.