The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [20]
Beyond the canal the path narrowed to a track between sugar cane and tall grass, and presently it met the broad level of the Grand Trunk Road. But instead of turning down it, they crossed over it and followed a field path towards the little village of Dahipur. Without the donkey they could not have gone far, but once out of sight of the highroad, Sita dismounted and walked, and in this way they put several miles between themselves and Delhi before the sun became too hot. Their progress had been slower than it might have been, for Sita was still actively aware of danger and made constant detours in order to avoid villages and casual wayfarers. It was true that Ash-Baba had inherited his mother's black hair and that the open-air life of the camp had burned his already brown skin as dark as any Indian's, but his eyes were agate-grey, and who was to say that some suspicious passer-by would not recognize him as a white child and kill him for the sake of blood-money? One could also never be certain what a child would say or do, and she would not feel safe until Delhi and the mutineers from Meerut were many days' march behind her.
The crops as yet provided little cover, but the plain was seamed and scored with dry gullies, and there were thickets of thorn and elephant grass that offered adequate hiding-places even for the donkey. Yet here too the English had passed, for a buzzing cloud of flies betrayed the body of an elderly Eurasian, probably a clerk from one of the Government offices, hidden in a patch of grass by the side of the path. He too, like the fat woman in the Kudsia Bagh, had crawled into the grass and died there; but unlike her he had been so sorely wounded that it was astonishing that he should have been able to drag himself so far.
It disturbed Sita to find that others too had attempted to escape across country instead of taking the road to Kurnal. The sight of such wretched fugitives would only serve to bring news of the rising to previously peaceful villages, and kindle scorn of the feringhis (foreigners) and support for the rebellious sepoys, and she had hoped by taking this route to out-distance the news from Delhi. Now it seemed as though she had set herself an impossible task, for the man who had died in the grass had quite obviously been there since the previous day, and it looked as though someone must have helped him to get that far – the same person who had carefully spread a handkerchief over his face before leaving him to the flies and the eaters of carrion. Sita dragged the reluctant donkey past, and distracted Ash's attention and her own anguished thoughts by embarking on his favourite story of the secret valley, and of how they would find it someday and live happily ever after.
Towards nightfall they were well off the beaten track, and she judged it safe enough to stop at a village whose twinkling lights promised a bazaar and the prospect of hot food and fresh milk. Ash-Baba was tired and sleepy and therefore less likely to talk, while the donkey too needed food and water, and she herself was very weary. They slept that night in a lean-to shed belonging to a hospitable cultivator, which they shared with the donkey and the cultivator's cow, Sita representing herself as the wife of a blacksmith from Jullunder way, returning from Agra with an orphaned nephew, the son of her husband's brother. She bought hot food and buffalo-milk in the bazaar, where she heard a variety of frightening rumours – each one worse than the last – and later, when Ash was asleep, she joined a group of gossiping villagers on the edge of the threshing-ground.
Sitting well back among the shadows, she listened to stories of the rising, the tale having reached here that morning, brought by a party of Gujars and confirmed in the late afternoon by five sepoys