The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [264]
‘Us?… your mother –?’
‘Mine, Bichchhu. Do you not recognize me? Look closer. Have I changed so much? You have not. I knew you again the moment I saw you – that first night in Jhoti's tent; as I knew the pearl too the instant it fell from the hidden pocket you had made for it in a coat that had torn in my hands.’
‘But… but you are a Sahib,’ whispered Biju Ram through dry lips, ‘a Sahib –’
‘Who was once Ashok,’ said Ash softly.
Biju Ram stared and stared. His eyes seemed to stand out from his head, and great beads of sweat that had nothing to do with the warmth of the hot night formed on his forehead and glittered in the moonlight. ‘No, it is not true’ – the words were barely more than a breath of sound – ‘it cannot be… it is not possible… I do not believe…’ But the muttered denials were contradicted by a dawning recognition on his face, and suddenly he said loudly: ‘If it is true, there should be a scar, the mark of a branding –’
‘It is still there,’ said Ash, and pulled open his shirt to show the silvery-white ghost of a half-circle, still faintly visible against his brown, suntanned skin. A mark made long ago by the mouth of an old-fashioned blunderbuss.
He heard Biju Ram's involuntary ‘Wah!’ and glanced down at the scar; which was unwise. He should have known better than to look aside from a man who had not been nicknamed ‘the scorpion’ for nothing and would not have ventured out unarmed. The heavy silver-mounted stick lay just out of Biju Ram's reach, but he carried a particularly deadly knife in a slit pocket in his achkan, and as Ash looked down he whipped it out and struck with the speed of his namesake.
The blow only missed its mark because Ash too could move swiftly; and though he had momentarily lowered his gaze he was aware of the quick movement and dodged instinctively, flinging himself to one side so that the thrust went harmlessly past his left shoulder. The force of it sent Biju Ram plunging forward, and Ash had only to put out a foot to trip him up and send him sprawling full length in the dust.
As he lay there, winded and gasping, Ash turned to snatch up the fallen knife and was tempted to plunge it between those heaving shoulders and be done with it. And had he indeed been of Zarin's blood he would have done so, for the sons of old Koda Dad had no pettifogging scruples in the matter of dealing with an enemy. But now, quite suddenly, Ash's ancestry and those tedious years at a public school betrayed him, for he could not bring himself to strike: not because to do so would have been murder, but for a more trivial reason – because he and his forebears had been taught that it is ‘not cricket’ to stab a man in the back or strike a fallen one; or to attack an unarmed man. It was the unseen presence of Uncle Matthew and a score of pastors and masters that stayed his hand and made him stand back and urge Biju Ram to get up and fight.
But it seemed that Biju Ram had no stomach for fighting, for when his breath returned to him and he began to scramble to his knees, the sight of Ash standing there, knife in hand, made him shrink back with a scream, and he fell on his face again to grovel in the dust and babble incoherent pleas for mercy.
The spectacle was not an edifying one, and though Ash had always known Biju Ram to be a vile creature, it had not occurred to him that the sadistic ogre of his childhood might be a coward at heart. It was a shock to discover that Bichchhu's pleasure in inflicting pain was only equalled by his aversion to enduring it himself, and that he could go to pieces so completely when faced with a taste of his own medicine. Deprived of supporters and a weapon, the ogre had suddenly become a