The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [268]
There remained only Hira Lal's earring.
Ash took it out of his pocket and looked at it, and saw the black pearl gather and reflect the moonlight as it had done on that last, long-ago night in the Queen's balcony. And as he looked, the words that Hira Lal had spoken then came back to him, and it was almost as though the man himself was speaking to him again, very softly, and from very far away: ‘Make haste, boy. It grows late and you have no time to waste. Go now – and may the gods go with you. Namaste!’
Well, he – or perhaps the black pearl – had avenged Hira Lal. But the pearl held too many memories, and remembering how Biju Ram had come by it, it seemed to Ash a thing of ill-omen. Its possession could have brought little satisfaction to the thief, since to own it was proof of murder, so it had to be kept hidden away, with an ever-present risk of discovery, for as long as anyone remembered Hira Lal; and in the end it had brought only death. The pearl had done its work, and now Ash could not wait to be rid of it.
There was a rat hole near the clump of pampas grass in which he had lain in wait for Biju Ram, and judging from the lack of tracks about it, one that was no longer tenanted. Ash went back to it, and having dropped in the earring, filled it in with earth and small stones that he stamped hard down; and when he had scattered a handful of dust over the spot there was no longer any trace of the hole, or any indication that there had ever been one.
He stood for a moment or two looking down at the spot and thinking that perhaps, one day, someone as yet unborn would unearth the earring and wonder how it came there. But they would never know, and anyway, by then the thing would be almost valueless, for pearls too can die.
The dawn wind had begun to stir the grasses when Ash turned on his heel and started back to the camp. But the sun had been well above the horizon by the time that one of Biju Ram's servants (that same Karam who had been allotted the role of scapegoat) reported that his master was missing.
He would, explained Karam, have disclosed this much sooner had he not imagined that his master must have gone out unexpectedly early and would soon return. It was not his business to question his master's comings and goings, but he had become increasingly anxious when tent after tent came down and still his master had not returned to eat his morning meal or give any orders for the day. Tentative inquiries among the servants and the other members of the young prince's entourage having proved fruitless, Karam had finally reported the matter to an officer of the guard, who had raised the alarm.
The search for the missing man was complicated by the enormous size of the camp and the fact that it was by then on the move, and it is more than likely that Biju Ram's body would never have been found had it not been for the kites and the vultures. But the sun had not yet risen when the first winged scavenger dropped out of the skies, to be followed by another and another; and presently one of the searchers had seen them and ridden out to investigate.
The discovery had been made only just in time, for half an hour later there would have been nothing to show how Biju Ram had died, and there would have been talk of foul play and, inevitably, exhaustive inquiries. As it was, in spite of a good deal of damage from beak and claw it was still possible to see that his death was due to poison and that his body bore the mark of a snake's fangs – two small punctures near the collar bone. How or why he had come to be in that spot was less easy to explain, but as Ash had surmised, this was eventually put down to a combination of heat and insomnia,