The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [403]
‘They came to select a site for the funeral pyre,’ said Sarji.
Ash nodded without speaking, his gaze on the dark patch of greenery ahead. Behind him the evening was full of sounds: the bleating of goats and the lowing of cattle, the shrill cries of herd-boys and the soft cooing of doves, the clamorous call of a partridge and from somewhere on the road the squeak and squeal of cart-wheels rumbling homeward to the city. Comfortable, every-day sounds; pleasantly familiar and very different from the deafening babble of the peering, jostling, wailing crowd that would gather here only too soon, jammed together shoulder to shoulder and pressing in on either side of this same dusty path that he was walking along now…
If he rode here he would have to leave Dagobaz tethered somewhere well beyond the crowds, for apart from the multitudes who would flock here to watch the cremation, thousands more would accompany the bier and its escort, milling about it and moving slowly forward in a rolling tide of humanity, resistless and terrifying. Visualizing the scene, Ash realized that the only advantage to be gained from it would be anonymity. No one was going to pay the least attention to him if he joined that crowd. He would merely be one of them, another onlooker, unremarkable and unremarked provided he came on foot. A mounted man would be far too conspicuous; and in any case, Dagobaz was unused to such crowds and there was no knowing how he would react to one.
‘It would not be possible,’ muttered Sarji, whose mind had evidently been moving on similar lines. ‘Had this place only been on the other side of the city, there might have been a chance. But we could never get away from here even if we could cut our way through the crowd at our backs, since those hills there hem us in on one side and the lake on the other, while over there –’ he jerked his chin to the eastward ‘– there is no way out, so we should have to ride back towards the city and everyone here would know it.’
‘Yes, I realized that.’
‘Then why are we here?’ There was more than a trace of uneasiness in Sarji's voice.
‘Because I wanted to see the place for myself before I made up my mind. I thought perhaps that there might turn out to be some… some feature of it that could be turned to advantage, or that might suggest something to me. There may yet be. If there is not, we shall be no worse off.’
The hoof-prints stopped within the fringe of a dense grove of trees, and it was easy to see where the riders had dismounted and left their horses before entering the grove on foot. Ash and Sarji, following the same path between avenues of tree-trunks and out into the open again, found themselves in a large clearing in the centre of what appeared to be a deserted city: a city of palaces or temples, set among the trees.
There were buildings everywhere. Memorial chattris. Vast, empty, symbolic tombs, built of the local sandstone and intricately and beautifully carved, some of them three and four storeys high so that their airy, domed pavilions, screened in pierced stone and piled one upon the other in the manner of a fantastic house of cards, stood well above the tree-tops.
Each chattri commemorated a Rana of Bhithor, and had been raised on the spot where his body had been burned. And each, in the manner of a temple, had been built to surround or face on to a large tank, so that any who came to pray could perform the proper ablutions. It did not appear that many did so, for the water in the tanks was, mostly green and stagnant and full of weeds and mud fish, and many of the chattris were half ruined. Pigeons, parrots and owls had built nests in crevices between the stones and