The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [418]
He shut his eyes against the glaring sunlight, but found this time that he could no longer shut out thought. Pictures formed behind his closed eye-lids as though he were seeing lantern-slides flashed on a screen: Juli in her yellow and gold wedding-dress with her black hair rippling unbraided to her knees, supporting the dazed, ruby-decked figure of her little sister… The two of them moving out from the shadows of the Queen's Palace into the blazing afternoon, walking towards the Suttee Gate and pausing there to dip their hands into a bowl of red dye before pressing them against the stone sides of the archway, where the imprint of their palms and fingers would join those of many former queens of Bhithor who had in their turn passed through that cruel gate on their way to death.
Well, at least it would bear no more prints, thought Ash. And perhaps some time in the next century, fifty, sixty or a hundred years hence, when even such dark corners as this would probably have been tamed and become respectable and law-abiding – and dull – parties of earnest globe-trotters would come to stare at the archway and be told the tale of the Last Suttee. The very last in Bhithor. And of how an unknown madman…
Ash had not noticed when the gossiping voice at his elbow ceased, or when the deafening babble of the crowd began to die away until even the hucksters and the children stopped shouting and stood quiet to listen. It was the unexpected silence that broke his waking dream. The watchers had seen puffs of white smoke and bright flashes from the forts that overlooked the city, and now that silence had fallen, they could hear the boom of cannon. The forts were firing a salute as the dead Rana left his capital city for the last time.
A man in the crowd cried shrilly, ‘Hark! They come,’ and Ash heard a far-off sound, harsh, ululating and indescribably mournful – the screech of conch-shells blown by the Brahmins who walked at the head of the funeral cortège. As he listened there came another sound, equally far away, but as unmistakable: a great roar as thousands of voices greeted the appearance of the suttees with shouts of ‘Khaman Kher! Khaman Kher! – ‘Well done!’
The crowded terraces and the close-packed masses below stirred and swayed like a field of corn when a gust of wind blows over it, and the babble broke out again, less noisily than before, but so fraught with anticipation that the very air of the hot afternoon seemed to vibrate to the tension that gripped the waiting crowds.
The hum of voices drowned those distant sounds, making it impossible to hear them or to judge how long it would be before the cortège reached the grove. Half an hour, perhaps? The distance by road between the Mori Gate and the grove was less than a mile and a half, though the sound of the conches had not to travel so far, it being considerably less as the crow flies. But then Ash had no way of knowing how far the procession had come already. The trees and the chattris, the dust and the heat-haze made it impossible to see the road, and it might be nearer than he supposed.
The only thing that he could be sure of was that it would come very slowly, because of the crowds who would press forward to throw garlands upon the bier and make obeisance to the dead man's widows, struggling to touch the hems of their saris as they passed, begging for their prayers and stooping to kiss the ground they had trodden on… Yes, it would be a slow business. And even when the cortège reached the burning-ground there would still be plenty of time, for he had taken the trouble to learn all that he could of the rites that would be performed.
Tradition dictated