The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [428]
The leaders blew on conches while the rear rank whirled strips of brass bells above the heads of those who walked between, and behind these came a motley company of other holy men, a score or more of them: saints, sadhus and ascetics, jangling bells and chanting; naked and ash-smeared or soberly dressed in flowing robes of saffron or orange, dull red or white; some with their heads shaved and others whose matted hair and beards, having never been cut, reached half-way to their knees. As wild a crew as Ash had ever seen, they had gathered here like kites who can see death from a great distance away, converging together from every corner of the State to attend the suttee. Behind them came the bier, borne high above the crowd and rocking and dipping to the pace of its bearers like a boat on a choppy sea.
The body that it bore was swathed in white and heaped about with garlands, and Ash was astonished to see how small it looked. The Rana had not been a big man, but then he had always been magnificently dressed and glittering with jewels, and always the centre of a subservient court; all of which had tended to make him seem a good deal larger than he was. But the spare, white-shrouded corpse on the bier looked no larger than an under-nourished child of ten. An insignificant object; and a very lonely one, for it was not the focus of the crowd's attention. They had not come here to see a dead man, but a still living woman. And now at last she was here, walking behind the bier; and at the sight of her, pandemonium broke loose, until even the solid fabric of the chattri seemed to tremble at the impact of that roar of sound.
Ash had not seen her at first. His gaze had been fixed on the shrunken thing that had once been his enemy. But a movement near him made him turn his head and he saw that Anjuli had come to stand beside him, and that she was staring through the chik with an expression of shrinking horror, as though she could not bear to look and yet could not keep herself from looking. And following the direction of that agonized gaze, he saw Shushila. Not the Shushila he had expected to see – bowed, weeping and half-crazed by terror, but a queen… a Rani of Bhithor.
Had he been asked, Ash would have insisted that Shu-shu would never be able to walk to the burning-ground unassisted, and that if she walked at all and did not have to be brought in a litter, it would only be because she had been stupefied by drugs and then half dragged and half carried there. But the small, brilliant figure walking behind the Rana's bier was not only alone, but walking upright and unfaltering; and there was pride and dignity in every line of her slender body.
Her small head was erect and the little unshod feet that had never before stepped on anything harsher than Persian carpets and cool polished marble trod slowly and steadily, marking the burning dust with small neat footprints that the adoring crowds behind her pressed forward to obliterate with kisses.
She was dressed as Ash had seen her at the marriage ceremony, in the scarlet and gold wedding dress, and decked with the same jewels as she had worn that day. Pigeon's-blood rubies circled her throat and wrists, glowed on her forehead and her fingers, and swung from her ears. There were rubies too on the chinking golden anklets, and the hard sunlight glittered on the gold embroidery of the full-skirted Rajputani dress and flashed on the little jewelled bodice. But this time she wore no sari, and her long hair was unbound as though for her bridal night. It rippled about her in a silky black curtain that was more beautiful than any sari made by man, and Ash could not drag his gaze from her, though his body cringed from that tragic sight.
She seemed wholly unconscious of the jostling crowds who applauded her, calling on her to bless them and struggling