The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [448]
Therefore he hurried them on, and only when the full heat of the morning was beating down on them, and Anjuli showed signs of flagging, did he pause to change places with her, declaring himself sufficiently rested to go forward on foot. But he would not let them stop, except for a short time at mid-day when they ate a frugal meal in the shade of an overhanging rock and he slept for a space.
That brief cat-nap ended, he urged them on again, plodding steadily forward, and turning whenever they crossed a ridge to look back and search for signs of pursuit. But nothing moved except the landscape, which appeared to quiver in the dancing heat, and in the brassy sky behind them a handful of dark specks that wheeled round and round and told their own tale. The kites and vultures had been driven from their meal by the arrival of men – probably a good many men – and were circling overhead waiting for the intruders to leave.
‘They have found the pool,’ muttered Bukta, ‘and now they will know that we have only one horse between the three of us and must keep to a foot's pace. Let us hope they will take their time drinking the water and quarrelling over who shall have your saddle and bridle.’
Perhaps they had done so. At all events, they did not succeed in coming within eye-shot of the fugitives, and by the time the sun was low in the sky and the parched hillsides were once again streaked with violet shadows, it had become clear that they would not do so now. So clear that when at last, and by starlight, they came to Bukta's old camping ground in the little tree-filled valley, he felt secure enough to light a fire in order to cook chuppattis and discourage any prowling leopard from approaching. And also to wash his blood-stained clothing and spread it out to dry.
They had all three been too exhausted to sleep well that night, and Bukta and Ash had taken it in turns to keep watch, for there were pug-marks in the damp earth at the water's edge and they could not risk losing the pony. By first light they were on the move again and, except that there was less sense of urgency and they did not pause so often to look behind them, the day was a repetition of the one before; though even hotter and more tiring. They rested only when Bukta permitted it, with the result that nightfall found them footsore, weary and parched with thirst, but among the foothills.
The old shikari had slept soundly that night, and so also had Anjuli, worn out by the strain of a long, hot day in the saddle. But though Ash too was very tired, he had slept only fitfully and once again his sleep had been troubled by dreams, not of pursuit or of Dagobaz, but of Shushila. The same dream, endlessly repeated, from which he awoke shuddering: only to dream it again as soon as consciousness slipped from him…
Each time he slept, Shushila appeared before him dressed in her bridal array of scarlet and gold, and implored him with tears not to kill her, but he would not listen and raising the revolver he pressed the trigger and saw the lovely, pleading face dissolve in blood. And woke again…
‘But what else could I have done?’ thought Ash angrily. Wasn't it enough that he should have to bear the responsibility for Sarji's death, without being haunted by the reproachful ghost of Shushila, whose end he had merely hastened as Bukta had hastened Dagobaz's? But then Shushila was not an animal: she was a human being, who had decided of her own free will to face death by fire and thereby achieve holiness; and he, Ash, had taken it upon himself to cheat her of that.
He had done more – he had interfered in something that was a matter of faith and a very personal thing; and he could not even be sure that Shushila's convictions were wrong, for did not the Christian calendar contain the names of many men and women who had been burned at the stake for their beliefs, and acclaimed