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By Root 3000 0

brought him a silver four-anna piece as a beginning, telling him that they should start saving up for the house. The little coin was more money than Ash had held in his hand for a long time, and to him even more than to Kairi it represented something approximating to riches. There were a dozen things he would like to have spent it on, but he hid it instead under a loose stone in the floor of the Queen's balcony, telling her that they would add to it when they could. They never did so, for money was hard to come by in the Hawa Mahal; and though there was always enough to eat, and clothing could be had if one could prove the need of it, Ash looked back on his life in the city as a time of affluence as well as freedom, and recalled with longing his modest wages as a horse-boy in Duni Chand's stables.

It was humiliating to realize that in these days he could not even match Kairi's meagre contribution, and that if he should ever obtain permission to leave the service of the Yuveraj, and overcome Sita's prejudice against soldiering as a career, he would not be able to join Zarin. For Koda Dad told him that the Guides Cavalry was recuited on the Silladar system, by which each recruit brought his own horse and also a sum of money with which to buy his equipment, the latter being refunded to him on discharge. Zarin had had both money and a horse, but Ash could see little prospect of acquiring either.

‘When I am married, I will give you all the money you need,’ consoled Kairi, whose betrothal was already being discussed in the Women's Quarter of the Hawa Mahal.

‘What's the good of that?’ retorted Ash ungratefully. ‘It'll be too late then. You won't be married for years and years – you're only a baby.’

‘I shall be six soon,’ urged Kairi, ‘and Aruna says that this is old enough to be married.’

‘Then they will take you away, perhaps days and days of marches from here; and however rich you are, you won't be able to send money back to Gulkote,’ said Ash, determined to look on the dark side of things. ‘And anyway, your husband might not give you any money.’

‘Of course he would. If I were a Maharani I should have crores and crores of rupees to spend – like Janoo-Rani has. And diamonds and pearls and elephants and –’

‘And an old, fat, bad-tempered husband who will beat you, and then die years and years before you do, so that you will have to become a suttee and be burned alive with him.’

‘Don't say that.’ Kairi's voice shook and her small face turned pale, for the Suttee Gate with its pathetic frieze of red hand-prints had always filled her with horror, and she could not bear to pass that tragic reminder of the scores of women who had made those marks – the wives and concubines who had been burned alive with the bodies of dead Rajahs of Gulkote, and who had dipped their palms in red dye and pressed them against the stone as they passed out through the Suttee Gate on their last short journey to the funeral pyre. Such slender, delicate little hands, some of them no bigger than her own. The British had forbidden the barbaric custom of suttee, but everyone knew that in remote and independent states, where white men were seldom seen, it was still practised; and half the population of Gulkote could remember seeing Kairi's grandmother, the old Rani, immolating herself in the flames that consumed the body of her husband, together with three lesser wives and seventeen women of the Zenana.

‘If I were you, Juli,’ said Ash thinking it over, ‘I wouldn't get married at all. It's too dangerous.’

Few Europeans had ever visited Gulkote, for although the state was now officially part of the territory that had come under the jurisdiction of the British Crown after the sepoy mutiny of 1857, its lack of roads and bridges continued to discourage travellers, and as it had given no trouble, the authorities were content to leave well alone until such time as they had settled the more pressing problems of the sub-continent. In the autumn of '59, the Rajah, with an eye to forestalling interference, had prudently sent his Prime Minister and a deputation of