The Moghul Part 98

"So it seems your luck changed after all, Amba.s.sador. For now. But I fear it may not last. As a friend I suggest you make the most of it."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The dark sky had begun to show pale in the east, heralding the first traces of day. Hawksworth stood in the shadows of his tent, at the edge of the vast Imperial camp, and pulled his frayed leather jerkin tighter against the cold. He watched as the elephants filed past, bulky silhouettes against the dawn. They were being led from the temporary stables on the hill behind him toward the valley below, where cauldrons of water were being stoked for their morning bath. Heating the water for the elephant baths had become routine during the reign of Akman, who had noticed his elephants s.h.i.+vering from their baths on chilly mornings and decreed their bath water warmed henceforth.

As he watched the line of giant animals winding their way through the camp, waving their trunks in the morning air, he realized they were not docile female _zenana _elephants, but male war elephants, first and second rank.

First-ranked war elephants, called "full blood," were selected from young males who had demonstrated the endurance and even temper essential in battle; those granted Second Rank, called "tiger-seizing,"

were slightly smaller, but with the same temperament and strength. Each elephant had five keepers and was placed under the training of a special military superintendent--whose responsibility was to school the animal in boldness amid artillery fire. The keepers were monitored monthly by Imperial inspectors, who fined them a month's wages if their elephant had noticeably lost weight. Should an elephant lose a tusk through its keepers' inattention to an infection, they were fined one eighth the value of the animal, and if an elephant died in their care, they received a penalty of three months' wages and a year's suspension.

But the position of elephant keeper was a coveted place of great responsibility. A well-trained war elephant could be valued at a hundred thousand rupees, a full _lakh_, and experienced commanders had been known to declare one good elephant worth five hundred horses in a battle.

Hawksworth studied the elephants, admiring their disciplined stride and easy footing, and wondered again why the army had stationed its stables so near the Imperial camp. Did Arangbar somehow feel he needed protection?

"They're magnificent, don't you think?" s.h.i.+rin emerged from her tent to join him, absently running her hand across the back of his jerkin. It had been six days since they had left Agra, and it seemed to Hawksworth she had grown more beautiful each day, more loving each night. The nightmare of the past weeks had already faded to a distant memory. She was fully dressed now, with a transparent scarf pinned to her dark hair by a band of pearls, thick gold bracelets, flowered trousers beneath a translucent skirt, and dark _kohl _highlighting her eyes and eyebrows.

He watched, enthralled as she pulled a light cloak over her shoulders.

"Especially in the morning. They say Akman used to train his royal elephants to dance to music, and to shoot a bow."

"I don't think I'll ever get used to elephants." Hawksworth admired her a moment longer in the dawn light, then looked back at the immense forms lumbering past, trying to push aside the uneasy feeling their presence gave him. "You'd be very amused to hear what people in London think they're like. n.o.body there has ever seen an elephant, but there are lots of fables about them. It's said elephants won't ford a clear stream during the day, because they're afraid of their reflection, so they only cross streams at night."

s.h.i.+rin laughed out loud and reached to kiss him quickly on the cheek.

"I never know whether to believe your stories of England."

"I swear it."

"And the horse-drawn coaches you told me about. Describe one again."

"It has four wheels, instead of two like your carts have, and it really is pulled by horses, usually two but sometimes four. It's enclosed and inside there are seats and cus.h.i.+ons . . . almost like a palanquin."

"Does that mean your king's _zenana _women all ride in these strange coaches, instead of on elephants?"

"In the first place, King James has no _zenana_. I don't think he'd know what to do with that many women. And there are absolutely no elephants in England. Not even one."

"Can you possibly understand how hard it is for me to imagine a place without elephants and _zenanas_?" She looked at him and smiled. "And no camels either?"

"No camels. But we have lots of stories about camels too. Tell me, is it true that if you're poisoned, you can be put inside a newly slain camel and it will draw out the poison?"

s.h.i.+rin laughed again and looked up the hill toward the stables, where pack camels were being fed and ma.s.saged with sesame oil. The bells on their chest ropes sounded lightly as their keepers began harnessing them, in strings of five. Hawksworth turned to watch as the men began fitting two of the camels to carry a _mihaffa_, a wooden turret suspended between them by heavy wooden poles. All the camels were groaning pitifully and biting at their keepers, their customary response to the prospect of work.

"That sounds like some tale you'd hear in the bazaar. Why should a dead camel draw out poison?" She turned back to Hawksworth. "Sometimes you make the English sound awfully naive. Tell me what it's really like there."

"It is truly beautiful. The fairest land there is, especially in the late spring and early summer, when it's green and cool." Hawksworth watched the sun emerge from behind a distant hill, beginning to blaze savagely against the parched winter landscape almost the moment it appeared. Thoughts of England suddenly made him long for shade, and he took s.h.i.+rin's arm, leading her around the side of their rise and back into the morning cool. Ahead of them lay yet another bleak valley, rocky and sere. "I sometimes wonder how you can survive here in summer.

It was already autumn when I made landfall and the heat was still unbearable."

"Late spring is even worse than summer. At least in summer there's rain. But we're accustomed to the heat. We say no _feringhi _ever gets used to it. I don't think anyone from your England could ever really love or understand India."

"Don't give up hope yet. I'm starting to like it." He took her chin in his hand and carefully studied her face with a scrutinizing frown, his eyes playing critically from her eyes to her mouth to her vaguely aquiline Persian nose. "What part do I like best?" He laughed and kissed the tip of her nose. "I think it's the diamond you wear in your left nostril."

"All women wear those!" She bit at him. "So I have to also. But I've never liked it. You'd better think of something else."

He slipped his arm around her and held her next to him, wondering if he should tell her of his bargain with Arangbar--that she had been released only because he had offered to take her from India forever. For a moment the temptation was powerful, but he resisted. Not yet. Don't give her a chance to turn headstrong and refuse.

"You know, I think you'd like England once you saw it. Even with no elephants, and no slaves to fan away the flies. We're not as primitive as you seem to imagine. We have music, and if you'd learn our language, you might discover England has many fine poets."

"Like the one you once recited for me?" She turned to face him. "What was his name?"

"That was John Donne. I hear he's a cleric now, so I doubt he's writing his randy poems and songs any more. But there

are others. Like Sir Walter Raleigh, a staunch adventurer who writes pa.s.sable verse, and there's also Ben Jonson, who writes poems, and plays also. In fact, lots of English plays are in verse."

"What do you mean by plays?"

"English plays. They're like nothing else in the world." He stared wistfully into the parched valley spread out before them. "Sometimes I think they're what I miss most about London when I'm away."

"Well, what are they?"

"They're stories that are acted out by players. In playhouses."

She laughed. "Then perhaps you should begin by explaining a playhouse."

"The best one is the Globe, which is just across the Thames from London, in the Bankside edge of Southwark, near the bridge. It was built by some merchants and by an actor from Stratford-up-on-Avon, who also writes their plays. It's three stories high and circular, with high balconies. And there's a covered stage at one side, where the players perform."

"Do the women in these plays dance, like our _devadasis_?"

"Actually the players are all men. Sometimes they take the roles of women, but I've never seen them dance all that much. There are plays about famous English kings, and sometimes there are stories of thwarted love, usually set in Italy. Plays are a new thing in England, and there's nothing like them anywhere else."

s.h.i.+rin settled against a boulder and watched the shadows cast by the rising sun stretch out across the valley. She sat thoughtfully for a moment and then she laughed. "What would you say if I told you India had dramas about kings and thwarted love over a thousand years ago?

They were in Sanskrit, and they were written by men named Bhavabhuti and Bhasa and Kalidasa, whose lives are legends now. A pandit, that's the t.i.tle Hindus give their scholars, once told me about a play called The Clay Cart. It was about a poor king who fell in love with a rich courtesan. But there are no plays here now, unless you count the dance dramas they have in the south. Sanskrit is a dead language, and Muslims don't really care for plays."

"I'll wager you'd like the plays in London. They're exciting, and sometimes the poetry can be very moving."

"What's it like to go to see one?"

"First, on the day a play is performed they fly a big white banner of silk from a staff atop the Globe, and you can see it all over London.

The admission is only a penny for old plays and two pence for new ones.

That's all you ever have to pay if you're willing to stand in the pit.

If you want to pay a little more, you can get a seat in the galleries around the side, up out of the dust and chips, and for a little extra you can get a cus.h.i.+on for the seat. Or for sixpence you can enter directly through the stage door and sit in a stall at the side of the stage. Just before the play begins there's a trumpet fanfare-- like Arangbar has when he enters the _Diwan-i-Am_--and the doorkeepers pa.s.s through the galleries to collect the money."

"What do they do with it?"

"They put it into a locked box," Hawksworth grinned, "which wags have taken to calling the box office, because they're so officious about it.

But the money's perfectly safe. Plays are in the afternoon, while there's daylight."

"But aren't they performed inside this building?" s.h.i.+rin seemed to be only half listening.