The White Rajah

  In spite of himself, Richard felt his blood run cold as he listened. He knew that these were not idle threats; the Rajah was speaking of something which he could bring about with a single word, a single gesture. Nor would he hesitate to use this power, if his evil mood drove him to it.

  Richard looked, not at the Rajah but at Amin Bulong. ‘His Highness forgets that you left a man on board my ship. A hostage. Your own grandson.’

  It was the Rajah who answered. ‘We do not hold a hostage so dear – even the grandson of a friend – that we would not sacrifice him, if need be.’

  ‘You would find my ship hard to take. She is alert, and ready to fight.’

  ‘We would not count the cost of a hundred prahus, either. In the end we would capture your ship, and we would have you, also. We would have – what is the English phrase? – the pleasure of your company … Have you heard of the water torture, Captain Marriott? It is a great favourite with the disciplinary arm of my Palace Guard. They claim that, given time and patience, they can make a man’s body swell up to three times its proper size, before it bursts. Myself, I see no reason to doubt them. They also have, for grosser sport, small cages of red ants which they strap to a man’s private parts. The ants become more potent, as the man becomes less …’ Suddenly, the fire died out of the Rajah’s eyes, as if he thought he had said enough, and could now turn to other, more pleasant prospects. ‘But how ridiculous to talk like this, when I know that we are near agreement … It is not as if I were driving a hard bargain, or seeking a free service from you. That would indeed be inhospitable. Did I mention the matter of a fee, Captain Marriott?’

  ‘You did not,’ answered Richard, summoning, with an effort, some irony of tone. ‘Truth to tell, you seemed preoccupied with other matters.’

  ‘Forgive an old man’s carelessness,’ said the Rajah. ‘It must have slipped my memory … To make your ship fit for battle, I will provide a thousand men, and whatever material you need. You will find that my shipwrights, who have ancient skills, can careen your vessel in less than an hour. And on the day that the Mystic is defeated, I will give you one hundred thousand rix dollars.’

  Richard could not control a start of surprise. It was an enormous sum – twenty thousand English pounds. As a fee for his services, it was fantastic; and as a bribe for changing his mind, it was still on a princely scale. With such a sum, he could do whatever he had a mind to; he could even quit the roving life, if he wished, and return to England as a rich man of leisure … He heard the Rajah’s voice as if from a long way away, as gentle and persuasive as it had formerly been brutal. ‘You may have this sum in gold or in rubies, as you choose … You may have it also in land, or in slaves, or in spices, or in opium, or in forests … But come, my friend’ – and now the Rajah’s voice was positively seductive in its appeal – ‘we are growing too serious. These are matters of business, matters for tomorrow. Now it is time for us to relax, and take our pleasure.’

  v

  I must not get drunk, thought Richard, blinking at the torchlight which wavered incessantly wherever he turned his eyes. But it was not an easy resolve; the heady wine had flowed freely, and the music had pounded and throbbed and wailed, for three hours and more, as the seven rich courses of the banquet, each tempting the appetite, had been opened before him like a Book of Delights. The Rajah had promised him pleasure, and all the gaudy magnificence of the Sun Palace had been spread for him. There had seemed no end to the succeeding dishes: spiced turtle in rice, roast sucking pig, rainbow-hued fish, fruits of all kinds – one had followed another in rich profusion, accompanied by great gold beakers of the cool Javanese wine which did more to provoke a fierce thirst than to slake it.

  Richard Marriott sat, on the Rajah’s right hand, at the centre of an immense table which filled one side of the audience chamber. Resin torches flared brightly all round the room; in its centre, open braziers of slow-burning wood supplied a flickering background for a hundred strange figures – wandering guests, serving men, palace guardsmen, pages, attendants, tumblers, musicians, acrobats, beggars, suppliants – who thronged the banquet. So far, Richard had seen no single woman in the room; the feast, which was in his honour, seemed an exclusively masculine occasion, like some barbaric version of the Hell Fire Club. But when he mentioned this to Amin Bulong, who sat nearby, the latter expressed surprise.

  ‘That has never been our custom here,’ he answered. For his age, Amin Bulong had shown great appetite and execution at table, and his wizened old face was shining with the effort. ‘Indeed, it would be unthinkable! In Makassang, men and women never take their food together, save in the strictest privacy, and public feasting has always been the reserve of men. The women have other occupations …’ He savoured his wine with, his thin inquiring nose, while round them the frieze of figures in the smoky half-darkness wound and unwound, like pictures on a turning tapestry, and the muted drums and pipes wove their curious pattern. Then he asked: ‘You are fond of women, Captain Marriott?’

  ‘Not more so than any other man, I think. But I am not indifferent.’

  The Rajah, who had been listening on his other side, broke in with a gentle laugh. ‘What you are eating now,’ he said, ‘will not make you indifferent, either.’

  Richard looked down at the dish before him. It was fish, of some kind new to him, served in coconut shells decorated with vine tendrils. Delicately spiced, it had seduced even an appetite now turning jaded. ‘It is delicious … I was about to ask your Highness what it was.’

  ‘It is trepang.’

  ‘Trepang?’

  ‘Trepang – the giant sea slug.’ The Rajah smiled again. ‘You have not heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You must spend more time in my country … We like to think that its aphrodisiac qualities are world-famous.’

  Now it was Richard’s turn to smile. ‘Sailors like to think that they have no need of such stimulants.’

  ‘Ah, the pride of youth!’ said the Rajah. In contrast with his earlier mood, he now seemed in high good humour; though he had eaten little – as might well have been his custom – yet it was clear that he had drawn great pleasure from the banquet, and that such occasions as this were much to his taste. Perhaps he did not deserve to rule this glittering kingdom, thought Richard – and then regretted the thought, which at such a moment seemed churlish and unworthy.

  Tonight, the Rajah, forgetting his cares, was playing host, in princely fashion; tomorrow he would rule again, and show that he was fitted for it … Richard lifted his glass of wine, which a page had just replenished, and the Rajah courteously followed his movement. But his was not a wineglass; it was a beaker fashioned from a skull, its dome hollowed out and rimmed with gold, its eye sockets aglow with precious jewels. It had been set before him ceremoniously at the beginning of the feast, and seemed to be an object of special veneration.

  ‘I must thank you again for your hospitality,’ said Richard. ‘I had no thought, when I stepped ashore this morning, that I would have so royal a welcome.’

  The Rajah was looking at him, his eyes bright above the rim of the grinning skull cup. ‘My wish was to make amends for the small discord of our earlier meeting. I hope that I have done so.’

  ‘Beyond question!’ answered Richard – and though it might be the wine speaking, he felt that this was true. ‘I can remember nothing but courtesy.’

  They drank, and bowed towards each other. ‘It is my feeling.’ said the Rajah after a moment, lowering his jewelled skull cup, ‘that you are a man who might be led to something, but cannot be commanded.’

  Through the haze of the wine, Richard Marriott made bold to answer in a way he would not have dared earlier. ‘I believe that your Highness and myself have much in common.’

  For a moment it seemed as if the remark were too near to insolence to be permissible. The Rajah’s small figure stiffened, and for a long minute he regarded Richard as though in doubt whether the latter were not presuming intolerably on his hospitality. T
hen his face suddenly cleared, and broke into a smile, and then into laughter, laughter so clear and unforced that everyone within earshot turned to share in it. After a moment – and it seemed an unheard-of condescension, judging by the reaction upon all their faces – he raised the skull cup again, in both his hands, and passed it to Richard.

  ‘Drink from my cup,’ he invited, still smiling, ‘in token of that likeness.’ And as Richard Marriott, aware of a special mark of honour, drank, the Rajah turned to his major-domo, who stood in unbroken attendance behind his chair of state, and said, simply: ‘The dancers.’

  At a sign from the major-domo, an imposing figure across whose yellow livery a broad purple sash was draped, denoting his rank, the music of the players faded into silence. There was a pause, as the centre of the banquet chamber was cleared, and the glowing braziers moved to one side; then the single beat of a gong was heard, reverberating with enormous power throughout the room, and to the slow percussion of drums a line of dancers appeared between the columns at the far end of the hall, and began to weave a pattern of the most insistent, sensuous beauty that Richard had ever witnessed.

  They were young girls, twenty of them, their pale brown bodies naked to the waist, wearing only the traditional costume of the harem, the diaphanous folds of which shimmered as their turning limbs caught the torchlight. The dance was slow, and intricately figured; it seemed to be a dance of enticement, and their serious faces – many of them exquisitely beautiful – were in voluptuous contrast with their bending and weaving and interplay of their bodies. Richard watched with hazy pleasure, mixed with a desire too delicate to become urgent; it seemed to him, in his mood of relaxation, that the dance was not for gross appetites, that it spoke of beauty rather than of promise, it ravished the eye and the heart with more certainty than any other part of his being.

  Strangely, it appeared that this was the mood also of all the other watchers in the audience chamber of the Sun Palace; here, perhaps, was a people who took their pleasure without greed, who saw the loveliness of women not as their prey but as their good fortune … Among all the faces near him, only those of his ‘bodyguard’ – John Keston, Peter Ramsay, and Burnside the sober Scot – betrayed any lustful intent, though it might be said that this trio, in their large-eyed, staring concentration upon the dancers, made up for the reticence of all the rest. Richard sat back in his chair and, turning, found the Rajah’s eyes resting inquiringly upon him.

  ‘You enjoy such entertainment?’ the latter asked, with a touch of irony.

  ‘Very much,’ Richard answered. ‘The girls are most accomplished … May I ask who they are?’

  ‘They are slaves.’

  The dance continued, while Richard, sipping his wine, gradually allowed his thoughts to stray far afield from what was before his eyes. He was in a mood to let this delicious world have its way with him … His strongest resolve, of a little earlier, had been, I must not get drunk; but now it seemed that this did not matter so greatly. He had already been seduced on so many different planes – of appetite, of hospitality, of the public bestowal of honour – that he had come to realize that he was likely to do what the Rajah wished. The old man had said that he could not be commanded. But it was certainly true that he could be led – and he had now been led, by devious stages of seduction, to a change of heart.

  It was, in essence, an appeal of personality. The Rajah had in turn insulted him grossly, threatened him with torture, and pleaded with his sense of chivalry and pride; but these were no more than the normal artifices of a potentate accustomed to having his own way, either by wily or by brutal means. They could not be held against him, any more than could the devious wheedling of a child. And it was true that Richard was, physically, in the Rajah’s power; if he were thwarted, the old man would certainly sacrifice one noble hostage, and the lives of countless lesser men, for the pleasure of revenge. Richard, in his present mood, with the wine putting a cloudy warmth of fellowship upon his brain, could not blame him for this ruthlessness. It was ingrained in the nature of a despotic ruler, whose will had rarely been crossed.

  But behind it, also, Richard sensed something else, which now made a much stronger appeal; the despair of an old and fearful man, an heirless ruler concerned with the blank face of the future. The Rajah’s erratic veering between threats and cajoling was a sign of two things – the weakness of decay, and a sense of vanishing power which could still become obstinate and real. He was rather to be pitied than anything else. He was rather to be pitied by Richard Marriott – for a hundred thousand rix dollars in gold.

  Perhaps it was this last prospect which (as the Rajah had implied) was tipping the balance in favour of action. But to put checkmate to the plans of Black Harris (thought Richard, turning back again to the dancers) might now be seen to be a duty as well as a pleasure. It was possible that his enemy, building on the alliance with the Anapuri, might have ambitions to rule Makassang himself; and Makassang deserved a better fate than Harris, or any other pirate whose thirst for blood and treasure overtopped all else.

  The dance was now ended – or rather, the line of dancers, their young bodies glistening, retreated to form a semicircle some distance from the table. The gong sounded again, with a thrice-repeated, crashing reverberation; and now the single figure of a girl appeared between the entrance columns. She held herself still for a moment, caught like a jewel in the flickering torchlight, and then she began a slow dance which brought her nearer, step by step, to where they sat.

  She was ravishingly beautiful; she outshone all the others as a planet outshines a hundred stars. Her face was the palest oval, beneath a headdress of gold filigree which twined in and out of her lustrous hair; her shoulders and bosom – for she was naked to the waist, like her companions – were the most exquisite Richard had ever seen. He caught his breath as he looked at her; in the whole of his thirty years, in a score of countries, he had never seen anyone to match her, in grace of form, in sensuous yet remote beauty of face. Utterly captivated, he turned to Amin Bulong.

  ‘Who is this?’ he asked, not trying to disguise his feeling. ‘Another slave?’

  ‘No,’ said Amin Bulong. He seemed suddenly constrained, as though not wishing their exchange to be overheard. ‘No, she is not a slave.’

  ‘I shall have no need of your trepang,’ said Richard coarsely, ‘with such seasoning as this.’

  Amin Bulong was now staring straight ahead of him, his manner more reserved than ever. It was the Rajah, a slight smile on his lips, who said gently: ‘This is a dance which is always completed by my daughter.’ Richard had never experienced a more excruciating moment of embarrassment; he felt his scarlet blush spreading, and he could have cut out his tongue. He scarcely saw the dance, which was short and formal, as if setting a crown upon what had gone before. He heard the music but faintly – drumbeats against the harmony of two pipes, in high and low pitch; he saw only that the girl danced with a studious elegance which had in it something of resignation, and that the onlookers watched her as if they were attending the close of some religious exercise. But when it was ended, with a low obeisance to the Rajah, and the girl had glided out into the shadows, he was still in the utmost confusion, and his face was burning.

  The Rajah, however, seemed completely unconcerned. He motioned to have Richard’s glass filled, and again for the musicians to continue their playing; then he remarked, as politely as ever: ‘That is called the Dance of the Priestesses … It is very ancient – we believe that it was a pagan temple dance, in the old days … Of course, there have been modern variations … I hope you found it entertaining?’

  Richard nodded, still hardly able to speak. ‘Yes, your Highness.’

  ‘My daughter’s role was that of the Virgin Sacrifice. I need scarcely explain to you what its significance was, in former times. However’ – he smiled, gravely amused – ‘we have become less bloodthirsty, with the years. She danced well, do you not think?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘Her
name is Sunara … She will be joining us shortly.’

  ‘Your Highness–’ began Richard, wishing somehow to retrieve his crassness. He was not sure what he was going to say: still confused, he was conscious of a flicker of anger that he should have been betrayed into this position. Almost, it might have been a calculated embarrassment … But before he could continue, Amin Bulong interposed, like some wise old diplomat stepping in to chart a safe channel.

  ‘We have many such dances, handed down through the generations. If you stay with us, Captain Marriott, you will see more of them. The Sea-Dyaks have a dance for blessing their nets, and the Anapuri have a rite which mimes the chariot of Phoebus Apollo, bringing the sunrise at the midsummer solstice. I do not know how they equate such things with the teachings of the Lord Buddha … But I hope you will stay long enough to enjoy these curiosities of Makassang.’

  ‘I will stay,’ said Richard, on an impulse which he could hardly define.

  ‘That is good news indeed,’ said the Rajah. He was leaning forward, in undisguised eagerness, and his fingers, touching the rim of the skull cup, were trembling. ‘I hope it is the forerunner of even better.’

  ‘And I will fight Black Harris for you,’ said Richard, speaking under the same compulsion. ‘On the terms which we have discussed together.’

  The Rajah and Amin Bulong exchanged long glances; on both their faces was the same tremulous satisfaction, the same confession of relief.

  ‘I cannot hide my pleasure and my gratitude,’ said the Rajah. Suddenly he was a much older man, leaning upon the strength of a younger; his expression, which in repose was proud, had softened into simple thankfulness. ‘You will have no cause to regret your decision.’