The White Rajah

  She decided to rescue him. ‘You wish to know whether I share his views?’

  ‘Yes, your Highness.’

  ‘I am my father’s daughter,’ she said. And before he could draw too much satisfaction from this, she added: ‘But of course, you are not all strength.’

  Taken aback, he said: ‘No man could be.’

  ‘Oh, it is not a shortcoming …’ She had laid down the yellow nankeen now, and with a smile to the old woman had moved on, while the palace servants thwacked a few of the nearest backs with light, teasing blows. ‘Did you know that you have a nickname already?’

  ‘No, your Highness.’

  ‘I heard it from Amin Sang. It is because of the earring. They call you Picanga.’

  ‘Picanga?’ The word meant nothing.

  ‘It is a word, I must tell you, of a low class. It means, She-Pirate.’

  ‘Now, by God–’ began Richard Marriott, nettled.

  Sunara smiled, with a backward glance under lowered eyelashes. ‘I can assure you, Captain Marriott, I do not altogether believe it.’

  But that was all she would say, on that subject, on that day.

  The longest, and the last, excursion which they made was to the Golden Pagoda itself.

  They crossed the bay in the state barge, reclining at ease beneath the tasselled stern canopy, with a detachment of the Palace Guard under Amin Sang as part of their company. The rowers – the unseen, unheard slaves confined between decks – kept up a steady, powerful stroke for two hours and more, with the music of pipes to cheer them, and an overseer to give them a commanding beat on the drum; the prow quivered endlessly as it cleft the water under this martial urging.

  The barge presently landed them at the village of Shrang Anapuri, and, preceded by the Palace Guard, whose bearing made no secret of the fact that they were superbly trained spearmen and would be delighted to prove the point, given the slightest excuse, they journeyed by litter to the lower portals of the Shwe Dagon. Richard was amazed by its size; close to, it seemed to be a whole community of buildings and shrines and votive arches, topped by the immense blazoned dome of gold leaf which, applied by generations of pious pilgrims (who paid outrageously for a single square inch of the precious covering) shone in fantastic splendour. They were greeted at the lowest steps by the High Priest, Selang Aro, with a sour personal welcome which had been ordered by the Rajah himself.

  After the briefest of courtesies, they removed their footgear, and began the slow climb upwards. Though it was a tall structure, decorated with unremitting care and piety, Richard was struck not by its majesty but by its squalor. The steps themselves were filthy, stained by the scarlet sputum of betel juice, by the excrement of wandering pi dogs, by the urine of countless children who squatted on the steps or played among the votive shrines. There were hordes of beggars, and though they were kept at bay by the Palace Guard, they maintained a shrill whining throughout the journey, a waving of skinny hands, a showing of stinking sores which, given the kindest heart in the world, could only excite disgust.

  Behind them, as the level of the steps rose, there were endless tiers of tiny shops selling drums, and candles, and lanterns, and paper flowers – all the paraphernalia of worship; and from these shops also there rose a clamour, a command to buy in the cause of holiness, a wafting of musty avarice.

  At the topmost level of the edifice, under the gilded dome itself, the crowds were even thicker, for here were the shrines with innumerable images of the Buddha – Buddha smiling, staring, sitting, reclining – each decorated with a garish maze of gold leaf, and blue enamel, and green mosaic tiling, and pink sugar-plum elaboration. Here thronged the pilgrims, and the beggars also, and the proud-faced monks in their saffron robes, standing before smaller pagodas with their begging bowls ever waiting, ever held in readiness. When alms were given, a bell was struck – and at some moments the whole Shwe Dagon seemed filled by the rise and fall of a bell-like chorus, a pious reverberation sometimes deep, sometimes thin and tinkling, calling (it seemed to Richard) heaven to witness the ascent of prayer, and earth to admire human generosity.

  Richard was struck also by the faces of the monks as they received these alms. They said nothing, they betrayed no emotion, either of gratitude or of simple pleasure. It was as if they were proclaiming: We hold the keys of Heaven; when you give, it is we who are doing you the honour, and you who are currying favour in the hope of salvation … Perhaps, thought Richard fancifully, the more one gave, the more one was despised by these impassive witnesses; large alms implied a large need, a heavier load of sin.

  The royal party stayed only briefly at the summit of the Shwe Dagon; Sunara seemed pale and listless after the long climb, and Selang Aro, leading the way, wore an expression of discontent, as if he would gladly be quit of this odious task, and turn again to higher things … Halfway down the descending steps, Sunara stumbled and came near to falling; and when Richard caught her arm and supported her, unobtrusively firm, she smiled up at him in gratitude.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. ‘It is so hot, and wearisome … Tell me what you think of this place.’

  ‘It is interesting,’ answered Richard, not wishing to offend her.

  She smiled wanly. ‘I would rather hear what you think.’

  An ancient beggar woman, her body so loathsomely crippled by deformity that one of her legs circled her neck, somehow eluded the guard and came slithering forward across the steps, almost tripping him up in her snake-like advance. Recoiling, he threw her a coin, and was rewarded by a cry of joy which pierced all other sounds – but he could feel no pleasure in the moment, only disgust and revulsion.

  ‘I cannot like it,’ said Richard after a pause. For a moment he glanced back at the enormous mass of the golden dome, towering over their heads in the sunshine. ‘Oh, it has an air, I grant you, and much prayer and devotion has gone to make it a holy place. But to me, it is oppressive. There is so much filthiness, and the buying and selling–’

  She smiled again. ‘You speak like Andrew Farthing,’ she said. ‘When he first saw it, he told my father–’ suddenly she broke into mimicry of an old man’s tones, precise and dry, ‘–“I am bound to state, we have nothing like this in the Scottish kirk.”’

  Richard laughed aloud. ‘That I can promise you.’

  They had reached the ground level at the farther side of the pagoda, and Selang Aro, leading the party, turned round to bend a baleful look upon him. Then he spoke in the slow English of which he had a smattering.

  ‘We are so happy to have amused you, Captain.’

  ‘It has been most interesting,’ said Richard correctly. ‘I thank you for your courtesy.’

  ‘I will be happy for you to pay us another visit, perhaps without soldiers.’

  Richard said nothing; he was aware of the other man’s hatred, but he could not challenge it at this time and place. Instead, he bowed, and moving out into the sunshine began to breathe the free air again.

  It had been arranged that they would ride part of the way back, re-embarking in their barge farther down the coast; and relays of horses had been planned to this end. The first of these was now waiting for them outside the Shwe Dagon, and after a short, grim-faced farewell from Selang Aro, the Princess and Richard, attended by Amin Sang, took their departure. Their path, inland from the coast road, led them through forest tracks which sometimes narrowed into jungle; it was a slow progress, but pleasant and cool, and the green fronded trees formed a most grateful shade above their heads.

  Sunara rode side-saddle, in the European mode, and she seemed to have recovered her spirits entirely – ‘I love the Lord Buddha better than his temple,’ she said, by way of explanation. They talked and laughed as they rode, and pointed out to each other flowers and birds and small animals, and answered in jest the cries of monkeys and parakeets, and enjoyed the dappled sunlight which sometimes filtered down through the trees, and, released from care, made the most of what became a mysterious and enchanting journey.

&nb
sp; Once they passed a colony of the great bats called flying foxes, roosting head downwards in the trees till nightfall gave them back their day. Once, in a forest clearing peopled by tree stumps, they came upon a gang of woodcutters, with a pair of huge working elephants patiently manoeuvring the teak logs into a pile. Once they forded a stream, and Amin Sang, who was leading, gave a shout of warning, and a crocodile beside the bank slid off into deep water, its scaly grey back gleaming in the sunlight. Once they chanced on a deserted longhouse of the Land-Dyaks which, when they peered within, was found to be crammed to the roof trees with seemingly benevolent skulls. Once, by the roadside, they came upon a tree blown down and raised up again – its roots were bared above the level of the earth, but it was propped up with joists of wood, and its withered branches were hung with flags and ribbons, all of gay colours.

  Richard reined in his horse. ‘Now what is this?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘Who has done it – and why?’

  ‘Tree worshippers,’ answered Sunara, over her shoulder. She also stopped her horse, and dismounted, and after a moment Richard did the same. Together they walked up to the curious object, while Amin Sang watched them from a bend in the pathway. ‘When a tree blows down in a storm, or is struck by lightning, this is what they do, to restore it.’

  They stood close to the tree. It was old, and entirely sapless, but it seemed alive still, in the mysterious fastness of the forest. Sunara pointed to the gnarled trunk, stained here and there with some darker hue.

  ‘They raise it up again, and smear it with blood to give it back its life, and deck it out with the flags and ribbons that you see.’

  He was very conscious of her slim figure standing by his side. ‘Why should they do that?’

  ‘To appease its soul,’ she answered, matter-of-factly.

  ‘They believe that a tree has a soul?’

  ‘Oh yes. All trees have souls. When the forests are cut down, the woodcutters always leave a few strong trees standing, for the expelled spirits to live in. Otherwise, they would be condemned to wander the bare earth forever, hopeless, without a home.’

  ‘Do you believe this?’

  She smiled at him. ‘Of course!’

  They were looking at each other now; Amin Sang was forgotten – and indeed, he had moved up the pathway out of sight, as if he had been commanded. Sunara was very beautiful, and serious, and she seemed to be waiting – or listening to the music which whispered between them. He nearly spoke from his heart, then; it was as much as he could do not to move forward, and take her in his arms, and tell her of his love. But the moment was not such a moment; the silence round them was too solemn, the forest too close, the beribboned tree too haunted and too holy. He could not speak of earthly love, in this green cathedral, before this altar.

  He said, unsteadily: ‘I will believe anything you tell me.’

  ‘That is as it should be,’ she answered gravely. Then she bowed to the tree, and turned, and walked with him back to their horses.

  But it was on this night that he did declare himself, and after it was done, no day in Makassang, or in his life, was ever the same.

  Dusk had fallen, by the time they returned to the Sun Palace, and after such a day they might have been glad to retire early. But Richard was wakeful, and it seemed that Sunara felt the same, for when the evening meal was done she joined him, and the Rajah, in a bower in the gardens, and they sat talking until the moon was bright above their heads.

  It was her father who talked at the greatest length, and they were content to listen, for the Rajah, in a mellow mood of remembrance, seemed eager to delve into a past of the utmost fascination, producing for their delight stories – some scandalous, some scarcely credible, all enthralling – of the kind which, alas, so often died with the passing of an old man. Watching his host, and listening entranced, Richard felt that it was a privileged moment. He wondered, indeed, if ever again in his life he would sit in such magic surroundings, with such companions – an ancient ruler, a beautiful princess – and be entertained on so royal a scale.

  The Rajah talked, in the custom of old men, of the days most remote in his recollection, when he was a boy growing up in Makassang, and his father was heir to the throne, and his grandfather – Satsang the First, of formidable memory – still ruled in a fashion which brooked no hindrance, and which punished treason with the swiftest cruelty imaginable. This must have been, by Richard’s reckoning, at the very dawn of the modern century – 1800, even 1795 – when (according to his schooling) England’s king was still, lamentably, George III, England’s hero was Lord Nelson, and England’s vilest foe Napoleon, who ravaged Europe with such brutal appetite and ate babies alive. Makassang, it seemed, had a comparable tapestry of discord; but she resolved it according to an Eastern mode which needed to borrow nothing from any schoolmaster in the world.

  ‘My grandfather,’ said the Rajah, looking up at the stars which could be glimpsed here and there through the bower of trees overhead, ‘had one guiding precept in his life which, alas, in these modern times have gone out of fashion. It was this – that one man is set apart, to be the ruler, and that all other beings in his kingdom have been born only to obey.’ With a gentle hand he stroked the shawl, of Kashmir silk, which an attendant had placed over his knees to protect him from the night air; while Richard and Sunara, like wide-eyed children allowed, by the forgetfulness of their elders, to eavesdrop upon the adult world when they should have been fast asleep, waited to hear what further strange evocation of the past he was going to show them. ‘It followed from this – so thought my grandfather – that any man who challenged his rule must never be given a second chance to do so; he must be destroyed, and destroyed in circumstances which would serve as an example to anyone else who might have a like ambition. I remember being told, by my nurse, of one such occasion–’ He broke off, and looked towards Sunara. ‘My child, I am talking freely, being in the mood for it. But I would not wish to shock you.’

  Sunara’s face was in darkness, the moon being clouded, but Richard could hear the smile which must be lighting it as she answered: ‘My dear Father, as well as being a child I am also a woman, and therefore prone to be driven mad by such delays. Pray do not torment me.’

  ‘Very well … Early in his reign – so the story goes – my grandfather discovered a plot against his life, involving a man named Costafaga, a prince – so-called – of the Land-Dyaks, who to this day are still our most determined enemies. Perhaps this happening was the reason for it … The Land-Dyaks, who as you know are headhunters, have some skill in the shrinking of their strange fetish; they remove the skull, and then render the flesh very small by the application of certain ointments and liquids. When Prince Costafaga, therefore, was trapped in his treachery and brought in bondage to the palace, it seemed to my grandfather that this was a man who would serve very well as a subject for his own tribal custom. In short, the ambitious Prince Costafaga was to be shrunk.

  ‘They could not start with his head, of course – what my grandfather had in mind was a living manikin.’ The Rajah’s voice, elaborately calm, came out of the night like a thin, terrifying ghost from the past. ‘But they could certainly start elsewhere … They enlisted the help of the Prince’s own doctor – the royal head-shrinker of the Land-Dyaks, no less – on the understanding that on the day that the Prince died, the doctor himself would also die. It transpired that he was a man eager to live … He removed first the bones of the Prince’s right arm and hand, very cleverly, and then sewed up the flesh and treated it in accordance with his disgusting talents. In a month it had shrunk to half its size, and in three months to one third. Then the left arm was so treated, and then both legs. There were no mistakes, no lapses of skill. The process took three years, and at the end, Prince Costafaga presented a bizarre appearance indeed. His body remained its normal size, but his legs and arms were each ten inches long. They were still perfectly formed. He could even move them slightly, when so persuaded. The fingers and toes, in particular, were those of a
new-born infant.’

  The Rajah broke off, perhaps to give his hearers a respite; and indeed, Richard Marriott was conscious of aqueasy stomach. But Sunara, when he looked at her face which could be faintly seen in the moonlight, appeared quite unmoved. Did the story not shock her, Richard wondered – could she really be, at heart, so cruel and so pitiless? She had been listening like a child at bedtime … But then it seemed that this was perhaps the true answer; to her it was a story, no more and no less; it was not real because she had not seen it – only her father’s words were real, and words could never be the equal of tortured flesh, pictures could not rank as screams of agony.

  The Rajah’s voice, continuing, broke in on his thoughts. ‘So there he was – Prince Costafaga of the Land-Dyaks, reduced to the size appropriate to a man who had plotted against his rightful lord … He was exhibited, in a litter, in a score of places all over Makassang, and he made a speech of contrition on each appearance. People could never quite decide whether he was an object of extreme pity, or a figure of fun. However that may be, there was no more rebellion against my grandfather, during his entire reign.’

  ‘And the Prince?’ asked Richard. ‘How did this thing end, for him?’

  ‘He died,’ answered the Rajah, ‘when his task was fulfilled. He died, shall we say, a martyr to experiment – for my grandfather, as well as being an unforgiving man, was an inquisitive one as well. He had some gross sport with that part of the body of which the Prince was, by reputation, proud. Then the doctor was given the task of reducing, if he could, the whole lower half of the trunk, in the same fashion; and there, alas, his skill failed him, and his patient – by now there could be no other word – died.’

  ‘And the doctor?’

  ‘He died also,’ said the Rajah. ‘My grandfather was a man of his word. The doctor, under sentence of death, was offered a chance of demonstrating his art on his own person – a limb at one time, for as long as he cared to continue – but he chose rather to take poison.’