‘Is Amin Sang returning?’ asked Richard, surprised enough to rouse himself from his studied unconcern.
‘Yes, so I have heard. But, alas, he will come too late to enjoy our ceremony.’ Captain Sorba sighed, a soldier’s sigh of duty and regret. ‘It is always the same – one misses so much when on garrison duty.’
Perhaps, thought Richard, Captain Sorba spoke truer than he knew; the whirling wheel of history had indeed moved on since Amin Sang had left the Sun Palace. It would be sad to meet his old friend with such a tale of woe, when their reunion should have brought only happiness. But in truth, there would be relief in meeting a friend of any sort.
He remained a short time after Sunara had withdrawn, acknowledging greetings, exchanging a word with such chiefs as he knew, preserving his outward calm unaltered. He did not shrink from any contact; but, to the very end, no one addressed him with more than the customary phrases of salute, and no one spoke their thoughts or inquired his own.
There was one certainty, he thought, surveying the subdued throng of guests, and the ring of armed guards at their fringe; this thing was done. Colonel Kedah now stood next to the Rajah, in a position of paramount executive strength. There was no banquet to mark this elevation, no rejoicing, no horseplay with clowns nor boisterous drinking bouts. Not a man raised his voice in song or homage, not a dog barked. Within an hour, the Rajah had left the audience chamber, and Kedah with him.
But it was legal enough, for all that, and final.
v
‘It is the people who deserve better,’ said Richard, not for the first time on that night. He was in a dark mood, the darkest of his life in Makassang; though they sat in the soft luxury of their palace apartments, he could only brood on the danger and evil which was in the very air, even in this private corner of their world. ‘They are such a happy people,’ he said morosely, ‘happy and loving – and now they have that butcher Kedah on their necks! You see how the lines are drawn? There is no one to protect them. God help them all, with Kedah at the head of power!’
‘They must be set free,’ said Sunara.
The Rajah’s audience had ended at dusk; at midnight, Richard and Sunara were still talking, with an endless repetition, round and round the same subject. They had played with Adam, before he went to bed, and visited the sleeping Presatsang; they had dined privately, and then taken the slow, moonlit walk they often took, in the palace grounds below their rooms. But their walk was not the same as on other nights; no peace attended their steps; there were too many sentries posted, and shadows moving; too much of the watchful world was with them. Later they had begun to talk, in isolation and privacy; but by then the intrusion was of a different sort – the intrusion of a vast silence, an eerie holding of the breath by all within the palace, by the very coral stones themselves.
When their child cried briefly in a distant room, it was like a warning call from the innocent to the doomed.
Richard, sitting in a deep couch with Sunara at his side, returned again and again to this same thought – the sullen chaos into which he believed Makassang must fall, with the Rajah relapsed into his evil mood, and Colonel Kedah given a free hand in government.
‘It is a monstrous prospect!’ he declared passionately. ‘If men cannot find happiness in this island, where under heaven can they find it? Yet we have as much chance of happiness now, as a man swimming in a school of sharks! Kedah will not rest till he has turned this island into a private kingdom – a private prison.’
‘It is not Kedah,’ said Sunara. She was as pale as before, but it was growing apparent that her spirit was not pale; late as was the hour, she was still alive with thought, and with the search for hope. ‘I wish it were so, but it is not. Kedah, for all his villainy, is only the sword. It is my father who wields it.’
‘Kedah makes a fine enough executioner himself – and a willing one also. In any case, between them they can turn this place into a slaughterhouse.’
‘Then we must hurry,’ she said. ‘If Makassang is not to be ruined.’
‘How, hurry?’
Sunara leant towards him. It was part of the aura of conspiracy that her voice should drop to a whisper; in their present situation, with all affairs in Makassang rising to a swift and murderous boil, intrigue and secrecy seemed inevitable. But it was still a shock to hear her murmur: ‘My father must go. And Kedah with him.’
He was taken aback by the simple directive. ‘What are you saying? How would they “go”? You might as well ask the lion tearing at his kill to “go”!’
But she was in a mood of insistence and determination, not to be baulked. ‘Now that Kedah has the power, my father’s rule will grow worse. It is happening already. The Da Costas were killed for no reason at all. Others have disappeared. The whole palace is full of spies and whispers. Did you know that the treasure vault has been barred, and put under guard? It is something unheard of – the vault has been left unwatched for two hundred years! And you saw how it was tonight, when we walked in the garden. The place is like a prison, like a tomb, and its walls will close in, until we are crushed. Must we wait for another planting of crosses on the Steps of Heaven? It will come – unless we act!’
He looked at her beside him on the couch, in mingled astonishment and doubt. ‘I have never known you like this … You must have been thinking as deeply as I have, though you said very little … What is foremost in your mind, Sunara? What makes you say that your father must go?’
She was groping for the right answer. ‘For me, it is the child, I think. Or the children together. No, it is us, Richard; the wellbeing of all our family. For you, perhaps it is the people … But whatever drives us to try to withstand evil, I know that together we could make the future so much richer. Because we have the same feeling about power, the same pity … If you were ruling in Makassang, it would be a happier place, and you would teach the people to make it happier still … I love you, and the two children, and I love our island. So do you, as I know well. How can we stand by, and see it destroyed?’
‘But you love your father also.’
‘Oh yes! That is the crown of it. I love him too much to see him become so wicked in his old age. I remember him as a kind and generous man. He took pride in ruling without cruelty – you have often heard him say so. But now – now he rules by fear, and nothing else, and so he has chosen Kedah to make cruelty his chief instrument … Why should this be, Richard? Why has he changed?’
‘It is growing old, I suppose.’
‘Are all old men monsters? Most men grow old with grace and kindness. Think of Amin Bulong – think of Mendel da Costa himself. He was greedy for money, perhaps, but he would not have killed and tortured for it, if he had had a whole army behind him! I tell you, there is some poison at work, and if it cannot be cured it will infect all of us, and we will wake up to find that we are as deep in cruelty and deceit as Kedah himself. That is, if we wake up at all!’
Looking at her, he said again: ‘I have never known you like this.’
She intercepted the glance, and leant across to kiss him, becoming briefly a woman again, the loving Sunara with whom he had joined his life.
‘I had it in mind,’ she told him, almost shyly, ‘to talk like a Western wife.’
‘A Western wife!’
‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘I hoped that you would recognize it … Do they not take part in discussions, without shame, and even speak their opinions?’
‘True.’
‘I wished to be like that. But only for you, Richard. You do not mind?’
‘I love you,’ he answered, ‘and I fear the future as much as you.’
‘Then we must act,’ she said again, ‘and you must rule Makassang.’
At her words he rose, aware of discomfort, almost of irritation; she used these phrases, she propounded these panaceas for evil, without relating them at all to what was procurable … Round them, the palace continued its silence; beneath their open window, there came at intervals the firm tread of a sentry,
and the ring of hardwood on stone as he grounded his spear; all else was a brooding stillness, a waiting for the next dreaded event.
Richard walked to the window, and looked out. He saw the beauty which was always there – the bearded silhouettes of palm trees, the dark slopes fading into darker nothingness, the moonlight on the sea far below. But now it all seemed menacingly hushed, a beauty muted by some force which might destroy it if it uttered a sound. Nearby, there was a faint scent of casuarina – that beautiful work of nature from whose milky sap clever men could distil their poisons … He turned back, and looked down at Sunara.
‘What use is it to say that?’ he asked. In his mood of tension and fear, he could not keep the irritation from his voice. ‘Words will not make me Rajah … I can never rule Makassang. I have no power. I have no following. Kedah will make the laws now – and he will see to it that I play no part in government.’
‘But you have a following,’ she insisted. ‘The people love you. When you walk in the bazaars, they press forward to catch your eye, to win a smile. You saw how the chiefs and the others looked at you during the audience tonight, when they heard the news. They hate Kedah! And they are coming to hate my father. But they love you.’
‘Love, love,’ he said bitterly, ‘I cannot fight the Palace Guard with love. Who would help me? Where is my guard? The people are too afraid to do anything but submit and suffer. The first brave man to run to my side would be crucified – and the next, and the next! Who in his senses would buy such a passage to eternity?’
‘Of course they are afraid, because they lack a leader.’ She was gazing at him now with rapt eyes. ‘But Richard, you can set them free, lead them to happiness. You were born to rule.’
He laughed. ‘I was born to rule five hundred acres in Gloucestershire. Not to play the potentate, ten thousand miles from home.’ His voice grew graver. ‘This is not my country, Sunara. I am an English country squire, not an Eastern rajah. What is it to me, if Kedah turns Makassang into bloody ruin? These are not my people. Let them fight their own battles. You and I can leave tomorrow, if we will.’
‘It is something to you,’ she answered passionately, ‘and they are your people, and we cannot leave tomorrow, nor any day until we die … Oh Richard, do not turn from them now. They need you desperately. You said yourself, “The people deserve better.” When you said that, you were thinking of them, not of yourself.’
‘I swear I did not mean to,’ he answered caustically. ‘This night air must affect the brain …’ Then he saw her deeply troubled look, and he went on: ‘Forgive me, Sunara – I did not mean to scoff. God knows our troubles are nothing to scoff at. But when you say to me, “You must rule Makassang,” I have to ask, “How?” And with murder and treachery as the certain reward, I have to ask, “Why?” as well. Why should I risk my neck, or worse, to win a country I do not want?’
She stood up; her small figure, divinely beautiful, had an appeal to more than the senses; in the midst of all their turmoil, it pulled at his heart as well. She came near to him, and said: ‘How you can rule, must wait. We cannot make plans as we might snap our fingers. But why you should rule – that I can tell you. But not with my own words. Will you read something, Richard?’
‘Read something?’ he echoed, astonished.
‘Yes.’ She stood before him, slim and straight as a wand – his wife, and now his suppliant. ‘I want you to read the journals of Andrew Farthing.’
He frowned. ‘I had forgotten them … You spoke of them long ago … What have they to do with me – and tonight, especially?’
‘You will see, if you read them. Will you read?’
‘It is so late, Sunara.’
‘It is later still, by another clock. Please read, for my sake, Richard.’
He shrugged. It seemed an absurd idea, at midnight in the Sun Palace; an idea rendered more absurd still by the pressing dangers and silences of the night. What could Andrew Farthing, an old Scottish minister long dead, mean to him at such a moment? He would be better off sitting with his back to the wall, nursing his pistols … But Sunara still stood before him, her whole being strangely urgent, and presently he sighed in the face of this persuasion, and said: ‘Very well. There will be little sleep for us, in any case. I will read.’
Already she had turned to a chest which stood in one corner, and had pulled aside the silken covering which veiled it. She bent, and lifted out some object wrapped in a cloth, and carried it to the table under the lamp. The bundle, unbound, proved to contain a pair of manuscript books, leather-covered, fastened by hasps with broad bronze hinges; and when she laid them down side by side, it could be seen that on the outside of each was printed, in faded Gothic script: Journal. A. Farthing.
‘This will keep me busy till dawn,’ Richard grumbled.
‘He wrote a large hand,’ she answered. ‘It will not take you long.’ She arranged the lamp so that its light fell on the first book, and turned a chair for him to sit down. ‘I am hoping that when you begin, you will not wish to stop reading … Will you have a glass of wine?’
‘A bottle, rather …’ He sat down at the table, and opened the first book; the worn leather crackled, giving off a musty odour of age and scholarship. He read, in tall angular writing and pale Indian ink: ‘MAKASSANG. January, the Year of Our Lord, 1817. By God’s will I arrived safely–’ and then a sound distracted him, the first sound, save for the pacing of the sentry, which had been heard within the room for many hours. It was the sound of footfalls, ringing, heavy, approaching down the long passageway outside their apartment. The footsteps drew nearer, stamping and slurring on the marble floor; they were growing as loud as thunder in the still night. Then the curtains were thrust aside, with a forceful hand, and a voice said: ‘Make way for the double-uncle!’
It was Amin Sang.
He could only stay a moment, he assured them, settling back in an armchair as though he would stay the night, at least; he must report his return to the Rajah, in accordance with the regulations … Amin Sang was demonstrably in high spirits, delighted to be back among the blessings of civilization; he had still been armed, dusty, and dressed for the road when he made his lively entrance. Above all, as befitted a warrior returning from duty, he was already somewhat tipsy, and would have none of their gloom.
‘I have ridden all day in this accursed heat,’ he declared, with a flourish of his wineglass, when the first cheerful greetings were over, and Richard, unable to forget the present, began to talk of palace affairs. ‘Spare me for a while, Tunku – at least give me time to swallow a small glass.’
‘You have swallowed a small glass already,’ said Sunara, with mock severity.
‘I am on leave!’ said Amin Sang. He drank, making no secret of his great contentment, and looked at Sunara with admiring eyes. ‘Your Highness, you are more beautiful than ever, if a rough soldier straight from the jungle may pay you such a compliment.’
‘He may,’ said Sunara. She, like Richard, was finding it difficult to maintain a serious mood, with Amin Sang importing such lusty good humour into their surroundings. ‘Have you just arrived, Captain?’
‘This very moment, your Highness. I sprang straight from my horse, and into this room!’ Amin Sang took another deep draught of wine. ‘With a few moments’ delay in the barracks cellar … Imagine – they tried to challenge me, below. Me, a guard-captain! By heaven, wait until the Fifty of the Brave hear that!’
‘The Fifty are somewhat scattered,’ Richard told him. ‘They are scarcely spoken of now.’
‘So I have heard. There were six or seven of them sent to join the West Garrison, and grumbling about the duty. But no matter – we will bring them together again, and sing our songs all night.’
‘We have had little singing lately,’ said Sunara.
Amin Sang nodded. ‘The palace seems gloomy, I will admit. Let it be my task to enliven it.’
For a short space, he did indeed enliven it, as far as Richard and Sunara were concerned, telling them such tal
es as garrison soldiers always told when they reached home – of the foolish blunders of other soldiers, of money won and lost at gaming, of unspeakable hardships connected with camp cooking, of arduous campaigns involving young women. To listen to him was a brief respite from the fears which pressed in upon them; knowing that it was in truth no more than a respite, they were at pains to enjoy it while they might. A cheerful hour passed, in laughter and drinking, with scarcely a thought beyond the lightest; presently Amin Sang tossed off the last of the wine, and stood up, and bowed to Sunara.
‘My duty to you, Princess …’ He was unsteady, but not unduly so. He gave a swaying bow towards Richard also. ‘Tunku … Thank you for a fine homecoming … Now I must report my arrival to his Highness.’
‘It is late for that,’ Richard advised him. ‘Go to bed now, and report in the morning.’
‘If there are still lights in the west wing, I will report,’ said Amin Sang, who seemed at last to be recalling his military obligations. Ceremoniously he straightened his tunic and sword belt. ‘Farewell!’
‘Be careful,’ said Sunara, smiling slightly. ‘Remember, you were not in the highest favour with my father, when you left the palace.’
Amin Sang gestured. ‘All is forgiven,’ he declared magnanimously. ‘I bring only sweetness and light.’ He saluted, and was gone.
Sunara looked after him, listening to his footsteps receding down the corridor. She shook her head, as any woman must who contemplates the folly of the masculine world. Then she turned back to Richard.
‘I am glad he is with us again … Though he makes me feel as if I were a grandmother, at least …’ She touched Richard gently on the arm, restoring their privacy. ‘Well, that is that. Now, will you read?’
vi
It was as she had forecast; once he started to read the journal of Andrew Farthing, he had not the least wish to cut short his study.