Christopher looked to the sky and fancied he could see the first bloom of dawn through the tree tops. But he had lost all sense of direction in the dark of the night. He kept the sounds of the chase behind him and they ran on as the light strengthened.
Abruptly the forest opened directly ahead of them. They were both running as fast as the thorn bushes and treacherous footing would allow them. Christopher grabbed Tamaana, throwing an arm around her shoulders, and both of them teetered on the brink of a precipice that opened in front of them, dropping sheer for several hundred feet to a rocky dry river course.
In the monsoon rains it would be a wide and rushing river. But now it was a chasm lined with teeth of sharp black rock.
Tamaana stared down into it for a few seconds. Then she turned her head and listened back over her shoulder. The dogs sounded much closer, clamouring with excitement as the scent of the chase grew stronger.
‘I am not going to let them take me.’ Tamaana made up her mind suddenly and tried to tear herself from his embrace. ‘I am going to jump.’
‘No, my darling. I can’t let you do it.’ He tightened the grip of his arms about her. He could hear the horses and the dogs coming up behind them, the sound of running men blundering through the jungle.
‘Better a quick death. If they catch us, they will make us suffer torments too terrible to contemplate.’
‘I love you,’ he shouted into her face. ‘As long as we stay alive, we have hope.’
She twisted her head away from him. ‘I listened to you once before. But never again. I will not let them take me.’
She almost succeeded in wriggling out of his grip, but he threw his full weight on top of her and forced her to the ground, just as the first team of dogs burst from the undergrowth behind them. After the dogs came uniformed men armed with clubs. They raced forward and fell upon the pair who were still struggling on the edge of the precipice, beating Tamaana and Christopher into a state of semi-conscious submission. Then they handcuffed their hands in front of them, and locked collars around their necks attached to steel chains. The ends of the chains were made fast to the saddles of two of the horses, and they were dragged back to the clearing where they had left Tamaana’s drunken henchmen, and the treasure chest.
This was the first opportunity that Christopher had to examine their captors. They were obviously crack troops and first class horsemen. All of them wore similar uniforms of quilted armour, steel helmets and orange sashes about their waists. There was an air of self-confidence about them that was intimidating. Christopher determined at once not to make his own warlike training apparent, and adopted a meek and humble attitude, with downcast eyes and obsequious bearing.
Their erstwhile prisoner, Poola, stood in their midst, unrecognisable from the gibbering wretch they had left only a few hours earlier. He had changed into fresh clothes, combed his beard and stood erect and proud. He gave a satisfied smile as he saw Christopher and Tamaana brought in.
‘Our situation has changed somewhat,’ he observed drily.
‘How did you find us so swiftly?’ Christopher asked meekly.
‘I can always follow the scent of gold.’ Poola kicked the wooden treasure chest that still stood in the centre of the clearing. He lifted the lid and sniffed at the contents. ‘I suppose you noticed that it smells rather strongly of anise? Did you think my family put the ransom in such a heavy chest merely to inconvenience you? Each time you put it down to rest, you left another trace of the scent on your path. Tungar and his dogs had little trouble following it.’
He gestured to the man beside him, his opposite in every way. Where Poola was short, urbane and plump, Tungar was tall and dangerous, with an ugly scar down the centre of his face. Christopher wondered how he could have survived the blow that made it. He wore a yellow feather tucked into his turban, and there was the unmistakable air of command about him.
‘And who then are you?’ Christopher asked.
‘I am not any mere merchant,’ Poola answered. ‘I am an advisor to her highness the Rani of Chittattinkara – and she does not suffer her servants to be molested. You are about to learn how she treats those who displease her.’
Tungar’s men loaded the treasure chest onto the cart they had brought with them. All Tamaana’s men were chained behind horses, along with Tamaana and Christopher, and the column set off.
Christopher didn’t know how long they walked. By the time Tungar, the captain, called a halt, Christopher’s feet hurt so much he could barely shuffle forward. The prisoners collapsed in a heap at the roadside. Flies settled on Christopher; ants and beetles crawled over his scabbed and bleeding legs. He longed to swat them, but his manacled hands were useless.
Some of the guards went into the forest. Through his pain, Christopher heard the rhythmic thud of axes chopping wood. Perhaps they meant to make a cooking fire. He was ravenous.
‘What will you do with us?’ he asked Poola. A plan had begun to form in his head. ‘Will you bring us to the Rani?’
Poola snorted. ‘I would not demean her highness with untouchable scum like you.’
‘You should take us to her,’ Christopher pleaded. ‘I have skills she might find useful.’
‘Oh, she has a use for you,’ Poola assured him unpleasantly. ‘And it does not require any effort on your behalf – except a little patience.’
The guards emerged from the forest carrying a long sapling, about the thickness of a man’s arm. They stripped the bark, and whittled one end to a needle-sharp spike. Others used their hatchets to scoop a small hole in the ground at the side of the road. The captured bandits stared, and even with the nooses around their necks they began to jabber with terror. They understood what their captors meant to do to them.
Poola stood over them. His hand hovered, half raised, pointing at each in turn like a man at a butcher’s stall uncertain what joint to choose for his dinner. His eyes rested a moment on Christopher.
‘You will be last,’ he told him. ‘When you have watched your friends die one by one.’
He pointed at the man beside Christopher, a swarthy individual named Vijay. Vijay had been charged with keeping watch over Poola, and he had not been gentle in his attentions. Now Tungar’s men cut the halter that bound him to the others and dragged him to the middle of the road. He struggled, but they pushed him to the ground and held him face down. Tungar knelt beside him.
Tungar took a pouch of the mutton fat he used to oil his rifle cartridges, and smeared it on the end of the sharpened stake. His men laughed and made obscene gestures. Vijay squirmed, and screamed so loud the guards stuffed a cloth in his mouth.
The guards who held his legs spread them wide apart. Two others took the sharpened pole and pressed it between his buttocks. Christopher could not bear to watch. He closed his eyes, though with his hands bound he couldn’t stop up his ears. Vijay had spat out his gag. Screams of agony split the jungle as the spike passed through his anus and into his body. The captors knew their business. Christopher could tell from the sounds Vijay made that they had avoided the vital organs. That would have meant too quick a death.
He opened his eyes. Vijay lay on the ground, still screaming, and the screams redoubled as the guards lifted the spike upright. He slid down the pole, plunging the point deeper into his own entrails, but the guards had lashed a small cross-piece to the stake that kept him from penetrating too far. He sank down on himself, collapsing, until he was hunched like a chicken on a spit. Blood ran out of his anus and pooled at the bottom of the stick for flies to drink and savour.
They put the base of the stake into the hole they’d dug, and packed it with earth and rocks to keep the stake upright. Then they stepped back to admire their work, laughing and joking among themselves. Christopher heard them making bets as to how long Vijay would survive – most seemed to estimate two or three days. Vijay’s screams had tailed away into choking sobs as the spike pressed the air out of his lungs.
Poola came across and looked down on Christopher with sa
distic anticipation.
‘It is twenty miles from here to Chittattinkara. I will do the same to one of your men, one every two miles, and when we reach the Rani’s palace I will hoist you and your whore on each side of the gates of her palace. That will teach our people what happens to those who threaten the Rani’s servants – and our commerce.’
Over the next two days, Poola made good his threat. One by one, the bandits were dragged from the group and impaled at the roadside. At last, as they approached the palace in the foothills, Christopher and Tamaana were the only survivors.
He had thought that repeatedly witnessing the ordeal might have brutalized him to what was coming. Instead, it only magnified his terror. He found himself watching with horrible fascination each time the spike went in, his anal muscles clenched, and he was unable to drag his eyes from the awful spectacle. With no food, and no rest, he began to hallucinate. He dreamed he was back in his father’s study, breeches around his ankles, bent over a chair waiting for the strap while his mother sat sternly in the corner and told him to be brave. Once he dreamed he was making love with Tamaana. Her fingers stroked his back in ecstasy, but when she lifted her hands he saw she had torn away great bleeding chunks of his flesh.
They reached the palace gates in the late afternoon of the second day. Birds wheeled in the sky, as if they already scented the feast of carrion they would be offered, while the inhabitants of the palace came out to watch the spectacle.
Tungar’s men already had the stakes, cut earlier in the day and sharpened to points. They stripped Christopher and Tamaana naked and pinned them down in the dirt, a few feet apart. Poola stood over them, speaking to the assembled crowd. In his high, pompous voice, he listed Christopher and Tamaana’s crimes. The audience cringed and sighed, but through the sweat filling his eyes Christopher could see the looks on their faces. They were looking forward to the entertainment.
Poola finished his speech with a florid canticle of praise to the Rani. Christopher twisted his head, wondering if the queen had come to witness his execution, but he could not see her. Poola nodded to Tungar, who snapped an order to his men.
They brought the stakes, flourishing them so the crowd could admire their sharpness, and imagine the torments they would inflict. At the sight of the spikes, all Christopher’s strength melted away. He began to babble, a hysterical stream of sobs and barely intelligible pleas. ‘I will repent. I will crawl on my belly over hot coals to kiss the Rani’s feet. I have skills. I can use them in her service. I can serve her well, only please God do not do this terrible thing to me.’
The spectators laughed and jeered and made monkey faces at him. In his panic, without realizing it, he had started speaking in English. Even Tamaana had never heard him speak the language before.
‘Quiet,’ she said in her own language. ‘At least die with dignity.’
Poola frowned, and gestured to the men to hurry their work. They readied the stake. Gobs of mutton fat dripped from its tip.
But Tungar had other ideas. He accosted Poola and started speaking, gesturing angrily at Christopher. In his daze, Christopher could not understand what he was saying, though it seemed urgent. Perhaps they were devising some new refinement to his torture.
The stake pricked between his buttocks. After two days of mounting horror, he screamed the moment it touched him. He felt warmth between his legs as his bowels emptied. Pinned down, face in the dirt, he met Tamaana’s eyes opposite. She kept perfectly still, making no sound.
‘I love you,’ she mouthed.
She made him feel ashamed. He bit his lip until it bled, trying to swallow the pain as the stake pushed into him. The guards were toying with him, inching it in, pulling back a little, enjoying every twitch and whimper. He wondered how long it would take to die.
He felt it slide out again, further than before. He tensed himself. Surely they were readying for the final push, ready to split him open and thrust it up through his entrails.
But the thrust did not come. Tungar was shouting at his men, and Poola was shouting at Tungar, and Christopher could not understand a word of it. The audience started to boo, but a glare from Tungar made them lapse into sullen silence. The crowd thinned.
The guards pulled him and Tamaana to their feet and dragged them away.
When they entered the palace dungeons, they were separated. Christopher was taken to one of the cells, but he had no idea of what they had done to Tamaana. They chained him to the stone wall and left him.
He lost count of the time that he lay in the dungeon. In his misery, bound in the utter darkness, he might as well have been in his grave. Only the pain assured him he still lived. His wrists and neck ached from his bonds, his buttocks were crusted with dried blood and faeces, and terrible hunger cramps wracked his stomach. Through a hole in the floor he could hear running water, a river that flowed beneath the dungeon in a culvert. With his mouth almost numb from thirst, it was the most perfect torture. He dreamed of diving into it, the cool taste of the water in his mouth.
At last, guards came, and they were not gentle. They cut his bonds and dragged him through the palace, still naked, along many galleries with gilded statues, and across courtyards screened by elaborate wooden shutters. At last, when he had lost all sense of direction, they came to a pair of bronze doors. The functionary who guarded them wrinkled his nose when he saw Christopher and tried to send him away, but his guards responded brusquely.
‘The Rani has commanded it.’
The doors opened. The room beyond was larger even than the great reception rooms in Bombay castle, decorated with tapestries and beautiful paintings. His captors led him around a tiger skin rug in the middle of the floor, to the far end of the room. Poola and Tungar knelt there before an ornate mahogany throne, upon which was seated a beautiful young woman. Eyes downcast, Christopher barely caught a glimpse of her before the guards pushed him to his knees. However he knew from her surreal beauty and the magnificence of her crown and costume that she was the Rani of Chittattinkara.
Poola and Tungar were arguing. Poola was red in the face, while Tungar’s scar seemed to throb, and both wore the expressions of men trying to contain their anger.
‘We cannot afford to confront the English,’ Poola was saying. ‘We depend too much on them for our trade.’
‘You mean you depend too much on them,’ Tungar countered. ‘How much did the English pay you to advise the Rani to grant them a monopoly?’
‘I wanted to secure a market for our wares. Without the English, no one else will buy them.’
‘There are other hat-wearers. They would probably give us a better price.’
They paid no attention to Christopher. He cowered on the floor, and wondered why they had brought him up from the dungeon.
The woman on the throne lifted her hand, clinking the golden bangles on her arms. Instantly, the two men fell silent and adopted subservient poses.
‘The English traders at Brinjoan are jackals who feast on our people,’ she declared. ‘We have sought to mend their ways, and each time they heap insult upon insult upon us.’
Tungar smirked. Poola bowed stiffly to concede to her opinion. ‘Your highness.’
‘However, we are not a vengeful people. War should be undertaken only as a last resort,’ the Rani continued.
Now it was Poola who nodded his approval.
‘You are one of the hat-wearers?’ said the Rani
Cowering on the floor, Christopher did not realize she had addressed him. Tungar reminded him with a sharp kick in the ribs. ‘Answer her highness when she deigns to address you.’
Christopher pushed himself onto his knees and looked up. The Rani sat on her throne as still and beautiful as a Hindu goddess. Gold and ivory bangles covered her slim arms; her dress was stitched with gold thread and pearls. A diadem circled her head, with a pendant ruby hanging down between her eyes like a bindi mark. From his studies in the kalari, Christopher knew it represented the sixth chakra, the seat of concealed wisdom. Her almond
-shaped eyes stared down at him, unreadable and ineffable.
‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, I am one of the hat-wearers.’
‘Then how do you explain this?’
Her eyes flicked towards one of her servants, who held a leather bag. Attentive to her every movement, he stepped forward and turned out the bag. The urumi slithered out onto the floor with a soft whickering sound. Christopher stared at it, like a cat watching a bird, calculating the distance and the time it would take him to reach it.
Tungar put his foot on the urumi, and touched the hilt of his sword. The message was unmistakable.
‘I ran away from home,’ Christopher explained. ‘An aasaan took me in to his kalari and trained me in the art of Kalaripayattu.’
‘He is lying,’ said Poola.
‘Bring me any Englishman, and when he hears me speak he will know that we are of the same nation,’ Christopher pleaded. He did not know why it mattered to them, but he understood that his life hinged on his nationality.
‘Can you teach my guards to use the urumi?’
Tungar began to protest, but the Rani silenced him with a wave of her hand. She waited for Christopher’s answer.
‘I can teach it,’ he declared. She wanted more. ‘I can teach them to stand together in battle, as the hat-wearers do, and to fire faster than they ever have before. I will make them into such an army as has never been seen in this country.’
‘This is unnecessary,’ Poola protested. ‘The path to greatness is commerce. War impoverishes all who indulge themselves in it.’
The Rani gave him a look that would have felled an elephant. ‘The hat-wearers have offered my people many injuries,’ she declared. ‘They must learn that we are a proud people, unafraid of their ships and their guns. If they do not bow to me, we will teach them a lesson they will not soon forget.’
Tungar ran his fingers over his chin, stroking the scar that split his face. ‘Your highness is wise and just.’
‘But I must be sure of this creature’s loyalty to me.’ She spoke about Christopher as if he wasn’t present. He only understood what she meant by the way all eyes in the room turned to him.