Perhaps there were someone alive, someone who could tell the tale. But that seemed scarcely to matter: the tale was here, told on the walls, told in the alluvium through which they’d walked— And told in the well, which reached down past groundwater, through densest rock, layer upon layer, down past imagining, to the dark, hot, center of the world.
At the same time that he tried to breathe, and with his mind tried to reconstruct what had occurred from what he had seen, he knew with certainty that he, and his men, were as of this moment marked for death. The Company would think that they had committed these acts, or that they were with these acts associated. There were British soldiers to be avenged. And women, and children. Dakkar knew he would be hunted to the ends of the earth, and until the end of time. That he would be slain on sight; that his family would not be spared; that onward down the years no relative or offspring of Prince Dakkar would be allowed by them to tread the earth. And who, asked Dakkar, could to that vengeance assign anything like blame? They killed ours, and we will now kill every last one of theirs. It is an impulse deeply human if not, in any other sense, possessed of humanity.
Yet even as he knew that he was already dead—and even as his mind, thinking of the walls and of the well, did not cease imagining what could never fully be imagined—there was also an inundation of energy. Of freedom. A sense of possibility opening up more rapidly than he could grasp. A blossom, a bloom, in each and every direction. For if he were already condemned: in the house of the dead there were no shackles. What, now, might constrain him from thought or act? The fear of consequence? There was no more consequence to be had here. He was Dakkar and he was dead and he was a prince of men but he was also no man. He had no future and so all futures now opened up before him for whatever time he’d been allotted.
He’d long had no regard for the British. Now, gazing down and away and back down the well, Dakkar had at once lost regard for the race of man. He was not a subject, and he was not a brother. He was a free man, free of compassion, free of the ties that bind, a sodality of one.
He would disband his small troop. Allow them to pursue whatever course they now saw fit. He would make his way alone—on horseback, or should that be too conspicuous, on foot—back to Bundelkhand. To spend his remaining moments within the walls where he’d been born, and with those whom fate had allowed him to love: his amah, his children, his wife. If by venturing within the gates of Cawnpore, by leaving his footprints in garrison muck, he’d sealed Madhya’s fate along with his own, he wanted to be with her before that fate came due, to make her remaining moments joyous, free from all care. Until whatever came after, no matter how brutal or final, were as mere footnote to a thousand-page text. Let her know that I love her. Then I can die, and my death will have been earned, and my life not without purpose in this world.
And so he gave over command to his wisest lieutenant, and gave his men autonomy to pursue the fight wherever it would lead. They chose to head northeast, toward Lucknow, where there were, perhaps, battles to be waged, comrades to be supported, a people to be freed. Dakkar would go west-southwest to Bundelkhand. To Orchha Palace. To home.
They went their separate ways at dawn. The sun was coming up and the full weight of what they had by lanternlight witnessed could now fully be seen. The sepoy massacred by the British. The British savaged by the sepoy. The sword marks low on the walls. The blood in spatters, then streaks, then pools. The thick, gelatinous smears on walls and on branches—what could only be the brain matter of those, sepoy and British alike, whose skulls had been crushed, shattered. With the rising sun came rising heat, and with rising heat, rising stench. You didn’t want to take a breath deeper than your throat.
Dakkar embraced his lieutenant, left shoulder–right shoulder, ceremonially, as if awarding a medal. Took him close to his breast, held him. Then:
Dakkar: “You will be victorious.”
His men, behind him, nodded. It was not a time, or a place, for cheers.
Lieutenant: “Travel well.”
Dakkar bent his head down briefly. Turned his back on his men. Took one step, then another, through unspeakable Cawnpore muck, toward the gate, thence toward home.
He went on foot—to travel by horse seemed the surest way to raise attention. Not in uniform or in finery but in the simplest garb, a cream-colored dhoti frayed and paled by time. Two days out, near Chapar Ghata, where the river for a brief stretch runs parallel to the road, he encountered a section of Campbell’s skirmishers, patrolling the road to Lucknow to assure that the main force of Campbell’s men were not attacked from the rear. But Dakkar had neither arms nor the garb of a soldier and he walked so humbly along the path that there was no reason to suspect him an enemy. They stopped him, made him turn round, patted him for weapons. What they saw: a man whose beard was rimed with dust, whose hair and skin had not been washed for long time, whose teeth and gums were red stained from chewing paan, whose feet were bare and callused and cracked. They made him lift his dhoti and patted him again. When they were satisfied he could do them no harm they let him go on his way. The next man they stopped was not as fortunate. The man had, in the folds of his kurta salwar, a small crescent-shaped kris. They confiscated it, let him free; but then, as he was walking away, shot him twice in the back and in the head. He fell to the ground and lay still. Dakkar heard this, knew what fate had befallen the other man— But did not turn around. He did not want to look, and did not want to be seen looking. He kept his head down, his feet close to earth. Through Sachendi to Rania; Nagin Jasi to Todarpore; back across the Yamuna; via the Kalpi Railway Bridge; past Shahjahanpore and Osargav and Okasa and Chamari; around Orai (there was too much danger of encountering British there, so Dakkar circumnavigated); then through Alt, where he labored for three days mucking the stables for one of the local men of good fortune in exchange for water and food. But with head down, always with head down.
Then, roughly paralleling the river down through Moth and Semri, Chiragaon and Parichha and Baragaon and Goramachhiya, past Karguan, where lived a man he knew he could trust. The man gave him a horse, his best, and asked nothing in return. Dakkar asked the man how he might thank him. The man replied that Dakkar already had.
It was on that horse that Dakkar rode through Shivaji Naggar, past the British cemetery on Gwalior Road, then up to Orchha. To home. Dakkar’s heart was not light—how could it be, given where he had been, what he had seen?—but the thought of returning to Madhya filled his spirit with a sense of light, of possibility.
The first presentiment that something had gone wrong came with the first man he saw. It was Achyuta who ran the kitchen staff, as did his father before him. Achyuta looked up. But instead of breaking out into that broad and contagious grin, as he had on so many encounters previous, he just looked down.
The second man Dakkar saw—the stable keeper Revant—did the same.
Now Dakkar was close enough to see the amahs, on the balconies, beating rugs with dusters. (When were the amahs not shaking pieces of cloth in daylight?) When they saw Dakkar and recognized him they cried, shrieked, keened. It was an unearthly sound. Still others recoiled, ran back into the palace, leaving their dusty rugs to hang in the now-still air. Ran back, as if they’d seen a ghost. Seen a bhoot: a perturbed and restless soul, condemned by some flaw or failure of this life to be interdicted from moving on to the next.
It was not until he had dismounted, was on the steps of Orchha Palace, with the amahs peering out through slits and windows, that anyone came to look him in the eye. Pashupati, who worked with Revant to mind the horses and other animals, came through the door. Stared at his prince from foot to eye. Finally: “Welcome home.” But in saying it he did not evince joy. Then he pulled the prince to him, close, something he’d not in thirty years done, or was likely ever to do again. The amahs, much of the staff were now near-certain that what they saw was a man not returned from the dead but rather from long travel.
“Where is Madhya?” said the prince, and in the faces of tho
se assembled found his answer. They brought him inside, unwound his dhoti, and bathed him, and brought scented flowers into the chamber, and soaked his feet in salt and essential oils. His hair and beard were washed and soaped and combed until all the dust of travel had been washed away.
In this he was looked after by Devi, who had been his amah when he was in swaddling cloth and who swaddled him now: she wrapped the prince in cloth that clung to his damp skin and made it dry. And as she soaked him and rubbed him and combed him and dried him and wrapped him and soothed his skin with sweet oil, she also spoke to him. Told him what his heart could not bear to know. That his daughter was gone, that his son was gone, lost to British knives; and that Madhya too was gone, lost to grief, lost to sati, when the men from Oudh—liars, traitors, merchants of grief, with deceit in their souls and British coin in their pockets—delivered to Madhya news of Dakkar’s death. One was a Sikh; another a bellied, jovial merchant’s son from Pondicherry. They did not seem like agents of empire but it was for that, and that alone, they had been chosen. They knew what effect their words would have. It is why they were by the British Empire paid to utter those words.
When Dakkar was clean, was dry, his servants helped him into his trousers, his tunic; then wound a turban round his head. A turban with upright feather. His best and oldest talwar, slow curved and honed, was strapped to a jeweled belt round his waist. He did visit, and for long moments, his room, their room, the one he had shared with Madhya—gone large and small and dark.
Then they went with him, one at each elbow, through the doors and out, blinking in sunlight. They took him to the pyre and they let him see what was there. It was not anything he did not already know but now he knew it in a different way, by image, by smell, and then, as he sifted cinders through his fingers, by touch. The taste of dry ash was in his mouth now. And would be, forever.
He stayed in the palace for three days. Long enough to send back the horse to the good man of Karguan, together with a small sack of gold coins. Long enough to make sure that every thing he had done as prince could be done by others in his absence.
On the third day he walked to the river Ken where it makes its canyon. The walls of the canyon were of pure crystalline granite in shades that ranged from pink to red to gray. He walked alone, a bamboo stick over his back and a small sack on the end of the stick. The Ken had been running for aeons, longer than man could measure or even fathom: the canyon ran some three miles and was a hundred feet deep. Then he reached the end of the canyon: Raneh Falls. It was there that the waters dropped long and low. The noise comforted his ears.
He put down his stick and untied the corners of the sack. Inside were the ashes of his wife, and of his children Rani and Hanuman, commingled. He took them up in his hand and let them fall through his fingers to the river just above the falls. He did this again and again until all the ashes were gone, down the falls; and the souls of his wife and children had gone to their next place.
His eyes were dry and there was some ash on his face from where the ash had blown but he did not make to wipe it off. He just turned, retraced his steps, walked back—it took him some time—to Orchha. He stayed in the palace overnight. Then he left. An odd quartet—his treasured mentor Singh, his aging French tutor Thomy-Thiérry, his Brahman Thugs Mohan and Feringheea, all now back from Lucknow—followed at a distance. The Prince did not speak to them, nor they to him. He wished no more to have truck with the society of men.
It was then that the prince recalled what he’d never forgotten: the dream of the Mussulman of Gwalior. A dream of a boat that sailed not upon the waves but beneath them. But to the prince: a dream of a life not lived upon this earth. A dream that called to him more loudly with each step. The waters of the Ken drowned out the sound of the land, until all that was left was the echo of his footsteps. Step by step he entered the old dream. Dakkar of Bundelkhand was now the Mussulman of Gwalior, and also no man, and also every man who had ever been given more than the heart can endure. He knew, now, his task. The earth was his home but it was time to leave.
He would wander the lands of the earth until he reached their edge, and then he would roam the waters of the earth, and when he could he would dive down into those waters and there find another home. The prince would become as the nameless Mussulman of Gwalior: He would fashion a sub-marine vessel, to be called the Neptune, honoring the lord of the sea whose dominion subtended two-thirds of the globe. The prince would be no man. In Latin: nemo. And thus did the Prince become Captain, and thus did Dakkar become Nemo.
And as Nemo he would live within the Neptune and live there beneath the waves. He would help the Candiotes in their rebellion, yes; he would disrupt the larger plans of empire, yes; he would sever the filaments that linked London to its empire, yes. And of course: he would put paid to each and every British man-of-war that dared to sail upon the seven seas.
He would live beneath the waves as a child beneath a blanket, reading by scant light creating worlds of his own. And there beneath the waves our Nemo would live until his time was done. Until a bullet from a large-bore rifle should find its way to and through his heart.
* * *
—
WE HAVE SEEN, now, the concatenation of events—some world-historical, some small as a mote of Cawnpore dust—that did to our Nemo give birth. And we shall most certainly return to our Nemo’s saga at the proper time. But for the moment let us lift the curtain more fully to introduce another of our tale’s dramatis personae, a man whose life will intersect with Nemo’s in ways that are neither casual nor without consequence.
As was the case with Nemo, this man may also be known to you. He is John Ahab, out of Nantucket. These two men, they are as like and as opposite as South Pole and North. You know of Nemo as a man who lives beneath the sea, and hates all upon it. John Ahab he lives upon the waves and hates, with equal fervor, all beneath. When the two of them are pitched ‘gainst each other—and this they will—’tis likely that neither will survive. What we know to a certainty: at battle’s end, when smoke and mist do clear, not more than one of them shall remain alive.
FIVE
NO ONE WOULD be faulted for believing the Captain Ahab to be dead. The tale of his dénouement has been ably recounted elsewhere, and seemed to leave our Ahab no means of egress save the path that o’erlooks paradise, or the other, so similar in appearance, that gives upon perdition. (Most would assume, given what they’d been told, he’d walked the latter.) There are, to be sure, deaths that bring a life to its full stop. Yet there are those deaths, particularly among the legendary, that punctuate more lightly.
Here is what we know with more certainty: Within a year or two of said captain’s demise, a traveling entertainment did mount and tour through the towns and cities of our Republic. It was billed: I AM AHAB: A ONE-MAN SHOW. The first recorded appearance was in Indianapolis, where there was enough business for a run of three weeks’ duration; it then moved on to Louisville. From Louisville to Nashville, from Nashville darting into Florida, then across Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas, up the river to Illinois then over to Indiana to start the circuit anew.
The show was less a play than a series of tableaux. In the first a young and strapping Ahab ascended the gangway, off to sea for the first time. In the second the young man told of his love of the sea, recited oceanic paeans in blank verse, sang a chantey. Then this boy of eighteen, this apprentice harpooneer, found his ship capsized and himself attacked by a whale. There was a brief intermission during which refreshments were sold. The show recommenced forty years later, with Ahab gaunt and aged and with hair more salt than pepper. He had but one question, which he asked of all: “Hast thou seen the White Whale?” In the following scene, unaccompanied by dialogue, he nailed a gold coin—an Ecuadorian eight escudos doubloon—to the mast. A long silent moment, one with fine resonance for those who already knew the tale. And on that moment: the curtain fell.
The curtain rose again. Now Ahab stood on deck, aimed his harpoon, let fly. Hit his
mark. The rope wrapped itself around him: He was enmeshed. Dragged down by it. Dragged overboard by it. Entombed by it. Curtain.
Then the curtain rose for the final time. An exhausted Ahab, hair now gone white as driven snow, addressed the audience directly. “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Thumped his ivory leg against the boards of the stage to induce generosity as the tall hat was passed among the spectators. As he moved from city to city, north to south and back, he adjusted the cadences of his speech to the rhythms of his audience. Cut some scenes. Elongated others. Continued his tour. Was offered a residence in Michigan but did not like that state. A state should be contiguous, he thought, and the idea of two disparate land masses with one name disturbed him.
It all came to an end, as many things do, in Philadelphia, where a young reporter, less canny than persistent, did by his research discover that whereas all documentation of the Pequod and its captain showed it was the captain’s right leg that had been savaged, the Ahab of the dramatic tableau was absent his left. Worse, word of the reporter’s article reached far beyond the newspaper’s circulation, traveling by telegraph, from mouth to ear. Within weeks there was nowhere in Indianapolis or Louisville or Nashville or Atlanta or Decatur where this John Ahab might ply his trade. He did then return to his hometown of Weehawken, to incubate other schemes by which a man missing a leg might make his way in the world without reliance upon alms. He stayed first with his mother and then, when that lodging grew to be insalubrious, in a small rooming house hard by the river, where a sextet of one-roomers, day-drinkers, isolatoes—most cast off by their wives—insisted to anyone who would hear them out that their billet was only temporary.
The Great Eastern Page 6
