I jerked it away.
Ignoring me, his hand hovered over my breast instead. He plucked a jeweled pin. “Instead, I shall take this.” His fingers, warm, strong, deft, and the brush of skin between my breasts, slightly raspy, sent a subterranean quake rippling from my toes.
I waited, breathless, for what came next.
Instead, he plopped akimbo on the cushion opposite, replacing the shattered pawn with my jeweled pin and, with a wave, indicated I make opening gambit.
“But perhaps you should care to destroy more?” he murmured. “A piece of your clothing, for, say, a queen or a king? A lock of hair for a checkmate? Or perhaps a kiss for—”
“They call it strip poker back in…” I scowled.
Back in where?
The dratted door to memory swung shut just as I nearly had it. Perhaps a piece of my memory for a king? Another touch of your hand for a… I shook my head.
Bending my head, I blindly selected a pawn, tipping it as I placed it.
The muscular hand nudged my hand aside, placing it upright. “Are you sure that was your opening gambit?”
Concentrate on the game.
I stubbornly replaced the pawn with a sharp click.
He made his move, distracting me with a lecture on chess while I sweated my return play.
“Chess was born in India, you do realize. Revered as indication of intelligence and strategy. A set is in every Indian home. In fact, even the Mahabharata has a crucial episode involving the game.”
“I have no idea what or who the Mahabharata is, nor do I particularly care,” I snarled, thinking furiously. Now, if I move the queen, there lies a multitude of traps already set, but if I take this pawn and…
He did not enlighten me. After five minutes deliberating, lingering on pawns, removing them, muttering to myself, he sighed heavily and offered, “If you lose, you will do as I say, you realize—exactly, but I am a sporting man.”
I fixed him with what I hoped was an icy green gaze from eyes like chips off a glacier. “I see no such rules in any game book.” Freezing him with more green ice, I asked, “And if I win?”
I sat in silence as he frowned and made his next play, brazenly shoving a knight into battle.
No dilettante he, respecting me too much, in my estimation, with his ruthless cutthroat stratagems, the first game handily won by him, though I played with wit and feverishly recalled plays dredged from deep in my hidden mind. I used female stratagem in turn, glancing greenly through what I hoped were sultry lashes, dragging my sari down by leaning over the board, vindicated as I noted him stirring restlessly. I moistened lips, biting and plumping them, and slowly ran my tongue along the rim of my glass. Oh, I was merciless, I hoped, turning him to a virtual custard.
When I coolly tipped his king in triumph, he glowered and topped our champagne from the crystal bucket weeping diamond drops. The night was humid. I longed to brush the ice along bared breasts.
As the evening wore on with the clicking of chess pieces and champagne, the rajah changed tactics, relating diverting tales regarding his garage mechanic, of all things, among others. Apparently, the rajah owned more cars than Ford Motor Company.
Another tale was of a five-times-removed cousin, a maharajah no less, who reigned over a cow pasture.
I found myself giggling, sipping too much wine. Drawn to his deftly playing tanned fingers as they moved across the board, still feeling their caress on my skin, I found it hard to concentrate, and without thinking, my “poisoned” pawn became a death knell and I had a “bad bishop” corralled by my own pawns.
“Phahhhh!” I uttered, disgusted.
The rajah smoothly tipped my queen—the White Buffalo Woman.
“From whence did you learn Caturaṅga?” he asked smoothly, perhaps mollifying, perhaps with complacency. I could not tell which.
“Chess, you mean? Apparently, I didn’t.” But I will now.
As the evening cooled, in my champagne-fueled state I made inventive, daring plays, contriving new gambits and making an accidental but brilliant move with my queen, backing up two rooks.
I did not notice a narrowing of his eyes as he hunched over for serious warfare. I seemed on fire, sending my army of kings, queens, knights, and pawns to scorch the checkered field of play, and in an audacious series of moves, captured his last piece with ill-advised crowing.
“Hah! I won! And handily!” I clapped my hands. “I have won! You lost!” I would have danced about the room had I been able to get up unaided. I gulped more bubbly wine instead.
The rajah glowered at the board. “You are most certainly not a lady!”
With a sweep of his arm, and a face like ancient granite, he brushed the remaining pieces off to shatter on the marble floor.
His heavy hooded eyes betrayed him. I drew back.
“A draw—to be continued,” he growled and, gripping me with two powerful hands, drew me bodily across the board before I could protest, scattering wine flutes and a last few game pieces.
Possibly unconsciously seductive, my eyes glazed from monsoonal heat and the wine, I dropped my head back, arching my neck, not in surrender but languor. Through half-closed eyes, I recognized his heavy gaze feverish with want, that naked thirst that comes with men and women, as his large hands strongly sculpted my back and my bottom naked under the silk, gripping me bone against bone, breasts mashed against his chest, as he ground my body into his, thrusting me back into the cushions and kissing me thoroughly and hard.
I protested weakly between kisses as we came up for air, but my body did not.
Was not this what I had wished for since he first stepped into the room? Since that time in the scullery?
His heartbeat and breath quickened. I felt his lips brushing my skin, ripping my sari with his teeth, cupping the swelling of my sex beneath with one hand. He bent his head to my breasts. I felt faint with longing. Ripping my silks aside, I dragged at his caftan in turn.
Then the imp shouted an alarm. This will not end well. You will lose your own self in this dangerous game—this battle of wills!
There is no battle of wills, I screamed at the imp. Leave me alone. Then I thought, in the last sane moment, what am I doing? I am not some back-alley trull he can have at will!
Pushing the rajah off with shreds of resolve, I stiffly gathered myself, awkwardly pulling my sari straight, brushing damp hair from my lips and trying to get my breathing under control.
“I thought you were saving me for your brother,” I said as coolly as five flutes of champagne and a tot or two of brandy allowed.
Digging your grave deeper, Sary girl? my imp sneered.
“Does it seem like it?” the rajah snarled. His eyes bore into mine.
I stared at his lips. His mouth so close…
“Make up your mind!” I snapped—Oh, please.
His grasp loosened. I fell backward even as I longed to burrow closer. I jumped up, no easy task, found my flute was empty, hitched over, and gulped chilled wine from the jeroboam on the sideboard. Then I railed, “I am here against my will. You will not tell me anything, but you give me bizarre reasons. You assume, sir, I am someone I am sure I am not. I wish to leave!”
“Are you certain you should be doing that, when you are so recently recovered?” He eyed the jeroboam with alarm. Perhaps he thought I would defend myself with it.
“I’ve drunk stronger, more manly stuff than this, and I do not need anyone like you telling me what is good for me!” I sneered, taking another hefty swig. Oh, I was making a lovely impression. Did I want Dutch courage, or was I wishing for oblivion? On the other hand, was I striving to breach my own defenses? I would never know.
The rajah jumped up, strode over, and with a controlled sweep of his hand, just stopping from a blow, barked, “You bore me! Get out of my sight!”
Our stance, toe to toe, would have set a forest ablaze.
I welcomed the fire. His wrath made me strong. “You are no better than your brother! You only suppose you are.” T
he look on his face would have stopped a Brahma bull.
“Perhaps you invite the comparison, madam! That can yet be arranged.”
I stood as any bare-knuckle fighter in a garbage-filled alley until his eyes blazed black fire—like the touch of ice can burn—and then, the rains, threatening all evening, came as if to quench our mutual fire, not a second too soon. I yearned to find out just how far I could have pushed him.
Against batons of lightning and thunderous rolls, the rains played staccato music on the marble terrace. No wind, only the solid drumming of a tropical deluge.
We looked out, startled as if just awakening, then at each other with sultry, heat-crazed eyes.
He reached for me.
I ran into his embrace. My head fit neatly under his chin. Our hearts beat miniature earthquakes, breaths mingling as our mouths neared, hesitantly, lips brushing past and returning, his lingering where my lips curled in at the corners. We were the eye of a storm, while heat lightning lit the sky. The rajah eyed the couch with crazed longing, yet unexpectedly set me aside. At the sudden release, I drunkenly swayed.
“The choice must be freely given,” he called below the thunderous music of the storm. “I do not beg. I do not steal that which is not mine. However, I cannot wait much longer than—than a burning wick on a barrel of explosives. But for now…you may go.” He spoke harshly. “Go, damn it! Leave while you can!”
I half-fell on the chaise, hiding my face in a cascade of hair, feverish from a hunger I could not name. I did not want to feel this way. “Make up your mind!” I snapped.
I picked up my tattered dignity and fled in confusion.
Muttered Hindi curses followed me.
Chapter Seventeen
Addiction
After a turbulent rest filled with scorching green eyes and storm-frizzed clouds of hair, the rajah was shaken awake by a servant. “My Lord, come quick! It is his supreme highness!”
The rajah frowned, torn from his dream-tossed sojourn with Sary. “What is it,” he snapped, “that you should disturb my rest?” Shiva! He sounded waspish as his exalted brother! He brushed his long hair back from his face. “Yes, yes, I’m coming.”
The rajah gazed down at his brother. Rain still pounded a marble balcony outside. In the tumult, his brother did not stir.
The maharajah’s new physician washed his hands, literally and figuratively.
“I cannot rouse him, your excellency. He has been rather—overindulgent of late. I tried to warn him of excesses and all that it entails. His heart—his…”
“Drugs!” His brother’s breathing was stertorous, like a cart with square wheels. White drool foamed from his mouth. Sticky paraphernalia, on the gilded table beside the massive man who resembled a beached and very sick whale, told the latest part of the tale. He picked up a syringe, dropped it with distaste, and poked a messy scattering of gray tablets.
“Oh, my, yes, I fear so! Yet I must obey him. You appreciate that, your excellency.”
The rajah waved him off.
The look the physician threw him suggested, That is easy for you. “An overdose, my lord. A race between overeating, drinking, and drugs…to the very edge of the abyss.”
The rajah made a disgusted, “Tchaa!”
“It would be my neck in the gallows like his last caregiver!” the doctor blurted.
The rajah gestured again, impatient, Go on.
“His excellency experiments on his own. I had nothing to do with this! I prescribe purges, unsweetened tea, clean water, and raw vegetables without sauces, but…”
“You surgeons go overboard. My brother cannot fall from such a great height to settle for rabbit food and water! Give him a middle ground, at least.” Not that his brother ever took things by halves. Why was he even trying?
Showing heat, the physician decried, “I beg your forbearance, my lord. He must dig himself from a great hole before he starts even the rabbit food!”
“What this time?” The rajah sighed. “Was it mushrooms?” He picked up the syringe again. ‘What is this?”
The physician shrugged. “Some. Before, I had supposed his only drugs were gluttony, drink, and a few soporifics—cannabis, light doses of the poppy. But…” The physician’s gaze swept the bed, disgusted. “For the last year, I fear, others supply him from foreign parts via the aero-plane service.”
He pressed fingers to his mouth in covetous awe. “Exotic barks, sweat from frogs, insects even! When I arrive, I see the most fearful concoctions—the residue—”
The rajah began to say, “Yes, I know all that—” Startled by a sudden movement under the coverlets, supposing his brother roused, he saw instead the tousled head of a frightened boy peeking from the covers.
He strode closer, yanking the covers. “What is this?”
To his astonishment, the head of a girl also—twelve years of age, perhaps, looking no better, poked out too. She watched the two, warily.
“These are children! Half-drugged children!”
“Oh, dear—oh, my! I neglected to tell you. I—I thought you knew…were tolerant…” The physician read the look on the rajah’s face and corrected his assumption that all potentates were corrupt. The stony look told him different.
The physician thrust belatedly past the rajah. “Shoo! Shoo!” He waved at the children. “His excellency uses them as bed warmers—he says.”
The rajah’s grimacing look would have shattered glass. “Bed warmers? The sun is high! This is India!” He flung open the draperies that kept the room in fetid golden twilight. “Get them out of here!”
To the children, he roared, “Go! Hide yourselves! Disguise yourselves. Mark yourselves, but do not come back. No! Don’t wait for your clothes!”
“Yes, but…” the boy whimpered. “He will have me beaten.” Just then, the maharajah stirred himself, blinking in outrage at the light.
With a panicky look, the girl hopped from the bed, falling onto the floor, then dragged the boy away, urging, “Come, Jaya!”
Grim-faced, the rajah turned back to the table, fingered the hypodermic, noted a residue of brown syrup in a brass spoon, smelt crumbles of tan grit, and rolled a scatter of dull green capsules in his palm like bullets. More telling were the tracked lines of brownish powder on a pair of the boy’s small-clothes. He looked at his brother, sickened.
“Take them to a safe place,” he warned the doctor.
Abruptly, the maharajah muttered, “Lea’ me ’lone,” and dropped back into an open-mouthed snore.
“Is he safe?” The rajah asked, blank-faced.
The look told the physician his interest was too small to register.
“His breathing calms.”
“Swell!”
“Yes. Just your loving presence…”
At the rajah’s warning look, the man abandoned that thought. “He does need a purging.”
“I shall not be around for that,” the rajah answered dryly. “But leave us now.”
****
The rajah contemplated the gray, corpulent face. It was like old lard left in the sun. Trying to drum up pity—or even some compassion—recalling the plump, rosy-cheeked brother who had been hedonistic, true, yet always laughing at himself, with his belly-busters in the pool, chuckling when his arrows hit all but the targets…
When had that changed?
When he reached twelve or so…a young man’s passage, be he king or beggar, into adulthood. Maidens flashing almond eyes looked up through lashes not at the heir to the throne but at the rajah instead, even though he was but a twig of ten.
That’s when his brother’s laughs became twisted and mean tricks a palliative. Drinking, and stuffing himself with sweets, made him even more repugnant to all within his sorry sphere.
The rajah smoothed his brother’s sweaty, sparse hair. This time, though, recalling the boy and girl, something clicked like a clock stuck at an hour, and suddenly meshed smoothly past the sticking point.
“You did this to yourself, my brother,” the rajah
whispered. “More’s the pity.”
He gave a final look at the sodden heap on the bed. Then, with a mighty sweep of his arm, brushed the “medicines” and the boy’s small-clothes onto the floor and stalked out.
“We begin a new game, my exalted brother! Now I make the rules!”
Chapter Eighteen
Caves of Ali Baba
“Come, come! Make ready!” Padmavati scolded. I recognized what that meant when her coven bore in caskets, mirrors, brushes, and perfumes. I could not believe this was happening again. Not after that night. I had not seen the rajah since. I turned myself into a wooden doll with frozen hinges, enduring the prolonged beautifying ritual. Numbed when they came for me, I was desperate and determined this time. In the folds of my sari, I had secreted six-inch hairpins.
I had not seen the rajah since the chess incident. He was finished with me. On to his next conquest, I thought bitterly.
I gripped the pins, praying I would have the courage to use them.
We crossed a bridge over a pond awash with lily pads in an area I had not been before. They left me in sculpted gardens, alone. Stunned, I watched the eunuchs melting into the dark, like bad actors leaving a stage.
I looked up in the sudden freedom. The moon was a melon rind and just as orange. Beyond the tarnished glow, the garden dissolved into misshapen contours. I revolved in place, looking about.
What now?
A trick?
My sari, per usual, was thin silk, yet I shuddered in the heat of the night, waiting for the maharajah to lumber from the massive topiaries. My ears, attuned, heard a whisper of cloth.
I tensed to hide among the dark shapes.
A brush of footfalls through short grass.
A faint aroma reached me—honeysuckle and jasmine mixed with something pungent and earthy—and the rajah, his face in shadow, emerged like a shimmering shade and waited silently for me. He held out a hand.
The other hand gripped a gnarled pitch torch, unlit, of rags, reeds, and—by the odor—creosote.
He waved the torch. “I could use one of those novelty electrical torches, but this is more appropriate and, perhaps, more reliable. Come.”
Sary and the Maharajah's Emeralds Page 11
