Sary and the Maharajah's Emeralds

by Sharon Shipley

  “Sary, pyara. If you sit discreetly with the other women, behind a heavier ghoon ghat, at the end, perhaps you may look on.”

  “Look on!” I shouted, warring between selecting the heaviest candlestick to whack him over the head or shoving him off the parapet. I began weeping instead.

  “What else may I give you?” He cupped my cheek with long brown fingers. “Anything you desire.”

  “Don’t appease me! You broke your promise! I wish to leave. I told you!” I flashed my eyes at him, hating my wheedling, carping tone yet suddenly wild to leave the stultifying palace, this small confining village. It was before the maharajah’s birthday when I was reborn in this alien place, the last I knew of the world outside.

  The desire became a need so strong I could not breathe.

  He removed his hand.

  “Just a day,” I amended. “I am”—I searched for words—“losing myself.” And that before I am found.

  “Indeed, I did promise. You shall have it.” Yet it was as if he meant, “You will be sorry.”

  “And another…”

  He lowered his brow, nailing me with his dark eyes, and picked up his ceremonial saber. “An-other?”

  ‘It will keep.”

  “As you will.” He spoke distantly, wincing a stiff smile, his mind already on the evening and the Dutch ambassador. And the maharani?

  I was learning Hindi and a smattering of Urdu, and attempted strumming simple melodies on a stringed instrument called a sitar.

  Yet I ended the evening by hanging over the parapet and staring out at the far distant city under the stars.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Unbridled Passion

  “Oh, how pretty. A true sweetheart!” I babbled, giddy as I stroked the mare’s glossy neck. Soft silver gray. Velvet nose. Large silvery eyes under ladylike lashes. I looked up at the rajah, ecstatic. Starlings flitted and rummaged straw in the rambling stables. The smell was heaven. Warm animals, hay, sunshine, and dust…and freedom!

  “Approve?”

  My face said it all.

  “Now,” he asked, hand hanging onto the bridle, “what is this other task you have set before me?”

  I toed the ground. “It is silly. Since you have not offered it.” I suddenly felt shy and hated that.

  He held the reins out of reach. “I must have this boon before we go thither,” he jested.

  “Thither? Is that a word?”

  He shrugged, as if to say, With you English-speaking creatures, who knows?

  I blew a ringlet off my forehead. “After all this time—you know my name, yet…I do not know…yours. I…think of you only as ‘the rajah,’ you see. No one ever calls you by your given name. The one your mother might have called you,” I finished lamely. “I thought, since we were going off together like this—” I waved my hand, exasperated. “Oh, never mind!”

  He smiled, bemused, suddenly interested in a starling’s flight to the rafters. “My mother named me after one of her favorite books,” he said gravely as he cupped his hand for my foot.

  “How odd. Not a family name or—?”

  I placed my foot in his hand and lifted myself with ease of familiarity over the saddle. A fact I filed away. I sat astride. I saw myself racing like the wind. Away from someone, someone riding hell-bent for leather, bullets whipping past. The crack of a rifle. The saddle between my legs, the pommel banging into me as the horse galloped off kilter in its mad race…

  He brought me back.

  “What?” I stared at him confused.

  “Quasimodo, from Victor Hugo. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Quasi, for short.”

  I yanked the reins from his hand. “Please!”

  “It is at least a yard long. I prefer the first of them—Ram.” He pronounced it Rawm. “Or Rami.” He shrugged elegant shoulders.

  “Ram.” I tested it on my tongue. “It suits you—Ram. But has it a meaning? Ram?”

  He mumbled something, adjusting my stirrups.

  “What? I didn’t hear that.”

  He mumbled something else.

  “Say it!” I wheedled. “What does it mean?”

  “It means…oh, god—or god-like, I suppose.” His ears turned red. “Now, can we be off?”

  I held back a giggle. God-like.

  ****

  His stallion, gleaming black and bad-tempered, suited Ram with his billowing gypsy silk shirt and hair whipping like a black flag.

  Leaving the last archway, we entered Bharatpur’s dusty, packed streets. I grabbed the pommel and twisted to look back at the immense golden pile blotting the skyline. No wonder I could not find my way. We had slipped out an obscure side entrance behind the royal stables, all but lost in vine.

  My first impression of the sprawling city was—too loud, too open, too dirty. City odors fought—sewage, frying food, incense—those of bodies. Crowds mauled us, ignorant of his status, in a tide of hawking messy commerce. Beggars brushed our horses. Children stood in the way to slow us while nimble fingers tugged at saddlebags. Ram, apparently foresighted, sprinkled them liberally with annas, half rupees and pices.

  “Cheeky little buggers.” He grunted cheerfully.

  The rajah could have been a wealthy corn merchant as we wended south through Bharatpur slums next to walled mansions, which became farther apart until, passing fields, we approached a wilderness. Entering under a rusting scrolled arch, we cantered into a world where egrets stalked, swans drifted, birds chattered crazed overhead, and unseen things slithered.

  “A hunting reserve,” the rajah explained. A curious mix of swamp, greenswards, and arid islands, the reserve was seemingly untouched.

  For an instant, the urge to dig my docile mare in the ribs and fly like a hot breeze to further freedom—here, or back there in the winding streets—was nigh overpowering.

  True freedom.

  “The reserve has no real end,” Ram was saying as if reading my mind.

  Still, as we passed under the arch, I raised from my saddle and looked behind me at the retreating city, when Ram was not looking.

  ****

  Ram hobbled our mounts at a sun-rippled clearing ringed with lotus, scrub willow, and thickets of honeysuckle and blackberries. The air was cool and moist, with the essence of moss.

  Feeling my aching backside and tender parts, I dismounted, throwing myself down on springy tufts of moss laced with tiny yellow flowers, and gazed through a funnel of branches.

  Sun dusted leaves of lime lace, spattering us with gilt as Rami sprawled beside me, chewing on a red clover. The palace was far behind. Anything could happen. We prolonged our feast of bread, cheese, olives, cold chicken, dates, and oranges, sipping a sweet red wine that coated our lips and tongues with wildness, fueling the banquet to come, where we could taste each other, mouths spiced with wine and garlic.

  Heat blossomed like a red flower as the day grew on. Ram’s shirt and my silks stuck. Sweat slicked our bodies. Still we lingered, enjoying the sun-spattered relative coolness and mossy wet fragrance.

  While horses grazed on fern, we eyed each other through heat-glazed eyes. “Hot…” I breathed as an outdrawn breath.

  The rajah—Ram—plucked at my riding shirt. Airy fingers of breeze dried sweat, leaving a delicate chill. I shuddered, closing my eyes, in unconscious seduction, dropping my head back as he wriggled off my jodhpurs.

  Our flesh was slippery. We lay there relishing the tickle of grass and the playful breeze brushing our skin, delaying the unspoken.

  He without ceremony pressed me into the springy moss, murmuring, “Sary—Sary, my rājpatnī, my sweet wife, my beloved,” and more incoherent words of love and naked passion. I didn’t care what they were.

  Despite the languid breeze, our bodies slicked against each other, my full breasts slipping against his chest’s springy black silk; sleek as a mermaid, I shot from his grasp, only to swim back, gripping his long black mane and thrusting my tongue deep, meeting his, as if we wanted to consume each other.

  He held e
ach wrist as efficiently as manacles. Our mouths slipped off each other, his hands slid down my arms, he licked the cleft between my breasts, tongued my neck, nipping my chin and finally my mouth, which he used fully. Then I felt the full weight of his wet, sinewy body. Feeling familiar strength against my belly, I reached between—I didn’t have to reach far! He was slick there too. I laughed deep in my throat as my hands kept slipping no matter how hard or big he became.

  “Shhh, shhh. Mere dil ka pyara. Love of my heart. Now, allow me to pleasure you.” He stayed my hands with difficulty. They had a mind of their own.

  Ram explored me, diving fingers and caressing my warm damp floss. “Don’t wait!” I demanded. My breathing was hard and harsh, burning my throat. He resisted, an agonizing moment in which I thought I would die if he did not continue. Then, crying out in delighted surprise, I allowed him to do his will, for his will was strong, and he was adept at the pleasures he performed. I needed to do nothing but drift in an erotic dreamscape for what seemed timeless hours. When I attempted to answer him with my own rhythm, whispering coarsely while biting his ear, he rode on, and I surrendered, wailing instead to the lacy branches above us, “Don’t stop…”

  “Never,” he rumbled thickly. “I want to devour you while I can…but am I hurting?” I answered by binding my legs tightly around his narrow waist and purring, unblushing, ferociously returning his bruising kisses.

  As if forbearance that even an angel would repeal came to an end, he, a magnificent stallion straining at the gate, at last let go the reins, and his weight took me with such grinding force, such thorough abandonment and power, I was overwhelmed—at first.

  Then I matched him, tasting the salt of his shoulders with my teeth sliding across his slick hot skin. Felt his muscles bulging and rippling, with each thrust deeper as if demons drove him under passion’s dark spell, until at last we cantered together to a gasping halt. We lay stunned and sated, watching the sun’s passage turn the green lace over our heads to honeyed orange.

  Our horses nibbled sweet grasses, in no more hurry to return than we two lovers; the day faltered as if reluctant to let go its honeyed kiss of the sun. I brushed a thumb over his full swollen lips—a spot of blood, like a ruby, welled where I had bitten him.

  We had entered a new realm.

  We both recognized it: I more than wife, he more than husband, destined to feel the need and the loss if absent from each other’s company for more than an hour—intuiting a restlessness that would follow us all our days…

  Or however many we had left.

  ****

  We bathed in a pool, black and chill as onyx, cooling our fevers and reflecting the young moon—leaving wine bottles, baskets, and picnic cloths where they lay. I looked back from my horse with a sad smile—a memorial of sorts.

  As we rode into city outskirts, I tried to hide a restlessness. I watched throngs going about normal life, closing shops, lighting lanterns, the hot grease of suppers cooking, mothers calling children, and I felt a renewed hunger. This was the real world. What was I playing at?

  The outing turned the palace into a mere stage setting, unreal and shabby in places, if one looked closely enough. I closed my eyes to keep from bolting. I gripped the reins. “I wish we need not return. I wish we were them.” I nodded at hawkers and night customers milling the market, women admiring bright silks and cottons, a man frying fish on a roadside stand. “I wish we lived in a small house, and…”

  He too studied the street bustle and shook his head. “Suicidal folly,” he said shortly. “Blood ties run thin where pride and a throne are at stake. For all his sloth, my brother holds unlimited power and riches, if not the effort involved.” He cast a rueful glance my way. “He would hound us to the ends of the world. He treats his spies and assassins well, if little else. For now, he pretends you are nonexistent; on the rare times he regains his wits, or rouses from his latest opium dream, imagined injuries roar back with creative vengeance.”

  We rode on through crowded streets.

  “But why? He is a monster. Surely they know he could turn on them.”

  “The same love of our necks we all hold. Sentries, palace guards, even the army, all remain loyal,” he said with a bitterness I had not seen before. “No one wants to die on his bloody altar waiting out the inevitable. Besides, it is rolling a boulder uphill to change thousands of years of tradition.” He looked at me with self-mocking irony.

  “No—” I looked about—the same fear infecting me, and whispered, “Have they not even…tried…?”

  “Assassinating him? I will overlook that. He is my brother! However…” He looked off, brooding. “Indeed. That is why the gharial pits—and the tigers. That is why the blind in the jungle. He threw a three-day orgy to watch the slaughter of a would-be assassin, a demented beggar, the last time, six months ago. Much as Roman emperors, some members of the elite, and the generals, are drawn to long-drawn-out executions. They seem to have developed a taste for it.”

  I stroked my gray’s mane, thinking furiously.

  “If we have no future, why not release me and let me take my chances? And you are as much a prisoner as I am.”

  It was perverse, and I knew it. Both of us shied from discussions of the past or future, or where I came from. Neither mentioned the oddity of my forgetfulness. At times, I wondered why. I had not dropped out of the sky like a Hindu deity, after all.

  The set of his jaw always stopped me when I ventured close to the mystery—something in his face, even pity, when he covertly watched me.

  He tugged at my pommel. People milled around us; we were an island unto ourselves. Anger jarred a latent sensation of the hot-blooded woman I must have been.

  “But there is more!” I demanded, clutching his own reins. He looked at me, furious. I would not be deterred. “I know there is. I feel it!”

  “This was a mistake!” His eyes flashed beneath thick expressive brows, and I mourned the willful assassination of our recent passion.

  To punctuate, Rami cantered ahead. Irritably, I raced after, nearly running down a crippled woman. After apologies and backward glances to see if she was being helped, I caught up.

  “We would be happy anywhere…I would! If I never see another jewel or eat another rich dessert, I will be content. I am not afraid! And you would not need to cover your brother’s mistakes. Surely someplace…”

  He looked at me with that pity I’d come to loathe. “Don’t ask again.” Then in a softer tone, “Nowhere is safe, mera pyara. And I love India. She is my other mistress. I cannot leave her to him.”

  The rest of the ride back was silent, each of us in our own world, yet some of the magic lingered.

  Change was coming, though, like a tiny ripple in the ocean creates a monsoon half a world away.

  Not a ripple to be seen, but monsoons were coming, both real and in our private worlds. Perhaps we should have sucked every bit of joy from that day.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Monsoons

  Our idyll lasted through seasonal rains flooding streets, dampening walls, slicking marble, and invading the palace in sultry wetness.

  Like children, Rami and I stood on the privacy of our parapet under warm volleys that turned our hair into weighty curtains and our clothes as sheer as onionskin, until, laughing, we stripped, reveling in the deluge engulfing us like a waterfall.

  “Haven’t done this since I was a lad!” Ram yelled through rain hammering the slick marble with silver nails. Mercury skirts danced about my bare legs. Wet hair flung silver tinsel. When I lifted my face to the invisible skies, the rajah kissed my wet mouth, and rain as warm as blood mingled with our tongues and lips and teeth.

  Hands slicked over buttocks and chests, clasped necks, gripped shoulders. He kissed my streaming wet nipples until my knees gave out. In one quick swoop, the rajah carried me inside. I clung to the doorway.

  “No! Here. Let’s love each other in the rain.” Without a word, Rami carried me back out into the cloudburst; slip-sliding
, we landed in a heap. Warm drumming rain drowned our words. Lips clinging, we let torrents sluice off us, silvering our steaming bodies. He pulled cushions from the settee as increasing gales of water threatened to drown us. Laughing at the sky, we admitted defeat and scrambled under the overhanging balcony. He impatiently braced me against a wall and there, shielded by a cascade plummeting off the roof tiles, we made love, with the spray clouding us in silvery mist, he murmuring through the wet tangled hair plastering my face.

  “Now I know you are a mermaid! You are Circe. My only addiction, as dangerous as my brother’s.”

  “And you mine.”

  ****

  How could anything go wrong?

  Yet our Eden was reaching a crisis so sharp it could turn on the blade of a guard’s scimitar.

  How could any serpent destroy this?

  Yet it was serpents—very real serpents—that were the catalyst for events neither the rajah nor I could have foreseen.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Elephant Walk

  The end began on an outing, one grudgingly given, I might add. The monsoon’s enforced imprisonment finally wore at us. It was like breathing through a damp tea towel. The business was a marauding tiger, the hunt delayed due to the rains.

  The days had turned starched blue and the sun into a cauldron. Still I reveled in the dry heat, high on the back of the usual elephant for such undertakings, this time traveling alongside a wide, sluggish, brown river. “They are perfect and beautiful as they are!” I protested. “It is their nature to kill—what, livestock?”

  “I have no yearning to drape myself in hot smelly pelts and parade about on review.” Rami grinned, waving at the retinue in open trucks ahead, bristling with rifles. “If that is your concern.”

  “Do you really need them all?” I scoffed, trusting we would be together somewhere, not on the back of another piebald elephant tearing into the jungle with a tribe of bloodthirsty, armed males. I shuddered in the heat, remembering the last such time.

  The rajah threw me a warning look, and I subsided as we turned for the village in question. With each thump of a mighty foot, the earth shook and saplings bent, leaving a leafy wake. The skies were hot and yellow now, through trees evaporating moisture into a soupy fog; the jungle turned acid green, and birds wheeled in torpid currents.