Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  Once, dropping off, letting sleep gather her up, Selena felt a movement, the passage of an inexplicable curtain of air, right there in her chamber. She was awake again, and tried to ease herself back to the gentle precipice, beyond which everything was peace and forgetfulness. She would not think about the maharajah, or the mysteries of which Ku-Fel and Davi had hinted. She wouldn’t permit into her mind the memory of Captain Jack’s terrible screams, or the bloodless manner in which the nawab and his friends had let the captain suffer and die. This new world was difficult enough to comprehend—let along confront—in the day. At night it was a thing she did not wish to contemplate.

  Again, the passage of something in the darkness, and a muted, muffled sound, oddly familiar, that struck a familiar emotion deep within memory.

  Ku-Fel had been adamant that Selena not go out of her chamber during the night. The hills were believed to shelter bandits, and, as Ku-Fel put it: “The maharajah has already traded gold for your golden skin, your hair, and he would be disturbed should he have to ransom it before it was even possessed.” And, too, Ku-Fel had ordered that no one but herself enter Selena’s chamber. Even Davi, the puzzling dark one, was made to stand outside her door when he brought food or drink, and wait until she took them from him. Always he would look at her with those huge eyes, in which the full weight of human wretchedness stood out so clearly, and with so little apparent reason.

  Selena heard the sound again. There was no doubt about it now. Something was in the room with her. The buried senses, formed in her ancestors half a million years ago, sprang to life. Tiny hairs came to life on the back of her neck. She had the impression of a small animal, pathetic and lost.

  “Who’s there?” she whispered, her voice quivery.

  Then the sound came, clear and unmistakable. Someone sobbing, trying to conceal it. Selena reached out into the darkness beside her pallet, felt the small, shaking body lying there. In the darkness, it was impossible to see. But her touch was sure.

  “Davi? Davi, what’s the matter? You could be punished for being here. Don’t you know?”

  She felt him nod. He sobbed hard for a moment, keeping the sound as muted as he could, and then brought himself under control.

  “I had to come,” he said, his voice husky in the stillness.

  “But why?”

  “I must, tell you something. It is heavy on my heart.”

  Against the instinct of her intuition, Selena was somewhat suspicious. Davi was crying, and certainly he had seemed as sad a person as she had ever known, but too many strange things were building, and everyone warned her to beware.

  “If you wish,” she said, a trifle coldly.

  He sensed her reserve. “Oh, please, please,” he begged. “You are the only one in whom I have felt compassion for seven years. That,” he added, in a softer voice, “is when it was done to me.”

  “What was done to you? Davi, speak. I cannot bear these hints anymore, this feeling that something sinister lies in wait foe me just beyond the next door, in the next room…”

  “That is India,” he said. “You must live with that. But you are right. Forgive me. Let me tell it all. As I said, you are the only one in whom I have felt compassion, and I cherish it. But I must be honest with you, and tell you now, lest, later, you feel I have not been truthful, and thus come to hate me…”

  “Hate you? Why…?”

  “You see, I cannot love,” he said.

  “You cannot…love?” It did not sound right. If anyone Selena had met in India could begin to love at all, surely it was Davi. “Is that why you were crying?”

  She sensed his movement of affirmation in the darkness.

  “I cannot contain it sometimes,” he told her. “It is too much for my heart to bear.”

  “But everyone can love, if he will just let himself.”

  “No, no,” he disagreed. “All that is lost to me now. I am a dead man, and even the power…”

  He changed his mind, and said no more about the power, but before Selena could interrupt, he carried her to a time ten years before when, he said, “my heart was young and full of hope.

  “I am a Dravidian, as you doubtless know by now. The peaceful, defeated peoples who must now, forever, bow down and lick the feet of masters, both foreign and domestic. Masters who are stronger in all the ways that do not count, and who have taken from me the only thing of importance. The ability to love. You see, as a child I lived in Bombay. We were of the lowest caste, but there were many of us together in a community. This offered protection, being by ourselves, and the life was not unpleasant. About ten years ago—I was eleven then—my heart was full indeed. Sul-vey had been picked, for me, as beautiful a girl child as India ever bore, and on my fourteenth birthday, we were to be joined.”

  “Married?”

  “No, more than that. Joined. For all time. According to the ancient ways. And our twin…” he seemed about to use one word, but abruptly passed over it, changed his mind “…our twin loves would unite to form…” Again, he seemed to have some difficulty choosing the word or words with which to explain himself to her. She remembered his earlier hesitation.

  “Power?” Selena guessed.

  He was silent for a moment, and she knew she had been right, but she didn’t know why, or what it meant.

  “Yes,” he said, very softly, “but I cannot speak of that yet. You would not grasp it, or you would not believe it. Let me just say that Sul-vey and I were to become one. But that was the year the black crows came.” He spat the words “black crows” with deep, uncharacteristic bitterness.

  “Black crows?” Some sort of plague, like locusts, which had descended and destroyed Davi’s livelihood?

  “The Portuguese missionaries,” he explained, the revulsion evident in his expression. “They came to Bombay that year. Strange men and women in black cloaks, who never smiled, and had no light in their hearts. And they came to the town where we Dravidians lived. At first, we were like children. We were stupid for them, and performed, and did the ancient songs and dances of our people. No, no, they said, after we had entertained. You must not do these things which you have been doing for thousands of years. You must not do them because they are idolatry, profanity, they will destroy you. We did not understand. We did not understand any of the things they told us, which had to do with a onegod person, and this onegod person loved us all so much that he killed someone called begottenson. It was hard to understand, you see. If onegod killed begottenson because of such great love, then what would he do to us?We were afraid, because the black crows had great ships, but some of our fathers thought they saw in the black crows a chance to elevate ourselves. The older men would meet and discuss what the Portuguese told us about school, about education, and eventually it was decided that, even if onegod did not smile upon Dravidian ways, the education of the black crows might make it possible for us to rise above our caste in an India that was becoming colonial, more open, less restricted. And I was chosen.

  “I was chosen, because in those times I had a high, sweet voice, and my songs had been noticed by the black crows when they came to see us perform. ‘We will take him,’ they told my father. ‘We will take him, and in return for the gift of his song, with which he shall praise onegod in our church, we will teach him the speech and the manner and the knowledge of the West. When he returns to you, he will be equipped to deal as a man with the merchants of Europe, thus reflecting great credit upon Dravidians, and he will also serve onegod by carrying out his will.’ Which, they said, was to take wealth from India, where it was ill-used and unappreciated, and carry it to Europe, where onegod had great need of it.

  “I did not wish to go, but I obeyed my father. I said farewell to Survey, and said that I would be with her always in my mind, and that our minds would be forever joined. I would be gone from her no more than two years, said the black crow who came to get me. But I could see already in his eyes that he was lying, and that, for some reason, the thought of Sul-vey and I speaking of un
ion horrified him. I later learned,” he added bitterly, “that the black crows and onegod and all of their ilk conspire to make filthy the things that are of most pleasure and beauty in life.

  “But they were quite good to me, and I was learning much that would be of use to me later. Numbers, and of money. Geography, countries. And how men traded and bargained, so that both of them might take profit from their having done business with one another. And I learned their songs and hymns which I sang for them in their ugly church in Bombay, that had a great high tower on it inimical to India and the Indian soul. And they called me ‘Angeli, perfecti angeli,’ and touched my face when I sang the hymns to onegod.

  “Two years went by, and then almost three, and it was drawing near that I should return and join with Sul-vey. In my mind, I could feel her excitement and desire, and mine was the same. Our time approached, and our souls were wrapped about the same dream. Also, I was becoming in the manly way, with hair on my face, and my voice was beginning to deepen, as it is with a man. This was noticed and frowned upon by the black crows, who were less frequent with their cries of ‘angeli,’ and I sensed, one night, very late, a great danger to me. The impression was so strong that I left my pallet in the loft, of the ugly church, and made my way to a large, dark room where I had seen the black crows gather like birds of death to talk of evil in their strange tongue. I found my way to a place outside the door, and heard them speak. It made no sense to me at first. ‘The voice, it is going,’ one of them said. ‘Soon it will be gone.’ Another said—and now I realized it was me of whom they spoke—‘We received an allowance of an extra year from his father, and it is almost over. He is due to marry soon. It is the way of the Dravidians.’

  “There was, for a time, great silence.

  “‘But God has given him great talent,’ said the leader of them, an old man, the one who had looked upon Sul-vey with such horror. ‘If he returns to his town, we shall lose him, and he will be pagan once more.’

  “‘But what shall we do?’ the others cried.

  “‘There are means of adjusting the voice,’ said the man, ‘and I believe onegod would wish us to do it.’

  “They sat in silence for another long time, and then they nodded, like birds feeding. I believed they would pray, pray that somehow what was natural about my voice growing into that of a man be hindered by onegod, so I would sing like perfecti angeli all my life.

  “But they did not pray,” he said. Once more, he began’ to weep.

  Selena guessed, and her skin grew cold at the horror of it.

  Davi was brief. “It was done with a knife,” he said. “I was given nothing for the pain, not even poppy, as is sometimes given to those in our land who must suffer surgery. They told me to offer it up to begottenson, and he would smile on me when it came my time to die. And then it was over, and in my mind I felt Sul-vey shrink from me. Of course, I could never return. I felt all of life shrink from me, and even inside myself there was nothing there had been.”

  There was nothing she could say.

  “Nor did my voice remain high and sweet,” he concluded, his tone thick with hatred in the bamboo room. “And when it did not, I was told to leave the ugly church. The black crows told me I had failed onegod, that the loss of my sweet voice was a punishment being visited upon me by begottenson himself…”

  “That’s terrible. That’s…not true. But, then what? You had the education, certain Western knowledge…?”

  “Ah, yes,” he said in disgust. “But I was still a Dravidian. You people of the West seem, somehow, to dislike, greatly those who have skin of a darker hue than your own. My ‘knowledge’ was as useless to me, wrapped in my skin, as a woman would be.”

  “But you can still love. I know how hard it must be, after what has been done to you by evil people. Monsters, those black crows and all like them who claim a special closeness to God.”

  “No,” Davi insisted. “Love is not one thing alone, not only spiritual. To love must be of the body as well as the spirit. No, I am only a slave now, with everything lost, and great danger surrounding me always. Because I have lost, along with the capacity to love, the…”

  He hesitated.

  “The power,” Selena said. “No, you haven’t.”

  She could feel his intensity, an almost preternatural form of self-concentration. And doubt.

  “That is impossible,” he said. “One must love to have the power. What do you mean?”

  “What is the power, precisely?”

  “We know it as the ability to speak in the wind, to meld with one whose mind and heart are warm. But I can no longer do that, after the knife…”

  Selena reached out and touched him. Then, impulsively, her arms were around him. “Yes, you can! Yes, you can do it! I felt it the day in the nawab’s palace, when you were warning me. You were, weren’t you? Yes, I knew. So you see…”

  But Davi was sobbing again, and trying to still himself. The sound of his weeping this time, though, was very different, as if his heart had once again begun to beat, as if after long silence, the memory of song returned to him.

  “I will use the power to help you if I can,” he promised, when once again he had control of his emotions. “I Cannot love fully, but you have helped me to understand a great thing, and I will repay you if I can.”

  Somewhere on the barge, footsteps sounded.

  “But I am afraid,” Davi whispered. “I am a cipher, and the punishments are terrible for one such as I.”

  The sound ceased.

  “Tomorrow we will come to Jabal-Mahal,” Selena said. “And I must know what to expect. Tell me of Gayle. Tell me of someone called Rupal.”

  He stiffened in fear. “Of the second,” he pleased, “please, no. One of my rank is not permitted to speak her name.”

  Her? So it was a woman!

  “…nor to think of her, nor to fix her image in the mind. But of the girl called Gayle, I shall tell you some, although it grieves my heart. You see, Haruppa, who served as agent for your sale, likewise came to Damanhaya last year with Gayle, who, although not as beautiful as you, had golden hair like yours, and was very much a woman born for the pleasure of a man. And Haruppa has paid for his sin,” he added with a victorious tone.

  She asked him how, and he told her. She remembered the feel of Haruppa’s hard, filthy hand across the cheekbone. “Thank you,” she said, feeling harder, more vengeful than she had ever felt before. I may have need of this feeling, she thought. “I will pay you back someday, for that favor,” she said to Davi.

  “It is of no importance. It was my pleasure. For it was he who brought Gayle to Jabalpur, and to all that has happened since. You have heard that she was with child, have you not?”

  “Yes,” Selena said. Captain Jack Randolph had paid terribly for his stolen moment of sensual ecstasy. But what of Gayle? And the poor child?

  “Her country was Scotland, like yours,” Davi was saying.

  Selena, startled, felt a wave of complicated emotion sweep over her, bathing her heart in warmth, her mind in light and hope and loss. Scotland! To hear the word spoken, so far from home, was magical, wonderment. And the proximity of another girl from that beloved land was…

  “Please!” she cried. “Speak!”

  And Davi did, but not with joy.

  “What you must first understand about Jabal-Mahal, and all which occurs there, is that everyone exists for the maharajah. We live to please him, first. If there is anything left of ourselves after that, we may live a bit for ourselves. But everything, and everyone, is his…”

  Like the feudal lords of old Europe, Selena was thinking.“…Gayle was adept at many things, but obeisant selflessness was not one of them. And there was the added misfortune of her being with the child of the British sea captain. At first, it did not matter, because no one knew and she did not tell. But, as always, it soon became evident. The maharajah was said to be enraged; Ku-Fel said he was beside himself. Never in my seven years at the palace had I heard of such anger a
nd thirst for revenge. And this other one of whom you asked, she, too, had a hand in it…”

  “Rupal?”

  “Shhhhh! There was much more to it than merely the expected child, and much I myself do not know. This you may learn when you are established in the harem.”

  “I shall speak to Gayle. She comes from Scotland…”

  “No, that will be impossible. Gayle is dead.”

  Selena said nothing until her heart slowed down. The great palace of Jabal-Mahal could be a deadly place.

  “So the maharajah ordered her killed?”

  “I do not know, but I do know that he did not save her. She could not have been removed without, at least, his tacit acquiescence.”

  Rupal? Ku-Fel? Someone else with the power to order death? And all over a child. Selena asked what had become of the baby.

  “Our maharajah allowed her to have it, on the slight chance that his blood would be apparent in the baby, that his humiliation would be mitigated. But it was not to be. The child was blond as an angel.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then Gayle was put to death.”

  “What of the child?”

  “It is now about four months old. It was to have been drowned at birth. The presence of such a child, in a nursery filled with the maharajah’s own children, would only serve to make her life a misery, a constant reminder to the maharajah of Randolph’s original perfidy, and a constant source of fuel for his own anger and retribution.”

  “A little girl? Why…why wasn’t she…destroyed?”

  Davi had become very nervous. “The order was never carried out,” he said.

  “So the little girl is still there?”

  “Not exactly,” Davi said.

  “Then where is she?”

  “I do not know exactly,” Davi said. “She was taken from her mother at birth, and brought into the countryside and given to a good woman who promised to see to her safety.”