We followed the group’s footprints through a tunnel, and it swiftly became clear we were approaching our destination.
“Turn out your lantern,” I told Nowra.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because we won’t need it.” I extinguished my own lantern—true enough, a faint light was now discernible further along the tunnel. I could only presume we had finally caught up with the other party. I bore them no ill will, of course. How could I? I didn’t know them. But I couldn’t be sure we would be met with the same equanimity. We would advance carefully, we would observe, and then, once assured that they meant us no harm—or at least, as assured as we could be—we would present ourselves. In hushed tones, I explained as much to Nowra. He didn’t argue, just nodded.
We moved as silently as possible, not difficult in the soft, dry earth lining the tunnel. Working our way towards the light, which brightened with every cautious step. It was clear that the source of the light was something significantly more impressive than a few lanterns. It had an emerald quality, shimmering on the cave walls like sunlight through stained glass.
The tunnel opened onto a wide plateau at last.
Beneath us, far bigger than one could imagine, even here in the heart of the mountains, lay a city.
I CAN’T REMEMBER when I first got into the habit of always checking the windows of any room I intended to spend time in. I suspect it goes all the way back to my unpleasant time hanging from an upper window of Lupton Tower during my schooldays.
It was a quite remarkable dawn that morning, I recall, though its beauty was somewhat wasted on me, my mind being elsewhere at the time. I had no interest in curtailing my schooling by plummeting to my death; but then I had no great desire to come face to face with the French master either, not considering the relationship I was enjoying with his wife. I did, finally, manage a controlled descent to the floor below, but being aware of fresh-air escape routes is a sensible precaution, and these days I make a point of it.
The main window of the Auckland Hotel’s lounge led out to a short balcony. From there, residents could look down on Calcutta—in all possible senses of the term—like an ancient monarch contemplating their province from the safety of the battlements. In itself, the balcony was no great escape, but as long as one doesn’t lose momentum I am gratified to report that it is entirely possible to leap from there and catch hold of the Union flag hanging from the front of the establishment.
I am no great patriot, but I will not deny the sight of that noble banner will forever trigger a warm, fond glow since that evening. It may sound absurd, but those few seconds swinging back and forth to reach the safe embrace of the park across the road were, by some measure, the most relaxing and pleasant of my day thus far.
If the cab drivers of that noble city were alarmed at the sight of a gentleman adventurer flying over them, they showed no sign. In truth, India has always been full of surprises; no doubt my aerial acrobatics ranked low amongst the spectacles that had already filled their days.
Coming to land in a thick hedge of Japanese boxwood, I could almost imagine the racket from the balcony behind me was applause. I was not, however, so egotistical as to luxuriate in the moment; in situations like that one doesn’t waste one’s hard-earned freedom, one can never tell how long it will last. I took to my feet and sprinted down the street, plucking foliage from my clothing.
Within a couple of hours I was on a ship heading back towards England.
I AM A lucky man. These eyes have seen sights most could not begin to imagine, and moreover, they have survived the experience. Nonetheless, that city in the mountains ranks amongst the strangest things I have ever seen.
In construction it called to mind a hive. The buildings were hewn from the rock so as to seem a continuous part of it, nature chipped and moulded to practical use. Not that the city’s aesthetic was entirely functional. Its makers had not downed tools the moment they had achieved a viable habitation: they had finessed and decorated. There were domes and minarets, courtyards and terraces. Many of the buildings had been decorated with precious stones—no wonder I hadn’t found any, the builders of this miraculous place had conscripted them all in the name of beauty. There was even fresh water, a river running through the heart of the city, culminating in a waterfall that glittered just as brightly as the precious stones. The source of the light was also now apparent. Strings of glowing cages filled with some form of phosphorescent material dangled above and between the buildings; hundreds of tiny light sources that, together, provided a green glow as bright as a summer dusk.
“Beautiful,” I said, because it felt necessary that this sight should be marked by speech, even though no words truly felt up to the task.
“For once we agree,” said Nowra.
But where were the people? By which I didn’t mean the party we had been following—though certainly there was no sign of them—but rather the inhabitants of this hidden world. It was a city of size and complexity, and yet the streets and alleyways that ran between the buildings were empty. Nobody looked out of the arched windows, nobody drew water from the river. While the city showed no sign of neglect, was it possible it was an artefact of history, a place no longer inhabited?
With that thought, I was suddenly struck by dizziness. It was a momentary spell, not unlike a bout of vertigo—which, I might note, was a condition I rarely experienced. In that moment, nothing around me seemed entirely fixed: not the walls of the tunnel mouth around me, not the buildings of the city before me, not even Nowra, that most solid and permanent figure—as fixed in my life these last few weeks as the grit in my boot. None of it seemed substantial.
I reached out to the rock wall of the tunnel, seeking to steady myself, but it simply wasn’t there. Stranger still, although my balance was lost and I felt myself toppling forward, I didn’t fall. No, that isn’t entirely accurate. I fell, but I did not land, just a lengthy sense of being outside the physical world entirely, adrift in some insubstantial plane.
It took a considerable effort to reassert myself. I insisted on the solid feeling of stone beneath my boots, and eventually found it once more. I insisted on the taste of the slightly stale air in my mouth, refusing to take no for an answer, and there it was. I insisted on the sight of that impossible city, glowing green in the heart of the earth, and once more I looked down upon it.
“Are you alright?” asked Nowra.
“Perfectly, thank you,” I replied. Which was true, because in that moment of dislocation I had remembered something terribly important. “Just a moment of dizziness.”
“So now what do you want to do?”
THE QUESTION SEEMED somehow insulting. I turned to the Foreign Secretary—or Grunter, as I had called him ever since our days at school together, for reasons that shall remain indistinct for the sake of decorum—and fixed him with my most despairing look.
“What do I want to do?” I asked. “I want to return to some form of normality, Grunter; I wish to sit in a restaurant without fearing the forces of law and order will descend on me at any moment. I want to stop seeing my name written on the front page of the Times right next to the words ‘ruthless’ and ‘murderer.’ Perhaps most of all, I wish to stop wearing this blasted wig and false beard. It itches.”
“Naturally,” he replied, sighing. “But it’s all rather complicated. You did shoot a young woman in front of many witnesses.”
“She wasn’t a young woman, Grunter, she was a rakshasa, a shape-changing demon bent on infiltrating the British government. The real Miss Collins was dead before I even arrived in Calcutta.”
“I know all that, Winnie,” he said, “but there’s simply no way we can inform the British public of such things. If you had been able to kill the demon with a tad more subtlety... we never imagined you’d just shoot her in front of an audience.”
“I took the opportunity when it presented itself.”
“Please don’t think me ungrateful, I am simply drawing your attention to the awkwardness of t
he situation. Roughly thirty people—including several minor aristocrats—saw you kill what appeared to be a young woman. The only way of clearing your name would be to admit what she really was, and the ministers—the few who even know the truth—are simply not willing to do that.”
“So you leave me to the wolves?” I couldn’t believe Grunter was doing this to me. Surely there was some way out of my current fix?
“Not if we can possibly help it,” he said, “but any solution is going to take a certain amount of time and a great deal of careful thought. Winston Bey must vanish for a while.”
“But I have no access to my assets! I can’t set foot near my home, let alone a bank. I’ve been sleeping rough since my return.”
He wrinkled his nose. “I am only too aware of that. Look, I can get you cleaned up, buy you passage somewhere—and that will be out of my own pocket, Winnie, the government can’t be seen to be involved—and, while you keep out of sight in some distant corner of the globe, I will do all I can to think of a way to clear your name. Or if not that, then to create you a new one.”
“And where exactly do you think I should go?” I didn’t like the sound of any of this, but I was enough of a realist to accept it. This was the only offer on the table, and in my current circumstances, beggars could not be choosers.
“Have you ever been to Australia?” he asked.
“WHAT DO I want to do?” I said. “Why, get to the truth, what else?”
Carved stone steps led down from the plateau.
“What truth are you seeking?” asked Nowra as we descended. “Something to help you return home to your old life? Perhaps if you destroy this place, they might welcome you back.”
“Destroy it?” I asked. “Is that really what you think of me? A blunt instrument, deployed against all the strangeness of the world? A hammer, to pound the unknown into dust? I am all that I have ever claimed to be, Nowra; a man wandering the world, seeing what may befall him.”
“You deny that the English government sent you here for a reason then?”
“I do.” Although it occurred to me that Grunter was perfectly capable of sending me here with an ulterior motive. Like all Whitehall creatures, that sort of thing amuses him sometimes.
The steps ended at a wide path into the city, and we wandered between the buildings. I didn’t waste time looking through the windows or exploring deeply. I knew where I was going.
“And the others?” asked Nowra. “Who sent them?”
“You’d have to ask them.” I smiled. “But then I imagine you already have.”
We’d arrived at what I had been aiming for, a small round building with a dome of red quartz. Entering, we stepped into a warm yellow light, bathing the five sleeping bodies we found lying on the floor: the four people we had been following, and, of course, myself.
“You are aware that you are dreaming?” Nowra asked.
“Yes. I wasn’t to begin with, but eventually... You wanted to know me. To understand me.”
“I am still not sure that I do,” he admitted.
“Can’t help that,” I replied. “You know me as well as I know myself by now, and—well—now we’re getting into a philosophical minefield, aren’t we?” I gestured to the other four lying before us. “And them? Do you understand them?”
“They say they are only here to investigate. If we present no threat, then they will leave us in peace.” He looked at me and I was relieved to note that the false image I had placed on him, humanising him, reducing him, was now gone. Because Nowra was many amazing things, of that I had little doubt, but the last thing he could be considered was human. That thick skin? Scales. That sharp tongue? Forked. Beware of snakes, the cave painting had suggested, especially those that can wrap themselves around your mind. He walked upright, possessed the four limbs we humans take as read, but I had been warned of snakes and found myself bitten anyway.
I thought about what he’d said, that these four had been sent to investigate this strange subterranean world. Was I seeing the hand of Grunter here? I suspected so. No doubt I was intended as an ace hidden up the sleeve. An extra pair of hands should it be necessary. Of course, if he’d bothered to tell me I could have saved myself no small amount of bother but that’s spies for you, consistently playing a game and refusing to explain the rules. It’s all terribly tedious.
“And you doubt them?” I asked. “You can see inside their minds, just as you’ve seen inside mine.”
“The young woman you killed was what you would term a monster.”
“Yes, she was.”
“But that is what concerns me. If you viewed her in such terms, how do you view me?”
I sighed. “My dear Nowra, you’ve been an exceedingly irritating guide, but that’s no excuse to put a bullet in your head. The creature that killed and copied poor Miss Collins had designs on conquest. It—and the rest of its kind—was attacking us. I was simply returning fire.”
“My people will be seen as a threat. You will hunt us down, you will try and destroy us.”
“Will we?” I thought for a moment, then asked the only thing I could think of. “Show me.”
“Show you?”
I gestured towards the city outside. “No more hiding. Show me it all.”
He inclined his head, tongue slipping in and out between dry lips. “Very well,” he said.
We stepped back outside, and streets that had been empty before now teemed with life. Nowra’s people, these beautiful amalgams of human and serpent, were everywhere. I saw them leaning out of their windows, running along the streets, bathing in the river, gathering in squares.
It would seem they had the best of both worlds: walking as we do, slithering up the walls of buildings, scrambling along the roof of the cavern.
From somewhere I could hear music, a low, hypnotic melody that sounded like the wind through narrow tunnels. I stepped a little way up the street, trying to find the source. It came from one of the squares, where several of the snake people were gathering around a large rock, honeycombed with holes. They moved around it, blowing into the holes, the whistling sounds rising up and blending with their echoes high overhead. Around these musicians, a crowd danced. Entwined in couples, they swayed and glided around the square, eyes closed, lost to the music.
“You’re still in my mind,” I said to Nowra.
“Yes.”
“So what do I think?”
He paused for a moment, closing his eyes and trying to decide. All he had to do was look at my face. Finally he opened his eyes, and there was softness there.
“You think we’re beautiful.”
“Yes,” I said, “yes, I do. And I can assure you that I could never destroy what you’ve built here. Quite the reverse: I would defend its safety until my dying day.”
“Yes,” he said, “I believe you would.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked him.
“Always.” He said. “Longer than you. Much longer.”
“I can believe that.”
Nowra and I were silent for a short while, the two of us walking the streets of his home, occasionally meeting with people he knew. Eventually we turned our attention to the pressing question.
“What about the others?” he asked. “How can I know whether they’re to be trusted?”
“You can’t,” I said. “But I’ve had a thought about that.”
“RUN!” I SHOUTED, as we burst from the mouth of the cave. “The fuse has only a few seconds left.”
“What do you think we’re doing?” asked Ms Braithwaite, “we’re not bloody idiots, you know!”
“Now, now, Gracie,” said De Quincey, rather breathless.
“Rocks, to the left!” Fairburne shouted. “They’ll provide cover.”
“Down!” shouted Nalangu, pushing me forward with the more tolerable end of her spear.
We threw ourselves behind the rocks that Fairburne had suggested, just as the sound of dynamite tore through the early evening. A shower of stones, a wa
ll of hot air and, for a moment, all of us blacked out.
“AT LEAST THAT’S what they think,” I told Nowra. “Look after yourself, old boy.”
“And you,” he said with a smile, “the world needs idiots, after all.”
With that, he and the handful of his people that had helped carry the four strangers out retreated back to their beautiful world.
AFTER A WHILE my new companions woke up.
“How much dynamite did you use?” asked Fairburne, rubbing at his ears, trying to clear his head.
“Enough,” I replied, pretending that I too had only just recovered from the effects of the blast. “But I suggest we get clear of the mountains, just in case I’ve encouraged some of it to fall upon our heads.”
I got to my feet and started marching towards Alice Springs, sure the rest of them would follow. They did.
“Terrible shame, really,” said the professor, glancing back over his shoulder. “It would have been fascinating to have studied their culture.”
“Too dangerous,” said Fairburne, “as much as I hate to admit it, we were lucky our new friend was there.”
“It was nothing,” I said. “I’ve been doing a little prospecting, so the dynamite was in my pack.”
“And you weren’t scared of ’em?” asked Gracie. “Most people would have been.”
“Oh,” I replied, “I have some small experience in these matters.”
“So do we,” said Nalangu. “It is our duty to protect the world from creatures like that.”
“Well, there’s a thing,” I said, “I don’t suppose you have a vacancy, do you? I’m at something of a loose end at the moment.”
Peccavi, Or If Thy Father
Mimi Mondal
THE SMALL EARTHEN bowl of turmeric crushed in milk sat insistently outside the bathroom. The sight of it made Anjali almost smile, then well into tears. The bowl had been placed there by Sabarmati dai, nursemaid, nanny, now elderly housekeeper; the only servant who still remained in the sprawling fort and palace of the Kishangarh Maharaja. It was tradition, the old woman grumbled. A Rajput princess, especially one in the prime of her youth and ready to be wooed by suitors, must under no circumstances neglect her beauty. That meant diligent coconut-oil massages to restore lustre to the hair, icy splashes of rosewater to the face every morning, turmeric paste to scrub off dead skin before bathing, until each part of her body glowed again like the rare jewel that she was. And would you look at that girl, dear God—come back from Vilait all skin and bone, chapped lips, hair like the head of a broomstick, looking every bit as scruffy as a beggar woman from the village. Was that any way for a princess to be?
The True History of the Strange Brigade Page 15
