Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye Read Free Book Online Page B

rice pudding, some boiled potatoes and a quantity of fresh fruit, a jam tart and half a plum cake as well as several varieties of biscuits. There was also milk, but it was sour, and various tinned foods that were too heavy to carry. But among a welter of broken wine bottles was one that had escaped destruction, and though it was empty there were plenty of corks, and she filled it with cold water from an earthenware
chatti
outside the kitchen and hurried back to Ash.
    The sky was growing lighter every minute and soon yesterday's looters, the
budmarshes
† from the bazaars, would wake after their night's rioting and come back to see if there was anything they had overlooked. It was unsafe to remain here a moment longer, but first she must strip off that betraying sailor suit; and she did so with hands that trembled with anxiety and haste.
    Ash did not understand why she had taken all the trouble to dress him in it only to take it off again, but he was thankful to be out of it, and relieved to see that he would not have to wear it again, for Sita left it lying under the pepper tree. He ate his way solidly through a lump of cold rice pudding while Sita filled her brass
lotah
from a little well among the trampled oleander bushes and drew water in a leather bucket for the donkey, and when that was done they mounted again and set off in the pearl-grey light of a new day towards the Grand Trunk Road that stretches northward towards Kurnal and the Punjab.
    The donkey would have kept to the level roads of the cantonment, but now that the sky was brighter Sita could see that most of the bungalows had been gutted by fire, and that smoke from a score of smouldering ruins still rose in ghostly columns above the scorched trees. It was a sight that increased her fears, and rather than cross the cantonment area she turned towards the Ridge and the dark bulk of the Flagstaff Tower, where the Delhi road ran northward to join the Grand Trunk.
    Looking back from the crest of the Ridge it was difficult to believe that the once busy cantonment that lay below them was now a desolate shell, for the trees provided a kindly screen and the lazy smoke that drifted up to form a haze above it might have been the smoke of kitchen fires, cooking breakfast for the vanished garrison. On the far side of the Ridge the ground sloped down to merge into the level plain through which the silver ribbon of the Jumna wandered between white sandbanks and a wide belt of croplands, while a mile and a half away – a shadow on the shadowy plain – lay the domes and walls of Delhi, afloat on the morning mists that were rising off the river. A long white road, straight as a sword blade, led from the Flagstaff Tower to the Kashmir Gate, but at that hour nothing moved on it, not even the wind. The air was still and the world so quiet that Sita could hear, from far, far away, the crowing of a cock in some village beyond the Najafgarh canal.
    The Ridge too was deserted, though even here the mute evidence of panic littered the ground: a child's shoe, a doll, a woman's rose-trimmed and beribboned bonnet hanging on a thorn bush, toys, books, bundles and boxes lost in the darkness or discarded in the frenzy of flight, and a dog-cart lying on its side in the ditch with a broken wheel and smashed shafts. The night dew lay thick on everything, bejewelling the wreckage and dipping the grasses in a film of silver; but the first hot breath of the coming day was already drying the dew, and birds had begun to chirp and twitter among the thorn-scrub.
    There was no one in the Flagstaff Tower, but here the debris lay thicker, and around it the trampled ground bore signs that a small army of women and children, officers, servants and horse-drawn vehicles had camped there for hours and left only recently; for there were carriage-lamps on the dog-cart, and one of them was still burning. The marks of wheels, hoof-prints and footmarks showed that those who had been there had fled northwards