The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye Page B

exposure. Their day was done. They were gone like dust before the wind, and not one would be left to carry the tale of their going. The shame of Plassey * was avenged and the hundred years of subjection at an end – and now there was no need to pay the taxes.
    ‘Is Esh-mitt Sahib also dead, then?’ asked an awestruck voice, presumably referring to a local District Officer who was, in all probability, the only white man whom the villagers had ever seen.
    ‘Assuredly. For on Friday – so Durga Dass says – he rode to Delhi to see the Commissioner-Sahib, and did not the sepoy with the pock-marked face say that all the Angrezi-log in Delhi were slain? It is certain that he is dead. He and all others of his accursed race.’
    Sita listened and believed, and stealing away into the darkness she returned hastily to the bazaar, where she bought a small earthenware bowl and the ingredients for making a brown dye that was equally effective and hardwearing on the human skin as on cotton cloth. Soaked overnight it had been ready by morning, and long before the village was awake she roused Ash, and leading him out into the dim light of dawn, crouched behind a cactus hedge where she stripped him and applied the dye with a cotton rag, working by touch as much as sight and whispering urgently that he was to tell no one, and to remember that from now on his name was Ashok: ‘You will not forget, Heart-of-my-heart? Ashok – promise me you will not forget?’
    ‘Is it a game?’ asked Ash, intrigued.
    ‘Yes, yes, a game. We will play that your name is Ashok and that you are my son. My true son: your father being dead – which the gods know is true. What is your name, son?’
    ‘Ashok.’
    Sita kissed him passionately, and adjuring him again not to answer questions, took him back to the shed. After eating a frugal meal and paying for their night's lodging, they set out across the fields, and by mid-day the village was far behind them and Delhi and the Meerut road only an ugly memory. ‘We will go north. Perhaps to Mardan,’ said Sita. ‘We shall be safe in the north.’
    ‘In the valley?’ asked Ash. ‘Are we going to our valley?’
    ‘Not yet, my King. One day surely. But that too lies in the north, so we will go northward.’
    It was as well for them that they did so, for behind them the land was ablaze with violence and terror. In Agra and Alipore, Neemuch, Nusserabad and Lucknow, throughout Rohilkhand, Central India and Bundelkhand, in cities and cantonments up and down the country, men rose against the British.
    At Cawnpore the Nana, the adopted son of the late Peshwa, whom the authorities had refused to recognize, turned on his oppressors and besieged them in their tragically inadequate entrenchments; and when after twenty days the survivors accepted his offer of safe conduct, and were herded onto river boats that they were told would take them to Allahabad, the boats were set alight and fired upon from the bank. Those who managed to struggle to shore were taken prisoner, the men shot, while some two hundred women and children – all who remained of a garrison that at the beginning of the siege had numbered a thousand – were penned up in a small building, the Bibi-gurh (women's house), where they were later hacked to death on the orders of the Nana, and their bodies thrown into a near-by well, the dying with the dead.
    In Jhansi that same royal widow whose wrongs Hilary had written of in his last report Lakshmi-Bai, the beautiful childless Rani who had been refused the right to adopt a son and disinherited by the East India Company – venged herself for those wrongs by massacring another British garrison unwise enough to surrender to her on her promise of safe conduct.
    ‘Why do the people put up with it?’ Hilary had asked Akbar Khan. ‘Why don't they do something?’ Lakshmi-Bai, the unforgiving, had done something. She had repaid the bitter injustice dealt her by the Governor-General and Council of the Honourable