A pretty young woman saw Charya and struck a gong beside the archway. At its brazen note, all the robbers stopped what they were doing and turned to him, clapping. The captain stood there with a glittering grin, drinking in the applause. As it slackened, he threw out an arm toward the Rajah—and, incidentally, Shea and Chalmers—and cried, "Make shanti to our new companions!"
"Shanti!" the robbers cried with one voice, and suited the action to the word. Randhir smiled and bowed to them. Watching him in the lamplight, Shea could only think it was lucky for him that the light was so dim—even this close, he couldn't make out the horsehair that flattened his nose.
"What of the score of the evening, Captain?" one man called out.
Charya grinned. "I've scarcely had time to count it all—but I have numbered the bags of loot. There are twenty, and at a guess, we have hauled more booty tonight than ever before!"
The robbers gave shouts of approval, applauding and hooting.
"Eat, drink, and be merry!" Charya cried. "You have earned it!"
The robbers answered with a shout of agreement and settled down to some serious debauchery.
But even the most decadent must grow sleepy, and these particular debauchers had put in a hard night's work before they began debauching. It took four or five hours, but the flaring torches began to burn out, and one by one, the robbers began to nod, then to lie down and pull up a cushion for a pillow. Some rolled themselves up in the rugs and covered their heads; all fell asleep right where they lay. They dropped off by twos and threes, until only the thieves right next to the wall were still sitting upright, and that was only because they were leaning back against it. Even they were nodding drowsily or leaning to one side; they might have been technically awake, but they were too stupefied with opium or hashish, to really be aware of anything.
Shea and Chalmers still sat with the Rajah, not feeling at all safe, the more so because they were among the few still awake. "Feigh drowsiness," Randhir muttered to them, or our heads will be forfeit." He wrinkled his nose at the smell of the smoke coming from Shea's hookah. "What manner of hashish is that?"
"One that couldn't stupefy a mouse." Shea didn't bother telling the king that he had chanted a singing commercial for a brand of cigarettes while he was lighting up.
A servant woman strolled by them, looking about for anyone needing attention. She glanced at the rajah, then looked again, staring in alarm. Randhir tensed for action, but the woman gave a quick, furtive glance about her, then knelt down by the rajah and busied herself tidying up about him. "Majesty!" she hissed. "O Rajah! How came you with these wicked men?"
Shea looked up, affronted, but Chalmers murmured, "She means the thieves, Harold, not necessarily us."
"You, too!" the woman said. "If you are with the Rajah, you must be his guards, or at the least, men of goodwill. Do you run away as fast as you can, Majesty, or they will surely kill you when they awake."
"Many thanks for kind wishes, woman," Randhir answered, his voice as low as hers, "but I do not know the way; this cave is a veritable maze, and I could not say how to find the trapdoor. In which direction am I to go?"
"Follow me!" the woman hissed, and stood up, hands full of dirty goblets. She threaded her way through the confused mass of snorers. The Rajah followed, walking as lightly and deftly as a tiger. Shea followed, trying to put his feet exactly where Randhir had, with Chalmers behind him. An inch to the left or right, and he would have stepped on the sleepers, who were likely to resent being awakened so suddenly and unpleasantly. He had a notion that they would show their resentment with knives or clubs, and wasn't eager to try to reason with them about channeling their aggressions.
The woman pulled the curtain aside, and they stepped into the robing-room again. There stood the ladder, rising up from the floor to lean against the foot-thick rim of the hole.
"Here stands your escape," the woman whispered. "Go now, my Rajah, and quickly!"
"I shall remember you for this," Randhir promised her. "You shall be rewarded."
"The only reward I crave is rebirth in a higher caste, my rajah, and to that I bend my efforts as well as I may. Forget your lowly handservant, and go!"
"May this good deed bring you great karma," Randhir said, and climbed up the ladder. Shea followed, reflecting that the woman was clearly a slave; she was doing the best she could to fulfill her dharma, her role in the order of the universe, but certainly had no choice in being maidservant to a gang of thieves.
Randhir crowded himself up against the trapdoor, hunched over; Shea wondered, but as the Rajah straightened with a grunt, heaving up, he saw the sense in the man's strategy; the heavy stone trapdoor swung up ever so slowly—but the ladder dipped and swayed, and Shea clung for dear life, thinking that the rung on which the rajah stood had to snap, it couldn't possibly hold against such pressure. . . .
It did hold, though, and with a final thrust, Randhir straightened. The door shot up, then fell open with a thud that made Chalmers wince. Randhir climbed up and out of the hole, then turned to heft the trapdoor closed . . .
. . . and saw Shea's head just above the opening. "What," he hissed, "are you still here?"
"And just as eager to get out of here as you are." Shea sidled over to the edge of the ladder, lifting one foot off to leave as much free room as possible, and beckoned to Chalmers, below the rim where Randhir couldn't see it. "We need to get out in a bad way, because if those bad men find out we're not bad too, then we're going to be in bad trouble."
Chalmers squirmed up past him.
"You put me in a dilemma," Randhir said, scowling. "If you are truly thieves, you could raise the alarm and bring down an ambush upon me, for surely there must still be guards about!"
"If I were a thief," Shea retorted, "I would have raised the alarm long ago, and they would have killed you while they had you in their hall."
"There is some sense in that," Randhir allowed. "Still, I cannot . . . Ho! Stop, you!"
But Chalmers threw himself over the rim of the hole and rolled out from beneath the trapdoor.
"Tricked!" Randhir snapped. "By Indra, if I suffer you to . . . Pah!"
The last was said in disgust as Shea rolled free, too, then rose, dusting off his hands. "Can I help you lower that thing? It won't do any of us any good if it goes 'boom' as it falls."
Randhir stood a moment, irresolute, Shea's offhanded offer taking him by surprise. Then he sighed and accepted the fait accompli. "Aye, it is well thought. Aid me, then, for the trap has grown heavy during this chatter."
Shea laid hold of the iron ring too, and together they lowered the trapdoor until it closed with a muffled thud. Then Randhir cast about him, doubled over, searching. Shea was just about to ask what was going on when the Rajah straightened with a soft exclamation of satisfaction, holding the plug of grass in his hand. He tamped it carefully back over the iron ring.
"He does replace his divots," Chalmers muttered to Shea.
"Sure he does," Shea whispered back. "He owns the whole golf course!"
"Come—away!" Randhir whispered, and turned to plunge back into the woods.
Shea hurried to catch up with him and said, keeping his voice low, "I think you said something about there maybe being guards still posted?"