But his luck had run true here on the far side of the world—it stayed bad. There had been years of peace in India before he had come—a little trouble here and there, but nothing serious. The Raj had seemed totally secure. But now he knew that dissension and discontent among the native recruits had been bubbling beneath the surface, waiting, it seemed, for his arrival. He had been here not even a year, and what happened? The Sepoys go on a rampage!
It wasn’t fair.
But it could be worse, Albert, old boy, he told himself for the thousandth time that day. It could be worse.
And it most certainly could be far better. Better to be back in Calcutta at Fort William. Not much cooler, but closer to the sea there. If India explodes, it’s just a hop and a skip to a boat on the Hoogly River and then off to the safety of the Bay of Bengal.
He took another sip and leaned his back against the wall. It wasn’t an officerly posture but he really didn’t give a bloody damn at this point. His office was like a freshly stoked furnace. The only sane thing to do was to stay here under the awning with a water jug until the sun got lower in the sky. Three o’clock now. It should be cooling down soon.
He waved his hand through the air around his face. If he ever got out of India alive, the one thing he would remember more vividly than the heat and humidity were the flies. They were everywhere, encrusting everything in the marketplace— the pineapples, the oranges, the lemons, the piles of rice—all were covered with black dots that moved and flew and hovered, and lit again. Bold, arrogant flies that landed on your face and darted away just before you could slap them.
That incessant buzz—was it shoppers busy haggling with the merchants, or was it hordes of flies?
The smell of hot bread wafted by his nose. The couple in the stall across the alley to his left sold chupattis, little disks of unleavened bread that were a dietary staple of everyone in India, rich and poor alike. He remembered trying them on a couple of occasions and finding them tasteless. For the last hour the woman had been leaning over a dung fire cooking an endless stream of chupattis on flat iron plates. The temperature of the air around that fire had to be a hundred and thirty degrees.
How do these people stand it?
He closed his eyes and wished for a world free of heat, drought, avaricious creditors, senior officers, and rebellious Sepoys. He kept them closed, enjoying the relative darkness behind the lids. It would be nice to spend the rest of the day like this, just leaning here and—
It wasn’t a sound that snapped his eyes open; it was the lack of it. The street had gone utterly silent. As he straightened from the wall, he could see the shoppers who had been busy inspecting goods and haggling over prices now disappearing into alleys and side streets and doorways—no rush, no panic, but moving with deliberate swiftness, as if they had all suddenly remembered somewhere else they had to be.
Only the merchants remained… the merchants and their flies.
Wary and uneasy, Westphalen gripped the handle of the sabre slung at his left hip. He had been trained in its use but had never actually had to defend himself with it. He hoped he wouldn’t have to now.
He sensed movement off to his left and turned.
A squat little toad of a man swathed in the orange dhoti of a holy man was leading a train of six mules on a leisurely course down the middle of the street.
Westphalen allowed himself to relax. Just a svamin of some sort. There was always one or another of them about.
As he watched, the priest veered to the far side of the street and stopped his mules before a cheese stand. He did not move from his place at the head of the train, did not even look left or right. He simply stood and waited. The cheese maker quickly gathered up some of his biggest blocks and wheels and brought them out to the little man, who inclined his head a few degrees after an instant’s glance at the offering. The merchant put these in a sack tied to the back of one of the mules, then retreated to the rear of his stall.
Not a rupee had changed hands.
Westphalen watched with growing amazement.
Next stop was on Westphalen’s side of the street, the chupatti stall next door. The husband brought a basketful out for inspection. Another nod, and these too were deposited on the back of a mule.
Again, no money changed hands—and no questions about quality. Westphalen had never seen anything like it since his arrival in India. These merchants would haggle with their mothers over the price of breakfast.
He could imagine only one thing that could wring such cooperation from them: fear.
The priest moved on without stopping at the water stand.
“Something wrong with your water?” Westphalen said to the vendor squatting on the ground beside him. He spoke in English. He saw no reason to learn an Indian tongue, and had never tried. There were fourteen major languages on this Godforsaken subcontinent and something like two hundred and fifty dialects. An absurd situation. What few words he had picked up had been through osmosis rather than conscious effort. After all, it was the natives’ responsibility to learn to understand him. And most of them did, especially the merchants.
“The temple has its own water,” the vendor said without looking up.
“Which temple is that?”
Westphalen wanted to know what the priest held over these merchants’ heads to make them so compliant. It was information that might prove useful in the future.
“The Temple-in-the-Hills.”
“I didn’t know there was a temple in the hills.”
This time the water vendor raised his turbaned head and stared at him. The dark eyes held a disbelieving look, as if to say, How could you not know?
“And to which one of your heathen gods is this particular temple dedicated?” His words seemed to echo in the surrounding silence.
The water vendor whispered, “Kali, The Black Goddess.”
Oh, yes. He had heard that name before. She was supposedly popular in the Bengal region. These Hindus had more gods than you could shake a stick at. A strange religion, Hinduism. He had heard that it had little or no dogma, no founder, and no leader. Really—what kind of a religion was that?
“I thought her big temple was down near Calcutta, at Dakshinesvar.”
“There are many temples to Kali,” the water vendor said. “But none like the Temple-in-the-Hills.”
“Really? And what’s so special about this one?”
“Rakoshi.”
“What’s that?”
But the water vendor lowered his head and refused to respond any further. It was as if he thought he had said too much already.
Six weeks ago, Westphalen would not have tolerated such insolence. But six weeks ago a rebellion by the Sepoys had been unthinkable.
He took a final sip of the water, tossed a coin into the silent vendor’s lap, and stepped out into the full ferocity of the sun. The air in the open was like a blast from a burning house. He felt the dust that perpetually overhung the street mix with the beads of perspiration on his face, leaving him coated with a fine layer of salty mud.
He followed the svamin through the rest of the marketplace, watching the chosen merchants donate the best of their wares without a grumble or a whimper, as if glad of the opportunity. Westphalen tracked him through most of Bharangpur, along its widest thoroughfares, down its narrowest alleys. And everywhere the priest and his mule train went, the people faded away at his approach and reappeared in his wake.