Free Shadow of the Moon by M. M. Kaye Page A

burning streets where the heat appeared to be imprisoned between the houses as water between the banks of a river, and out to the open country where the House of the Peacocks lay surrounded by acres of parkland and groves of trees.
    The grass was burned brown and the
neem
trees were shedding their dying leaves over the pathways, but the orange and lemon and mango trees were still richly green, and the scent of late-flowering oleanders mingled with the heavy incense of the hot dust. The dim, shuttered rooms were close and stuffy and the patio fountains were silent, but after the noise and heat and colour of the Gulab Mahal it seemed to Sabrina incredibly cool and peaceful, and she wandered through the quiet, darkening rooms, touching the heavy Spanish furniture and the fragile French ornaments with a caressing hand, as though they were friends whom she was greeting - or bidding farewell.
    There were still a few late roses by the river terrace, and fallen petals lay among the parched grasses and made small splashes of colour on the hot stone paving. The river was low and barred with the faint silver ripples of shoal water, and white, long-legged birds like a species of small heron picked their way along the warm shallows, ghost-like in the dusk. A peacock called harshly from among the bamboo thickets, its cry catching the echo from the curved wall at the far end of the terrace: Pea-oor! …
Pea-oor! … Pea-oor
! Sabrina had always loved to hear the peacocks cry at dusk and dawn at the Casa de los Pavos Reales, but tonight it seemed to her that the harsh call held a strange aching note of sadness.
    From somewhere out on the plains beyond the darkening river the sound was taken up by the faraway long-drawn howl of a jackal: wild, wailing and unutterably lonely, and Sabrina was seized once more by the sudden uncontrollable spasm of fear that she had experienced when she had read the news of Emily’s death. A fear of India. Of the savage alien lands that lay allabout her, stretching away for thousands of miles and yet hemming her in. Of the dark, secretive, sideways-looking eyes; the tortuous unreadable minds behind those bland expressionless faces. The incredible cruelties that were practised within the King’s palaces, of which the zenana women whispered. The stories that Aziza Begum would tell by starlight, sitting on the flat roof-top overlooking the crowded city - stories of battle and intrigue and murder. Of queens and dancing-girls and zenana favourites burnt alive on the funeral pyres of their lords. Tales of the savage sack of great cities:
    â€˜â€¦
then went the Queens and the wives and the women to an underground chamber to make the
Johar
: dressed as though for a marriage feast and bearing with them their gold and jewels and all the treasure of the city. And the vaults were sealed, and they made therein a great pyre and were destroyed there: and the treasure also. Then those of their men who were left armed themselves and threw wide the gates and went out to do battle; and were slain, every one. Thus when Salah-un-din the Conqueror rode with his warriors into the city, Lo! it was a city of the dead, and hollow as the palm of my hand
…’
    And yet again:
    â€˜
The son of Mahmoud took Fateh Khan prisoner and put out his eyes with a jewelled dagger; but still he refused to betray the hiding-place of his brother. Then Mahmoud and his family cut him in pieces, first an ear and then his nose; his right and then his left hand; but Fateh Khan said naught except to ask that they should speed his death. Only when his beard, which is sacred to a follower of the Prophet, was cut off did he shed tears. Then did they cut off his feet, the one after the other, but still he would not betray his brother, and at long last they cut his throat and death released him
…’
    Thus Aziza Begum, telling the stories that made up the blood-stained history of the land. But though the one was a story several