Free Nightrunners of Bengal by John Masters Page A

stone.
    The girl was an arrow, straight and taut. She arched her back and was a bow, bent, straining to let go. The bow released; she was a woman and twisted in slow ecstacy. Her breasts pointed the way for her seeking, hesitant feet; her mouth drooped slack and wet and her eyes were blind. She twined around him, her restless body so slight it could not escape. His hands went out and took hold of her buttocks. He dug his fingers into her flesh; the flesh yielded.
    He looked into her eyes, searching deep, his nostrils pinched and his breathing difficult The keys lay there, not in him; a shameless splendour of desire would drive him onuntil her desire was peace. She moved, and his fingers tightened. She had brown eyes, and in their depths a flat wall of—nothing.
    He sighed softly and let his grip relax. Dear girl, dear lovely arrow girl. She had done her best. He caressed her bottom, smiled, and pushed her gently away. After a long wondering hesitation she smiled and stepped back, pace by slow pace, smiling, into the darkness. A moment longer she remained as an image held on the retina—big eyes, tight hair, a half-smile, and a whiteness of small teeth. Prithvi Chand slept.
    The violin crept down a stair of sound. At the foot the rhythms met for the last time, and silence joined them. The collar of his shirt constricted his breathing. He rose to his feet, walked carefully out of the room and along the passage, and climbed up through the fort towards the battlements.
    It was cold in the open air; the day’s clouds had passed and the sky hung low, a roof of twinkling fire. Leaning against the parapet, he lit a cheroot and saw the smoke drift north against the stars; nearly always, at night, a breeze blew down the river. He looked at the bulk of the fort, black and enormously crouched below him.
    A Rawan had built it on the site of a smaller house, in the sixteenth-century morning of the Mogul glory. The plan of the entry port showed the hand of a French engineer, and Prithvi Chand had confirmed that another Rawan had commissioned a student of Vauban’s to modernize the fort in 1710. Mahrattas, Rajputs, and Moguls had captured and recaptured it, and at last the British. For five hundred years the Rawans had ruled their lands from here. Their hold had been now tenuous, now firm, but they had never altogether relaxed their grip, whether as independent kings, as viceroys for the Mogul, as vassals of the Mahrattas, as caged pets of the British. The fort lived on with them. The Rani still held audience in the huge room on the ground floor; soldiers and servants moved up and down the passages; today no prisoners shared the dungeons with the bats, butthere were signs—a smell of ammonia, a pile of calcined excrement in the corner of a cell—that there had been prisoners yesterday, or last month, and might be again tomorrow.
    Yet the fort slept a last sleep; for all its mass it was a ghost. Rodney paced slowly round the walk, and stopped again on the south face, over the zenana. The fountains were dry which had once played for waiting women. No one sat on the marble benches under the grottoes which the builders had imitated from Al Kadhimain. The kings were dead and the disputes settled. The dispossessed crowded round him, changeless, drowned in tides of history. What a wonder of silk and steel this must have been!
    He stirred, the unease of death in his bones, remembering the tree roots that pushed apart the stones of the lower wall, the lily pads and water weeds that grew along the river front at the foot of the red masonry cliff. It must be fifty years since canopied barges carried the prince and his court out on the water. Now mangy dogs wandered in and out of the wicket in the main gate and lifted their legs against the cloisters, and a pile of ordure stank against the outside of the north wall. The uniforms of the Bodyguard hung in yellow tatters from their bodies; they had been rich and splendid once.
    The shape of the land