Her mouth stopped moving, lips agape in her tilted back head as the sound of tearing cloth came from above the pool. A knife blade had appeared in the muslin ceiling sheet directly overhead, slashing a gap a yard long in the fabric. The cut spread, both longways and across as the sheet was pulled on at the edges, opening up like a split sail in a gale. Each of the watchers was astonished to see, revealed in the gap, a young Indian boy lying on one of the roof beams, his legs wrapped around it with all the unthinking agility of a monkey, the shiny new knife in his hand matching the vivid white teeth displayed in a wide grin.
None of the woman had the faintest notion of what could be going on: puzzlement compounded by the sight of the punkah cord being held steady in the boy's hand, with a large round glass-like object hanging from the end of it.
The boy shouted, the cord began to run through his fingers, the object dropped, within eight feet of the surface of the pool before stopping again – and Camilla Hartley-Dexter screamed in fear.
What was hanging from four securing ropes at the bottom of the cord was a large transparent glass bowl, open topped and with steeply curved sides, like the ones used to keep goldfish in. But there was no water inside this bowl and the mass of wriggling bodies trying to climb the smooth sides were not gold in color but green. Small green snakes, each about six inches long and instantly recognizable as green kraits – the deadliest snakes on the entire subcontinent. All that was needed was for the bowl to continue its fall into the water and the whole mass of deadly and infuriated reptiles would be tipped out of their small prison into the larger confines of the pool. A fall and a release which could only mean a quick and agonizing death for anyone still inside the pool.
Jean Ellington was the first to recover at least part of her wits. She wriggled like one of the snakes herself as she tried to slide on her back over the pool's retaining wall while still keeping her eyes on the bowl hanging over them all like the sword of Damocles.
'Stop it, you fool – stop it!' Camilla screeched. 'Look at him!'
Jean looked up, straight into the glistening eyes of the boy and those shiny white teeth – and the glittering steel of the knife blade now pressed against the cord hanging from the pulley below the beam he was lying on. The gesture, the meaning and the threat were all as clear and unmistakable as an aimed gun and far more terrifying. Amanda instantly stopped trying to get over the wall: furthermore, as the boy pointed a finger at her and then at the pool, she slipped back into the water without hesitation.
Normally, she might have been astonished and disgusted in obeying a native urchin. But nothing was normal with that tangle of writhing bodies and evil little heads pressing against the glass directly above her. Many terrible and fearsome things she could have borne calmly and courageously but an intertwined mass of venomous snakes were not among them. She was petrified with fear.
'Hallo, ladies. Another warm afternoon, isn't it?'
The wives gaped at the hut door and at Manga holding it open with a deep bow for His Royal Highness the Colonel Prince Ravi of Kultoon. He passed her a small leather purse which sent the ayah down on her knees in obeisance. But even that action was nowhere as astonishing as the fact that Prince Ravi was wearing nothing but a pyjamy tunic of pure silk around his muscular body, a tunic secured only by a loosely knotted sash at the waist. He strolled into the hut with all the casual assurance of a born aristocrat – and behind him came a crowd of men, the other officers of the Kultooni Irregulars, all dressed in the same half naked style as their Colonel. And all of them grinning in the same way at a shared joke. Some of them also had purses in their hands, which they threw down in front of the eye rolling ayahs.
The clinking and chinking noises as the purses hit the floor sent the Indian women into scrabbling seizures which were rapidly followed by worshipping gratitude, the servants all on their knees like Manga, arms outstretched and foreheads dipping down and down again in thanksgiving. The cavalrymen scarcely noticed the servants' reactions as they gathered in a line behind their Colonel, like spectators on the touch line of a polo field. And even the bowl of angry snakes could not keep the women's eyes away from the riding crops several of the brown skinned men were either holding or had dangling from straps around their wrists.
'What the hell do you think you're doing, Your Royal Highness?' Carol Carnac-Smyth yelped.
The Prince reached out his hand and one of the younger officers put into it the heavy and ungainly shape of a Webley.45 pistol. Ravi pulled back the hammer with his thumb, lifted the barrel up and pointed it directly at the glass bowl. Then he moved it slightly to one side: there was a huge bang, the pistol recoiled in a chorus of screams and the smell of cordite spread around the room. Camilla Hartley-Dexter for one felt a sudden warmth in the water between her legs in reaction to the shot as she pissed herself in fear. The bullet must have passed within an few inches of the bowl and if it had hit it …
'Well, ladies,' the Prince said calmly, 'To answer the question, I thought we might have a really jolly jig-jig party. That is to say, you're the ones who get jig-jigged by all these fine fellows here -otherwise I might try a little more target practice. Think about it before you come to any rash decisions.'
He handed the smoking pistol back to the junior officer then clicked his fingers. Things happened: unexpected things. A shower of silver coins fluttered down from above to land and float on top of the pool.
No, not silver coins: the same size, round as coins, silver in color but far too light to be metallic.
Jean Ellington picked one up and stared at the familiar words on it -the very same words she had first seen at school when one of the girls had shown the exact same kind of silverfoil packet to her friends in fits of giggles. What were being scattered into the pool were rubber contraceptive sheaths in their sealed packets, each one guaranteed free of defects by the manufacturers, The Imperial and Britannic Rubber Company, Adam and Eve Street, Market Harborough, Great Britain.
Jean looked up again, past the coiling snakes and saw the boy on the rafter reach into a haversack at his waist and pull out another handful of condoms to scatter like confetti over the women. Confetti might be a suitable metaphor Jean realized with total disbelief: unless this was all a incredible joke there was nothing at all to stop the Prince from treating all the white women as if they were his wives, taking them as he wished for his pleasure – and giving them to his friends as well for their gratification.
Zan-zar-zamin, land, gold and women, the traditional objects of crime on the frontier. The Prince already had land and gold in plenty: now he seemed set on completing the trilogy. But no Indian had dared to molest a European woman since the great mutiny of eighty years before.
The British suppression of the mutiny had been so ruthless that since then a unprotected English virgin with a sack of gold on her back could have walked from the mountains to the sea without fear of being molested.
'You wouldn't dare,' Jean said, her voice croaking like a frog's.
Prince Ravi smiled. 'You know, Mrs Ellington, I had a feeling one of you might say that. So let me introduce you to Mr Manji and his assistant.'
Mr Manji was a fat little babu in a cheap copy of a European suit, his assistant a thin little babu in an even cheaper copy of a European suit. But there was nothing very cheap about the tripod they carried in or the big American made Speedmaster camera on top of it. It was the sort of camera that only a professional photographer would use and the Prince waved his hand towards it as though introducing it as well.
'Ladies, whether you want to take advantage of the contraceptives I have supplied is up to you. But you are going to have no choice at all about being photographed in every detail as you behave like a chorus line of French whores. Afterwards you may certainly tell your husbands all about it if you wish, but I doubt that New Delhi and London will begin a war of suppression against Kultoon on your behalf. Dear me, no, not with Mr Gandi already making so much political trouble. But if that should happen, and trouble is caused, you can be certain that I will make sure that every peddler of filthy pictures from Suez to Shanghai will soon be supplied with ample stocks of highly detailed photographs of each one of you being broken in as remounts for the Kultooni cavalry. And dear me, won't they sell like hot cakes in the local bazaars? Not above half, I shouldn't wonder. So my advice is not to tell any tales out of school unless you want to become very famous.'
The Prince clapped his hands lightly together with glee. 'But don't think I'm not prepared to deal fairly with you. If any one of you wishes it so, I will have the snake bowl lowered a little so that you may put your hand inside it and thus die without being dishonored. I'm quite certain that none of you will be so foolish, but the offer is always there, should any of you wish to emulate the fate of the good Queen Cleopatra. And as for those of you whom may be suffering overmuch from maidenly shyness, we've brought the riding crops. Red cheeks at both ends is too much of a good thing, hey?' 'He's mad, stark staring mad,' Deborah Boxwood thought.
It was Carol Carnac-Smyth who spoke up though: 'And what happens if you make a stupid mistake with those snakes which results in us all getting killed? Do you think the Viceroy will overlook that?'
The Prince shrugged and spread his hands like a bazaar carpet seller showing his astonishment at an
