The mat wall pressed once, twice, against the small of her back. Painfully she hoisted her bound hands, grown prickly and numb from the tight cord, and thrust outwards with them, once, twice, three times, tapped with impotent fingers, scratched with her nails against the fibre.

  Hard fingers pressed back against her fingers in recognition and reassurance. The rhythm of the tabla ceased. Whoever he was, he had found her.

  ‘He will come,’ whispered the man with the rifle, turning his featureless cotton face towards her for a moment. She saw light – already, even in this enclosed place, there was light of a kind – flow down his sinewy arms and long torso, and die into the pallor of the sadhu’s cloth twisted round his loins. ‘He will come, and this time he will be mine. You want to see him die, you, woman?’

  Behind Priya’s back, with aching, insinuating gentleness, the tip of a knife eased its way between the stitches that seamed the coconut-matting wall. She felt the steel touch her arm, sliding by above the wrist without grazing. She heard the first fibre of the first stitch part, and thought it a terrible and wonderful sound, like the trumpets outside the walls of a city under siege. Very carefully she shifted her position a little, sitting forward on the coils of net, and posing her body steadily between her captor and the knife.

  They reached the loftiest rise of the dunes, and Purushottam’s headlong march wavered as soon as the ridge-thatch of the distant hut broke the suave undulations of the sand like a clump of stiff grass. He turned and looked at Dominic, seemed to be searching hopelessly for something to say by way of good-bye, and then would have walked on without a word, after all, because there was nothing left to say. But Dominic laid an arresting hand on his arm.

  ‘No, not yet. Look, it’s only just after half past six. Take every moment you safely can.’ Safely! How could they be sure that the word had any longer a meaning for any of them? How did they know, even, that Priya was still alive? Dead hostages are quiet hostages, make no attempts at escape, identify no suspects. But in so far as there was still any hope at all, they had to preserve it as long as they could.

  ‘He must see me coming before the deadline,’ said Purushottam, in the level, low voice that had hardly varied its tone since they had found the note. ‘Before seven, not at seven.’

  ‘He’ll see you the minute you go over that crest. Forty yards. Even if you go at ten to seven, you’ll be nearly halfway to him by the hour. Wait till then.’

  He shook his head, but he stayed. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes, it matters. The one moment we throw away may be the one that makes the difference. At least give it a chance.’

  ‘You expect a miracle?’ said Purushottam, with the most painful of smiles. ‘I’ve been thinking – he must have a gun, don’t you think so? I think a rifle. Because he’s set me up as a target he can hardly miss, even at long range. The one thing moving in all this space, and no cover anywhere. Not that I’m looking for cover. And the sea right there at his back – that’s the way he means to get away.’

  If he’s a poor enough shot to want me at short range before he can be sure of killing me, he thought, unable to break the habit of hope, I might be able to rush him yet. He wouldn’t be able to take his eye off me then to turn on Priya, and inside a hut that size a rifle will be an unwieldy weapon. If I could reach him, hit or not hit, I might at least be able to give her the chance to get away.

  The sun was already well above the horizon behind them, climbing with amazing speed. The dunes put on colour, and became a rippling sea of lights and shadows.

  Dominic shook the arm he held. ‘Give me until ten to seven. Promise!’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked it indifferently, for he knew there was nothing his friend could do to help him. They were all bound hand and foot; for at the least wrong move, Priya would pay.

  ‘Try and work round by the shore, if I can. I give you my word I’ll keep out of sight.’

  ‘Impossible. You’ve seen how indented the coast is. It would take you hours.’

  It was true; he was only reaching out for something he could at least seem to be doing, to avoid the one thing he could not bear, having to stand here and watch Purushottam walk out to his death without raising a hand to help him. No Sidney Cartons here, even supposing one could be that sort of hero; whoever was in that hut knew very well the appearance of the young man for whom he was waiting. Nobody else would do; and the mere sight of another person approaching would mean the end of Priya. No, there was nothing at all left for him but to watch.

  ‘Even if you swam every bay and climbed over every headland,’ Purushottam said gently, ‘you couldn’t possibly get near by seven o’clock. You don’t know these seas. It would be suicide to try it.’

  Their eyes met, and improbable as it seemed, they both smiled pallidly. ‘Coming from you at this moment,’ said Dominic, ‘that’s good.’

  ‘If Priya dies,’ said Purushottam simply, ‘I don’t want to survive. But I shouldn’t like to have to apologise to – what was her name? Tossa? – for you. No, don’t go. Stay with me.’

  Dominic stayed. A quarter to seven.

  ‘If only we’d taken her with us…’

  ‘No, don’t! What’s the use? We do the best we can.’

  Twelve minutes to seven. ‘I’m going now,’ said Purushottam. ‘Remember me to the Swami, and don’t let him start saying: “If only… ”, either. I’ve got no complaints.’

  He didn’t wait for any reply, and he didn’t look back. He walked over the crest of the dunes, set his course towards the distant dark speck of the hut, and marched straight towards it across the empty yellow expanse of sand.

  A hand came through the growing slit in the fibre wall, and fingers felt their way carefully and blindly over Priya’s swollen wrists, and singled out the spot where the cords crossed. The knife followed the guiding fingers, grazed her wrist lightly, and found the cords.

  How long he had been working out there she had no means of reckoning, but it felt like an age. Even the parting of a thread seemed to produce a loud, commanding sound, the knife had to work with infinite quietness and delicacy, slowly, very slowly. She knew that it was growing light, she knew the sun was up, by the shafts of brightness that entered at the rifle-slit and through the chinks of the door. The man with the gun leaned devotedly at his spyhole, the barrel of the rifle thrust out towards the dawn; and he was humming to himself sometimes, and laughing gently, sure of his triumph.

  Her numbed hands lurched apart suddenly as the cords parted, and she gripped her fingers together to hold her position, afraid even of the rustle of her own clothing. Pain seeped slowly back into her wrists, a live pain; she was no longer quite so helpless. She held her place, covering her ally from sight; and with her reviving fingers she felt carefully at the slit in the matting wall behind her back. It ran upward from ground level – which was nearly at her waist, for the dune rose to the cliff’s edge behind the hut – almost to the top of her head. To take it higher was more dangerous, though blessedly this was the dark side of the hut, no sun here to shine through the crack. Priya raised herself a little on the pile of coiled nets, to cover a few more inches of the wall. The gap was not yet quite long enough to allow her to slip out quietly and adroitly. The hand from outside took a moment to press her hand, warmly and quickly, before it went on with its work.

  A long tremor of fulfilment and delight passed through the braced back turned towards her from the window, and a low, chuckling cry marked the moment when Purushottam came into sight. The hands that held the rifle calmed and grew still and competent upon the barrel and trigger. His whole body became a concentration of duty and efficiency. Even when he addressed her now, he could not turn away his eyes from that solitary figure to look at the bait that was bringing it into his sights. She had served her turn; she was of no importance, first or last.

  ‘He is coming! So quickly he is coming, he is in a hurry! Now I could drop him… no, not yet, let him come nearer…’

  It had become a race. The knife sawed away with feverish haste, ripping the slit in the matting higher. Purashottam walked rapidly, some corner of his mind still pondering the possibility – if it was a possibility – of getting just within range and then charging in like a madman, in an attempt to get to grips with his enemy. At least that would leave him no time to turn on Priya – if Priya still lived…

  Fatally, he let this half-hysterical hope in speed infect his pace as he approached. He was winning his race, and to win it was to lose it. There was no time left at all. The swathed head leaned lovingly to the rifle-stock, the long, muscular hand tightened its finger on the trigger and began to squeeze, slowly, slowly…

  Two more minutes, and the hands of the rescuer would have been helping Priya out silently and swiftly through the matting. But there was not even one minute left, and no means of buying one.

  Dominic had stood motionless all this time where Purushottam had left him, because there was nothing else for him to do; and even to stir from the spot, unless it was to follow, which he must not do, seemed like a kind of betrayal. But tension drew him, almost against his will, up the last few yards of the slope. He raised himself just far enough to see over the plain of sand, and could not turn his eyes away. He watched the lonely figure advancing upon the distant hut, more like an attacking army than a reluctant victim, very erect, moving in an unswerving and unrelenting line – a little more, thought Dominic helplessly, and he’d be running. And already so near! He felt the hairs in his neck rising with apprehension. The shot must come any moment…

  Another figure emerged suddenly from behind the hut, a diminutive, fleshless figure in yellow robes that clung to his body wetly and glistened as he moved. He walked as rapidly as Purushottam, and on a converging course. Round the corner of the hut he came, and at a distance of a few feet from the shutter he stepped deliberately into the path between the levelled rifle and its target, blotting out Purushottam from view. There was nothing in the sights of the rifle now but his bony golden body and the saffron folds of his robe.

  The Swami Premanathanand, to whom violence was impossible, was fighting this last engagement in his own way and with his own unique weapon, a finite body interposed at the last moment between death and its victim.

  Fourteen

  Cape Comorin: Saturday Morning, Continued

  « ^ »

  For the man peering through the sights of the rifle, the world dissolved suddenly into a blur of saffron cloth only a few feet away from the barrel of the gun. The lonely, advancing figure at whose heart he had been aiming had vanished in yellow light at the very moment when his trigger finger was tightening to squeeze gently home and put an end to it. The marksman uttered a curious, wailing cry of alarm and dread, and there was one instant when everything hung in the balance, when the finger almost completed its pressure and emptied the first round into that saffron cloud. It was superstitious shock that turned his hands feeble; the barrel of the gun lurched, and was lowered. He raised his cheek from the stock, to gaze with his own eyes, instead of with the automatic eye of the gun. And the cloud that blotted out the world condensed into the apparition – for what else could it be, here where he had deliberately created an empty solitude all round him? – of an elderly, venerable, composed personage in a yellow robe and a brown woollen shawl, standing perfectly still before him, almost within touch, though he saw it only through the slit he had made for firing.

  Whether this was a god, a demon or a man, he had to stare it in the face and find a way past it, and instantly, or everything was lost. It stood so still that he dreaded it might not be human, after all. What man would take his stand there and wait, saying not a word? Ah, but the interloper was looking only at a blank wall! Did he even know that there was an armed man within? He could not know. No one who knew that would dare!

  The man with the rifle flung out a long left arm, and swept aside the shutter of fibre matting, gleefully expecting an ordinary man’s predictable reactions of fright and retreat when suddenly confronted at short range with a loaded gun. The image remained undisturbed, serene and immovable, its mild eyes observing everything without alarm.

  At the back of the hut Priya started up out of her nest of ropes and nets, stunned by the sudden burst of light from the window, and half-crazed with terror and exhaustion. Beyond her captor’s shoulder she caught one glimpse of the Swami’s composed, half-smiling face, but she could not believe in what she was seeing. A hand reached through the mat wall, plucking urgently and insistently at her arm.

  ‘Come, come, please come…!’

  ‘Get out of my way!’ screamed the swathed head in its shroud of saffron cloth, choking with rage and hatred. ‘Stand out of my way, or I’ll kill you!’

  The Swami, so impotent, so feeble a presence, merely moved a step or two nearer to the window-opening, to ensure that whatever was behind him should remain invisible. He did not say: ‘Kill me, then!’, but he did not move aside. Some way behind him he heard Purushottam’s wildly running feet sliding and labouring in the sand. He could not hear Dominic, though Dominic was running, too, at his fastest, and straight for this spot. The Swami folded his hands before him, just out of reach from within the window, but so near that he eclipsed the world and covered his friends from harm.

  ‘Come, quickly, come…’ begged the voice outside the rear wall, and the timid, agitated hand tugged at Priya’s wrist. She yielded to the pressure, drawn back towards the wall that gaped to let her through. And suddenly, above the Swami’s golden shoulder, she saw Purushottam, running, stumbling, wild with anguish and hope; and then she could not move.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ howled the muffled head, almost inarticulate with fury. ‘Now, or I will kill this girl!’ He had remembered in time that he had at his disposal this more powerful persuasion, and at the recollection he swung upon her, levelling the rifle from his hip at point-blank range.

  What he saw brought another thin shriek of rage out of him, for the wall at her back gaped, and a hand was holding it wide for her and urging her through the gap. He took one long, deliberate pace towards her, the rule steadying with deadly intent on her breast. And Priya, tearing herself loose from the hand that held her for one inspired and desperate instant, scooped up in her arms the topmost coils of the pile of nets, and hurled them in his face.

  She saw the closely-wound meshes open like a fantastic flower in mid-air, filling the lances of sunlight with dancing dust, and her nostrils with particles of fibre like musty pollen. Rifle and man lost their clarity of line, disintegrating into a tangled jigsaw-puzzle, as the flying lengths of net descended over both, and were carried by their weighted edges round elbows and hands, and the barrel and stock of the gun. The impact drove the man’s body backwards, off-balance, and the shot went into the beaten earth at the foot of the wall, spattering Priya’s feet with flecks of soil.

  She turned, blindly and desperately, and clawed her way through the torn matting, the cut edges rasping her arms and her cheek. Hands reached out eagerly to help her, daylight flowed over her, clean sand filtered into her sandals. Her rescuer folded an arm protectively about her and hurried her away, across the narrow neck of land and into the first rocky defile of the path that led down into the second cove. In that maze of rocks they could hope to find safe cover even from a rifle.

  The Swami stirred slowly, like a man coming out of a trance, and for once his face wore a look of immense surprise, though there was no one to witness the phenomenon. He was undoubtedly alive, and that was matter for profound surprise. He looked round, blinking at the sun. Purushottam was toiling through the last undulations of sand towards the hut, and some way behind him Dominic followed.

  The Swami took the necessary three steps to the door of the hut, and pushed it open, letting in the sunlight over the heaving, trammelled form on the floor. The man had almost freed himself, slashing furiously at the folds of net with the knife he had kept in his loincloth. As the door flew open he dragged himself clear, snatched up the rifle as he rose, and charged head-down for the doorway and freedom. He had heard the pursuers drawing nearer; perhaps he thought they were more and better-armed than they were. This game, in any event, was already lost, for his hostage was gone, and if he stayed to fight he might be captured, and must be identified. He chose to run. And the Swami, to whom violence was impossible, stood courteously out of his path and gave him free passage.

  It was the rifle that cheated him. A filament of the net had trapped the bolt, and as he rose and flung himself forward, grasping the stock, the net followed like a snake as far as the doorway, uncoiling until its weight became too great to be towed any further, and there ripped the rifle out of his hand. He checked for a fraction of a second, and then abandoned it and ran on, headlong for his life. He made for the nearer and smaller cove, plunged down the first steep drop into the stones of the pathway, and continued in a series of strong, passionate deer-leaps halfway down to the beach.

  Not until then had he raised his head or paused even for an instant to look beyond the next step. But there he did pause, and glanced down towards the sea, and uttered a sudden enraged and desolate cry. He looked from headland to headland, but the cove was empty, sunlit and serene. He turned wildly to look back, and Purushottam was already at the Swami’s side, and Dominic not a hundred yards behind. There was no going back. He turned to the ocean again, and ran, plunged, glissaded onwards, across the yellow sand above the tide, into the fringes of the black sand now almost hidden, through the shallows that flashed at his heels as he ran, and still outwards until the surge lifted him from his feet, and he swam strongly and valiantly out to sea.

  ‘I am afraid he was looking for his boat,’ the Swami said in gentle, almost regretful explanation. ‘That was where he left it, you see. We moved it in the night.’