I decided I had been mistaken. This was not the homeland of the Amazons. It was the homeland of the Harpies.

That latest opinion was not shaken by what next transpired. We got to the village of Panruti well after sunset and found it also lacking any dak bangla, and Tofaa again snatched at a man in the street, and we went through the same performance as yesterday. He went home, we followed him, he loudly refused us entrance and was immediately overridden by a blustering female. The only difference in this case was that the henpecked husband was quite young and the hen was not.

When I thanked her for inviting us in, and Tofaa translated my thank-you, it came out something of a stammer. “We are grateful to you and your … uh … husband? … son?”

“He was my son,” said the woman. “He is now my husband.” I must have gaped, or blinked, for she went on to explain. “When his father died, he was our only child, and he would soon have been of an age to inherit this house and all its contents, and I would then have been a dead-woman-waiting-to-die. So I bribed the local sadhu to marry me to the boy—he being too young and ignorant to object—and thereby maintained my share in the property. Unhappily, he has not been much of a husband. So far, he has sired on me only these three: my daughters, his sisters.” She indicated the slack-jawed and witless-looking brats sitting lumpishly about. “If they are all I have, their eventual husbands will inherit next. Unless I give the girls to be devadasi temple whores. Or perhaps, since they are woefully deficient in their mentality, I could donate them to the Holy Order of Crippled Mendicants. But they may be even too imbecile to make proper beggars. Anyway, I am naturally anxious, and naturally trying mightily every night, to produce another son, and so keep the family property in the direct family line.” Briskly, she set before us some wood slabs of kàri-sauced food. “Therefore, if you do not mind, we will all eat in a hurry, so he and I can get to our palang.”

And again that night I overheard the moist noises of surata going on in the same room, this time accompanied by urgent whispers, which Tofaa repeated to me the next morning—“Harder, son! You must strive harder!” I wondered whether the avaricious woman planned next to marry her grandson, but I did not really care, and I did not ask. Nor did I bother remarking to Tofaa that all she had told me during our voyage —regarding the Hindu religion’s concern about sin, and strictures against it, and dire punishments for it—seemed to have had little elevating effect on Hindu morality in general.

Our destination, the capital city called Kumbakonam, was not impossibly far from where we had landed on the coast. But no Hindu peasant had any riding mounts to sell us, and not many men were willing to take us for hire to the next village or town down the road—or more likely, their wives would not let them—so Tofaa and I had to proceed by exasperatingly slow stages, whenever we could find a carter or a drover going our way. We rode jouncing in ox carts, and splayed across the sharp spine ridges of oxen, and dragged along on stone sledges, and straddling the rumps of pack asses, and once or twice riding real saddle horses, and many times we just set out walking, which usually meant we had to sleep in the roadside hedgerows. That was no intolerable hardship for me, except that on every one of those nights Tofaa gigglingly pretended I was bedding us down in the wilderness only to rape her, and when I did no such thing, she grumbled long into the night about the ungallant way I was treating a nobly born Lady Gift of the Gods.

The last outlying village on our way had a name that was bigger than its total population—Jayamkondacholapuram—and was otherwise remarkable only for something that happened, while we were there, to diminish its populace even further. Tofaa and I were again squatting in a cow-dung hut and supping on some mystery substance disguised in kàri, when there arose a rumbling sound like distant thunder. Our host and hostess immediately sprang erect and shrieked in unison, “Aswamheda!” and ran out of the house, kicking aside several of their children littered about the floor.

“What is aswamheda?” I asked Tofaa.

“I have no idea. The word means only a running away.”

“Perhaps we ought to emulate our hosts and run away.”

So she and I stepped over the children and went out into the single village street. The rumbling was nearer now, and I could tell that it was a herd of animals coming at a gallop from somewhere to the south. All of the Jayamkondacholapuramites were runing away from the noise, in a panicked and headlong mob, heedlessly trampling under their feet the numerous very young and very old persons who fell down. Some of the more spry villagers climbed up trees or onto the thatched roofs of their dwellings.

I saw the first of the herd come galloping into the southern end of the street, and saw that they were horses. Now, I know horses, and I know that, even among animals, they are not the most intelligent of creatures, but I also know that they have more sense than Hindus. Even a wild-eyed and foam-flecked running herd of them will not step on a fallen human being in its path. Every horse will leap over, or swerve aside, or if necessary execute a tumbler’s somersault, to avoid a fallen man or woman. So I simply threw myself prone in the street and dragged Tofaa with me, though she squealed in mortal terror. I held us both lying still and, as I expected, the maddened herd diverged around us and thundered past on our either side. The horses also took care to avoid the inert bodies of aged and infant Hindus already mashed by their own relatives and friends and neighbors.

The last of the horses disappeared on up the road to the northward, and the dust began to settle, and the villagers began to clamber down from roofs and trees and to amble back from whatever distances they had run to. They immediately commenced a concerted keening of grief and lament, as they peeled up their flattened dead, and they shook their fists at the sky and squawled imprecations at the Destroyer God Siva for having so unfeelingly taken so many of the innocent and infirm.

Tofaa and I went back to our meal, and eventually our host and hostess also returned, and counted their children. They had not lost any, and had trodden on only a few, but they were as sorrow-stricken and distraught as all the rest of the village—she and he did not even, after we all went to bed, perform surata for us that night—and they could not tell us anything more about the aswamheda except that it was a phenomenon which occurred about once a year, and was the doing of the cruel Raja of Kumbakonam.

“You would be well advised, wayfarers, not to go to that city,” said the woman of the house. “Why not settle down here in tranquil and civilized and neighborly Jayamkondacholapuram? There is ample room for you, now that Siva has destroyed so many of our people. Why persist in going to Kumbakonam, which is called the Black City?”

I said we had business there, and asked why it was so called.

“Because black is the Raja of Kumbakonam, and black his people, and black the dogs, and black the walls, and black the waters, and black the gods, and black the hearts of the people of Kumbakonam.”

3

UNDETERRED by the warning, Tofaa and I went on southward, and eventually crossed a running sewer that was dignified with the name of Kolerun River, and on the other side of it was Kumbakonam.

The city was much larger than any community we had yet come through, and it had filthier streets bordered with deeper ditches full of stagnant urine, and a greater variety of garbage rotting in the hot sun, and more lepers clicking their warning sticks, and more carcasses of dead dogs and beggars decaying in public view, and it was more rancid with the odors of kàri and cooking grease and sweat and unwashed feet. But the city really was no blacker of color or layered no thicker with surface dirt than any lesser community we had seen, and the inhabitants were no darker of skin and layered no thicker with accumulated grime. There were a great many more people, of course, than we had seen in one place before, and, like any city, Kumbakonam had attracted many eccentric types that had probably left their home villages in search of wider opportunity. For example, among the street crowds I saw quite a few individuals who wore gaudy feminine saris, but had on their heads the untidy tulbands usually worn by men.