“May I request also, Your Highness, a pair of horses for me and my interpreter, that we may ride back to the coast and seek sea transport from there?”
“You shall have them, first thing in the morning, and likewise a stalwart pair of my palace guards for your escort.”
I hurried off to start my packing for departure, and told Tofaa to do the same, and she complied, though not very cheerfully. We were still at it when the Musicmaster stopped by our chambers to say his farewells. He and we exchanged compliments and good wishes and salaam aleikum, and then his eye chanced to fall on the things laid out on my bed to be packed, and he remarked:
“I see you are taking with you an elephant’s tooth as a memento of your stay.”
“What?” I said. He was regarding the Buddha’s tooth. I laughed at his jest and said, “Come, come, Master Khusru. You cannot fool me. An elephant’s tusk is taller than I am, and I could probably not lift one.”
“A tusk, yes. But do you think an elephant chews its fodder with its tusks? For that, it has ample tiers of molars. Like this one. You have never looked into an elephant’s mouth, I take it.”
“No, I have not,” I muttered, quietly gnashing my own molars. I waited until he had made his last salaam and left us, and then I burst out, “A cavàl donà no se ghe varda in boca! Che le vegna la cagasangue!”
“What are you shouting, Marco-wallah?” asked Tofaa.
“May the bloody gripes take that cursed Raja!” I raged. “The little wart was worried by my continued presence here, and evidently he despaired of anybody ever coming with another Buddha’s tooth, real or false. So he provided one himself. And took my reward for it! Come, Tofaa, let us go and revile him to his face!”
We went downstairs and found the chief steward, and I demanded audience with the little Raja, but the man said apologetically:
“The Raja went out, borne in his palanquin, to ride through the city and grant his subjects the privilege of observing him and admiring him and cheering at him. I was just explaining that to this importunate caller who insists he has come a far distance to see the Raja.”
As Tofaa translated that, I glanced only impatiently at the caller—just another Hindu man in a dhoti—but my eye caught on an object he was carrying, and at the same moment Tofaa cried excitedly:
“It is he, Marco-wallah! It is the very pearl fisher whom I remember from Akyab!”
And indeed the man was carrying a tooth. It was another immense one, and quite similar to my own latest acquisition, except that it was cupped in a mesh of gold tracery, like a stone set in a jewel, and the whole had a patina of unmistakable great age. Tofaa and the man jabbered together, then she turned to me again.
“It is truly he, Marco-wallah. The man who gamed with my late dear husband in the Akyab hall. And this is the relic he won with the dice that day.”
“How many did he win?” I said, still skeptical. “He has already delivered one.”
Jabber, jabber, and Tofaa spoke to me once more. “He knows nothing of any other. He has only this moment arrived, having trudged on foot all the way from the coast. This tooth is the only tooth he has ever had, and he is sad to part with it, for it much increased his crop of pearls in the season past, but he is dutifully heeding his Raja’s proclamation.”
“What a happy coincidence,” I said. “This seems to be a day for teeth.” I added, as I heard a commotion in the courtyard outside, “And here the Raja returns now, just in time to greet the one honest Hindu in his realm.”
The little Raja strutted in, trailed by his fawning entourage of courtiers and congratulators and other toadies. He halted in some surprise at seeing our group waiting in the entry hall. Tofaa and the steward and the fisherman all collapsed to lower themselves below the Raja’s head level, but, before any of them could speak, I addressed the little Raja in Farsi, and said silkily:
“It appears, Your Highness, that the good pearl fisher was so pleased with the reward for the first tooth—and the meal to which you treated him—that he has brought another.”
The little Raja looked startled and bewildered for a moment, but he quickly comprehended the situation, and realized that I had caught him out in his chicanery. He did not act guilty or abashed, of course, but only indignant, and flashed a look of pure venom at the innocent fisherman, and contributed another blatant lie:
“The greedy wretch is only trying to take advantage of you, Marco-wallah.”
“Perhaps he is, Your Highness,” I said, continuing to pretend that I was believing his farce. “But I will gratefully accept this new relic, as well. For now I can make this one a gift to my Khakhan Kubilai, and leave the other as my parting gift to Your Gracious Highness. Your Highness deserves it. There is only the question of the reward I have already paid. Do I give the fisher an equal amount for this new delivery?”
“No,” the little Raja said coldly. “You have already paid most generously. I shall persuade the man to be satisfied with that. Believe me, I shall persuade him.”
He snapped instructions to the steward to take the man to the kitchen for a meal—another meal, he thought to add—and went stamping furiously off to his quarters. Tofaa and I returned to our own to finish packing. I carefully wrapped the new, gold-meshed tooth for safe carrying, but left the other for whatever disposition the little Raja might wish to make of it.
I never saw the man again. Perhaps he could not face me, realizing that I was leaving Kumbakonam with my never very high opinion of him lowered even further, now knowing him to be not only a posturing travesty of a sovereign, but also a giver of false gifts, a cheater of his own people, an embezzler of another’s rightful recompense and—worse than all that—a man incapable ever of admitting error or wrong or fault. Anyway, he did not say goodbye or even get out of bed to see us off, when at dawn we took our leave.
Tofaa and I, in the rear courtyard, were standing about while our two assigned escorts saddled our horses and strapped our packs on the cantles, when I saw two other men emerge from a back door of the palace. In the early half-light, I could not see who they were, but one of them sat down on the ground while the other stood over him. Our escorts paused in their work and muttered uneasily, and Tofaa translated for me:
“Those are the Court Executioner and a condemned prisoner. He must be guilty of some noteworthy crime, for he is being accorded the karavat.”
Curious, I went a little closer to them, but not close enough to interfere. The karavat, I finally could see, was a peculiar sort of sword blade. It had no handle, but was simply a crescent of sharp steel, like a new moon, each of its points ending in a short chain, and each chain ending in a sort of metal stirrup. The condemned prisoner—not in any hurry, but not too reluctantly either—himself put the crescent blade at the back of his neck, with the chains draped over his shoulders in front. Then he bent his knees and drew up his feet to where he could put a foot in each of the stirrups. Then, after the briefest moment to take a last deep breath, he leaned his neck back against the blade and kicked both feet out straight. The karavat very neatly, and by his own unaided action, sliced his head from his body.
I went closer yet and, while the executioner relieved the body of the karavat, I looked down at the head, which was still opening and shutting its eyes and mouth in a surprised kind of way. It was the pearl fisher who had brought the real Buddha’s tooth, the only enterprising and honorable Hindu I had encountered in India. The little Raja had rewarded him, as he had said he would.
As we rode away, I reflected that I had at last seen something which the Hindus could be proud of calling their own. They had nothing else. They had long ago disowned their native-born Buddha and relinquished him to alien lands. The few splendors they could boastfully display to visitors had, in my opinion, been crafted by some different and vanished race. The Hindus’ customs and morals and social order and personal habits had, in my opinion, been taught to them by the monkeys. Even their distinctive musical instrument, the sitar, was the contribution of a foreigner. If the karavat was the Hindus’ own invention, then it had to be their only one, and I was willing to concede them that one—a lazy way of letting the condemned kill themselves—as the highest achievement of their race.