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People began to ask Rajkumar questions. ‘What are these soldiers doing here?’
Rajkumar shrugged. How was he to know? He had no more connection with the soldiers than did they. A group of men gathered around him, crowding in, so that he had to take a few backward steps. ‘Where do the soldiers come from? Why are they here?’
‘I don’t know where they come from. I don’t know who they are.’
Glancing over his shoulder, Rajkumar saw that he had backed himself into a blind alley. There were some seven or eight men around him. They had pulled up their longyis, tucking them purposefully up at the waist. The sepoys were just a short distance away, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. But he was alone in the alley – the only Indian – out of earshot, surrounded by these men who were clearly intent on making him answer for the soldiers’ presence.
A hand flashed out of the shadows. Taking a grip on his hair, a man pulled him off the ground. Rajkumar swung up a leg and dug it back, aiming his heel at his assailant’s groin. The man saw the kick coming and blocked it with one hand. Twisting Rajkumar’s head around, he struck him across the face with the back of his fist. A spurt of blood shot out of Rajkumar’s nose. The shock of the blow slowed the moment to a standstill. The arc of blood seemed to stop in its trajectory, hanging suspended in the air, brilliantly translucent, like a string of garnets. Then the crook of an elbow took Rajkumar in the stomach, pumping the breath out of him and throwing him against a wall. He slid down, clutching his stomach, as though he were trying to push his insides back in.
Then, suddenly, help arrived. A voice rang through the lane. ‘Stop.’ The men turned round, startled.
‘Let him be.’
It was Saya John, advancing towards them with one arm in the air, looking oddly authoritative in a hat and coat. Tucked snugly into the palm of his upraised hand was a small, blunt-nosed pistol. The men backed away slowly and once they’d gone, Saya John slipped the pistol into his coat pocket. ‘You’re lucky I saw you,’ he said to Rajkumar. ‘Didn’t you know better than to be out on the streets today? The other Indians have all barricaded themselves into Hajji Ismail’s compound, at the foot of Mandalay hill.’
He held out a hand and helped Rajkumar to his feet. Rajkumar stood up and wiped the blood off his throbbing face. They walked out of the alley together. On the main road soldiers were still marching past. Rajkumar and Saya John stood side by side and watched the triumphal parade.
Presently Saya John said: ‘I used to know soldiers like these.’
‘Saya?’
‘In Singapore, as a young man I worked for a time as a hospital orderly. The patients were mainly sepoys like these – Indians, back from fighting wars for their English masters. I still remember the smell of gangrenous bandages on amputated limbs; the nighttime screams of twenty-year-old boys, sitting upright in their beds. They were peasants, those men, from small countryside villages: their clothes and turbans still smelt of woodsmoke and dung fires. “What makes you fight,” I would ask them, “when you should be planting your fields at home?” “Money,” they’d say, and yet all they earned was a few annas a day, not much more than a dockyard coolie. For a few coins they would allow their masters to use them as they wished, to destroy every trace of resistance to the power of the English. It always amazed me: Chinese peasants would never do this – allow themselves to be used to fight other people’s wars with so little profit for themselves. I would look into those faces and I would ask myself: what would it be like if I had something to defend – a home, a country, a family – and I found myself attacked by these ghostly men, these trusting boys? How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger, but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?
‘In English they use a word – it comes from the Bible – evil. I used to think of it when I talked to those soldiers. What other word could you use to describe their willingness to kill for their masters, to follow any command, no matter what it entailed? And yet, in the hospital, these sepoys would give me gifts, tokens of their gratitude – a carved flute, an orange. I would look into their eyes and see also a kind of innocence, a simplicity. These men who would think nothing of setting fire to whole villages if their officers ordered, they too had a certain kind of innocence. An innocent evil. I could think of nothing more dangerous.’
‘Saya,’ Rajkumar shrugged offhandedly, ‘they’re just tools. Without minds of their own. They count for nothing.’
Saya John glanced at him, startled. There was something unusual about the boy – a kind of watchful determination. No excess of gratitude here, no gifts or offerings, no talk of honour, with murder in the heart. There was no simplicity in his face, no innocence: his eyes were filled with worldliness, curiosity, hunger. That was as it should be.
‘If you ever need a job,’ Saya John said, ‘come and talk to me.’
Just before sunset the occupying troops withdrew from the fort. They carried away cartloads of booty from the palace. To the astonishment of the townsfolk, they left without posting pickets around the fort. For the first time that anyone could remember the gateways of the citadel stood open and unguarded.
The soldiers marched back the way they had come but through streets that were now empty. As the tramp of their feet faded away an uneasy quiet descended on the city. Then, with the suddenness of a nighttime eruption in a chicken-coop, a group of women burst out of the fort and came racing over the funeral bridge, their feet pounding a drum roll on its wooden surface.
Ma Cho recognised some of the women. They were palace servants; she had seen them going in and out of the fort for years, stepping haughtily down the road in their slippered feet, their longyis plucked daintily above their ankles. They were running now, stumbling through the dust without a thought for their clothes. They were carrying bundles of cloth, sacks, even furniture-some were bent over like washerwomen on their way to the river. Ma Cho ran out into the street and stopped one of the women. ‘What are you doing? What’s happened?’
‘The soldiers – they’ve been looting the palace. We’re trying to save a few things for ourselves.’ The women disappeared and all was quiet again. Presently the shadows around the fort began to stir. There were ripples of activity in the darkness, like the fluttering of moths in the recesses of a musty cupboard. People crept slowly out of the dwellings that surrounded the citadel. Advancing to the walls they peered distrustfully at the empty guard-posts. There were no soldiers anywhere in sight, nor even any sentries from the palace guard. Was it really possible that the gates had been left unguarded? A few people stepped on the bridges, testing the silence. Slowly, walking on the balls of their feet, they began to advance towards the far bank of the eighty-foot moat. They reached the other side and went creeping to the gates, holding themselves ready to run back at the slightest check.
It was true: the guards and sentries were all gone. The palace was unguarded. The intruders slipped through the gates and vanished into the fort.
Ma Cho had been watching undecided, scratching her chin. Now she picked up her sharp-bladed da. Tucking the wooden handle into her waist she started towards the funeral bridge. The fort’s walls were a blood-red smear in the darkness ahead.
Rajkumar ran after her, reaching the bridge abreast of a charging crowd. This was the flimsiest of the fort’s bridges, too narrow for the mass that was trying to funnel through. A frenzy of jostling broke out. The man beside Rajkumar found himself stepping on air and dropped over the side; a wooden plank flipped up, tipping two women screaming into the moat. Rajkumar was younger than the people around him and lighter on his feet. Slipping through the press of bodies, he went sprinting into the fort.
Rajkumar had imagined the fort to be filled with gardens and palaces, richly painted and sumptuously gilded. But the street he now found himself on was a straight and narrow dirt path, lined with wooden houses, not much different from any other part of the city. Directly ahead lay the palace and its nine-roofed spire – he could see the gilded hti flashing in the darkness. People were pouring down the street now, some carrying flaming torches. Rajkumar caught a glimpse of Ma Cho rounding a corner in the distance. He sprinted after her, his longyi tucked tight around his waist. The palace stockade had several entrances, including doorways reserved for the use of servants and tradespeople. These were set low in the walls, like mouseholes, so that no one could pass through them without bowing. At one of these small doorways Rajkumar caught up again with Ma Cho. The gate was quickly forced. People began to tumble through, like water over the lip of a spout.
Rajkumar stayed close behind Ma Cho as she elbowed her way to the entrance. She heaved him in and then squeezed through herself. Rajkumar had the impression of having fallen upon a perfumed sheet. Then he rolled over and found that he was lying on a bed of soft grass. He was in a garden, within reach of a sparkling canal: the air was suddenly clear and cool, free of dust. The orientation of the palace’s gateways was towards the east: it was from that direction that ceremonial visitors approached, walking down the formal pathway that led to the great glass-tiled pavilion where the King held court. On the western side of the stockade – the side that was closest to the funeral gate – lay the women’s quarters. These were the halls and apartments that now lay ahead of Ma Cho and Rajkumar. Ma Cho picked herself up and hurried, panting, in the direction of a stone archway. The doors of the main chamber of the women’s palace lay just beyond, yawning open. People stopped to run their fingers over the doors’ jade-studded panels. A man fell on his knees and began to pound the slats of wood with a rock, trying to knock out the ornaments. Rajkumar ran past, into the building, a couple of steps behind Ma Cho. The chamber was very large and its walls and columns were tiled with thousands of shards of glass. Oil lamps flared in sconces, and the whole room seemed to be aflame, every surface shimmering with sparks of golden light. The hall was filled with a busy noise, a workmanlike hum of cutting and chopping, of breaking wood and shattering glass. Everywhere people were intently at work, men and women, armed with axes and das; they were hacking at gem-studded Ook offering boxes; digging patterned gemstones from the marble floor; using fish-hooks to pry the ivory inlays from lacquered sadaik chests. Armed with a rock, a girl was knocking the ornamental frets out of a crocodile-shaped zither; a man was using a meat cleaver to scrape the gilt from the neck of a saung-gak harp and a woman was chiselling furiously at the ruby eyes of a bronze chinthe lion. They came to a door that led to a candlelit anteroom. There was a woman inside, standing by the latticed window in the far corner.
Ma Cho gasped. ‘Queen Supayalat!’
The Queen was screaming, shaking her first. ‘Get out of here. Get out.’ Her face was red, mottled with rage, her fury caused as much by her own impotence as by the presence of the mob in the palace. A day before, she could have had a commoner imprisoned for so much as looking her directly in the face. Today all the city’s scum had come surging into the palace and she was powerless to act against them. But the Queen was neither cowed nor afraid, not in the least. Ma Cho fell to the floor, her hands clasped over her head in a reverential shiko.
Rajkumar dropped to his knees, unable to wrench his gaze away. The Queen was dressed in crimson silk, in a loose garment that billowed over her hugely distended stomach. Her hair was piled in lacquered coils on her tiny, delicately shaped head; the ivory mask of her face was scarred by a single dark furrow, carved by a bead of sweat. She was holding her robe plucked above her ankle and Rajkumar noticed that her legs were encased in a garment of pink silk – stockings, an article of clothing he had never seen before. The Queen glared at Ma Cho, lying on the floor in front of her. In one hand, Ma Cho was holding a brass candlestand with a chrysanthemum pedestal.
The Queen lunged at the prostrate woman. ‘Give that to me; where did you get it? Give it back.’ Leaning stiffly over her swollen stomach, the Queen tried to snatch away the candlestand. Ma Cho eluded her hands, pushing herself backwards, crab-like. The Queen hissed at her: ‘Do you know who I am?’ Ma Cho offered her yet another respectful genuflection, but she would not part with her candlestand. It was as though her determination to cling to her loot was in no way at odds with her wish to render due homage to the Queen.
Just one day earlier the crime of entering the palace would have resulted in summary execution. This they all knew – the Queen and everyone who had joined the mob. But yesterday had passed: the Queen had fought and been defeated. What purpose was to be served by giving her back what she had lost? None of those things was hers any more: what was to be gained by leaving them to the foreigners to take away?
Through all the years of the Queen’s reign the townsfolk had hated her for her cruelty, feared her for her ruthlessness and courage. Now through the alchemy of defeat she was transformed in their eyes. It was as though a bond had been conjured into existence that had never existed before. For the first time in her reign she had become what a sovereign should be, the proxy of her people. Everyone who came through the door fell to the floor in a spontaneous act of homage. Now, when she was powerless to chastise them, they were glad to offer her these tokens of respect; they were glad even to hear her rail at them. It was good that they should shiko and she berate them. Were she meekly to accept her defeat none would be so deeply shamed as they. It was as though they were entrusting her with the burden of their own inarticulate defiance.
Rajkumar’s eyes fell on a girl – one of the Queen’s maids. She was slender and long-limbed, of a complexion that was exactly the tint of the fine thanaka powder she was wearing on her face. She had huge dark eyes and her face was long and perfect in its symmetry. She was by far the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld, of a loveliness beyond imagining.
Rajkumar swallowed to clear his throat, which was suddenly swollen and dry. She was in the far corner of the room with a group of other girls. He began to work his way towards her along the wall.
She was an attendant, he guessed, perhaps nine or ten years old. He could tell that the bejewelled little girl beside her was a Princess. In the corner behind them lay a heap of richly coloured cloths and objects of brass and ivory. The girls had evidently been busy salvaging the Queen’s possessions when they were interrupted by the mob.
Rajkumar looked down at the floor and saw a jewelled ivory box lying forgotten in a corner. The box had a gold clasp and on its sides were two small handles, carved in the shape of leaping dolphins. Rajkumar knew exactly what he had to do. Picking the box off the ground, he ran across the room and offered it to the slender little girl.
‘Here.’
She wouldn’t look at him. She turned her head away, her lips moving silently as though in a chant.
‘Take it,’ said one of the other girls. ‘He’s giving it to you.’
‘Here.’ He thrust the box at her again. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
He surprised himself by taking hold of her hand and placing it gently on the box. ‘I brought it back for you.’
She let her hand rest on the lid. It was as light as a leaf. Her lowered eyes went first to the jewelled lid and then travelled slowly from the dark knots of his knuckles to his torn and dirt-spattered vest and up to his face. And then her eyes clouded over with apprehension and she dropped her gaze. He could tell that her world was ringed with fear so that every step she took was a venture into darkness.
‘What’s your name?’ Rajkumar said.
She whispered a couple of inaudible syllables.
‘Doh-lee?’
‘Dolly.’
‘Dolly,’ repeated Rajkumar. ‘Dolly.’ He could think of nothing else to say, or as much worth saying, so he said the name again louder and louder, until he was shouting. ‘Dolly. Dolly.’
He saw a tiny smile creep on to her face and then Ma Cho’s voice was in his ear. ‘Soldiers. Run.’ At the door, he turned to look back. Dolly was standing just as he’d left her, holding the box between her hands, staring at him.
Ma Cho tugged at his arm. ‘For what are you staring at that girl, you half-wit kalaa? Take what you’ve got and run. The soldiers are coming back. Run.’
The mirrored hall was echoing with shouts. At the door, Rajkumar turned back to make a gesture at Dolly, more a sign than a wave. ‘I will see you again.’
Four (#ulink_45763448-5ee0-5d5a-a5df-d4d357cbb6e5)
The Royal Family spent the night in one of the furthest outbuildings in the palace grounds, the South Garden Palace, a small pavilion surrounded by pools, canals and rustic gardens. The next day, shortly before noon. King Thebaw came out to the balcony and sat down to wait for the British spokesman, Colonel Sladen. The King was wearing his royal sash and a white gaung-baung, the turban of mourning.
King Thebaw was of medium height, with a plump face, a thin moustache and finely shaped eyes. As a youth he had been famous for his good looks: it had once been said of him that he was the handsomest Burman in the land (he was in fact half Shan, his mother having come to Mandalay from a small principality on the eastern border). He’d been crowned at the age of twenty and in the seven years of his reign had never once left the palace compound. This long confinement had worked terrible ravages on his appearance. He was only twenty-seven but looked to be well into middle age.
To sit on the throne of Burma had never been Thebaw’s personal ambition. Nor had anyone in the kingdom ever imagined that the crown would one day be his. As a child he had entered into the Buddhist boy’s customary novitiate in the monkhood with an enthusiasm unusual in one of his birth and lineage. He had spent several years in the palace monastery, leaving it just once, briefly, at the behest of his father, the august King Mindon. The King had enrolled Thebaw and a few of his step-brothers in an English school in Mandalay. Under the tutelage of Anglican missionaries Thebaw had learnt some English and displayed a talent for cricket.
But then King Mindon had changed his mind, withdrawing the princes from the school and eventually expelling the missionary. Thebaw had returned gladly to the monastery on the palace grounds, within sight of the water-clock and the relic house of the Buddha’s tooth. He had proceeded to earn distinction in scriptural study, passing the difficult patama-byan examination at the age of nineteen.
King Mindon was perhaps the wisest, most prudent ruler ever to sit on the throne of Burma. Appreciative though he was of his son’s gifts, he was equally aware of his limitations. ‘If Thebaw ever becomes king,’ he once remarked, ‘the country will pass into the hands of foreigners.’ But of this there seemed to be little possibility. There were forty-six other princes in Mandalay whose claims to the throne were as good as Thebaw’s. Most of them far exceeded him in ambition and political ability.
But fate intervened in the familiar guise of a mother-in-law: Thebaw’s happened to be also his step-mother, the Alenandaw Queen, a senior consort and a wily and ruthless exponent of palace intrigue. She arranged for Thebaw to marry all three of her daughters simultaneously. Then she shouldered him past his forty-six rivals and installed him on the throne. He had no choice but to assent to his accession: to accept was an easier alternative than to refuse, and less potentially lethal. But there was a startling new development, something that threw everybody’s calculations off kilter: Thebaw fell in love with one of his wives, his middle Queen, Supayalat.
Of all the princesses in the palace, Supayalat was by far the fiercest and most wilful, the only one who could match her mother in guile and determination. Of such a woman only indifference could have been expected where it concerned a man of scholarly inclination like Thebaw. Yet she too, in defiance of the protocols of palace intrigue, fell headlong in love with her husband, the King. His ineffectual good nature seemed to inspire a maternal ferocity in her. In order to protect him from her family she stripped her mother of her powers and banished her to a corner of the palace, along with her sisters and co-wives. Then she set about ridding Thebaw of his rivals. She ordered the killing of every member of the Royal Family who might ever be considered a threat to her husband. Seventy-nine princes were slaughtered on her orders, some of them newborn infants, and some too old to walk. To prevent the spillage of royal blood she had had them wrapped in carpets and bludgeoned to death. The corpses were thrown into the nearest river.
The war too was largely of Supayalat’s making: it was she who had roused the great council of the land, the Hluttdaw, when the British began to issue their ultimatums from Rangoon. The King had been of a mind for appeasement; the Kinwun Mingyi, his most trusted minister, had made an impassioned appeal for peace and he was tempted to give in. Then Supayalat had risen from her place and gone slowly to the centre of the council. It was the fifth month of her pregnancy and she moved with great deliberation, with a slow, shuffling gait, moving her tiny feet no more than a few inches at a time, a small, lonely figure in that assembly of turbaned noblemen.
The chamber was lined with mirrors. As she approached its centre, an army of Supayalats seemed to materialise around her; they were everywhere, on every shard of glass, thousands of tiny women with their hands clasped over their swollen waists. She walked up to the stout old Kinwun Mingyi, sitting sprawled on his stool. Thrusting her swollen belly into his face, she said. ‘Why, grandfather, it is you who should wear a skirt and own a stone for grinding face powder.’ Her voice was a whisper but it had filled the room.
And now the war was over, and he, the King, was sitting on the balcony of a garden pavilion, waiting for a visit from Colonel Sladen, the spokesman of the conquering British. The evening before, the colonel had called on the King and informed him, in the politest and most discreet language, that the Royal Family was to be transported from Mandalay the next day; that His Majesty would do well to use the remaining time to make his preparations.
The King had not stepped out of the palace in seven years; he had not left the vicinity of Mandalay in all his life. What were his preparations to be? One might as well try to prepare for a journey to the moon. The King knew the colonel well. Sladen had spent years in Mandalay as a British emissary and had often visited the palace. He was fluent in Burmese and had always shown himself to be correct in his manners, at times affable and even friendly. He needed more time, the King had told Sladen, a week, a few days. What could it matter now? The British had won and he had lost: what difference could a day or two make?
The afternoon was well advanced when Colonel Sladen came walking up the path that led to the South Garden Palace, a pebbled trail that meandered between picturesque pools and goldfish-filled streams. The King stayed seated as Colonel Sladen approached.
‘How much time?’ said the King.
Sladen was in full dress uniform, with a sword hanging at his waist. He bowed regretfully. He had conferred at length with his commanding officer, he explained. The general had expressed his sympathy but he had his orders and was bound by the responsibilities of his position. His Majesty must understand; left to himself he, Sladen, would have been glad to make accommodations, but the matter was not in his hands, nor anyone else’s for that matter …
‘How much time then?’
Sladen reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold watch. ‘About one hour.’
‘One hour! But …’
A guard of honour had already been formed at the palace gates; the King was being waited on.
The news startled the King. ‘Which gate?’ he enquired in alarm. Every part of the palace was charged with portents. The auspicious, ceremonial entrance faced east. It was through these gates that honoured visitors came and departed. For years British envoys to Mandalay had been consigned to the humble west gate. This was a grievance of long standing. Sladen had waged many battles with the palace over such fine points of protocol. Would he now seek to exact revenge by forcing the King to exit the palace by the west gate? The King directed an apprehensive glance at the colonel and Sladen hastened to reassure the King. He was to be allowed to leave by the east gate. In victory the British had decided to be generous.
Sladen looked at his watch again. There was very little time now and a vitally important matter had yet to be settled: the question of the entourage that was to accompany the Royal Family into exile.
While Sladen was conferring with the King, other British officers had been busy organising a gathering in a nearby garden. A large number of palace functionaries had been summoned, including the Queen’s maids and all other servants still remaining on the grounds. King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat looked on as the colonel addressed their servants.
The Royal Family was being sent into exile, the colonel told the assembled notables. They were to go to India, to a location that had yet to be decided on. The British Government wished to provide them with an escort of attendants and advisors. The matter was to be settled by asking for volunteers.
There was a silence when he finished, followed by an outburst of embarrassed coughs, a flurry of awkward throat-clearings. Feet were shuffled, heads lowered, nails examined. Mighty wungyis shot sidelong glances at powerful wundauks; haughty myowuns stared awkwardly at the grass. Many of the assembled courtiers had never had a home other than the palace; never woken to a day whose hours were not ordered by the rising of the King; never known a world that was not centred on the nine-roofed hti of Burma’s monarchs. All their lives they had been trained in the service of their master. But their training bound them to the King only so long as he embodied Burma and the sovereignty of the Burmese. They were neither the King’s friends nor his confidants and it was not in their power to lighten the weight of his crown. The burdens of kingship were Thebaw’s alone, solitude not the least among them.
Sladen’s appeal went unanswered: there were no volunteers. The King’s gaze, that mark of favour once so eagerly sought, passed unchecked over the heads of his courtiers. Thebaw remained impassive as he watched his most trusted servants averting their faces, awkwardly fingering the golden tsaloe sashes that marked their rank.
This is how power is eclipsed: in a moment of vivid realism, between the waning of one fantasy of governance and its replacement by the next; in an instant when the world springs free of its mooring of dreams and reveals itself to be girdled in the pathways of survival and self-preservation.
The King said: ‘It does not matter who comes and who does not.’ He turned to Sladen: ‘But you must come with us, Sladen, as you are an old friend.’
‘I regret this is impossible, Your Majesty,’ answered Sladen. ‘My duties will detain me here.’
The Queen, standing behind the King’s chair, directed one of her flinty glances at her husband. It was all very well for him to express fine sentiments, but it was she who was eight months pregnant, and saddled moreover with the care of a colicky and difficult child. How was she to cope without servants and attendants? Who was going to calm the Second Princess when she had one of her raging tantrums? Her eyes scanned the assembly and settled on Dolly, who was sitting on her heels, braiding leaves of grass.
Dolly looked up to see the Queen glaring at her from her place on the pavilion balcony. She gave a cry and dropped the leaves. Had something happened? Was the Princess crying? She jumped to her feet and hurried towards the pavilion, followed by Evelyn, Augusta and several of the others.
Sladen breathed a sigh of relief as the girls came up the steps of the pavilion. Some volunteers at last!
‘So you’re going?’ he said, as the girls hurried past, just to make sure.
The girls stopped to stare; Evelyn smiled and Augusta began to laugh. Of course they were going; they were orphans; they alone of the palace retainers had nowhere else to go, no families, no other means of support. What could they do but go with the King and Queen?
Sladen glanced once again at the assembly of courtiers and palace servants. Was there no one else present who would accompany the King? A single shaky voice answered in the affirmative. It belonged to an official of advanced age, the Padein Wun. He would go if he could bring along his son.
‘How much time left?’
Sladen looked at his watch. ‘Ten minutes.’
Just ten more minutes.
The King led Sladen into the pavilion and unlocked a door. A wedge of light fanned into the darkened room, igniting a firefly display of gold. The world’s richest gem mines lay in Burma and many fine stones had passed into the possession of the ruling family. The King paused to run his hand over the jewelled case that held his most prized possession, the Ngamauk ring, set with the greatest, most valuable ruby ever mined in Burma. His ancestors had collected jewellery and gemstones as an afterthought, a kind of amusement. It was with these trinkets that he would have to provide for himself and his family in exile.
‘Colonel Sladen, how is all this to be transported?’
Sladen conferred quickly with his fellow officers. Everything would be taken care of, he reassured the King. The hoard would be transported under guard to the King’s ship. But now it was time to leave; the guard of honour was waiting.
The King walked out of the pavilion, flanked by Queen Supayalat and her mother. Halfway down the meandering path the Queen turned to look back. The Princesses were following a few paces behind with the maids. The girls were carrying their belongings in an assortment of boxes and bundles. Some had flowers in their hair, some were dressed in their brightest clothes. Dolly was walking beside Evelyn, who had the Second Princess on her hip. The two girls were giggling, oblivious, as though they were on their way to a festival.
The procession passed slowly through the long corridors of the palace, and across the mirrored walls of the Hall of Audience, past the shouldered guns of the guard of honour and the snapped-off salutes of the English officers.
Two carriages were waiting by the east gate. They were bullockcarts, yethas, the commonest vehicles on Mandalay’s streets. The first of the carts had been fitted out with a ceremonial canopy. Just as he was about to step in, the King noticed that his canopy had seven tiers, the number allotted to a nobleman, not the nine due to a king.
He paused to draw breath. So the well-spoken English colonels had had their revenge after all, given the knife of victory a final little twist. In his last encounter with his erstwhile subjects he was to be publicly demoted, like an errant schoolchild. Sladen had guessed right: this was, of all the affronts Thebaw could have imagined, the most hurtful, the most egregious.
The ox-carts were small and there was not enough room for the maids. They followed on foot, a ragged little procession of eighteen brightly-dressed orphan girls carrying boxes and bundles.
Several hundred British soldiers fell in beside the ox-carts and the girls. They were heavily armed, prepared for trouble. The people of Mandalay were not expected to sit idly by while their King and Queen were herded into exile. Reports had been heard of planned riots and demonstrations, of desperate attempts to free the Royal Family.
The British high command believed this to be potentially the most dangerous moment of the entire operation. Some of them had served in India and an incident from the recent past weighed heavily on their minds. In the final days of the Indian uprising of 1857, Major Hodson had captured Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last of the Mughals, on the outskirts of Delhi. The blind and infirm old emperor had taken refuge in the tomb of his ancestor, Humayun, with two of his sons. When it came time for the major to escort the emperor and his sons back into the city, people had gathered in large numbers along the roadside. These crowds had grown more and more unruly, increasingly threatening. Finally, to keep the mob under control, the major had ordered the princes’ execution. They had been pushed before the crowd and their brains had been blown out in full public view.
These events were no more than twenty-eight years in the past, their memory freshly preserved in the conversation of messes and clubs. It was to be hoped that no such eventuality would present itself now – but if it did it would not find King Thebaw’s escort unprepared.
Mandalay had few thoroughfares that could accommodate a procession of this size. The ox-carts rumbled slowly along the broader avenues, banking steeply round the right-angled corners. The city’s streets, although straight, were narrow and unpaved.
Their dirt surfaces were rutted with deep furrows, left by the annual tilling of the monsoons. The ox-carts’ wheels were solid, carved from single blocks of wood. Their rigid frames seesawed wildly as they ploughed over the troughs. The Queen had to crouch over her swollen stomach to keep herself from being battered against the sides of the cart.
Neither the soldiers nor their royal captives knew the way to the port. The procession soon lost its way in the geometrical maze of Mandalay’s streets. It strayed off in the direction of the northern hills and by the time the mistake was discovered it was almost dark. The carts wound their way back by the light of oil-soaked torches.
