"Let's leave it." She looked toward him. "Still burning." Then she reached out and brushed his lips with her fingertips one last time. He watched in dismay as she passed on through the doorway. In moments she was lost among the shadows of the orchard. BOOK THREE THE ROAD CHAPTER THIRTEEN East along the Tapti River valley the land was a verdant paradise, a patchwork of mango and pipal groves and freshly turned dark earth. By mid-October the fields of cotton, corn, and sugarcane were in harvest; and in the lowlands paired buffalo strained to turn the crusted mud to readiness for broadcast sowing the grain crops of autumn: millet, wheat, and barley. The monsoon-washed roads had again grown passable, and now they were a continual procession, as mile-long caravans of corn-laden bullock carts inched ponderously west toward the shipping port of Surat. The distance from Surat to Burhanpur was one hundred and fifty _kos_, and in dry weather it could be traversed in just over a fortnight. Vasant Rao had hired fifty carts to transport the sealed bundles--which he said were lead--to Burhanpur, swelling his entourage of forty Raput horsemen by fifty low-caste drivers and bullock teams. He had also hired five additional carts to carry provisions. Brian Hawksworth had contracted for his own cart and driver, negotiating a price of twenty rupees for cartage of his belongings all the way from Surat to Agra. He was amused to reflect that the chest containing King James's gifts for the Moghul of India traveled lashed to the bed of a ramshackle, wooden-wheeled cart originally intended for hay. The caravan had been scheduled to depart early on a Saturday morning, but the drivers had suddenly refused to budge until the following day. Hawksworth had confronted his driver, Nayka, a dark-skinned low-caste man with the spindly limbs of the underfed, and demanded to know why. Nayka had twisted his head deferentially, riveting his eyes on the ground, and explained in halting Turki. "Today is Saturday, Captain Sahib. Saturdays and Tuesdays are sacred to the goddess Devi, the Divine Mother. Journeys begun on those days always meet disaster. Bandits, tigers, washed-out roads. A Mussalman once made my cousin bring a cart of indigo to Surat from a village down the river on a Tuesday, and a bridge broke under his load. Both of his bullocks were drowned." It was mid-afternoon on Sunday when the caravan finally pulled out from the water tank at Surat's Abidjan Gate. By nightfall they had traveled three _kos_, reaching the outskirts of the village of Cossaria. The next day they made twelve _kos_ east-northeast to reach the town of Karod, a strategic fort on the Tapti, dominated by a hilltop castle that garrisoned two hundred Rajput soldiers. The next three days their camp stages had been the towns of Viara, Corka, and the large garrison city of Narayanpur.