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Chapter five. Change of Course |
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She had just reached the edge of the Angami country, and there was a risk that the powerful villages round Khonoma might become involved. At that point, the Kuki caretaker of Lakema rest-house heard of her whereabouts and passed the news on to the Deputy Commissioner at Kohima - at that time Mr Mills. To defeat the spies she was known to have in Kohima bazaar, a false expedition went off by day, in a blaze of glory, and in the wrong direction; and the real one left at dusk, unnoticed, on a thirty-mile night march. |
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They found her sentries drunk, for, primed with wrong information, everyone had been celebrating their supposed security. The sepoys swarmed over the palisade and surrounded her house, but when she began to shriek spells and call on her bodyguard to resist, the men who composed it perhaps remembered Hangrum; for they laid down their spears and surrendered, and it was left for the sepoys to go in and pull her out, screaming, scratching and kicking and inflicting the only casualty on the expedition by biting a Naik severely in the thumb. A few hours later she was telling Mills that it was very hard work being a goddess - people wanted to worship her night and day, and she never had time for a bath. So she had her bath, in the rest-house, with sentries at every exit; and the goddess, queen and terror of the Kacha Nagas, the elusive sorceress, the evasive divinity, went off to Manipur and trial - and a sentence of fourteen years for abetment of murder. |
