The Tenacity of Darkness: Book # 2 of A Thorn for Miss R.

by Sakiv Koch

  I didn’t waste my last bullet aiming at the sound of this new voice. I would probably just graze him superficially, if not miss him altogether. I had the long-forgotten and yet intensely familiar sensation of someone pressing a red-hot iron deeper and deeper into the tissue of my bleeding, burning wound.

  The knife-thrower was zigzagging closer all the time. He loved to laugh and mumble to himself from time to time, perhaps to tempt me into coming out and taking a potshot at him, but most probably he was just a maniac, sadistically enjoying that game of lethal hide and seek. I couldn’t pick any signs of movement upstairs, which empowered me to give this particular hyena my complete attention.

  I thought I knew his type — he was obviously someone with a big ego that bruised very quickly (an ego quite identical to my own, in fact). I had got to get his goat; I had to annoy him enough to raise the level of his madness above its default levels.

  “Hey, careful, little guy, you may fall and knock out your milk teeth,” I called out in a tone of voice adults adopt for wayward children. Of course I had no idea about his stature — he might have been a giant, for all I knew — but his gasp and quick breathing told me I had rankled him.

  “Oh, you are just a bloody curry muncher,” he spat out, having evidently deduced my ethnicity from my accent, his own tone of voice burgeoning with uncontrollable fury. “I will cut you up —.”

  “Aw, poor you,” I cut him off mid-sentence. “I can understand a weak and wimpy guy like you rattling off big threats all the time. Everybody’s got to have at least one big thing.”

  “YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT ME, NOTHING!” he bellowed. I heard him rushing at my hiding spot. The guy might indeed have a small frame, but he didn’t lack guts, particularly given the fact that he was probably not carrying any firearms (or he would have fired at me instead of throwing knives, wouldn’t he?)

  I stepped out to meet him. The level of visibility was equivalent to a darkened cinema hall’s. I saw my assailant as an indistinct figure holding two distinctly gleaming objects in his hands. He looked no higher and no wider than I was at the age of fourteen.

  I didn’t want to kill him, not only because he looked like a kid but also because I needed someone to take me to the king, where ever these men were holding him.

  He lunged at me with his knives slashing and thrusting independently, as though he were two different men. I’d have found it hard to defend myself even if I had the full use of my left arm; without it, he would have indeed carved out a ventilator large and deep enough for my precious life to make an involuntary exit.

  My right arm went up in the air. My midriff jerked back from the reach of his moving blades, while my head and shoulders flowed forward and downward, toward his head and shoulders. The Colt-holding hand at the end of my significantly longer arm connected with his skull, thereby depriving his own hands the pleasure of inserting their sharp properties into my flesh.

  The blow from the Peacemaker’s butt stunned him. His legs folded under him. He sank down to the floor slowly while making clicking noises in his throat. I knew that sound. He was fighting to not cry! I went behind him and jammed the barrel of my revolver against the base of his head.

  “I wasn’t half as good when I was your age,” I told him in an effort to help his effort of not weeping.

  “You’ll become a great fighter when you grow up. If you grow up. The slightest mischief on your part will result in my blowing your head off. You understand?”

  He didn’t respond. His body began to quiver with the onset of sobs.

  “Do you understand, boy? Speak up, I know you are not deaf!” I said, increasing the pressure of death on the backside of his brainpan.

  “I am not a b-boy!” he said hoarsely, his voice breaking with the need to gulp down one of those lumps of tears which lodge themselves painfully in the middle of one’s throat when life’s inexplicable injustices overwhelm one entirely. “I will be twenty-nine the day after tomorrow,” he added in the way of the explanation for his grief.

  I shrugged. I neither had sympathy nor any time or spare blood to waste. That knife in my arm was giving me hell. I didn’t want to pass out in the company of these people.

  “Tough luck,” I said, using an expression I had picked up somewhere recently. “You are going to shove your knives far away. You are then going to rise to your feet very slowly, without any fancy movements. You will turn around in slow motion, pat yourself thoroughly, take out any other weapons of any kind on your person, and drop them to the floor. Your next task will be to pull out your knife from my arm and drop it to the floor — the knife, not the arm, that is. This is something you would want to do extremely carefully. I can’t see your face clearly, but the workings of your mind are crystal clear to me. The birth of a mischievous thought in your mind will ensure the expiration of your brains. Try not to make me any more nervous or jumpy than I already am. If you do all this correctly, you may live to turn twenty-nine years old the day after tomorrow.”

  He executed everything I ordered him to execute very carefully, very nicely. He may have despised his existence, but he was certainly in no hurry to get it terminated. I screamed my head off when he extracted his blade from my poor arm. Fortunately for me, it was a slim affair, that blade, and it hadn’t dug very deep. But my shriek and twitch were equal in pitch and intensity to the shriek and twitch I had produced as a child when Vijender Singh had sliced my arm open all those years ago.

  My childish reaction to pain appeared to please the man so much he chuckled to himself. A monogrammed silk handkerchief lay in the right pocket of my mud-and-blood-caked coat. I snaked my left palm across the breadth of my frame and extracted the kerchief with a herculean effort.

  “Take this and bind my wound.”

  The man bandaged my arm as nicely as anyone untrained in the art of nursing could. The flow of my blood subsided to a trickle, saturating my hankie before dripping from it in slow droplets.

  “Now take me to my king!” I commanded.

  The man laughed his manic laugh.

  An identical laughter rang out of the darkness.

  Chapter 16: The Small Big

  N adya performed her last act of contortion as she fell with her baby still held in her arms. She twisted midair so that her body would cushion, and not crush, her daughter.

  A scream of such magnitude tore at the heart of the night that it curdled every listener’s blood, perhaps even the sap of the vegetation around. Its intensity was such that the screamer foamed at the mouth. That banshee shriek went on and on, coming straight from Akilina’s immortal soul, bringing flecks of blood to her mouth, putting a momentary halt to the flying bullets and the skittering horses.

  The old woman’s calamity-destroyed mind couldn’t encompass the idea of Nadya’s decease. Despite Akilina’s unworldly, ululating screaming, Nadya was and will always be alive to her.

  Illya, too, went uncontrollably mad. A volcano of sheer violence erupted in the very core of the mild-mannered clown’s being. He sprang at an armed, mounted man with a lusty, sky-rending cry.

  The startled rider swung his rifle at the strange, masked man leaping at him like a maddened tiger. Illya slapped the barrel of the weapon aside, rammed into the man, and brought him down to the forest floor, where the demented father’s gnashing teeth closed on and tore out a chunk of that inhuman human’s throat.

  The woods burned, but the prevalent wind steered the flames toward the dirt road, which served as a firebreak.

  One of the English sisters came out from behind an enormous banyan tree and ran toward Nadya’s corpse, perhaps to retrieve baby Runa out of her mother’s arms. She held a pistol, but it hung limp and quivering in her hand, as though its wielder’s slim frame shook with ponderous sobs. It’s highly probable that this woman held herself personally responsible for the unspeakable tragedy she had just witnessed. After all, Nadya had been an innocent bystander.

  “No, Emma, no!” a woman’s voice, coming from somewhere close by, cried
desperately.

  “Get back, Emma!” a male voice cried, equally urgently.

  Four of the nine horsemen were dead or injured, leaving a large enough number of men still able and willing to inflict more indelible harm. Two of these men were already converging toward the wolfish Illya when Emma broke cover and came out in the open. The men going for Illya swerved and went after Emma.

  A few yards away, Sunder stood frozen with shock and fear, holding his also-frozen son in his arms. Shyam thawed to a screaming, kicking state after a moment of animation-stealing incredulity. The boy was little only in years — in size and weight, he was already an adolescent. He broke his father’s grip with ease, hit the ground, and also began running toward his fallen, unmoving friend. Sunder ran after him.

  Akilina still stood where she had stood when the unthinkable had happened. She was bent at the waist; her feet were splayed, her head was tilted back, her mouth was pouring out her misery in those soul-wilting wails.

  Illya snatched his screaming victim’s weapon and sprang up with a snarl. “Nadya, Nadya, my Nadya!” he cried, his mask now skewed, his contorted mouth dripping blood. He lamented his broken heart out as he reeled blindly to the spot where his precious daughter lay on the hard, cold ground.

  Emma didn’t stop at her sister’s call. Nor did she pay any heed to her coach’s driver. All the five surviving men from the pursuing party were closing in on her now, but she appeared oblivious of them, too. She dropped to her knees when she reached the dead woman’s body. The little girl in her mother’s embrace was neither moving nor making any sound. She looked —.

  Shyam fairly fell upon Nadya’s body. He took her face in his hands. “Please get up. Please speak. Please look at me,” he begged her fervently —

  A pursuer reached Emma and grabbed her left arm just as she took Runa’s arms in her hands. The man pulled the young woman roughly, indirectly pulling Runa out of the circle of Nadya’s unresponsive arms —

  “Get your hands off my sister!” Emma’s twin suddenly sprang out of nowhere, appearing at her sister’s side as if by magic. The man dragging Emma paid her sister no mind. Not even when she placed her pistol against his head. He elbowed her to push her away. And then the mulish brain that orchestrated that act of violence blew out of its cranium in a shower of its own mushy bits, blood, bone-shards, and clumps of hair.

  Shyam, who was still clinging to Nadya and bawling his little heart out, got splattered with the gooey matter. Sunder dived to pick him up, to take him away from the epicenter of that emergent death-field.

  “No! Do not shoot! Do not —” one of the remaining men yelled at the same time, warning his companions not to target the sisters. But a rifle went off, nonetheless. A father anxious to protect his son intercepted the incoming bullet.

  The impact spun Sunder around. His outflung arms momentarily pointed in his killer’s direction, as though the victim intended to embrace the shooter. Sunder fell near Nadya’s head, the middle-aged father now as lifeless as the young mother.

  Illya cried piteously and snatched little Runa from Emma’s limp arms.

  “STOP IT!” he shouted with a lung-bursting shout. The little girl in his arms was still not moving. “STOPPPPPPP IT!”

  The Englishwomen got to their feet and stood side by side, entirely indistinguishable from each other. Their coachman/guard came and stood before them. Akilina stopped screaming and finally moved. She shambled like a sleepwalker and took Runa from Illya, pressing the unmoving child to her breast.

  The surviving pursuers stood a few feet away. Their weapons were aimed at the opposite group, but they appeared unwilling to fire. Some unspoken signal passed between them. All four men turned as one, mounted their horses, and raced away from that tract of woods they had turned into a bloody, burning hell.

  ***

  The lights played on the placid pond’s surface. Runa played on the pond’s shore. She cried while she laughed. She laughed while she cried. She cry-laughed and laugh-cried. She made castles out of sand and then made sand out of those castles.

  “The duck is in the water,” she mumbled to herself, looking at a bird gliding through the pond. “The water is in the duck.”

  Shyam watched her from a little distance, puzzled and happy and devoted. He assumed the role of her lifeguard whenever she ventured near a body of water. She had fallen into this very pond once, about a year back, after mumbling something like, “I’m mostly water, too.”

  “I just wanted to swim with the duck,” she explained later, standing shivering (with cold, not fright) at Illya’s knee. Akilina had screamed. She screamed a lot since that night of slaughter nearly five years ago. Her toothless mouth would open wide and her withered face would cave in on itself, but no sound issued forth from that upturned circle of misery.

  Illya, an elderly, horribly scarred clown, still had a place in touring circuses and most circus people’s hearts. He generally found enough work to scrape together a half-decent living for two children and an increasingly childlike old woman.

  Runa had been two years old at the time of her beautiful mother’s untimely demise. The little girl said and did things in a strangely philosophical way for a seven-year-old. A few of the people who came across her thought that her tragedy had somehow unhinged her; a lot many more people held her to be some kind of divine spirit born with extraordinary enlightenment.

  At times, when the always-tough going got rock-hard; when the travails of sheer poverty pushed aside all other concerns and wounds into a shallow background, Runa would go sit under a banyan tree in sukh-asana — a yogi’s meditation pose — and close her eyes gently. She would remain there for hours, sitting calmly, breathing evenly, with a faint hint of a smile on her small mouth. The smile neither deepened nor lessened. The eyelids never flickered. The spine never bent or bowed, irrespective of the number of people who stopped to look at her. Some of them laughed. Some said unkind words, but the majority would lay offerings at her feet.

  The pile of gifts would sometimes grow high enough to keep hunger at bay for weeks altogether. Zealous women (along with Shyam, of course) guarded her and her ‘belongings’ until she would open her eyes. But the little girl wouldn’t even glance at all those riches upon ending her meditation and opening her eyes.

  She wouldn’t let her ‘followers’ carry the things — coins, currency notes of small denominations, fruits, bags of grain, sugar, salt, etc. — to her home. She would just shake her little head and arguments would die upon her admirers’ tongues. These women sometimes wept, looking at the obviously hungry child who wouldn’t take a single bite, a single paisa, from the things given to her of the givers’ own free will.

  A spell of (relative) abundance would invariably follow Runa’s spiritual trances. She hadn’t become an object of worship only because they were still nomads, going where the big circuses went.

  She became less cryptic and mystic as she grew up, exhibiting both her mother’s graceful beauty and her indomitable spirit. In appearance, she looked more European than Indian. In her botanical categorization of people, she began labeling herself ‘half-part rose, a quarter-part cactus, and a quarter-part touch-me-not’.

  She had an unquenchable thirst for Nadya-related knowledge. She knew a bit about her biological father, but she never asked any questions concerning him. Illya spoke with her in Russian, telling her stories about her once-garrulous granny, her heroic mother, about circuses and their people, about animals, about the world with its gratuitous evil and its unexpected kindnesses.

  He told her, again and again, about boatman Dmitry. He told her how he had found the infant Nadya by her dead mother’s side in the boatman’s deserted cabin and how he had later found Akilina choking on a berry stuck in her throat in a cold, dark jungle. He told her how happy the old midwife had been at discovering her ‘hope’ in little Nadya.

  Time was fashioning Runa into a ravishing beauty. She had inherited her mother’s intense blue eyes, her lithe, tall frame, her sculpted fe
atures. Runa’s complexion was darker, like a pinch of coffee powder mixed in a jug of creamy milk.

  She began training as a contortionist-cum-gymnast in her seventh year, showing the same remarkable aptitude for the arts that her mother had possessed. The one element wherein she differed remarkably from her remarkable mother was ‘the mothering factor’: Runa, rather than being mothered by Akilina, became the old woman’s mother. The little girl took it upon herself to reconstruct Akilina — to work backward with the shadowy husk and bring back the lost substance.

  Runa’s patience was inexhaustible. She would take Akilina’s gnarled fingers in her small hands and smile at the old woman with the same stoic, unshakable smile that sat upon her lips when she sat meditating under trees. Runa worked her silent magic until the old woman’s unseeing eyes — still surprisingly alive for someone so deadened by inexorable grief — focused upon Runa’s face. The thin, pinched mouth, besieged from all sides by several tribes of wrinkles, curved infinitesimally at its corners. And then the long-silent woman spoke.

  “Yes, you live,” she said hoarsely, as though addressing Nadya before turning to Nadya’s daughter. “You are she. You are my hope.”

  Chapter 17: The Mysterious Island

  The twenty-nine-year-old knifeman with the stature of a fourteen-year-old and the (apparent) mental level of a toddler bandaged my wound (given by him in the first place) pretty effectively.

  The flow of my blood subsided to a trickle, saturating my hankie before dripping from it in slow droplets.

  “Now take me to my king!” I commanded.

  The man laughed his manic laugh in what felt like outright defiance! Before I could tap him on the head with my revolver to teach him some manners, an identical laughter rang out of the darkness.

  “You kill me,” my man said cheerfully. “My brother will kill you. Instant vengeance!”