Somewhere he’d read about those blackened faces—the fighting monks of the Tibetan lamaseries. Even their name popped up. He repeated it:
“Dok-dokpa!”
He kept his air of unconcern. But he decided that, at the first show of battle, he’d seize old Father Tsarong over there, and hold him as both shield and hostage.
“They have heard,” said Tsarong, “what your presence has said about Dorje-Pamo. They wish to honor the messenger of the Pig-Faced Goddess.”
It was simply stated, but it sounded like irony to Shattuck. He had an idea that old Tsarong was not so simple as he would have it appear. Nor could Tsarong have been so unimportant, either. The other elder had placed himself slightly back of Tsarong. The beardless one was frankly remote.
“Stand up and face them, Tsarong La,” said Shattuck.
“Your presence——”
“Stand up and face them! Signal them to remain where they are.”
There was something besides blood that had begun to beat through Shattuck’s arteries. It was always that way when a fight threatened— especially if it was apt to be a fight against overwhelming odds. It was a sort of lulling warmth. It was as sweet as a bugle call to a cavalry horse. It was a premonition.
As Tsarong still hesitated—pretending not to hear—pretending not to understand—Shattuck saw a glint of something in the old man’s eyes that confirmed the premonition in his veins.
From where he sat, Shattuck jumped. It was a trick that Juma’s young fighting bucks had taught him. They’d be sitting crosslegged on the ground—they might have been sitting like that for hours; and then—presto!— they could fling themselves to right or left, or forward or backward, as if their legs had been springs.
As Shattuck sprung, it was exactly as if a fragment of that swelling din from down the hillside had detached itself and had almost fallen upon him.
He came down crouching at the side of old Tsarong. As he did so he whirled and fired without taking aim. An instant afterward—and always afterward—it seemed to him that he must have seen what was coming up behind him with some sort of eyes different from those in the front of his head.
He’d as if seen that enemy sneaking upon him from behind.
Felt boots, red cloak, black face—it was a giant of a man, and he’d been on the point of cutting down on him with one of the biggest swords that Shattuck had ever seen.
The bullet from Shattuck’s rifle had taken the giant through the shoulder. He was twisted back and around like a big tree hit near the top by lightning. The sword got a jerk that sent it spiraling like a boomerang for a good twenty yards.
“You next?” grunted Shattuck.
And even while this was happening he had caught an arm about the old man Tsarong’s shoulders.
To Tsarong it must have been like an embrace from Death.
“Shadak—Shadak Khan!” Tsarong squeaked.
In the confusion of the moment the pronouncing of that name reached Shattuck like a happy portent—a sure enough mantram.
He was aware that Tsarong wasn’t the only one who’d pronounced that name. So had that other elder—also perhaps the beardless boy. The fact that they had joined in the cry—some intonation of horror and pleading in their voices— gave Shattuck an idea.
“Ai-ya!” he laughed. “You thought to fool me, Old Man Tsarong. Why, you’re the Governor yourself!”
CHAPTER IV
All this had taken place in full view of that mob of dokpas and civilians coming up from the camp. They’d been coming pretty fast. There’d been a crescendo to their racket culminating in a shriek and clang that was like the explosion of a high-powered shell.
The Goliath of the sword was staggering around in a narrowing circle like a dog looking for a place to lie down. Down he went—coiled, then straightened out. He was summoning all that vast strength of his to become a man again—become the hero he must have felt himself when he’d swung up that big sword of his to kill an earth demon, no less, and his whole tribe looking on.
It was a swift impression that Shattuck got— but detailed, one apt to be lasting. That big face of his, shining with grease and blacking, contorted with terror more than pain, was nothing human.
Then Shattuck saw that the big man had been merely the first of several. There must have been a dozen swordsmen headed in his direction.
In one respect, at any rate, his strategy had been correct. There wasn’t a single gun in sight. Tsarong must have seen to that. Unwilling to take a chance on any dokpa marksmanship, he’d given his order accordingly when he’d sent his runner back to the camp.
Shattuck, still embracing Tsarong, gave an order:
“Tell your swordsmen to retire—” The old man panted, but did not speak.
“—else I’ll kill you before their eyes!”
“The victory is God’s!” Tsarong panted— slowly, fatalistically—in English. He raised his voice and shrilled something in Tibetan.
Just an affair of seconds all this was— seconds that galloped like horses in a race, but each horse of a second mounted by some watchful jockey that recorded every move.
“You haven’t answered me, Tsarong La,” said Shattuck softly.
“Wherefore, O Shadak Khan, when you know all things?”
“It’s you, the Governor of Chan-tang.”
“I am but half the Governor, as you see, O Shadak Khan. The other half is he who sat beside me. Each district has two governors.”
Shattuck eyed the other bearded and earringed elder. He’d been sitting there in a white trance.
“And what’s your name?” Shattuck asked.
The old man merely gasped like a carp out of water. He wanted to answer something. But he was afraid. He hadn’t understood.
“Don’t you understand even the language of heaven?” Shattuck asked in his best Chinese.
“Kuan-hua!”
The stricken elder recovered himself in a gulp of amazement that made him forget his fears.
“The Mandarin dialect,” was what he meant.
“My lord speaks even the language of the Sons of Heaven!”
“I am, indeed, your lord, Old Uncle,” Shattuck told him rapidly in Chinese. “And make no mistake. I have proved it. I am a spirit merely disguised as a Hairy Face. Which is the superior of you twain?”
“My brother, Tsarong, is the elder.”
“Doesn’t he speak the Kuan-hua?”
“Inadequately. While I went East, he went West.”
“Tell Moon Face, here,” said Shattuck, “to go get such help as is needed to carry away this crippled dokpa. He is to be cared for kindly.”
Moon Face was sped on his way.
“And before he returns,” Shattuck hurried on, “I’ll tell you that both of you old men are deserving death. But see! Instead of that, here while all your people are looking on, I embrace you both. To him who went West I speak the language of the West. To him that went East I speak the language of the East. Who then, am I?”
“Verily, you are Shadak Khan!”
“I am Shadak Khan! I am Captain Trouble! V
Have you not heard—hasn’t the Dalai Lama himself heard—that a new king is coming into the world? I am he! I’ve come to rule the world for a while! My name is—Shadak Khan! My name is— Captain Trouble!”
Something of this talk must have reached the crowd down the hill. It may have done this partly through that curious intuition of crowds— especially of crowds already incandescent and annealed by excitement. Moon Face, the messenger, may have spread something of it as he went down seeking help for the wounded man.
A dozen lamas not of the fighting sort but regular ge-longs—the superior sort who’d had brains enough to pass their examinations, and showing it in their faces—had responded to the call. The appearance of them gave Shattuck another idea.
“And is there not one among these,” he asked, “who speaks either the language of the Chiling-ky-me?”—he’d put the question in English, but he’d used th
e only Tibetan word he knew. It made a pretty flourish.
Chiling-ky-me!
Old Juma had taught him that word. For Juma had conducted robber raids off and on into pretty nearly every section of the high country, even into Tibet. The word meant foreigners—that is, the English.
Before old Tsarong could pull himself together to answer Shattuck, it was another’s voice who answered in English:
“Sir, my—father—”
Shattuck, just at the sound of that voice, felt a tingling thrill, he didn’t know why. He didn’t have time to ask. He’d raised his eyes and had seen the speaker—a lean face and a shaven head that might have belonged to some young Roman general. Even his tattered robe of a Tibetan lama might have been a toga.
The voice was forcing a calm that the brilliant eyes belied.
“Sir, my—father—was—American!”
CHAPTER V
It was Shattuck’s turn to exert all his will at self-control. The other lamas were staring. So were the two old governors. Shattuck could feel that they were. But he kept his eyes on that soberly flashing face of the young lama who’d spoken.
“Brother,” he said, “what is your name?”
“My Tibetan name is Champela.”
“You have another?”
There was a long pause.
“John Day.”
It had been his father’s name, this young lama explained. His father had been a geologist who’d married his own Lalla Rookh in the Vale of Cashmere. They’d both been killed by an avalanche in that gorge called by the Tibetans “the Four Devil Pass.”
It was also Champela himself who referred to his mother as Lalla Rookh. He’d read the poem as a boy.
“So did I,” said Shattuck.
To Shattuck, after his months of exile, it was as if he’d stumbled onto a lamasery here in the heart of Asia floating the American flag.
While the other lamas carried the wounded black-face away, Shattuck deserted the two old governors and drew Champela aside.
“John Day,” he said, “are you free?”
Champela reflected.
“As free as you are, Shadak Khan,” he replied.
Shattuck let the title ride. There’d been no hint of mockery in it. If anything, there’d been something just the opposite. It was as if the title had been confirmed by a prophet.
“You’re not held by any vows?”
“None but those I have made to myself.”
“No chief lama is your master?”
“Not even the Dalai Lama himself, Shadak Khan.”
“Why don’t you call me by my right name, John Day?”
“I believe that I am calling you by your right name, Shadak Khan. Your coming has been predicted since a thousand years—since twice a thousand years—”
“You mean?”
“A scourge of God, perhaps—a Shadak Khan—a Captain Trouble. He has a thousand names. But so has the sun. So has Maitreya—He Who Will Come—”
They were standing there on the high slope of what has been called the Roof of the World. The sun was going down. And with one of those sudden transformations of light so common in mountain country the snow peaks had turned to flaming gold.
“You be my prime minister, John Day,” said Shattuck.
He’d still intended his proposal, even then, to sound something like a joke. But it didn’t sound like a joke at all. It was as if the very mountains were celebrating the event. This was something that had been predicted since, twice a thousand years.
“I’ll be your prime minister,” Champela told him.
“Shake!”
The young lama might not have caught the meaning of the word in that particular sense, but he was quick enough to understand the extended hand.
“Now I’m not free,” he said.
“Neither am I.”
“No man is free from his destiny—and this, our meeting, also was predestined—perhaps since the beginning of the world.”
There was a barbecue in the little valley of the camp that night, though not in the American style. The Tibetans like to eat their meat boiled— or raw; washed down with gallons of tea and rancid butter, or chang, the beer of the country, and arrak, a whisky distilled from the beer.
The dung fires seethed and spit blue flames.
There was singing, dancing and fights, before it was fairly dark.
The people were celebrating the advent of Shadak Khan. They weren’t quite sure yet just what this signified. But it had something to do with Dorje-Pamo, the Pig-Faced Goddess. They knew that much. And that was enough. The way to please old Dorje-Pamo was to gorge and souse, brawl and make love.…
But John Day, prime minister of Shadak Khan, wouldn’t let Shattuck partake of the feast— not even as a guest of the governors.
“They’ll fill you with aconite,” he said, “you’d be dead before dawn.”
Most Tibetans were ardent poisoners in times of great emergency.
There was an early moon. In its ghostly light a cavalcade of ponies left the scene of the camp and wound its way further up the valley.
Shattuck was in the midst of it, in the place of greatest safety and honor. Those in front and those following, so far as he could see, were white lamas like Champela.
In the moonlight it was hard to think of Champela as John Day, American. For that matter, Shattuck found it hard to think of himself as himself. He was something else—something bigger than himself—something predestined since the beginning of the world.
Shadak Khan!
Captain Trouble!
CHAPTER VI
By the light of this same moon a caravan of more than three hundred camels came padding back into this same secret valley from the outlying desert. Unknown to Shattuck it was this caravan for which the warring Tibetans had been waiting.
The camel-bells made music in the night. It was a rhythmic music to which the swishing feet of the stock kept time like the feet of tireless dancers. It would have been hard to find a better equipped or a better conducted caravan anywhere.
Every man was armed. Even the camel-pullers were armed.
Any old caravan man would have spotted the sort of caravan this was without looking twice.
“T’u fang-tze!”
Opium-runners! Caravans like this brought the precious “white opium” of Persia through the Gobi to all points east. But even an old Gobi man might have been puzzled by the loads and the haste of this present caravan if not by the trails it followed.
No opium-train ever followed the regular roads anyway.
But these camels were carrying full loads— compact and strongly boxed. Arms! That would be sure. But the trail could lead nowhere except back into the wild and thinly populated Chantang country of Tibet’s Far West.
Along a smooth bit of going the owner of the outfit, mounted on a nimble black pony, drew alongside of his caravan-master, who was riding half asleep and half awake on the pick of the camels. The relations of owner and master were about like those of owner and captain on a ship at sea.
They were speaking Mongolian, a language that had been largely developed in desert places. Their voices were no louder than the occasional bubbling of the camel the caravan-master rode.
“We’ll soon arrive at the turn-off of the Thorny Well Trail, Big Man,” the owner of the outfit said.
“What of it, Duke?”
“It is a short way and a safe way.”
“To where we’re going?”
“No, Big Man, to Kansu.”
“We’re not going to Kansu, Duke. We’re going to the Lesser Valley of the Soaring Meditation.”
“I can’t help thinking about how much more money these arms would bring in China than they would in Tibet.”
The caravan-master yawned and belched.
“Big Man, I mean it.”
“Mean what?”
“The difference in price would enrich us both. General Hokwa is in Kansu with all the gold he collected during his last campaign.”
“But Kansu needs these machine-guns. Tibet doesn’t.”
“Search me!” groaned Big Man, or words to that effect.
He dropped his head on his chest and pretended to be sleeping again. The owner of the outfit still ambled on at his side.
“Big Man,” he said, “when they’ve got you back there in the hills, how do you know that those louse-breeding Tibetans are going to pay you?”
“I don’t know it.”
“What then?”
“They’ll pay first or they don’t get the arms.”
“They may take them anyway.”
“From this bunch? Don’t make me laugh? This bunch? I haven’t got a man in my string who hasn’t been slitting throats for the past ten years! We’re a bunch of fighting wildcats.”
CHAPTER VII
“We’ll need a fighting-man like you,” said the old abbot, as Shattuck stood before him.
John Day translated the Tibetan into perfect English.
“They are bringing fighting-machines into the Little Valley,” the abbot went on in a whispering monotone, “and they that bring the machines are fighting men.”
The abbot was very old. His eyes were so glazed that they appeared to be sightless. He seemed to be talking in his sleep about things that he saw in his sleep.
He sat cross-legged on a cushioned bench back of a carved teakwood table. On the table were a covered teacup and a bell. The table was like an altar. When the abbot was silent he sat so still it was easy to imagine that he was an image in a temple.
He was silent for a long time, then he spoke again.
“The spirit of revolution has entered Tibet. There are foolish men planning to put a king in the place of the Dalai Lama.”
John Day translated. He saw that Shattuck was about to ask a question, but he raised a warning hand.
It was as if the movement had struck a spark of life from the image presented by the abbot. What he said was:
“I will answer your question, Captain Trouble.”
And Shattuck knew then beyond all doubt— as he’d already been prepared to believe—that he was in the presence of an authentic Bogdo—a Living Buddha. Although the old seer continued to speak in Tibetan it was as if a skillful painter were now casting up a picture on some invisible canvas of the air.
The Adventure Megapack: 25 Classic Adventure Stories Page 45
