The Deceivers

by John Masters

  The men of the troupe looked like—men of a troupe with a dancing bear. At this season scores of such parties moved about the roads of India. Some of the villagers might have wondered why they had no women with them, as was customary. But who cared? They sat quietly, grouped around William, and waited. These men, who were mere buriers by rank, treated him with respect because of his reputation as a strangler, and because of the high regard which they knew their Jemadar held for him.

  The grave was dug, under the bank of a dry backwater nearby, and concealed in thick brush. The men had dug without making a noise, pressing their picks and hoes into the earth rather than striking with them. The sharpened stakes, the log, the rough club lay neatly stacked beside the pit. No stranger who came in by accident to the troupe’s resting place would see anything suspicious. Besides, there would be ample warning. One of the diggers, a man who could whistle like a parakeet, lay hidden in the trees across the stream where he could see in both directions. Another crouched in concealment a mile back up the trail, ready to talk with the Jemadar or receive a sign from him.

  William waited, fingered his rumal, and tried not to look at the bear. By logic, it was no more evil to murder the sepoys than to murder the Nawab and his wives and their innocent followers: if anything, less evil, because the sepoys were at least well-armed men in the vigour of life and capable of defending themselves. But William had been an officer of sepoys, and in his mind this coming affair had grown until it was the giant embodiment of evil. He was sick at heart. He had meant only to do good. In trying to help his people, he had caught himself in these chains of evil. But if he had not followed the Deceivers, and become one of them, the evil would never have been uncovered. In the time since he set out with Hussein, no circumstances had changed. What had been true then was true now. If he fled now, and acted on what he already knew, he could make only a little cut in the Deceivers’ organization, which would quickly heal, and all would soon again be as it was before. ‘A campaign to cover all India,’ Hussein had said; and it was true. Where was God, the true Christian God? Had God arranged it, so loathing Kali, that even to know her was to know Death, become Death?

  The oppression of the goddess’s widespreading sins bore down on him. He had said he would not kill. He had been a Christian, believing in the value of the life that God lent to mankind and sanctified by the lending. He could stand no more. He had become two men, a Christian and a Deceiver, and was being torn apart by remorse. His notes had enough in them to bring the evil fully out into the open. Then, surely, no one could deny that there was need of a great unified campaign. Thinking further, he swore to himself, and knew that men could deny, and would, and still not be wicked, only complacent. The weight of death began to pile up on his head. He had failed Mary, and God.

  The chief of the buriers muttered, ‘Gopal-ji, one comes, running. It is the sentry from the road.’ The men rose to their feet, hitched up their loincloths, hefted their hoes in their hands, and stood unobtrusively ready. The bear raised its head and stopped whining. The bullocks champed on their cud.

  The sentry ran through the trees and came to them. ‘A traveller, southbound, cries that the Padampur rajah’s cavalry is getting ready in the city for some job down this way. I managed to tell the Jemadar. He’s going to do our affair, just the same. The omens are good.’ The sentry leaned forward, panting and holding his sides. ‘Quick, to the ford! Hide there. The signal, “The water is deep” from the Jemadar. Hurry!’ He was gone.

  One man stayed with the bear; William and the rest scurried crouching through the tall grass beside the river until they saw the road ahead. They lay down, in cover beside the ford, on the right of the road.

  As they dropped, breathing hard, to the earth, the leading sepoys came down the incline to the ford. They looked uneasily alert and their muskets were ready in their hands. Some of the Deceivers walked behind them, mingling with women and other sepoys. William did not know what had put the sepoys on their guard, but it was clear that they did not trust their new-found companions of the road. Yet they could do nothing. Relying on their arms, ignorant of the octopus power of the organization that sought to kill them, they came on.

  At the water those in front waited for the others to catch up. The main party came down the road in a close-knit group, surrounding a bullock cart. A heavily pregnant woman rode in the cart on top of a pile of baggage; a sepoy sat on the bar, driving it; his musket was slung across his shoulders. Two children, of about six and nine years old, played tag immediately behind the cart. The other women swung lightly along together with no loads on their heads, their saris drawn half across their faces. One carried a baby on her hip. The Jemadar and two or three more Deceivers walked among the soldiers and women, and seemed to be talking, and kept glancing over their shoulders at the remainder of the band coming along close behind.

  William crumbled the earth between his fingers where he lay. He saw that the Jemadar had gained the confidence of the sepoys. They had come to trust his large friendliness and engaging personality. It was probably he who had planted in them their suspicions of the rest of the band, so, naturally, they drew closer to him. That was it. He saw another five Deceivers hurry up from the rear, to be received into the party about the bullock cart.

  Now all of them glanced suspiciously, almost warningly, at the other travellers in the caravan. The Jemadar whispered with Hussein and a sepoy. William could not hear the words but he could guess at them: ‘This ford is a dangerous place. If these fellows are indeed bad men, as I suspect, let us close up for protection.’ The more the sepoys closed up, the less effective would their firearms be.

  He could hear nothing to the north, and wondered whether the rajah of Padampur’s cavalry would come, and what their errand was. That situation was far from clear. He would have to find out about it as soon as he could. Had the rajah known the band was coming? If so, how? How much else did he know? And why didn’t the Jemadar postpone this attack until the cavalry were past?

  But he himself did not have to wait. This was his moment of release, offered to him in perfect circumstances. The success of the ambush depended as much on him and the men of the bear troupe as on anything. A force of law—the rajah’s cavalry—was at hand. How far were they? Cautiously he eyed the men lying around him. None carried the rumal which, seen in another’s hand or imagined in another’s loincloth, now made William sweat and tremble; but they were all armed with their digging implements and hidden knives.

  Yet this was the moment. He must shout his warning now, run out, and take his chance among the sepoys.

  No, not now; in a second or two, when he would have a better chance of surviving. The risk of death did not frighten him; but if he was killed all the evidence would be lost for ever, all the dead dead in vain. Hussein alone knew where he had buried the notes. Hussein could go back and dig them up, but he wouldn’t. Hussein seemed to be struggling still against Kali, but William knew he would lose his fight and his soul.

  William waited, his mouth open, and watched the Jemadar, and listened for the hoofbeats of cavalry. The Jemadar stood in his stirrups to peer down at the shallow stream. He said with owlish surprise, ‘The water is deep,’ and leaped off his horse on to the back of a sepoy who was already in the shallows and beginning to cross the ford, and bore him down into the water. On the bank Piroo’s cloth whirled in a semi-circle, pulled out by the weight of the wrapped rupee. The sepoys and women broke out in a wild confusion of shouts and screams. The men of the bear troupe crouched like sprinters about to begin a race and looked at William. William sprang to his feet and opened his mouth wide to shout a warning.

  The moment had passed. Already men and women and children had died.

  A sepoy with a fear-crazed face, running to find shelter from the inexplicable horror, burst into William’s hiding-place. The man was on him, and had a musket in his hands. He saw William, his pupils contracted, his arms jerked down, and he thrust the muzzle of the musket against William’s breast.
William yelled, ‘Look out!’ and flung himself sideways. He heard his own hysterical laugh. Whom was he warning now?

  His sideways movement ended in a pivot off the left foot, the rumal jumped into his hands and whirled through the air. Both ends were in his hands. He looked down and saw nothing but his tight, white knuckles. He felt the powerful jerk from his thighs and waist and shoulders. His wrists cracked in and up against the sepoy’s neck. Another crack burst over it. A slow warmth crept up his spine and mingled in his brain with the falling, fading scarlet coat.

  At last he heard his own choking sobs. He stumbled forward out of the sheltering bushes. The Jemadar lay on his face in the water at the edge of the river. Blood trickled from his head, reddening the placid water downstream where it ran over submerged green and brown stones. The tang of gunpowder burned sharp in William’s nostrils, but he had heard nothing. His arm hurt; he saw black powder marks on it near the elbow. The sepoy must have fired his musket before he died.

  Another shot boomed as he stood panting by the ford, gaping to understand the panoramic struggle about him. A last sepoy, cornered, his back against a tree, swung his empty musket as five Deceivers ran at him. They pressed him back against the trunk; a man behind him swung the rumal. Another Deceiver moved quickly, caught the screaming children, and in two quick motions they lay sprawled in the road. The other children were dead. The women were dead in their dull red and blacks. The sepoys were dead in their scarlet coats; their white drawers, blue edged, were soiled with the dust and mud of the road.

  Piroo’s sharp face pressed into his own. ‘You, Jemadar-sahib! Yes, you are our Jemadar now. He said so, didn’t he?’ He motioned to the corpse in the water. ‘What now? Quick. The cavalry are on us.’

  ‘Why?’ William faltered.

  ‘We didn’t pay the rajah his cut last time we were through here. He heard we were coming somehow. What now? Quick!’

  William thought quickly, his stupor gone and self-hatred ruling in its place. Everyone who had deserved to live was dead. Should he now let the band be caught by the cavalry? Why? The rajah of Padampur was just another murderer, from what Piroo said. Like the Deceivers, he picked up money by every means in his power. He knew about them, and their bands paid him ‘protection’ to be left alone while in his territories. He might punish one band, as now, but he would do nothing to help destroy the system. He would have William put away quietly.

  William knew that, whatever he did later, now he must somehow lead the band to safety. It was no use telling them to disperse and slip away in small groups. In this country cavalry would catch most of them. The valley was wide open except near the river, where trees and scrub and rank grass made riding difficult. Besides, there was a better way. He remembered Chandra Sen’s tactics on the Betul road.

  The Deceivers pressed round him. He said urgently, ‘Get the muskets and ammunition. Reload. Drag the bodies out of sight, no farther. Horsemen, mount! Ride up the road, meet the cavalry, pretend to fight them. When they’re engaged, break and flee, that way, into the edge of grass there. Make sure they follow at split gallop. The rest of you, get in there in the grass. Trip the horses, bring them down, then use all your weapons. Don’t let anyone escape!’

  Piroo raised his hand in acknowledgment, and a gleam of admiration shone unwillingly in his face. The band ran to carry out William’s orders, moving silently, with speed and practised certainty. They hurled the children’s bodies over the thorns into the darkness of the bush. They dragged the sepoys out of sight. A minute more and the dead women with the dusty skirts were gone. The five horsemen, Yasin leading them, splashed fast through the ford and galloped north and out of sight.

  Piroo took charge of the rest and ran with them across the stream into the tall grass on the far bank. William hurried after, struggling to keep his feet in the knee-deep water. A clangour and mingled shouts sounded down the road from the north. Only a minute had passed since Yasin’s mounted band had rattled round that corner a quarter of a mile away.

  In the grass the bear troupe and the other men on foot worked with the speed and energy of ants. Some quickly, surely, loaded the muskets, lying on their sides so that the muzzles and the stabbing ramrods would not show above the grass. Others cut swathes of grass, then worked in pairs, twisting in opposite directions, plaiting short loose ropes. Knives flickered under the river bank where three men cut stakes and with short, desperate strokes sharpened them.

  William remembered his horse, and the bullocks, and the bear across the river, and the man in charge of them. None of these were doing any work. How many stranglings and garrotings and burials had that horribly human bear seen? Surely it too could choke a man to death, or dig, or cut sharp stakes? He turned and stared north.

  Yasin’s horsemen flashed into sight, bending low, as if in terror, over their horses’ withers. At the corner they left the road and galloped across country directly toward the band hidden in the grass. One of them, waving a musket, turned and fired clumsily at unseen pursuers.

  The Padampur cavalry galloped into view, brilliant in pink cloaks and tight green silk trousers and chain-mail jerkins and round steel helmets. The wild shouting grew to a roar. William counted anxiously and made it seventeen. A man more gorgeously dressed than the rest, wearing a fan of egret plumes on his helmet, rode at their head. He heard Piroo’s voice in his ear. ‘The rajah-sahib himself. He must be very angry.’

  William’s lips twisted in a derisive smile. He had another person to despise now, to place in the long gallery with himself and the rest of the human race. The rajah of Padampur had an unctuous record in his dealings with the English. He kept a brilliant court and entertained with a lavish, unexpectedly civilized charm. William sneered because so many Residents and Political Agents had been deceived; because so much power for good, so much wealth, nourished itself on banditry and was expended for the benefit of murder. What terrors did the ordinary people of India not have to live with?

  The horsemen under Yasin played their rôle perfectly. The pursuing cavalry could not see their contorted faces, but they had written panic into the stoop of their backs. They reached the grass and did not look down as they galloped past. Yasin’s horse swerved wildly but could not avoid stamping on a Deceiver’s back. The man writhed like a wounded snake, his face greeny-brown and his back broken, but he made no sound.

  The rajah’s long, aristocrat’s face was contorted like a wolf’s as he screamed, ‘Come back, swine! Sons of whores! Come back! Pigs! Cowards!’

  His cavalry screamed behind him. Yasin’s men urged their horses over the bank forty yards ahead and plunged into the water. The cavalry, riding in a loose crescent, the rajah in the middle and the points back, pounded into the long grass.

  The hidden men jerked the plaited ropes which lay between them, leaned back, and held the ropes two feet off the ground. Men propped the butts of the sharp stakes against the unyielding soil and inclined the points forward so that they slid into muscle and flesh as the horses galloped on to them. The grass rose up, and weapons reached out of it. Yasin’s horsemen turned round and galloped back into the battle. Muskets exploded in a sudden fusillade. The black puffs of powder smoke drifted through the grass. Daggers flashed in the bright sun, the triumphant yells of the cavalry died in hiccuped cries of panic, from across the river the bear roared in his cage. The Deceivers rose up screaming. William stood with them, and his heart pounded, and his fingers kneaded the rumal in his waistband.

  The rajah’s horse stumbled beside him. The rajah’s black moustache and blazing-black eyes hurtled down on him. He saw them near, and as personal enemies, against the background of heaving grass and embossed round shields and coloured clothes and whirling swords. The rajah fell forward at his feet and struggled to free a short dagger from his sash.

  All the brightness outside, and the movement, were reflected in black mirrors behind William’s eyes, and the rumal was in his hand. A wolf snarled at his feet. It was the evil of Kali, as the harlot girl had been
the lust of Kali, and he could strangle it in one motion. It was the evil thing that God made and, having made, strove to destroy. His knuckles sprang up white … he heard the double crack.

  He bowed his head and slowly, luxuriously, let his wrists turn down. The rumal unloosed. There was never such power as this in all the world, or such fulfilment.

  Piroo was beside him. The fight was finished. William said, ‘All done?’

  ‘All, Jemadar-sahib. Some of their horses have run away, some are dead, some we have.’

  Piroo’s voice was pure respect, and in his face the awe of a man who meets Death walking in at his gate or comes suddenly upon Dedication praying in the streets. The awe was in Hussein’s eyes too, mixed there with a panic fear, as of the supernatural.

  The chief burier lifted up his voice. ‘Oh, Jemadar-sahib-bahadur, now we know why our leader who is dead said you might be the greatest that the Deceivers have ever known.’

  Here was the second of the strong emotions that exalted him—the admiration of a smaller for a greater in the same craft. A village carpenter had praised a chair he’d made once, and it had felt like this.

  ‘What now, Jemadar-sahib?’ Piroo asked humbly. ‘There will be trouble over this. From Padampur they will send the rest of the army after us.’

  William shrugged. ‘I think not. There will be a new rajah. After this, he will be advised to make peace with us.’

  It was true. The Deceivers were a monster, shapeless but universal, headless but possessed of many brains. Anything wielding less than the full power of the English government would have to come to terms with them. William knew now that nearly every rajah, nearly every important squire and landowner in the country, must know something of the Deceivers. Some helped them overtly, some did not, all kept silent. Together they strengthened and executed the law of nature, which always weakens the weak, robs the poor, and murders the defenceless.