Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  King tied the prisoner, Ramsden superintending. They roped him into the cart by arm and legs, while Grim kept watch and Chullunder Ghose gasped up his bad news, sentence about with the Sikh.

  “They killed the Gauri with a cord!”

  “Sahibs , they fired the house and—”

  “They seized me, and—”

  “Sahibs , I went for Cyprian, but they had him already. The bed was empty, and I broke it for a club to—”

  “Hell, you men!” said Ramsden. “Why not go to the house and see.”

  CHAPTER XIII. “I felt the tingle of the magic and fell unresisting.”

  THEY went. They saw. There was not a trace of Cyprian — only the Gauri’s house in flames and a belated fire-engine in charge of a weary man who said:

  “These women’s houses are a bad risk — jealousy, you know — carousal — anything may happen — lamp upset arson maybe — you police—”

  But the policeman had his hands full and, being a white officer, in a land where they say the white man’s bolt is shot, sought excuses for not interfering too much.

  “Native prejudices, don’t you know.”

  There lay a man in mid-street, belly-downward, with a great wound in his back such as ten lives could have sped through — a northerner — Hillman by the look of him — perhaps Sikunderam. Quarrelsome lot, those tribesmen. Probably he set the fire and died for it.

  But what should a wretched policeman do, with the certainty that a Hindu lawyer would he hired by somebody to accuse him of stirring racial passions? He ordered the corpse carried to the morgue, to await identification.

  Around a corner hardly a hundred yards away stood Ali of Sikunderam, most bitterly reviling fate between the bouts of explanation that he brandished, as it were, in the teeth of friends:

  “Sahibs , they slew him as a beast is slain — my Habibullah! They ran from behind and hit him with a butcher’s cleaver! What can I do? How can I claim the body? The police—”

  “But how — listen, Ali! How did they come to pick Habibullah?”

  “Sahibs — have I not said? The house was burning and no ishteamer * yet. And no police. One stood by the corner and asked me as I ran, ‘Who is the great one who can slay three men with three blows?’ Who am I that I should swallow pride? I answered: ‘Lo! My son, my Habibullah! He slew three with three blows! Will you see him try the feat again?’ said I. And with that the fellow shouted, ‘Him first!’ pointing. Whereat about a dozen men ran forth from a doorway, and one of them smote my son with the cleaver!”

  “What did you do?” asked Narayan Singh, standing in the shadow of the ox-cart for concealment’s sake; for he looked like a man who had come hot from fighting.

  “What could I do? Ishteamers came — two of them — and the police. May Allah blast the lives of the police! I ran — I and my two sons. What else?”

  “No sign of Father Cyprian?”

  “None! Nor of my four sons!” answered Ali, running the fingers of both hands through his gray-shot beard. “If my sons lie in the ashes yonder, burned by Hindus, may Allah so do to me and more likewise unless I burn half of Delhi to the ground! I will lay India waste! I will raise a lashkar * in the Hills and raid and rape this land until a Hindu won’t dare show himself! I—”

  “Hs-s-sh!” said King. “We can’t wait here. What next?”

  “What next is where to hide ox-cart!” sighed Chullunder Ghose. “Characteristic of ox-carts being tractability! Requirements of this party, self included, being absence from the flesh at present! Even the police could trace us by the corpses — like a lot of bottles! Debauch of bloodshed! Self am drunk with blood — inebriated — very! I say office! That is advice of blood-drunk babu! Go to office. Subsequently I lose ox-cart in Chandni Chowk, being goat as usual!”

  “But the prisoner?”

  “I said ‘subsequently,’” sighed Chullunder Ghose, oppressed in spirit by the world’s obtuseness and its too material demands. “To the office with the prisoner; to hell with me. Your servant, sahibs ! Vae victis ! Caught with stolen ox-cart, trying to conceal same under garbage — no friends — no attorney — ten years — verb. sap. — are we going? Yes?”

  They went, but Ali and one son backed off, promising to turn up at the office by another route. Ramsden, with Jeremy to lend him aid and countenance, sought an Eurasian apothecary, to whom Jeremy told fabulously interesting tales of dark intrigue while Ramsden was sluiced out, salved and bandaged—”à la queen’s taste,” as the man of drugs described it. Thereafter Jeremy and Ramsden chose a round-about route, using every trick in Jeremy’s compendium for throwing off pursuit — which brought them, subject to the quirks of Destiny, beneath the window of a building, whence policemen issued — five — that minute freed from extra duty — arguing.

  “It was a hundred-rupee note!” said one of them. “Nay, fifty!”

  “I saw!”

  “I likewise!”

  “I say it was fifty!”

  “I saw you take it from his clothes. It was in a leather purse. You threw the purse away. It was a hundred!”

  “Fifty!”

  “Show us then!”

  They all stood in a group beneath a street light, and the man who had emerged first drew a fifty-rupee note from his pants pocket, carefully unfolded it, and held it in the pale rays.

  “Good that we were all dismissed together, or it would have been but ten by now!” said one of them, and they all laughed.

  “Who can change it? Ten for each of us!”

  They laughed again. Not one of them had change. Ramsden and Jeremy were within five paces when the laugh was cut short — turned into the blasphemy of spitting cats — and like the blast that whoops along the valleys of his homeland Ali of Sikunderam with one son swept into the middle of the group, snatched the fifty-rupee note, spat in the face of the man who had held it, and vanished!

  “Hell!” exclaimed Ramsden. “Now we’re it’!”

  He was right, or he would have been, but for Jeremy. Failing the right victim, pick the easiest and “shake him down!”

  The five policemen turned on two who might have money, and who looked easy to convict of almost anything.

  “Sahibs !” said Jeremy; and the very title flattered them. “This is the servant of the Burra-wallah High Commissioner Dipty sahib . He and I recognized those rascals!”

  The police closed in around them.

  “This bandaged bear? The Dipty-sahib’s butler maybe? A fine tale!”

  “Aye! And an end to it, unless ye use discretion!”

  Jeremy fell back on dignity of the assumed kind — something that he lacks unless by way of mimicry. To a man those five police were Moslems. Jeremy was robed in the hated garb of a Hindu sect notorious as more fanatical than even the most bigoted “True-believers.” But the police of most of the cities of the world have experienced the fruits of interference with entrenched ecclesiastics. However lawless, they let them alone if they may, occasionally envying, no doubt, the opportunities for “honest increment” so hugely greater — so immensely safer than their own.

  This follower of Kali doubtless had his own way of exerting influence. It might be true that the “Dipty-sahib” kept a strong man in his pay for private reasons. If it were a lie, the man in bandages seemed none the less to be befriended by a member of a dangerous cult.

  “Dogs!” snarled Jeremy. “Will ye snoot among the garbage, or be laid on a true scent?”

  He was giving them no option really. No policeman, not the most cantankerous Mahommedan, would dare refuse a clew from a religious personage. None might wear those orange-yellow robes except the recognized initiates of a dreaded mystery. That much was notorious. Surely no initiate would play a trick on the police.

  “You know where we may find those robbers?” one asked with as much deference in his voice and manner as he found compatible with True- believing.

  “I know,” answered Jeremy. But he knew, no more than they, as he recounted afterward, the sheer, star
k impudence of the trick he was going to play on them. He was simply “spieling,” as he called it— “talking to encourage the ideas to come;” and whenever Jeremy does that the unexpected happens.

  “Show us, sahib .”

  Jeremy’s whole facial expression changed. The idea had come to him, smiling from the blue. He wore now the look of rapt intensity with which he holds an audience, while his subtle fingers achieve impossibilities of legerdemain. That look of itself alone would have been sufficient, but for Ramsden; he had to explain away Ramsden satisfactorily, or else to extricate him brazenly, and the difficulty only added to the zest.

  “You know our house?” he asked, selecting his words to avoid a compromising wrong phrase. (He did not even know at that time whether or not the followers of Kali had a temple, or even a meeting-place in Delhi.)

  “The temple of Kali? Surely,” said one of the police. “Well — go to that, and—”

  They looked disappointed, and the air of deference waned visibly, as Jeremy noticed; but they did not know he noticed it.

  “Nay, better; I go with you. Lead on. We will follow to attract less notice.”

  The police agreed to go four in front, provided one of them might follow behind for “discretionary purposes.”

  They were not capable of quite trusting a Hindu stranger in the circumstances, any more than Jeremy was really sure they could guide him to the enemy’s headquarters. But the police know scores of things of which they do not comprehend the significance. They led Jeremy and Ramsden to the very door of a temple, on whose front the image of the Dreadful Bride of Siva scowled through her regalia of snakes and skulls.

  It was a battered image. Moslem rule and riot each had taken toll of it. The nose was missing. Not a snake or skull of all her ornaments was whole. The dirt of a generation and the tireless energy of time had joined their forces, so that Kali’s face was ground like that of the poor — into unrecognition; part of the disguise, that, like the necklaces and snakes. None cared. None visited that temple to ask unpleasant questions. Though the purlieus of the door were clean enough to appease the municipal inspectors, the gloom within was unattractive. He who lurked in a yellow smock in the shadows beyond the threshold was no showman, but a guardian of sacred privacy, whose very glance was a rebuff.

  “Do ye dare enter?” Jeremy asked of the about-to-be-confused police.

  They naturally did not dare. It dawned on them that they were fooled, and helpless.

  “You should look for your Hillmen in a coffee-shop, three streets to your right and straight along for half a, mile,” he told them, smiling.

  So they smiled back, dejectedly, as victims of a practical joke who do not care to admit they are annoyed. They saw him thrust Ramsden toward the inner temple gloom, and turned away with a grim jest about Hindus and holy places that would have done credit to the Prophet of Allah himself.

  “Let’s sit,” suggested Jeremy.

  Ramsden sat down, almost on the threshold, almost absolutely invisible in the deep night that precedes dawn; and Jeremy beside him, next the street.

  “We’ll give them time to lose sight of us, and then hoof it,” said Jeremy. “Meanwhile, we know now where the yellow-jackets’ nest is. If a yellow-belly sees us he’ll mistake me for a member of the gang.”

  “Not so!” said a voice in the dark within a yard of him, in English.

  He looked into the eyes of death — of Kali! — of the Goddess of Annihilation! — into the eyes of Siva’s awful Bride! Her arm reached out toward him from the darkness. Living snakes, encircling her hair like tresses of Medusa, writhed as in torment. Skulls that might have been of monkeys or of men — that was no telling in that light — rattled like dry gourds on a rope about her shoulders. There was a faint smell, not of a charnel-house, but of herbs that suggested prophylaxis, and by inference the reason for it — blood!

  “Catch hold of me!” gasped Ramsden, reaching for Jeremy’s hand. But he was fixing his attention elsewhere.

  The goddess was young, as with a youth eternal. Full lips, cheeks, breasts — burning eyes aflow with something else than greed — a plump arm, shapely as a serpent — grace of movement — snakes — and dry skulls!

  And the smell — the word “smell,” Jeremy remembered, had brought that yellow-robed prisoner to his senses — the penetrating, subtle smell of herbs did more than offset things. It banished them! They faded out.

  Ramsden had lost consciousness, huge and heavy, with his shoulders across Jeremy’s thighs, until someone took him by both feet and drew him into the temple. Jeremy felt himself going. The gloom swam — full of Kali’s glowing eyes — she seemed to have scores of them that everlastingly reduced themselves to two.

  “I felt the tingle of the magic and fell unresisting.”

  He remembered Ali’s boast. He let himself go — lay back in the arms of someone whom he could not see — Kali’s arms and her snakes for aught he knew! — and let them drag him unresisting head-first into the darkness that was cool and echoing and dry.

  So he was conscious when they slammed a door on him. Nor would he have been Jeremy if he had lain still, uninquisitive. He set to work to grope about a great room, stumbling over Ramsden’s inert bulk, until his hand rested on a truckle-bed and his ears heard breathing. He produced matches from the belt in which he kept cigarettes and money under his smock — struck one — saw a face he knew, and burned his fingers while he stared at it.

  “By God! Pop Cyprian!”

  CHAPTER XIV. “We’ve got your chief!”

  “RAMMY, old top!”

  Jeff Ramsden had moved, and Jeremy’s voice in the womb of blackness greeted his return to consciousness. But he had to repeat the words several times before there was any answer; Jeff had forgotten where he left off, and lay cautious like the centipede “considering how to run.”

  “Listen, it’s me, Jeremy. We’re under Kali’s temple, and Pop Cyprian’s here sleeping like a baby on a full meal. I’ve struck matches — seven left — can’t find lamp or candle. I’ll strike one more, and keep the last six for emergency. Wake up!”

  It dawned on Jeff that Jeremy did not consider this was an emergency. He laughed.

  “Good enough!” said Jeremy. “Don’t stare at the match. It’s the last, remember.”

  There are those who don’t believe in miracles, but accept the turning on of light as commonplace. Moreover, they may vote, and some are known as educators.

  This happened: where nothing was, and no light, suddenly a vaulted crypt developed, glowing with the color of warm gold wherever rays from a mean, imported Japanese match shone on a projection. Agni, leaping from the womb of wood, had wrought another wonder, that was all. (The age of miracles is done.)

  Between two shadows of carved pillars lay Cyprian face-upward, like a corpse laid out for burial, but breathing rhythmically, smiling like a man who sees beyond the veil and is agreeably surprised. He lay on army blankets on a bed that could be carried easily, and was covered up to the armpits with a white sheet. The shadows all around him leaped like things alive. Arches appeared and vanished. Jeff tried to guess the height of the vaulted roof above him.

  “Blast!” remarked Jeremy. “That’s the fifth time! My fingers are cooked through.”

  Light vanished, but the momentary picture left its impression on the retina. For seconds, though his eyes were shut, Jeff saw the golden masonry, and Cyprian in an aura that the shadows were closing in like floods to overwhelm.

  “I’ve tried to wake him,” said Jeremy. “I’ve pinched him. He don’t move. But his respiration, temperature and pulse all seem about normal. Do you suppose he’s hypnotized?”

  “I know I’ve been poisoned,” Jeff answered. “You’ll have to pardon my bad French.”

  He vomited enormously; but even so, with that necessity off his mind, he could not remember what had happened.

  “You were knocked over by a smell,” said Jeremy. “It didn’t get me.”

  That was swank unshriven �
� Jeremy, not long ago a victim of the hypnotist whom Ramsden slew, reasserting his equality. Subsequently, from beneath, as memory always works, the salient points of recent history emerged into Jeff’s consciousness, developed by the acid understanding that Jeremy had some need to assert himself.

  “Wasn’t I in a fight?” asked Jeff.

  “No, old top. The other Johnny was. You won. Listen: King, Grim and the rest of ’em are prob’ly in our office in the Chandni Chowk, waiting for us. We’re under the floor, and maybe under the cellar of Kali’s temple. A lady runs the place whose hair needs combing — no, not cooties — snakes! She wears men’s skulls for ornaments. Vamped ’em possibly. Our crowd hold one yellow-belly prisoner, and what with Narayan Singh and you we’ve killed a bag-full. Contrariwise, they’ve got us. My guess is we’re safe enough as long as our crowd is alive and alert. But if they should burn half of Delhi in order to roast our folks alive, why then—”

  “Why then you would be spoorlos ,* wouldn’t you!” said a voice in the dark, that was a man’s, but for all the money in the world not Cyprian’s.

  Jeremy accepted that as an emergency and struck match one of the remaining six. A breath blew it out before it finished sputtering. He struck another, sheltering it between his hands. Eyes laughed at him, but a breath blew the match out before he could see the face that framed them. Nevertheless, he was nearly sure that breath and eyes belonged to different individuals. He struck a third match and Jeff prospected in his own way. Jeff’s fist, launched not quite at random in the dark, hit someone hard and sent whoever it might be crashing backward against Cyprian’s cot, upsetting man and cot together — waking Cyprian.

  “Mercy, where am I? Light! Turn on the light!” said the old priest querulously. Memory failed him, too.

  But a voice spoke like the resonances of a bronze bell, in a tongue that neither Jeremy nor Ramsden knew, and slowly — almost like aurora borealis — soft light beginning dimly in a dozen places filled the crypt. It seemed to commence among corners and slowly to collect itself into a whole, until at last it framed nine individuals, the chief of whom in the center out-frowned all the others as a mountain dwarfs the hills. He was motionless, immense, a man who had attained the stark simplicity of elemental knowledge and a kind of power that goes with it. Except for one thing he could have passed for a Mahatma — one of those pure embodiments of spirituality, who set the whole world first and themselves last, thus conquering the world. In his eyes there glared the cold fire of ambition. He was proud with the pride of Lucifer, who fell. Pride is the first of all foes that the Mahatma vanquishes, and so this individual’s attainment, if prodigious, none-the-less was not good.