Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  I don’t know what I should have done if it had not been for the Tibetan ponies, who as usual were full of high spirits because their noses were turned homeward. One of them had kicked Chullunder Ghose off into a snow-drift and gone off at a gallop. I heard the babu bellowing for help, rode forward and pulled him out into the track. I explained the situation. He enjoyed it.

  “You might marry her in Tibet!” he suggested.

  I threatened to send him back with her unless he could think of something more practical than that, and he stood still, thinking, until his feet grew cold and he began to stamp them in the snow. Then he came up close and whispered. His was better than no advice at all, so I jumped off the pony, knocked the knife out of the Ladakhi’s hand, seized him and held his arms until Chullunder Ghose could tie them behind him. Then I took the woman’s knife away and tied her hands too, she cursing me like a cat beset by terriers. I had hardly finished when a flame shot up out of the darkness more than a mile away, and the girl, nearly falling as she struggled to free herself, screamed excitedly

  “Sidiki’s house!”

  That might have been a signal. Suddenly three men rushed at us out of the darkness. One; a giant, who seemed to be their leader, made for me and I swung my fist straight for his jugular vein; he went headlong in the snow and lay still. The second man went for Chullunder Ghose, and the third for the girl, who appeared to expect him, letting herself fall into his arms. He had his hands full, so I went to the babu’s rescue. His antagonist was lunging at him with a long knife and the babu, on his back, was kicking skillfully.

  It occurred to me to make that man a prisoner, but he turned on me with a knife. I hit hard, landing with my left over his heart and he went down like a pole-axed bullock, giving way at the knees and falling forward.

  The third man had mounted the pony and was trying to pull the woman up behind him, but the pony was giving him trouble. I knocked him down. The pony bolted, following the trail, and that was perfectly satisfactory; there would now be two riderless ponies, whose arrival, crowding themselves into the line, would be sure to bring back Grim and Narayan Singh.

  I tried to take that third man prisoner but he slipped away into the darkness. To have fired at him might have brought half the countryside in pursuit of us. Sidiki’s house was blazing furiously now, making a splurge of light veiled by the snow — an amazingly beautiful scene, with the shadowy trees in the foreground and here and there a glimpse of men and animals. I stooped to examine the man I had hit over the heart. He seemed dead, so I began to look for the giant who had attacked me first, and Chullunder Ghose yelled a warning as I peered into the drift where I thought he had gone for good. He had recovered. He came at me suddenly; Chullunder Ghose threw himself down in the way and the giant tripped over him, the babu clinging to his legs. I seized the giant’s knife wrist and in a second we were all three down together.

  That greasy monster was the strongest man I have ever wrestled with. I weigh two hundred and forty pounds, and Chullunder Ghose at least as much; he flung us about like threshers clinging to a wounded whale, and though I rained blows at him whenever I could get a hand free they only seemed to increase his violence. He hit as hard as I did. Using both hands with all my might I could not make him let go of the knife. It was all I could do to keep the knife out of my heart and, even so, he cut me badly in a dozen places. He was a first-class fighting man.

  To make things worse, the woman got her hands free somehow and began to help him. She jumped on my back and tried to throttle me, her finger nails tearing the skin of my throat. Chullunder Ghose crawled out of the fight and wrenched her off me, throwing her down in the snow and sitting on her.

  Then the giant began to have the best of it. My hold on his knife wrist weakened. His dark face, close to mine, leered as he levered me on to my back, my own foot slipping on the crushed snow as I tried to escape from under him. I could not yell to Chullunder Ghose, and he could not see what was happening, for it was black dark down between the drifts. The giant broke my hold on his wrist at last, and though I could not see the knife I knew he was poising it to plunge it into me.

  But that second’s enjoyment of anticipation cost him his life. There came a thudding of hoofs down wind and a slither as a pony halted, all four feet together. Being half-dead I could hear little and see less, but I could feel the giant collapse on top of me.

  “Hurt, sahib!” asked Narayan Singh’s voice.

  He pulled the dead man off and helped me to my feet, I leaning on him, for I had lost a lot of blood. Then Grim came galloping, and Chullunder Ghose took his weight off the woman to give her a chance to explain herself, but she had no breath left and only sobbed and writhed. With an arm over Grim’s shoulder and Narayan Singh’s, I managed to gasp out what had happened.

  “Where’s that Ladakhi servant?” Grim asked.

  He went to look for him. The man was lying face downward on the snow, with his throat cut and his hands still tied behind him. Grim went in search of the man I had hit over the heart. He was gone; not a sign of him anywhere.

  Then Sidiki ben Mohammed came, riding frantically, our two runaway ponies trailing him. He cried out:

  “Oh, my house! My house and all my fortune! Oh you bringers of bad luck — what you have done to me!”

  Grim helped him off his pony.

  “There’s your wife,” he said. “Ask her.”

  Sidiki looked at her and kicked her with enthusiasm.

  “Curse the day I ever saw you!” he exclaimed. In that mood he was not much like Queen Victoria and Lord Roberts. He would have kicked his wife to death if Grim had not prevented.

  “What next?” Grim asked him.

  Neither Grim nor I nor anyone knew what to do. We could hardly leave Sidiki in the case he was, with his house on fire, although from what we could see of the blaze through the snow there was no chance of saving a stick of the place. If we returned we were sure to be charged with arson, murder, robbery; Sidiki ben Mohammed probably would be the first to turn on us. I was bleeding from a dozen knife wounds, weak, growing weaker, and possibly incapable of staying on a pony’s back. And if we should go on without Sidiki we would have no guide.

  Meanwhile, all the pack ponies had been left in a sheltered place half a mile up the track and were probably rolling on their loads.

  “What do you want us to do?” Grim asked.

  Sidiki ben Mohammed wrung his hands and stared at him.

  “I am ruined!” he said. “I am ruined!”

  A solution suddenly occurred to me. I made Grim pull him closer, since I could hardly speak above a whisper.

  “How much was your place worth?” I demanded.

  He named a sum that was enormous from the point of view of Leh, and I don’t doubt he overstated it by half, but it was not much as Americans measure fortunes.

  “I will pay you,” I said, “by an order on New York, to be cashed by Benjamin of Delhi, if you will guide us as far as that monastery and hold your tongue about us afterward.”

  “Allah! You will pay? You gentlemen will pay me?” He came out of his hysteria that instant — jumped out of it into the opposite extreme. “There is something in me of Lord Roberts!” he exclaimed. “My wives — the servants rescue them! My house — I build another! Let us go!”

  “Not yet,” said Grim. He sent Narayan Singh up trail to bring the bodies of Tsang-Mondrong and Tsang-yang. “We’ll dump them here beside these other dead ones. It will look like any ordinary hill fight.”

  Narayan Singh went at a gallop and Grim began bandaging me, using handkerchief, strips from his shirt and the turban Chullunder Ghose wore under his enormous yak-skin cap, washing the wounds with snow to stop the bleeding. Sidiki ben Mohammed dragged his wife to her feet and tried to question her, slapping her face when she refused to answer; he picked up the giant’s knife and Grim had to leave off bandaging to prevent his using it.

  “Why not kill her? Why not leave her lying here? She tried to poison Mordecai! I don�
�t doubt it was she who burned my house! She has tried it before! She has a lover — a Tibetan! She is an immoral woman! She is an adulteress! She has sold my honor!”

  “We will take her along,” said Grim. “I’ll find a way to make her talk.”

  The wife (she was not older than sixteen) began to edge away into the darkness but her husband seized her wrist and dragged her back, she screaming at him:

  “You daren’t kill me! They won’t let you! I shall tell all I know about you!”

  She began an incoherent stream of accusations in a language that only her husband understood, and kept it up until Narayan Singh came trotting back, with the bodies of Tsang-Mondrong and Tsang-yang on one pony behind him. He dumped the bodies into a snow drift and ripped off the gunny-bag shrouds.

  There we left them, Grim and I riding one pony, he holding me on. Sidiki ben Mohammed took his own wife on the extra pony that Narayan Singh had brought, Chullunder Ghose mounting the other, and Narayan Singh brought up the rear on foot.

  I remember nothing after that for a long time, except the voices of Sidiki ben Mohammed and his child-wife shrilling at each other, she accusing him and he declaring he would treat her as Abdurrahman of Kabul used to treat faithless women (not particularly mercifully, that is, if accounts are true). I had lost so much blood that finally I fainted into Grim’s arms.

  CHAPTER XII. Dugpas.

  It requires more courage and intelligence to be a devil than the folk who take experience at hearsay think. And none, save only he who has destroyed the devil in himself, and that by dint of hard work (for there is no other way) knows what a devil is, and what a devil he himself might be, as also what an army for the devils’ use are they who think the devils are delusion.

  — from The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup

  I RECOVERED consciousness inside a monastery. All of us, Sidiki included, were occupying one large cell. The solitary window, facing southward, was unglazed; its wooden shutter stood open to allow smoke to escape from a stone hearth in the middle of the floor; there was no hole overhead — no chimney of any kind. Through the window was a view of snow-clad ranges, and from the cot on which I lay facing the window it looked as if we were suspended in mid-air.

  Grim told me we had been there three days and were likely to have to wait another ten before I should be fit to travel. I got off the bed to try my strength and nearly fell. He helped me to the window and I leaned out; there was a sheer drop straight under us of at least a thousand feet and below that again a rocky slope of twice the depth that looked impossible to climb. No eagle had a nest more dizzily inaccessible. I returned to the bed feeling weaker than ever, and there was another lapse of consciousness.

  When I came to my senses again there was an old monk in the room; he had a big black bottle in his hand, and by the filthy taste in my mouth I judged he had been dosing me. Sidiki ben Mohammed was leaning over me, Saying in the Kashmiri dialect of Ladakh:

  “You must save him! You must save him! He owes me money!”

  The old monk’s face was like polished ivory that had been smeared with lamp smoke — easy-going and good natured but regarding life through little slant eyes as a temporary inconvenience to be tolerated. I was feeling better and he seemed aware of it; he chuckled.

  “No talk,” he advised, and left the room.

  There was a drone of conversation. Grim and Narayan Singh were questioning a woman who was answering pertly, as if she were not in the least afraid of them but annoyed by their insistence. When I turned my head I could see she was Sidiki ben Mohammed’s girl wife, still smothered in yak-skin but with her coat unfastened, showing a smock and Mohammedan trousers underneath. Barring that her face was dirty, she was beautiful — glittering dark-blue eyes and an impudent mouth — well-molded features; her plaited black hair in coils over her shoulders.

  “Do you remember that you promised you would pay me money!” asked Sidiki, shaking my shoulder.

  Narayan Singh jerked him away and came and stood beside me, followed by Chullunder Ghose, but Grim went on questioning the woman.

  “Pay him nothing!” Chullunder Ghose advised. “We have discovered he is helpless anyhow!”

  They helped me out of bed and I went to sit beside Grim with my back against an image of Chenresi carved on a stone wall; the image looked extraordinarily like Chullunder Ghose.

  “This woman,” said Grim (she was squatting exactly in front of me on a pile of sheepskins), “has lied in circles until she is telling the truth at last from sheer exhaustion of imagination. First she said you carried her off. Then she said she was trying to overtake Sidiki to warn him that someone had fired the house. Next she said she herself set the house on fire because the other wives were jealous and treated her badly. Finally, she admitted it was she who tried to burn the place when Mordecai was there, and that it was she who tried to poison Mordecai. Now at last she admits she has a lover, but she won’t name him; and she threatens that unless we let her go to her lover she will inform against us all, and particularly against Sidiki ben Mohammed, who, it seems, is in the smuggling business — rifles, ammunition and tobacco.”

  “A man must live,” Sidiki interposed. “How else shall one acquire a fortune in Ladakh? And now I have lost my fortune. She ought to be beaten to death!”

  Grim went on talking: “It’s known, even in this monastery, that the dugpas have caught Rait. Dugpas is the name for sorcerers who cultivate evil for the sake of evil — that’s as close as I can come to understanding it — they’re vaguely like the Kali-worshipers of India. The people Rait set out to reach, and whom we want to reach, are the students of Life, so to speak — much in the same way that Luther Burbank studies botany, for the love of it. The dugpas are as much their enemies as the law of gravity is the enemy of the will to rise. Rait had intelligence enough to work his way into the outer fringe of the dugpa mysteries, but that was his limit. He began to try to use the Dalai Lama’s letter that he stole from Mordecai. The Dalai Lama — or the Kun-Dun as they call him — and the Tashi Lama of Shigatse, are the trusted outer representatives of the inner secret White Lodge, whose headquarters is said to be Sham-bha-la.

  “It was like trying to illuminate a gas tank with electric sparks. A policeman’s badge in a den of thieves as proof of good faith would have been child’s play compared to that letter of Mordecai’s.

  “I had this from the abbot who runs this monastery. He’s a gentle old philosopher, who told me what he knows about Rait in order to dissuade us from going forward. However, he admits that Benjamin’s letter obliges him to help us on our way if we insist. Benjamin takes orders from the White Lodge, although he isn’t a White and doesn’t know much more about them than we do.

  “Now here’s the situation: The dugpas pounced on Rait and tortured him — mentally; they’d know too much to make his information unreliable by torturing his body; a man will say anything with a hot iron on the sole of his foot. They specialize in subtle processes.

  “Rait told them he had written to you to follow him: Maybe they knew that already. I don’t know what their means of communication is, but it’s swift, for we know how Tsang-yang and Tsang-Mondrong were clapped on our trail. Their agents caught our two Tibetans in the shed in Sidiki’s yard in Leh, and before they killed them, learned from them that we had talked with Mordecai. Mordecai knew too much; therefore so do we, and we’re to be tempted to try to rescue Rait. They will either try to kill us up there in the mountains or else confront us with Rait, discover what we know, if anything, and kill the lot of us together. Or — now get this:

  “They’re hypnotists. They’re incredibly expert psychologists. And they’re just as keen on getting control of the whole world as, for instance, the Bolshevists are. They believe in their black science as enthusiastically as the Bolshevists believe in communism — much more enthusiastically, that is, than most Christians believe in Christianity. And remember: those men who have caught Rait are merely the small fry who take orders from the higher-up
s behind the scenes.

  “They may propose to catch us, and psychologize us, and make use of us in some way. The White Lodge accepts chelas. Christians make converts and put them to work. Everybody with a bug in his head tries to rope in everybody else — so why not dugpas?

  “There’s war between them and the White Lodge all the time. Both sides practise secrecy to keep the other side from finding out their plans and methods.

  “Now our friend Sidiki ben Mohammed, is as different from Rait as chalk from cheese in some respects, but he resembles him in others. He has been trying to play both sides simply for the love of the intrigue and for his own advantage. Rait was so inquisitive he would do anything to find out what he was after. Sidiki draws the line at too much danger, or too much hardship, and revolts from extremes, either good or evil, one way or the other.”

  “You forget my hospitality,” Sidiki interrupted. “I have gone to great extremes in that respect, and at great danger to myself.”

  Grim ignored the interruption. “And Sidiki has this girl wife, who is a red-hot fool. She has fallen in love with a Tibetan who may be a low-rank dugpa whom she has hardly seen, but who has sent her messages by the mouth of an old woman who was allowed into Sidiki’s house to charm warts. The old woman came frequently, and she is probably the dugpa’s mother. She promised this little fool that she should be a Shape’s wife in Tibet if she did what she was told. That was why she tried to poison Mordecai, tried to burn her husband’s house, and succeeded at the second attempt. The giant, whom Narayan Singh killed in the nick of time to prevent his killing you, was the lover’s servant. They would probably have carried her off and sold the little fool in Baltistan or Tibet.