Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Is this true?” the Ranee asked. Her voice and her eyes were tragic, but that was entirely unintentional. “You mean about the charts? I don’t know.”

  “Is it true,” she asked, “that you confessed just now to Harriet, in the other room?”

  “No,” Gup answered, “she lied about that, to protect herself from a confession that she made to me.” Then the dreaded question came. Gup hated to lie to her but he knew he would have to. He must protect Tom O’Hara at all costs. However, the actual literal wording of the question saved him for the moment from a downright lie. Not that it mattered. It maddened him to have to be forced to love and deceive at the same time. It was a rotten world; he supposed he had to be rotten like the rest of ’em.

  “Have you spoken with any mullah?”

  “No — excepting Jonesey. I believe he is one.”

  “Did you see those charts?”

  “Yes. Jonesey showed them to me.”

  The Ranee laid Glint’s letter on the table. “Where is the spy who brought this?”

  Harriet Dover’s shoulders suggested vague indifference. “I understand there was an accident. He fell over the cliff.”

  “Why was he not brought to me?”

  “He fell over the cliff, I told you.” The expression was still of complete indifference, but insolence had crept into her voice, and it is the little, half-heard nuances that direct thought into the very channels that the schemer fences to avoid. There was a sudden change in the atmosphere — as sudden as when hornets hum forth, vibrant in the stillness. The Ranee’s blue eyes widened and such anger glowed in them as burns up all irrelevancy.

  “Harriet! I told you I will hold you answerable if men are murdered without trial and without even my knowledge! I forbade executions. War is one thing — unavoidable and sometimes honorable — sometimes righteous. But to kill men like vermin — I won’t have it! Have you dared to order executions? Have you dared to permit them? Have you dared, after what I told you, to ignore them?”

  “Do you mistake me for Omnipotence with myriads of eyes?” Harriet Dover retorted. “If you had your way your preventions would be worse than cure. Do you expect to govern savages by signing your name to a treatise on brotherly love? They have the law and the prophets. They don’t need you for that!”

  But the tide had turned and no sarcasm could hold it back. All kings, all queens are puppets to the extent that others build their thrones and others bring to them the filtered or polluted news on which their judgment must be based. But not even arbitrary rulers can be swindled all the time, and there is no more deadly danger than to let a man or woman of courage learn or suspect that nominal underlings are actually stealing power under a cloak of lip-obedience to principles which they secretly despise and disobey. Gup smiled. He could see what was coming. The Ranee saw his smile and read it rightly, because she was thinking of first principles, not of herself, and intuition surges along that channel.

  “Did you say she confessed to you, Gup? What was it?”

  Gup bluffed brazenly. “Send for the Amir’s representative,” he answered. And then, because he knew how little evidence he had and doubted that the Amir’s man would fall into any open trap, he bluffed again, turning on Harriet Dover:

  “Why did you order that poisonous Russian released?”

  “I didn’t. She ordered it.”

  “Why did you ask her to order it? Were you afraid he might send some message to her? And be brought into her presence? And be questioned? Were you afraid he might talk about poison? And the Amir’s wife?”

  “What does this mean?” the Ranee demanded.

  “This,” said Gup, “that if the Amir’s Syrian wife should die—”

  The bluff worked! Harriet Dover lost her grip on insolence and, in a well-masked panic, took the defensive. She was not yet beaten. Gup knew she was probably more dangerous in that mood than in any other.

  “Listen,” she said. “If the truth will out, let me tell it. Mayn’t we sit down?”

  The Ranee nodded. Gup pushed up the big chair for her, at the end of the table. He and Harriet Dover faced each other at her right and left hand. Harriet rested her chin on her left hand and Gup noticed that the chin was slightly undershot and longer than it should be; he wondered why he had never noticed that before. He laid his turban on the table; the thing bothered him. Harriet Dover drummed on the polished teak with ivory-white fingers.

  “You admit,” she said, “that this was all my doing? I mean, the original plan was mine. I thought it out. I conceived it. It is my child. You fell in with the plan and lent your money, reputation, good looks and such brains as you have in return for the title of empress and the opportunity to put into practise certain principles that you believe are practical?”

  “I do not,” said the Ranee. “I admit that I have listened to you — possibly too often. And that I have trusted you — perhaps not always wisely. My plan is one that I talked over with Jullunder before I had ever heard of you.”

  “Perhaps there are two plans,” Gup suggested grimly. “Perhaps a cuckoo laid an egg in your nest.”

  Harriet Dover ignored him, or tried to. She leaned her elbow farther on the table, her eyes fixed on the Ranee’s. “You will admit, at any rate, that I have done the work.”

  “I do not,” said the Ranee.

  “Well, then, most of the work. And you have approved of what I have done.”

  “Not always,” said the Ranee.

  “You have given me authority—”

  “Too much sometimes.”

  “And I have actually had authority to act as your state secretary in negotiations with prospective allies and—”

  “Within limits,” said the Ranee, “subject always to my approval, step by step.”

  “But it has not been possible to keep you posted step by step. You surely know that. There have been too many wheels within wheels, and my time has been too occupied to permit my discussing with you every possible contingency before it happened. Think of the scores of instances where I have brought a finished negotiation to you, and you have confirmed it although you knew nothing about it until that moment. You knew there simply hadn’t been time to waste on preliminary talk, so you trusted me—”

  “Perhaps more than I should have done! However, I am listening.”

  “I have kept numberless plans in my head that I never mentioned to you, Lottie, because they were not yet ripe for discussion. But I have never once swerved from the main idea. I have lived with it day and night. I have thought of everything, including how to make you so strong when the time comes that not even the whole strength of the British Empire can unseat you. I know how you love peace and how you hope to impose peace on these barbarous people. But how can you hope to have peace if the Indian Government should be forced only to make temporary concessions? That might happen. They might even yield the Punjaub in order to gain breathing time, but you know very well you can’t fight the whole British Empire for ever. So I have kept my eye on the future.”

  “And she has tried to do,” said Gup, “what every secretary of state with an unmarried ruler on his hands, has tried to do since women were a bargain-counter on the political market. But you will notice this difference: more experienced diplomats have had the decency to be frank about it with their principals. The long and the short of it is, she has offered you, money and army and all, to the Amir of Afghanistan — as his wife, if he poisons the present one — as his queen, if he happens to keep a diplomatic promise. And the Amir has retorted with the offer of a husband from among his seedy relatives.”

  Harriet Dover almost spat at him. Her livid hatred froze the flow of blood, so that her face grew pale, her lips white and her eyes as darkly angerful as thousand-year-old amber.

  “Liar!” she almost shouted.

  “Send for the Amir’s representative,” said Gup.

  Gup knew that the only remarkable thing about her breakdown was that he had stumbled on her “crystallization point,” as they say
of metals. She had cracked. There would be no mending her. Lawyers understand the process well enough; the most imperturbable witness breaks down and becomes almost idiotic when skill or luck or coincidence lays bare the concentration point at which weakness has gathered itself. Genius induces overstrain along one line. The weakness sets up somewhere else. She tried blustering.

  “Am I on trial?” she demanded savagely. “If so, I demand a jury of my peers — all women! No man is fit to accuse a woman, let alone judge her! This man in particular is simply Nietzsche’s blond beast. He is incapable of thinking. He has only emotions. He is good for nothing but hard labor, or to hurl himself into battle — if he has the courage — which I doubt!”

  “No,” said the Ranee, “you are not on trial. I won’t put you on trial. But what shall I do with you?”

  “Do with me? You? Oh, damn such insolence! You with your vaudeville brains — you! — do anything with me! I could have made an empress of you, if you had had the sense to leave yourself in my hands. But you turn aside for that blond animal! Go and show your legs to London! Go and sing balderdash popular songs to the sons of tradesmen! It is not too late — you look more like one of Bourgereau’s Psyches than you ever did! They’ll talk about your goo-goo eyes, and you can marry a duke and join the church and be respectable, after you’ve grown sick of this fool! Try me — you? You couldn’t understand me in a million years!”

  “I suppose,” said the Ranee, “you have worked too hard and you’ve cracked under the strain. But I can’t, just because I’m sorry for you, let my aim fail.”

  Harriet Dover leaned back in her chair and laughed, on the verge of hysterics. “Fail?” she mocked. “It has failed! You went to pieces when you abandoned me for this insufferable cad! God! Never in all my life, until this minute, have I wished I were a man! Oh, if I were a man what misery I might undo! What a sword I would use! What a lancet I would let into the ulcers that are rotting the world’s life! And I would show such fools as you no more mercy than the lightning has for fat sheep!”

  She was on the verge of collapse, drumming on the table now with the fingers of both hands. Gup strode to the door — opened it — almost caught Jonesey listening at the keyhole.

  “Women!” he commanded. “Three or four of ’em!”

  They were barely in time. Harriet Dover swayed in her chair and fell sidewise into the arms of one of them.

  “Take her to her bed and call the doctor,” said the Ranee. “I will come soon.”

  When the door closed Gup stood facing her and there was silence for such a long time that he began to count his breathing. He was in command now, and he knew it, but he was not sure yet that she knew it. He knew that in that minute the whole destiny of Asia was in his hands. There was nothing he might not do, with fifty thousand men to be hurled into battle — five hundred thousand craving to be led, on any sort of profitable foray, by the first man capable of leading — fifty million waiting on the plains of India to rise and welcome their latest conqueror! Nevertheless, he knew what he would do, and not do. And he believed he knew what passed through her mind; she would try to take the reins now dropped by Harriet Dover. And her pride would enter in. She would wish to show the Amir what it cost to slight the offer of her hand in marriage. He supposed any woman would feel that way.

  He strode toward her. She was gazing at him but she neither spoke nor moved. He supposed then that she was grieving for Harriet Dover and he felt awkward, regretting his own lack of skill in consolation phrases. He, too, felt almost sorry for Harriet Dover — almost, but not quite. Nothing could alter the fact that she was a dangerous devil and probably not yet well out of the way. He felt far more sorry for this woman who had trusted her and who felt all her womanhood stung by the-Amir’s insolence.

  “Oh, I know you!” she said suddenly. “You despise me as she did! I trusted her because I loved her. She has tried to trade me to an Amir, for his harem. What will you do, I wonder? You shall not despise me. I will not endure that.”

  “Lottie,” he said, “what do you want me to do?”

  She stared at him. It was the first time he had called her by that name. He saw the light in her eyes soften and glow, and then harden again as she controlled herself. He had to set his teeth. He would not — dammit, he would not make love to a woman to whom he must lie with almost the next breath. Not if it broke his heart and hers too, would he fail to keep that standard of behavior flying.

  “I want you,” she said, “for my friend. I need one rather badly.” It was a wry brave smile that she summoned. “Gup, you are seeing me at my worst. I don’t mind — really I don’t mind the Amir’s insult. But it hurts to lose Harriet Dover — and I think it hurts almost more to know how long I have half-suspected her and refused to believe my own intuition because — Gup, I love my friends.”

  “What do you want me to do, Lottie?”

  “Answer the Amir! Command my army! I will find out what Harriet Dover has done, and undo it.”

  “If I answer the Amir,” said Gup, “I will defy him. And if I defy him, I will fight him.”

  “I wish that.”

  “You commission me to answer for you?”

  “Yes. I wish it.”

  Gup, alone, strode through the door into the outer room. He strode straight to the dais. Rahman wished to speak to him but he raised his hand for silence.

  “Inform the Amir’s representative that we are ready with our answer,” he commanded. Jonesey went in haste to do his bidding. Gup, Rahman, everybody remained standing. There was silence for fifteen minutes, seven women staring at the men, and the ticking of Rahman’s turnip-watch as audible as a cheap alarm-clock! Then the Amir’s representatives came filing in and bowed — to the vacant divan, since the Ranee was not to be seen (but a door creaked behind the curtain leading to the silver-peacock room).

  “I am commander-in-chief,” said Gup, “of her Highness the ex-Ranee of Jullunder’s army.”

  They bowed again. Jonesey and Rahman exchanged glances. The captain of her body-guard looked better pleased than if he had been decorated on parade.

  “I speak for her Highness,” said Gup, “and I am authorized to answer, to the Amir’s insolence, that such terms as he has offered are beneath our notice and we are no longer in a mood to bargain with him. I am authorized to add, that if your Excellencies’ comfort can in any way be served, or your return to Kabul expedited, our resources are at your service.”

  Bomb-shells might have fallen and produced less consternation — less excitement — less explosions of the Nine-and-ninety Names of Allah. Dignity came to the aid of the Amir’s men; they bowed and followed Jonesey to the door. Then Rahman:

  “Son of the storms,” he exploded, “know you what this means? Know you what Kabul will answer to that speech?”

  “No,” said Gup. “I am no reader of an Amir’s mind. But is the army ready?”

  “By my beard, yes, ready!” Rahman answered. “And the word is — ?”

  “Silence!” said Gup. “Silence until we learn the Amir’s answer.”

  The mystery of inspiration needs

  No new materials, no elements of chance.

  The selfsame actors to another tune it leads,

  Transmuting dead tread to a buoyant dance

  Like nature’s. Then the ifs and the perhaps

  Change sides; sly treachery and dark deceit

  Turn swiftly on each other and are traps

  That take their own inventors by the feet.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “But wait and see what happens when we get the wind up!”

  RAHMAN chose Gup’s body-guard, and that night Gup slept — on a cot in a bare-walled cavern — four hours, with a sentry at the door. Jonesey slept within hail. Rahman snored in a near-by cave until the tunnel rumbled like a subway. Pepul Das slept like a cat on a mat at the foot of Rahman’s bed. Until Gup got up and strode away to breakfast in a cavern where through the window he could see the first pale light limning the savage
outlines of the crags around the valley’s rim, the tunnel was patrolled by the six-foot Pathans of Rahman’s selection. There is nothing on all God’s earth more personal than a hand-picked guard of Hillmen sworn to stand between their leader and all violence, of whatsoever enemy, and be it as subtle as slow poison or as menacingly terrible as blazing flame.

  He found he might no longer eat until a courteous, hook-nosed giant with a black beard had dared death, sipping the coffee and nibbling fragrant food before he touched it. Even his cigarettes were handed to him by a man who picked the first one from the box at random and, not having any use for such effeminate things, chewed it in his presence. His personal cook and the six-foot stalwart, looking like an ogre from a fairy-tale, whose duty was to clean the pots and pans were ushered in and stood before him. By their fathers’ beards and in the Nine-and-ninety Names of Allah, they swore it should be on their heads if their master suffered so much as a twinging bellyache.

  A doctor came in — challenged in the tunnel with a noise like fire-irons falling, and saluted with the silent scorn of men who intended to give him lots of blood and mangled bodies to engage his curious zeal. He was a Sikh with diplomas from two European schools of medicine, a frequent correspondent in the columns of the Lancet and accused, by some, of being an authority on Freudian phenomena; by others frowned at as a fogy of the medieval school, half of whose stock-in-trade was superstitution.

  “Yes,” he said, “Harriet Dover is ill, and I am not sure she was ever well. Nervous breakdown is a blanket phrase that may mean genius up a wrong tree. If you wished for a more illuminating label, I would mention hell’s bells; it says less and it probably means more. I could draw you a curve of her physical resistance, showing how she simply had to crack. I have always considered her crazy. I am interested in crazy people. I joined this enterprise because nothing else could make me famous in such a short time. If you win — which you won’t! — I shall have anything I ask for in the line of hospitals and clinics. If you lose — which you will! — they will shoot you or hang you. They will have to knight me! I shall be like the Spanish doctor, whom the all-conquering Americans had to leave in charge of the Philippine hospitals. Nobody could take his place. Nobody can take mine. I shall, of course, employ a press-agent; only he will be called a secretary. I shall revel in the well-earned and adroitly exploited reputation of being a brilliant organizer, whose ministrations to the wounded of both sides prevented lots of agony and possibly an epidemic. No, I don’t practise surgery — much. I leave that to the labor-gang — I mean my specialists. Surgeons haven’t any brains; they are mechanics. Come and see my plant.”