Shadow of the Moon

by M. M. Kaye

Alex moved forward, a step at a time. He was conscious of a cold tingling sensation between his shoulder-blades and was aware that his mouth was dry. For a fleeting moment he wondered what would happen if the ring meant nothing to the guardians of the shaft. Would they let him stand to one side and wait as others were waiting, or would they— The light of the torches flared full in his face and his nerves tightened and leapt, but the hand he held out was entirely steady.

  The three small stones in Kishan Prasad’s ring gleamed redly in the torchlight, and the ring appeared a small and insignificant thing; but the men who held the torches evidently recognized it. One of them, bending forward to stare at it, muttered something that Alex did not catch, and salaamed low, and Alex walked between them and down a narrow flight of steps, aware that the palms of his hands were wet and there were drops of cold sweat on his forehead.

  The entrance to the shaft had been concealed by a huge flagstone that had been drawn up with ropes, and it must have taken at least two men, and probably more, to move it. The walls of the shaft were smooth and dry and the worn steps so steep and narrow that only one man at a time could possibly have descended them. They went down further into the ground than Alex would have believed possible, and once again he had the sensation of walking into a trap. A bat flew up past him, its leathery wings brushing his cheek - proof at least that there was some other entrance - and then he had reached the foot of the steps at last and was standing in a vaulted chamber, the roof of which was supported by crude stone pillars.

  It was impossible to gauge the full extent of the underground room, for the walls beyond the pillars were lost in darkness and the only illumination was supplied by a single brazier supported on an iron tripod that stood at the far end of the vault, in which an uneasy flame burned flickeringly. The stone floor and the pillars were slimy to the touch, and not dry as were the walls of the stair shaft, and in the faint light of the brazier Alex could see tree-roots that had thrust down between the curved slabs of the vaulted ceiling. That accounted for the bats and the fact that the air was breathable. Perhaps this underground room had once held the hoarded treasures of a king, or been used for some dark priestly purpose. Probably the latter, for there appeared to be carvings on the wall behind the brazier.

  There seemed to be between thirty or forty men squatting on the stone floor between the pillars, but it was difficult to tell in that uncertain light whether there were more of them whom Alex could not see. He edged his way towards a pillar and squatted down by it, Indian-fashion, keeping his back to the stone. He could hear hard breathing all about him and smell the rank smell of unwashed human bodies, and as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness he saw that many of those present were sadhus - holy men of all sects and persuasions - wild-eyed and ash-smeared, naked or wearing the ill-cured skins of animals, their long hair matted and hideous. Bairagis, Sannyasis, Bikshus, Paryrajakas; Aghorins whose custom it is to steal and eat the flesh of corpses; devil-worshippers, mendicants and mystics.

  Alex shuddered and felt his skin crawl, and was grateful for the feel of the dank stone at his back. But it was not the presence of the Hindu ascetics that made him afraid. It was the unbelievable, impossible fact that there were others in that ill-lit underground vault. Not only Sikhs, but Mussulmans also; followers of the Prophet to whom all Hindus were dogs of unbelievers, crouching side by side with the worshippers of Shiva the Destroyer, of Vishnu and Brahma and Ganesh of the elephant head, of many-armed Mother Kali the drinker of blood, and of a hundred other gods and godlings. It was true, then. Mussulman and Hindu were prepared to combine against the men of ‘John Company’ - against the white-faced foreign conquerors whose dominion had lasted for a hundred years. Nothing but a common cause and a common hatred could have brought about this weird gathering.

  A man stood up at the far end of the chamber, towering above the crouching figures that filled the aisle between the stone pillars. His back was to the fitful flame of the brazier and Alex could not see his face, but the voice and dress told him much.

  The man was a Mussulman and probably from Oudh. A tall man with a silver tongue. He spoke quietly and with a curious suggestion of a chant; the voice of a priest or a story-teller; and the tale he told was the story of a conquered people - oppressed, cheated, robbed and exploited by the men from the West, from the land beyond the Black Water. He spoke of kings and princes who had died fighting the Company, or been defrauded of their rights. Of great names and great houses that had become as the blown sands of the deserts of Bikaner. Of cherished laws and customs and religious freedoms that had been curtailed or put aside. Of sheltered zenana women, queens and princesses in their own right, sent to beg their bread in the streets …

  His voice rose and sank and the men before him swayed and groaned in unison as though they were so many puppets pulled upon a single string. Even Alex, listening - Alex who knew just how much of that tale was truth and how much fable, exaggeration or falsehood - found himself stirred to anger or intolerably moved by that wild, bitter, sorrowful saga. He forgot that he was an Englishman and a servant of the Company, and swayed and groaned with the swaying, groaning mob.

  He did not know for how long the man spoke - it might have been for an hour, or two hours, or three. The flame in the brazier flickered and danced and the shadow of the speaker leapt and shrank and leapt again across that motley mob of listening men with an effect as hypnotic as the remarkable voice. The man ended with an impassioned plea for unity: ‘They of the Company be few. A handful only, scattered up and down the land. We of Hind have risen against them many times, but the risings have always failed. They have failed because we of this land were divided one against the other. But it is well known that ten men with one heart are equal to a hundred men with different hearts; and it needs only this - that we hold together with one heart - and we are rid of them for ever. Let us put aside our differences and strike as one!’

  He flung up his arms with a wild gesture, and the crowd gasped and shrank back as a green fire seemed to run up his arms and leap for a moment from his spread fingers. But the spell had snapped for Alex. He had seen that trick performed by an illusionist at a London theatre, and sanity returned to him: and with it an icy sense of danger. If this man could sway others as he had swayed this bigoted, caste-ridden, creed-divided assembly tonight, he was more dangerous to the Company than anything that had as yet risen against them.

  Another man was speaking. A Hindu this time. His theme was the same, but his shrill, impassioned oratory lacked the almost hypnotic appeal of the previous speaker, and Alex allowed his attention to wander and concentrated on trying to memorize as many as possible of the audience and file their features away for future use. It was no easy task in that wavering light, but there were several faces that he thought he would recognize again.

  The talk went on and on and Alex shifted restlessly. During his first years in India, when he and Niaz would take leave together and go off shooting, he had taught himself to squat native-fashion on his heels. It had amused him to study and copy the habits and customs and speech of many kinds of men - a game which Niaz, who was a natural mimic, had entered into with enthusiasm - but his grey eyes had made it impossible for him to pass as any but a hillman or a northerner, and so he had selected his present role and worked hard to perfect himself at it. He had used it upon several occasions, in company with Niaz, to gain sorely needed information, but having spent the last year and more in Europe his muscles had grown unused to the treatment they were receiving. They ached abominably and he began to wonder how much longer this performance was going to last, and if he had not already heard sufficient for his purpose? It would be easy to rise and steal up the stair shaft - it was less than six paces behind him and surely no one would dispute his passage if he gave an obvious excuse? But he did not go.

  Yet another man was speaking; a sadhu this time. His message was less general and more specific. Spread the word! Carry it into every town and every village. Tell every man to be ready; to
procure arms and secrete them; to steal them if necessary! To sharpen his sword, his axe or his knife and to tip his lathi with iron. The coming year was the Year of the Prophecy in which the Hundred Years of Subjection would be accomplished. Man, woman and child, the oppressors must be slain, so that not one would remain to carry the tale to the West.

  ‘Carry the word! Carry the word!’ The hoarse hysterical voice rang and echoed uncannily under the vaulted stone. ‘See! now we prepare a sign as in the old days, so that all men may know!’

  A shaven priest arose and threw something on the brazier and the flame flared up with a sudden intolerable brightness that for a brief moment threw the avid faces into harsh relief. It died again and in the near-darkness that followed a second priest began a chant that was taken up by other voices.

  The light flickered up again, though dimly, and the two priests moved about it, coming and going. The crowd craned their necks to see, and Alex would have given much to stand upright and look over the heads and backs that obscured his view, but he did not dare to draw attention to himself by doing so. He could catch only glimpses between the silhouetted heads. Something was being poured onto a platter; it appeared to be ata - the coarse-ground flour of the villages. A man squatting near the brazier began to beat on a small drum; softly at first, so that it was barely more than a rhythmic accompaniment to the chant, but growing slowly louder and more insistent, until gradually the chant changed its note and became a frenzied incantation, and Alex recognized it as a hymn to Kali:

  ‘Kali! Kali! Oh, dreadful-toothed Goddess! Devour, cut, destroy all the malignant - cut with an axe! Bind, bind, seize! Drink blood! Secure, secure! Salutation to Kali!’

  The ranks of half-seen men began to jerk and sway and once more one of the two priests flung something on the brazier. But this time the brief flare of the flame was followed by a dense smoke that whirled upward and filled the darkness with a choking smell akin to incense: a heady, stupefying smell that drugged and yet exhilarated. The other priest who had moved back into the shadows returned, dragging something that struggled feebly and gave a small bleating cry. A sacrifice, of course, thought Alex. ‘A white goat for Kali.’ They would cut the creature’s throat with suitable ritual.

  He saw the light glint on the long blade of a knife, and the men nearest the priests and the brazier drew back and caught their breath in a harsh and simultaneous gasp that was clearly audible above the thudding beat of the drum. A shudder swept back through the crowd as a wave sweeps in from the open sea, so that even those who could not see felt the surge of that savage emotion, and Alex was seized with a sudden sick horror, inexplicable and paralyzing. A horror that crisped his hair and dried his mouth and brought cold sweat out on his forehead.

  He would have moved then if he could, but his muscles would not obey him, for he was helplessly afraid with a fear that he had never known before. A primitive, primeval fear; not of death, but of Evil … He could hear the harsh panting breath of the men about him and it seemed to him as though they breathed as a pack of wolves might breathe; avidly, tongues lolling, circling about a wounded buck.

  The smoke from the brazier faded and the flame leapt clear, and as it did so a man near it sprang to his feet with a hoarse cry. It was the tall man who had first spoken, and for a moment his face showed clear in the leaping light; a harsh, hawk-nosed face whose deep-set eyes were white-ringed with horror. He called out something that Alex did not hear, for the drum beat louder and the chant rose to a frenzy. Someone in the crowd pulled the man back, and the knife flashed and fell. There was a bubbling, agonized cry, shrill and high and almost instantly drowned in the concerted groaning howl of the crowd. But it had not been an animal’s cry, and Alex stumbled to his feet and stood pressed against the slimy stone of the pillar, and saw what it was that had cried out.

  It was not the body of a white goat that lay on the slab of stained and reeking stone below the flickering brazier, but the naked body of a child. A white child. Alex caught a momentary glimpse of yellow hair and a small mouth that gaped from that last shriek of terror above the gaping scarlet gash of the severed throat. It was a boy of no more than three or four years of age, his small body startlingly white against the dark stone and the bright blood.

  A blind, killing rage laid hold of Alex, blotting out reason and any thought of caution. His hand fumbled in the breast of the flowing Pathan shirt and closed upon the warm metal of the pistol he carried hidden there. At that range he could not miss the priest who stood above the child’s body. He would kill him and his fellow-priest who held the bowl, and three others. And after that there was still his knife …

  He jerked out the pistol and levelled it, and as he did so the man immediately in front of him rose, momentarily blocking his view, and turned to grope his way into the blackness beyond the line of pillars. But that moment had been enough. Sanity returned to Alex and the red fog of rage cleared from his brain. There were more important things at stake than avenging the slaughter of a child. The lives and safety of other children, and of countless men and women, might hang upon his ability to leave that underground den alive. It would do no good to anyone were he to die too, even though he were to take a dozen of that evil company with him to the grave. The thing was too big. It would go forward and spread, and there would be one less voice to cry a warning. Niaz too would not live to tell that tale, for he too would fight.

  Alex slid the pistol back into hiding and wiped the sweat out of his eyes. The horrible ritual of the sacrifice had drawn all eyes and there had been no one watching him. He sank down again onto his heels and found that he was shivering violently. The man who had stolen away into the darkness had left him a clearer field of vision, and once more someone threw a substance on the brazier which hissed and flared and burnt with a bright flame, throwing the faces nearest to it into strong relief. One face in particular caught Alex’s attention. A dark gloating face contorted with hate and excitement; the eyes wide and glittering and avid. Red stones - rubies from their colour - adorned his ears and flashed upon his quivering hands. ‘I shall know that man again, at least,’ thought Alex.

  There was some ritual being performed that he could see but not understand, and then he realized that the fresh blood was being mixed with the flour on the platter. He caught the familiar movements of kneading that he had seen a thousand times before in the lines and beside camp-fires and in the bazaars. They were making a chuppatti; the daily bread of India. To the droning accompaniment of strange incantations and the ceaseless, maddening thud of the drum the dough was kneaded, shaped, flattened and baked on a metal platter laid across the glowing brazier. And all the while, to the sound of that chanting, the rows of watching men swayed and bowed and grovelled on the ground in a state of half-hypnotic frenzy.

  At last the platter was lifted off the fire and the priests of Kali broke up the bread that smoked upon it, mumbling and grunting invocations to gods and devils - invocations as old and as evil as those chanted in the temples of Moloch. The man with the ruby earrings was handed a square of silk by someone behind him, and laying it across his hands he received the broken pieces of the chuppatti from the priests.

  ‘Let the token be sent forth!’ howled the tallest of the priests, tossing his arms above his head. ‘Let it go up and down the land. From the North to the South, from the East to the West! And wheresoever it passes, there shall men’s hearts be turned to hatred of the oppressors. For this is the pestilence - this is the evil - this is the blood of the British!’ His eyeballs rolled in his head and there was froth on his lips. ‘Hear me, Kali! Hear me, O drinker of blood! From the North to the South! From the East to the West!’

  He fell to the ground and writhed upon the stone floor as the second priest flung oil into the brazier and a crackling flame leapt upward to the roof, blazed furiously for a moment and died. The drum crashed and was still. The chanting ceased on a long wailing note and the vault was plunged into darkness and silence - a darkness in which only the red coals of t
he brazier gleamed like a single malignant eye.

  A voice spoke softly into that silence: ‘This that ye have witnessed shall be binding upon all; for were it known, there is not one here whom the feringhis would not hang at a rope’s end for this night’s work. In the eyes of the Company’s Government all who have seen it would be held guilty of the blood that has been shed. It were well to remember this, lest any be tempted to speak unwisely.’ The voice ceased, and presently man after man rose noiselessly and groped their way to the stair shaft to pass up it and out into the clean night air.

  Once there they did not linger, but seemed anxious to avoid each other’s company, emerging from the shaft like ants debouching from a hole in the ground, to hurry furtively away into the darkness.

  The torch-bearers had gone and the stone-paved square with its surrounding wall of jungle was shadowy under the starlight and the waning moon. Alex made his way down the black length of the nullah, guided by a spark of light that proved to be a single chirag - a tiny earthenware saucer filled with oil in which a wisp of cotton did duty as a wick - which had been left on a ledge by the narrow cleft of the gateway. He saw the spark vanish briefly as the man ahead of him passed in front of it and entered the tunnel, and then he himself had reached it.

  17

  Three minutes later Alex was climbing the goat-track on the far side of the nullah and presently he was among the high grass at the end of the plain.

  A hand touched his arm as he passed under the black shadow of a thorn tree, and a voice whispered: ‘It is I, brother.’

  ‘Back!’ said Alex softly. He caught Niaz by the wrist and dragged him swiftly back into the high grass beside the path, crouching down beside him. A moment later another man climbed the slope out of the nullah and passed along the path at a jog-trot. It was a sadhu, his ash-smeared body grey in the moonlight. ‘Down,’ whispered Alex to Niaz who would have moved. ‘Keep down!’ They flattened themselves against the dry ground in the shelter of the dusty, sharp-edged grass and lay still as man after man hurried silently along the narrow goat-track towards the distant village, each man keeping his distance from the next and each one glancing furtively from left to right and quickly over his shoulder: sadhus, sepoys, merchants, townsmen and zemindars; followers of the Prophet or wearers of the sacred thread; disciples of Baba Nanak, and worshippers of Kali.