“Holy cow,” Willie exclaimed. “India? How do you know we’re in—” She rolled over to find herself staring up at the strange, withered face of an old, bony-thin man. She gasped.
The man wore a tattered robe. Around his neck hung strings of fantastic beads. His skin was dark umber, aged as time. He looked like a witch doctor.
An eerie wind rose up howling all around them. Suddenly the old man placed his palms together—Willie jumped—and moved his wedded hands up to touch his forehead.
Willie and Short Round watched, mystified, as Indiana, in like manner, returned the shaman’s silent greeting.
They walked now, the shaman and four turbaned peasants, followed by Indy, carrying his bullwhip; Short Round, carrying Indy’s bag; and Willie, carrying her evening gown and heels. It was a gutted, rocky path they took, through barren, rolling hills. Scrub covered the landscape in patches; an occasional fruitless tree. The air smelled dusty.
Short Round walked comfortably, taking three paces to each of Indy’s two. It wasn’t easy following in the footsteps of such a one, but Short Round was up to the task, for he loved Indy. Indy had befriended him when he hadn’t a friend, trusted him when he’d earned no trust. And Indy was going to take him to America.
They were on their way now. Short Round could hardly believe it. America: where everyone had shoes and hats, rode in cars, knew how to dance, shot straight, made jokes, played hard, held true, looked great, talked smart, ate well, took chances that paid off. That’s where Short Round was going.
He’d guard Indy tenaciously until they got there. Then, once Indy didn’t need a bodyguard anymore, Short Round figured he’d just be Indy’s son; that way he could continue to take care of Indy without having to drive to work every day. The only problem with this plan was that if Indy became Shorty’s father, a mother would be needed. A wife. Like yin needed yang. Like Nick Charles had Nora; Fred Astaire had Ginger Rogers. Robin and Marian. Gable and Harlow. Hsienpo and Ying-t’ai.
It was in the context of these envied and archetypal pairings that Short Round cast his eye on Willie in a new light.
She might be just right for Indy. She was pretty enough; she’d gone the distance, so far. She might do okay for a mom. She and Indy could adopt him, and they could all live on the Twentieth Century Limited, riding the rails back and forth to New York City. It could be a good life. Short Round would have to consider her carefully for the job. He would give it some thought.
Willie, meanwhile, was feeling enormous relief to be alive, even if it was in a big desolate nowhere. Several times during the past night she might as easily have been dead in a big desolate nowhere, and alive was definitely better. She felt the warm stone on her bare feet, she felt the glorious sun on her face, she felt absolutely in intimate touch with her very life. She felt hungry.
She wondered if Indy had any food in his bag or jacket. Walking faster, to catch up with him, she saw he was talking to the shaman.
Actually, the shaman was talking to Indy. “Mama okey enakan bala; gena hitiyey.” Indiana wasn’t exactly fluent in this dialect, but he understood it all right: “I was waiting for you,” the shaman was saying. “I saw it in a dream. I saw the aeroplane fall out of the sky by the river. I saw this in my dream.” The old man kept repeating it over and over.
Willie reached them, listened a moment. “What’d he say?” she asked.
“They’ve been expecting me,” said Indy. He looked puzzled.
“What do you mean—how?”
“The old man saw it in a dream.”
“Dream,” she scoffed. “Nightmare is more like it.”
Indy squinted. “He said they were waiting at the river; they were waiting for the plane to fall down.”
It was a bewildering statement. Willie shook her head. “Where was I? Was I in the dream?”
Indiana smiled at her. Actresses, he thought. He didn’t know any more than she did, though, so there didn’t seem much use in speculation. He just kept walking.
Willie, to ease her growing discomfort, just kept talking. “That’s all? So how’d the dream end? How do we get out of here? When do we eat? I’m famished. What about me?”
The rocky ground turned to parched clay Soon a hot wind swirled dust eddies all around them as the clay became thin soil, cracked and blighted. And finally, at the foot of these ravaged hills, they came to the village.
Mayapore village: like the soil, cracked and blighted.
They walked down a dessicated road through the town. A sense of devastation was palpable. Pitiful villagers stood in groups of three or four, watching the strangers being brought in. Watching without hope.
Women pulled buckets from dry wells, coming up with sand. Miserable dogs skulked between huts of crumbling clay, daub, and wattle. Patient vultures lurked in a few scraggly trees. It was worse than a drought. It was a deathwatch.
Indiana noticed several villagers staring at Short Round, or pointing. A few haggard women seemed to be crying, though they shed no tears, for their bodies would not easily give up such precious water. Indy drew Shorty closer to him; these signs made him uneasy for the boy. Suddenly he realized why.
There were no children in the village.
Short Round saw it, too. He grew frightened by the odd attention, and worried for Indy’s safety. He was Indy’s bodyguard now, after all. He pulled closer, to keep an eye on his old friend, as the wretched population looked on.
They were shown into a small stone hut with three pallets on the floor. It had no windows, so was fractionally cooler than the arid exterior.
“Sleep now,” the shaman told them, “for your journey has made you tired. Later we will eat, and talk. But for now, sleep.” He left them without another word.
Indy translated for his companions.
“But I’m so hungry,” whimpered Willie.
“Try counting lamb chops,” suggested Indiana, lying down on the earth.
It must have worked, for soon they were all asleep.
Black clouds thick with ash clotted across the blood-red sunset.
Indiana, Willie, and Short Round sat tensely on broken stools in a hut with a thatched roof but no walls, only stone arches, encouraging whatever evening breeze there was to enter. Half a dozen elders were silhouetted on the dirt floor around them, some women, some men. Central to these was the village Chieftain, an ancient white-haired man who carried the anguish of all his people on his face.
The Chieftain gave commands. Three more women scuttled in, set wooden bowls before the visitors. No bowls were placed before the elders.
Willie looked expectant. “I sure hope this means dinner.”
“Estuday. Estuday,” Indy said to the women. Thank you.
As he spoke, the women were, in fact, ladling food into the dishes of the guests. It was a grayish gruel mixed with yellow rice and a bit of moldy fruit rind. Willie stared at it in despair. “I can’t eat this.”
“That’s more food than these people have to eat in a week,” Indy advised her. “They’re starving.”
“I can see that,” she replied tersely. “What I fail to see is how my depriving them of this meal is going to help that plight—especially when it makes me gag just to look at it.” As it was, the entire situation made her completely lose her appetite. How could she possibly take this meager portion from these wasting souls? It had never been this bad on the farm in Missouri; even so, these weathered faces brought back unwanted memories. Willie wished she were somewhere else.
“Eat it,” Indy ordered.
“I’m not hungry,” Willie insisted.
The village elders looked on.
Indy smiled thinly. “You’re insulting them and embarrassing me. Eat it.”
She could have cared less about embarrassing Jones, but she had no desire to add affront to the poverty of the village. She ate. They all did.
The Chieftain smiled with satisfaction. “Rest here before you go on,” he said in English.
“We’d appreciate that,” nodded Indiana. So the
Chief spoke English. The British must have been nearby at one time.
“We not rest,” Short Round piped up. “Indy is taking me to America. We go now. We go America.” He just wanted to make sure that was the ground rule here, and understood as such, before anyone came up with any other other thoughts on the matter.
“We go to America,” Willie corrected his grammar. She hadn’t actually let herself think of it before now, but it all of a sudden sounded like a pretty damn good idea. Manhattan, maybe.
“America. America,” nodded the Chieftain, comprehending the notion only vaguely.
“Relax, kid,” Indy said to Shorty, dropping his hat on the boy’s head. Then to the chief: “Can you provide us with a guide to Delhi? I’m a professor and I have to get back to my university.”
“Yes. Sajnu will guide you.”
“Thank you.”
The shaman spoke now. “On the way to Delhi you will stop at Pankot.” It was spoken as if it were already fact, as if he were merely reporting something that had already happened.
Indiana noted the change in tenor. “Pankot isn’t on the way to Delhi,” he said carefully.
“There, you will go to Pankot Palace,” the shaman went on as if Indy hadn’t said a word.
Indy tried a new tack. “I thought the Palace had been deserted since 1857.”
“No,” the shaman corrected. “There is a new Maharajah now, and again the Palace has the dark light. It is as a hundred years ago. It is this place that kills my village.”
Indy was having trouble picking up the thread. “I don’t understand. What’s happened here?”
The shaman spoke slowly, as if explaining to a small child. “The evil starts in Pankot. Then like monsoon it moves darkness over all country.”
“The evil. What evil?” said Indy. He could hear the shaman speaking on two levels, but the levels kept shifting; Indy had the feeling he was trying to see through broken glasses.
Short Round didn’t like the direction of this conversation one hit. “Bad news. You listen to Short Round, you live longer.” He especially didn’t like the interest Indy was showing in the subject. Evil was something you didn’t play around with. Evil didn’t care if you could shoot straight, or run fast.
The shaman continued. “They came from Palace and took Sivalinga from our village.”
“Took what?” broke in Willie. She, too, was getting interested: there was a drama unfolding here, like a dark stage play. She had the sense she was being auditioned for a part.
“A stone,” Indy explained. “A sacred stone from the shrine that protects the village.”
“It is why Krishna brought you here,” the shaman nodded.
Indy wanted to set him straight on that account, though. “No. We weren’t brought here. Our plane crashed.”
Short Round agreed with this assessment. He said “Boom!” and fluttered his fingers down into the palm of his other hand, to make the explanation more graphic for these simple people.
Indy clarified further. “We were sabotaged by—”
“No,” stated the shaman, like a patient teacher to a dim pupil. “We pray to Krishna to help us find the stone. It was Krishna who made you fall from sky. So you will go to Pankot Palace and find Sivalinga and bring back to us.”
Indiana started to object. But then he looked at the sad, pleading Chieftain, the starving peasants, the tortured elders, all watching him helplessly. And he looked, too, once more, into the deep unwavering eyes of the old shaman.
Darkness fell. They all rose; the Chieftain led the way to the edge of the village, accompanied by peasants, elders, and guests. Torches flared throughout the assemblage, like furied spirits. Dogs howled mournfully; the stars seemed far away.
They approached a house-sized boulder, with a small domeshaped altar cut into it. Shorty walked close beside Indiana, confused and apprehensive.
“Indy, they made our plane crash?” he whispered. “To get you here?”
“It’s just superstition, Shorty,” he reassured the boy. “Just a ghost story. Don’t worry about it.”
Short Round wasn’t reassured. He knew ghost stories—tales of mountain demons, and ancestral wandering spirits, stories his brothers had told him before the night they disappeared, stories he’d heard on the street after his family was all gone, after they themselves had been stolen away by thunder-goblins. Stories from shadowy alleyways, and the backs of bars. Stories that came to life at night, when the ghosts came out.
Shorty spoke a silent petition to the God of the Door of Ghosts, the deity who kept vagrant spirits from entering our world . . . or allowed them to pass.
When the group reached the carved niche, the shaman made a gesture of devotion. Short Round began climbing up the rockface to look into this primitive shrine—just to be sure there were no ghosts inside that might be a threat to Indy—but Indiana pulled him back down to earth, giving him a cautionary look.
“They took the Sivalinga from here?” Indy asked the Chief.
“Yes.”
Indiana examined the little nook. It was empty, but an indentation at its base indicated the conical shape of the stone that once had lain there. The shape was familiar to him. “The stone, was it very smooth?”
“Yes,” nodded the shaman.
“It was from the Sacred River?”
“Yes. Brought here long ago, before my father’s father.”
“With three lines across it.” Indy could see it in his mind.
“Yes, that is right.”
“Representing the three levels of the universe,” Indy went on: the illusion of worldly matter; the reality of transcendental spirit; the oneness of all space, time, and substance. It was potent mythology; it vaunted potent talismans. “I’ve seen stones like the one you lost. But why would the Maharajah take this Sacred Stone from here?”
Willie was peering into the empty shrine over Indy’s shoulder. Shorty held on to her leg.
The shaman spoke fiercely. “They say we must pray to their evil god. We say we will not.” Firelight danced in the tearful mist that coated his eyes.
Willie spoke softly. “I don’t understand how losing the rock could destroy the village.”
The shaman was torn by the fullness of his emotion. He tried to speak, but could not find the words in English. Slowly he talked, in his own language, to give his heart some small measure of ease. “Sive linge nathi unata . . .”
Indy translated softly for the others. “When the Sacred Stone was taken, the wells dried up. Then the river turned to sand.” He looked back at the shaman. “Idorayak?” he asked, meaning: “Drought?”
“Na!” the shaman denied. “Gos Kolan maha polawa . . .”
And again, Indiana translated the Hindi: “Our crops were swallowed by the earth, and the animals lay down and turned to dust. One night there was a fire in the fields. The men went out to fight it. When they came back they heard the women crying in the darkness. Lamai.”
“Lamai,” echoed Willie, intently following the words on Indy’s lips in the light of the torches.
“The children,” whispered Indy. “He said they stole their children.”
The shaman walked to the edge of the torchlight and stared out into the darkness. Willie wanted to cry. Short Round felt a chill creep into his breast; he moved closer to Indy. Indy had no words.
The shaman gave a weighted sigh, returned to the circle of light, faced Indy. “You will find our children when you find Sivalinga.”
Indy had to clear his throat before he could speak. “I’m sorry. But I don’t know how I can help you.” He didn’t want to know. There was something deathly about all this. It felt like the edge of a maelstrom.
The shaman and the Chieftain stared keenly into Indiana’s eyes, refusing to accept his denial. Theirs were the eyes of the village, the soul of a crumbling people.
Indy continued to protest. “The English authorities who control this area are the only ones who can help you.”
“They do not listen,”
droned the Chieftain.
“I have friends in Delhi, and I will make sure they investigate this.”
“No, you will go to Pankot,” the shaman charged him. The old man repeated this over several times in his own tongue; with each monotone repetition, Indy felt his resistance dissolving, felt his will reforming in the way the banks of a river will change inexorably under the torrent of the monsoon and be the same river yet altered in its course.
The shaman continued speaking, still in the language of his people.
“What’s he saying now?” Willie prompted.
Indy spoke hoarsely. “He says it was destined that I come here. He says I will know evil; evil already sees me here and knows I am coming. This is my destiny, and the future cannot be changed. He says he cannot see this future. It is my journey alone.”
Short Round and Willie stared at Indy, in the thrall of the story.
Indy gazed, disturbed, at the shaman, each man dancing in the other man’s eyes.
The three companions lay in their hut, trying to sleep, but could not sleep. Images haunted them: disappearing children, animals turning to dust, emptiness incarnate; red flames, black souls.
Indy had explored enough dark regions of the globe to know that every belief system had its own sphere of influence; every magic held sway in the provinces that spawned it. And magic was afoot here, exerting a power over him he could as yet ill define. Still, neither could he put it from his mind. He could only wrestle with it, in the shadows of his half-sleep.
Willie just wanted to leave. She hated this place—the dirt, the hungry farmers, the tense air. It was like just before a tornado, back home. Just before the roof fell in. She wished she could hail a taxi out of here.
Short Round had a bad feeling, a very bad feeling. These people were putting Indy under a spell, binding his spirit so his body would have to follow. Short Round had heard such stories from sailors who’d been to the Philippines or to Haiti; such stories rarely ended well. He would have to be constantly vigilant now, to protect Indy from inner threats as well as outer. He’d have to be more than a bodyguard now; he’d have to be a soul-guard.
Nor was the lady safe, he sensed. Ghosts nibbled her shadow. He could see them from the corner of his eyes; they vanished only if he turned his head to view them straight on. So Short Round would have to watch out for her, too. Otherwise, who would be Indy’s wife in America, after they escaped this spooky, barren place?
The Adventures Of Indiana Jones Page 22