Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  King knew he counted on the effect of it, for the hypnotist works by rule of thumb and uses one trick after another until the resisting victim yields. He hung on to his remaining self-command like a man over-board clinging to an oar, and was conscious of the sound of wheels advancing tip-street. He could hear bullocks’ feet. He knew what that meant.

  Ali’s hammering ceased, and just as suddenly began again.

  “What do you want?” King demanded — a very unsafe question to put to a skilful hypnotist, unless you happen to be just as skilful in defense. It was tantamount to lowering his guard by way of tempting an opponent. But he knew that all he had to do was gain time now and keep the man’s attention. A hypnotist engaged in trying to master three strong men at once is as oblivious to other sounds and circumstances as his victims will be when he has control of them.

  “You!” said the fellow with the bronze face. “Only you! These are not strong enough!”

  He pushed Grim and Jeremy — brushed them aside with his left hand, and they fell to the ground as if he had pole-axed them. That of itself had almost been enough to overcome the last of King’s resistance, only that King’s face was toward the wall and the bronze man had his back to it. King saw something, the other did not even hear.

  “You know so much, you shall be a Ninth, and later on perhaps a captain of a Nine!” He continued to speak English.

  The bronze smile never varied, but the dark eyes changed; they were considering King’s resistance, speculating as to the source of its strength, calculating which next trick to play. Slowly, the way a serpent moves advancing on a spell-bound bird, his right arm began to approach King’s eyes, and every faculty the man owned was concentrated in one immense magnetic effort to induce a responding state of mind in King. King knew that if the finger touched him he would go down under it beaten — for the time at all events.

  He stepped back — saw the wall — again saw something else — another, less inhuman hand — stepped back again and shouted to help break the spell:

  “Rammy!”

  Jeff boasts that eight of him would weigh a ton. If so, two hundredweight and a half of solid bone and muscle landed from the top of the wall feet-first on the shoulders of the hypnotist — as unexpected and as efficacious as a mine exploded in a crisis! The hypnotist was caught off-guard, and all his deviltry was no more good.

  Slow to think and cautious as he always is, Ramsden had lain on the top of the wall to listen and look before jumping. He knew what to do. He had the whole plan mapped out in his mind. But he knew, too, that his only chance of executing it was to keep the bronze enemy engaged. Give him a minute’s respite and he would be as dangerous as ever. The two had gone down on the stone flags hard enough to knock the senses out of any ordinary men. But the enemy recovered as swiftly as a snake recoiling for the strike, and Jeff had to wade in fist-first whether he wanted to or not, taking the fight to him, giving him no grace for concentration, forcing him on the defensive, barking his orders at King like irregular explosions from a motor-car’s exhaust.

  “Let Ali in! Out o’ here! Leave this erne! Get Grim! Get Jeremy! Quick! Quick! Cyprian’s! I’ll fix this—”

  Fixing consisted of catch-as-catch-can, no hold barred, all the fist-work thrown in there was time and room for. He of the bronze face knew his hour was come unless he could break the arms and legs of his heavy assailant. His occult powers were as contingent on environment and suitable conditions as are steam and electricity.

  Jeff knew he could expect no quarter. Weight for weight they were a match, and strength for strength — a man who had kept fit by wrestling because he loved the last ounce of the grit and guts he drew from the Great Quartermaster’s store — and another who had cultivated strength from a delight in mastery, and cruelty, and the ability to go unchallenged. The magic of good nature, slow to wrath, against black magic and relentlessness!

  It was not easy to judge which way the odds were.

  They tore, wrenched, struck and scrambled for holds like lions in the mating season when the lioness looks on. Once the man in yellow set his teeth into Jeff’s collarbone and tried to tear it out; but that only offered Jeff a steady target for his fist; it was as good as a head in chancery; Jeff’s fist went home into the other’s jaw with a blow that put all hypnotism out of the question for the rest of that fight; it was like the thump of a pole-ax in the slaughter yards.

  Every hold that either got was broken by fist-work or some other means that would be reckoned fouling in the ring. Again and again each crashed the other’s head down on the stone flags. They fought beside the stones that had fallen from the summit of the minaret, striving to break each other’s bones against sharp corners. Once, when the man in yellow drew a deep breath, Jeff got three fingers in under his ribs and all but tore them out. That was the only time when pain drew a cry from either of them. According to Ali, who was hectoring his sons, dragging out the prisoner, helping King to carry out Grim and Jeremy, and narrating his own adventure between breaths, they looked like a tiger battling with a python as they rolled, heaved, struck and snarled for breath under the torture of each other’s holds. King said they looked like an illustration out of Dante’s Hell.

  They bled from collision with the masonry. They soon became so slippery with blood that no hold held, and that was when Jeff’s advantage gradually told — (if gradually means much in a fight that was as swift as the whirling typhoon is from start to finish.) Ramsden had the other’s arm bent backward around his head and was twisting it with one hand while he kept a scissors-hold and pounded the man’s eyes with the other fist — when King at last got the prisoner and Grim and Jeremy, with Ali’s sons for guard, into the covered ox-cart.

  King came on the run then. He reached the spot as the bronze man broke the scissors-hold and writhed heels-over-head to untwist the tortured arm. And as King picked up a broken stone to brain the enemy, Jeff rose — swept tip his weakening man by neck and leg — lifted him — and with an effort born of twenty years’ clean living and good will hurled him head-first on to the flags. His skull cracked like an egg.

  “I said I’d fix him. Let him lie,” said Jeff beginning to feel himself for damages.

  “No, bring him,” King answered.

  Without waiting for the reason Jeff gathered up the still pulsating body and carried it outside to the already crowded bullock-cart. There Ali was holding forth to his sons, talking to them from the driver’s seat through the embroidered curtains:

  “Remember that, sons of forgetfulness! Bury my brother and bear it in mind against the day of revenge. He died like a fool, but I was wise. I felt the tingle of the magic and fell unresisting. Put him in the wagon gently. Lo, they took the rupees Jimgrim gave him! But I live! Hah! I lay considering how to attack that devil from behind! When the tingling left my bones I used my knife-hilt on the door, and if Rammy sahib had not come I—”

  “One man make room for this corpse! Let the prisoner make its intimate acquaintance!” King interrupted.

  So Ali’s advice to his sons was cut short and one of the guards had to get out and follow the cart, in which were now two corpses, the prisoner, Ali and two sons, and Grim and Jeremy. Ramsden acted as driver, sticking his toes under the bullocks’ tails in the fashion of Hindustan and steering with a tail in each hand, making noises to the patient brutes pretty closely resembling the cry of an angry parrot.

  Ramsden could have passed for a hospital case without extra make-up. His late antagonist had used the losing desperado’s recipe, disfiguring where he could not break, in the vain hope of destroying the superior man’s morale. With hair torn from his black beard — raw seams where the Hindu’s fingernails had grouted — blood in his hair, and turban gone — torn raiment, and great bruises showing through the rents — Ramsden looked more like a wild man from the Hills than any sort of civilized being. And that was no ill circumstance in itself, for it tended to prevent interference.

  The same solitary constable who had run when Gri
m, Jeremy and King dropped down into the street like highwaymen, came close to regain his own self-respect by bullying these night-farers. But King walked in front in yellow garb, with that red caste-mark on his forehead; one of the sons of Ali with a tulwar walked behind, making the keen steel whistle and announcing that three heads with three blows was his average score. Worst of all, Ramsden sat perched above the shaft-tail, looking capable and willing to pull any man to pieces — growling like a big bear.

  So the constable remarked it was a hot night, and Habibullah called him a liar, saying no heat was like that of Tophet, where the enemies all went whom he beheaded three at a time with three blows.

  “Ho! I scatter their brains for the birds!” he shouted, until even father Ali — richer than he had been — considered it expedient to reprimand him.

  “Have I wasted rupees fifty on an empty boaster?” he demanded acidly through the rear embroidered curtains; and thenceforward Habibullah marched sedately, thumbing the tulwar instead of swinging it, reflecting on life’s little ironies no doubt.

  Inside the ox-cart Grim and Jeremy recovered presently, not having once lost consciousness. The effect of the bronze man’s hypnotism had been like that of the drug curare, paralyzing the nerve centers yet leaving them free to feel and to think as acutely as ever. The hypnosis lasted several minutes after the man’s death.

  “Proving,” said Grim, “that we ourselves did it to us. All he did was to know how to make us do it.”

  But that did not help Jeremy. He was disconsolate. Shame ate his heart out that he, the deceiver of thousands, the ventriloquist, the conjurer, should have fallen captive of another’s bow and spear.

  “For it’s as much a trick as palming ’em!” he grumbled. “I swear it’s a trick! By crickey, I’ll learn it, and by God I’ll hypnotize the whole of India! You watch!”

  Grim lit an oil lamp that hung in a bracket from the roof and, more with the notion, of quieting Jeremy than anything, began to introduce the prisoner to the corpse.

  It was no use pretending any longer to the prisoner that they were Indian members of a different Nine; he had heard them speaking English.

  But there was a chance that he knew no German, and an almost equally good one that superstition had eaten all his judgment long ago. Grim whispered a long while in German to Jeremy, who presently raised the battered corpse and propped it in the corner, where the feeble lamp-rays shone on the face and the open eyes. The jaw fell, and Grim, watching the prisoner’s face, settled back into his own dark corner satisfied.

  The corpse spoke!

  “I am dead!” it announced in Punjabi through broken teeth that had left their mark indelibly on Ramsden’s fist.

  The prisoner gasped. Ali and his sons grew gray with fear. Their teeth chattered. Ali would have used the hilt of his long knife on the corpse to beat it into silence but for Grim’s restraining arm. The atmosphere was perfect for any kind of illusion — stifling, electric, full of panic.

  “I am dead, but the silver cord is not yet cut,” said the corpse.

  Even Grim felt a shiver pass through him. He reached up and turned the light out lest the illusion fail, for the jaw had dropped unseemly and betrayed no intention of closing again to frame the words that Jeremy put into it. Nevertheless, they had seen the blood and the broken teeth — enough to account for faults of pronunciation.

  “I see dimly — only dimly,” said the corpse. “Who sits against me?”

  Two of the sons of Ali, deathly frightened, named their names. The corpse went on with sharper accent:

  “Who else? I smell—”

  The word smell may have had significance unknown to Jeremy. It made the prisoner toe the line. He sat up straight and answered:

  “I sit in front of you. Why speak Punjabi? Talk in our tongue!”

  “I? I? Who is I?” the corpse demanded angrily. “Nanak.”

  “Ah! I had looked for Nanak. I was seeking Nanak when the Karma overtook me.* Nanak — listen!”

  “Speak the secret tongue!” said Nanak, trembling in his last effort to retain incredulity and self-control.

  Grim struck a match and blew it out. The moment’s flash lit up the dead face, making it seem to move — an accident — one of those accidents that do occur to men who strive persistently. All that Grim had intended was to guard against Nanak’s escape.

  “Nay. For I will not speak twice; and these must understand,” said the corpse. “Hear thou me, Nanak. These are they of an alien race whom the gods have sent to unmask the Nine Unknown. Obey them, Nanak. For. the Nine Unknown are known to the gods, who have endured them long enough.”

  The prisoner had passed the point of incredulity and hesitated on the verge of full belief.

  “If thou speakest truth,” he said, “tell me, why art thou dead, and I living?”

  A poser for the priests! But the answer was as prompt as the solution of any trick staged by Jeremy.

  “Karma* overtook me. The tale of thy years, Nanak, has a while to run. Thy willingness to shield a friend at thy cost has obtained thee a privilege. Obey these men, Nanak, that the gods may love and recompense thee!”

  The corpse ceased speaking. In the ensuing silence Nanak with a crackling throat sought to induce it to say more, wheedling, imploring, praying for answers to a score of doubts that tortured his bewildered mind.

  But if Jeremy knows one thing it is this: Never repeat a miracle! If lightning never strikes the same tree twice, no conjurer need hope to mystify again the same audience in the same place with the selfsame trick.

  Grim struck another match and lit the lamp. The corpse looked more dead than even Ali’s brother did, who lay face-downward with the thin, round end of a brass dart just protruding from the base of his shaved skull. The dead thing’s head lolled sidewise and rolled with each bump of the two-wheeled cart, amid a chorus of quick, low-breathed exclamations of:

  “Allah! Lord of Mercies! Nay, there is no God but Allah! Allah! Allah!”

  Then came Chullunder Ghose, near-naked and beside himself, charging by King, not recognizing him, distracted, slippery with sweat. King’s fingers slipped off his arm and failed to bring him to a halt. He ran straight at the big oxen, that will gore a white man but permit the vegetarian Hindu almost any liberties. Setting a foot on the how of the yoke between them he leaped along it and collapsed in Ramsden’s lap — a mound of hot flesh on a fellow every inch of whose anatomy was sore.

  “Oh terrible! Most awful happenings! Rammy sahib—”

  Ramsden, saying nothing, bundled him over the rump of the near ox to the street, where he lay for a minute calling on a pantheon of gods and devils. It was luck that preserved the wheel from passing over him. King turned back; Grim and Jeremy emerged; Chullunder Ghose was hauled clear of hoofs and wheels. Ali of Sikunderam suggested drastic remedies.

  “A Hindu thinks fire is a god.* Burn him then with latches! Let the god wring speech from him!”

  “Oh, terrible! Oh, awful happenings!” moaned the Babu.

  They could not wait there in mid-street while Chullunder Ghose rambled of uncertainties. Nor was there room for the babu in the covered cart without removing guards or corpses. Corpses had it. One corpse at least.

  “Out with him! Into the shadow! In with the babu! That’s it — drive on, Rammy!”

  Noises that only oxen understand emerged from Jeff’s aching throat, and with a tail in each hand again he sent the conveyance forward, only to bring it to a halt a moment later.

  Now another apparition raged up-street, as nearly naked as the babu had been — bearded, this one — swift — enormous — with a turban still in place and shaking what looked like a club in his right hand.

  “Sahibs !”

  “Quick, Narayan Singh! What’s happened?”

  He could hardly speak for gasping. There was spittle on his black beard — smoke, and its stinging red-rimmed traces in his eyes — a cut across his knuckles where le had guarded a blow — and a bloody, wet mess where a knife of
some kind had passed between arm and ribs.

  “They got my pistol!”

  “Who? How? When? Where?”

  “They did! Now! From behind!”

  “Where, man? Where?”

  “Her house! Gauri’s!”

  “Where’s Cyprian?”

  “Sahibs ! Sahibs !” Narayan Singh was wilder-eyed than ever. The thing in his hand was no club, but a broken section of a bed-rail. He shook it like a clansman summoning the border-watch.

  “They have burned the house!”

  “And Cyprian?”

  “My sons! My sons!” yelled Ali of Sikunderam. “I left four of them at Gauri’s!”

  He waited for no ceremony of permission — charged down-street with the remaining sons, waving his Khyber knife, beside Habibullah, bidding him make good his newly won fame as a smiter of three in three blows. And in the nick of time Jeremy pounced on the prisoner, who was seizing the obvious advantage; they fought under the wheels, rolling over and over, hardly noticed until Jeremy found breath to shout for help — a shout that saved Chullunder Ghose.

  For while the babu lay in something like hysterics, grateful for the darkness in the covered cart, three men in yellow crept from the rear and groped over the cart-tail, seizing Ali’s brother’s corpse by both the feet and dragging it out in such light as there was for inspection.

  “Dead! Nay, he is not the boaster!” said a voice in Punjabi.

  “Look!” said another. “They fight under the cart! Our guru is alive!”

  “Nay, we found the guru’s body! Those are others! Slay!”

  It was then that Jeremy shouted — then that King, Grim and Ramsden darted around the cart — then that one of the men in yellow answered:

  “Nay, I say I saw the boaster run!”

  So whether they fled from Grim and Jeremy, or whether Jeff’s appearance was too terrifying, or whether they dared all in lust for vengeance on the man who “slew three Kali-wallahs with three smites,” did not transpire. They fled, dodging the blows aimed left and right at them — dodging even the terrific swipe of Narayan Singh’s broken bed-rail — leaving behind neither explanation nor the corpse of the guru with the bronze face — although where they had cached that was another mystery.