by Talbot Mundy
“Chenresi!” she giggled again. Then her little bright pig-eyes glanced at me and she began to walk toward me quickly. However, my alarm was premature. She shot the door bolt home and, after favoring me with one more furtive glance, returned to the more gallant man. After ogling him a moment she sat down on the mat and faced him, almost knee to knee.
“My name is Kyim-shang.” That statement entitled us to doubt whatever else she might say. Kyim-shang was the famous queen of Tibet who was the daughter of an emperor of China; such names are not bestowed on modern peasants.
Having given her announcement time to sink in she produced out of the ample storage space beneath her bulging bosom two gold chains. Then, touching the earrings that weighed down the lobes of her ears, she intimated (or so we understood) by signs that Chullunder Ghose should estimate their value.
“Now you like me?” she asked.
By the grace of such wit as remained to our babu he did not say no to her. She took his silence for consent and loosed the floods of speech.
She spoke so fast that I could not make head or tail of it at first and Chullunder Ghose did hardly any better, but it dawned on her before long that she was wasting time and breath, so she began to talk more slowly and, though her dialect was difficult, we picked out enough words to get the general drift.
She was sick of the monastery. The monks ill-treated her, calling her foul names, although by bringing her there and keeping her they were just as guilty as herself. Black or yellow-robed, they were a bad lot and there was not much to choose between them, but the dok-dokpa were the worst. She said that two-thirds of the monks in that monastery were dok-dokpas, and the head lama was afraid of them.
“They tried to drop rocks and ice on you,” she went on, “and he knew it. But since you got here with a right guide, he is afraid to let them kill you now. Yet the only way he can prevent it is by promising to have you killed by someone else. So in the morning he will send that man to Jalung-dzong to warn those monks to lie in wait for you.”
“Why do the dok-dokpas want to kill us?” I asked.
She ignored me but answered my question as if Chullunder Ghose had asked it:
“They are afraid you will tell tales about them that may reach the Kun- Dun, who might send them a lama who can really discipline them. Between flattery and threats they can manage this old fool.”
I asked another question and she answered without turning her head to look at me, her idea, I think, being that Chullunder Ghose might possibly be jealous.
“Do you know anything about the chiling, who was called Lung-tok, who was taken prisoner and sent to Jalung-dzong?”
“Everybody knows. He tried to learn the secrets of the dugpas. Now they learn his. And if they catch you they will learn yours.”
“Mother of modesty, why do you think we were guided to this place?” Chullunder Ghose asked her.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “But you will be guided to your death from this place unless you listen to me.”
We listened eagerly enough, she thawing toward me and even talking directly at me as it began to penetrate her understanding that the babu did not mind. Nevertheless, she rather resented his lack of jealousy.
“Go forward — go backward — or remain here; you will be killed! You must escape tonight, and there is nobody except me who will show you how. You must leave those other two, and you must do exactly as I tell you.”
She beckoned me, fingers downward, signifying I should sit a little closer although farther from her than Chullunder Ghose. Then with lowered voice and her head between Chullunder Ghose and me she spoke slowly, repeating such words as she thought we did not understand:
“Leave the ponies — no good. Each man carry barley. Tonight — I come — you follow.”
She laid three fingers on her lips for secrecy, stuck her tongue out at Chullunder Ghose and, with a sidewise leer at me, suggestive of a crumb of patronage, scrambled to her feet and left the room by the inner door, moving much more silently and swiftly than she looked capable of doing.
Her aroma remained, however. I did not know what to think, and as Chullunder Ghose was obviously going to ask me what I did think as soon as he had finished flapping away the smell, I fled into the open air in search of Grim, intending to repeat the woman’s conversation to him, without comment, while it remained fresh in memory.
Narayan Singh was pacing up and down outside the stables, stamping his feet and flapping his arms to keep warm. He looked worried, and relieved to see me, glancing at the sky that was already almost dark and at the shadows deepening in every corner of the courtyard. He kept hitching his sword hilt forward.
“Jimgrim went in there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the stable door. “He bade me wait.”
I opened the door and called to Grim. There was no answer and no sound except from the ponies. It was very dark in there so I struck a match. No sign of Grim. I struck another one and went to examine a pile of sheep-skins over in the farther corner; there were deeper shadows there but I drew them blank. Narayan Singh, framed in the doorway, assured me he had seen Grim enter the stable. I told him to come and look for himself, but be refused.
“Nay! Jimgrim bade me stand guard.”
I struck more matches and looked everywhere for some other way out of the stable, even pulling aside the heap of sheepskins; but at the back there appeared to be nothing except solid cliff, into which the roof-beams were set, and in the other three walls there was only the one door. I returned to Narayan Singh and questioned him but he stuck to his story.
“Jimgrim went in there and closed the door. Nay, I do not know why. Nay, I heard no sound. On my honor I have not slept. I have stood here as he bade me, and he has not come out.”
I told him about the woman and what she had said.
“One woman was already bad enough,” he commented. “That hag who led us here was a mother of mischief. I looked into her eyes and I saw mockery. If there is another woman meddling, it is time we made ready for trouble.”
Narayan Singh seemed in a nervous, superstitious mood and kept on glancing at the deepening shadows. It was clouding over and there were no stars visible. I shut the stable door and told Narayan Singh to keep a sharp lookout for Grim while I would go and bring the babu.
Nothing in the world was darker than that courtyard by the time I crossed it. I could hardly see the monastery door but I could hear the monks at prayer, murmuring responses to an accompaniment of bell-ringing and the blare of a radong.
It was pitch dark in the room where I had left the babu, but I heard voices whispering and as I entered he spoke aloud:
“Nay, pearl of purity, I swore a vow never to offend against a virgin. He whose name is Rammy shall offend first. Here he comes.”
He clutched my arm, the woman pulling at his other sleeve, and although I could not see I could hear him try to thrust her away from him, she resisting.
“Rammy sahib, this mountain of corruption — this chasm of stinks says we are to go now while the monks are all praying. She has brought two bags of barley. She says unless we follow her the yellow lama will imprison us.”
I told him that Grim was missing and that my plan was to get the ponies ready. He agreed. He would have agreed to anything to escape from the arms of that Tibetan woman.
“But unless we let her come with us she will have her revenge — which might possibly be sweeter to her than herself,” he remarked. “She would certainly spread the alarm.”
Abruptly he commanded her to gather up the barley bags and carry them. She grunted as she hove the weight of one of them and called to him to help her lift the other, but we strode out and left her to follow or not as she might choose. She dropped the bags and overtook us, taking our arms and forcing herself between us.
“Never mind!” she exclaimed. “Never mind! I shall go back for the barley. You wait in the stable for me.”
She followed us toward the stable door, recoiling when she saw Narayan Singh loo
m out of shadow.
“Tsa-a-ah!” she exclaimed. “Where is the other one?”
Narayan Singh laid hold of her. “Aye, where!” he answered. “Mother of abominations, you shall stay until we find him!”
She let loose a peculiarly modulated yell. It was not loud but there was terror in it. Narayan Singh opened the stable door, thrust her through and closed it again.
“No sign of Grim?” I asked.
“None, but I have faith in Jimgrim. He will turn up.”
“Let’s be ready for him when he comes,” I said. “You’d better help us load the ponies.”
He demurred, having orders to stay where he was; but I saw no sense in his standing there, since he was twice as good as Chullunder Ghose at managing the ponies in the dark. I told him I took the responsibility and he went into the stable, muttering. Chullunder Ghose went next; I, last, and shut the door behind me since the monks might have a watchman on the prowl.
Then I felt in my pocket for matches and shook the box, and suddenly a man’s voice close beside me exclaimed “No!” A hand like a steel vise clutched my arms. Chullunder Ghose gasped. I heard an oath from Narayan Singh and then the swish-swish of his saber. Then a cut-off scream; I did not doubt it was the woman’s.
CHAPTER XX. Prisoners — Jimgrim is missing.
Until he shall be tested to the utmost none may know what hidden weakness lingers in him. Neither can he know his own strength.
— from The Book Of The Sayings Of Tsiang Samdup
I STRUCK out right and left into the dark. I was surrounded. There were other men who moved among the ponies, whispering, and I was sprung on from behind by men who struggled to tie my arms while another drove his thumbs into my throat. Chullunder Ghose cried out for help, but someone struck him on the head and after that he made no sound. Narayan Singh fought like a catamount somewhere in among the ponies that lashed out with their heels at random; he kept shouting to me to use my pistol, but with two men on either arm I could not reach it.
Suddenly he shook himself free and used his, getting in two shots before they rushed him from behind. I heard the pistol knocked or dragged out of his hand; it struck the wall not far from me. Then I went down under half a dozen men, whose greasy bodies stank of the accumulated filth of years. My muscles cracked as they got the cords around my arms and I cried out to Narayan Singh to save himself and find Grim if he could. An invisible hand struck me hard over the mouth, feeling for it first with thumbs and fingers, and a voice growled in Tibetan:
“Silence!”
Narayan Singh had received my leave to go. He went like a whirlwind. Someone — very likely he — had loosed the ponies and they milled around the shed, while he clung to the mane of one of them. There was tumult in the dark, and then, in what seemed like a second, he was gone through the shed door. A voice I thought I recognized commanded in Tibetan: “Go after that fool and kill him!”
It was like Grim’s voice! Somewhere in the darkness close to me Chullunder Ghose recovered his stunned senses just sufficiently to murmur “Jimgrim!” Someone hit him on the head again and he lay still. With four men holding me face downward I could only move inch by inch, but I contrived to get a glimpse of night sky through the open shed door and, against it, a man’s figure. He was staring out into the night, watching the men who had pursued Narayan Singh. Even his figure looked like Grim’s.
Cords cut my arms; men knelt on me and I was half-stunned — in no fit state to trust my senses but it was hardly likely I should not know Grim. A sort of madness seized me as the conviction grew that Grim had gone insane. I began to struggle, until a blow on the back of the head reminded me to lie still.
The man in the doorway laughed; and it was Grim’s laugh. Presently he closed the door, but struck a match and lit a cigarette. Then instantly, by the flare of the match, I recognized him.
He was wearing Grim’s clothes — native Indian khaki underneath a yak-skin overcoat. He came and stood over me, raising my chin with his toe, then struck another match to let me see him.
I hated him less for that indignity than for having made me think, for one mad minute, he was Grim. His beard was gone; the long black hair that he had worn over his shoulders when we saw him last had been tucked inside the yak- skin cap, but he was unmistakably the man who threw me backward in Sidiki ben Mohammed’s house in Leh — the same of whom I dreamed between the gods’ knees in the cave above the hall of stalagmite. His look of tigerish masculinity had vanished with the beard, but I could see he was taller than Grim, now that he stood naturally, and when he squatted down close to me, cross-legged, it was with the same effortless, slow movement as if he had been lowered by an unseen hand. He appeared to be proud of that trick.
“You were looking for Rait! You shall see him,” he said.
He appeared to expect me to answer, and laughed cynically when I did not.
“I can read your thoughts more easily than understand your clumsy accent,” he remarked in perfectly good English. But it sounded more like a boast intended to make me lose confidence in my own senses.
“You poor super-hypocrite!” he sneered. “You are not a typical example of the West, you are its archetype; you are its perfect specimen! You funny muscle-maniac! You straw in the wind of misdirected energy! You make me laugh, you poor, unpigmented, blind checker-on-a board! Now listen:
“Your Jimgrim is done for. You were warned in the letter Rait wrote you not to bring him or that sabered imbecile Narayan Singh. You brought them in spite of the warning, so their blood is on your head. Not that it matters. The world is richer for the loss of two such fools.
“You are a bigger fool than either of them, and how we’re going to smash the shell of your stupidity is something of a puzzle; however, we will do our best, and if you break up with the shell, it won’t much matter.
“I gave you credit for being a bit less stupid than you are, and intending to trap you, I put on Jimgrim’s clothes, at you don’t know what disgusting inconvenience to me; they reek of his smug self-righteousness.”
I lay still. The cord on my arms was slipping and I hoped to get a hand free and break his neck. But one of the men who was kneeling on me felt at the cord and tightened it so sharply that I winced.
“Ah!” remarked the man in Grim’s clothes. “Pain is a great educator. If you had Rait’s imagination we could make much more of you, I don’t doubt. We tortured him mentally. You won’t suffer worse, but differently. The result won’t be so efficacious. To reach mind through the body is to lose by indirectness. We shall never be able to make more of you than an assistant for your friend Rait.
“How you do make me laugh! Now you lie there and believe you are enough of a man to hold out and to disobey us after we have finished schooling you! Rait thought himself too clever. You think yourself too obstinate. Well, you shall see what we have made of Rait in hardly any time at all, and that may help you to yield without quite so much suffering — although we don’t believe in sparing the initiate. We stamp pain on the memory and kill out even the suggestion of a possibility of mercy.
“You are going to learn, in your degree, my friend, how true is your identity with Nature, who is red in tooth and claw and not the merciful, wise mother that the sentimentalists so moralize about.”
He gave me the impression he was merely passing time until it was convenient to make his next move; and he confirmed it when the men returned who had been looking for Narayan Singh. They whispered to him and he gave a sharp command I did not catch.
Immediately the men who knelt on me began to kick and drag me to my feet and I heard others striking and prodding Chullunder Ghose. The babu cried out and someone struck him over the mouth. I called to him to play the man, but almost before the words were out one of my captors’ knuckles struck me and made my lips bleed. I was dragged out through the doorway and compelled to walk through the gap in the courtyard wall behind the man in Grim’s clothes.
My captors were all monks in sheepskin overcoats and t
here were at least a dozen of them following me down the trail, so I could not see what happened to Chullunder Ghose though I could hear considerable noise; and when, at last, we reached the bottom of the long descent and halted near the chorten at the entrance it appeared that they had dragged him all the way down on his back with his hands tied and a rope passed through his armpits. The man in Grim’s clothes prodded him until he stirred, then turned to me.
“Understand,” he said, thrusting his face close to mine, “there will be no nonsense about sparing you. You’re coming. You’re coming on foot. Try to refuse and you will be tortured. You will not in any case be carried or allowed to die.”
He began to search my pockets leisurely, transferring all their contents to a bag that one of his monks carried slung by a strap. When he found my automatic pistol he laughed as if it were a baby’s toy and held it up for the monks to be amused at. One of them showed the pistol he had taken from Chullunder Ghose and another, seizing it by the barrel, cracked me over the shins with it.
Nothing hurts more on a cold night than a blow on the shin. My legs were not tied. I kicked him, putting all the lift into it that I could muster. It was not long before I wished I had controlled that impulse. Though I broke a couple of his ribs he was a tough, determined expert in malignity and all the pain the broken ribs caused he repaid to me twice over on the march, with greater will because the others laughed at him.
The man in Grim’s clothes led the way, striding along as if leagues were yards. My captors ordered me to follow next, and the monk whose ribs I had broken took another man’s staff to lean on, but used it more often to prod at my heels from behind — a species of torture far more irritating than the pain of the rope on my wrists. When I turned on him I was tripped with the staff, knocked down and then struck until I got up and resumed the march. In the darkness twenty yards behind me more than a dozen monks were bullying Chullunder Ghose. They dragged him on his back until the agony of that awoke his stunned brain and he scrambled to his feet. Because he cried out then they put a rope around his neck and jerked it, beating him when he stood still for lack of breath.