Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Why tell me all this?” Quorn asked him.

  “To disturb you,” said the babu. “If I like a man at first sight, I invariably tell him secrets, to discover his reaction to them. That is thoroughly immoral, but it often saves me from making mistakes later on.”

  “Ain’t going to be no later on,” Quorn answered. “Me and you are destined to be strangers. I’ll be civil to you, that’s all.”

  “Ah!” Chullunder Ghose shone with amusement. His intelligent eyes became liquid with silent laughter. “Having been the destinee of too much trouble, as for me I don’t believe in destinee at all. To hell with it.”

  “Same here,” Quorn agreed. Then he finished his drink by way of emphasis. The babu emerged from his chair, with astonishing lack of effort in such a big-bellied man, and beckoned to a sais to bring his pony. He mounted the animal, Quorn marveling that even such a stocky little mount as that could carry such a huge weight.

  “Neither of us then believes in destiny? Both are skeptics? Good,” said the babu, smiling as he gathered up his reins and opened his sunshade. “Destiny, however, may not be a skeptic. How if destiny believes in us? Have you considered it? Auf wiedersehen — come and have a drink with me at any time.”

  He rode off, riding admirably. Seen from behind he resembled the pot-bellied Chinese god of Luck, all confidence, good temper and amused indifference to human morals.

  Quorn stuck his hands in his pockets. “That guy’s up to no good,” he remarked to himself. Then he strolled across the compound to observe the elephants.

  III

  Asoka

  Before he had been three weeks in Narada, Quorn had struck up quite an acquaintance with the biggest elephant of all, Asoka, who was chained by one leg to the picket farthest from the compound gate. He was a monster possessed of immeasurable dignity and was reputed, too, to have a temper like a typhoon, although Quorn had seen no evidence of that. He and the great animal were satisfied to stare in silence at each other, neither betraying a trace of emotion. Asoka swayed and fidgeted, as all elephants do. Quorn stood still. A mahout watched, squatting beneath a neem tree with his naked brats around him, all dependent for their living on the elephant and all ungrateful, but aware of obligations.

  Quorn’s back being toward the compound gate, he did not see the Maharajah enter — did not even hear him ride in followed by a group of mounted squires. The Maharajah was a handsome man, magnificently horsed. He looked too lazy to be dangerous; but his squires kept well out of range of his riding whip. He wore a blood-red turban, possibly suggestive of his inner feelings; and he spent ten or fifteen minutes at the congenial task of cursing the ancestors, immediate and distant relatives, the female family and person of the head mahout, to whom, after threatening to have him thrashed to death, he gave reluctant leave to live because a substitute might be an even more disgusting scoundrel.

  Meanwhile, destiny being a dead superstition, some other influence touched the trigger of the unseen mechanism that propels events. Perhaps it was the fact that Quorn found time a little heavy on his hands. For the first time in his entire experience of elephants he had the curiosity to find out whether or not Asoka would obey his orders. He commanded the brute to lie down. To his agreeable surprise, Asoka slowly descended to earth, like a big balloon with the gas let out, and thrust out a forefoot for Quorn to sit on. Quorn did not understand that gesture, but he sensed some sort of invitation and drew nearer. Then, smiling at his own foolishness, wondering what Philadelphia would think of it, he vaulted on to the great brute’s neck, thrusting his knees under the ears, as he had seen mahouts do. He felt younger and ridiculous, but rather pleased. He thought he could imagine worse things than to have to ride elephants all day long.

  It was at that moment, just as Quorn was mounting, that the mahout’s brats, underneath the neem tree, caught sight of the Maharajah riding forward down the track between the avenue of big trees in the middle of the compound. They yelled with one voice to Asoka to get up and salute the Heavenborn. Quorn held on, exclaiming —

  “Hold her, now there, steady!”

  But Asoka knew no English. He rose like a leisurely earthquake. Quorn tried to think of ways to get down, but his nerves were suddenly, and utterly for the moment, paralyzed. Asoka raised a forefoot, threw his trunk in air, and screamed the horrible salute that Hannibal, a thousand viceroys and kings, some wisemen and a host of fools have been accepting as their due since elephants were first made captive. It sounded like paleolithic anguish.

  The Maharajah was riding a new, young horse that had not yet been broken to the voice of elephants. The horse reared, terrified. The Rajah spurred him. Four-and-thirty elephants at pickets scattered up and down the compound, taking their signal from Asoka, trumpeted a goose-flesh raising chorus, each of them raising a forefoot and stamping the dusty earth until a cloud went up through which the sun shone like a great god, angry.

  Terror, aggravated by whip and spurs and by the cries of the mahouts, became a thousand devils in the Maharajah’s horse’s brain. Strength, frenzy, speed and will were his to get to hell from that inferno. He shed the Maharajah — spastically, as a cataclysm sheds restraint. He fled, as life goes fleeing from the fangs of death — a streak of sun-lit bay with silver stirrups hammering his flanks, and a broken rein to add, if it were possible to add to anything so absolute and all-inclusive as that passion to be elsewhere.

  Asoka trumpeted again, accepting all that tumult as applause. The Maharajah sprawled in smelly dirt, too angry to be stunned, too mortified to curse his squires. But panic warned those gentry that their master’s royal anger would be vented on themselves; and they were conscious of too many undetected crimes against him to feel able to defy injustice. They must act, to direct injustice elsewhere. So some fool struck Asoka as the source of the catastrophe, struck him across his friendly, sensitive, outreaching trunk with a stinging whalebone riding whip.

  Then genuine disaster broke loose naturally — upward of four tons of it, with Quorn on top. A green and golden panorama veiled in smelly haze, with sacred monkeys scampering like bad thoughts back to where bad thoughts come from, wherever that is; and a crowd of frantic horses, shouting mahouts and screaming children darting to and fro, was opened, split asunder and left gasping at Asoka’s great gray rump. It had an absurd tail, like an elongated question mark suggesting that all speculation was useless as to what would happen next.

  The unbelievable had happened. Never before, in more than forty years, had Asoka broken faith by snapping that futile ankle-ring. He had always played fair. He had pretended the rusty iron was stronger than the lure of mischief, thus permitting an ungrateful, dissolute mahout to spend the price of a new steel ring on arrack, which is worse than white mule whisky, and more prolific of misjudgment.

  And now Quorn and Asoka were one unit, provided Quorn could keep his balance, and his knees under those upraised ears. He had never before ridden on an elephant. The only earthquake motion he had ever felt was on the steamer on the way to India, and there had been something then to cling to, as well as fellow passengers to lend him confidence. He was alone now — as alone as an unwilling thunderbolt, aware of Force that was expelling him from something that he understood, into an unknown but immediate future where explosion lay in wait.

  “Whoa, blood! Steady!”

  Asoka screamed contempt of consequences. Quorn’s helmet fell over his eyes; he did not dare to lift a hand to push it back in place. He was drenched in sweat. He felt the low branches of trees brush past him and was aware of danger, colored green, that went by far too swiftly to be recognized. The speed was beyond measurement; it was relative to Quorn’s imagination and to nothing else except Asoka’s wrath. They four were one — two animals, two states of consciousness, with one goal, swiftly to be reached but unpredictable.

  They passed through the compound gate like gray disaster being born. Several sarcastic godlets on the ancient gateposts grinned good riddance. And because the road led straight tow
ard the market, headlong forward went Asoka, caring nothing whither so he got there, and then somewhere else. Carts went crashing right and left. A swath of booths and tents were laid low. Fruit stalls, egg stalls, sticky colored drink stalls, peep-shows, fortunetellers’ tents and vegetable curry stalls lined the long road amid piles of baskets. An indignant elephant goes through and not around things. All that trash went down as if a typhoon struck it, each concussion a fresh insult to Asoka. He was red-eyed. He was a rebel against the human race.

  Quorn ceased to wonder what would happen. Fear had gone its limit. He recovered that state of consciousness that makes some men superior to elephants. Not that he felt superior — not yet by any means; he felt like nothing on the edge of chaos. But he had begun to speculate in terms of why, instead of what.

  “Why me?” he wondered. “Easy, feller, easy! Where d’you kid yourself you’re going, fathead? Let me down and then smash all you want to! Who-o-a, Irish!”

  There were dozens of collisions, there was a mile of ruin in his wake, before it occurred to Quorn that he was speaking the wrong language. By that time there was a black umbrella threaded on Asoka’s trunk. like a rat preventer on a ship’s cable. He was catastrophically anxious to be rid of the incomprehensible thing, and Quorn had to cling to his perch like a monkey. That umbrella changed mere passion into a deliberate determination to destroy, and Quorn could sense that. He did his utmost to guide the elephant away from the market-place. He might as well have tried to turn the sun from its course.

  Quorn’s helmet was struck by a roof-beam as they charged in through the cluttered entrance; it collapsed, shapeless, looking like a twisted turban — like the turban on the man named Gunga on the carving on the end wall. For perhaps five seconds, malignantly choosing his mark, Asoka paused in the market entrance. Panic struck the crowd dumb, and for a moment motionless. The drama took Quorn by the spine and stiffened him. He sat majestically, unapproachably aloof as if there on purpose, obeyed by the monster he rode. Then he raised his hand. He shouted to them. But he could not remember afterwards what words he used.

  Asoka screamed and burst into the throng. And there is no wrath like an elephant’s. It is a prehistoric passion. It is elemental, learned in the dawn of time when Nature brewed the future in a cauldron of floods and earthquakes, burning trash like white-hot lava and obliterating errors with sulphurous deluge. Asoka’s taught, trick loaded memory was in abeyance. Herd memory, subconscious, filled him with a horror of all newness. There is almost nothing that is not new to that primeval instinct — new, abominable, loathsome, to be trodden and unmade.

  Down went the market stalls — cloth, eggs, brassware, chickens, crockery, imported clocks, curry and spices, cooked food, benches, baggage, basketry — smashed into a smear of vanity that once was. Humans in white-eyed droves fled this and that way, witless, aimless, shrilling, praying to a thousand gods — as if the gods cared! There was a dreadful din under the roof, like the braying and cracking of battle, until the Maharajah’s soldiers came, astonishingly fierce of wax and whisker but above all careful not to harm Asoka, who was expensive, or the crowd that was cheap but not unfriendly in its own way.

  The soldiers made a vast and most important counterdemonstration. They brought three bugles into action. They fired blank volleys; and in the pauses of that startling din they made the vast roof thunder with reverberating martial commands. And being well drilled, they avoided danger, which was excellent example. There began to be plenty of room for Asoka. Havoc fully finished, and the noise being intolerable, Asoka glimpsed the sunlight in the entry and went avalanching forth in quest of a less nerve-wracking field of battle.

  Some said afterwards that Quorn shouted on the way out, though others doubted that, and Quorn never remembered. But all agreed that he had raised his right arm, as if his right hand held an ankus, and that his gesture, position, attitude were those — exactly — of the Gunga sahib, he who rode the elephant amid the broken carving of the end wall. It was agreed by all, including many who did not see it and who therefore knew much more about it, that all he lacked to make resemblance perfect was the funny little howdah up behind him. His smashed helmet looked exactly like the Gunga sahib’s turban. His coat was gone; he had thrown it away; he sat in flapping, loose, bazaar-made shirt-sleeves. People who believe in such nonsense as reincarnation and destiny may be excused for having stared hard at the carving on the wall. There is no law against comparing one thing with another. Men, whose stalls and goods and money have been smashed into an uninsured and eggy chaos, need some sort of superstitious comfort to help them endure it. There was grief, but there was no wrath, in the wake of that awful event. It was karma, grievous but inevitable.

  “Patience bringeth peace,” observes the commentator on the Laws of Manu. “Anger aggravates. Be gentle, O ye sufferers, lest worse befall you.”

  IV

  “This May Be Wonderful. But Is It Wise?”

  Asoka went ahead, up-street, in straight spurts. He was growing winded. Nearly a score of dogs ceased licking sores and scratching their verminous pelts, to let themselves be swept into the current of excitement. Asoka became the pursued. He hated dogs; but an offensive, uninvited, unclean pack of yellow curs, each in a little dust cloud of his own, ears up, tail between legs and anatomy tautened in spasms of energy, yelped at his heels. It was enough to make a herd of elephants hysterical. Asoka went in search of solitude. He deserted the city.

  It was the sort of day that might have almost tamed a locomotive, so hot was the sun. The very palms and mangoes seemed to cast a shriveled shadow. Sound itself fainted with weariness. Sweat died still-born. Dust enwrapped everything. Asoka’s ton-weight footsteps fell on silent earth. He was a great gray ghost bestridden by a wraith, dry throated, talking to himself.

  “Crashing the gates o’ death, I’d call it! He ain’t thinkin’. He ain’t lookin’. All he’s doin’ is to get the hell from here. He don’t care where he goes until he hits what stops him. Wish I was in Philadelphia!”

  But it was no use wishing. One had to do something. There was a wall in the distance — a good, high, solid looking stone wall that should stop a steam-roller. Quorn decided he would try to guide the elephant straight at the wall. It might be possible. The brute was getting dog-tired. Quorn remembered how short-sighted elephants are. A sort of instinct told him what to do. If he could get near enough to the wall there were overhanging branches; he could grab those and swing himself up to safety. He began to urge the elephant, not guessing that his voice might stir the monster to a last tremendous effort. But it happened.

  They went at the wall like a battering ram, and the wall was rotten. There was a shock that almost threw Quorn over backward. The wall shook, tottered, and fell inward into dusty heaps. Asoka swayed into the gap, then staggered forward, stumbled on some masonry, and fell. He lay sobbing, heaving, near enough to an artificial fish-pond to smell water and too spent to reach it. Quorn was pitched into a woeful heap and rolled into the pond, among the frightened frogs. He felt mud on the bottom; it frightened him, although the water was not very deep. He groped for something to take hold of — heard a voice and touched a hand. It was a little one — a woman’s or a child’s. He seized it. Then another, stronger hand took hold of him and he felt himself dragged to dry land.

  “Will you kindly let me use my lip-stick?” said a woman’s voice, in English. He discovered he was still holding the small hand, and there was something in it, so he let go. Then he began to be able to see distinctly, and it occurred to him at once that he was probably dead, because he had never even dreamed of such a girl as this one. She was using her lip-stick calmly, making faces in a tiny mirror; and what with her pale-blue dress, and her eyes, and her sandaled feet, and dark hair, she was so lovely that he blinked at her speechless. Quite unconscious that his middle finger had been smeared with lip-stick carmine, he began scratching his forehead. Were those stories true, that his mother had told him about angels, when he was knee-high to her ap
ron-string?

  It was the voice of Chullunder Ghose that brought him back to earth. He recognized that instantly.

  “Sahiba, solitude has taken wings, like easy money! This babu advises you go home.”

  Quorn turned to stare at him — fat, bland, imperturbable, but vehement. He was a man with a plan, one could see that. It occurred to Quorn he might be interrupting an important interview. He removed his battered helmet from respect for a lady’s presence, then felt at his head and discovered his skull was almost baked through by the sun’s heat. His eyes wandered; he saw a shawl of golden gauzy silk that hung from a branch of some shrubbery. He was afraid of the Indian sun; without stopping to think whose the shawl might be, he seized it and bound it on his head like a turban. Then he turned again toward the lady, and for the first time she was able to observe his eyes and the crimson caste-mark he had made unconsciously above them with his lip-sticked middle finger. She uttered an exclamation, almost screaming. Quorn hastened to reassure her:

  “You’ve no call to fear me, missy. Me and him committed trespass, but we didn’t mean no harm.”

  He turned from her to look at “him” — Asoka, sobbing and tossing his trunk in futile efforts to reach water. “Hey, you,” he ordered the babu, “panee lao! Fetch a bucket quick, he’s famished.”

  Chullunder Ghose merely gestured toward some bushes, where Quorn spied an expensive, imported watering can that had been abandoned among the flowers by a gardener who probably preferred the ancient goat-skin mussuk. Quorn fetched the can and filled it at the pond, then grabbed Asoka’s trunk and thrust it into the receptacle.

  “There, ye darned old ijjit, suck your fill an’ sober up.”

  The water vanished, to be squirted down Asoka’s dusty throat while Quorn refilled the can. A second and a third dose went sluicing down the same course. Then Quorn himself took a drink, and the relief it gave him stirred imagination. He sat down on Asoka’s forefoot.