Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “You are not to say to the chuprassy whence you have that news. But say that if it does not reach the Major’s ears immediately there will be a new chuprassy within three days. If he asks who said that, say a bullfrog told it to you. Go then to the palace. Watch what happens. If the Rajah goes away by elephant, you are to set on fire as soon as possible the” — he hesitated— “it must be a very big blaze. It should look like the work of rioters. I must be able to see it from far away. And it must kill no one. It must not inflict important hardship.”

  Dish-face nodded. “I can burn the place I sleep in, sahib. It stands alone in a deserted compound at the rear of the palace. It is a great old wooden barn, wherein they stored the grass for elephants. But a contractor filled it full of grass no elephant would eat, and now the rats are in it, because the roof is tight and the grass dry.”

  “Atcha. Set it well alight then,” said the babu. “I have given you the money for your railway ticket. You will not see me again until we meet in Delhi.”

  “At the usual place?”

  “Yes, if you are not shot by a Rajah’s watchman as you run from the burning barn. Go now, and be careful.”

  But it was the babu who was almost caught off guard and was lucky to keep that rendezvous in Delhi. He was almost sizzling with excitement as he hurried through the rain on foot towards the barn where Ram Dass kept his surplus grain. His theory that typhoons illustrate the nature of all violence and that, therefore, the safest place is always in the slowly moving midst of the disturbance, may have made him overlook the element of motion of the midst. He was no longer in it. Three hundred yards from the barn, with a couple of acres of muddy slums to thread his way through and the rain in his face, he was suddenly struck on the jaw by a stone as he passed a narrow alley between two disreputable houses.

  Ninety-nine men in a hundred might have taken to their heels. But his brain was too swift for his instincts.

  “He who hits to kill, hits harder,” he reflected. So he dodged into the alley whence the stone had come. There was not much more than shoulder room between the walls, and rain came pouring from the eaves on both sides, forming an ankle-deep stream down the middle. There was no shelter — no cover of any kind, except the buttress of a house wall on the right hand. It projected two feet out into the alley-way. He ran towards it. Out from behind it sprang the villager who had named himself Silent Shadow. Quicker than the shadow of a rat, he knocked the babu off his balance and shoved him flat-backed against the wall behind the buttress. Then he smote him in the belly.

  “It is too big! Suck it inward! Anyone who passes in the street could see it.”

  “Where is your elephant?”

  “Where I left him, by the barn of Ram Dass. But your honor ordered me to watch who followed. So I noticed that the same men whom I prevented from taking that elephant away from Hawkesey — they, I mean, who found and carried in that badmash whom your honor slew with my club — they four came forth from a guardroom near the palace gate and followed. They were very weary men, and they had knives and clubs and pistols. So I said to myself, they are up to no good since nobody sends out tired men on a long chase but to do that which weariness will urge them to do swiftly.”

  “Must I listen to a tale about your cleverness?”

  “But I was clever, sahib! I am much the best assistant that your honor ever found by good luck! Did your honor not forbid me to have speech with them? So what could I do but coax them to have speech with me?”

  “Very well, they spoke. And what then?”

  “Only one of them spoke. The others smote me; and they twisted my arms until I had to speak. However, that was all right, and not disobedience at all, because I lied to them. It is a well-known fact that lies are nothing and the truth can prove them to be nothing. Telling nothing is not speech, so I was not disobedient. I told them that your honor saw a woman through a window and had called to her to set a signal whenever her husband should be away from home. I said she set the signal and I saw it and informed your honor; so your honor hurried to the house.”

  “Did they believe that?”

  “Yes, they presently believed it, after I had added certain details. They would have broken my toes and fingers if I had not been clever and made them believe. I told them how your honor wished to use that woman as a spy, by getting her to talk to the zenana servants. So they set an ambush, saying they will stop such treason. There they wait, to slit your honor’s throat; but me they drove away, mistrusting me. They feared I might cry out or make a signal and inform your honor. So I came here by way of the back street. And here I waited in all this draughty air and rain, as cold and hungry as a—”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Round the corner. Just round the corner of the next street.”

  “Very well. Now we shall see if you are fit for permanent employment. Go and tell them — and demand a fee for telling it — that you have just now seen me entering the shop of Ram Dass. If they doubt you, offer to go with them.”

  “But if they take me to the kana—”

  “You will get a meal there and a dry bed. What should you care if you sleep in a police cell? We, of our service, sometimes even serve a term in jail to hide from enemies.”

  There was no more speech between them, but it was as if an ax had fallen and severed the thread of the villager’s interest. He nodded, but the nod was unconvincing. The natural slyness left his eyes and was replaced by a look of stolid honesty, which is a danger-sign in yokels. The intangible, perhaps magnetic, current that unites two men in one enthusiasm, ceased as suddenly as switched-off light; and the villager smiled as he walked away into the rain. If he had looked back, he might have noticed that Chullunder Ghose was smiling also.

  “He was too good to be true, that villager,” remarked the babu to himself. “That one is the ninth or the tenth I have tested who was afraid of a cell, although crafty enough to fool a hundred constables. Well — now he sells me to the constables, so what next? There are two ends to this alley.”

  But the villager knew that; and the babu felt equally certain that the villager had decided to betray him. The chances were that two of the police would come from either end, so as to catch him whichever way he bolted. But to do that, two of them would have to give the other two enough time to run round the block of buildings and take up position. Nothing for it but the buttress.

  “There is no time now for bad luck! O thou Lord Ganesha, lift me by the short hair! Grip same as it rises!”

  It was such a buttress as an ape might clamber easily enough, but it was slippery with rain and not an easy climb even for an athlete equipped with leg- irons. For the babu it looked like stark impossibility. But he kicked off his slippers and stowed them in his waistband. Pudgy-looking fingers and bare toes took a grip on cracks and the interstices of weathered bricks. Knees and elbows hugged the buttress as a vice hugs lumber, and he went up like a jack-o’-ladder in a toyshop, until he swung himself over a low parapet on to a flat roof and lay there listening.

  Three minutes later, four men approached from opposite directions and came to a halt beneath him. One of them spoke to a fifth man:

  “Well, where is he?”

  “Sahib, he was here!”

  “You lie, you vermin! I watched this end of the alley.”

  Another man spoke: “If that fat brute had escaped at our end, we two surely would have seen him running. There is no door here — no window. He could not have hidden. This lying jungli has been fooling us!”

  “I have not, sahibs, I—”

  “Take that, you mud-begotten toad!”

  “And take that, you dog of a liar!”

  “And take that!”

  “And that!”

  “To the kana! We will teach him in the kana!”

  “In a dark cell we will teach him—”

  “Where a rat or two will gnaw his whip-sores!”

  “He shall eat salt—”

  “Lots of it, and listen to the splash of w
ater!”

  “Put the handcuffs on him.”

  “Hold him while I bruise his insteps! Why should he walk in comfort when our feet ache from a long wait on account of his lies?”

  “Ouch — ohee-ee-yow-oh-h-h-!”

  “Forward, or I’ll crack you on the heels, you jungle-hopper!”

  Peering above the parapet, the babu watched them march away down the alley in single file, with the villager limping in their midst.

  “Another cull!” he muttered. “What a pity! He was almost all right, that one. But the tainted egg becomes a bad egg. That one will become a criminal. There is not room for a split hair between those and us; and yet the stars are nearer to the earth than they and we to one another! Too bad!”

  Down he went over the parapet, and out the far end of the alley, hurrying, and not once glancing backward.

  “I am probably beholden to the god Ganesha,” he reflected. “And the gods are worse than money-lenders. They collect — they collect — they collect! So why waste breath on thanks to them? And bombs don’t fall twice in the same place. Good luck is just like a cold in the head; it runs for three days if it isn’t squelched the first hour. Three days? I can do it, if only Hawkesey hasn’t acted like a true-blue Britisher and shot my works away to save his character — or something. It will probably be something.”

  CHAPTER 21. “What are good guys for?”

  Copeland sat up, in the howdah, smoking, studying the back of the mahout’s head and admiring the way the rain ran from the roof of the enormous barn — a two-storied affair. The upper part projected and was supported on thick wooden posts; it served as shelter from the rain, and the smell of the corn and semsem seed and peas was not bad, so that Copeland actually was enjoying the long wait. He had hardly realized how tired he was, after so many days of incessant and exacting work, until he sat in that swaying howdah while the elephant pumped restlessly at an imaginary crank. And there was lots to think about — the Sikh’s enthusiasm — Major Eustace Smith’s boils and abominable manners — the riots in front of the palace — this astonishing elephant — and the babu. Most of all the babu. It was like a dream directed by a humorous, fat showman.

  Copeland had ceased to believe or disbelieve. He chuckled over it, enjoyed it and pretended to himself that nothing mattered, although at the back of his mood was sane sense warning him that things like that don’t happen unless serious events are stirring underneath the surface.

  “Hell, it’s not my funeral!” he reflected. “It’s the tiger’s if I’ve luck and if the babu isn’t lying. He probably is, but who cares? He amuses me, I like him, and I shan’t mind if he soaks me any reasonable sum of money. All I’ve missed until now is the Rajah, but I’m riding his elephant, so that’s something. And I don’t know where I’m off to, which is even better! Here’s luck!”

  He drank from his flask, relighted his pipe, and almost fell asleep in the gently swaying howdah, with nothing bothering him except mosquitoes and the smell of the mahout, who stank of garlic, betelnut and unwashed underclothing. He was somewhere between sleeping and waking when a clod of earth fell in his lap and the babu called up from beside the elephant:

  “Come down! I have a key to this place, but just look at the cripple from whom I took it! Ram Dass probably employs him because he couldn’t run away with grain-bags!”

  There was a rope suspended from a beam, so Copeland swung himself down by that. A half-paralyzed and at least half-insane watchman fled at sight of him, limping and writhing round a corner of the building.

  “He would not have let me have the key if I hadn’t told him you are sent by Ram Dass to remove his legs and arms and have them cured in the United States. Let us steal two hundred pounds of grain.”

  “I’m willing. But, for God’s sake, why?” asked Copeland.

  “Fuel! Number One Welsh for the non-stop special! Elephants are engines with the fire-box at the wrong end. Do you like excitement? Look at me then; I am essence of it! Come on!”

  Between them they dragged out four bags of the best unhulled rice, and the elephant hoisted them into the howdah. Then he lifted Copeland and the babu, who addressed the mahout with savage vehemence:

  “You son of evil, I am wet through and ashamed to ride behind a filthy drunkard such as you are! So beware of making me more angry than I am already! I want speed and plenty of it. If I have to speak again to you about it, I will brain you with your ankus and then drive the elephant myself! Get going. Take the road towards the river.”

  An elephant is one of the fastest things on four legs. Corn-fed and in good condition, with his feet well tended, he can out-speed and out-endure any mammal that breathes, excepting always, man. He is incomparable in squelchy going, if the squelch is only on the surface so that it does not bog his great weight. But his head bobs, and his body sways; he is as comfortless at high speed as a racing motor-boat in the teeth of a wind-crossed tide. So Copeland presently bestowed his breakfast on the blue-black mud that smick-smacked to the suck-and-plug of four enormous feet. He was not interested in the sandwiches he had brought and that Chullunder Ghose appropriated. Optimism oozed away, along with the rain that drooled down from the high-peaked howdah- top. It is impossible to vomit and be proud, or even to be reasonably vain; so he began to live on obstinacy. Nothing but that preserved him from the last disgrace of asking to be set down and left by the roadside. At the end of ten miles he would have welcomed a tiger, if the brute would only guarantee to kill him.

  However, most people survive even sea-sickness and its equivalent, especially men like Copeland, who can laugh at themselves between the devastating spasms. Sunset found him sprawling on his back with his eyes shut, unable to endure the sight of a revolving universe. One hour after sunset he was sitting up and following the babu’s gaze across the trees in the direction of Kutchdullub.

  They had stopped on high ground, he supposed, to breathe the elephant. But except for the great brute’s heaving lungs there was no motion now, and Copeland’s senses came back to resume work almost as swiftly as they had deserted him. He saw a column of flame in the distance, and a hell-red splurge below the belly of a black cloud. It looked as if a city was burning.

  “What is it?” he asked — his first words since they left Kutchdullub.

  “Just a signal,” said the babu.

  “Looks like rioting to me.”

  “It means that things are going much too much like clockwork,” the babu answered. “I shall begin to suspect disaster unless something goes wrong presently.”

  “My works have been going wrong,” said Copeland with a pale grin.

  “That is not enough, however. In important matters there are always errors. To succeed, it is essential to get those errors cleaned up and out of the way. If not, the climax catches us with so much to attend to that we act like politicians chasing broken pledges with a fish-net. I am worried.”

  “Talk sense, can’t you? What does the signal mean?”

  “It means that the Rajah has left his palace.”

  “Didn’t you want that?”

  “I insisted on it! I have used up all my ingenuity to get him to do so. He has done it. Now I am afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “I can imagine only one way now by which he might upset my calculations. I imagine that, however; and it makes me feel like being raised the limit by a fool who drew one card and may have filled a royal flush.”

  “I don’t know what you’re calculating. What could he do to upset you? Do you suppose he is out after our tiger?”

  “If he isn’t, we are flummoxed, sahib, if you know what that means.”

  “For the love of Pete, talk sense and then I’ll try to understand you.”

  “Sahib, if he has not had enough to drink to inflame his ego — which is to say, if he has the wind up too badly — some stray, fluffy little shred of common sense still floating in the water on his brain may tempt him to disgrace his ancestors and save himself by hurrying across the border in
to British India. If he should do that, and claim protection against his cousin and the priests, accusing them of having caused the riots, my work would be wasted and the British would have to send for Jack the Ripper to invent a reason for not coming to his rescue — since a treaty is a treaty, even among statesmen!”

  “Are you framing him, for God’s sake?”

  “Sahib, he is framed in barbed-wire by his own besotted conduct! It is inconvenient to abdicate him, so he must be buried. And he can’t be executed, so he must be made into a hero.”

  “Bumped off?”

  “Much more diplomatic. Have you ever seen a scorpion sting itself to death?”

  “Eh? Suicide?”

  “No, no. But allowed to follow causes to their natural conclusion, sahib.”

  Copeland shied off vigorously. “Dammit, I’ve no share in this. I won’t be drawn in. If you’d given me a hint of all this, I’d have—”

  “You shall keep your moral feet dry,” said the babu. “Cheloh!” he commanded, and the elephant resumed its squelching down the pitch-dark lane between the jungle and a wilderness of flooded fields.

  Copeland would have liked to argue, but the vertigo seized him again. It was not quite so bad as before, but it made speech impossible; so he lay still, watching the crimson cloud grow dull-red as the rain descended on the fire beneath it. For another hour they swayed amid a sea of forest noises into black night. Then a shout — unmistakably English — stopped them, and Copeland sat up. An electric torch stabbed at the darkness and the elephant was bathed in milky white light, striped with parallel lines of rain.

  “Oh, Hawkesey — is it Hawkesey?” asked the babu, his voice sonorous with emotion.

  The answer was equally sonorous, but the emotion different: