by Talbot Mundy
“Send Sidiki after me!” Brown shouted after him, and a minute later a nearly naked Beluchi struck a match and emerged from the darkness, with the light of a lantern gleaming on his skin. He followed like a snake, and only Brown’s sharp, authority-conveying footfalls could be heard as he trudged sturdily — straight-backed, eyes straight in front of him — to where an age-old baobab loomed like a phantom in the night. He marched like a man in armor. Not even the terrific heat of a Central-Indian night could take the stiffening out of him.
The Beluchi ran ahead, just before they reached the tree. He stopped and held the lantern up to let its light fall on some object that was close against the tree-trunk. At a good ten-pace distance from the object Brown stopped and stared. The lamplight fell on two little dots that gleamed. Brown stepped two paces nearer. Two deadly, malicious human eyes blinked once, and then stared back at him.
“Does he never sleep?” asked Brown.
The Beluchi said something or other in a language that was full of harsh hard gutturals, and the owner of the eyes chuckled. His voice seemed to be coming from the tree itself, and there was nothing of him visible except the cruel keen eyes that had not blinked once since Brown drew nearer.
“Well?”
“Sahib, he does not answer.”
“Tell him I’m tired of his not answering. Tell him that if he can’t learn to give a civil answer to a civilly put question I’ll exercise my authority on him!”
The Beluchi translated, or pretended to. Brown was not sure which, for he was rewarded with nothing but another chuckle, which sounded like water gurgling down a drain.
“Does he still say nothing?”
“Absolutely nothing, sahib.”
Brown stepped up closer yet, and peered into the blackness, looking straight into the eyes that glared at him, and from them down at the body of the owner of them. The Beluchi shrank away.
“Have a care, sahib! It is dangerous! This very holy — most holy — most religious man!”
“Bring that lantern back.”
“He will curse you, sahib!”
“Do you hear me?”
The Beluchi came nearer again, trembling with fright. Brown snatched the lamp away from him, and pushed it forward toward the fakir, moving it up and down to get a view of the whole of him. There was nothing that he saw that would reassure or comfort or please a devil even. It was ultradevilish; both by design and accident — conceived and calculated ghastliness, peculiar to India. Brown shuddered as he looked, and it took more than the merely horrible to make him betray emotion.
“What god do you say he worships?”
“Sahib, I know not. I am a Mussulman. These Hindus worship many gods.”
The fakir chuckled again, and Brown held the lantern yet nearer to him to get a better view. The fakir’s skin was not oily, and for all the blanket-heat it did not glisten, so his form was barely outlined against the blackness that was all but tangible behind him.
Brown spat again, as he drew away a step. He could contrive to express more disgust and more grim determination in that one rudimentary act than even a Stamboul Softa can.
“So he’s holy, is he?”
“Very, very holy, sahib!”
Again the fakir chuckled, and again Brown held his breath and pushed the lantern closer to him.
“I believe the brute understands the Queen’s English!”
“He understanding all things, sahib! He knowing all things what will happen! Mind, sahib! He may curse you!”
But Brown appeared indifferent to the danger that he ran. To the fakir’s unconcealed discomfort, he proceeded to examine him minutely, going over him with the aid of the lantern inch by inch, from the toe-nails upward.
“Well,” he commented aloud, “if the army’s got an opposite, here’s it! I’d give a month’s pay for the privilege of washing this brute, just as a beginning!”
The man’s toe-nails — for he really was a man! — were at least two inches long. They were twisted spirally, and some of them were curled back on themselves into disgusting-looking knots. What walking he had ever done had been on his heels. His feet were bent upward, and fixed upward, by a deliberately cultivated cramp.
His legs, twisted one above the other in a squatting attitude, were lean and hairy, and covered with open sores which were kept open by the swarm of insects that infested him. His loin-cloth was rotting from him. His emaciated body — powdered and smeared with ashes and dust and worse — was perched bolt-up-right on a flat earth dais that had once on a time been the throne of a crossroads idol. One arm, his right one, hung by his side in an almost normal attitude, and his right fingers moved incessantly like a man’s who is kneading clay. But his other arm was rigid — straight up in the air above his head; set, fixed, cramped, paralyzed in that position, with the fist clenched. And through the back of the closed fist the fakir’s nails were growing.
But, worse than the horror of the arm was the creature’s face, with the evidence of torture on it, and fiendish delight in torture for the torture’s sake. His eyes were his only organs that really lived still, and they expressed the steely hate and cruelty, the mad fanaticism, the greedy self-love — self-immolating for the sake of self — that is the thoroughgoing fakir’s stock in trade. And his lips were like the graven lips of a Hindu temple god, self-satisfied, self-worshiping, contemptuous and cruel. He chuckled again, as Brown finished his inspection.
“So that crittur’s holy, is he? Well, tell him that I’m set here to watch these crossroads. Tell him I’m supposed to question every one who comes, and find out what his business is, and arrest him if he can’t give a proper account of himself. Say he’s been here three days now, and that that’s long enough for any one to find his tongue in. Tell him if I don’t get an answer from him here and now I’ll put him in the clink!”
“But, sahib—”
“You tell him what I say, d’you hear?”
The Beluchi made haste to translate, trembling as he spoke, and wilting visibly when the baleful eyes of the fakir rested on him for a second. The fakir answered something in a guttural undertone.
“What does he say?”
“That he will curse you, sahib!”
“Sentry!” shouted Brown.
“Sir!” came the ready answer, and the sling-swivels of a rifle clicked as the man on guard at the crossroads shouldered it. There are some men who are called “sir” without any title to it, just as there are some sergeants who receive a colonel’s share of deference when out on a non-commissioned officer’s command. Bill Brown was one of them.
“Come here, will you!”
There came the sound of heavy footfalls, and a thud as a rifle-butt descended to the earth again. Brown moved the lamp, and its beams fell on a rifleman who stood close beside him at attention — like a jinnee formed suddenly from empty blackness.
“Arrest this fakir. Cram him in the clink.”
“Very good, sir!”
The sentry took one step forward, with his fixed bayonet at the “charge,” and the fakir sat still and eyed him.
“Oh, have a care, sahib!” wailed the Beluchi. “This is very holy man!”
“Silence!” ordered Brown. “Here. Hold the lamp.”
The bayonet-point pressed against the fakir’s ribs, and he drew back an inch or two to get away from it. He was evidently able to feel pain when it was inflicted by any other than himself.
“Come on,” growled the sentry. “Forward. Quick march. If you don’t want two inches in you!”
“Don’t use the point!” commanded Brown. “You might do him an injury. Treat him to a sample of the butt!”
The sentry swung his rifle round with an under-handed motion that all riflemen used to practise in the short-range-rifle days. The fakir winced, and gabbled something in a hurry to the man who held the lamp.
“He says that he will speak, sahib!”
“Halt, then,” commanded Brown. “Order arms. Tell him to hurry up!”
The Beluchi translated, and the fakir answered him, in a voice that sounded hard and distant and emotionless.
“He says that he, too, is here to watch the crossroads, sahib! He says that he will curse you if you touch him!”
“Tell him to curse away!”
“He says not unless you touch him, sahib.”
“Prog him off his perch!” commanded Brown.
The rifle leaped up at the word, and its butt landed neatly on the fakir’s ribs, sending him reeling backward off his balance, but not upsetting him completely. He recovered his poise with quite astonishing activity, and shuffled himself back again to the center of the dais. His eyes blazed with hate and indignation, and his breath came now in sharp gasps that sounded like escaping steam. He needed no further invitation to commence his cursing. It burst out with a rush, and paused for better effect, and burst out again in a torrent. The Beluchi hid his face between his hands.
“Now translate that!” commanded Brown, when the fakir stopped for lack of breath.
“Sahib, I dare not! Sahib—”
Brown took a threatening step toward him, and the Beluchi changed his mind. Brown’s disciplining methods were a too recently encountered fact to be outdone by a fakir’s promise of any kind of not-yet-met damnation.
“Sahib, he says that because your man has touched him, both you and your man shall lie within a week helpless upon an anthill, still living, while the ants run in and out among your wounds. He says that the ants shall eat your eyes, sahib, and that you shall cry for water, and there shall be no water within reach — only the sound of water just beyond you. He says that first you shall be beaten, both of you, until your backs and the soles of your feet run blood, in order that the ants may have an entrance!”
“Is he going to do all this?”
The Beluchi passed the question on, and the fakir tossed him an answer to it.
“He says, sahib, that the gods will see to it.”
“So the gods obey his orders, do they. Well, they’ve a queer sense of duty! What else does he prophesy?”
“About your soul, sahib, and the sentry’s soul.”
“That’s interesting! Translate!”
“He says, sahib, that for countless centuries you and your man shall inhabit the carcasses of snakes, to eat dirt and be trodden on and crushed, until you learn to have respect for very holy persons!”
“Is he going to have the ordering of that?”
“He says that the gods have already ordered it.”
“It won’t make much difference, then, what I do now. If that’s in store for me in any case, I may as well get my money’s worth before the fun begins! Tell him that unless he can give me a satisfactory reason for being here I shall treat him to a little more rifle-butt, and something else afterward that he will like even less!”
“He says,” explained the Beluchi, after a moment’s conversation with the fakir, “that he is here to see what the gods have prophesied. He says that India will presently be whelmed in blood!”
“Whose blood?”
“Yours and that of others. He says, did you not see the sunset?”
“What of the sunset?”
Brown looked about him and, save where the lantern cast a fitful light on the fakir and the sentry and the native servant, and threw into faint relief the shadowy, snake-like tendrils of the baobab, his eyes failed to pierce the gloom. The sunset was a memory. In that heavy, death-darkness silence it seemed almost as though there had never been a sun.
“‘A blot of blood,’ he says. He says the order has been given. He says that half of India shall run blood within a day, and the whole of it within a week!”
“Who gave the order?”
“He answers ‘Hookum hai!’ — which means ‘It is an order!’ Nothing more does the holy fakir say.”
“To the clink with him!” commanded Brown. “I’m tired of these Old Mother Shipton babblings. That’s the third useless Hindu fanatic within a week who has talked about India being drenched in blood. Let him go in to the depot under guard, and do his prophesying there! Bring him along.”
The sentry’s rifle-butt rose again and threatened business. The Beluchi gave a warning cry, and the fakir tumbled off his dais. Then, with the trembling Beluchi walking on ahead with the lantern, and Brown and the sentry urging from behind, the fakir jumped and squirmed and wabbled on his all but useless feet toward the guardroom. When they reached the tree where the goat had bleated, the Punjabi skin-buyer rose up, took one long look at the fakir and ran.
“Well, I’ll be!” exclaimed the sentry.
“You’ll be worse than that,” said Brown, “if you use that language anywhere where I’m about! I’ll not have it, d’you hear? Get on ahead, and open the door of the clink!”
The sentry obeyed him, and a moment later the fakir was thrust into a four-square mud-walled room, and the door was locked on him.
“Back to your post,” commanded Brown. “And next time I hear you swearing, I’ll treat you to a double-trick, my man! About turn. Quick march.”
The sentry trudged off without daring to answer him, and Brown took a good look at the fakir through the iron bars that protected the top half of the door. Then he went off to see about his supper, of newly slaughtered goat-chops and chupatties baked in ghee. His soul revolted at the thought of it, but it was his duty to eat it and set an example to the men; and duty was the only thing that mattered in Bill Brown’s scheme of things.
“Maybe it’s true,” he muttered, “and maybe it’s all lies; there’s no knowing. Maybe India’s going to run blood, as these fakirs seem to think, and maybe it isn’t. There’ll be more blood shed than mine in that case! ‘Hookum hai’— ‘It is orders,’ heh? Well — there’s more than one sort of ‘Hookum hai!’ I’ve got my orders too!”
He doubled the guard, when supper bad been eaten and the guardroom had been swept and the pots and kettle had been burnished until they shone. Then he tossed a chupatty to the imprisoned fakir, spat again from sheer disgust, lit his pipe and went and sat where he could hear the footbeats of the sentries.
“They can’t help their religion,” he muttered. “The poor infidels don’t know no better. And they’ve got a right to think what they please ‘about me or the Company. But I’ve no patience with uncleanliness! That’s wrong any way you look at it. That critter can’t see straight for the dirt on him, nor think straight for that matter. He’s a disgrace to humanity. Priest or fakir or whatever he is, if I live to see tomorrow’s sun I’ll hand him over to the guard and have him washed!”
Having formed that resolution, Brown dismissed all thoughts of the fakir. His memory went back to home — the clean white cottage on the Sussex Downs, and the clean white girl who once on a time had waited for him there. For the next few hours, until the guard was changed, the only signs or sounds of life were the glowing of Brown’s pipe, the steady footfalls of the sentries and occasional creakings from the hell-hot guard-room, where sleepless soldiers tossed in prickly discomfort.
II.
Bill Brown, with his twelve, had not been set to watch a lonely crossroad for the fun of it. One road was a well-made highway, and led from a walled city, where three thousand men sweated and thought of England, to another city, where five thousand armed natives drew England’s pay, and wore English uniforms.
The other road was a snake-like trail, nearly as wide but not nearly so well kept. It twisted here and there amid countless swarming native villages, and was used almost exclusively by natives, whose rightful business was neither war nor peace nor the contriving of either of them. It had been a trade-road when history was being born, and the laden ox-carts creaked along it still, as they had always done and always will do until India awakes.
But there are few men in the world who attend to nothing but their rightful business, and there are even more in India than elsewhere who are prone to neglect their own affairs and stir up sedition among others. There are few fighting-men among that host. They are priests for t
he most part or fakirs or make-believe pedlers or confessed and shameless mendicants; and they have no liking for the trunk roads, where the tangible evidence of Might and Majesty may be seen marching in eight-hundred-man battalions. They prefer to dream along the byways, and set other people dreaming. They lead, when the crash comes, from behind.
Though the men who made the policies of the Honorable East India Company were mostly blind to the moving finger on the wall, and chose to imagine themselves secure against a rising of the millions they controlled; and though most of their military officers were blinder yet, and failed to read the temper of the native troops in their immediate command, still, there were other men who found themselves groping, at least two years before the Mutiny of ‘57. They were groping for something intangible and noiseless and threatening which they felt was there in a darkness, but which one could not see.
Baines was one of them — Lieutenant-General Baines, commanding at Bholat. His troops were in the center of a spider’s web of roads that criss-crossed and drained a province. There were big trunk arteries, which took the flow of life from city to walled city, and a mass of winding veins in the shape of grass-grown country tracks. He could feel, if any man could, the first faint signs of fever rising, and he was placed where he could move swiftly, and cut deep in the right spot, should the knife be needed.
He was like a surgeon, though, who holds a lancet and can use it, but who lacks permission. The poison in India’s system lay deep, and the fever was slow in showing itself. And meanwhile the men who had the ordering of things could see neither necessity nor excuse for so much as a parade of strength. They refused, point-blank and absolutely, to admit that there was, or, could be, any symptom of unrest.
He dared not make new posts for officers, for officers would grumble at enforced exile in the country districts, and the Government would get to hear of it, and countermand. But there were non-commissioned officers in plenty, and it was not difficult to choose the best of them — three men — and send them, with minute detachments, to three different points of vantage. Non-commissioned officers don’t grumble, or if they do no one gets to hear of it, or minds. And they are just as good as officers at watching crossroads and reporting what they see and hear.