Told in the East
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Talbot Mundy >> Told in the East
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15 This eBook was produced by Jake Jaqua.
TOLD IN THE EAST
By Talbot Mundy
[[Original Book edition published by Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis,
1920. Source of the following edition is the omnibus "Romances of
India" which was a reprint of three of Talbot Mundy's novels.]]
Romances of India
By Talbot Mundy
- King of the Khyber Rifles
- Guns of the Gods
- Told in the East
Contents
Hookum Hai.............1
For The Salt Which He Had Eaten............129
Machassan Ah............235
TOLD IN THE EAST
Hookum Hai
A Blood-red sun rested its huge disk upon a low mud wall that crested
a rise to westward, and flattened at the bottom from its own weight
apparently. A dozen dried-out false-acacia-trees shivered as the
faintest puff in all the world of stifling wind moved through them;
and a hundred thousand tiny squirrels kept up their aimless scampering
in search of food that was not there.
A coppersmith was about the only living thing that seemed to care
whether the sun went down or not. He seemed in a hurry to get a
job done, and his reiterated "Bong-bong-bong!"--that had never ceased
since sunrise, and had driven nearly mad the few humans who were
there to hear it--quickened and grew louder. At last Brown came
out of a square mud house, to see about the sunset.
He was nobody but plain Bill Brown--or Sergeant William Brown, to
give him his full name and entitlements--and the price of him was
two rupees per day.
He stared straight at the dull red disk of the sun, and spat with
eloquence. Then he wiped the sweat from his forehead, and scratched
a place where the prickly heat was bothering him. Next, he buttoned
up his tunic, and brushed it down neatly and precisely. There was
official business to be done, and a man did that with due formality,
heat or no heat.
"Guard, turn out!" he ordered.
Twelve men filed out, one behind the other, from the hut that he had
left. They seemed to feel the heat more than Brown did, as they fell
in line before Brown's sword. There was no flag, and no flag-pole
in that nameless health-resort, so the sword, without its scabbard,
was doing duty, point downward in the ground, as a totem-pole of Empire.
Brown had stuck it there, like Boanerges' boots, and there it stayed
from sunrise until sunset, to be displaced by whoever dared to do
it, at his peril.
They had no clock. They had nothing, except the uniforms and arms
of the Honorable East India Company, as issued in this year of Our
Lord, 1857--a cooking-pot or two, a kettle, a little money and a
butcher-knife. Their supper bleated miserably some twenty yards away,
tied to a tree, and a lean. Punjabi squatted near it in readiness
to buy the skin. It was a big goat, but it was mangy, so he held
only two annas in his hand. The other anna (in case that Brown should
prove adamant) was twisted in the folds of his pugree, but he was
prepared to perjure himself a dozen times, and take the names of
all his female ancestors in vain, before he produced it.
The sun flattened a little more at the bottom, and began to move
quickly, as it does in India--anxious apparently to get away from
the day's ill deeds.
"Shoulder umms!" commanded Brown. "General salute! Present-umms!"
The red sun slid below the sky-line, and the night was on them, as
though somebody had shut the lid. Brown stepped to the sword, jerked
it out of the ground and returned it to his scabbard in three motions.
"Shoulder-umms! Order-umms! Dismiss!" The men filed back into the
hut again, disconsolately, without swearing and without mirth. They
had put the sun to bed with proper military decency. They would have
seen humor--perhaps--or an excuse for blasphemy in the omission of
such a detail, but it was much too hot to swear at the execution of it.
Besides, Brown was a strange individual who detested swearing, and
it was a very useful thing, and wise, to humor him. He had a way
of his own, and usually got it.
Brown posted a sentry at the hut-door, and another at the crossroads
which he was to guard, then went round behind the but to bargain
with the goatskin-merchant. But he stopped before he reached the tree.
"Boy!" he called, and a low-caste native servant came toward him
at a run.
"Is that fakir there still?"
"Ha, sahib!"
"Ha? Can't you learn to say `yes,' like a human being?"
"Yes, sahib!"
"All right. I'm going to have a talk with him. Kill the goat, and
tell the Punjabi to wait, if he wants to buy the skin."
"Ha, sahib!"
Brown spun round on his heel, and the servant wilted.
"Yes, sahib!" he corrected.
Brown left him then, with a nod that conveyed remission of cardinal
sin, and a warning not to repeat the offence. As the native ran
off to get the butcher-knife and sharpen it, it was noticeable that
he wore a chastened look.
"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 the 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.
So where a little cluster of mud huts ached in the heat of a right
angle where the trunk road crossed a native road some seventy miles
from Bholat, Bill Brown--swordsman and sergeant and strictest of
martinets, as well as sentimentalist--had been set to watch and listen
and report.
There were many cleverer men in the non-commissioned ranks of Baine's
command, many who knew more of the native languages, and who had
more imagination. But there was none who knew better how to win
the unqualified respect and the obedience of British and native alike,
or who could be better counted on to obey an order, when it came,
literally, promptly and in the teeth of anything.
Brown's theories on religion were a thing to marvel at, and walk
singularly wide of, for he was a preacher with a pair of fists when
thoroughly aroused. And his devotion to a girl in England whom no
one in his regiment had ever seen, and of whom he did not even possess
a likeness, was next door to being pitiable. His voice was like
a raven's, with something rather less than a raven's sense of melody;
he was very prone to sing, and his songs were mournful ones. He
was not a social acquisition in any generally accepted sense, although
his language was completely free from blasphemy or coarseness. His
ideas were too cut and dried to make conversation even interesting.
But his loyalty and his sense of duty were as adamant.
He had changed the double guard at the crossroads; and had posted
two fresh men by the mud-walled guardroom door. He had lit his pipe
for the dozenth time, and had let it go out again while he hummed
a verse of a Covenanters' hymn. And he had just started up to wall
over to the cell and make a cursory inspection of his prisoner, when
his ears caught a distant sound that was different from any of the
night sounds, though scarcely louder.
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