Guns of the Gods: A Story of Yasmini's Youth, Talbot Mundy [book club books .TXT] 📗

He did not rise at first to greet her, for Jinendra's priest was fat; there was no gainsaying it. After about a minute a sort of earthquake taking place in him began to reach the surface; he rocked on his center in increasing waves that finally brought him with a spasm of convulsion to the floor. There he stood in full sunlight with his bare toes turned inward, holding his stomach with both hands, while Yasmini settled herself in graceful youthful curves on the cushioned bench, with her face in shadow, and the smirking maid at her feet. Then before climbing ponderously back to his perch on the throne the priest touched his forehead once with both hands and came close to a semblance of bowing, the arrogance of sanctity combining with his paunch to cut that ceremony short.

"Send the girl away," he suggested as soon as he was settled into place again. But Yasmini laughed at him with that golden note of hers that suggests illimitable understanding and unfathomable mirth.

"I know the ways of priests," she answered. "The girl stays!"

The priest's fat chops darkened a shade.

"There are things she should not know."

"She knows already more in her small head than there is in all thy big belly, priest of an idol!"

"Beware, woman, lest the gods hear sacrilege!"

"If they are real gods they love me," she answered, "If they have any sense they will be pleased whenever I laugh at your idolatry. Hasamurti stays."

"But at the first imaginary insult she will run with information to wherever it will do most harm. If she can be made properly afraid, perhaps—"

Yasmini's golden laugh cut him off short.

"If she is made afraid now she will hate me later. As long as she loves me she will keep my secrets, and she will love me because of the secrets—being a woman and not a belly-with-a-big-tongue, who would sell me to the highest bidder, if he dared. I know a Brahman. Thou and I are co-conspirators because my woman's wit is sharper than thy greed. We are confidants because I know too much of thy misdeeds. We are going to succeed because I laugh at thy fat fears, and am never deceived for a moment by pretense of sanctity or promises however vehement."

She said all that in a low sweet voice, and with a smile that would have made a much less passionate man lose something of his self-command. Jinendra's priest began to move uneasily.

"Peace, woman!"

"There is no peace where priests are," she retorted in the same sweet- humored voice. "I am engaged in war, not honey-gathering. I have lied sufficient times today to Mukhum Dass to need ten priests, if I believed in them or were afraid to lie! The shroff will come to ask about his title-deed. Tell him you are told a certain person has it, but that if he dares breathe a word the paper will go straight to Dhulap Singh, who will destroy it and so safely bring his lawsuit. Then let Dhulap Singh be told also that the title-deed is in certain hands, so he will put off the lawsuit week after week, and one who is my friend will suffer no annoyance."

"Who is this friend?"

"Another one who builds no bridges on thy sanctity."

"Not one of the English? Beware of them, I say; beware of them!"

"No, not one of the English. Next, let Gungadhura be told that Tom
Tripe has ever an open-handed welcome at Blaine sahib's—"

"Ah!" he objected, shaking his fat face until the cheeks wabbled. "Women are all fools sooner or later. Why let a drunken English soldier be included in the long list of people to be reckoned with?"

"Because Gungadhura will then show much favor to Tom Tripe, who is my friend, and it amuses me to see my friends prosper. Also I have a plan."

"Plans—plans—plans! And whither does the tangle lead us?"

"To the treasure, fool!"

"But if you know so surely where the treasure is, woman, why not tell me and —"

Again the single note of mocking golden laughter cut him off short.

"I would trust thee with the secret, Brahman, just as far as the herdsman trusts a tiger with his sheep."

"But I could insure that Gungadhura should divide it into three parts, and—"

"When the time comes," she answered, "the priest of Jinendra shall come to me for his proportion, not I to the priest. Nor will there be three portions, but one—with a little percentage taken from it for the sake of thy fat belly. Gungadhura shall get nothing!"

"I wash my hands of it all!" the priest retorted indignantly. "The half for me, or I wash my hands of it and tell Gungadhura that you know the secret! I will trust him to find a way to draw thy cobra from its hole!"

"Maybe he might," she nodded, smiling, "after the English had finished hanging thee for that matter of the strangling of Rum Dass. Thy fat belly would look laughable indeed banging by a stretched neck from a noose. They would need a thick rope. They might even make the knot slippery with cow-grease for thy special benefit."

The priest winced.

"None can prove that matter," he said, recovering his composure with an effort.

"Except I," she retorted, "who have the very letter that was written to Rum Dass that brought him into thy clutches—and five other proofs beside! Two long years I waited to have a hold on thee, priest, before I came to blossom in the odor of thy sanctity; now I am willing to take the small chance of thy temper getting the better of discretion!"

"You are a devil," he said simply, profoundly convinced of the truth of his remark; and she laughed like a mischievous child, clapping her hands together.

"So now," she said, "there is little else to discuss. If Gungadhura should be superstitious fool enough to come to thee again for auguries and godly counsel—"

"He comes always. He shows proper devotion to Jinendra."

"Repeat the former story that a clue to the treasure must be found in
Blaine sahib's house —"

"In what form? He will ask me again in what form the clue will be, that he may recognize it?"

"Tell him there is a map. And be sure to tell him that Tom Tripe is welcome at the house. Have you understood? Then one other matter: when it is known that I am back in my palace Gungadhura will set extra spies on me, and will double the guard at all the doors to keep me from getting out again. He will not trust Tom Tripe this time, but will give the charge to one of the Rajput officers. But he will have been told that I was at the commissioner sahib's house this morning, and therefore he will not dare to have me strangled, because the commissioner sahib might make inquiries. I have also made other precautions—and a friend. But tell Gungadhura, lest he make altogether too much trouble for me, that I applied to the commissioner sahib for assistance to go to Europe, saying I am weary of India. And add that the commissioner sahib counseled me not to go, but promised to send English memsahibs to see me." (She very nearly used the word American, but thought better of it on the instant.)

"He will ask me how I know this," said the Brahman, turning it all over slowly in his mind and trying to make head or tail of it.

"Tell him I came here like himself for priestly counsel and made a clean breast of everything to thee! He will suspect thee of lying to him; but what is one lie more or less?"

With that final shaft she gathered up her skirts, covered her face, nudged the giggling maid and left him, turning the key in the lock herself and flitting out through gloom into the sunlight as fast as she had come. The carriage was still waiting at the edge of the outer court, and once again the driver started off without instructions, but tooling his team this time at a faster pace, with a great deal of whip-cracking and shouts to pedestrians to clear the way. And this time the carriage had an escort of indubitable maharajah's men, who closed in on it from all sides, their numbers increasing, mounted and unmounted, until by the time Yasmini's own palace gate was reached there was as good as a state procession, made up for the most part of men who tried to look as if they had made a capture by sheer derring-do and skill.

And down the street, helter-skelter on a sweating thoroughbred, came Maharajah Gungadhura Singh just in time to see the back of the carriage as it rumbled in through the gateway and the iron doors clanged behind it. Scowling—altogether too round-shouldered for the martial stock he sprang from—puffy-eyed, and not so regal as overbearing in appearance, he sat for a few minutes stroking his scented beard upward and muttering to himself.

Then some one ventured to tell him where the carriage had been seen waiting, and with what abundant skill it had been watched and tracked from Jinendra's temple to that gate. At that he gave an order about the posting of the guard, and, beckoning only one mounted attendant to follow him, clattered away down-street, taking a turn or two to throw the curious off the scent, and then headed straight for the temple on his own account.

An Audit by the Gods

Thus spoke the gods from their place above the firmament
Turning from the feasting and the music and the mirth:
"There is time and tide to burn;
Let us stack the plates a turn
And study at our leisure what the trouble is with earth."

Down, down they looked through the azure of the Infinite
Scanning each the meadows where he went with men of yore,
Each his elbows on a cloud,
Making reckoning aloud -
Till the murmur of God wonder was a titan thunder-roar.

"War rocks the world! Look, the arquebus and culverin
Vanish in new sciences that presage T. N. T!
Lo, a dark, discolored swath
Where they drive new tools of wrath!
Do they justify invention? Will they scrap the Laws that Be?

"Look! Mark ye well: where we left a people flourishing
Singing in the sunshine for the fun of being free,
Now they burden man and maid
With a law the priests have laid,
And the bourgeois blow their noses by a communal decree!

"Where, where away are the liberties we left to them -
Gift of being merry and the privilege of fun?
Is delight no longer praise?
Will they famish all their days
For a future built of fury in a present scarce begun?"

"Most Precious friend … please visit me!"

The one thing in India that never happens is the expected. If the actual thing itself does occur, then the manner of it sets up so many unforeseen contingencies that only the subtlest mind, and the sanest and the least hidebound by opinion, can hope to read the signs fast enough to understand them as they happen. Naturally, there are always plenty of people who can read backward after the event; and the few of those who keep the lesson to themselves, digesting rather than discussing it, are to be found eventually filling the senior secretaryships, albeit bitterly criticized by the other men, who unraveled everything afterward very cleverly and are always unanimous on just one point—that the fellow who said nothing certainly knew nothing, and is therefore of no account and should wield no influence, Q. E. D.

And as we belong to the majority, in that we are uncovering the course of these events very cleverly long after they took place, we must at this point, to be logical, denounce Theresa Blaine. She was just as much puzzled as anybody. But she said much less than anybody, wasted no time at all on guesswork, pondered in her heart persistently whatever she had actually seen and heard, and in the end was almost the only non-Indian actor on the stage of Sialpore to reap advantage. If that does not prove unfitness for