The Devil's Guard, page 23
Suddenly he shook himself free and used his, getting in two shots before they rushed him from behind. I heard the pistol knocked or dragged out of his hand; it struck the wall not far from me. Then I went down under half a dozen men, whose greasy bodies stank of the accumulated filth of years. My muscles cracked as they got the cords around my arms and I cried out to Narayan Singh to save himself and find Grim if he could. An invisible hand struck me hard over the mouth, feeling for it first with thumbs and fingers, and a voice growled in Tibetan:
"Silence!"
Narayan Singh had received my leave to go. He went like a whirlwind. Someone—very likely he—had loosed the ponies and they milled around the shed, while he clung to the mane of one of them. There was tumult in the dark, and then, in what seemed like a second, he was gone through the shed door. A voice I thought I recognized commanded in Tibetan: "Go after that fool and kill him!"
It was like Grim's voice! Somewhere in the darkness close to me Chullunder Ghose recovered his stunned senses just sufficiently to murmur "Jimgrim!" Some one hit him on the head again and he lay still. With four men holding me face downward I could only move inch by inch, but I contrived to get a glimpse of night sky through the open shed door and, against it, a man's figure. He was staring out into the night, watching the men who had pursued Narayan Singh. Even his figure looked like Grim's.
Cords cut my arms; men knelt on me and I was half-stunned—in no fit state to trust my senses but it was hardly likely I should not know Grim. A sort of madness seized me as the conviction grew that Grim had gone insane. I began to struggle, until a blow on the back of the head reminded me to lie still.
The man in the doorway laughed; and it was Grim's laugh. Presently he closed the door, but struck a match and lit a cigarette. Then instantly, by the flare of the match, I recognized him.
He was wearing Grim's clothes—native Indian khaki underneath a yak-skin overcoat. He came and stood over me, raising my chin with his toe, then struck another match to let me see him.
I hated him less for that indignity than for having made me think, for one mad minute, he was Grim. His beard was gone; the long black hair that he had worn over his shoulders when we saw him last had been tucked inside the yak-skin cap, but he was unmistakably the man who threw me backward in Sidiki ben Mahommed's house in Leh— the same of whom I dreamed between the gods' knees in the cave above the hall of stalagmite. His look of tigerish masculinity had vanished with the beard, but I could see he was taller than Grim, now that he stood naturally, and when he squatted down close to me, cross-legged, it was with the same effortless, slow movement as if he had been lowered by an unseen hand. He appeared to be proud of that trick.
"You were looking for Rait! You shall see him," he said.
He appeared to expect me to answer, and laughed cynically when I did not.
"I can read your thoughts more easily than understand your clumsy accent," he remarked in perfectly good English. But it sounded more like a boast intended to make me lose confidence in my own senses.
"You poor super-hypocrite!" he sneered. "You are not a typical example of the West, you are its architype; you are its perfect specimen! You funny muscle-maniac! You straw in the wind of misdirected energy! You make me laugh, you poor, unpigmented, blind checker-on-a board! Now listen:
"Your Jimgrim is done for. You were warned in the letter Rait wrote you not to bring him or that sabered imbecile Narayan Singh. You brought them in spite of the warning, so their blood is on your head. Not that it matters. The world is richer for the loss of two such fools.
"You are a bigger fool than either of them, and how we're going to smash the shell of your stupidity is something of a puzzle; however, we will do our best, and if you break up with the shell, it won't much matter.
"I gave you credit for being a bit less stupid than you are, and intending to trap you, I put on Jimgrim's clothes, at you don't know what disgusting inconvenience to me; they reek of his smug self-righteousness."
I lay still. The cord on my arms was slipping and I hoped to get a hand free and break his neck. But one of the men who was kneeling on me felt at the cord and tightened it so sharply that I winced.
"Ah!" remarked the man in Grim's clothes. "Pain is a great educator. If you had Rait's imagination we could make much more of you, I don't doubt. We tortured him mentally. You won't suffer worse, but differently. The result won't be so efficacious. To reach mind through the body is to lose by indirectness. We shall never be able to make more of you than an assistant for your friend Rait.
"How you do make me laugh! Now you lie there and believe you are enough of a man to hold out and to disobey us after we have finished schooling you! Rait thought himself too clever. You think yourself too obstinate. Well, you shall see what we have made of Rait in hardly any time at all, and that may help you to yield without quite so much suffering—although we don't believe in sparing the initiate. We stamp pain on the memory and kill out even the suggestion of a possibility of mercy.
"You are going to learn, in your degree, my friend, how true is your identity with Nature, who is red in tooth and claw and not the merciful, wise mother that the sentimentalists so moralize about."
He gave me the impression he was merely passing time until it was convenient to make his next move; and he confirmed it when the men returned who had been looking for Narayan Singh. They whispered to him and he gave a sharp command I did not catch.
Immediately the men who knelt on me began to kick and drag me to my feet and I heard others striking and prodding Chullunder Ghose. The babu cried out and some one struck him over the mouth. I called to him to play the man, but almost before the words were out one of my captors' knuckles struck me and made my lips bleed. I was dragged out through the doorway and compelled to walk through the gap in the courtyard wall behind the man in Grim's clothes.
My captors were all monks in sheepskin overcoats and there were at least a dozen of them following me down the trail, so I could not see what happened to Chullunder Ghose though I could hear considerable noise; and when, at last, we reached the bottom of the long descent and halted near the chorten at the entrance it appeared that they had dragged him all the way down on his back with his hands tied and a rope passed through his armpits. The man in Grim's clothes prodded him until he stirred, then turned to me.
"Understand," he said, thrusting his face close to mine, "there will be no nonsense about sparing you. You're coming. You're coming on foot. Try to refuse and you will be tortured. You will not in any case be carried or allowed to die."
He began to search my pockets leisurely, transferring all their contents to a bag that one of his monks carried slung by a strap. When he found my automatic pistol he laughed as if it were a baby's toy and held it up for the monks to be amused at. One of them showed the pistol he had taken from Chullunder Ghose and another, seizing it by the barrel, cracked me over the shins with it.
Nothing hurts more on a cold night than a blow on the shin. My legs were not tied. I kicked him, putting all the lift into it that I could muster. It was not long before I wished I had controlled that impulse. Though I broke a couple of his ribs he was a tough, determined expert in malignity and all the pain the broken ribs caused he repaid to me twice over on the march, with greater will because the others laughed at him.
The man in Grim's clothes led the way, striding along as if leagues were yards. My captors ordered me to follow next, and the monk whose ribs I had broken took another man's staff to lean on, but used it more often to prod at my heels from behind—a species of torture far more irritating than the pain of the rope on my wrists. When I turned on him I was tripped with the staff, knocked down and then struck until I got up and resumed the march. In the darkness twenty yards behind me more than a dozen monks were bullying Chullunder Ghose. They dragged him on his back until the agony of that awoke his stunned brain and he scrambled to his feet. Because he cried out then they put a rope around his neck and jerked it, beating him when he stood still for lack of breath.
For a while the wish, inspiring faint hope, that Grim was not dead and might bring Lhaten and some of those other mysterious individuals to the rescue, kept me from jumping over the dark edge of the ravine whose direction we followed. But the more I thought of Grim the more conviction grew that he had been killed. How else could the man in front of me obtain his clothes?
And as for Narayan Singh, what chance had he? The odds were ten to one that those who pursued him had found and killed him. He could not have hidden in the monastery. There was no way to escape except by that zigzag descent, on which pursuers would have the advantage of pursued all the way down. I did not doubt Narayan Singh was dead.
That pessimistic outlook once accepted, the exasperation of being prodded on the heels at every third or fourth stride nearly broke down reason. Death was tempting if for nothing else than that it would deprive my captors of the fun of torturing me further; it was infinitely preferable to the thought of being made mad to the extent that I would yield my will, which seemed to be their object.
There were a dozen places where I might have jumped off before the men who drove me could prevent. I even pretended to worse fatigue than I actually felt, in order to get them used to my sudden stumbling so that they should not jump too quickly to prevent me when I made up my mind—a thing that, when left to myself, I am habitually slow to do.
I am not afraid of death, although I have the ordinary healthy man's mistrust of suicide as any way out of a difficulty. The thought that Chullunder Ghose would have to face the misery alone if I should take that dark plunge to oblivion was what in the end prevented me. I decided to wait, and endure, and leave the problem up to him. If he should prefer suicide we would break through the veil of death together; if not, I could probably endure what he could.
Then I remembered Mordecai's brave break for liberty across the passes and it seemed to me that though he died before he reached home he had won a finer fight than any I ever took hand in. I made up my mind I would endure until the end, whatever that might be, if only because Mordecai had done it.
Strangely, after that the thought returned that Grim might be alive and that Narayan Singh might possibly have found him. I could not imagine how Grim's clothes could have changed ownership without his being taken prisoner or killed, but even the uncertainty was better than the pessimism of despair, and I began to use caution not to go too near the edges of the yawning chasms that we passed.
Long before morning Chullunder Ghose made an attempt to kill himself. He had a rope around his neck which would have hanged him or else dragged two monks to death along with him, if he had reached the edge of the ravine in time. But they were too alert. They threw him to the ground and beat him mercilessly, rubbing snow on his face and neck when he lost consciousness.
After that they tied the two of us together since the babu could hardly drag himself along, and they prodded me persistently and flogged me with the knotted ends of ropes whenever I tried to rest from the strain of supporting a man heavier than myself.
The man in Grim's clothes never troubled himself once to turn and look at us. He appeared to be sure his men would carry out instructions, and when the coldest dawn I ever knew began to color the surrounding peaks I caught only one glimpse of him, a mile ahead, after which he vanished.
By that time Chullunder Ghose was in delirium, moving forward almost automatically; all I had to do was to support him, but the little strength I had left was hardly equal to it. The prodding no longer hurt. What little landscape I could see was swimming in a mist of blood-red. I could not feel my wrists and supposed they were frozen, but did not care. I decided at last to lie down and be beaten to death, forgetting the man's threat that I would not be permitted to die; but it took thought an awfully long time to convert itself into action, and we reached a cave while I was still telling myself what to do. I felt as if I were talking to another fellow, whom I pitied.
The man in Grim's clothes waited for us near the cave mouth. I had lost sense of direction and nothing seemed to stand still long enough for me to see it properly; the only thing that really registered in my exhausted brain was that Grim's clothes were too small for him and that he looked like a cad without his beard. He had a pointed chin, with a twist that I thought might straighten if I hit it hard enough; and his eyes, instead of being leonine, looked more like a hyena's.
"How is that for a beginning?" he asked.
He gave me a shove that sent Chullunder Ghose and me both sprawling on the cave floor. Then he stooped to examine my wrists and ordered one of his men to cut the rope and chafe them, but he did nothing to prevent the man whose ribs I had broken from continuing to prod me with the staff. I could not use my arms, and when I tried to kick I found I could not aim straight, which made them all laugh and they prodded me from every direction for the fun of it.
Chullunder Ghose was totally unconscious, lying on his face. The man in Grim's clothes produced what looked like a silver pocket flask from the bag into which my pockets had been emptied, pulled out a wooden stopper with his teeth and, turning the babu over with his foot, poured a few drops of liquid on his swollen lips. Almost at once he began to recover and tried to sit up but was promptly knocked down again.
Then it was my turn. I was dragged to the rear of the cave and held while the man in Grim's clothes forced some of the liquid through my set teeth, driving his fingernails into my gums to make me yield.
"That is soma," he said when he had forced me to swallow a few drops.
The stuff was tasteless and had no noticeable smell, but its effect was almost instantaneous. My whole body became so perfectly at ease that I was hardly conscious of it and my brain became abnormally active. The red left my eyes. The cave, and everything in it, was as clear as if etched with a pen.
"Now think!" he commanded.
Instantly the journey from Darjiling, including Benjamin's store in Delhi, the Zogi-la, Mordecai, Sidiki ben Mahommed's house and every other detail, came to mind in one uninterrupted panorama. As in dreams, when there is neither time nor place and events occur simultaneously without being superimposed or intermixed, I saw everything in a moment.
I felt as if my will were bound with cords, exactly as my hands had been. It was agreeable to have that lucid mental vision, yet it felt like something stolen and a baffled impulse to resist it totally offset the feeling of exhilaration.
"Now you see," said the man in Grim's cloths. "Nothing has occurred of your volition. Rait wrote to you to come. You came. It would have made no difference which route you took; we would have caught you. Rait, who has ten times your capability, had to strive for seven years to find our lodge and gain admission. We made him work for it and spared him nothing. After there was nothing left in him that could even wish to play us false he had the right to choose his own assistant. He chose you, so those letters were written to tempt you to try to rescue him. We understand men's weaknesses. And now, if you have it in you, you are going to be made fit to go to the United States with Rait."
The stuff he had forced through my teeth had made me speechless. I had will enough remaining to resent his cocksure impudence, but not even the desire to speak.
"Now take this into your mind," he went on. "You are going to be hurt, tired until the senses lose control of you and what you have always believed is your own will dies forever. When all that nonsense about virtue has been dredged out—you are going to be taught as much as you are capable of learning. You are to be a foil for Rait and that shall be the goal of your ambition. So until you yearn with all your faculties to be obedient to Rait there is going to be only enough peace and relaxation to make agony more keen by contrast.
"Mercy is stupidity, and there will be none. I will give you one hint how to ease the strain, because you may break under it otherwise and that fat Bengali you have brought with you would make a poor substitute. So remember: "The agony won't last so long if you make up your mind to accept what is being done to you. Resign yourself to the inevitable, and begin to try to see the possibilities."
He strode away. I saw him talking to Chullunder Ghose. Gradually, minute after minute, pain returned and presently there came the monk whose ribs I broke, to prop himself against the cave wall and instruct three others how to torture me by prodding at my stiffened muscles.
The monks gorged themselves in a group, devouring meat like wild beasts, but the man in Grim's clothes stood alone with his back toward me, so that I could not see what he was eating. I began shivering with cold and every movement was like a knife stab because of the pain in my muscles, but a monk came and pulled off my overcoat, using a dagger to slit up the sleeves and save trouble.
After that the man in Grim's clothes fed Chullunder Ghose, and then me, telling half a dozen monks to hold me while he forced a measured quantity of filthy cheese into my mouth; it tasted as if mixed with axle-grease. When I spat the stuff out he scraped it from the floor and then got hold of my tongue, the way a horse is dosed, forcing the mess down my throat with his fingers while one monk held my head between his knees and another kept a rock jammed tight between my teeth.
My overcoat was then slit up with daggers and they gave me part of it to wear around my stomach, tying it in place with strips cut from the coat itself.
"That will keep you alive without making you comfortable," said the man in Grim's clothes.
At a sign from him they gloved my hands before they tied my wrists again. Then I was dragged on my back to where Chullunder Ghose lay and made fast to him by the knee and ankle, after which they kicked us to our feet and made us walk like men in a three-legged race.
