Mahommed Khan threw open the outer door and bowed sardonically. “Precedence for priests!” he sneered, tapping at his sword-hilt. “Thou goest first! Next come I, and last Suliman with the memsahib! Thus can I reach thee with my sword, O priest, and also protect her if need be!”
“Thou art trusting as a little child!” exclaimed the priest, passing out ahead of him.
“A priest and a liar and a thief—all three are one!” hummed the Risaldar. “Bear her gently, Suliman! Have a care, now, as you turn on the winding stairs!”
“Ha, sahib!” said the half-brother, carrying Ruth as easily as though she had been a little child.
At the foot of the stairway, in the blackness that seemed alive with phantom shadows, the High Priest paused and listened, stretching out his left hand against the wall to keep the other two behind him. From somewhere beyond the courtyard came the din of hurrying sandaled feet, scudding over cobblestones in one direction. The noise was incessant and not unlike the murmur of a rapid stream. Occasionally a voice was raised in some command or other, but the stream of sound continued, hurrying, hurrying, shuffling along to the southward.
“This way and watch a while,” whispered the priest.
“I have heard rats run that way!” growled the Risaldar.
They climbed up a narrow stairway leading to a sort of battlement and peered over the top, Suliman laying Ruth Bellairs down in the darkest shadow he could find. She was beginning to recover consciousness, and apparently Mahommed Khan judged it best to take no notice of her.
Down below them they could see the city gate, wide open, with a blazing torch on either side of it, and through the gate, swarming like ants before the rains, there poured an endless stream of humans that marched—and marched—and marched; four, ten, fifteen abreast; all heights and sizes, jumbled in and out among one another, anyhow, without formation, but armed, every one of them, and all intent on marching to the southward, where Jundhra and Doonha lay. Some muttered to one another and some laughed, but the greater number marched in silence.
“That for thy English!” grinned the priest. “Can the English troops overcome that horde?”
“Hey-ee! For a troop or two of Rajputs!” sighed the Risaldar. “Or English Lancers! They would ride through that as an ax does through the brush-wood!”
“Bah!” said the priest. “All soldiers boast! There will be a houghing shortly after dawn. The days of thy English are now numbered.”
“By those—there?”
“Ay, by those, there! Come!”
They climbed down the steps again, the Rajput humming to himself and smiling grimly into his mustache.
“Ay! There will be a houghing shortly after dawn!” he muttered. “Would only that I were there to see!... Where are the sepoys?” he demanded.
“I know not. How should I know, who have been thy guest these hours past? This march is none of my ordering.”
The priest pressed hard on a stone knob that seemed to be part of the carving on a wall, then he leaned his weight against the wall and a huge stone swung inward, while a fetid breath of air wafted outward in their faces.
“None know this road but I!” exclaimed the priest.
“None need to!” said the Risaldar. “Pass on, snake, into thy hole. We follow.”
“Steps!” said the priest, and began descending.
“Curses!” said the Risaldar, stumbling and falling down on top of him. “Have a care, Suliman! The stone is wet and slippery.”
Down, down they climbed, one behind the other, Suliman grunting beneath his burden and the Risaldar keeping up a running fire of oaths. Each time that he slipped, and that was often, he cursed the priest and cautioned Suliman. But the priest only laughed, and apparently Suliman was sure-footed, for he never stumbled once. They seemed to be diving down into the bowels of the earth. They were in pitch-black darkness, for the stone had swung to behind them of its own accord. The wall on either side of them was wet with slime and the stink of decaying ages rose and almost stifled them. But the priest kept on descending, so fast that the other two had trouble to keep up with him, and he hummed to himself as though he knew the road and liked it.
“The bottom!” he called back suddenly. “From now the going is easy, until we rise again. We pass now under the city-wall.”
But they could see nothing and hear nothing except their own footfalls swishing in the ooze beneath them. Even the priest's words seemed to be lost at once, as though he spoke into a blanket, for the air they breathed was thicker than a mist and just as damp. They walked on, along a level, wet, stone passage for at least five minutes, feeling their way with one band on the wall.
“Steps, now!” said the priest. “Have a care, now, for the lower ones are slippery.”
Ruth was regaining consciousness. She began to move and tried once or twice to speak.
“Here, thou!” growled the Risaldar. “Thou art a younger man than I—come back here. Help with the memsahib.”
The priest came back a step or two, but Suliman declined his aid, snarling vile insults at him.
“I can manage!” he growled. “Get thou behind me, Mahommed Khan, in case I slip!”
So Mahommed Khan came last, and they slipped and grunted upward, round and round a spiral staircase that was hewn out of solid rock. No light came through from anywhere to help them, but the priest climbed on, as though he were accustomed to the stair and knew the way from constant use. After five minutes of steady climbing the stone grew gradually dry. The steps became smaller, too, and deeper, and not so hard to climb. Suddenly the priest reached out his arm and pulled at something or other that hung down in the darkness. A stone in the wall rolled open. A flood of light burst in and nearly blinded them.
“We are below Kharvani's temple!” announced the priest. He led them through the opening into a four-square room hewn from the rock below the foundations of the temple some time in the dawn of history. The light that had blinded them when they first emerged proved to be nothing but the flicker of two small oil lamps that hung suspended by brass chains from the painted ceiling. The only furniture was mats spread on the cut-stone floor.
“By which way did we come?” asked the Risaldar, staring in amazement round the walls. There was not a door nor crack, nor any sign of one, except that a wooden ladder in one corner led to a trapdoor overhead, and they had certainly not entered by the ladder.
“Nay! That is a secret!” grinned the priest. “He who can may find the opening! Here can the woman and her servant stay until we need them.”
“Here in this place?”
“Where else? No man but I knows of this crypt! The ladder there leads to another room, where there is yet another ladder, and that one leads out through a secret door I know of, straight into the temple. Art ready? There is need for haste!”
“Wait!” said the Risaldar.
“These soldiers!” sneered the priest. “It is wait—wait—wait with them, always!”
“Hast thou a son.”
“Ay! But what of it?”
“I said 'hast,' not 'hadst'!”
“Ay. I have a son.
“Where?”
“In one of the temple-chambers overhead.”
“Nay, priest! Thy son lies gagged and bound and trussed in a place I know of, and which thou dost not know!”
“Since when?”
“Since by my orders he was laid there.”
“Thou art the devil! Thou liest, Rajput!”
“So? Go seek thy son!”
The priest's face had blanched beneath the olive of his skin, and he stared at Mahommed Khan through distended eyes.
“My son!” he muttered.
“Aye! Thy priestling! He stays where he is, as hostage, until my return! Also the heavenborn stays here! If, on my return, I find the heavenborn safe and sound, I will exchange her for thy son—and if not, I will tear thy son into little pieces before thy eyes, priest! Dost thou understand?”
“Thou liest! My son is overhead in the temple here!”
“Go seek him, then!”
The priest turned and scampered up the ladder with an agility that was astonishing in a man of his build and paunch.
“Hanuman should have been thy master!” jeered the Risaldar. “So run the bandar-log, the monkey-folk!”
But the priest had no time to answer him. He was half frantic with the sickening fear of a father for his only son. He returned ten minutes later, panting, and more scared than ever.
“Go, take thy white woman,” he exclaimed, “and give me my son back!”
“Nay, priest! Shall I ride with her alone through that horde that are marching through the gate? I go now for an escort; in eight—ten—twelve—I know not how many hours, I will return for her, and then—thy son will be exchanged for her, or he dies thus in many pieces!”
He turned to Suliman. “Is she awake yet?” he demanded.
“Barely, but she recovers.”
“Then tell her, when consciousness returns, that I have gone and will return for her. And stay here, thou, and guard her until I come.”
“Ha, sahib!”
“Now, show the way!”
“But—” said the priest, “our bargain? The price that we agreed on—one lakh, was it not?”
“One lakh of devils take thee and tear thee into little pieces! Wouldst bribe a Rajput, a Risaldar? For that insult I will repay thee one day with interest, O priest! Now, show the way!”
“But how shall I be sure about my son?”
“Be sure that the priestling will starve to death or die of thirst or choke, unless I hurry! He is none too easy where he lies!”
“Go! Hurry, then!” swore the priest. “May all the gods there are, and thy Allah with them, afflict thee with all their curses—thee and thine! Up with you! Up that ladder! Run! But, if the gods will, I will meet thee again when the storm is over!”
“Inshallah!” growled Mahommed Khan.
Ten minutes later a crash and a clatter and a shower of sparks broke out in the sweltering courtyard where the guns had stood and waited. It was Shaitan, young Bellairs' Khaubuli charger, with his haunches under him, plunging across the flagstones, through the black-dark archway, out on the plain beyond—in answer to the long, sharp-roweled spurs of the Risaldar Mahommed Khan.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg