Collected fiction, p.398
Collected Fiction, page 398
The intermittent yells were like the baying of wolves. Occasionally Danton could see a black jumping-jack spring Up and vanish again, while a spear would shoot into the firelight. The small figure of Jieng was busy exhorting the natives, who milled around in a confused mass. Abruptly they flung down their guns and fell on their faces. No use to fight, they figured. It was fate, alas. They burrowed their pug noses into the dirt and repeated “Om mani padme hum.”
Jieng ran back to Dr. Danton. “They will not help. What now?”
For answer the white man lifted his revolver and fired at a half-seen silhouette, which dodged, seemingly unhurt. There was another outburst of yells, the pattering of feet, and a shower of spears. One blade cut Danton’s sleeve.
The black cloud overhead, which no one was noticing at the moment, quivered convulsively, as though in rage. It muttered low, ominous thunder. And then a lightning bolt streaked down from it.
Well-aimed, it found a hillman, outlining him in white radiance. The man flung up his arms, shrieked, and fell dead. Before he hit the ground another bolt flashed from the sky.
“What luck,” Danton whispered.
Jieng said: “I would not call it luck. A-i! Another!”
A third streak of lightning darted from the cloud and disposed of a third hillman. Then another—and still more. Danton was irresistibly reminded of a sniper sitting calmly on top of that incredible cloud, carefully aiming and firing. The hillmen gave up and ran away. The lightning pursued. The unfortunate wretches scattered across the plain, but could not escape. Danton and Jieng watched as their quondam enemies were disposed of, neatly and noisily.
CHAPTER II
Kroo’s Miracle
SLOWLY the cloud came back. It hovered directly over Danton, muttering faintly, Jieng, with a foreboding sound, departed. The white man was suddenly lifted into the air.
Briefly he was blind. Then his vision cleared. He was looking down on the camp and the vague, moonlighted plain. The prostrate bodies of his native carriers were piled in a heap. Jieng was a huddled black blot. Danton discovered that he was about forty feet above the ground, sitting on the edge of a singularly solid cloud.
Vertigo assailed him. He rocked forward and back, clawing at his support in a baffled manner. The whole thing was quite impossible. Moreover, he was in immediate danger of falling.
“Jieng!” he yelped.
Jieng looked up and began to salaam. The other natives made temporary white blurs of their faces and then followed Jieng’s example. Dan ton cursed them dispassionately.
He was sitting on a cloud. That, in itself, was unusual enough to be noteworthy. The texture of the cloud, he discovered with tentative fingers, was rubbery, somewhat like a sponge. It was comfortable, as far as that went. Even an electric chair might be comfortable for a brief time. Finally, something was licking Danton’s neck.
He gingerly turned his head to confront the bland, friendly gaze of the yak. The huge creature was lying down just behind him, and the propinquity of that Minotaur-like face was distressing. The horns looked dangerous, even though they had the texture of crumbly wood.
Something—either the yak or the cloud—rumbled. Danton didn’t know which.
He looked down and yelled at Jieng. “Get me down from here, you benighted fool.”
“How?” Jieng asked cogently, without ceasing his salaams.
The problem was solved at that point when both Danton and the yak were gently levitated back to the ground. Danton found himself sitting astride the beast. He hurriedly dismounted and burst into a cold sweat.
“Liquor,” he said, rummaging in a knapsack. “Oh confound Tibet anyway.” He drank whisky and barked sharp orders to Jieng. “We’re getting out of here. Right away.”
“Soon,” said Jieng. “The carriers wish to thank the god who saved us from the hillmen, He must love you. The yak is probably sacred to him.”
“Rot,” Danton snarled, thinking of Gompo Lamas and Tibetan adepts. “It’s hypnotism or something. Nay,” he went on, his voice suddenly thickening, ‘thou hast beheld the power of Kroo. Kroo the All-Wise! Kroo the Terrible! Bow down and worship Kroo!”
“Ya! Kroo is great!” the diplomatic Jieng remarked hastily, and prostrated himself, as did the other natives.
Danton, standing aghast, stared down at the salaaming group. Why in the dickens had he said that?
He hadn’t. The words had come from his mouth without conscious volition of his own. He had listened as though someone else had been speaking.
“Get up!” he said irritably. “Don’t—Kroo is great! Worship Kroo or die writhing and impaled.”
“Ya!”
Danton ground his teeth together. He felt slightly mad. With urgent haste he recovered the whisky bottle and gulped the stinging fluid.
HIS voice boomed out. “Go! Leave Kroo, who would speak privately with his High Priest!”
Instantly the natives, led in reverse by Jieng, began to wriggle away backwards, like crayfish. It was an unnerving spectacle. Danton didn’t move till the last writhing figure had vanished in the outer darkness. Then he drank more whisky.
“I’m going crazy,” he remarked. “Schizophrenic. Jekyll and Hyde. Two years in Tibet . . . ugh!”
“Be not afraid,” his own voice broke in, deepened and roughened in tone. “Kroo speaks. Thou art dear to Kroo.”
“I said it and yet I didn’t say it,” Danton gasped. “It’s my voice., but—”
“Be not skeptical,” he interrupted himself, again in the deeper voice. “Gods may speak through their High Priests. Or so it was in the old days. And I—I know all tongues you do, and a great many more as well. Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” Danton finished, changing to English.
“I’m crazy!”
“No, but you’re getting tight—that is, the spirits of the wine have begun to—” Danton broke into a stream of searing, extremely vulgar oaths in an obscure Tibetan dialect. “Okay,” he went on at last. “So I’m a peasant god. What the blazes! If I’d been the god of a lot of super-civilized stuffed shirts, I could talk their lingo. But I wasn’t. Mud and blood conceived me. And what was good enough for my first worshippers is plenty good enough for these modern children of noseless mothers. Vashangya!” Danton didn’t recognize the word, but it sounded like an oath.
He finished the bottle and broke open another. The whole thing was quite unreal.
He was alone in a vast, cold emptiness lighted only by the tiny fire and the distant brilliance of the stars. The natives had disappeared. He was alone, and talking to himself.
“Jieng!” he yelled. “Come back. Nay—return at your peril, verminous dogs!” Danton started in on the other bottle. It helped. It helped a good deal, especially when things lost their hard outlines and became a bit fuzzy. After that, it did not seem quite so strange to be sitting here conversing with . . . himself? No—
“Are you still skeptical?” Danton asked.
“Gosh, yes,” he replied, briefly.
“Then you must be convinced.”
“How? It’s my own voice—”
“I use your throat and tongue as you would use a musical instrument. As I could use the yak—”
Danton fell suddenly silent. The yak lurched forward into the dim firelight.
“—Or any creature over which I had power,” the yak remarked. “The beast throat is harder to use, for it isn’t made to speak as humans do. Still, there it is. Are you convinced? If you are, we will talk further.”
“It’s hypnotism. Danton said stubbornly. “Maybe Jieng’s doing it.”
“Mm-m.” The yak paused.
Abruptly Danton began to rise into the air. He dropped the bottle and yelped.
“Do you believe yet?” his voice inquired.
“No!” Danton gasped. “Hallucina—” He shot up like a rocket. The air became perceptibly colder.
“Do you believe?”
“N-n—”
“I can’t transport you to the moon, but I can take you halfway there before my power weakens. When you find yourself believing in Kroo, say so.”
Danton gulped hard.
THE ground dropped away, the mountain peaks, white with glaciers, looking like a relief map far below. Danton was rising fast. He experienced difficulty in breathing.
“Child of a wallowing ape!” his own voice demanded, painfully. “Will you speak—or die?”
Danton nodded. “I—believe—”
“You’re more skeptical than a Gnostic. But okay.” The upward rush was reversed. Presently Danton found himself hovering no more than five hundred feet above the encampment.
“Now,” he said, in Kroo’s voice, “we can talk.”
“Yeah,” Danton agreed weakly. “But I’d talk better if I had another drink.”
“Why not?” The bottle appeared, flying up like a bullet. It came easily to rest in Danton’s hand. “Drink! It’s a good brew—sturdy, savage stuff, like kumiss. I am pleased that you have no taste for the insipid wines of the hot countries. The men of my birthplace drank kumiss. Once they lived near my temple where you bought my sacred yak.”
A light broke over Danton. “Ah, then that was your temple?”
“How could you tell?” The voice was almost bitter. “A half-ruined hut! In a village of dead men—stupid fools. I was dying and in prison. I, whose worshippers have shouted and slain till the earth ran red—by Me. There’s hot blood in my veins! Or there was. And it stirs again. High Priest, I want a temple.”
“Oh? Well—”
“And I shall take one. I shall be great again. All men shall bow to me, and you are my High Priest.”
“But I don’t want to be your High Priest,” Danton said desperately. “You need a—a lama, or a shaman. I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“When there’s need, I’ll speak With your tongue, as an oracle.”
“Wait! Don’t—”
“Will not Carruthers be pleased?”
“Not by the yaks, certainly,” Danton said in a hopeless voice. “Look, can’t I get out of this somehow? I’ve got to get back to the States—”
“All right. Where are these States?” Danton thought fast. Back in New York, he would at least be in familiar surroundings, and less at a loss. He might be able to cope with Kroo. He might—
In any case, he’d be back home. And not completely alone, with not a white man for hundreds of miles around. He wouldn’t be any worse off, certainly!
“East,” Danton said. “Due east till you hit St. Augustine. I’ll let you know . . .”
“East it is.”
Kroo’s yak was levitated upward. Danton found himself sitting astride the beast. Below, the landscape slid away.
A thought struck him. “Hey, wait! I haven’t paid the natives.”
“Pay them, for serving my High Priest?” Kroo gave vent to an expletive that made Danton’s lips feel soiled. The eastward progress continued.
CHAPTER III
Japanese Ways
YES, They went fast—for Danton.
Kroo did not use instant teleportation, because he wanted to examine the strange new world in which he found himself. Not for centuries had he been out of Tibet. Moderns—what vast cities and temples might they have reared?
In an hour they were passing over Bhutan. Before dawn they crossed the Brahmaputra, and fled on above the northern tip of Burma. Beyond Sadiya, where the railroad stops and the great jade deposits begin, Kroo noticed something of interest.
To tell the truth, he was a little tired. His vitality had run low through years of attrition, and, while he would not have admitted it to a human or even to another god, he was beginning to get cold feet. He was wondering about the new deities that had displaced Amon and Baal and Anubis.
Kroo had an inferiority complex.
It was not his fault. Kroo had not come of a sophisticated race. He was, as he had mentioned to Danton, mud and blood. In short, a peasant—a barbarian. Very often, centuries ago, he had writhed under the barbed taunts of more cosmopolitan gods who looked on him as a clod. Even in the days of his greatest power, Isis had called him nouveau riche.
And that hurt. Kroo realized his limitations, of course. He had little education and less culture. True, he had power—but all gods had that. Suppose he emerged into a modern world, where new gods reigned, sleek and debonair, and announced that he was Kroo?
The new gods might raise their brows, shrug, and turn away. Their sophistication might make them feel that Kroo was not worth knowing.
The ancient, savage god shook his heavy shoulders angrily. He’d show ’em! He might be a minor deity, but—
He sighed. Too well Kroo knew his pettiness. To think otherwise would be like expecting to be permitted into Godsheim after he died. Only the truly great ones went there, certainly not the sick, weakened gods who died of faith-starvation.
But he was alive—had a new lease on life, in fact. Very well. He would rule. He would battle some small god and supplant him, reigning from the evicted one’s temple and building up a new kingdom. Already he had a High Priest and a sacred yak. Next, a temple, and worshippers.
A temple—and here it was.
Myapur is a town in upper Burma, half native shacks, half more modern structures. A British engineer had done wonders in Myapur until circumstances had caused his death. The most notable structure was a well-built cement-and-metal powerhouse that had been the engineer’s chief pride.
In the early dawn Kroo slanted down toward the powerhouse, sending an inaudible call before him. No answer came. The resident god was asleep, then, like Danton, who had relaxed comfortably on the yak’s back Kroo’s power supporting him.
Several men in uniforms were standing outside the powerhouse’s doors. They jumped, startled, as the panels swung open. Kroo gave them a passing glance. They were short and stocky, with yellowish skins and dark hair and eyes. They had rifles.
Kroo sensed the danger of the weapons. He might have blasted the soldiers into ash, but just now he was on another god’s threshold, and it behooved him to walk carefully. So, with foresighted courtesy, Kroo threw a veil of darkness around the powerhouse, and, in the blackness, swiftly transported Danton and the yak through the portal.
IT WAS indeed a temple. The altars were sombrely magnificent, great dynamos that, at present, were silent. Myapur had been blacked out all night, for fear of bombers. It was an especially strategic point to the invaders, so long as their occupation was not suspected by the British.
Kroo thought. The god wasn’t here. Probably away, on a visit. Well, the best defence is a good offense. Kroo decided to go in search of his unsuspecting enemy, scouting the ground to discover whether the enemy god was dangerously powerful. If so, Kroo would hastily go away. Otherwise—
Kroo showed his yellow tushes in a nasty grin. He went away, lifting the dark veil as he did so, and leaving Danton in the powerhouse, atop the impassive yak.
Kroo would be back later.
Meanwhile, hands gripped Danton and pulled him off his shaggy steed. There was a crackle of outraged questions and commands. Footsteps pounded through the powerhouse. The guards rushed in from the portico and screamed for gas masks.
“Hello,” Danton said, blinking around sleepily at the uniformed men who surrounded him. “I’ve been dreaming—, no I still am.” He shook himself, and the hands tightened on his arms.
The yak burped.
“Who are you? How did you get here?” an officer demanded.
Danton recognized the dialect. His suspicions were confirmed by the realization that he was in a bona fide powerhouse. Kroo was real, then. The god must have veered northward during the night, landing in Japan instead of skimming the Amami Islands on his way to America.
Danton had been in the interior of Tibet for two years. The uninformed archeologist beamed, relieved at being among civilized people once more.
His Japanese was not too rusty. “My name’s—”
“Shoot him,” someone suggested.
“No, take him to Captain Yakuni. He has given strict orders.”
“But he is a spy.”
“Then he must be questioned. The Captain—”
“Hey,” Danton said. “I’m no spy.”
“Silence. What shall be done with the yak?”
“Drive him out, child of a greater fool than yourself.”
“Listen,” Danton broke in uncomprehendingly. “Give me a chance to explain.”
“Silence. Come.”
“But—”
“Silence.”
There was silence. Danton was escorted from the powerhouse, leaving the yak to the ministrations of the soldiers. The yellow light of dawn hurt his eyes. He blinked, staring.
The powerhouse, he saw, was camouflaged by a thick growth of champac, mixed with a few teak and mahogany giants. To his right the ground fell away sharply into a deep gorge, from which the muffled thunder of racing water emerged.
In the distance was a zayat, half ruined now, but unmistakably a Burmese rest-house for travelers.
Burma? A powerhouse? Japs?
Danton batted his eyes. He was escorted southward, along a well-worn path, and down a steep, forested slope. Beneath him lay a village.
Pagodas confirmed his suspicion that this was Burma.
He glanced back. The powerhouse was invisible now. Only the sharp eye of a god could have detected its presence from above.
“This way.”
THIS building had once been a temple, Danton saw. Now it was converted into something less esoteric. Guards at the door snapped a challenge. There was a brief interchange of remarks, terminated by the sound of a voice cursing dispassionately in Gaelic. Danton was thrust forward.
A door opened. He found himself in a small room that had been efficiently furnished as an office. Seated at a table strewn with papers was a smiling, middle-aged Japanese who sported a beard. It was not much of a beard, thin, straggly, and looking vaguely moth-eaten, and it entirely failed to give the man an appearance of dignity. He looked up at Danton’s entrance and nodded briefly.
