The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge (61 page)

His hobby of the infallibility of the human will, his will in particular, had served him well in the past but now he had spurred it too hard and it had raced away with his reason. Hazard’s mind, high-strung and sensitive, the mind of a genius, had broken down at last. Hope? There could be no hope, any more than there could be a sane explanation of why Hazard had played squarely into Blalock’s hands in the cellar. Into the hands of Blalock, who— I could not spare Hazard one reproach.

“You might have let me shoot him, Hazard. He deserved it, the traitor!”

“Hush!” warned Hazard again with an alarmed glance toward the door. And then in a whisper: “Yes, Blalock had planned to betray us. But don’t be too hard on him. It was for the sake of a cause for which he knew we’d both be willing to die; and indeed he must have known that he would very likely die along with us.”

It hurt me to hear Hazard talking so nonsensically. I looked away from him around the room, and immediately saw something that lightened my spirits a little. There were no windows in the walls, but directly above the door was a small, transom-like opening, doubtless placed there for ventilation. Here was at least a chance to divert my mind from our troubles; here was a chance to witness the chicanery that would put Koshinga’s foot upon the throat of the Republic.

“We can at least see this thing,” I suggested rather bitterly. “If we had our guns—but of course, we haven’t. One thing I think I promise though; the impressiveness of this affair will be broken by at least one white man’s yell. I wonder they didn’t think of that.”

“I wonder too,” said Hazard; “but they probably didn’t have any other place to put us. But, Partridge, I’m going to ask you this—not a sound, not a sound. In the name of all we’ve gone through together! I wish I’d explained before, and I’d like to explain now; but there’s too much depending on it, and I daren’t even whisper it. Ask Sha Feng if I’m not right—and promise me.”

Then he smiled more cheerfully than I’d seen him smile for months.

“There’ll be enough excitement about this affair before it’s finished, without starting anything.”

And I made him the promise. His manner was convincing and he might have something in mind. And I, of course, could hope for no more from my threatened interruption than, possibly, a little speedier death.

There was a small bench in the room and we placed it before the door just under the opening. Then we sat down upon it to wait for the arrival of the priests. And it was characteristic of the accuracy of detail with which Koshinga contrived his plots, and of his power to command implicit obedience of all who dealt with him, that we hadn’t long to wait, and that the whole assemblage arrived almost as a unit.

But in this case, of course, Koshinga had been assisted by another fact. The priests had known the prophesied date of the meeting. Doubtless they had made their plans and calculations long beforehand. The message of Koshinga, however and with whatever marvelous swiftness delivered, had only set in motion the plan carefully contrived three centuries ago by the first Koshinga. Or, according to the belief of the people who were to be duped, twenty-six centuries ago by Lao-Tse.

Anyway, not an hour passed before a steady stream of men began to enter the audience room of the temple. We could hear their slippered footsteps, and a growing hum of conversation pitched in a tone of awe and wonder.

If that was the effect already produced upon them by the sight of those long-buried images, I wondered how they would feel when they saw the living Koshinga, the exact reproduction in flesh of one of those effigies, the exact fulfilment of the prophecy which had brought them here. A marvelous tale indeed they would carry back to their people—marvelous, even without the crowning wonder of the dragon which was to bring a message from the gods.

I restrained my curiosity as long as I could; but at last I mounted the bench. Hazard and Sha Feng followed my example; and together we looked out upon what was, I suppose, one of the strangest gatherings that ever assembled in this most interesting world.

BY NOW the audience chamber was nearly filled. Their backs were toward us, but we could pick out the shaven-pated Taoists, the Po-Bon monks with hair to their waists, the lamas from Tibet, gorgeous in their cassocks of yellow silk, scarlet
khatas,
and great, purple mantles.

Up the aisle another group of these lamas were marching, holding in their hands their cardinal’s hats, lacquered on top with gold and scarlet underneath. In contrast there were the black-gowned high priests of China proper and warrior churchmen from Mongolia with swords by their sides.

My imagination was already straining itself to conceive of the immense authority possessed by these men when I heard the usually imperturbable Hazard draw his breath sharply, and followed his eyes to see what had startled him.

And it was only then that I became actually and entirely aware of the importance of what I was witnessing and its probable brutal consequences—for the Dalai Lama had entered the hall!

Beyond doubt the most powerful single individual in Asia, the permanent incarnation on earth of Pradjapani the secondary Buddha, head of the Saskya secret order, king of Debadjung, revered by all Tibetans and Mongols and by all Buddhistic Chinese, this soldier, intriguer and archpriest had come to meet the man who claimed to be greater than he—had come to meet Koshinga.

I knew him from a sketch drawn by one of the very few white men who have ever talked with him. Besides, he was accompanied by a bodyguard of about twenty soldiers, carrying rifles, and uniquely uniformed in red with orange facings—the Debadjung uniform.

He himself looked every inch a soldier; his face was European in cast and orange in color; and his medium-sized, very erect and sinewy figure was clad all in the royal Tibetan yellow, tunic and trousers and boots. A sword with a jeweled hilt swung in a scabbard by his side.

His lips were tightly compressed; his eyes, neither oblique nor slanting, looked straight in front of him, and a slight frown was on his face. He led the way down the aisle and he and his bodyguard took seats that had evidently been reserved for them, in the front of the chamber, just before the two images.

“Ah!” I heard Hazard murmur to Sha Feng. “This should make it easier.”

I didn’t know what he meant. Unquestionably it made it more dangerous; but also, with the entrance of that man whose hidden hand has been behind so much of Asiatic history, I felt a vague and ill-defined hope. And I thought I understood a little more clearly why Koshinga had hesitated to assemble these forces which even he might not be able to control. But the stronger these forces were the more dreadful would be the result of even a temporary domination by that devil-man.

There were no more arrivals after the Dalai Lama. I looked for signs of the Ko Lao Hui or Blalock; but none was visible. It was like Koshinga to keep them out of sight; claiming the support of the gods, he could not afford to lean heavily upon human assistance. And the tense and expectant silence which followed the seating of the Dalai Lama lasted until Koshinga appeared.

He didn’t appear immediately; he knew how to make men wait for him. He knew how men’s nerves grow ragged, their senses susceptible and their minds befuddled from waiting under stress. For about fifteen minutes nothing more happened of that event the importance of which made the stake of my own nearly forfeited life appear so insignificant, when—

Koshinga stood upon the platform. He hadn’t come upon it; he had assumed form there; and in the dim light the manner of his appearance seemed to be a swift emergence from the side of the larger stone image. For a moment he stood beside that image, motionless and silent. By that pause he challenged comparison, challenged any one to detect a line of difference between the long-buried stone face and his own.

There was no difference. Both were monstrous in the true sense of the word; there was not even a suggestion of the race to which either might belong; if humanity is human then they were both dehumanized; strength beyond the strength of normal men and untinctured by a grain of sympathy—that was what one read in both those faces. Even the dull-gray gown that Koshinga wore resembled the robe of the image.

Then Koshinga spoke; but before he spoke I noticed that every man in the assemblage swayed back a little in his seat. It was as if a great, weakening wind of intense and evil power had come from that platform and swept back through the chamber.

Indeed, I knew from three previous personal experiences with Koshinga that there was no one present but became in that moment a little less his own master, a little fainter of will and resolution, and although I could not see a face I knew that every eye was fixed on Koshinga in something like an open and helpless stare of fascination.

Only the Dalai Lama, if my eyes were to be trusted at that distance, braced himself in his seat and stiffened his shoulders and seemed to regard Koshinga uncompromisingly.

“There was a prophecy,” began Koshinga slowly in a voice of immense volume. “I am the fulfilment of that prophecy. There was Lao-Tse who was also Buddha. I am he. I am he who was always, who made the cycles, who gave the old law and who will give the new.

“I was and I return again. I am he who rules and who must be obeyed. Heaven has sent me to master the earth; and death will be the award of Heaven to those who oppose me, but the kingdoms of earth will be divided between those who follow me.”

And such was the suggestion of abominable power that he managed to convey in his voice and manner that even to me his claim of omnipotence seemed at that moment in no way absurd. Impossible, of course—so my reason assured me; but emotionally I had to fight hard to keep from falling under his sway.

I wondered how many of the priests were engaged in the same debate with themselves. They sat under his speech as if entranced, as if they themselves were more than half-deluded—they who had come here seeking but a new means of continuing the delusion of their people.

Koshinga’s speech wasn’t a long one, and I’ve already given the substance of it. Several times he reiterated his promises and threats; and then he touched lightly upon the promised Holy War that would bring in its train the mastery of the East over world affairs. Under him the combined Taoist and Buddhist hierarchies would be the seat of that world power. Absolute despot as he had been in the past and hoped to be in the future, he must have found it hard to make that promise—another reason why he had hesitated to carry out this last item of the program of the first Koshinga.

“But this is needless talk,” Koshinga went on. “From the beginning it was written that I should come and that I should rule; and the gods who have sent me give me wisdom and power. The dragon that lies under the earth, and whose breath is death to common men, comes forth to talk to me.

“He tells me the true
feng shui,
the secrets of wind and water and earth and the mastery of all the elements. And it has been promised, and you know of the promise, that he should come to me today, bringing me the will of Heaven and declaring it to you. Wherefore let the dragon himself speak, declaring my authority.”

It’s been the saving habit of a lifetime, during which I’ve seen as many strange things as reason would permit me to see, to discredit all explanations that are not based on natural law. Because man’s knowledge is still incomplete, that habit of mine has sometimes left me bereft of any explanation at all; but I was now duly grateful for it. In truth, that which I now saw was enough to shake one’s reason at the source.

KOSHINGA had stopped speaking, and was regarding with unshaken calm the monstrous fulfilment of his promise rising, as I live, from out of the earth directly to Koshinga’s right front. It was the head of a dragon, that creature which is a myth, but whose scaly coils have for forty centuries been entwined with Chinese history and Chinese thought, and whose pictured image surrounds every Chinaman from cradle to grave.

It rose from earth so hard-packed that it broke away in great triangular wedges; and it crawled with a spasmodic motion as of a thing worked by wires, sprawling toward Koshinga with great taloned claws thrust alternately forward and back and digging into the ground—grotesque head uplifted, yellow scales gleaming.

Of course, it was only a trick, only a part of the wild and immense sorcery by which Koshinga hoped to rule the ignorant. Of course, it wasn’t necessary for Koshinga’s purpose that they who beheld it should regard it as anything else. It was only necessary that they should be able to tell their people that they had seen this thing, and that Koshinga’s claim to power had received the endorsement of the embodied dragon.

Credulity would do the rest, the credulity which has so many times in China ripened into a harvest of death. Indeed, there have been few changes of power or dynasty in China that have not been accompanied by some such signs and portents, and this was merely the greatest sign of all. A trick, a trick, I repeated to myself, and still—

And still it is a rule that there are none so susceptible of delusion as they who live by deluding others; and I felt sure that in that trick Koshinga had surpassed himself, had overleaped necessity, had builded perhaps better than he knew.

For with the appearance of that dragon something like a curtain of horror perceptibly dropped over the temple, and I myself was afflicted with dismay and terror, trembling in the very depths of my being. The personality and speech of Koshinga had been enough; the appearance of the dragon overrode reason; and by my own feelings I knew that whatever message the dragon might bring would be accepted for the time being at least, and by the majority of the priests, as truth straight from on high.

It was then that I stole a swift glance at Hazard, hoping to receive from that man whose courage I’d never seen shaken, something that would help me tauten the failing resistance of my spirit. And I did, for he smiled at me. If it hadn’t been impossible, I should have said that it was the smile of satisfaction and pleased expectancy, as if he had known what was to happen, and what would happen next, and was well pleased with it all.