The Man who would be King - Part III

"'A God can do anything,' says I. 'If the King is fond of a girl he'll not
let her die.' 'She'll have to,' said Billy Fish. 'There are all sorts of
Gods and Devils in these mountains, and now and again a girl marries one
of them and isn't seen any more. Besides, you two know the Mark cut in the
stone. Only the Gods know that. We thought you were men till you showed
the sign of the Master.'

"I wished then that we had explained about the loss of the genuine secrets
of a Master-Mason at the first go-off; but I said nothing. All that night
there was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-way down the
hill, and I heard a girl crying fit to die. One of the priests told us
that she was being prepared to marry the King.

"'I'll have no nonsense of that kind,' says, Dan. 'I don't want to
interfere with your customs, but I'll take my own wife.' 'The girl's a
little bit afraid,' says the priest. 'She thinks she's going to die, and
they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.'

"'Hearten her very tender, then,' says Dravot, 'or I'll hearten you with
the butt of a gun so that you'll never want to be heartened again.' He
licked his lips, did Dan, and stayed up walking about more than half the
night, thinking of the wife that he was going to get in the morning. I
wasn't any means comfortable, for I knew that dealings with a woman in
foreign parts, though you was a crowned King twenty times over, could not
but be risky. I got up very early in the morning while Dravot was asleep,
and I saw the priests talking together in whispers, and the Chiefs talking
together too, and they looked at me out of the corners of their eyes.

"'What is up, Fish?' I says to the Bashkai man, who was wrapped up in his
furs and looking splendid to behold.

"'I can't rightly say,' says he; 'but if you can induce the King to drop
all this nonsense about marriage, you'll be doing him and me and yourself
a great service.'

"'That I do believe,' says I. 'But sure, you know, Billy, as well as me,
having fought against and for us, that the King and me are nothing more
than two of the finest men that God Almighty ever made. Nothing more, I do
assure you.'

"'That may be,' says Billy Fish, 'and yet I should be sorry if it was.' He
sinks his head upon his great fur cloak for a minute and thinks. 'King,'
says he, 'be you man or God or Devil, I'll stick by you to-day. I have
twenty of my men with me, and they will follow me. We'll go to Bashkai
until the storm blows over.'

"A little snow had fallen in the night, and everything was white except
the greasy fat clouds that blew down and down from the north. Dravot came
out with his crown on his head, swinging his arms and stamping his feet,
and looking more pleased than Punch.

"'For the last time, drop it, Dan,' says I, in a whisper. 'Billy Fish here
says that there will be a row.'

"'A row among my people!' says Dravot. 'Not much. Peachey, you're a fool
not to get a wife too. Where's the girl?' says he, with a voice as loud as
the braying of a jackass. 'Call up all the Chiefs and priests, and let the
Emperor see if his wife suits him.'

"There was no need to call anyone. They were all there leaning on their
guns and spears round the clearing in the centre of the pine wood. A
deputation of priests went down to the little temple to bring up the girl,
and the horns blew up fit to wake the dead. Billy Fish saunters round and
gets as close to Daniel as he could, and behind him stood his twenty men
with matchlocks. Not a man of them under six feet. I was next to Dravot,
and behind me was twenty men of the regular Army. Up comes the girl, and a
strapping wench she was, covered with silver and turquoises but white as
death, and looking back every minute at the priests.

"'She'll do,' said Dan, looking her over. 'What's to be afraid of, lass?
Come and kiss me.' He puts his arm round her. She shuts her eyes, gives a
bit of a squeak, and down goes her face in the side of Dan's flaming red
beard.

"'The slut's bitten me!' says he, clapping his hand to his neck, and, sure
enough, his hand was red with blood. Billy Fish and two of his
matchlock-men catches hold of Dan by the shoulders and drags him into the
Bashkai lot, while the priests howls in their lingo,--'Neither God nor
Devil but a man!' I was all taken aback, for a priest cut at me in front,
and the Army behind began firing into the Bashkai men.

"'God A-mighty!' says Dan, 'What is the meaning o' this?'

"'Come back! Come away!' says Billy Fish. 'Ruin and Mutiny is the matter.
We'll break for Bashkai if we can.'

"I tried to give some sort of orders to my men--the men o' the regular
Army--but it was no use, so I fired into the brown of 'em with an English
Martini and drilled three beggars in a line. The valley was full of
shouting, howling creatures, and every soul was shrieking, 'Not a God nor
a Devil but only a man!' The Bashkai troops stuck to Billy Fish all they
were worth, but their matchlocks wasn't half as good as the Kabul
breech-loaders, and four of them dropped. Dan was bellowing like a bull,
for he was very wrathy; and Billy Fish had a hard job to prevent him
running out at the crowd.

"'We can't stand,' says Billy Fish. 'Make a run for it down the valley!
The whole place is against us.' The matchlock-men ran, and we went down
the valley in spite of Dravot's protestations. He was swearing horribly
and crying out that he was a King. The priests rolled great stones on us,
and the regular Army fired hard, and there wasn't more than six men, not
counting Dan, Billy Fish, and Me, that came down to the bottom of the
valley alive.

"Then they stopped firing and the horns in the temple blew again. 'Come
away--for Gord's sake come away!' says Billy Fish. 'They'll send runners
out to all the villages before ever we get to Bashkai. I can protect you
there, but I can't do anything now.'

"My own notion is that Dan began to go mad in his head from that hour. He
stared up and down like a stuck pig. Then he was all for walking back
alone and killing the priests with his bare hands; which he could have
done. 'An Emperor am I,' says Daniel, 'and next year I shall be a Knight
of the Queen.'

"'All right, Dan,' says I; 'but come along now while there's time.'

"'It's your fault,' says he, 'for not looking after your Army better.
There was mutiny in the midst, and you didn't know--you damned
engine-driving, plate-laying, missionary's-pass-hunting hound!' He sat
upon a rock and called me every foul name he could lay tongue to. I was
too heart-sick to care, though it was all his foolishness that brought the
smash.

"'I'm sorry, Dan,' says I, 'but there's no accounting for natives. This
business is our Fifty-Seven. Maybe we'll make something out of it yet,
when we've got to Bashkai.'

"'Let's get to Bashkai, then,' says Dan, 'and, by God, when I come back
here again I'll sweep the valley so there isn't a bug in a blanket left!'

"We walked all that day, and all that night Dan was stumping up and down
on the snow, chewing his beard and muttering to himself.

"'There's no hope o' getting clear,' said Billy Fish. 'The priests will
have sent runners to the villages to say that you are only men. Why didn't
you stick on as Gods till things was more settled? I'm a dead man,' says
Billy Fish, and he throws himself down on the snow and begins to pray to
his Gods.

"Next morning we was in a cruel bad country--all up and down, no level
ground at all, and no food either. The six Bashkai men looked at Billy
Fish hungry-wise as if they wanted to ask something, but they said never a
word. At noon we came to the top of a flat mountain all covered with snow,
and when we climbed up into it, behold, there was an Army in position
waiting in the middle!

"'The runners have been very quick,' says Billy Fish, with a little bit of
a laugh. 'They are waiting for us.'

"Three or four men began to fire from the enemy's side, and a chance shot
took Daniel in the calf of the leg. That brought him to his senses. He
looks across the snow at the Army, and sees the rifles that we had brought
into the country.

"'We're done for,' says he. 'They are Englishmen, these people,--and it's
my blasted nonsense that has brought you to this. Get back, Billy Fish,
and take your men away; you've done what you could, and now cut for it.
Carnehan,' says he, 'shake hands with me and go along with Billy. Maybe
they won't kill you. I'll go and meet 'em alone. It's me that did it. Me,
the King!'

"'Go!' says I. 'Go to Hell, Dan. I'm with you here. Billy Fish, you clear
out, and we two will meet those folk.'

"'I'm a Chief,' says Billy Fish, quite quiet. 'I stay with you. My men can
go.'

"The Bashkai fellows didn't wait for a second word but ran off, and Dan
and Me and Billy Fish walked across to where the drums were drumming and
the horns were horning, It was cold--awful cold. I've got that cold in the
back of my head now. There's a lump of it there."

The punkah-coolies had gone to sleep. Two kerosene lamps were blazing in
the office, and the perspiration poured down my face and splashed on the
blotter as I leaned forward. Carnehan was shivering, and I feared that his
mind might go. I wiped my face, took a fresh grip of the piteously mangled
hands, and said:--"What happened after that?"

The momentary shift of my eyes had broken the clear current.

"What was you pleased to say?" whined Carnehan. "They took them without
any sound. Not a little whisper all along the snow, not though the King
knocked down the first man that set hand on him--not though old Peachey
fired his last cartridge into the brown of 'em. Not a single solitary
sound did those swines make. They just closed up tight, and I tell you
their furs stunk. There was a man called Billy Fish, a good friend of us
all, and they cut his throat, Sir, then and there, like a pig; and the
King kicks up the bloody snow and says:--'We've had a dashed fine run for
our money. What's coming next?' But Peachey, Peachey Taliaferro, I tell
you, Sir, in confidence as betwixt two friends, he lost his head, Sir. No,
he didn't neither. The King lost his head, so he did, all along o' one of
those cunning rope-bridges. Kindly let me have the paper-cutter, Sir. It
tilted this way. They marched him a mile across that snow to a rope-bridge
over a ravine with a river at the bottom. You may have seen such. They
prodded him behind like an ox. 'Damn your eyes!' says the King. 'D'you
suppose I can't die like a gentleman?' He turns to Peachey--Peachey that
was crying like a child. 'I've brought you to this, Peachey,' says he.
'Brought you out of your happy life to be killed in Kafiristan, where you
was late Commander-in-Chief of the Emperor's forces. Say you forgive me,
Peachey.' 'I do,' says Peachey. 'Fully and freely do I forgive you, Dan.'
'Shake hands, Peachey,' says he. 'I'm going now.' Out he goes, looking
neither right nor left, and when he was plumb in the middle of those dizzy
dancing ropes, 'Cut, you beggars,' he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan
fell, turning round and round and round twenty thousand miles, for he took
half an hour to fall till he struck the water, and I could see his body
caught on a rock with the gold crown close beside.

"But do you know what they did to Peachey between two pine trees? They
crucified him, Sir, as Peachey's hand will show. They used wooden pegs for
his hands and his feet; and he didn't die. He hung there and screamed, and
they took him down next day, and said it was a miracle that he wasn't
dead. They took him down--poor old Peachey that hadn't done them any
harm--that hadn't done them any...."

He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, wiping his eyes with the back of
his scarred hands and moaning like a child for some ten minutes.

"They was cruel enough to feed him up in the temple, because they said he
was more of a God than old Daniel that was a man. Then they turned him out
on the snow, and told him to go home, and Peachey came home in about a
year, begging along the roads quite safe: for Daniel Dravot he walked
before and said:--'Come along, Peachey. It's a big thing we're doing.' The
mountains they danced at night, and the mountains they tried to fall on
Peachey's head, but Dan he held up his hand, and Peachey came along bent
double. He never let go of Dan's hand, and he never let go of Dan's head.
They gave it to him as a present in the temple, to remind him not to come
again, and though the crown was pure gold, and Peachey was starving, never
would Peachey sell the same. You knew Dravot, Sir! You knew Right
Worshipful Brother Dravot! Look at him now!"

He fumbled in the mass of rags round his bent waist; brought out a black
horsehair bag embroidered with silver thread; and shook therefrom on to my
table--the dried, withered head of Daniel Dravot! The morning sun that had
long been paling the lamps struck the red beard and blind sunken eyes;
struck, too, a heavy circlet of gold studded with raw turquoises, that
Carnehan placed tenderly on the battered temples.

"You behold now," said Carnehan, "the Emperor in his habit as he
lived--the King of Kafiristan with his crown upon his head. Poor old
Daniel that was a monarch once!"

I shuddered, for, in spite of defacements manifold, I recognized the head
of the man of Marwar Junction. Carnehan rose to go. I attempted to stop
him. He was not fit to walk abroad. "Let me take away the whiskey, and
give me a little money," he gasped, "I was a King once. I'll go to the
Deputy Commissioner and ask to set in the Poorhouse till I get my health.
No, thank you, I can't wait till you get a carriage for me, I've urgent
private affairs--in the south--at Marwar."

He shambled out of the office and departed in the direction of the Deputy
Commissioner's house. That day at noon I had occasion to go down the
blinding hot Mall, and I saw a crooked man crawling along the white dust
of the roadside, his hat in his hand, quavering dolorously after the
fashion of street-singers at Home. There was not a soul in sight, and he
was out of all possible earshot of the houses. And he sang through his
nose, turning his head from right to left:

"The Son of Man goes forth to war,
A golden crown to gain;
His blood-red banner streams afar--
Who follows in his train?"

I waited to hear no more, but put the poor wretch into my carriage and
drove him off to the nearest missionary for eventual transfer to the
Asylum. He repeated the hymn twice while he was with me whom he did not in
the least recognize, and I left him singing it to the missionary.

Two days later I inquired after his welfare of the Superintendent of the
Asylum.

"He was admitted suffering from sunstroke. He died early yesterday
morning," said the Superintendent. "Is it true that he was half an hour
bareheaded in the sun at midday?"

"Yes," said I, "but do you happen to know if he had anything upon him by
any chance when he died?"

"Not to my knowledge," said the Superintendent.

And there the matter rests.