The Bronze Bell Part 40

The causeway down which the hors.e.m.e.n of forgotten kings of Khandawar had clattered forth to war, in its age-old desuetude had come to decay.

Between its great paving blocks gra.s.s sprouted, and here and there creepers and even trees had taken root and in the slow immutable process of their growth had displaced considerable ma.s.ses of stone; so that there were pitfalls to be avoided. Otherwise a litter of rubble made the walking anything but good. Amber picked his way with caution, grumbling.

The grade was rather more steep than it had seemed to be from the plain. Now and then he stopped to regain his breath and scrub a handkerchief over his forehead, on which sweat had started despite the cold. At such times his gaze would seek inevitably and involuntarily, the lotus-pointed pinnacle whereon the Eye was poised, blazing. Its baleful emerald glare coloured his mood unpleasantly. He had a fancy that the thing was actually watching him. The sensation was creepy.

For that matter, nothing that met his eye was calculated to instil cheer into his heart. Desolation worked with silence sensibly upon his thoughts, so that he presently made the alarming discovery that the bottom had dropped completely out of his stock of scepticism, leaving him seriously in danger of becoming afraid of the dark. Scowling over this, he stumbled on, telling himself that he was a fool: a conclusion so patent that neither then nor thereafter at any time did he find reason to dispute it.

After some three-quarters of an hour of hard climbing he came to the wooden bridge, and halted, surveying it with mistrust. Doubtless in the olden time a substantial but movable structure, strong enough to sustain a troop of warriors but light enough to be easily drawn up, had extended across the chasm, rendering the city impregnable from capture by a.s.sault. If so, it had long since been replaced by an airy and well-ventilated latticework of boards and timbers, none of which seemed to the wary eye any too sound. Amber selected the most solid-looking of the lot and gingerly advanced a pace or two along it. With a soft crackling a portion of the timber crumbled to dust beneath his feet. He retreated hastily to the causeway, and swore, and noticed that the Eye was watching him with malevolent interest, and swore some more.

Entirely on impulse he heaved a bit of rock, possibly twenty pounds in weight, to the middle of the structure. There followed a splintering crash and the contraption dissolved like a magic-lantern effect, leaving a solitary beam about a foot in width and six or eight inches thick, spanning a flight of twenty and a drop of sixty feet. The river received the rubbish with several successive splashes, distinctly disconcerting, and Amber sat down on a boulder to think it over.

"Clever invention," he mused; "one'd think that, after taking all this trouble to get me here, they'd changed their minds about wanting me.

I've a notion to change mine." He looked up at the cusped and battlemented gateway opposite him, shifted his regard to the Eye, and shook his fist vindictively at the latter. "If ever I get hold of the chap that invented you...!" An ingenious imagination failing to suggest any form of torture commensurate with the crime, he relapsed into gloomy meditation.

There seemed to be no possibility of turning back at that stage, however. Kuttarpur was rather far away, and, moreover, he doubted if he would be permitted to return. Having come thus far, he must go on.

Moreover, Sophia Farrell was on the other side of that Swordwide Bridge, and such being the case, cross it he would though he were to find the next world at its end. Finally he considered that he was presently to undergo an Ordeal of some unknown nature, probably extremely unpleasant, and that this matter of the vanishing bridge must have been arranged in order to put him in a properly subdued and tractable frame of mind.

He got up and tested the remaining girder with circ.u.mspection and incredulity; but it seemed firm enough, solidly embedded in the stonework of the causeway and immovable at the city end. So he straddled it and, averting his eyes from the scenery beneath him, hitched ingloriously across, collecting splinters and a very distinct impression that, as a vocation, knight-errantry was not without its drawbacks.

When again he stood on his feet he was in the shadow of the outer gateway, the curtain of the second wall confronting him. The stillness remained unbroken but the moonlight illuminated with startling distinctness the frescoes, half obliterated by time, and they were monstrous, revolting and obscene, from a Western point of view. A bastion of the third wall hid the Eye, however; he was grateful for that.

Casting about, he discovered the second gateway at some distance to the left, and started toward it, forcing a way through a tangle of scrubby undergrowth, weeds, and th.o.r.n.y acacia, but had taken few steps ere a heavy splash in the river below brought him up standing, with a thumping heart. After an irresolute moment he turned back to see for himself, and found his apprehension only too well grounded; the Swordwide Bridge was gone, displaced by an agency which had been prompt to seek cover--though he confessed himself unable to suggest where that cover had been found. There was no one visible on the causeway, and n.o.body skulked in the shadows of the bastions of the main gate.

Furthermore it seemed hardly possible that in so scant a s.p.a.ce of time human hands could have worked that heavy beam out of its sockets. And if the hands had been human (of course any other hypothesis were ridiculous) what had become of their owners?

He gave it up, considering that it were futile to badger his wits for the how and the wherefore. The important fact remained that he was a prisoner in dead Kathiapur, his retreat cut off, and--Here he made a second discovery, infinitely more shocking: his pistol was gone.

Amber remembered distinctly examining the weapon in Dulla Dad's boat, since when he had found no occasion to think of it. Now either it had jolted out of his pocket in that wild ride from Kuttarpur, or else Naraini had managed deftly to abstract it while in his arms by the summer palace, or when, later, she had shrunk against him in real or affected terror of the Eye. Of the two explanations his reason favoured the second. But he made no audible comment, though his thoughts were as black as his brow and as grimly fashioned as the set of his jaw.

Turning back at length he made his way to the second gateway and from it to the third, under the lewdly sculptured arch of which he stopped and gasped, forgetting himself as for the first time Kathiapur the Fallen was revealed to him in all the awful beauty of its naked desolation.

A wide and stately avenue stretched away from the portals, between rows of dwellings, palaces of marble and stone, tombs and mausoleums, with meaner houses of sun-dried brick and rubble, roofless all and disintegrating in the slow, terrible process of the years. Here a wall had caved in, there an arch had fallen out. The thoroughfare was strewn with fallen lintels, broken marble screens, blocks of red sandstone, bricks, and in between them the fig and pipal nourished with the bebel-thorn, the ak, the mimosa, the insidious convolvulus twining everywhere. At the far end of the street a yawning black arch rose in the white, beautiful facade of a marble temple on whose uppermost pinnacle the Eye hovered, staring horridly.

As Amber moved forward small, alert ghosts rose from the undergrowth and scurried silently thence: a circ.u.mstance which made him very unhappy. Even a brilliant chorus of sharp barks from an adjacent street failed to convince him that he had merely disturbed a pack of jackals, after all, and not the disconsolate brooding wraiths of those who had died and been buried in the imposing ruined tombs, what time Kathiapur boasted ten thousand swords and elephants by the herd.

The way was difficult and Amber tired. After a while, having seen nothing but the jackals, an owl or two, several thousand bats and a crawling thing which had lurched along in the shadow of a wall some distance away, giving an admirable imitation of a badly wounded man pulling himself over the ground, and making strange gutteral noises--Amber concluded to wait for the guide Naraini had promised him.

He turned aside and seated himself upon the edge of a broken sandstone tomb. The silence was appalling and for relief he took refuge in cheap irreverence. "Home," he observed aloud, "never was like this."

A heart-rending sigh from the tomb behind him was followed by a rattle of dislodged rubbish. Amber found himself unexpectedly in the middle of the street and, without stopping to debate the method of his getting there with such unprecedented rapidity, looked back hopefully to the tomb. At the same moment a black-shrouded figure swept out of it and moved a few paces down the street, then paused and beckoned him with a gaunt arm. "I wish," said Amber earnestly, "I had that gun."

The figure was apparently that of a native swathed in black from his head to his heels and seemed the more strikingly peculiar in view of the fact that, as far as Amber could determine, he had neither eyes nor features although his head was without any sort of covering. He gulped over the proposition for an instant, then stepped forward.

"Evidently my appointed cicerone," he considered. "Unquestionably this ghost-dance is excellently stage-managed.... Though, of course, I _had_ to pick out that particular tomb."

He followed in the wake of the figure, which sped on with a singular motion, something between a walk and a glide, conscious that his equanimity had been restored rather than shaken by the incident. "You wouldn't think," he reflected, "that a man like Salig Singh would lend himself to anything so childish. Still, I'm not through with it yet."

He conceived a scheme to steal up behind his guide and strip him of his masquerade, but though he mended his pace he got no nearer, and eventually abandoned it on the consideration that it was probably most inadvisable. After all, he had to remember that he was there for a purpose, and a very serious one, and that properly to further that purpose he must comport himself with dignity, submissively, accepting, at least with a show of ease, each new development of the affair along its prearranged lines. And so he held on in pursuit of the black shadow, pa.s.sing forsaken temples and lordly pleasure-houses, all marble tracery and fretwork, standing apart in what had once been n.o.ble gardens, sunken tanks all weed-grown and rank with slime, humbler dooryards and cots on whose hearthstones the fires for centuries had been cold--his destination evidently the temple of the unspeakable Eye.

As they drew nearer the leading shadow forsook the shade of the walls which he had seemed to favour, sweeping hastily across a plaza white with moonglare and without pause on into the black, gaping hole beyond the marble arch.

Here for the first time Amber hung back, stopping a score of feet from the door, his nerves a-jangle. He did not falter in his purpose; he was going to enter the inky portal, but ... would he ever leave it? And the world was still sweet to him. His quick, darting gaze registered a dozen impressions in as many seconds: of the silver splendour spilled so lavishly upon the soulless corpse of the city, of the high, bright sky, of dead black shadows sharp-edged against the radiance, of the fleet flitting spectre that was really a flying-fox....

Afar a hyena laughed with a sardonic intonation wholly uncalled-for--it was blood-curdling, besides. And down the street a melancholy air breathed gently, sighing like a soul astray.

"This won't do," he told himself; "it can't be worse inside than out here."

He took firm hold of his reason and went on across the dark threshold, took three uncertain strides into the limitless unknown, and pulled up short, hearing nothing, unable to see a yard before him. Then with a terrific crash like a thunder-clap the great doors swung to behind him.

He whirled about with a stifled cry, conscious of a mad desire to find the doors again, took a step or two toward them, paused to wonder if he were moving in the right direction, moved a little to the left, half turned, and was lost. Reverberating, the echoes of the crash rolled far away and back again, diminishing in volume, dying until they were no more than as a whisper adrift in the silence, until that was gone....

Profound night enveloped him, vast, breathless, without dimensions. One can endure the blackness that abides within four well-kenned walls; but night unrelieved by the least gleam of light, night without bounds or measurements, enfolding one like a stifling blanket and instilling into the brain the fear of nameless things, quickening the respiration and oppressing the heart--that is another thing entirely, and that is what Amber found in the Temple of the Bell. Darkness swam visibly before his eyes, like a fluid. The sound of his constrained breathing seemed most loud and unnatural. He could hear his heart rumbling like a distant drum.

Digging his nails into his palms, he waited; and in the suspense of dread began to count the seconds.

One minute ... two ... three ... four....

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other....

Seven ...

He pa.s.sed a hand across his face and brought it away wet with perspiration....

Nine ...

In some remote spot a bell began to toll; at first slowly--_clang_!...

_clang_!... _clang_!--then more quickly, until the roar of its sonorous, gong-like tones seemed to fill all the world and to set it a-tremble. Then, insensibly, the tempo became more sedate, the fierce clamour of it moderated, and Amber abruptly was alive to the fact that the bell was _speaking_--that its voice, deep, clear, sound, metallic, was rolling forth again and again a question couched in purest Sanskrit:

"_Who is there_?... _Who is there_?... _Who is there_?..."

The hair lifted on his scalp and he swallowed hard in the effort to answer; but the lie stuck in his throat: he was not Rutton and ... and it is very hard to lie effectively when you stand in stark darkness with a mouth dry as dust and your hair stirring at the roots because of the intensely impersonal and aloof accents of an inhuman Bell-voice, tolling away out of Nowhere.

"_Who is there_?"

Again he failed to answer. Somewhere near him he heard a slight noise as of a man moving impatiently; and then a whisper: "Respond, thou fool!"

"Art thou come, O Chosen of the Gateway?" the Bell-voice rang.

"I ... I am come," Amber managed to reply. And so still and small sounded his own voice in the huge s.p.a.ces of the place that he was surprised to find he had been heard.

"Hear ye!" rang the Bell. "Hear ye, O Lords and Rulers in Medhyama! O Children of my Gateway, hear ye well! He is come! He stands upon the threshold of the Gateway!"

Resonant, the echoes of those awe-inspiring tones died upon the stillness, and in response a faint sighing rose and, momentarily growing in volume, became as the roaring of a mighty wind; and suddenly it was abrupted, leaving only a ringing in the ears.

A great drum roared like the crack of Doom; and Amber's jaw dropped.

For in the high roof of the temple a six-foot slab had been noiselessly withdrawn, and through it a cold shaft of moonlight fell, cutting the gloom like a gigantic rapier, and smote with its immaculate radiance the true Gateway of Swords.

Not six paces from him it leaped out of the darkness in an iridescent sheen: an arch a scant ten feet in height, and in span double the width of a big man's shoulders, woven across like a weaver's frame with ribbons of pale fire. But the ribbons were of steel--steel blades, sharp, bright, gleaming: a countless array of curved tulwars and crescent scimetars, broad jataghans, short and ugly kukurees, long kutars with straight ends, slender deadly patas, snake-like bichwas; swords with jewelled hilts and engraved and damascened blades; sabres with channels cut from point to guard wherein small pearls ran singing; khands built for service and for parade; swords of every style and period in all the history of India. With their pommels cunningly affixed so that their points touched and interlaced, yet swung free, they lined the piers of the arch from base to span and all the graceful sweep of the intrados, a curtain of shimmering, trembling steel, barring the way to the Mystery beyond. Which was--darkness.

"O ye Swords!" belled the Voice.... "O ye Swords that have known no dishonour! O ye Swords that have sung in the grasp of my greatest!

Swords of Jehangar, Akbar, Alamgir! Swords of Alludin, Humayun, Shah Jehan! Swords of Timur-Leng, Arungzeb, Rao Rutton!..."

The invocation seemed interminable. Amber recognised almost every name noted in the annals and legends of Hindustan....