Guns of the Gods

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Guns of the Gods
A Story of Yasmini's Youth
By Talbot Mundy

Contents

Yasmini: "Set down my thoughts not yours if the tale is to be worth
the pesa."

I. "Gold is where you find it."
II. "Friendship's friendship and respect's respect, but duty's what I'm
paid to do!"
III. "Give a woman the last word always; but be sure it is a question,
which you leave unanswered."
IV. "The law .... is like a python after monkeys in the tree-tops."
V. "Most precious friend, please visit me!"
VI. "Peace, Maharajah sahib! Out of anger came no wise counsel yet!"
VII. "That will be the end of Gungadhura!"
VIII. "They're elephants and I'm a soldier. The trouble with you
is nerves, my boy!"
IX. "It means, the toils are closing in on Gungadhura!"
X. "Discretion is better part of secrecy!"
XI. "Say: that little girl you're wanting to run off with is my wife!"
XII. "Ready for anything! If I weaken, tie me on the camel!
XIII. "I am a king's daughter!
XIV. "Acting on instructions from Your Highness!"
XV. "Me for the princess!"
XVI. "And since, my Lords, in olden days--"
XVII. "Suppose I lock the door?"
XVIII. "Be discreet, Blaine .... please be discreet!"
XIX. "I am as simple as the sunlight!"
XX. "Millions! Think of it! Lakhs and crores!"
XXI. "The guns of the gods!"
XXII. "Making one hundred exactly!"
XXIII. Three amber moons in a purple sky.
XXIV. A hundred guarded it.
XXV. And that is the whole story.

Guns of the Gods

Out of the Ashes

Old Troy reaped rue in the womb of years
For stolen Helen's sake;
Till tenfold retribution rears
Its wreck on embers slaked with tears
That mended no heart-ache.
The wail of the women sold as slaves
Lest Troy breed sons again
Dreed o'er a desert of nameless graves,
The heaps and the hills that are Trojan graves
Deep-runneled by the rain.

But Troy lives on. Though Helen's rape
And ten-year hold were vain;
Though jealous gods with men conspire
And Furies blast the Grecian fire;
Yet Troy must rise again.
Troy's daughters were a spoil and sport,
Were limbs for a labor gang,
Who crooned by foreign loom and mill
Of Trojan loves they cherished still,
Till Homer heard, and sang,

They told, by the fire when feasters roared
And minstrels waited turns,
Of the might of the men that Troy adored,
Of the valor in vain of the Trojan sword,
With the love that slakeless burns,
That caught and blazed in the minstrel mind
Or ever the age of pen.
So maids and a minstrel rebuilt Troy,
Out of the ashes they rebuilt Troy
To live in the hearts of men.

Yasmini

"Set down my thoughts not yours if the tale is to be worth the pesa."

The why and wherefore of my privilege to write a true account of the
Princess Yasmini's early youth is a story in itself too long to tell here;
but it came about through no peculiar wisdom. I fell in a sort of way
in love with her, and that led to opportunity.

She never made any secret of the scorn with which she regards those
who singe wings at her flame. Rather she boasts of it with
limit-overreaching epithets. Her respect is reserved for those rare
men and women who can meet her in unfair fight and, if not defeat
her, then come close to it. She asks no concessions on account of
sex. Men's passions are but weapons forged for her necessity; and
as for genuine love-affairs, like Cleopatra, she had but two, and the
second ended in disaster to herself. This tale is of the first one that
succeeded, although fraught with discontent for certain others.

The second affair came close to whelming thrones, and I wrote of that
in another book with an understanding due, as I have said, to opportunity,
and with a measure of respect that pleased her.

She is habitually prompt and generous with her rewards, if far-seeing
in bestowal of them. So, during the days of her short political eclipse
that followed in a palace that had housed a hundred kings, I saw her
almost daily in a room--her holy of holies--where the gods of ancient
India were depicted in three primal colors working miracles all over
the walls and where, if governments had only known it, she was already
again devising plans to set the world on fire.

There, amid an atmosphere of Indian scents and cigarette smoke,
she talked and I made endless notes, while now and then, when she
was meditative, her maids sang to an accompaniment of rather
melancholy wooden flutes. But whenever I showed a tendency to
muse she grew indignant.

"Of what mud are you building castles now? Set down my thoughts
not yours," she insisted, "if your tale is to be worth the pesa."

By that she referred to the custom of all Eastern story-tellers to stop at
the exciting moment and take up a collection of the country's smallest
copper coins before finishing the tale. But the reference was double-edged.
A penny for my thoughts, a penny for the West's interpretation of the
East was what she had in mind.

Nevertheless, as it is to the West that the story must appeal it has seemed
wiser to remove it from her lips and so transpose that, though it loses
in lore unfortunately, it does gain something of directness and simplicity.
Her satire, and most of her metaphor if always set down as she phrased it,
would scandalize as well as puzzle Western ears.

This tale is of her youth, but Yasmini's years have not yet done more
than ripen her. In a land where most women shrivel into early age she
continues, somewhere perhaps a little after thirty, in the bloom of health
and loveliness, younger in looks and energy than many a Western girl
of twenty-five. For she is of the East and West, very terribly endowed
with all the charms of either and the brains of both.

Her quick wit can detect or invent mercurial Asian subterfuge as swiftly
as appraise the rather glacial drift of Western thought; and the wisdom
of both East and West combines in her to teach a very nearly total
incredulity in human virtue. Western morals she regards as humbug,
neither more nor less.

In virtue itself she believes, as astronomers for example believe in the
precession of the equinox; but that the rank and file of human beings,
and especially learned human beings, have attained to the very vaguest
understanding of it she scornfully disbelieves. And with a frankness
simply Gallic in its freedom from those thought-conventions with which
so many people like to deceive themselves she deals with human nature
on what she considers are its merits. The result is sometimes very
disconcerting to the pompous and all the rest of the host of self-deceived,
but usually amusing to herself and often profitable to her friends.

Her ancestry is worth considering, since to that she doubtless owes a
good proportion of her beauty and ability. On her father's side she is
Rajput, tracing her lineage so far back that it becomes lost at last in
fabulous legends of the Moon (who is masculine, by the way, in Indian
mythology). All of the great families of Rajputana are her kin, and all
the chivalry and derring-do of that royal land of heroines and heroes is
part of her conscious heritage.

Her mother was Russian. On that side, too, she can claim blood royal,
not devoid of at least a trace of Scandinavian, betrayed by glittering
golden hair and eyes that are sometimes the color of sky seen over
Himalayan peaks, sometimes of the deep lake water in the valleys. But
very often her eyes seem so full of fire and their color is so baffling that
a legend has gained currency to the effect that she can change their
hue at will.

How a Russian princess came to marry a Rajput king is easier to understand
if one recalls the sinister designs of Russian statecraft in the days when
India and "warm sea-water" was the great objective. The oldest, and
surely the easiest, means of a perplexed diplomacy has been to send
a woman to undermine the policy of courts or steal the very consciences
of kings. Delilah is a case in point. And in India, where the veil and the
rustling curtain and religion hide woman's hand without in the least
suppressing her, that was a plan too easy of contrivance to be overlooked.

In those days there was a prince in Moscow whose public conduct so
embittered his young wife, and so notoriously, that when he was found
one morning murdered in his bed suspicion rested upon her. She was
tried in secret, as the custom was, found guilty and condemned to death.
Then, on the strength of influence too strong for the czar, the sentence
was commuted to the far more cruel one of life imprisonment in the
Siberian mines. While she awaited the dreaded march across Asia in
chains a certain proposal was made to the Princess Sonia Omanoff,
and no one who knew anything about it wondered that she accepted
without much hesitation.

Less than a month after her arrest she was already in Paris, squandering
paper rubles in the fashionable shops. And at the Russian Embassy
in Paris she made the acquaintance of the very first of the smaller Indian
potentates who made the "grand tour." Traveling abroad has since
become rather fashionable, and is even encouraged by the British-Indian
Government because there is no longer any plausible means of preventing it;
but Maharajah Bubru Singh was a pioneer, who dared greatly, and had
his way even against the objections of a high commissioner. In addition
he had had to defy the Brahman priests who, all unwilling, are the strong
supports of alien overrule; for they are armed with the iron-fanged laws
of caste that forbid crossing the sea, among innumerable other things.

Perhaps there was a hint of moral bravery behind the warrior eyes that
was enough in itself and she really fell in love at first sight, as men said.
But the secret police of Russia were at her elbow, too, hinting that only
one course could save her from extradition and Siberian mines. At any
rate she listened to the Rajah's wooing; and the knowledge that he had
a wife at home already, a little past her prime perhaps and therefore
handicapped in case of rivalry, but never-the-less a prior wife, seems
to have given her no pause. The fact that the first wife was childless
doubtless influenced Bubru Singh.

They even say she was so far beside herself with love for him that she
would have been satisfied with the Gandharva marriage ceremony sung
by so many Rajput poets, that amounts to little more than going off alone
together. But the Russian diplomatic scheme included provision for the
maharajah of a wife so irrevocably wedded that the British would not be
able to refuse her recognition. So they were married in the presence
of seven witnesses in the Russian Embassy, as the records testify.

After that, whatever its suspicions, the British Government had to admit
her into Rajputana. And what politics she might have played, whether
the Russian gray-coat armies might have encroached into those historic
hills on the strength of her intriguing, or whether she would have seized
the first opportunity to avenge herself by playing Russia false,--are matters
known only to the gods of unaccomplished things. For Bubru Singh,
her maharajah, died of an accident very shortly after the birth of their
child Yasmini.

Now law is law, and Sonia Omanoff, then legally the Princess Sonia
Singh, had appealed from the first to Indian law and custom, so that
the British might have felt justified in leaving her and her infant daughter
to its most untender mercies. Then she would have been utterly under
the heel of the succeeding prince, a nephew of her husband, unenamored
of foreigners and avowedly determined to enforce on his uncle's widow
the Indian custom of seclusion.

But the British took the charitable view, that covering a multitude of sins.
It was not bad policy to convert the erstwhile Sonia Omanoff from secret
enemy to grateful friend, and the feat was easy.

The new maharajah, Gungadhura Singh, was prevailed on to assign an
ancient palace for the Russian widow's use; and there, almost within
sight of the royal seraglio from which she had been ousted, Yasmini had
her bringing up, regaled by her mother with tales of Western outrage
and ambition, and well schooled in all that pertained to her Eastern heritage
by the thousand-and-one intriguers whose delight and livelihood it is to
fish the troubled waters of the courts of minor kings.

All these things Yasmini told me in that scented chamber of another
palace, in which a wrathful government secluded her in later years for
its own peace as it thought, but for her own recuperation as it happened.
She told me many other things besides that have some little bearing
on this story but that, if all related, would crowd the book too full. The
real gist of them is that she grew to love India with all her heart and India
repaid her for it after its own fashion, which is manyfold and marvelous.

There is no fairer land on earth than that far northern slice of Rajputana,
nor a people more endowed with legend and the consciousness of
ancestry. They have a saying that every Rajput is a king's son, and every
Rajputni worthy to be married to an emperor. It was in that atmosphere
that Yasmini learned she must either use her wits or be outwitted, and
women begin young to assert their genius in the East. But she outstripped
precocity and, being Western too, rode rough-shod on convention when
it suited her, reserving her concessions to it solely for occasions when
those matched the hand she held. All her life she has had to play in a
ruthless game, but the trump that she has learned to lead oftenest is
unexpectedness. And now to the story.

Chapter One

Royal Rajasthan

There is a land where no resounding street
With babel of electric-garish night
And whir of endless wheels has put to flight
The liberty of leisure. Sandaled feet
And naked soles that feel the friendly dust
Go easily along the never measured miles.
A land at which the patron tourist smiles
Because of gods in whom those people trust
(He boasting One and trusting not at all);
A land where lightning is the lover's boon,
And honey oozing from an amber moon
Illumines footing on forbidden wall;
Where, 'stead of pursy jeweler's display,
Parading peacocks brave the passer-by,
And swans like angels in an azure sky
Wing swift and silent on unchallenged way.
No land of fable! Of the Hills I sing,
Whose royal women tread with conscious grace
The peace-filled gardens of a warrior race,
Each maiden fit for wedlock with a king,
And every Rajput son so royal born
And conscious of his age-long heritage
He looks askance at Burke's becrested page
And wonders at the new-ennobled scorn.
I sing (for this is earth) of hate and guile,
Of tyranny and trick and broken pledge,
Of sudden weapons, and the thrice-keen edge
Of woman's wit, the sting in woman's smile,
But also of the heaven-fathomed glow,
The sweetness and the charm and dear delight
Of loyal woman, humorous and right,
Pure-purposed as the bosom of the snow.

No tale, then, this of motors, but of men
With camels fleeter than the desert wind,
Who come and go. So leave the West behind,
And, at the magic summons of the pen
Forgetting new contentions if you will,
Take wings, take silent wings of time untied,
And see, with Fellow-friendship for your guide,
A little how the East goes wooing still.

"Gold is where you find it."

Dawn at the commencement of hot weather in the hills if not the loveliest
of India's wealth of wonders (for there is the moon by night) is fair
preparation for whatever cares to follow. There is a musical silence cut
of which the first voices of the day have birth; and a half-light holding
in its opalescence all the colors that the day shall use; a freshness and
serenity to hint what might be if the sons of men were wise enough;
and beauty unbelievable. The fortunate sleep on roofs or on verandas,
to be ready for the sweet cool wind that moves in advance of the rising
sun, caused, as some say, by the wing-beats of departing spirits of the night.

So that in that respect the mangy jackals, the monkeys, and the chandala
(who are the lowest human caste of all and quite untouchable by the
other people the creator made) are most to be envied; for there is no
stuffy screen, and small convention, between them and enjoyment of
the blessed air.

Next in order of defilement to the sweepers,--or, as some particularly
righteous folk with inside reservations on the road to Heaven firmly insist,
even beneath the sweepers, and possibly beneath the jackals--come
the English, looking boldly on whatever their eyes desire and tasting
out of curiosity the fruit of more than one forbidden tree, but obsessed
by an amazing if perverted sense of duty. They rule the land, largely
by what they idolize as "luck," which consists of tolerance for things they
do not understand. Understanding one another rather well, they are
more merciless to their own offenders than is Brahman to chandala,
for they will hardly let them live. But they are a people of destiny, and
India has prospered under them.

In among the English something after the fashion of grace notes in the
bars of music--enlivening, if sharp at times--come occasional Americans,
turning up in unexpected places for unusual reasons, and remaining--
because it is no man's business to interfere with them. Unlike the English,
who approach all quarters through official doors and never trespass
without authority, the Americans have an embarrassing way of choosing
their own time and step, taking officialdom, so to speak, in flank. It is
to the credit of the English that they overlook intrusion that they would
punish fiercely if committed by unauthorized folk from home.

So when the Blaines, husband and wife, came to Sialpore in Rajputana
without as much as one written introduction, nobody snubbed them.
And when, by dint of nothing less than nerve nor more than ability to
recognize their opportunity, they acquired the lease of the only vacant
covetable house nobody was very jealous, especially when the Blaines
proved hospitable.

It was a sweet little nest of a house with a cool stone roof, set in a rather
large garden of its own on the shoulder of the steep hill that overlooks
the city. A political dependent of Yasmini's father had built it as a haven
for his favorite paramour when jealousy in his seraglio had made peace
at home impossible. Being connected with the Treasury in some way,
and suitably dishonest, he had been able to make a luxurious pleasaunce
of it; and he had taste.

But when Yasmini's father died and his nephew Gungadhura succeeded
him as maharajah he made a clean sweep of the old pension and
employment list in order to enrich new friends, so the little nest on the
hill became deserted. Its owner went into exile in a neighboring state
and died there out of reach of the incoming politician who naturally wanted
to begin business by exposing the scandalous remissness of his
predecessor. The house was acquired on a falling market by a money-lender,
who eventually leased it to the Blaines on an eighty per cent. basis--
a price that satisfied them entirely until they learned later about local proportion.

The front veranda faced due east, raised above the garden by an eight-foot
wall, an ideal place for sleep because of the unfailing morning breeze.
The beds were set there side by side each evening, and Mrs. Blaine--
a full ten years younger than her husband--formed a habit of rising in
the dark and standing in her night-dress, with bare feet on the utmost
edge of the top stone step, to watch for the miracle of morning. She
was fabulously pretty like that, with her hair blowing and her young figure
outlined through the linen; and she was sometimes unobserved.

The garden wall, a hundred feet beyond, was of rock, two-and-a-half
men high, as they measure the unleapable in that distrustful land; but
the Blaines, hailing from a country where a neighbor's dog and chickens
have the run of twenty lawns, seldom took the trouble to lock the little,
arched, iron-studded door through which the former owner had come
and gone unobserved. The use of an open door is hardly trespass
under the law of any land; and dawn is an excellent time for the
impecunious who take thought of the lily how it grows in order to
outdo Solomon.

When a house changes hands in Rajputana there pass with it, as well
as the rats and cobras and the mongoose, those beggars who were
wont to plague the former owner. That is a custom so based on ancient
logic that the English, who appreciate conservatism, have not even
tried to alter it.

So when a cracked voice broke the early stillness out of shadow where
the garden wall shut off the nearer view, Theresa Blaine paid small
attention to it.

"Memsahib! Protectress of the poor!"

She continued watching the mystery of coming light. The ancient city's
domed and pointed roofs already glistened with pale gold, and a pearly
mist wreathed the crowded quarter of the merchants. Beyond that the
river, not more than fifty yards wide, flowed like molten sapphire between
unseen banks. As the pale stars died, thin rays of liquid silver touched
the surface of a lake to westward, seen through a rift between purple
hills. The green of irrigation beyond the river to eastward shone like
square-cut emeralds, and southward the desert took to itself all imaginable
hues at once.

"Colorado!" she said then. "And Arizona! And Southern California!
And something added that I can't just place!"

"Sin's added by the scow-load!" growled her husband from the farther bed.
"Come back, Tess, and put some clothes on!"

She turned her head to smile, but did not move away. Hearing the man's
voice, the owners of other voices piped up at once from the shadow,
all together, croaking out of tune:

"Bhig mangi shahebi! Bhig mangi shahebi!" (Alms! Alms!)

"I can see wild swans," said Theresa. "Come and look--five--six--seven
of them, flying northward, oh, ever so high up!"

"Put some clothes on, Tess!"

"I'm plenty warm."

"Maybe. But there's some skate looking at you from the garden. What's
the matter with your kimono?"

However the dawn wind was delicious, and the night-gown more decent
than some of the affairs they label frocks. Besides, the East is used
to more or less nakedness and thinks no evil of it, as women learn
quicker than men.

"All right--in a minute."

"I'll bet there's a speculator charging 'em admission at the gate," grumbled
Dick Blaine, coming to stand beside her in pajamas. "Sure you're right,
Tess; those are swans, and that's a dawn worth seeing."

He had the deep voice that the East attributes to manliness, and the
muscular mold that never came of armchair criticism. She looked like
a child beside him, though he was agile, athletic, wiry, not enormous.

"Sahib!" resumed the voices. "Sahib! Protector of the poor!" They
whined out of darkness still, but the shadow was shortening.

"Better feed 'em, Tess. A man's starved down mighty near the knuckle
if he'll wake up this early to beg."

"Nonsense. Those are three regular bums who look on us as their preserve.
They enjoy the morning as much as we do. Begging's their way of telling
people howdy."

"Somebody pays them to come," he grumbled, helping her into a pale
blue kimono.

Tess laughed. "Sure! But it pays us too. They keep other bums away.
I talk to them sometimes."

"In English?"

"I don't think they know any. I'm learning their language."

It was his turn to laugh. "I knew a man once who learned the gipsy bolo
on a bet. Before he'd half got it you couldn't shoo tramps off his door-step
with a gun. After a time he grew to like it--flattered him, I suppose, but
decent folk forgot to ask him to their corn-roasts. Careful, Tess, or
Sialpore'll drop us from its dinner lists."

"Don't you believe it! They're crazy to learn American from me, and
to hear your cowpuncher talk. We're social lions. I think they like us
as much as we like them. Don't make that face, Dick, one maverick
isn't a whole herd, and you can't afford to quarrel with the commissioner."

He chose to change the subject.

"What are your bums' names?" he asked.

"Funny names. Bimbu, Umra and Pinga. Now you can see them, look,
the shadow's gone. Bimbu is the one with no front teeth, Umra has only
one eye, and Pinga winks automatically. Wait till you see Pinga smile.
It's diagonal instead of horizontal. Must have hurt his mouth in an accident."

"Probably he and Bimbu fought and found the biting tough. Speaking
of dogs, strikes me we ought to keep a good big fierce one," be added
suggestively.

"No, no, Dick; there's no danger. Besides, there's Chamu."

"The bums could make short work of that parasite."

"I'm safe enough. Tom Tripe usually looks in at least once a day when
you're gone."

"Tom's a good fellow, but once a day--. A hundred things might happen.
I'd better speak to Tom Tripe about those three bums--he'll shift them!"

"Don't, Dick! I tell you they keep others away. Look, here comes Chamu
with the chota hazri."

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