"Lo!" whispered some of the circle. "Hark to his '_Ram Ram!_' He knows--Pidar Narayan knows."

CHAPTER VI

ALPHA AND OMEGA

Am-ma was fishing. Breast deep in the water, which in the early dawn stretched like a shining shield to meet the pale primrose vestments of the coming day, his bodiless head and shoulders slid sedately over the surface like some strange kind of wild-fowl; for his hands, clasped at the back of his curly frizz of hair, held the apex of a conical, reed-distended net, shaped like a pair of wings. His eyes were closed, and, despite all lack of visible movement, the tenseness of every muscle, the strained look of every curve, showed that he was on the alert for something; that something, being the first hint of possible prey sent by his hidden feet as they felt, like hands, over the bottom.

Felt lightly, buoyantly, with scarce more pressure than the water itself, until, at the first suspicion of a fish lying half-buried in the sand, they would fling themselves air-wards to change places with his head; and that, with the net twirled dexterously above it, would go down like an extinguisher over the suspicious ridge or furrow.

Sometimes--most often, of course,--they proved to be nothing else; but sometimes, again, there would be a pause, during which the black legs would remain uppermost, and then, once more, the black head would come air-wards with a wriggling fish, held, if it happened to be a small one, in its white teeth. For Am-ma had not been provided by nature with a pouch, like the pelicans who were fishing hard by; and, being absolutely dest.i.tute of clothing and pockets, had to sidle sedately to the bank with each prize before seeking another, since both hands and feet were needed for its capture. Otherwise, his method of fishing was little removed from the birds,--the net being considered as his beak.

If anything, it was the more primitive of the two, since the pelicans fished in companies, drawing a serried line round each likely shallow; whereas Am-ma had all the distrust of his fellow which marks man in his earliest development. For, even amongst his kind, Am-ma was held to be barbarian; though, Heaven knows! the six or seven millions of wild tribes and forest races in India which go to make up its two hundred and eighty, are primitive enough. Those six or seven millions, frankly, absolutely savage, who, as the census puts it, are 'not to be specified'; remaining, as they do, untouched by either the civilizations or religions with which they have come in contact. Six or seven millions, whose very superst.i.tions are their own monopoly!

Some there were among these fisher folk of Eshwara who, like Gu-gu, were faintly leavened with latter-day learning, faintly amenable to latter-day standards; but Am-ma's dull brain was satisfied with what it had inherited; which included, amongst other things, sight, hearing, touch, keen almost beyond belief. So he opened his eyes at a sound which, to an ordinary person, would have been as inaudible as the swift coming of sunlight in the sky; and his sight told him immediately what it was in detail. A canoe was coming down the lagoon with two men in it. Now there was only one canoe in Eshwara, and that belonged to Pundit Ramanund. He had been over the black water, and learnt, amongst a number of other strange new things which were of no use, how to paddle a canoe--his own or another's! For what good was a canoe when you did not know the sandbanks? And how could you know the sand-banks unless you swam over them and dived down to them? Then, if you could do that, what was the good of a canoe? An air-bag, or even an earthen pot under the pit of your stomach, on which you could lie, was sufficient for all practical purposes.

Therefore one of the men Am-ma knew must be Ramanund; the other, by his turban, was a Mahomedan. Did _he_ know the sand-banks? Am-ma shaded his eyes with one hand, and watched to see. Evidently not; the canoe stuck here, there, everywhere, yet still came on slowly. But if the occupants wanted--as everybody seemed to want nowadays--to cross over to the other side--that other side where the red brick headworks of the ca.n.a.l showed like a plinth--to those strange, new white tents where the Lord was expected; then they would find the navigation more intricate.

Am-ma being conservative inevitably, smiled at the certainty, closed his eyes, and went on fishing; till he opened them again at a shout.

"Which way?" he echoed, his voice sounding hollow from its nearness to the water. "By the deep stream, always."

"And which is that, fool?" came Roshan's voice angrily.

"Where there is most water," returned Am-ma calmly. "Cease from paddling, and the canoe will tell you without fail. Such things know of themselves. They are wise."

"But we want to get over to the camp as quickly as we can," said Ramanund, interrupting an impatient retort of Roshan Khan's, with an aside to the effect that they had better not alienate their only hope.

The river was lower than he had expected, or he would never have suggested crossing in the boat, as quicker than the bridge; yet there was not time to go back.

Am-ma smiled cunningly. "None will get quicker than he can, my masters; that much is certain." Being pleased with his own wit, he laughed, and kicking up his heels, ducked his head, to come up again a few yards nearer in shallower water, where he could stand and salaam.

"The n.o.ble people," he said gravely, "must surely follow the stream if they go in company; but if they will quit comfort, and wade, carrying their boat here and there, I, Am-ma, will show them. But it is annoyance. Without going with the stream there is always annoyance."

"It is better than going back or sticking still, anyhow!" remarked Roshan Khan to his companion; adding in Hindustani--"Then come quick--there is room for thee and thy net, and we will pay thee."

Am-ma shook his head. "There is weight enough for difficulties without me, my masters; and here or there is one to a fisher." So saying, he closed his net with one dexterous twist, slipped his arms through it so that it hung behind his back, and struck across the shallows.

"Yonder is our aim," he said briefly, pointing to a blue thread of smoke rising from the water's edge a good way down stream. "They burn a dead man there to-day; it is ever a good guide to the living."

"'Twill be the Brahmin lad the _Huzoors_ killed by mistake with their _Dee-puk-rag_. Didst hear the tale?" asked Ramanund. Why, he would have been puzzled to tell, since he had no definite desire to foster ill-feeling or fear; but it had been the talk of the town till those small hours which end gossip, even in India, and the talk had confirmed the theory, which so many of his kind hold firmly, if vaguely, that the ma.s.s of the people feel the English rule to be unjust.

But Am-ma was not of the people. He was of the six million and odd barbarians. He turned, showing his broad white teeth in a grin. "Ay!

'Twas well done. Now, as in old days, folk will know who is true leader." There was no doubt, no fear in his mind. Had not his tribe always, of old, chosen as its chief and G.o.d the man who could hold a torch in each hand at arms' length, one lighted, the other unlit, and bid the flame pa.s.s from one to the other seven times? And as for a man's life, was it not always expedient that one should die for the people upon occasions?

Ramanund frowned; perhaps because Am-ma concluded by ordering the crew out of the boat, and the water was cold. It could scarcely have been anything else which brought annoyance, since he, like most of his kind, prided himself on being truly a British subject.

So, paddling and pushing, wading, and even carrying, they crossed from shallow to shallow, from sand-bank to sand-bank, led by Am-ma, swimming and diving like a duck, or walking on ahead unconcernedly, his eyes fixed in keen-sighted approval on that group close to the water's edge, towards which he steered.

Yet it was a gruesome group, in truth, which circled round that solitary and still more gruesome figure in the centre. A figure squatting like the rest (since, when wood is dear, funeral piles must be restricted) in full view, yet mercifully obscured for the most part by the heavy column of smoke which rose straight to a level with the leaping flames, then, tilting sideways before the intermittent breeze of early dawn, drifted westward, to hide those white tents upon the horizon.

"Above or below, fool!" called Ramanund, sharply, as they neared the sh.o.r.e. "I am no _Dom_, like thou, to choose my way among dead men's bones."

The allusion to the semi-aboriginal tribe who earn their livelihood by streaking the dead, brought a frown this time to Am-ma's face.

"I am no _Dom_, either," he retorted, "and were I one, thou wouldst be glad of my guidance to the fire some day, Pundit-_jee!_" Roshan Khan listened with the wholehearted contempt of his race and creed. "Be quick, either way," he said, scornfully. "We have bare time, as it is."

Yet he, also, swerved from that gruesome group, which, as the two--dressed as Europeans, save for their turbans--stepped ash.o.r.e and hurried off in the direction of the camp, stood up in a linked semi-circle to salaam, then squatted again with a clank of leg irons.

Am-ma, his task over, had paused in the deeper water, and was once more sidling sedately. The sun had risen with the inconceivable swiftness with which it rises from a dead-level, treeless plain, and shone reddish-yellow, like a fire, on his wet skin. The shadow of that dense column of smoke sidled sedately on the water also, shifting with the shifting spirals of the reality.

"Had he spilt blood?" asked Am-ma, suddenly, as that something, half-hidden in the smoke, seemed to dissolve, sending a great fountain of sparks, bright even in the sunlight, up into the air.

One in the semicircle clucked denial.

"A _jogi_--they say of Gorakh-nath's monastery--had him for disciple.

And there was _dhatoora_ in the sweetmeats, for sure. Whether he was strangler, G.o.d knows! Perhaps. Yet such travellers deserved poison; who but a fool trusts a strange hand?"

A big man at the end of the semicircle, who had a sinister face despite his good conduct badge, looked round hastily to where, a little distance off, the two jail-warders in charge were dividing a smoke on the sly with swift mysterious bubblings; then lowered his voice.

"Ay! none but fools; and _he_--" (a nod towards that thing in the centre which was now dying down to red embers pointed his meaning) "is the first; not the last. I, Gopi, _gosain_,[6] say so. Let fools wait and see. Wise men will not."

There was a clank of leg irons as if some stirred uneasily. "Thou canst talk," murmured a voice. "When thy 'tucket' (ticket of leave)--G.o.d knows how got!--is so nigh."

Gopi smiled comfortably. "Ay! To-morrow, and the next day, and the next. Then, once more, purification in the Pool of Immortality. Once more, sanctification at the 'Cradle of the G.o.ds.'" He cast his eyes upwards unctuously, like an Eastern Chadband, so rehearsing the part of piety he meant to play once more on his release.

Am-ma nodded his bodiless head cheerfully. "There will be no Pool of Immortality for the pilgrims this year. So Gorakh-nath says. The ca.n.a.l will drain the spring. But then, he is angry at being turned out of his gun. The people will not give so much--that is it!"

The _gosain's_ face lowered at the news. "Turned out? Who hath done it?"

Am-ma's eyes were closed, for his feet had found likely ground; he paused a second, tensely alert--

"He who comes," he said, suddenly; "the Master."

As he spoke, the quick thud, followed by a lingering reverberation of the first saluting gun, told that the Viceroy of India was entering his camp.

"The Lord hath come!" said the circle of prisoners, in awed tones.

All save Gopi, the _gosain_. He sneered. "The Lord-_sahib_. Ay! he may be that--but the Master--no!"

Am-ma gave a contented little chuckle.

"He killed _that_, anyhow," he said nodding again, "and he hath the _Dee-puk-rag_. Is not that enough for poor folk?" Then his feet, feeling something far out of sight in the still deep waters, came air-wards, and his head went down.

When it came up again, the gang of prisoners were being filed back to gaol, leaving the still glowing embers of what had been a man to send a clear blue smoke into the clear blue sky.

"They have the _Dee-puk-rag_--that is enough," murmured the fisher to himself as he slid with the stream.