Son of Power

by Will Levington Comfort; Zamin Ki Dost

Among the visitors that came in for the jungle play was Ian Deal, one of the younger of Carlin's seven brothers; one of the two who hadn't appeared for her marriage. The other missing brother was in Australia, but Ian Deal had been in India at the time of the ceremony and not the full-length of India away. Skag had thought about this; Carlin had doubtless done more than that. Once she had flushed, when someone had marked Ian's absence to the point of speaking of it. Before that, Skag had only heard that Ian was one of the best-loved of all. . . .

He watched the meeting of the brother and sister. It was at the railway station in Hurda, and Skag couldn't very well get away. There was something almost like anguish in the face of the young man as he hastened forward—anguish of devotion that never hoped to express itself; anguish by no means sure of itself, because it burned with the thought of Carlin being nearer to any man. Ian didn't speak, as he stopped with a rush before his sister. He merely touched her cheek, but his eyes were the eyes of a man whose heart was starving. The English observe that this jealous affection occasionally exists between twins; the Hindus suggest certain mysterious spiritual relations as accounting for it. . . . Finally Skag realised that Carlin's eyes were turned to him, something of pity in them and something of appeal.

It was all very quick then. Skag's hand was out to her brother. Ian didn't see it. Only his right elbow raised the slightest bit; his dark face flushed and paled that second. The stare was refined; it wasn't hate so much as astonishment that any man could ever bring the thing about to touch Carlin's heart. Back of it all was the matter that Ian Deal would have died before confessing—the pain and powerlessness of a brother who loves jealously.

Few beings of his years would have seen so deep and kept his nerve that instant, but Skag had been different since his battle with the cobra. He had decided never to lose his nerve again. This was the first test since that day. . . . His throat tightened a second, so that he had to clear it. All he knew then was that her brother was striding away, having muttered something about the need to see after unshipping Kala Khan, his Arab mount, which was aboard the train. There was a sort of shimmer between Skag's eyes and Ian Deal's vanishing legs that made them seem lifted out of all proportion. Then Carlin caught his arm, carried him forward and to her at the same time, as she whispered:

"You were perfect, Skag-ji. I never loved you so much as that moment, when poor Ian refused to take your hand—"

Skag cleared his throat a second time. . . . Carlin had used that name only once or twice before; and only in moments of her greater joy in him. He had been told by Horace Dickson that "ji" used intimately was "nicer" than any English word.

Something in this experience threw Skag back to the point of the cobra and the last experience with crippling nerves. Of course, it was the thought of Carlin imprisoned in the playhouse that broke him. Starting to run when he first saw the cobra on the threshold, he counted Failure. That burst of speed for ten steps had put the king into fighting mood. Skag had beaten thin in his own mind the possibility of ever committing Failure again. A man must not lose his nerve in the stress of a loved one's peril. One doesn't act so well to bring the event to a winning. In fact, there is no excuse and no advantage and no decency in losing one's nerve, any time, any place. . . .

Skag had known things in certain seconds of his duel with the cobra. (Mostly, a man only thinks he knows.) Carlin had stood on the threshold, not more than fifteen feet away, while he was engaged. No one had told him at that time, that the man does not live who can continue to keep off a fighting cobra from striking home; but Skag learned in that short interval. He faced not only the fastest thing he had ever seen move, but it was also the stillest. It would come to a dead stop before him—stillness compared to which a post or a wall is mere squat inertia. This lifted head and hood was sustained, elate—having the moveless calm one might imagine at the centre of a solar system. Its outline was mysteriously clear. Often the background was Carlin's own self. The action took place in the period of the Indian afterglow, in which one can see better than in brilliant sunlight, a light that breathes soft and delicate effulgences. The cobra at the point of stillness was like dark dulled jewels against it—dulled so that the raying of the jewels would not obscure the contour.

And once toward the last, as he fought (the inside of his head feeling like a smear of opened arteries), Skag had seen Carlin over the hood of the cobra. She had seemed utterly tall, utterly enfolding; his relation to her, one of the inevitables of creation. Nothing could ever happen to take her away for long. Matters which men call life and death were mere exigencies of his scheme and hers together.

In a word, it was a breath of the thing he had been yearning for, from the moment he first saw her in the monkey glen; the need was the core of the anguish he had known in the long pursuit of the thief elephant; the thing that must come to a man and a maid who have found each other, if there is to be any equity in the romantic plan at all, unless the two are altogether asleep and content in the tight dimensions of three-score-and-ten.