"What do you have to say before it's curtains?" the general asked.
"For myself, nothing," the Rock answered, and translated for the Son of God.
"Tell him he does not know what he is doing, and I forgive him on account of that," the rebel leader answered.
After the Rock translated that, the general laughed. "As if I need his forgiveness!" He pointed a stubby forefinger at the chieftain. "So you're the hotsy-totsy King of the Jews, are you?"
"You said it," the Son of God told him.
"Here's what else I say." The general turned to his aides. "Crucify both of them. One right side up, one upside down-I don't care which is which. Do it outside the compound. Let the prisoners watch before we send 'em to the mines and the arenas."
"Yes, sir, General Pontius!" the aides chorused.
"And fetch me a basin," the general added. "I need to wash my hands."
A Good Bag
Brad Linaweaver
Observing the general through a cloud of foul cigar smoke, the old woman insisted, "I don't care about other mediums and their pretenses at purity. The cosmic forces are indifferent to their petty little virtues. What matters is purity of the blood! I assure you that any manifestations we experience tonight will not be put off by my affinity for tobacco."
Her host laughed but ended with a cough. The old woman's taste in cigars was truly awful but if Sir Francis Younghusband, hero of the Tibetan-Chinese war, could prevail against the always testy declarations of Prime Minister Balfour, he would survive these vapors in his London study. Besides, if this woman was hale and hearty in her eighties, the damned cigars might have beneficial properties unknown to modern medicine.
"Forgive my bad manners, HPB," he said. "I only tease you because I wish you'd consider switching to my brand of tobacco."
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophy movement, only allowed close friends to address her by initials. She had first taken a liking to Younghusband when he was a colonel with an uncanny ability to find himself in hot water-and that didn't mean teatime! He had the kind of male face she most admired. Under an imposing brow he sported a walrus mustache that set off the receding hairline. The gray hairs he'd acquired since becoming a general added a touch of distinction.
It was the right sort of face for a master at the Great Game; the game that Younghusband had changed for all time. Before he redrew the maps, the game was not so much for the Russians and British to seek mastery over Central Asia as to block each other's efforts in that regard. Now there was a new game.
"You and Tibet are tied together by destiny," she said. "You were the first military man I ever met who impressed me as a true mystic."
She made it sound more like a sentence of death than a compliment. Her piercing black eyes accented the pronouncement. Most people were made uncomfortable by her relentless stare but Younghusband found it exhilarating. Nothing impressed a spiritualist more than worldly accomplishment.
"I'm glad it stopped raining," he said. "Reminded me of those bloody downpours in Lhasa."
"We will have a still night."
"Would you like to see the room I've prepared for the sйance?"
The black eyes danced in the old head. "I'd rather meet your wife first."
While they had been talking, Mrs. Younghusband began to play the piano at the end of the hall. That meant she had put the children to bed for the evening. Notes of Chopin beckoned to the warriors.
"This is a proud day for me," said the general, "the first time you'll meet my wife."
HPB took him by the arm in an uncharacteristically feminine gesture. "Will you tell her that I'm a notorious Russian spy?"
Neither laughed. Over the years she had been accused of everything. For a time it had seemed that she would not recover from charges by Richard Hodgson of the Society for Psychical Research that she had ingratiated herself with the Third Section of Russian intelligence. She was just too Russian for Whitehall to trust her! But with Theosophical chapters in every capital of Europe, she had been convincing when announcing herself as a citizen of the world.
Further complicating matters was that she was of mixed parentage, German as well as Russian. Various German admirers hinted that they, too, wished to play the Great Game. What side was she really on?
British doubts evaporated when Younghusband released to the press how information from Madame Blavatsky saved him from an assassin during military operations in Lhasa in 04. As he walked down the long hallway of his ostentatiously large house, the general reflected in this safe and secure year of 1910 how much he truly owed to this crazy Russian mystic on his arm.
At the beginning of the Tibetan expedition, things had not been going well. The thirteenth Dalai Lama proved deficient as a political strategist. Only twenty-eight years old at the time, he had paid too much credence in the prophesy of one of his magicians that 1904, the Year of the Wood Dragon, would see a series of events culminating in the destruction of Tibet.
No stranger to the Great Game, the young leader placed his hopes with the czar to protect him against the British Empire. So when Colonel Younghusband began his military entry into Lhasa, the Dalai Lama and a small party escaped to the north. Their destination was Mongolia. Left behind was another lama to negotiate as regent-a sharp operator by the name of Tri Rimpoche.
Madame Blavatsky's intervention did more than save an eager colonel's life. She saved his career and changed the nature of the mission.
Her spy network was not part of Russian intelligence. The Theosophy movement had agents, too! HPB had friends and allies among Buddhists and Hindus because of the many points of convergence between her system and the Eastern religions. Weirdly enough, she even made converts from their ranks!
She learned that the Russians had no intention of coming to the Dalai Lama's aid. Shouting Cossack oaths at the British Empire was one thing; but close scrutiny of a good map showed that the British only needed a few thousand men to stop a Russian force of any size emanating from Lhasa. So why worry about Lhasa? The mountain passes were so narrow that it was a defender's dream.
And then the Chinese made everything really complicated. Ironically, the Russian agent Zerempil tried to kill the daring colonel as part of a mission to prevent China moving into eastern Tibet. The idea was that removing Younghusband also meant removing a challenge to General Chao Her-feng. Since Zerempil died instead, there was no way of testing his thesis. Zerempil never bothered to consider the possibility that Younghusband's death might just as readily embolden the Chinese.
As General Younghusband opened the door that would bring his wife face to face with the person who had done so much to shape his destiny, he appreciated that his honored guest's cigar had gone out. There were many small miracles and mercies in this vale of tears.
The pale young woman stopped playing the piano.
"Dear, this is Madame Blavatsky."
The older woman took the younger woman's hands in hers and spoke softly. "You are a gorgeous creature. I'm not surprised to learn that the source of such beautiful playing is herself beautiful."
Younghusband had never seen his wife blush at the words of another woman before. Her long swan's neck turned ever so slightly as if she half expected HPB to kiss her. It appeared that Madame had made another conquest.
The general didn't need a sйance to take him back to the day when Blavatsky convinced him that she did indeed possess occult powers. How else could she tell him where to find the exact place and moment in the Tibetan wilderness where bandits had set upon the Dalai Lama and his party?