“Yet Sam freed many to do his will,” said Tak.
“Aye. He made and kept a nightmare pact, so that some of them do still walk the world. Of all men, they respect perhaps only Siddhartha. And with all men do they share one great vice.”
“That being. . .?”
“They do dearly love to gamble. . . . They will make game for any stakes, and gambling debts are their only point of honor. This must be so, or they would not hold the confidence of other gamesters and would so lose that which is perhaps their only pleasure. Their powers being great, even princes will make game with them, hoping to win their services. Kingdoms have been lost in this fashion.”
“If,” said Tak, “as you feel, Sam was playing one of the ancient games with Raltariki, what could the stakes have been?”
Yama finished his wine, refilled the glass. “Sam is a fool. No, he is not. He is a gambler. There is a difference. The Rakasha do control lesser orders of energy beings. Sam, through that ring he wears, does now command a guard of fire elementals, which he won from Raltariki. These are deadly, mindless creatures—and each bears the force of a thunderbolt.”
Tak finished his wine. “But what stakes could Sam have brought to the game?”
Yama sighed. “All my work, all our efforts for over half a century.”
“You mean—his body?”
Yama nodded. “A human body is the highest inducement any demon might be offered.”
“Why should Sam risk such a venture?”
Yama stared at Tak, not seeing him. “It must have been the only way he could call upon his life-will, to bind him again to his task — by placing himself in jeopardy, by casting his very existence with each roll of the dice.”
Tak poured himself another glass of wine and gulped it. “That is unknowable to me,” he said.
But Yama shook his head. “Unknown, only,” he told him. “Sam is not quite a saint, nor is he a fool.”
“Almost, though,” Yama decided, and that night he squirted demon repellent about the monastery.
The following morning, a small man approached the monastery and seated himself before its front entrance, placing a begging bowl on the ground at his feet. He wore a single, threadbare garment of coarse, brown cloth, which reached to his ankles. A black patch covered his left eye. What remained of his hair was dark and very long. His sharp nose, small chin, and high, flat ears gave to his face a foxlike appearance. His skin was tight-drawn and well-weathered. His single, green eye seemed never to blink.
He sat there for perhaps twenty minutes before one of Sam’s monks noticed him and mentioned the fact to one of Ratri’s dark-robed Order. This monk located a priest and passed the information to him. The priest, anxious to impress the goddess with the virtues of her followers, sent for the beggar to be brought in and fed, offered new garments and given a cell in which to sleep for as long as he chose to remain.
The beggar accepted the food with the courtesies of a Brahmin, but declined to eat anything other than bread and fruit. He accepted, too, the dark garment of Ratri’s Order, casting aside his begrimed smock. Then he looked upon the cell and the fresh sleeping mat that had been laid for him.
“I do thank you, worthy priest,” he said, in a voice rich and resonant, and altogether larger than his person. “I do thank you, and pray your goddess smile upon you for your kindness and generosity in her name.”
The priest smiled at this himself, and still hoped that Ratri might pass along the hall at that moment, to witness his kindness and generosity in her name. She did not, however. Few of her Order had actually seen her, even on the night when she put on her power and walked among them: for only those of the saffron robe had attended Sam’s awakening and were certain as to his identity. She generally moved about the monastery while her followers were at prayer or after they had retired for the evening. She slept mainly during the day; when she did cross their sight she was well-muffled and cloaked; her wishes and orders she communicated directly to Gandhiji, the head of the Order, who was ninety-three years old this cycle, and more than half blind.