The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  He sat there silent and stony, while some friendly hillmen carried his son’s body away, decently wrapped in a white fringed death shroud, a kindly old woman’s blue turquoise beads forced between the rigid little ringers so that the hand of Ali, which had not protected his body during life, might protect his fluttering soul after death.

  He sat there till the wind came driving the dusk toward the East; till the sky flushed with the green of the tropics, like a curved slab of thick, opaque jade; till the afternoon sun glared hot and golden; till once more the mists of evening rose and coiled. The mists of the hills—the mists in his soul! They echoed this day to the scream and toll of the death gongs, and from his heart there beat up a sob which all his faith could not still.

  He sat the next night through and watched the hiving stars swarm and swirl past the horizon. He watched them die one by one. He watched the young sun shoot up, racing along the rim of the world in a sea of fire, with shafts of purple light that put out the paling moon. He watched a long streamer of north bound birds, wild parrots tumbled out of their southern home by the moist sweep of the Punjab monsoon; they flopped about the lank pines, screeching dismally, their motley finery of feather bedraggled with the snow chill of the Himalayas.

  A scout bird detached itself, flew down, then up, flanking the packed crowd of its comrades in long, graceful evolutions, finally leading them toward the Raven’s Station, which etched the sky line, peaked and hooded, jeering like a face, extending its somber, scarred walls like a grim jest hewn out of stone, evilly infinite, like the very stronghold of the night and the hills, like a sooty smudge on the crimson and gold blaze of day—and Hadji Rahmet’s thoughts whirred on the parrot’s wings: up to the Raven’s Station.

  Up there was the patter of little hard feet tapping the stone flags; a curly head, tinged with red; a sturdy little nut-brown body: Akbar Khan, the Red Chief’s son, blood of his blood and bone of his bone.

  Up there was childish laughter, as the old women whispered Persian fairy tales—of the flea who tried to lighten the camel’s load, of Oguun, the god of little babes, whose fingers and toes are made of sugar cane and whose heart is a monstrous ball of pink sweetmeat that was baked in far China.

  A child’s laughter!

  The thought tore the hadji’s heart, ragged, paining, like a dull knife.

  “O Lord!” the prayer came automatic and meaning less, “pardon and pity and pass over what Thou knowest, for Thou art the most dear and the most generous—” He was silent. He bent his head as if listening. At his feet the cataract gurgled away to the darkness of the deep-cleft passes lap-lap-lap mocking.

  “And then,” the hadji would say afterward, “the dagger of grief pricked the bubble of my faith.” And a great turmoil surged in his heart, beyond control, beyond prayer even; running into something molten, finally emerging into the solid fact of his hatred, his desire for revenge.

  It seemed to bring up from his heart and brain unexpected, rather forgotten qualities, as a storm-whipped wave brings up mud and gravel from the ground bed of the shore.…

  * * * *

  That night Hadji Rahmet turned thief. He stole a tiny trotting bullock belonging to Ram Chander Dass, the Hindu who picked up a scant living by lending badly chipped silver rupees to the hillmen and, as the mullah said, by praying every night for the swag-bellied and bestial god of the Hindus, which same god is the guardian angel of Compound Interest.

  He stole the bullock. For he had decided to kill the Red Chief’s son, and he knew that, while sharp eyes would detect a stranger wandering up the slopes to the Raven’s Station, none would bother about a bullock—in a land where bullocks mean money and food and clothes—nor would sharp eyes, looking from above, see a man clinging to the bullock’s shaggy belly, his hands buried in the thick pelt of the wabbly hump.

  His long, lean body tortured into a grotesque angle and now and then bumping against the sharp stones of the rock path, the hadji hung on precariously while the bullock lashed out right and left, lowering its head, snorting, bellowing, stamping, whisking its tufted tail, dancing about as if stung by a bramra beetle in its efforts to shake off the strange burden that clung to its nether side; at last settling into a resigned, bovine trot and reaching the horses paddock which stretched beyond the Red Chief’s sheep corral just after daybreak.

  Already, down in the valley, the night mists were twisting into baroque spirals, tearing into gauzelike arabesques that burned like the plumage of a gigantic peacock in every mysterious blend of green and purple and blue.

  Once in the paddock, the hadji dropped to the ground while the bullock trotted away to join its mates that were dipping their ungainly noses into a stone bin half buried beneath the crimson, feathery foliage of a squat manna bush. There was nobody about the inner court yards this time of early day. The watchmen were pacing above, on the crenelated, winglike battlements that flushed out sharp and challenging under the rays of the young sun, farther on, where the sun had not yet penetrated, melting into the great pine woods that poured down the steep slopes and running together into a single sheet of purplish black, stippled white here and there with a sudden glisten of snow.

  The hadji stood still and listened. There was no sound except the occasional click-clank-click of a metal scabbard tip dragged along the stones of the battlements or the creaking of a grounded rifle butt.

  The watchmen were looking across the valley. It was there that, a week earlier, the Red Chief had lifted the slate-blue, mottled Kabuli stallion belonging to Jehan Tugluk Khan, the great naib of the Uzbek Khel; it was thence that the Uzbek Lances might pour toward the Raven’s Station to take toll. The sentinels had seen the bullock dance up the paddock, stamping and lashing and roaring. But what harm was there in a bullock, mad with spring fever?

  Hadji Rahmet looked about him. To the left, separated from the paddock by a stone wall, was a garden, transplanted painfully tree for tree and shrub for shrub from the Persian lowlands, and challenging the eternal snows in an incongruous, stunted, scraggly maze of crotons and mangoes, teak and Mellingtonia, poinsettias and begonia creepers—all frozen, homesick, out of place. The Red Chief had slaughtered a hundred head of cattle and sold their hides to pay for the exotic plants on the day when his little son had first repeated after him the words of the Pukhtunwali, the ancient Afghan code of honor and conduct: “As to him who does me harm, may I be permitted a full measure of revenge. May I cause his hands to drop away, and his feet. May his life pass into the dark like a sheet of foam.…”

  Beyond the garden, a little higher up, stretched the gray stone stables of the blooded horses. The hadji could hear the strangely human cry of a mare heavy with foal, a stallion’s answering whinny.

  He crossed the paddock toward the castle itself. It towered in massive outlines over a hundred feet high, built of rough granite and shiny quartz blocks set in concrete, swinging out in a great semicircle, its flanks resting upon the naked rock of the hills. Directly in front of him he saw a door, doubtless stolen generations ago during a raid into India. For it was made of a single, solid, age-darkened, adz-hewn teak slab, with dowels that fitted into a fretted ivory frame. No Afghan hand—clumsy except with martingale and tempered steel—had carved this door. No Afghan hand had fashioned the bossed, jewel-crusted silver plaque set in the center. But it was Afghan carelessness which had let the door warp, which had caused the delicate bayonet lock to crack away from the wood, leaving room for a narrow, nervous hand to slip inside and finger the bolt.

  The hadji sucked in his breath. His fingers moved noiselessly. Another short jerk and the bolt would slide from its groove—

  He stood quite still, his heart beating like a hammer.

  Faint, from the other side of the door, came a rustle of silken garments, the noise of bare feet pattering away. The zenana, the women’s quarter, doubtless, he thought; and there would be an old nurse about, with sharp ears and shrill, lusty tongue.

  He shut his teeth with a little dry click. His heart fe
lt swollen, as if he had washed it in brackish water, and he asked God—it seemed a personal issue between him and God—if he should be cheated of his revenge because an old woman, thin of sleep, was rummaging about the zenana in search of charcoal and hubble-bubble and Latakia tobacco spiced with rose water and grains of musk.

  And, steadily, as he waited, his finger immobile on the bolt of the door, undecided what to do, the sun was rising, striking the jagged cliffs with dusted gold, tumbling broken-rayed into the courtyard and drinking the newly thawed snow. Already the east was flushing with pink and orange as the mists drifted through the valley, shearing a glittering crimson slice from the morning sun. Already, looking nervously over his shoulder, he saw down the path one of the Red Chief’s peasants carrying a rough, iron-tipped milking yoke across his shoulders. Still he stood, undecided, ears and eyes tense.

  The thousand noises of the waking day were about him. Somewhere a tiny koel bird was gurgling and twittering. A little furry bat cheeped dismally. A pea cock-blue butterfly flopped quick—quick as the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk. A mousing owl rustled in the byre thatch.

  The stallions whinnied. There was a metallic buzzing of flies around a gnarled siris tree.

  Then, through the drowsy canticle of waking day, straight through the cheeping and rustling and whinnying and buzzing, the hadji heard another sound—a cry—faint, then louder, decreasing, then stabbing out sharp and distinct: “Father!”

  A human cry, calling for human help; rising to an intolerable note of appeal, half choked, accompanied by a rattling and crackling of steel, a crunching and stamping and snorting—curious, flat, dragging noise—and for a moment the hadji’s heart was as still as freezing water. “Father!” came the cry again, and again: “Fa—” cut off in mid-air. Like his son’s last cry, the cry of a dead soul trying to span the gulf of consciousness to the living heart!

  Then once more the snorting and stamping, the steely jar, coming from the stables of the blooded horses.

  The hadji gulped his fear and looked.

  Beyond the stunted garden he saw a little curly, red-tinged bullet-head peep above the wall, a small brown leg stretching up, the heel, helpless, foolish, trying to find hold on the smooth stone coping. Once more the cry, agonized—the little head jerking, the little heel slipping a soft thud…and the hadji, the hair on his neck bristling as though Death had whispered in his ear, ran across courtyard and garden. He cleared the stone wall at a jump.

  Inside, at the open door of the stables, he saw the Red Chief’s son, a small, huddled bundle, the neck strangely twisted, the hands grasped clawlike about the left front fetlock of a slate-blue, mottled stallion. It was clear to the hadji what had happened.

  The boy had sneaked out, very early, to take a look at the Kabuli stallion which his father had lifted from Jehan Tugluk Khan. He had tried to undo the steel chain by which the horse was fastened. The animal had become frightened, had reared and plunged and kicked; the boy had become entangled in the steel halter, had tried to jerk himself free; the stallion had become more frightened than ever.

  “Patience, little Moslem. Patience, little brother!” said the hadji. He approached the stallion sidewise, hand held high and open to show that he carried neither bit nor martingale, soothing with soft voice, then with cunning palm, rubbing the high, peaked withers, the soft, quivering muzzle, the tufted ears, leaning forward and blowing warm into the dilated nostrils, finally loosing the steel halter chain.

  The headstall dropped. The stallion jumped back, and the little boy fell on the ground, flopping grotesquely—and something reached out and touched the hadji’s soul, leaving the chill of an undescribable uneasiness.

  He bent to pick the boy up. The little body lay still, lifeless.

  He looked. He saw a blue mark across the lad’s windpipe where the steel chain had pressed—and he thought that his own son was dead, and that dead was the Red Chief’s son. He thought that the hand of man had killed the former, the hand of God the latter, thus evening the score.

  But—was the score even?

  For a full minute he considered.

  His mind resisted from the spontaneous passivity bred by long-continued meditations on Peace. But his hand surrendered to the brain’s subconscious, driving 1 will. His hand acted.

  He drew the dagger from the waist shawl. He cut across the blue mark which the steel chain had graved on the boy’s windpipe, obliterating it with torn flesh and a rush of blood. He left the dagger sticking in the wound. His name was cut in the ebony hilt. The Red Chief would find, and read, and—yes!—thus the score would be even!

  * * * *

  The hadji never knew how he reached safety. He had a vague memory of a sentinel challenging him, of a bullet whistling above his head, of how he went down the path scudding on his belly like a jackal to the reek of carrion. He remembered how, as he reached the valley, the western tower of the Raven’s Station seemed like a spire away on the world’s rim—a spire of hope and lost hope. He remembered the sudden gusts of snow coming down like hissing spears, with the moon reeling above him through the clouds like a great, blinding ball of light and with a lonely southern peak pointing at the mute stars like a gigantic icicle, frozen, austere, desolate.

  He remembered vaguely how he traveled day and night, day and night, and it was only gradually, slowly, as his mind jerked free from fleshly thrall and buffeted its road back through the mists of passion to God’s Peace, that there came to him knowledge of why he was fleeing from that thing in the glitter of the hills as from a thing accursed.

  It was not fear of the Red Chief. Nor was it remorse that he had mutilated the dead body. For the hadji was an Afghan, and there was no worth nor dignity to him in a lifeless thing.

  What weighed on his soul, like a sodden blanket, was the doubt of what he would have done had he found the Red Chief’s son alive.

  He had gone to the Raven’s Station to kill. But would he have killed? Would he have broken God’s covenant of Peace—and, killing, would he have done right or wrong?

  The doubt was on his soul like a stinging brand; and so the hadji took stick and wooden bowl and lived on alms and went through the scorched Indian plains, from shrine to shrine, seeking release from doubt, release from memory.

  * * * *

  He did bodily penance, gradually subduing his physical Self. He submitted to the ordeal of fire, walking barefoot through the white-hot charcoal, uncovering his shaven head to the burning fire bath. And he felt not the pain of the body. Only his soul trembled to the whip of doubt.

  Then he met a Holy Man from Gujrat who told him that to clear his vision and fatten the glebe of understanding he must do penance with his head hanging downward. True, the other was a Hindu infidel whose gods were a monkey and a flower. But he himself was a Sufi, an esoteric Moslem, taking the best of all creeds and despising none, and he did as the fakir told him.

  He swung with his head to the ground and shut his eyes. When he opened them again he saw all upside down, and the sight was marvelous beyond words. The blue hills had lost their struggling height and were a deep, swallowing, mysterious void. Against them the sky stood out, bold, sharp, intense, immeasurably distant; and the fringe of clouds at the base of the sky seemed a lake of molten amber with billows of tossing sacrificial fire.

  He gazed. He gazed himself into stupefaction. But his memory remained: an inky scrawl across his soul.

  “For memory,” said the hadji, “is not of the body, but of the soul!”

  THE HOME-COMING

  Yar Khan was off to his own country in the Month of Pilgrimages. He broke the long journey at Bokhara, to buy a horse for the trip South, to exchange his Egyptian money for a rupee draft on a Hindu banker in Afghanistan, and to buy sweets and silks for the many cousins in his native village.

  He had left there sixteen years before, a child of seven, when his father, a poor man, but eager for gain, and sensing no chance for barter and profit in the crumbling basalt ridges of the foot-hills, ha
d gone West—to Cairo. There he and his father the mother had died in giving him birth had lived all these years; all these years he had spent in that city of smoky purple and dull orange, but never had he been of Cairo. The tang of the home land had not left him; always his heart had called back to the sweep and snow of the hills, and he had fed his love with gossamer memories and with the brave tales which his father, Ali Khan, told him when the homesickness was in his nostrils and when the bazaar gold of Cairo seemed gray and useless dross.

  Of gold there had come plenty. Ali Khan had prospered, and in his tight little shop in the Gamalyieh, the Quarter of the Camel-Drivers, he had held his own with the Red Sea traders who meet there, and cheat and fight and give one another the full-flavored abuse of near-by Asia.

  Yar Khan had lived the haphazard life of Eastern childhood, with no lessons but those of the crowded, crooked streets and an occasional word of prosy Koranic wisdom from some graybeard among his father’s customers. When he had reached his fifteenth year, manhood had come—sudden and a little cruel as it comes to Asians. On that day, his father had taken him into the shop, and, with a great gesture of his lean arms, had pointed at the dusty confusion of his stock-in-trade; at the mattings full of yellow Persian tobacco, the pipe bowls of red clay, the palm-leaf bags containing coffee and coarse brown sugar, the flat green boxes filled with arsenic and rhubarb and antimony and tafl and sal-ammoniac.

  “He of great head becomes a chief, and he of great feet a shepherd,” Ali Khan had said, ridiculing Fate after the manner of the hill-bred. “Thou art blood of my blood. From this day on, thou wilt be a trader, and thou wilt prosper. Gold will come to thy hands—unasked, like a courtesan.”

  Ali Khan had been right. Together, father and son had prospered. They had heaped gold on clinking gold, and of gold, too, had been the father’s endless talk, praising the cold metal at yawning length, dwelling, as it were, on the outer husk of things; and when Yar Khan’s softer mind rebelled at the hard philosophy Ali Khan would laugh and say: “Thou art right, little son. Gold is the breath of a thief. Gold is a djinn. Gold is an infidel sect. But”—with a shrewd wink—“give gold to a mangy dog—and the people will call him Sir Dog. For gold is strength!”