The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  “Allah!” he said. “It is not I who shall be a widower tonight, but Azeena who shall be a widow!”—and his knife flashed free while the bear came on, slow, ponderous, thinking in her ugly, twisted brain that all would be over in two crimson minutes if she could only tear the man away from the protecting tree.

  Mortazu Khan knew it, too. “Assassin!” he cried. “Base-born and lean bastard!”

  “Waughree!” replied the bear.

  She came on without haste, leaned smack against the tree, and tried to reach around it, right and left, with her murderous claws. But the tree was too stout, and for the moment the hillman was safe.

  He smiled. Then he frowned. For the sun was rising higher, and he had to reach Ghuzni—the doctor—and back yonder Azeena was dying…

  “Unclean spawn of filth!” he cried. “Large and stinking devil!”—and quite suddenly, watching his chance, he flashed his dagger to the left. He brought down the point with speed and ferocity, straight into the brute’s right eye.

  Something warm and sticky squirted up his arm. The bear, crazed with pain, jumped high in the air like a rubber ball, came down again, roaring, squealing, bellowing, slid lumberingly to the left, and again Mortazu Khan resumed his dance.

  But this time it was another dance. This time the bear had no sharp angles to make. Both man and beast were close against the tree, circling, circling.…

  * * * *

  The sun rose and dipped. Far on the edge of the horizon the peaks of the Gul Koh flushed gold and lavender.

  “Waughrrr!” snorted the bear, stamping her clumsy paws.

  “Wheet-wheet!” chirped the echo from the upper most branches of the fir, silly, mocking and safe! And back beyond the bracken-clad slope, Azeena was dying hard, and his son was dying—dying before he was born—because Bibi Bear had broken the truce of the fat season.

  Mortazu Khan trembled with rage and fear. But—away!—circling the tree, escaping the murderous claws!

  He did not jump. No longer did he dance. He seemed to stream, to flow, like a liquid wave, his body scrunched into a curve while his lungs pumped the breath with staccato thumps. Only his hand was steady, taking crimson toll again and again, and the bear followed, roaring like forked mountain thunder. The blood on her huge body was caked with dirt and moss until the wounds looked like gray patches on a fur jacket.

  A shimmering thread of sun-gold wove through the branches and dipped low to see what was happening. Far in the east a crane-pheasant called to its mate. The wind soared lonely and chilly.

  They were out of breath, man and beast. Momentarily they stopped in their mad circling, the bear leaning against one side of the tree, a deep sob gurgling in her hairy throat, the blood coming through her wounds like black-red whips, while the man was huddled against the opposite side as tight and small as he could. He was tired and sleepy. His right hand felt paralyzed, but still it gripped the dagger. He knew that the end was near, knew that he himself must hasten it, that he must face Bibi Bear face her in the open and kill or be killed. For back yon der was Azeena, and the minutes were slipping by like water.

  He raked together the dying embers of his strength. “Allah!” he mumbled. “Do thou give me help!”—And then he heard again the cry of the cursed, feathery thing:

  “Wheet-wheet!”

  But it seemed less mocking than before, more insistent, as if the bird, too, had lost its sense of security, had begun to fear the shaggy murderer below.

  Mortazu Khan looked up. Then he saw it. It had dropped to a branch lower down, and it was not a bird— It was round and toddling and fluffy and blue-gray. A little, fat bear cub it was; and then Mortazu Khan knew why Bibi Bear had broken the truce of the fat season, and a certain pity and understanding came to the hillman’s simple heart.

  Here he was fighting for his wife, his unborn son, and he said to himself that the bear, too, was fighting for the young of her body, for the thing which gave meaning to life. And it was without hatred—with respect, rather, and a feeling of comradeship—that Mortazu Khan stepped away from the protecting tree, deliberately to give battle in the open.

  The bear followed, growling. And so the two stood there, confronting each other, both breathing hard ready to leap, ready to finish the fight.

  It was the man who leaped first. For the fraction of a second he balanced himself, his bleeding toes gripping the ground. Then he went straight into the bear’s embrace, the point of his dagger ahead of him like a guidon. His lips were crinkly and pale, his tongue like dry saddle leather, his eyes cold and gleaming. But straight he jumped, and straight stabbed the knife, finding the brute’s pumping, clamorous heart, while the claws met across his shoulder-blades and tore a furrow down his back.

  Straight to the heart! With every ounce of bunched strength and despair, and as the bear, in mortal agony, realized her steely grip, he struck again and again and again. But there was no hatred in the blows.

  “Ahi!” he sobbed, as the bear toppled sideways and fell, curling up like a sleeping dog. “Ahi! Poor Bibi Bear! Brave Bibi Bear!”

  His back bled and hurt. But he jerked the pain away with a shrug of his massive shoulder. The English hakim would have two patients instead of one, he told himself, and, dizzy, a little depressed, he turned to resume his walk across the plateau.

  But something seemed to float down upon his consciousness, imperceptibly, like the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk, and he stopped and returned to the fir-tree. Standing on his toes, he reached up and caught the toddling, fluffy cub which was trying hard to back up, to regain the security of the higher branches.

  “Come, little Sheik Bear!” he crooned as he might to a frightened child. “Come! There is room for thee in the house of Mortazu Khan! Room and food and water—and soon, if Allah be willing and the hakim’s medicine strong, a little man-child to play with thee!”

  And, the cub nuzzling his heaving chest with a little grunt of satisfaction, Mortazu Khan walked toward the flat roofs of Ghuzni, leaving behind him a thin trail of blood, but hurrying, hurrying.

  THE RIVER OF HATE

  “The Wrath of the Thunder Gods,” the Kafiri hillmen called the river that dropped to the western plains of Afghanistan and over into soft Persia in a succession of overlapping falls like the feathers on the breast of a pouter pigeon, while the Afghan nobles who, armed with the great, carved seal of the Governor of Kabul, came there to levy the quota of young men for the Emir’s army, called it the “River of Hate.”

  And Kafiri, as well as Afghans, spoke the truth.

  For, during three months of the year, the North wind was riding a wracked sky and met the shock of the racing, roaring river, and the thunder crashed from the high ranges, splintering the young pines, occasionally taking toll of human life; and it was hate, even more than the swirling breadth of the river, which divided the villages that squatted on either bank.

  South of the river, the Red Village lay spotted and threatening, like a tiger asleep in the sun, while North the flat-roofed houses of the White Village seemed snowflakes dropped on slabs of sullen granite as sullen as the temper of the people when they looked across and saw the men of the Red Village sweep the whirlpool of the Black Rock with crude, effective net traps made of jungly rattan and hempen ropes; when they saw the catch of fat, blue-scaled, red-eyed khirli fish drawn up on the bank and flopping in the quivering light like dusky flecks of sunshine.

  The Black Rock was the fortune of the Red Village. Forming the end and pinnacle of a chain of ragged, slippery stones that spanned three-fourths of the river’s breadth and rose and fell to the rise and fall of the water, it was within fifteen feet of the southern bank, and in winter, when rain had been heavy in the mountains and the River of Hate surged up a man’s height in a couple of hours, it acted like a natural dam.

  But in summer, when, freed from snow, the higher range limned ghostly out of the purple-gray distance and drought shrunk the river, the Black Rock peaked to a height of thirty feet and caused the water to
drop into a great whirlpool, not far from the Red Village, where it blossomed like a gigantic waxen flower.

  Too, it is in summer that the khirli fish, obeying their ancient tribal customs, come from their spawning, and when they return down the River of Hate on their way to the Persian Gulf, they are tired and weary with the many miles. So they lie down to rest in the bottom of the whirlpool of the Black Rock where the fishing rights, by immemorial law, antedating the law of the Koran, belong to the people of the Red Village; and the villagers catch them and feast, while the men of the White Village bemoan their fate and take the name of Allah—and if the Afghan priests be not listening the names—of various heathen gods decidedly in vain.

  But they do not fight the people of the Red Village, except with an occasional stone or stick hurled from ambush and not meant to kill. For a law is a law.

  * * * *

  When, after seven years’ service in the Emir’s army—during which he had learned to shoot straight, to substitute a tall black fur cap, worn rakishly over the right ear, for the greasy shawl turban of the Kafiri, to embroider his rough hill diction with flowery Persian metaphor, and to ogle the women in the bazaars—Ebrahim Asif received word that his father, Sabihhudin Achmat, had died, and that he was now chief of the White Village, he went straight to the Governor of Kabul and asked to be released from service.

  “My people are clamoring for me,” he added in a lordly manner.

  The Governor saw before him a young man, not over twenty-five, of a supple sweep of shoulders, a great, crunching reach of arms, a massive chest, and a dead-white, hawkish face that rose up from a black, pointed beard like a sardonic Chinese vignette. He thought to himself that here was a Kafiri, a turbulent pagan hillman indeed; but that seven years in Kabul must have put the Afghan brand upon his soul, and that he might be a valuable ally if ever his lawless tribesmen should give trouble—perhaps, only Allah knew! as a raiding vanguard accompanying an invading British or Russian column, as the little, sniveling, dirt-nosing jackals accompany the tiger.

  “Your prayer is granted, Ebrahim Asif,” the Governor said. “Return to your own people—a chief. And—” he smiled, “also remember that you are an Afghan, and no longer a lousy hillman!”

  “Yes, Excellency!” said Ebrahim Asif.

  On the second day out of Kabul he was back over the borders of his own country. On the third, he saw the faint, silvery gray mountain, flung like a cloud against the sky, that marked the western limit of the White Village.

  On the morning of the fourth, he was sitting on a raised earthen platform in the communal council hut of the village where his ancestors had been hereditary rulers since before the shining adventure of Shikandar Khan, he whom the Christians call Alexander the Macedonian, his rifle across his knees, and a naked, pot-bellied boy of ten fanning him with a silver-handled yak tail, stolen during some raid into Tibet. He was holding a perfumed, daintily embroidered handkerchief to his nose.

  On the bare mud floor, below the platform, squatted the men of the village, some thirty in number, in a confused heap of sun-and-dirt-browned arms, legs and patched multi-colored garments.

  Ebrahim Asif, remembering the days of his child hood when his father had occupied the seat of chief which today was his, turned slightly to the left.

  Directly in front of him squatted an old man whose name was Jarullah. His face was like a gnarled bit of deodar wood beneath a thatch of bristly, reddish hair.

  Ebrahim Asif pointed at him.

  “Jarullah,” he said, “you are the oldest. Let me hear what wisdom, if any, the many years have brought you.”

  “It is not money we want,” muttered Jarullah.

  Then, embarrassed he knew not why, he checked himself. His roving eyes sought his knees and he coughed apologetically, until a young man, lean, red-haired, with pock-marked vulpine features and bold gray eyes, stepped forward, pushed Jarullah unceremoniously aside, and squatted down in his place.

  Over his shoulder, he pointed through the doorway, at the River of Hate, and the hissing whirlpool of the Black Rock, and beyond, at the Red Village, that seemed stiff and motionless in the quivering heat as if forged out of metal. Only at the bank were signs of life—the men pulling in the nets sagging with their shimmering load. Occasionally, a high-pitched, exult ant yell drifted thinly across.

  “Our bellies are empty, Chief,” the young man whose name was Babar, said sulkily, “while they—” he spat—“the people of the Red Village—”

  Ebrahim Asif rose, picked up his rifle by the shoulder strap, and walked toward the door.

  “The old feud, eh?” he asked. “The feud over a potful of stinking khirli fish? By the teeth of the Prophet—on whom peace—I shall spice their mid-day meal with a couple of bullets and a rich sluicing of blood!”

  But Jarullah stepped into his path and laid a trembling hand on his shoulder.

  “There is the law, Chief!” he cried in a cracked, excited whine. “The fishing rights of the southern bank belong to the Red Village. Remember the law of the Kafiri!”

  “There is no law for Afghans,” smiled Ebrahim Asif.

  “Right!” shrieked the old man. “There is indeed no law for Afghans! But you are a Kafiri, Chief. You must keep sacred the ancient law of the tribes—” and an angry, clucking chorus rose from the squatting clansmen.

  “The ancient law! The ancient law!”

  Ebrahim Asif was utterly astonished.

  Quite instinctively he had picked up his rifle. Quite instinctively he had decided to send a few bullets whizzing to the opposite shore. It would be perfectly safe. For the only firearms that ever came into Kafiristan were those of the Emir’s ruffianly soldiers, soldiers either on active duty or, like himself, released from service, and he knew that for many years past no man of the Red Village had been drafted into the army.

  Thus he was perfectly safe in announcing his presence to them with a charge of lead and, later on, of coming to terms: a fair half of the khirli catch to his own village—otherwise bullets and blood.

  It was simple—as sublimely simple, as sublimely brutal as his whole philosophy of life.

  But they had spoken about the law—the ancient law—

  The young man with the pock-marked, vulpine face—Babar—had seemed the most manly of them all.

  “What do you say, Babar?” he asked, and the other mumbled piously, “It is the law. The fishing rights of the southern bank belong to the Red Village.”

  Ebrahim Asif shook his head. He stalked through the doorway, while the villagers looked after him, stolid, sullen. He walked up to the River of Hate.

  The men of the Red Village were still fishing, peace ful, undisturbed, serenely safe. One looked up, squinted against the light with sharp, puckered eyes, and seemed to see the rifle in Ebrahim Asif’s hand. But he paid no attention to it. To him, too, there was the ancient law.

  And, suddenly, out of the nowhere, a heavy weight dropped on Ebrahim Asif’s soul.

  “Yes,” he murmured, “there is the law—for us Kafiri—” and he tossed the rifle into the swirling, foaming water.

  * * * *

  Late that night, as he sat alone in his father’s hut, which was now his, scraps of memory came to him. Piece by piece he put them together.

  He remembered how, years ago, when he had been a naked, sun-burned child with a red turban cloth wound about his shaven poll, his father, Sabihhudin Achmat, had been guide to a Kashmiri rajah who had come North to hunt the thick-pelted, broad-headed tigers that drift into Kafiristan in the wake of the Mongolian snows. The rajah had brought a large retinue of servants, and one evening they and their master and his father had whispered together.

  They had set to work, under the rajah’s guidance. All night they had worked, with little Ebrahim looking on open-mouthed, using odd bits of steel and wire taken from the rajah’s voluminous baggage, and wood and stones and spliced ropes and rattan.

  About midnight they had sneaked out of the house and through the sleeping villag
e, to the bank of the River of Hate, carrying between them a strange contrivance that seemed round and heavy. Hours later, his father had returned, drenched to the skin, but triumphant.

  Today, Ebrahim Asif knew that the strange contrivance the Kashmiri men had fashioned that night and which his father had put in a hole of the Black Rock, below the surface, was a water wheel to change the main current of the whirlpool, for since then he had seen many such wheels.

  And when the next drought had shrunk the river and the khirli fish had returned from their spawning, when the people of the Red Village had swept the whirlpool of the Black Rock, day after day, they had caught no more than a lean handful of skinny, smelly dagger-fish, while the men of the White Village, wondering, yet obeying their chief’s command, had gone down to the northern bank where the fishing rights were theirs and had set to work with improvised gear.

  The catch had been huge; and for weeks, they had eaten their fill of khirli spiced with turmeric and sesame, while the people on the opposite shore had be moaned their fate and had rubbed empty wrinkled stomachs.

  Only the hereditary chief of the Red Village, Yar Zaddiq, a shrewd, elderly man, over six feet in height, with gray hair that had once been reddish-brown, a biting tongue and doubting, deep set eyes, had suspected the hand of man and, late one night, when the water was very low, had swum over to the Black Rock at the risk of his life and had investigated.

  He had called for help. The wheel had been torn out, and a few days later, four miles up the river, accompanied by several of his clansmen, he had chanced upon Sabihhudin Achmat and had beaten him terribly.

  After that, there had been no more catching of khirli fish on the northern bank, and the old hate of White Village against Red had grown a thousandfold.

  * * * *

  The days that followed were drab and listless.

  Ebrahim Asif stalked through the village in his best, most braggart Kabuli manner.

  But, for the first time in his life, he was aware of a strange sensation which, had he been a westerner, he would have correctly analyzed as self-consciousness.