El Borak and Other Desert Adventures

by Robert E. Howard

  Another lay sprawled near the charred hut, his ghastly face frozen in a grin of agony as he chewed spasmodically on a bullet. He had been shot in the belly and was taking a long time in dying, but not a whimper escaped his livid lips.

  A fellow with a bullet hole in his forearm was making more racket; his curses, as a comrade probed for the slug with a dagger point, would have curdled the blood of a devil.

  O’Donnell glanced up at the tower, whence wisps of smoke drifting told him that his five snipers were alert. Their range was greater than that of the men at the wall, and they did more damage proportionately and were better protected. Again and again they had broken up attempts to get at the horses in the stone pen. This pen was nearer the inclosure than it was to the rocks, and crumpled shapes on the ground showed of vain attempts to reach it.

  But O’Donnell shook his head. They had salvaged a large quantity of food from the burning hut; there was a well of good water; they had better weapons and more ammunition than the men outside. But a long siege meant annihilation.

  One of the men wounded in the night fighting had died. There remained alive forty-one men of the fifty with which he had left Shahrazar. One of these was dying, and half a dozen were wounded — one probably fatally. There were at least a hundred and fifty men outside.

  Afzal Khan could not storm the walls yet. But under the constant toll of the bullets, the small force of the defenders would melt away. If any of them lived and escaped, O’Donnell knew it could be only by a swift, bold stroke. But he had no plan at all.

  The firing from the valley ceased suddenly, and a white turban cloth was waved above the rock on a rifle muzzle.

  “Ohai, Ali el Ghazi!” came a hail in a bull’s roar that could only have issued from Afzal Khan.

  Yar Muhammad, squatting beside O’Donnell, sneered. “A trick! Keep thy head below the parapet, sahib. Trust Afzal Khan when wolves knock out their own teeth.”

  “Hold your fire, Ali el Ghazi!” boomed the distant voice. “I would parley with you!”

  “Show yourself!” O’Donnell yelled back.

  And without hesitation a huge bulk loomed up among the rocks. Whatever his own perfidy, Afzal Khan trusted the honor of the man he thought a Kurd. He lifted his hands to show they were empty.

  “Advance, alone!” yelled O’Donnell, straining to make himself heard.

  Someone thrust the butt of a rifle into a crevice of the rocks so it stood muzzle upward, with the white cloth blowing out in the morning breeze, and Afzal Khan came striding over the stones with the arrogance of a sultan. Behind him turbans were poked up above the boulders.

  O’Donnell halted him within good earshot, and instantly he was covered by a score of rifles. Afzal Khan did not seem to be disturbed by that, or by the blood lust in the dark hawklike faces glaring along the barrels. Then O’Donnell rose into view, and the two leaders faced one another in the full dawn.

  O’Donnell expected accusations of treachery — for, after all, he had struck the first blow — but Afzal Khan was too brutally candid for such hypocrisy.

  “I have you in a vise, Ali el Ghazi,” he announced without preamble. “But for that Waziri dog who crouches behind you, I would have cut your throat at moonrise last night. You are all dead men, but this siege work grows tiresome, and I am willing to forgo half my advantage. I am generous. As reward of victory I demand either your guns or your horses. Your horses I have already, but you shall have them back, if you wish. Throw down your weapons and you may ride out of Khuruk. Or, if you wish, I will keep the horses, and you may march out on foot with your rifles. What is your answer?”

  O’Donnell spat toward him with a typically Kurdish gesture. “Are we fools, to be hoodwinked by a dog with scarlet whiskers?” he snarled. “When Afzal Khan keeps his sworn word, the Indus will flow backward. Shall we ride out, unarmed, for you to cut us down in the passes, or shall we march forth on foot, for you to shoot us from ambush in the hills?

  “You lie when you say you have our horses. Ten of your men have died trying to take them for you. You lie when you say you have us in the vise. It is you who are in the vise! You have neither food nor water; there is no other well in the valley but this. You have few cartridges, because most of your ammunition is stored in the tower, and we hold that.”

  The fury in Afzal Khan’s countenance told O’Donnell that he had scored with that shot.

  “If you had us helpless you would not be offering terms,” O’Donnell sneered. “You would be cutting our throats, instead of trying to gull us into the open.”

  “Sons of sixty dogs!” swore Afzal Khan, plucking at his beard. “I will flay you all alive! I will keep you hemmed here until you die!”

  “If we cannot leave the fortress, you cannot enter it,” O’Donnell retorted. “Moreover you have drawn all your men but a handful from the passes, and the Khurukzai will steal upon you and cut off your heads. They are waiting, up in the hills.”

  Afzal Khan’s involuntarily wry face told O’Donnell that the Afghan’s plight was more desperate than he had hoped.

  “It is a deadlock, Afzal Khan,” said O’Donnell suddenly. “There is but one way to break it.” He lifted his voice, seeing that the Pathans under the protection of the truce were leaving their coverts and drawing within earshot. “Meet me there in the open space, man to man, and decide the feud between us two, with cold steel. If I win, we ride out of Khuruk unmolested. If you win, my warriors are at your mercy.”

  “The mercy of a wolf!” muttered Yar Muhammad.

  O’Donnell did not reply. It was a desperate chance, but the only one. Afzal Khan hesitated and cast a searching glance at his men; that scowling hairy horde was muttering among itself. The warriors seemed ill-content, and they stared meaningly at their leader.

  The inference was plain; they were weary of the fighting at which they were at a disadvantage, and they wished Afzal Khan to accept O’Donnell’s challenge. They feared a return of the Khurukzai might catch them in the open with empty cartridge pouches. After all, if their chief lost to the Kurd, they would only lose the loot they had expected to win. Afzal Khan understood this attitude, and his beard bristled to the upsurging of his ready passion.

  “Agreed!” he roared, tearing out his tulwar and throwing away the scabbard. He made the bright broad steel thrum about his head. “Come over the wall and die, thou slayer of infidels!”

  “Hold your men where they are!” O’Donnell ordered and vaulted the parapet.

  At a bellowed order the Pathans had halted, and the wall was lined with kalpaks as the Turkomans watched tensely, muzzles turned upward but fingers still crooked on the triggers. Yar Muhammad followed O’Donnell over the wall, but did not advance from it; he crouched against it like a bearded ghoul, fingering his knife.

  O’Donnell wasted no time. Scimitar in one hand and kindhjal in the other, he ran lightly toward the burly figure advancing to meet him. O’Donnell was slightly above medium height, but Afzal Khan towered half a head above him. The Afghan’s bull-like shoulders and muscular bulk contrasted with the rangy figure of the false Kurd; but O’Donnell’s sinews were like steel wires. His Arab scimitar, though neither so broad nor so heavy as the tulwar, was fully as long, and the blade was of unbreakable Damascus steel.

  The men seemed scarcely within arm’s reach when the fight opened with a dazzling crackle and flash of steel. Blow followed blow so swiftly that the men watching, trained to arms since birth, could scarcely follow the strokes. Afzal Khan roared, his eyes blazing, his beard bristling, and wielding the heavy tulwar as one might wield a camel wand, he flailed away in a frenzy.

  But always the scimitar flickered before him, turning the furious blows, or the slim figure of the false Kurd avoided death by the slightest margins, with supple twists and swayings. The scimitar bent beneath the weight of the tulwar, but it did not break; like a serpent’s tongue it always snapped straight again, and like a serpent’s tongue it flickered at Afzal Khan’s breast, his throat, his groin, a constant thr
eat of death that reddened the Afghan’s eyes with a tinge akin to madness.

  Afzal Khan was a famed swordsman, and his sheer brute strength was more than a man’s. But O’Donnell’s balance and economy of motion was a marvel to witness. He never set a foot wrong or made a false motion; he was always poised, always a threat, even in retreat, beaten backward by the bull-like rushes of the Afghan. Blood trickled down his face where a furious stroke, beating down his blade, had bitten through his silk turban and into the scalp, but the flame in his blue eyes never altered.

  Afzal Khan was bleeding, too. O’Donnell’s point, barely missing his jugular, had plowed through his beard and along his jaw. Blood dripping from his beard made his aspect more fearsome than ever. He roared and flailed, until it seemed that the fury of his onslaught would overbalance O’Donnell’s perfect mastery of himself and his blade.

  Few noticed, however, that O’Donnell had been working his way in closer and closer under the sweep of the tulwar. Now he caught a furious swipe near the hilt and the kindhjal in his left hand licked in and out. Afzal Khan’s bellow caught in a gasp. There was but that fleeting instant of contact, so brief it was like blur of movement, and then O’Donnell, at arm’s length again, was slashing and parrying, but now there was a thread of crimson on the narrow kindhjal blade, and blood was seeping in a steady stream through Afzal Khan’s broad girdle.

  There was the pain and desperation of the damned in the Afghan’s eyes, in his roaring voice. He began to weave drunkenly, but he attacked more madly than ever, like a man fighting against time.

  His strokes ribboned the air with bright steel and thrummed past O’Donnell’s ears like a wind of death, until the tulwar rang full against the scimitar’s guard with hurricane force and O’Donnell went to his knee under the impact. “Kurdish dog!” It was a gasp of frenzied triumph. Up flashed the tulwar and the watching hordes gave tongue. But again the kindhjal licked out like a serpent’s tongue — outward and upward.

  The stroke was meant for the Afghan’s groin, but a shift of his legs at the instant caused the keen blade to plow through his thigh instead, slicing veins and tendons. He lurched sidewise, throwing out his arm to balance himself. And even before men knew whether he would fall or not, O’Donnell was on his feet and slashed with the scimitar at his head.

  Afzal Khan fell as a tree falls, blood gushing from his head. Even so, the terrible vitality of the man clung to life and hate. The tulwar fell from his hand, but, catching himself on his knees, he plucked a knife from his girdle; his hand went back for the throw — then the knife slipped from his nerveless fingers and he crumpled to the earth and lay still.

  There was silence, broken by a strident yell from the Turkomans. O’Donnell sheathed his scimitar, sprang swiftly to the fallen giant and thrust a hand into his blood-soaked girdle. His fingers closed on what had hoped to find, and he drew forth an oilskin-bound packet of papers. A low cry of satisfaction escaped his lips.

  In the tense excitement of the fight, neither he nor the Turkomans had noticed that the Pathans had drawn nearer and nearer, until they stood in a ragged semicircle only a few yards away. Now, as O’Donnell stood staring at the packet, a hairy ruffian ran at his back, knife lifted.

  A frantic yell from Yar Muhammad warned O’Donnell. There was no time to turn; sensing rather than seeing his assailant, the American ducked deeply and the knife flashed past his ear, the muscular forearm falling on his shoulder with such force that again he was knocked to his knees.

  Before the man could strike again Yar Muhammad’s yard-long knife was driven into his breast with such fury that the point sprang out between his shoulder blades. Wrenching his blade free as the wretch fell, the Waziri grabbed a handful of O’Donnell’s garments and began to drag him toward the wall, yelling like a madman.

  It had all happened in a dizzying instant, the charge of the Pathan, Yar Muhammad’s leap and retreat. The other Pathans rushed in, howling like wolves, and the Waziri’s blade made a fan of steel about him and O’Donnell. Blades were flashing on all sides; O’Donnell was cursing like a madman as he strove to halt Yar Muhammad’s headlong progress long enough to get to his feet, which was impossible at the rate he was being yanked along.

  All he could see was hairy legs, and all he could hear was a devil’s din of yells and clanging knives. He hewed sidewise at the legs and men howled, and then there was a deafening reverberation, and a blast of lead at close range smote the attackers and mowed them down like wheat. The Turkomans had waked up and gone into action.

  Yar Muhammad was berserk. With his knife dripping red and his eyes blazing madly he swarmed over the wall and down on the other side, all asprawl, lugging O’Donnell like a sack of grain, and still unaware that his friend was not fatally wounded.

  The Pathans were at his heels, not to be halted so easily this time. The Turkomans fired point-blank into their faces, but they came on, snarling, snatching at the rifle barrels poked over the wall, stabbing upward.

  Yar Muhammad, heedless of the battle raging along the wall, was crouching over O’Donnell, mouthing, so crazy with blood lust and fighting frenzy that he was hardly aware of what he was doing, tearing at O’Donnell’s clothing in his efforts to discover the wound he was convinced his friend had received.

  He could hardly be convinced otherwise by O’Donnell’s lurid blasphemy, and then he nearly strangled the American in a frantic embrace of relief and joy. O’Donnell threw him off and leaped to the wall, where the situation was getting desperate for the Turkomans. The Pathans, fighting without leadership, were massed in the middle of the east wall, and the men in the tower were pouring a devastating fire into them, but the havoc was being wreaked in the rear of the horde. The men in the tower feared to shoot at the attackers along the wall for fear of hitting their own comrades.

  As O’Donnell reached the wall, the Turkoman nearest him thrust his muzzle into a snarling, bearded face and pulled the trigger, blasting the hillman’s head into a red ruin. Then before he could fire again a knife licked over the wall and disemboweled him. O’Donnell caught the rifle as it fell, smashed the butt down on the head of a hillman climbing over the parapet, and left him hanging dead across the wall.

  It was all confusion and smoke and spurting blood and insanity. No time to look right or left to see if the Turkomans still held the wall on either hand. He had his hands full with the snarling bestial faces which rose like a wave before him. Crouching on the firing step, he drove the blood-clotted butt into these wolfish faces until a rabid-eyed giant grappled him and bore him back and over.

  They struck the ground on the inside, and O’Donnell’s head hit a fallen gun stock with a stunning crack. In the moment that his brain swam dizzily the Pathan heaved him underneath, yelled stridently and lifted a knife — then the straining body went suddenly limp, and O’Donnell’s face was spattered with blood and brains, as Yar Muhammad split the man’s head to the teeth with his Khyber knife.

  The Waziri pulled the corpse off and O’Donnell staggered up, slightly sick, and presenting a ghastly spectacle with his red-dabbled face, hands, and garments. The firing, which had lulled while the fighting locked along the wall, now began again. The disorganized Pathans were falling back, were slinking away, breaking and fleeing toward the rocks.

  The Turkomans had held the wall, but O’Donnell swore sickly as he saw the gaps in their ranks. One lay dead in a huddle of dead Pathans outside the wall, and five more hung motionless across the wall, or were sprawled on the ground inside. With these latter were the corpses of four Pathans, to show how desperate the brief fight had been. The number of the dead outside was appalling.

  O’Donnell shook his dizzy head, shuddering slightly at the thought of how close to destruction his band had been; if the hillmen had had a leader, had kept their wits about them enough to have divided forces and attacked in several places at once — but it takes a keen mind to think in the madness of such a battle. It had been blind, bloody, and furious, and the random-cast dice of fate had dec
ided for the smaller horde.

  The Pathans had taken to the rocks again and were firing in a half-hearted manner. Sounds of loud argument drifted down the wind. He set about dressing the wounded as best he could, and while he was so employed, the Pathans tried to get at the horses again. But the effort was without enthusiasm, and a fusillade from the tower drove them back.

  As quickly as he could, O’Donnell retired to a corner of the wall and investigated the oilskin-wrapped packet he had taken from Afzal Khan. It was a letter, several sheets of high-grade paper covered with a fine scrawl. The writing was Russ, not Urdu, and there were English margin notes in a different hand. These notes made clear points suggested in the letter, and O’Donnell’s face grew grim as he read.

  How the unknown English secret-service man who had added those notes had got possession of the letter there was no way of knowing; but it had been intended for the man called Suleiman Pasha, and it revealed what O’Donnell had suspected — a plot within a plot; a red and sinister conspiracy concealing itself in a guise of international policy.

  Suleiman Pasha was not only a foreign spy; he was a traitor to the men he served. And the tentacles of the plot which revolved about him stretched incredibly southward into high places. O’Donnell swore softly as he read there the names of men trusted by the government they pretended to serve. And slowly a realization crystallized — this letter must never reach Suleiman Pasha. Somehow, in some way, he, Kirby O’Donnell, must carry on the work of that unknown Englishman who had died with his task uncompleted. That letter must go southward, to lay bare black treachery spawning under the heedless feet of government. He hastily concealed the packet as the Waziri approached.

  Yar Muhammad grinned. He had lost a tooth, and his black beard was streaked and clotted with blood which did not make him look any less savage.