El Borak: The Complete Tales

by Robert E. Howard

  “Has there been a raid over the border?” he asked.

  “This fool came seeking someone,” scornfully answered Muhammad. “He walked into a trap set for him.”

  “What will be done with him in Rub el Harami?” pursued the newcomer, and Brent’s interest in the conversation suddenly became painfully intense.

  “He will be placed on the slave block,” answered Muhammad, “according to the age-old custom of the city. Who bids highest will have him.”

  And so Brent learned the fate in store for him, and cold sweat broke out on his flesh as he contemplated a life spent as a tortured drudge to some turbaned ruffian. But he held up his head, feeling Shirkuh’s fierce eyes upon him.

  The stranger said slowly: “It may be his destiny to serve Shirkuh, of the Jebel Jawur! I never owned a slave--but who knows? It strikes my fancy to buy this Feringi!”

  Brent reflected that Shirkuh must know that he was in no danger of being murdered and robbed, or he would never so openly imply possession of money. That suggested that he knew these were picked men, carrying out someone’s instructions so implicitly that they could be depended on not to commit any crime not included in those orders. That implied organization and obedience beyond the conception of any ordinary hill chief. He was convinced that these men belonged to that mysterious cult against which Stockton had warned him--the Black Tigers. Then had their capture of him been due merely to chance? It seemed improbable.

  “There are rich men in Rub el Harami, Kurd,” growled Muhammad. “But it may be that none will want this Feringi and a wandering vagabond like you might buy him. Who knows?”

  “Only in Allah is knowledge,” agreed Shirkuh, and swung his horse into line behind Brent, crowding a man out of position and laughing when the Afghan snarled at him.

  The troop got into motion, and a man leaned over to strike Brent with a rifle butt. Shirkuh checked the stroke. His lips laughed, but there was menace in his eyes.

  “Nay! This infidel may belong to me before many days, and I will not have his bones broken!”

  The man growled, but did not press the matter, and the troop rode on. They toiled up a ridge in a long shadow cast by the crag behind which the sun had sunk, and came into a valley and the sight of the sun again, just sinking behind a mountain. As they went down the slope, they spied white turbans moving among the crags to the west, and Muhammad ez Zahir snarled in suspicion at Shirkuh.

  “Are they friends of yours, you dog? You said you were alone!”

  “I know them not!” declared Shirkuh. Then he dragged his rifle from its boot. “The dogs fire on us!” For a tiny tongue of fire had jetted from among the boulders in the distance, and a bullet whined overhead.

  “Hill-bred dogs who grudge us the use of the well ahead!” said Muhammad ez Zahir. “Would we had time to teach them a lesson! Hold your fire, you dogs! The range is too long for either they or us to do damage.”

  But Shirkuh wheeled out of the line of march and rode toward the foot of the ridge. Half a dozen men broke cover, high up on the slope, and dashed away over the crest, leaning low and spurring hard. Shirkuh fired once, then took steadier aim and fired three shots in swift succession.

  “You missed!” shouted Muhammad angrily. “Who could hit at such a range?”

  “Nay!” yelled Shirkuh. “Look!”

  One of the ragged white shapes had wavered and pitched forward on its pony’s neck. The beast vanished over the ridge, its rider lolling limply in the saddle.

  “He will not ride far!” exulted Shirkuh, waving his rifle over his head as he raced back to the troop. “We Kurds have eyes like mountain hawks!”

  “Shooting a Pathan hill thief does not make a hero,” snapped Muhammad, turning disgustedly away.

  But Shirkuh merely laughed tolerantly, as one so sure of his fame that he could afford to overlook the jealousies of lesser souls.

  They rode on down into the broad valley, seeing no more of the hillmen. Dusk was falling when they halted beside the well. Brent, too stiff to dismount, was roughly jerked off his horse. His legs were bound, and he was allowed to sit with his back against a boulder just far enough away from the fires they built to keep him from benefiting any from the heat. No guard was set over him at present.

  Presently Shirkuh came striding over to where the prisoner gnawed at the wretched crusts they allowed him. Shirkuh walked with a horseman’s roll, setting his booted legs wide. He carried an iron bowl of stewed mutton, and some chupatties.

  “Eat, Feringi!” he commanded roughly, but not harshly. “A slave whose ribs jut through his hide is no good to work or to fight. These niggardly Pathans would starve their grandfathers. But we Kurds are as generous as we are valiant!”

  He offered the food with a gesture as of bestowing a province. Brent accepted it without thanks, and ate voraciously. Shirkuh had dominated the drama ever since he had entered it--a swashbuckler who swaggered upon the stage and would not be ignored. Even Muhammad ez Zahir was overshadowed by the overflowing vitality of the man. Shirkuh seemed a strange mixture of brutal barbarian and unsophisticated youth. There was a boyish exuberance in his swagger, and he displayed touches of naive simplicity at times. But there was nothing childish about his glittering black eyes, and he moved with a tigerish suppleness that Brent knew could be translated instantly into a blur of murderous action.

  Shirkuh thrust his thumbs in his girdle now and stood looking down at the American as he ate. The light from the nearest fire of dry tamarisk branches threw his dark face into shadowy half relief and gave it somehow an older, more austere look. The shadowy half light had erased the boyishness from his countenance, replacing it with a suggestion of somberness.

  “Why did you come into the hills?” he demanded abruptly.

  Brent did not immediately answer; he chewed on, toying with an idea. He was in as desperate a plight as he could be in, and he saw no way out. He looked about, seeing that his captors were out of earshot. He did not see the dim shape that squirmed up behind the boulder against which he leaned. He reached a sudden decision and spoke.

  “Do you know the man called El Borak?”

  Was there suspicion suddenly in the black eyes?

  “I have heard of him,” Shirkuh replied warily:

  “I came into the hills looking for him. Can you find him? If you could get a message to him, I would pay you thirty thousand rupees.”

  Shirkuh scowled, as if torn between suspicion and avarice.

  “I am a stranger in these hills,” he said. “How could I find El Borak?”

  “Then help me to escape,” urged Brent. “I will pay you an equal sum.”

  Shirkuh tugged his mustache.

  “I am one sword against thirty,” he growled. “How do I know I would be paid? Feringi are all liars. I am an outlaw with a price on my head. The Turks would flay me, the Russians would shoot me, the British would hang me. There is nowhere I can go except to Rub el Harami. If I helped you to escape, that door would be barred against me, too.”

  “I will speak to the British for you,” urged Brent. “El Borak has power. He will secure a pardon for you.”

  He believed what he said; besides, he was in that desperate state when a man is likely to promise anything.

  Indecision flickered in the black eyes, and Shirkuh started to speak, then changed his mind, turned on his heel, and strode away. A moment later the spy crouching behind the boulders glided away without having been discovered by Brent, who sat staring in despair after Shirkuh.

  Shirkuh went straight to Muhammad, gnawing strips of dried mutton as he sat cross-legged on a dingy sheepskin near a small fire on the other side of the well. Shirkuh got there before the spy did.

  “The Feringi has offered me money to take a word to El Borak,” he said abruptly. “Also to aid him to escape. I bade him go to Jehannum, of course. In the Jebel Jawur I have heard of El Borak, but I have never seen him. Who is he?”

  “A devil,” growled Muhammad ez Zahir. “An American, like this dog
. The tribes about the Khyber are his friends, and he is an adviser of the ameer, and an ally of the rajah, though he was once an outlaw. He has never dared come to Rub el Harami. I saw him once, three years ago, in the fight by Kalat-i-Ghilzai, where he and his cursed Afridis broke the back of the revolt that had else unseated the ameer. If we could catch him, Abd el Khafid would fill our mouths with gold.”

  “Perhaps this Feringi knows where to find him!” exclaimed Shirkuh, his eyes burning with a glitter that might have been avarice. “I will go to him and swear to deliver his message, and so trick him into telling me what he knows of El Borak.”

  “It is all one to me,” answered Muhammad indifferently. “If I had wished to know why he came into the hills, I would have tortured it out of him before now. But my orders were merely to capture him and bring him alive to Rub el Harami. I could not turn aside, not even to capture El Borak. But if you are admitted into the city, perhaps Abd el Khafid will give you a troop to go hunting El Borak.”

  “I will try!”

  “Allah grant you luck,” said Muhammad. “El Borak is a dog. I would myself give a thousand rupees to see him hanging in the market place.”

  “If it be the will of Allah, you shall meet El Borak!” said Shirkuh, turning away.

  Doubtless it was the play of the firelight on his face which caused his eyes to burn as they did, but Muhammad felt a curious chill play down his spine, though he could not reason why.

  Shirkuh’s booted feet crunched away through the shale, and a furtive, ragged shadow came out of the night and squatted at Muhammad’s elbow.

  “I spied on the Kurd and the infidel as you ordered,” muttered the spy. “The Feringi offered Shirkuh thirty thousand rupees either to seek out El Borak and deliver a message to him, or to aid him to escape us. Shirkuh lusted for the gold, but he has been outlawed by all the Feringis, and he dares not close the one door open to him.”

  “Good,” growled Muhammad in his beard. “Kurds are dogs; it is well that this one is in no position to bite. I will speak for him at the pass. He does not guess the choice that awaits him at the gates of Rub el Harami.”

  Brent was sunk in the dreamless slumber of exhaustion, despite the hardness of the rocky ground and the chill of the night. An urgent hand shook him awake, an urgent whisper checked his startled exclamation. He saw a vague shape bending over him, and heard the snoring of his guard a few feet away. Guarding a man bound and fettered was more or less of a formality of routine. Shirkuh’s voice hissed in Brent’s ear.

  “Tell me the message you wished to send El Borak! Be swift, before the guard awakes. I could not take the message when we talked before, for there was a cursed spy listening behind that rock. I told Muhammad what passed between us, because I knew the spy would tell him anyway, and I wished to disarm suspicion before it took root. Tell me the word!”

  Brent accepted the desperate gamble.

  “Tell him that Richard Stockton died, but before he died, he said this: ‘The Black Tigers have a new prince; they call him Abd el Khafid, but his real name is Vladimir Jakrovitch.’ This man dwells in Rub el Harami, Stockton told me.”

  “I understand,” muttered Shirkuh. “El Borak shall know.”

  “But what of me?” urged Brent.

  “I cannot help you escape now,” muttered Shirkuh. “There are too many of them. All the guards are not asleep. Armed men patrol the outskirts of the camp, and others watch the horses--my own among them.”

  “I cannot pay you unless I get away!” argued Brent.

  “That is in the lap of Allah!” hissed Shirkuh. “I must slip back to my blankets now, before I am missed. Here is a cloak against the chill of the night.”

  Brent felt himself enveloped in a grateful warmth, and then Shirkuh was gone, gliding away in the night with boots that made no more noise than the moccasins of a red Indian. Brent lay wondering if he had done the right thing. There was no reason why he should trust Shirkuh. But if he had done no good, at least he could not see that he had done any harm, either to himself, El Borak, or those interests menaced by the mysterious Black Tigers. He was a drowning man, clutching at straws. At last he went to sleep again, lulled by the delicious warmth of the cloak Shirkuh had thrown over him, and hoping that he would slip away in the night and ride to find Gordon--wherever he might be wandering.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was Shirkuh, however, who brought the American’s breakfast to him the next morning. Shirkuh made no sign either of friendship or enmity, beyond a gruff admonition to eat heartily, as he did not wish to buy a skinny slave. But that might have been for the benefit of the guard yawning and stretching nearby. Brent reflected that the cloak was sure evidence that Shirkuh had visited him in the night, but no one appeared to notice it.

  As he ate, grateful at least for the good food, Brent was torn between doubts and hopes. He swung between halfhearted trust and complete mistrust of the man. Kurds were bred in deception and cut their teeth on treachery. Why should that offer of help not have been a trick to curry favor with Muhammad ez Zahir? Yet Brent realized that if Muhammad had wished to learn the reason for his presence in the hills, the Afghan would have been more likely to resort to torture than an elaborate deception. Then Shirkuh, like all Kurds, must be avaricious, and that was Brent’s best chance. And if Shirkuh delivered the message, he must go further and help Brent to escape, in order to get his reward, for Brent, a slave in Rub el Harami, could not pay him thirty thousand rupees. One service necessitated the other, if Shirkuh hoped to profit by the deal. Then there was El Borak; if he got the message, he would learn of Brent’s plight, and he would hardly fail to aid a fellow Feringi in adversity. It all depended now on Shirkuh.

  Brent stared intently at the supple rider, etched against the sharp dawn. There was nothing of the Turanian or the Semite in Shirkuh’s features. In the Iranian highlands there must be many clans who kept their ancient Aryan lineage pure. Shirkuh, in European garments, and without that Oriental mustache, would pass unnoticed in any Western crowd, but for that primordial blaze in his restless black eyes. They reflected an untamable soul. How could he expect this barbarian to deal with him according to the standards of the Western world?

  They were pressing on before sunup, and their trail always led up now, higher and higher, through knife cuts in solid masses of towering sandstone, and along narrow paths that wound up and up interminably, until Brent was gasping again with the rarefied air of the high places. At high noon, when the wind was knife-edged with ice, and the sun was a splash of molten fire, they reached the Pass of Nadir Khan--a narrow cut winding tortuously for a mile between turrets of dull colored rock. A squat mud-and-stone tower stood in the mouth, occupied by ragged warriors squatting on their aerie like vultures. The troop halted until Muhammad ez Zahir was recognized. He vouched for the cavalcade, Shirkuh included, with a wave of his hand, and the rifles on the tower were lowered. Muhammad rode on into the pass, the others filing after him. Brent felt despairingly as if one prison door had already slammed behind him.

  They halted for the midday meal in the corridor of the pass, shaded from the sun and sheltered from the wind. Again Shirkuh brought food to Brent, without comment or objection from the Afghans. But when Brent tried to catch his eye, he avoided the American’s gaze.

  After they left the pass, the road pitched down in long curving sweeps, through successively lower mountains that ran away and away like gigantic stairsteps from the crest of the range. The trail grew plainer, more traveled, but night found them still among the hills.

  When Shirkuh brought food to Brent that night as usual, the American tried to engage him in conversation, under cover of casual talk for the benefit of the Afghan detailed to guard the American that night, who lolled nearby, bolting chupatties.

  “Is Rub el Harami a large city?” Brent asked.

  “I have never been there,” returned Shirkuh, rather shortly.

  “Is Abd el Khafid the ruler?” persisted Brent.

  “He is emir of Rub el
Harami,” said Shirkuh.

  “And prince of the Black Tigers,” spoke up the Afghan guard unexpectedly. He was in a garrulous mood, and he saw no reason for secrecy. One of his hearers would soon be a slave in Rub el Harami, the other, if accepted, a member of the clan.

  “I am myself a Black Tiger,” the guard boasted. “All in this troop are Black Tigers, and picked men. We are the lords of Rub el Harami.”

  “Then all in the city are not Black Tigers?” asked Brent.

  “All are thieves. Only thieves live in Rub el Harami. But not all are Black Tigers. But it is the headquarters of the clan, and the prince of the Black Tigers is always emir of Rub el Harami.”

  “Who ordered my capture?” inquired Brent. “Muhammad ez Zahir?”

  “Muhammad only does as he is ordered,” returned the guard. “None gives orders in Rub el Harami save Abd el Khafid. He is absolute lord save where the customs of the city are involved. Not even the prince of the Black Tigers can change the customs of Rub el Harami. It was a city of thieves before the days of Genghis Khan. What its name was first, none knows; the Arabs call it Rub el Harami, the Abode of Thieves, and the name has stuck.”