Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Alwa, as a soldier, knew exactly where fresh horses could be borrowed while his tired ones rested. A little way beyond the outskirts of the city lived a man who was neither Mohammedan nor Hindoo — a fearful man, who took no sides, but paid his taxes, carried on his business, and behaved — a Jew, who dealt in horses and in any other animal or thing that could be bought to show a profit.

  Alwa had an utterly complete contempt for Jews, as was right and proper in a Rangar of the blood. He had not met many of them, and those he had had borne away the memory of most outrageous insult gratuitously offered and rubbed home. But this particular Jew was a money-lender on occasion, and his rates had proved as reasonable as his acceptance of Alwa’s unwritten promise had been prompt. A man who holds his given word as sacred as did Alwa respects, in the teeth of custom or religion, the man who accepts that word; so, when the chance had offered, Alwa had done the Jew occasional favors and had won his gratitude. He now counted on the Jew for fresh horses.

  To reach him, he had to wade the Howrah River, less than a mile from where the burning ghats glowed dull crimson against the sky; the crowd around the ghats was the first intimation he received that the streets might prove less densely thronged than usual. It was the Jew, beard-scrabbling and fidgeting among his horses, who reminded him that when the full moon shone most of the populace, and most of Jaimihr’s and Howrah’s guards, would be occupied near Siva’s temple and the palace.

  He left his own horses, groomed again, and gorging their fill of good, clean grain in the Jew’s ramshackle stable place. Joanna he turned loose, to sneak into any rat-hole that she chose. Then, with their swords drawn — for if trouble came it would be certain to come suddenly — he and his nine made a wide-ringed circuit of the city, to a point where the main street passing Jaimihr’s palace ended in a rune of wind-piled desert sand. From the moment when they reached that point they did not waste a second; action trod on the heel of thought and thought flashed fast as summer lightning.

  They lit through the deserted street, troubling for speed, not silence; the few whom they passed had no time to determine who they were, and no one followed them. A few frightened night-wanderers ran at sight of them, hiding down side streets, but when they brought up at last outside Jaimihr’s palace-gate they had so far escaped recognition. And that meant that no one would carry word to Jaimihr or his men.

  It was death-dark outside the bronze-hinged double gate; only a dim lamp hung above from chains, to show how dark it was, and the moon — cut off by trees and houses on a bluff of rising ground — lent nothing to the gloom.

  “Open! The jaimihr-sahib comes!” shouted Alwa and one of his horsemen legged up close beside the gate.

  Some one moved inside, for his footsteps could be heard; whoever he was appeared to listen cautiously.

  “Open for the Jaimihr-sahib!” repeated Alwa.

  Evidently that was not the usual command, or otherwise the gates would have swung open on the instant. Instead, one gate moved inward by a fraction of a foot, and a pureed head peered cautiously between the gap. That, though, was sufficient. With a laugh, the man up closest drove his sword-hilt straight between the Hindoo’s eyes, driving his horse’s shoulder up against the gate; three others spurred and shoved beside him. Not thirty seconds later Alwa and his nine were striking hoof sparks on the stone of Jaimihr’s courtyard, and the gates — that could have easily withstood a hundred-man assault with battering-rams — had clanged behind them, bolted tight against their owner.

  “Where is the bear cage?” demanded Alwa. “It is a bear I need, not blood!”

  The dozen left inside to guard the palace had recovered quickly enough from their panic. They were lining up in the middle of the courtyard, ready to defend their honor, even if the palace should be lost. It was barely probable that Jaimihr’s temper would permit them the privilege of dying quickly should he come and find his palace looted; a Rangar’s sword seemed better, and they made ready to die hard.

  “Where’s Ali Partab?”

  There was no answer. The little crowd drew in, and one by one took up the fighting attitude that each man liked the best.

  “I say I did not come for blood! I came for Ali Partab! If I get him, unharmed, I ride away again; but otherwise—”

  “What otherwise?” asked the captain of the guard.

  “This palace burns!”

  There was a momentary consultation — no argument, but a quickly reached agreement.

  “He is here, unharmed,” declared the captain gruffly.

  “Bring him out!”

  “What proof have we that he is all you came for?”

  “My given word.”

  “But the Jaimihr-sahib—”

  “You also have my given word that unless I get Ali Partab this palace burns, with all that there is in it!”

  Distrustful still, the captain of the guard called out to a sweeper, skulking in the shadow by the stables to go and loose Ali Partab.

  “Send no sweepers to him!” ordered Alwa. “He has suffered indignity enough. Go thou!”

  The captain of the guard obeyed. Two minutes later Ali Partab stood before Alwa and saluted.

  “Sahib, my master’s thanks!”

  “They are accepted,” answered Alwa, with almost regal dignity. “Bring a lamp!” he ordered.

  One of the guard brought a hand-lantern, and by its light Alwa examined Ali Partab closely. He was filthy, and his clothing reeked of the disgusting confinement he had endured.

  “Give this man clothing fit for a man of mine!” commanded Alwa.

  “Sahib, there is none; perhaps the Jaimihr-sahib—”

  “I have ordered!”

  There was a movement among Alwa’s men — a concerted, horse-length-forward movement, made terrifying by the darkness — each man knew well enough that the men they were bullying could fight; success, should they have to force it at the sword-point, would depend largely on which side took the other by surprise.

  “It is done, sahib,” said the leader of the guard, and one man hurried off to execute the order. Ten minutes later — they were ten impatient minutes, during which the horses sensed the fever of anxiety and could be hardly made to stand — Ali Partab stood arrayed in clean, new khaki that fitted him reasonably well.

  “A sword, now!” demanded Alwa. “Thy sword! This man had a sword when he was taken! Give him thine, unless there is a better to be had.”

  There was nothing for it but obedience, for few things were more certain than that Alwa was not there to waste time asking for anything he would not fight for if refused. The guard held out his long sword, hilt first, and Ali Partab strapped it on.

  “I had three horses when they took me,” he asserted, “three good ones, sound and swift, belonging to my master.”

  “Then take three of Jaimihr’s!”

  It took ten minutes more for Ali Partab and two of Alwa’s men to search the stables and bring out the three best chargers of the twenty and more reserved for Jaimihr’s private use. They were wonders of horses, half-Arab and half-native-bred, clean-limbed and firm — worth more, each one of them, than all three of Mahommed Gunga’s put together.

  “Are they good enough?” demanded Alwa.

  “My master will be satisfied,” grinned Ali Partab.

  “Open the gate, then!” Alwa was peering through the blackness for a sight of firearms, but could see none. He guessed — and he was right — that the guard had taken full advantage of their master’s absence, and had been gambling in a corner while their rifles rested under cover somewhere else. For a second he hesitated, dallying with the notion of disarming the guard before he left, then decided that a fight was scarcely worth the risking now, and with ten good men behind him he wheeled and scooted through the wide-flung gates into outer gloom.

  He galloped none too fast, for his party was barely out of range before a ragged volley ripped from the palace-wall; one of his men, hampered and delayed by a led horse that was trying to break away from him,
was actually hit, and begged Alwa to ride back and burn the palace after all. He was grumbling still about the honor of a Rangar, when Alwa called a halt in the shelter of a deserted side street in order to question Ali Partab further.

  Ali Partab protested that he did not know what to say or think about the missionaries. He explained his orders and vowed that his honor held him there in Howrah until Miss McClean should consent to come away. He did not mention the father; he was a mere side issue — it was Alwa who asked after him.

  “A tick on the belly of an ox rides with the ox,” said Ali Partab.

  “Lead on, then, to the mission house,” commanded Alwa, and the ten-man troop proceeded to obey. They had reached the main street again, and were wheeling into it, when Joanna sprang from gutter darkness and intercepted them. She was all but ridden down before Ali Partab recognized her.

  “The mohurs, sahib!” she demanded. “Three golden mohurs!”

  “Ay, three!” said Ali Partab, giving her a hand and yanking her off the ground. She sprang across his horse’s rump behind him, and he seemed to have less compunction about personal defilement than the others had.

  “Is she thy wife or thy mother-in-law?” laughed Alwa.

  “Nay, sahib, but my creditor! The mother of confusion tells me that the Miss-sahib and her father are in Howrah’s palace!”

  They halted, all together in a cluster in the middle of the street — shut in by darkness — watched for all they knew, by a hundred enemies.

  “Of their own will or as prisoners?”

  “As prisoners, sahib.”

  “Back to the side street! Quickly! Jaimihr’ rat’s nest is one affair,” he muttered; “Howrah’ beehive is another!”

  CHAPTER XIX

  Now, secrets and things of the Councils of Kings

  Are deucid expensive to buy,

  For it wouldn’t look nice if a Councillor’s price

  Were anything other than high.

  Be advised, though, and note that the price they will quote

  Is less at each grade you go deeper,

  And — (Up on its toes it’s the Underworld knows!) —

  The cheapest of all is the Sweeper.

  JOANNA — when Alwa forgot about her and loosed her to run just where she chose — had sneaked, down alleys and over roof-tops, straight for the mission house. She found there nothing but a desultory guard and an impression, rather than the traces, of an empty cage. About two minutes of cautious questioning of neighbors satisfied her where the missionaries were; nothing short of death seemed able to deprive her of ability to flit like a black bat through the shadows, and the distance to Howrah’s palace was accomplished, by her usual bat’s entry route, in less time than a pony would have taken by the devious street. Before Alwa had thundered on Jaimihr’s gate Joanna had mingled in the crowd outside the palace and was shrewdly questioning again.

  She arrived too late to see McClean and his daughter seized; what she did hear was that they were prisoners, and that the Maharajah, Jaimihr, and the priests were all of them engaged in the secret ceremony whose beginning was a monthly spectacle but whose subsequent developments — supposed to be somewhere in the bowels of the earth — were known only to the men who held the key.

  Like a rat running in the wainscot holes, she tried to follow the procession; like everybody else, she knew the way it took from the palace gate, and — as few others were — she was aware of a scaling-place on the outer wall where a huge baobab drooped century-scarred branches nearly to the ground on either side. The sacred monkeys used that route and where they went Joanna could contrive to follow.

  It was another member of the sweeper caste, lurking in the darkness of an inner courtyard, who pointed out the bronze-barred door to her through which the treasure guardians had chanted on their way; it was he, too, who told her that Rosemary McClean and her father had been rushed into the palace through the main entrance. Also, he informed her that there was no way — positively no way practicable even for a monkey or a bird — of following further. He was a sweeper-intimate acquaintance of creeper ladders, trap-doors, gutters drains, and byways; she realized at once that there would be no wisdom in attempting to find within an hour what he had not discovered in a lifetime.

  So Joanna, her beady eyes glittering between the wrinkled folds of skin, slunk deeper in a shadow and began to think. She, the looker-on, had seen the whole play from its first beginning and could judge at least that part of it which had its bearing on her missionary masters. First, she knew what Jaimihr’s ambition was — every man in Howrah knew how he planned to seize Miss McClean when the moment should be propitious — and her Eastern wisdom warned her that Jaimihr, foiled, would stop at nothing to contrive vengeance. If he could not seize Miss McClean, he would be likely to use every means within his power to bring about her death and prevent another from making off with his prize. Jaimihr, then, was the most pressing danger.

  Second, as a Hindoo, she knew well how fiendishly the priests loathed the Christian missionaries; and it was common knowledge that the Maharajah was cross-hobbled by the priests. The Maharajah was a fearful man, and, unless the priests and Jaimihr threatened him with a show of combination, there was a slight chance that he might dread British vengeance too much to dare permit violence to the McCleans. Possibly he might hold out against the priests alone; but before an open alliance between Jaimihr and the priests he would surrender for his own throne’s sake.

  So far Joanna could reason readily enough, for there was a vast fund of wisdom stored beneath her wrinkled ugliness. But her Eastern limitation stopped her there. She could not hold loyalty to more than one cause, or to more than one offshoot of that cause, in the same shrewd head at once. She decided that at all costs Jaimihr must be out of the way so that the Maharaja might be left to argue with the priests alone. For the moment no other thought occurred to her.

  The means seemed ready to her hand. A peculiarity of the East, which is democratic in most ways under the veneer of swaggering autocracy, that servants of the very lowest caste may speak, and argue on occasion, with men who would shudder at the prospect of defilement from their touch. There was nothing in the least outrageous in the proposition that the sweeper, waiting in a corner for the procession to emerge again so that he might curl on his mat and sleep undisturbed when it had gone, should dare to approach Jaimihr and address him. He would run no small risk of being beaten by the guards; but, on the other hand, should he catch jaimihr’s ear and interest him, he would be safe.

  “Wouldst thou win Jaimihr’s favor?” asked Joanna, creeping up beside him, and whispering with all the suggestiveness she could assume.

  “Who would not? Who knows that within week he will not be ruler?”

  “True. I have a message for him. I must hurry back. Deliver it for me.”

  “What would be the nature of the message?”

  “This. His prisoner is gone. A raid has taken place. In his absence, while his men patrolled the city, certain Rangars broke into his palace — looted — and prepared to burn. Bid him hurry back with all the men he can collect.”

  “From whom is this message?”

  “From the captain of the guard.”

  “And I am to deliver it? Thou dodderest! Mother of a murrain, have I not trouble sufficient for one man? Who bears bad news to a prince, or to any but his enemy? I — with these two eyes — I saw what happened to the men who bore bad news to Howrah once. I — with this broom of mine — I helped clean up the mess. Deliver thine own message!”

  “Nay. Afterward I will say this — to the Jaimihr-sahib in person. There is one, I will tell him, a sweeper in the palace, who refused to bear tidings when the need was great.”

  “If his palace is burned and his wealth all ashes, who cares what Jaimihr hears?”

  “There is no glow yet in the sky,” said Joanna looking up. “The palace is not yet in flames; they loot still.”

  “What if it be not true?”

  “Will Jaimihr not be gl
ad?”

  “Glad to see me, the bearer of false news, impaled — or crushed beneath an elephant — ay — glad, indeed.”

  “The reward, were the Jaimihr-sahib warned in time, would be a great one.”

  “Then, why waitest thou not to have word with him. Art thou above rewards?”

  “Have no fear! He will know in good time who it was brought thee the news.”

  They argued for ten minutes, Joanna threatening and coaxing and promising rewards, until at last the man consented. It was the thought, thoroughly encouraged by Joanna, that the penalty for not speaking would be greater than the beating he might get for bearing evil news that at last convinced him; and it was not until she had won him over and assured herself that he would not fail that it dawned on Joanna just what an edged tool she was playing with. While getting rid of Jaimihr, she was endangering the liberty and life of Alwa — the one man able to do anything for the McCleans!

  That thought sent her scooting over housetops, diving down dark alleyways, racing, dodging, hiding, dashing on again, and brought her in the nick of time to a ditch, from whose shelter she sprang and seized the hand of Ali Partab. That incident, and her intimation that the missionaries were in Howrah’s palace, took Alwa back up the black, blind side street; and before he emerged from it he saw Jaimihr and his ten go thundering past, their eyes on the sky-line for a hint of conflagration, and their horses — belly-to-the-earth — racing as only fear, or enthusiasm, or grim desperation in their riders’ minds can make them race.

  A little later, in groups and scattered fours, and one by one, his heavy-breathing troopers followed, cursing the order that had sent them abroad with-out their horses, damning — as none but a dismounted cavalryman can damn — the earth’s unevenness, their swords, their luck, their priests, the night, their boots, and Jaimihr. Forewarned, Alwa held on down the pitch-dark side street, into whose steep-sided chasm the moon’s rays would not reach for an hour or two to come, and once again he led his party in a sweeping, wide-swung circle, loose-reined and swifter than the silent night wind — this time for Howrah’s palace. There was his given word, plighted to Mahommed Gunga, to redeem.