Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  * * * * *

  The Sikh carried Suliman, who promptly fell asleep with his head hanging downward over the stalwart shoulder like a dead sheep’s, swinging in time to the stride.

  “That kid’s a nuisance,” Catesby commented. “However, I suppose he can’t be expected to wake up and walk in this sand, and we can’t leave him. I’ll carry him turn about with you.”

  “Nay, sahib, it is nothing. Let him sleep. In the morning when he wakes he may serve a purpose.”

  But full rations ever since Jim had rescued him from starving in the Jaffa Gate had filled out the boy’s stocky frame, and it was no easy matter to carry him for mile after mile across that loose desert land. Even when they came to cultivation the going was still heavy, and Catesby took his turn, wondering after five minutes of it at the Sikh’s endurance.

  They had to put the boy down, and wake him, and make him walk when they neared the railway because, being in Arab costume, they were certain to be fired at unless they took cover and watched their chance. Finally, after slinking for half an hour among long shadows, they crawled through a culvert and emerged on the far side without being challenged, although two Gurkas on patrol passed within ten yards of where they hid.

  Within three hundred paces of them, then, was a cluster of ruined buildings, shot to pieces in the war and never since rebuilt, but patched here and there as if someone had tried to make them habitable. In the moonlight, they looked like a medieval castle with its upper story gone, for part of what might have been the keep reared jagged and broken above the rest.

  “What is that place, sahib?” asked Narayan Singh.

  “Nothing much. It used to be an Arab village with a mosque in the middle. Our guns shelled it, and most of it was burned. That tower you see is all that’s left of the minaret. Nobody uses the place now.”

  “Hah!”

  The Sikh’s one monosyllable suggested a world of reservations rather than assent.

  “That place’ll be full of lice and bedbugs,” Catesby warned.

  “Aye, and these days the peace have made us fat, sahib. They will have good feasting! The top of that broken tower is the place from which to watch.”

  “Come on, then. Let’s get bitten.”

  But it was not easy to reach the buildings without risking being seen by sentries on patrol, and they had to crawl under cover of a ridge of sandy earth that held more thorns and insects to the square yard than a brush has bristles. Then a pariah dog smelled them and yelped to the pack, and for five minutes they were the center of abominable noise.

  They did not dare shoot, any more than the curs dared come close enough to be killed with a stick. Throwing lumps of dirt and sticks only increased the yelping; and there weren’t any stones. But finally another pariah yelped in the distance and the pack raced off to fight him for his find.

  After that it was an easy matter to approach the ruined mosque, but quite another task to climb the tower. The cluttered village street was all in shadow, but the moon shone full on the mosque wall, showing it all in ruins with the broken tower beside it, erect and unclimbable.

  The place was of typical Arab “culture” — jumbled, tumbled, cluttered, evil-smelling, verminous; war had only multiplied the normal chaos. That minaret had been the only decent building, and it remained the only thing worth anybody’s trouble.

  There was one little slit of a window visible almost directly facing the moon. It looked faintly luminous.

  “D’you suppose there’s glass in it?” asked Catesby. “Does that look like reflected light to you?”

  Narayan Singh scouted closed to investigate. The window was much too high to reach, but he climbed on a broken wall to reach its level and returned at the end of ten minutes, stopping on his way to examine the ground close to the door. A slash of while across the blackness of his beard betrayed that he was pleased with the result.

  “I heard no sound, sahib; but there is no glass, and there is a light within. Moreover, I found this.”

  He put a scarab ring into Catesby’s hand.

  “Jimgrim sahib’s!” cried the Sikh.

  “How d’you know? They’re common enough. It might be anyone’s.”

  “Ask the butcha.”

  Suliman examined it and grew exited at once.

  “Taib! That is Jimgrim’s. I have cleaned it for him fifty times.”

  “I suppose they’ve killed him.”

  Catesby had been too much of late under the brigadier’s harrow to be an optimist.

  “Nay, sahib. More likely he dropped it there for me to find. If they had killed him we should have found his naked body in the cave or thereabouts. If they had looted the ring and dropped it when they reached this place, they would have missed it and have looked. It lay in full moonlight on the flat side of a broken stone against the wall.”

  “Then I go,” said Suliman, “to break that door down with this kukri.”

  “Ahsti, ahsti!” said the Sikh. “What is your judgment, sahib?”

  * * * * *

  Catesby was in high spirits again.

  It took a Jenkins to depress him, and not much more than a symptom of encouragement to set him up.

  “No sense in rushing things. If he’s dead, he’s dead. If he’s alive in there we’ll get him. Is there another door?”

  “None, sahib. I saw all around the place.”

  “Then we’ll watch this one until morning, and creep up close enough to hear if anything happens. Look about for a beam to have handy in case we should want to burst the door in.”

  Together they pulled a roof-beam out from a mess of fallen thatch, and laid it where they could find it in the dark that would shut down when the moonlight waned. Then Narayan Singh crept close to the door and listened. He was grinning again when he returned.

  “He is in there, and alive. I heard his voice. I could not hear the words. He seemed to be close to the door and to be carrying on a conversation. Shall I go back and rap on the door softly as a signal?”

  “No. It might be the signal for his death. How many voices did you hear?”

  “One other.”

  “He’d be sure to yell if they tried to murder him. In that case, down with the door. But if we go to his rescue before he needs us we might spoil his game.”

  “Atcha, sahib,” said the Sikh; but he examined both pistols again and plainly did not like the inactivity.

  It relieved his anxiety a little, however, when Catesby chose a black hole to hide in among the tumbled ruins of the mosque within twenty paces of the minaret door.

  * * * * *

  Nobody who has not tried it, out hunting or in war, can guess how hard it is to listen attentively and scratch himself at the same time. Suliman, who not so many months ago had been clothed in little else than paupers’ lice and had hardly had time to forget the indifference that goes with it, suffered least. Perhaps, too, his carcass was less appetizing.

  But the Sikh is a clean race, prone to look down on even the tubbed and scrubbed British officer as none too particular. And that heap of ruins was alive with myriads of body-insects, “whose seed is in themselves” and that exist apparently eternally on nothing until warm-blooded provender arrives.

  Yet they did not dare move away. The moon was too low in the sky, and whoever had brought Jim to that place would likely to make a move of some kind before morning, or at least soon after sunrise. If this were a rendezvous of thieves, whoever approached it would likely do some careful scouting in advance. There was nothing for it by to lie still and scratch — and swear — and scratch.

  The Sikh’s ears were sharpest, and once he swore he heard the voice of a man begging for mercy.

  “Maybe Jimgrim has a man down?” ventured Suliman.

  But the other two grew nervous, and this time it was Catesby who crawled to the door to listen while Narayan Singh watched the coast. Catesby, too, distinguished the voices of two men, or thought he did; but the door was too thick for him to hear one word or establish Jim’s iden
tity. He crept back again into hiding in that divided frame of mind from which small comfort ever comes, wondering what he would think of himself should it turn out afterward that Jim had been all along in peril of his life — already dead perhaps; yet recalling Jim’s words earlier that night, that it would be better to wait for a week than spoil things by a false move.

  When dawn came, what with insects and indecision they were thoroughly miserable, stiff, sore, hungry and depressed by the zero-hour self- consciousness that sheds the drear light of cold unreason on every circumstance. Suliman, who had been blubbering, fell asleep again.

  Catesby’s thoughts were back on Jenkins and the hopelessness of clearing himself of a false charge in view of the brigadier’s notorious ability to lie plausibly. Narayan Singh was squatting with eyes half-closed, dreaming in another language and another dimension, for that matter; not even the Sikhs can tell each other what thoughts reach them when the far-away look settles on their faces.

  None of them saw the morning visitors arrive until the twelfth and last of them came abreast and the first one struck the door with cautious knuckles. They were ordinary-looking fellaheen — villagers, that is — and each man carried some ordinary-looking load or other — baskets, mats, bags, a patchwork quilt.

  The last man led a donkey — one of those bruised and tortured little insects that make less noise than a ghost and eat endless Arab blows and insult in return for overwork. None of the men had a weapon as far as it was possible to see; for lack of the customary thick club the last man used his fist on the donkey’s nose as a hint that it was time to stand still.

  The leading man knocked half a dozen times; then the door opened and they all filed in, but from where the watchers lay it was not possible to see who opened it. The donkey went in too, and the lock squealed again behind her.

  There followed further agonies of indecision and impatience; for, weapons or no weapons, there is no limit at all to the senseless cruelty of which the fellaheen are capable. Like their prototypes of Egypt the Palestinians have such a heritage of oppression to look back on that their actions are simply a matter of mood.

  They smolder, as it were, in childlike harmlessness for periods whose probably duration no psychologist can guess; and burst out into senseless, superstitious fury without any apparent cause. Fear they understand always; fair treatment never, having no education in it. Jim would be about as safe in their hands as among sheep or wolves, whichever mood was uppermost.

  It was probably intuition that held Catesby’s hand. Narayan Singh was all for action — for storming the door and holding up the crowd within at pistol- point, his one obsession being that order given him half-jokingly by Colonel Goodenough to bring Jim back to Jerusalem alive. He snarled between his teeth at Catesby, urging force, and laughing. It is a bad sign when a Sikh does that.

  “Hold your tongue,” Catesby ordered him.

  Having to control the other did him good. He realized almost for the first time how the court martial hanging over his head had lowered his own opinion of himself to a degree that the Sikh’s more subtly receptive mind had found contagious. He braced himself deliberately.

  Hitherto he had almost unconsciously admitted to the rule that, being technically under arrest, he was technically void of the right to command. Now he fell back on the racial issue. Right or wrong, the white man has his place above the black, and above all the grades of color whether ebony or yellow, Aryan, Mongol or Ethiopian.

  Narayan Singh recognized the change. The world being what it is, a product of history, improving only gradually, men still like leaders; and the braver and more self-disciplined the man the less he appreciates a leader in whose face he may sneer with impunity.

  There was absolutely nothing menial about Narayan Singh; he was a high- chinned man, who would polish his officer’s boots for pride in the well-groomed officer. But the officer good enough to have his harness cleaned by him and lead him must know his own mind. He would rather be told to hold his tongue by a mistaken strong man than be allowed his own way by a weakling. If it were not so, there would be no leaders and no led.

  Having made up his mind to await the event and shoulder the full responsibility, Catesby scratched himself philosophically. He was no longer a victim, nor could the fact that he was lousy lower his self-respect. Whatever he had done rightly hitherto that night was due to intuition and old habits of thinking that survive under imposed disgrace, making it impossible for a true man to become untrue, or a leader incapable of leading, except gradually, step by step.

  Now it was as if a cloud of depression vanished. He did thenceforward what he consciously chose to do, captain of his own soul and master of his destiny. Even Suliman, waking drowsily, sensed the difference.

  They did not wait very long. The door opened again and the donkey came forth first, loaded so heavily that it could barely stagger and showing its teeth because of the biting tightness of the cords that kept the load in place.

  Over it all like a Joseph’s coat of many colors they had tied the patchwork quilt, knotting it under the animal’s belly; the suggestion that conveyed, whether it was intentional or not — you can’t ever gage the fellaheen’s simplicity or artfulness — was that they were honest villagers removing their household goods. Only a very suspicious observer would have balked at their having no women with them to carry the heaviest burdens.

  The men filed out one by one after the donkey, each with a heavier load than he took in with him, but using what he had brought to cover or contain what he had come for — sacks — baskets — mats and an old tarpaulin knotted by the corners and carried between two men. The only remarkable difference was that whereas twelve men had entered, thirteen now came out, and there remained at least one inside to lock the door after them.

  The thirteenth man looked cleaner than the rest, and carried no bundle. Also his right wrist was raw and seemed painful; and when he rubbed it with the other hand a bright red weal became visible on the left wrist too.

  Suddenly Suliman leaped to his feet. Catesby clapped a hand on his mouth and dragged him down again only in the nick of time.

  “Keep quiet, you little — !” he whispered. “Yes, I know it’s Jimgrim.”

  He knew exactly what to do now; needed no advice or urging from Narayan Singh. He waiting only until he could speak without risk of the twelve men hearing him. There was not the slightest need to hurry. He let them go a hundred yards and disappear beyond the ruined village wall before he gave an order. Then:

  “Narayan Singh, you wait here and watch the door. If anyone comes out, arrest him. If anyone else goes in, all right; wait and watch. But in that case don’t let anyone out on any terms; drive ’em back with your pistol; shoot if you must, but hold ’em in there somehow until help comes. If nothing happens don’t show yourself. Do you understand?”

  “Malum, sahib.”

  “Now Suliman — how long is it since you begged? Have you forgotten? Off with your boots — socks too — leave ’em here. You’re dirty enough, Lord knows. Better leave your head-gear too. Tear your pants a bit; you’re too well cared for to look plausible. Now some more dust in your hair. You’ll do.

  “Follow now, and beg from Jimgrim. Don’t look back at me, and don’t take no for an answer. If they turn and beat you, stick to them. Pretend you’re so hungry that you don’t mind being hurt. Cut along.”

  He lifted the youngster out of the dark hole and pitched him on to his feet outside. A moment later he followed as far as the gap in the wall. From that point he could watch what happened without any risk of being seen.

  * * * * *

  The missionaries and police know best what perfectly consummate actors Arab children are. Their elders have grown set in the accepted ways, so that a grown man or woman seldom varies from a given method; usually the people of one village thieve and lie to a pattern, and are all at sea when anyone gets acquainted with their habit.

  But the children are less conservative, until the years bring on
that eastern intellectual inertia that is partly due to Koran teaching and partly to polygamy. Suliman had lost none of his natural alertness yet, and he had not been long enough in Jim’s control to lose delight in mischief for the sake of lawlessness.

  So he accepted that part perfectly. Running until he was breathless — fingering the sweat into the corners of his eyes until it looked like tears — plucking grass as he ran, to chew and make the corners of his mouth filthy with green slime, he overtook the procession and begged alms in the name of Allah.

  Nor did he go to Jim first, but singled out the owner of the donkey; for the beggar’s principle is to flatter with first attention whoever had most in view of this world’s goods, thus sometimes stirring a ridiculous unconscious sense of rivalry. Human nature is absurd stuff, or the beggars would all be at work producing.

  Clearly those twelve men were in no mood to be generous. They cursed the boy as he approached them one by one; and when he would not go, but clung to them like one of those persistent Palestinian flies, bleating his parrot-cry of hunger with the same indifference to “imshi!” (“Clear out!”) that the flies show to an angry hand, they picked up clods to heave at him. But he dodged those, cursed the throwers as a matter or etiquette, and came back with the same persistence.

  If the thirteenth man recognized him he gave no sign of it; and Suliman seemed to consider him not worth an effort, judging him with the beggar’s rule in mind as a maskin (poor man) because he walked last. It would have been an insult to the rest and rank bad form, clods notwithstanding, to have begged from him before giving the men ahead first chance to show their quality.

  So when he did at last approach Jim and cling to the skirt of his abyi nobody suspected old acquaintance. Jim told him gruffly to “imshi,” like the rest of them, although one corner of his mouth quivered slightly in the faint beginnings of a smile. He might as well have tried to “imshi” the weather. Suliman clung on, and begged like an old hand at the game. The East believes in importunity and sets as high a value on reiteration as do the advertisers of the West.