by Talbot Mundy
“That’s one of Ali’s seven sons,” said King, so Grim cried out, and the man came, swaggering between the sheets and breaking down a few as his elbows came in contact with the string, leaving a chattering rage in his wake that pleased him beyond measure. Nor was it one of the sons at all, but Ali of Sikunderam himself.
“Where is the Portuguese?” King asked him.
“My sons have him in view. I don’t know just now where he is.”
“Where are they?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. They were to report here one by one, as each watched him for a distance and then turned him over to another.”
“And none has returned.”
“No, none yet.”
“What have you been doing?”
“By Allah! Quarreling with Hindus. If you sahibs had not come there is one who might have found his manhood presently and made sport—”
“Have you watched da Gama’s room?” demanded King.
“Nay, why should I? Who should watch a bat’s nest! I have held the roof, where my sons may find me.”
“Then you don’t know who, or how many men went to the Portuguese’s room?” Ramsden asked him.
“Ask the Prophet! How should I know! You heard me say I kept roof,” he retorted. He had a notion that Ramsden was a subordinate who might be snubbed, because he said less than the others.
“Are your sons as wide-awake as you are?” Ramsden asked; and Jeremy, seeing his friend’s fist, drew deductions; he whistled softly and stood aside.
“My sons are—”
“The Seven Sleepers!” Jeff suggested, finishing the sentence for him; which was cartel and defiance in the raw code of Sikunderam, although Ramsden hardly knew that yet.
He learned it then. Ali whipped his knife out and sprang, being due some education too.
The knife went whinnying through the air and pierced a sheet, where it knocked a Hindu lantern out and was recovered presently. Before a hand could interfere or a word restrain them Ali and Ramsden were at grips. The hairy Northerner within the space of ten grunts lost his footing and began to know the feel of helplessness; for Ramsden’s strength is as prodigious as his calmness in emergency.
As easily as he had wrenched the knife away Jeff whirled the Afghan off his feet and shook him, the way a terrier shakes a rat, making his teeth rattle and a couple of hidden knives, some cartridges and a little money go scattering along the roof — shook him until all the kick was out of him — shook him until his backbone ached and even his desperate fingers, weakening, ceased from clawing for a hold.
Then, holding him with one hand by the throat so that he gurgled, Jeff set him on his feet, reserving his other fist for such necessity as might arise.
“This had to come,” he said. “Now — you know English — are we friends or enemies?”
He let go with a laugh and shoved Ali back on to his heels, ready to grip again if the other should choose enmity.
“By Allah! Wait until my sons learn this!” gasped Ali, rubbing the throat under his beard where Jeff’s thumb had inserted itself.
“I will lick them two at a time when their turn comes. Now’s your turn. What’s your answer?”
Ali looked in vain for a hint of sympathy. The others stood back, giving the man of their own race full opportunity. There was nothing for Ali ben Ali to do but capitulate or fight. He did not stomach either course contentedly.
“If I say friend you will think I am a coward,” he retorted.
“If you say enemy, I will know you are a fool!” said Ramsden, laughing; and that was additional cause for offense, for whatever you do you must not laugh when you speak of weighty issues with Sikunderam.
“You laugh at me? By—”
Ramsden realized his error in the nick of time. Sikunderam would submit to being thrown off the roof rather than be laughed at.
“I jested with the thought that you could be a fool,” Jeff answered.
It was lame, but it just limped. It gave the Northerner his chance to back down gracefully.
“By Allah, I am friend or enemy! Nothing by halves with me!” said Ali. “I am not afraid of life or death, so take your choice!”
“No, your choice,” Jeff answered.
“Mine? Well, I have enemies and by Allah a friend is as scarce as an honest woman! Let these be witnesses. I call you friend!”
“Shake hands,” said Ramsden, and Ali shook, a little warily because of the strength of the grip he had felt.
“You have the best of the bargain,” he said, striving to grin, not finding it too easy, for he passed in his own land for a man who brooked no insult. “You are one man and I eight, for I have seven sons!”
“If they’re included,” answered Jeff, “that saves my thrashing them!”
“They are included, for the sake of thy great thews,” said Ali. “Now they are yours as well as mine. Your honor is theirs, and theirs yours. We become nine!”
“Nine again!” laughed Jeremy. “If anyone were superstitious — !”
Jeff thought of a superstition, and of Ali’s knife that had gone slithering through the sheet and smashed a lamp. The Northern knife is more than weapon. It is emblem, sacrificial tool, insignia of manhood, keeper of the faith, in one. Jeff set out to find the knife and give it back, doing the handsome thing rather more effectively because of clumsiness.
Seizing a handful of the Hindu’s. slit sheet, he tore the whole thing down, disclosing two inquisitively angry women and a man. The man was stout, and could not speak for indignation, but was not so bereft of his senses that he did not know the value of a silver-inlaid Khyber knife.
Jeff threw the sheet over the women, solving that part of the problem with accustomed common sense, and solved the other with his toe, inserting it under the indignant Hindu, who was exactly wide enough of beam to hover the whole weapon under him diagonally as he sat still with his legs crossed. Jeff seized the long knife, picked up a corner of the bobbing sheet, pushed the Hindu under it to join his women-folk, and offered the knife to Ali, hilt-first.
“Thou art my brother!” exclaimed Ali, minded to grow eloquent. Emotion urged him to express his fundamental creed, and the easiest thing in the world that minute would have been to start him slitting Hindu throats. “Together thou and I will beard the Nine Unknown!” he boasted. “We nine will show the rest the way! By Allah—”
He was working himself up to prodigies of boasting, to be followed certainly by equally prodigious feats, for that is how swashbuckling propagates itself; and no mistake is greater than to think swashbuckling is unimportant; the world’s red history has been written with its sword- points.
“Thou and I—”
But there came interruption. One of his sons arrived, striding like a Hillman up the stairs and touching nothing with his garments, as a cat can go through undergrowth. A young man, with his beard not more than quilling out.
“Now we shall know!” said Ali, and King took the youngster’s elbow, swinging him into the midst, where he stood self-consciously.
“Where is the Portuguese?” King asked him. “The Portuguese?”
Ali of Sikunderam, magnificently posing, scratched his beard and grew increasingly aware of anti-climax as the meaning of the question was explained. The youngest of the seven sons with his spurs to win and no more than a murder yet to his credit seemed to be lagging behind opportunity — forgot — was stupid.
“Oh! Ah! Yes. That little yellow man — him with the little black beard and the black coat — da Gama — him you mean? How should I know where he is? Oh yes, I followed him a little way. But there were others, who left this roost with him, carrying books and rolls and things like that. One beckoned me and ordered me to carry books. Hah! He was a Hindu by the look of him, a man in a yellow smock. Having received my answer, which was a good one, he acknowledged his mistake and paid me a compliment. He said he had not understood. He had been told that porters and dependable guards would come, and had mistaken me for a porter. He
asked my forgiveness, standing in mid-street with his arms full of musty books — what sort of books? Allah! How should I know! Not a Koran among them, you may be sure of that! — I wasn’t interested in his books — He said that men would soon come from a house in the next street, who would seek to kill him, so would I go to that house — he described it to me, and an evil place it is — and obstruct the men who came out, quarreling if need be? Well — that was a man’s work, and I went. I have just come from there.”
“What of da Gama? What happened? Did you see the Portuguese?”
The questions came like pistol-shots in several languages — English, Punjabi, Pushtu, Hindustanee.
“No. I don’t know what became of the Portuguese. There was a woman there — inside. I followed her in. Men came later, and I hamstrung one of them! When I can find my brothers we will all go to that house, and there will be happenings!”
There was nothing to be said. Not even Ali spoke a word. The youngster went rambling on, inventing things he might have said and deeds he might have done if he had thought of them at the time, until it slowly dawned on him that there was something lacking of enthusiasm in his audience. Ali did not even trust himself to utter a rebuke, and none else cared to. The vibrations of bitter disappointment — if that is what they are — made themselves felt at last, and the young man backed away, explaining — to himself — to the night at large:
“How should I have known? The man said he would carry books, and would I do the dangerous work? Am I a coward? How could I refuse him? And besides—”
There came two others of the seven — older men — hard breathing, breaking out in sweat, and anxious for news of Abdullah the youngest. They had seen nothing of the Portuguese at all. In accordance with a plan — a “perfect” plan as they explained it — they had waited in the appointed shadows to see the Portuguese go by. There were only six streets he could take, and they had watched each one, leaving the youngest to tag along behind the Portuguese and act as communicating link. Whichever way the Portuguese should take, the brother whom he passed would follow; and Abdullah, the youngest, would run to inform the others. The plan was perfect. The Prophet himself could not have devised a better one.
But Abdullah had not come. And another man had come, who said Abdullah was lying belly-upward of a knife-thrust in another street. So. They went to see, Suliman first finding Ahmed, so as to have company and help in case of a brawl. Not finding Abdullah they had come back.
“There is Abdullah,” remarked Ali dryly. “Beat him!”
Which they did. Like the immortal Six Hundred at Balaclava, theirs not to reason why. They beat him to the scandal of a whole community that bivouacked on one roof, and rival roofs with no such violence to entertain them cat-called comment to and fro, casting aspersions on the house and good name of Fernandez de Mendoza de Sousa Diomed Braganza, who could not endure that in silence, naturally. He came up on the roof to investigate.
Running into King and cannoning into Grim off Ramsden, Diomed recognized the strangers who had invaded his hotel, paying money for unprofitable answers, and undoubtedly not sent by the police. That was enough. The stranger is the man to turn on, because the crowd is sure to back you up. Besides, he had their hundred rupees, which probably exhausted that source of revenue — and the dry cow to the butcher, every time!
Striking an attitude that would have cheapened Hector on the walls of Troy with his straight black hair abristle like a parokeet’s crest, Diomed Braganza called on the “honorable guests of his hotel” to “come and throw robbers off the roof,” — a dangerous summons on a hot night in a land where passion lies about skin deep and nearly all folk have a bone to pick with Providence.
There had been enough North country horse-play, and enough meek tolerance for once. The women’s voices chattered like a hennery aroused at night, and the men responded, from instinct and emotion, which combine into the swiftness and the fury of a typhoon.
“I am your servant! I have tried to make you comfortable! These ruffians are too many for me!” shouted Diomed. “Come and help me, noblemen — my guests!”
They came with a rush, the nearest hesitating under cover of the flapping sheets until they saw and felt pressure behind them and the dam went down, not in a tide of courage but of anger with the racial rage on top, which is the swiftest of all, and the fiercest.
That was no time to argue. Ramsden took Diomed by thigh and shoulder, raised him overhead, and hurled him screaming and kicking into the thick of the assault, to create a diversion if the half-breed had it in him. And he hadn’t! He had shot his bolt and served his minute. Three or four went down under his impact, but the rest ignored him as the spate screams past an obstacle. And there were knives — clubs — things thrown. Over and through and under all the noise there was a penetrating voice that prodded at the seat of anger:
“They are spies! They are government agents! Bande Materam !” [*]
Ramsden held the stairhead for the others to back down one by one, King dragging Ali ben Ali by wrist and neck to keep him from using his Khyber knife that according to his own account of it had leaped from the sheath unbidden. (Ali was not the first, at that, to blame his true reactions on to untrue circumstance.) And even so, King only held him as you hold a hound in leash, until the moment — which occurred when Grim and Jeremy fell backward down the stairs together, struck by a bed hurled at random; wooden frame and loose, complaining springs that whirred like the devil in action. King dodged to avoid the thing, and Ali cut loose to uphold the testy honor of Sikunderam.
So there was a scrimmage for a minute at the stairhead that beat football, Grim and Jeremy returning, forcing their way upward to stand with their friends, and the others all in one another’s way as each insisted on retreating last and all except Ali helped to plug the narrow exit. They had Ali’s sons in the midst of them, for precaution, but that arrangement did not last long. Ali’s Khyber knife was whickering and working in the dark a stride or two ahead, and someone reached Ali with a long stick, drawing blood. Ali yelled — not a call for help exactly, yet the same thing, “Akbar! Allaho akbar !” the challenging, unanswerable battle-yell of Islam, naming two truths, one implied — that “God is great” and that the witness of it means to die there fighting.
Might as well have tried to hold a typhoon then as Ali’s three sons. There was one who had been beaten, with his pride, all raw, aspiring to be comforted in anybody’s blood. He broke first, but the other two were only a fraction of a second after him, and there was a fight joined in the dark a dozen feet ahead, where men hurled broken lanterns, bed-legs, copper cooking-pots, friend hitting friend — where a fool with a whistling chain lashed right and left — and answering the “Akbar! Akbar! Allaho akbar !” of Sikunderam there rose and fell the “Bande Materam !” of someone prodding Sikh and Hindu passion.
“Hail motherland!” You can stir the lees of almost any crowd with that cry. Thought of retreat had to go to the winds as King, Grim, Ramsden and Jeremy hurled themselves into the fray to disentangle Ali and his illegitimates, if possible — as all things, of course, are possible to men whose guts are in the right place.
Possible, but not so easy! It was dark, for one thing; all the lamps were smashed that had not been extinguished by the women, and Ali had deliberately struck to kill at least a dozen times, using the quick, upturning thrust that lets a victim’s bowels out. There was blood in quantity that made the foot slip on the roof and, though it was impossible to see how many he had hit — and his own count of a hundred was ridiculous — there was no doubt of the rage for retaliation. The men in front were yelling to the men behind for light and longer weapons, and three or four came running with a pole like a phalanx-spear, while shouts from below announced that some had fallen off the roof.
Another shout, worse, wilder, turned that shambles into panic in which women fought men with their long pins for a footing on the stair.
“Fire!” And the acrid, stringing smell of it before the cry h
ad died away and left one man — Grim — aware that he who had started the “Bande Materam “ and he who had cried “Fire!” were the same! It was the note of cynicism — the mechanical, methodical, exactly timed note — the note of near-contemptuous understanding that informed Grin.
Not that information did him any good, just then. There was a rush of panic-stricken brutes, plunging deathward in the lust for mere life, screaming, stripping, scrambling, striking, tearing at the clothing of the ranks ahead; and the half-inch iron pipe that did for stairhead railing went down like a straw before it, so that men, women, children poured into the opening like meat into a hopper and there jammed, filling the jaws of death too fast! Others leaped on top of that, hoping to unplug the opening by impact, or perhaps beyond hope, crazed. There wasn’t anything to do that could be done. No seven men in all the earth could tame that rush — not even Ramsden, who fought like old Horatius on the bridge across the Tiber, and was borne hack on his heels until he swayed above the street and saved himself by a side leap along the low parapet.
Then the smoke came, billowing upward all around the roof, and a scream arose from the people jammed in the stairhead — song of a charnel-house! — hymn of the worst death! — and an obbligato made of crackling. Then the smell, as human flesh took fire, worse even than the Screaming and the roar of flames!
Through all that ran a bellowing — incessant — everlastingly repeated — on another note than the mob-yell from the street and the brazen gong of the arriving firemen — penetrating through the scream and the increasing crash of timbers — giving a direction through the choking smoke as a fog-horn does at sea.
“Jimgrim! Oh, J-i-m-g-r-i-m! Oh, J-i-m-g-r-i-m! It is I — Narayan Singh! Come this way, J-i-m-g-r-i-m!”
Over and over again, unvarying, on one note, nasal, recognizable at last as bellowed through the brass horn of a phonograph — the summons of a sane man in a sea of fear!
Grim gathered the others. There was light now and a man could see, for the flames had burst the roof. Thirty or forty more of Diomed Braganza’s guests swooped this and that way in a herd like mercury on a tipping plate, and one cried that the bellowing through the trumpet was the voice of God! That was the end, of course. Fatalism multiplied itself with fear and they leaped, hand-in-hand some of them, some dead before they reached the street and others killing those they fell on. Sixty feet from coping down to pavement — plenty for the Providence that governs such things!
