Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Then I stood in the doorway, not particularly nervous on account of rifles, since I argued they would hardly shoot a prisoner worth money if they could avoid it; but curious. Four of the men were playing a game with a wooden board and pebbles — a sort of prehistoric form of checkers. I sat down between two of them and looked on, remembering to bless them in the name of the Prophet of God, and they returned the blessing civilly enough, although one great hairy ruffian standing on the look-out near by slapped his rifle meaningly. I nodded to him and he seemed to accept that as a satisfactory promise of good conduct. His principal business seemed to be to watch the British aeroplanes and give warning if they should turn in our direction.

  One of the players asked me if I had any money to gamble with, but I was not fool enough to say yes. I always carry money. There were four five-hundred-rupee notes tucked away in a pocket inside my waistband, and I suspected Joan Angela of having more than that in some fairly safe hiding-place; but the sight of money would have acted like blood on wolves. However, the question gave me an idea, and there are better ways than bribery to win the friendship of a savage. Admire a horseman’s horse, a musician’s music, a politician’s politics, and he is your man.

  I singled out the strongest-looking of them and admired his muscle. He began to brag immediately and to show off, picking up a piece of wood about the thickness of an axe-handle. He brake it with a jerk. I entered into competition with him, breaking one of the pieces, which was more than twice as difficult. It made my head ache, but aroused the excited interest of all of them. The fellow came back at me with an offer to try hand-grips, elbows to the ground; so we lay down face to face, each with his right elbow on the rock, and gripped fingers; he chose a tricky grip that gave him an advantage, but I let him have it, and rapped his knuckles on the rock so sharply that he shouted, and they all laughed. He refused to try that a second time, so to put him in good temper I let him beat me at pulling against each other, foot to foot, and after that we were all on excellent terms. He told me his name was Akbar bin Mahommed.

  I asked him why they had been so glad to see the old hag kicked out from the hut, but instead of answering the question they all became suddenly interested in their rifles, and pretended to hear sounds among the rocks below that called for investigation; so when they had quit that foolishness I began to tell them stories, remembering how Grim was used to managing wild Arabs in that way. They became like children almost instantly, and one man turned his back so that I might rest my head against his while I talked. I told about magic I had witnessed in Benares, and about imaginary old women who could turn a man into a crow, the crow into an alligator, the alligator into a fish, and the fish into an insect, after which the insect could be trodden on and squashed by the first hoof that happened along — evolution vice versa, as it were. They voted that a splendid story, and began to brag about their own witches. The hag whom I had kicked so cavalierly turned out to be one of them.

  Her principal virtue, or demerit, according as a man employed her or became her victim, was that she could see in the dark what a man would do by daylight; and by mixing incantations with his food could prevent his doing this or that thing and oblige him to do something else. That, they said, was why Kangra Khan had sent her into the hut with us; and they added that now no doubt I would have to do as Kangra Khan wished. But they all claimed to have suffered under the old harridan in some way or another. She had made this man’s cow abortive, that man’s wife barren, and the other’s child had died of smallpox. One fellow vowed he had spent nine months in Peshawar gaol, all because, for spite, she had given him the wrong magic when he set forth to rob soldiers at the guard-post.

  “But she will bewitch your foot for having kicked her!” Akbar bin Mahommed added by way of afterthought. “And that is a pity, for the foot is a good strong man’s. Better kill her next time, lest a worse evil befall. By Allah, I myself would kill her if I dared; but my son is only two years old and at that age men die easily.”

  “Is she devoted to Kangra Khan?” I asked him.

  “Devoted to none but the devils! She supports him. None dares refuse to obey him for fear of her.”

  It seemed likely Kangra Khan would resent my having kicked the hag, if that was the state of local politics. I suggested something of the sort, but they all laughed.

  “Nay! He, too, is afraid of her. The next time she refuses him a request he will bring her back to thee to be kicked and choked! None of us dares wring her neck, but who cares whether she bewitches thee?”

  I asked where the British Lancers were, and with considerable glee they pointed out a sort of amphitheatre in the foot-hills about twenty miles away. After a while I made out an extended string of dots, like insects, and they told me those were the Lancers vainly searching in the wrong direction for Joan Angela and me.

  “And, by Allah, there will be some on this side who get boots and new weapons!” they added. “Kangra Khan has set an ambush.”

  I asked about Kangra Khan, and they all agreed he was a good strategist but a domineering fellow who could not brook rivalry or even argument.

  “He thinks that when he speaks his word is Allah’s, and the mullah must stand aside, praying backwards under his breath! In time of fighting Kangra Khan is best; in peace, the mullah; so we play the one against the other; but by the Prophet, on whom blessings, a man can hardly call his life his own in any event.”

  Presently a party of Lancers began scouting in our direction, and we could see the machine-gun ready to search out nooks and crannies so I was ordered back into the hut, whose roof I noticed then was hidden from above on three sides by an over-leaning crag and camouflaged by the rock’s shadow. It would probably be impossible for a flyer to see the hut at all until late afternoon. I stood in the doorway and watched the guard take cover as skillfully as if they had had a course in Flanders; then went in and took my turn on the sheepskins, while Joan Angela stood watch.

  They brought us meat and stolen rice at noon, with curry in it — pretty evil stuff. I cached a little of the rice in a handkerchief and went to sleep again, we taking turn and turn about until evening, when they brought us more food, this time bread of a sort made in the form of flat cakes like chupatties. I cached quite a lot of that.

  Then Kangra Khan came looking tired and none too well satisfied. He omitted the customary blessing as he filled the doorway and stood glaring in at us with his rifle slung behind his back.

  “You have a last chance now to pay the ransom,” he said angrily. “The mullah has paper and pen. Will you sign a letter for us to send?”

  Joan Angela laughed at him, which is not a wise course to take toward a chieftain in those savage hills.

  “No,” she said, “I’ve promised to attend your funeral.”

  CHAPTER 3. “Thou and I are birds who love the storm, Sahiba.”

  THE sun went down in an angry glare behind the hills at Kangra Khan’s back as he stood in the doorway muttering oaths into his beard. He did not choose to be laughed at by a woman. Nevertheless, he postponed reprisals, and the reason appeared presently.

  “See that!” he snarled, tossing an envelope to me. So, as it was dark inside the hut, I went to the door and walked out past him holding the letter toward the last red rays of sunshine. It was written in Persian.

  To Kangra Khan of the Orakzai (it ran), from Athelstan King.

  Take notice. This affair is between you and me. You have prisoners a woman and one of my friends. Their honor and their lives are in your keeping. If ill-treatment should be offered either of them then you and I will have a bone to pick and the jackals shall tell the answer to the night. Settle your own quarrel with the Raj, but look to me to hold you answerable for the proper treatment of my friends.

  I began to read the message aloud to Joan Angela, but Kangra Khan snatched it from my hand.

  “Mashallah! Does he think I am a wild beast?” he demanded. “Curse his impudence! Those Lancers have slain a dozen of my men this afternoon, and th
e fliers have finished off another score. Shall I not play tit-for-tat on you two?”

  I could have smashed him where he stood, for a well-aimed blow would have cracked his head against the doorpost, but there were too many men in the dark behind him to make that chance worth taking. Besides, it was decidedly unlikely he would kill such valuable prisoners as he calculated us to be.

  “He invites you to act like a gentleman,” I suggested.

  “Not he! He threatens me!”

  “He says it’s between you and him,” I retorted. “We’re only prisoners. You can’t drag us into it.”

  He seemed to see the force of that. A savage always is at a disadvantage when his sense of fairness is appealed to. It is only the civilised folk who hold ethics subject to convenience. I think what angered him was that King should have doubted his proper intentions.

  “Ye shall eat as I eat, sleep as I sleep, march as I march, suffer as I suffer,” he growled. “By Allah, ye shall pay the price I name or be forever prisoners!” He strode into the hut as if to seize Joan Angela, but was satisfied when she came backing out in front of him. “By Allah, who is Lord of all, now hear me! Ye have a hundred days. Pay me the money before the hundred days are up or I take this woman for a wife and shoot thee, Ramm-is-den. That will be my answer to Attleystan King!”

  He tore the letter into little bits in front of us and threw them to the winds, then turned and strode away, tossing an order back over his shoulder to the men who were clustered in a group between us and the edge of the rock on which the hut stood. They signed to us to follow him and closed in before and behind, so that we trod on the heels of the men in front and those behind crowded us. Escape would have been impossible, and after an hour’s hard traveling the chance grew even less, for we followed a track that wound in and out among crags and ravines with seldom more than room for two to go abreast, and often only room for single file. It was impossible to see into the ravines, for the cliffs above us cast a deep-black shadow, and only the snarling of Jhelum’s tributary streams among the boulders hinted now and then at what might be in store for anyone who stumbled.

  But Joan Angela was a long way yet from being ill-pleased with her lot. She was getting what she had come away from home for — excitement. Money had taught her that you can’t buy anything worth having except responsibility, and she was tired of expensive civilization — bored to rebellion against it. This was fun in her eyes; real risk; genuine adventure; thrilling. She began to sing until a man turned in his tracks and ordered her curtly to be silent.

  Joan Angela was going much the stronger of the two. A blow on the back of the head leaves effects that are not thrown off too easily. At the end of the second hour I began to feel dizzy and had to sit down for a rest at intervals, to the awful disgust of our escort and the alarm of Joan Angela.

  “The big bullock weakens soonest!” they quoted, sneering.

  “We’d better offer to pay up if you’re going to be sick,” Joan Angela argued. “I won’t have your life on my conscience.”

  It only made it worse, of course, to have to argue with her. What was worse still, Kangra Khan looking down from above overheard us and joined in.

  “Ye have but a hundred days to pay in any case!” he reminded us; and though I could not see him I could almost feel him grin. “One month for a letter to go to America. One month for the letter to return. A month for negotiations, and ten days to make the payment in! Be but one day late and the woman shall know what wifing means in a village of the Orakzai! Attleystan King may come then and make a feud for her; mayhap he will bury such bones of thine as the jackals haven’t cracked up, Ramm-is-den!”

  “Better pay,” said my friend Akbar bin Mahommed, with a hand on my shoulder. “Mashallah! It would be shame to see such a corpse as thine blistering in a nullah. Write thou the letter and go free when the money comes. Make a feud with him thereafter and I will join thee!”

  I thought that a mighty handsome offer and it put new heart in me. That was no time or place to write letters in; time enough to do that in the morning, if Joan Angela should then elect to yield. A man who offers friendship to a fellow in a tight place ranks ace high in my esteem, whatever his friendship may be actually worth. I struggled on again; and after a while we came to a circular cup in the hills where a group of stone huts surrounded a corral in which were three lean horses.

  There was argument. There always is in that land when anything whatever is to be done or left undone; but at the end of half an hour’s explosive blasphemy, in which the name of Allah mingled with pollution and the angels were summoned to witness the mess, two of the horses were finally “borrowed under duress” for Joan Angela and me, and the poor old skate that fell to my lot started on the worst, and last, adventure of his life.

  I overheard Kangra Khan saying he really took the horses, not on my account, but because the men we took them from would want them back, and therefore would be wary about giving information about our route to any British troops who might chance on our line of retreat. That sounded plausible, but it may have been only his method of keeping up a reputation with his men for iron-hearted craftiness. It served at any rate to inform me on two points. I bullied my sorry beast until I was knee to knee with Joan Angela.

  “Our host is afraid of pursuit, and not too popular hereabouts,” I told her. “Pathans are poor hands at sticking together. If there’s a dispute among themselves our chance to escape improves.”

  She nodded. “I won’t pay as long as your head holds out,” she answered. “But you and I are friends, Jeff, and you know me well enough to say so the minute you feel like it. If it weren’t for your injury I’d call it good fun.”

  Well, opinions differ as to what is fun. Now, looking back at it, I can see her point of view; but just then there was nothing except dislike for squealing (to apply no stronger term) that kept me from counseling surrender. I made up my mind to let things take their course until the next day, after which I would urge her to pay the ransom unless some obvious means of escape should present itself. You see, Joan Angela is not the type of young woman you can treat in any way except as an equal mentally and physically. She can endure as much as any man alive in the way of roughing it, and about the only kind of man who doesn’t find her splendid company is the kind who can’t or won’t forget the sex problem. To her mind it is no problem, anyhow, and if I had played the part of a heavy male protecting her against a world too dangerous for her sex she would have held it against me all my days. I would have lost a friend I value.

  Yet men who have seen her since, in evening dress at Simla and such places, have thought me a scoundrel for not compelling her, by force if necessary, to pay the ransom and have done with it. There is one man in particular whose talkative head I intend to punch as soon as I am well enough to leave this hospital.

  We rode interminably up and down a winding track that would have suited goats, I walking as often as not because my horse was too weak to negotiate the stiffer places with my weight on him. Once or twice, as if to prove the dissension among the Pathans that I suspected, there were shots fired near at hand; but whether at us or in pursuance of some regulation feud it was impossible to guess. We were making a prodigious noise, stumbling over the rocks and kicking loose stones that went echoing down into the gorges. Sound travels in those hills as if through speaking galleries, and a wakeful enemy might have heard us coming for miles away.

  The strange part was that although we saw the flash of a rifle frequently, and our men usually fired at the spot where the flash was seen, not a bullet sang near us. It was like a sham fight staged for the motion-pictures, and Kangra Khan led on and on, as if there were no fight at all.

  Then the moon rose, wan and silvery, veiled like a bride in a wreath of mist; and we came to a cliff shaped like Gibraltar. At the angle facing us the track divided, turning to right and left. Kangra Khan took the left hand, and we filed after him. Close behind me walked Akbar bin Mahommed, and there were two more men guardin
g our rear about fifty or a hundred yards behind — both busy at the moment with an enemy who yelled insults and fired wildly from between rocks practically out of range.

  The wan moonlight shone on that Gibraltar-shaped cliff, and it was impossible to pass it unseen. There was a distance of possibly two hundred yards along which the track that Kangra Khan had chosen wound like a glistening snake before it dipped into gloom again. It looked like sheer, stark suicide to follow that course under fire: the track was narrow; there were no caves, no boulders, no shelter; a man’s shape would be silhouetted against grey cliff. An owl swooped by, and bird and shadow were as clear as if they had been etched. The only element of safety was the deep, dark ravine on the left hand, which was so wide that an enemy under cover on the far side would have to sight carefully; but, even so, the range was not more than three hundred yards.

  However, Kangra Khan hurried forward, perhaps in haste to get the danger done with, and his men hurried at his heels at two or three yard intervals. Akbar bin Mahommed, close behind me, made no comment, and the firing in the rear ceased. Silence fell as if the air had suddenly refused to carry any sound except the snarling of a waterfall a mile away.

  “Wait a minute!” I said, and Joan Angela drew rein. We watched Kangra Khan and his men step forward into the pale light.

  “Allah! What now?” asked Akbar bin Mahommed.

  Suddenly a hurricane of rifle-firing spilt the silence, and for about a minute the ledge on the far side of the ravine was lit with spurting flame. There must have been fifty men pot-shotting out of ambush, and at one spot flashed powder enough to suggest a machine-gun. Bullets splashed against the glistening cliff, and whole sections of shale shuddered and slid downward. Yet Kangra Khan continued on his way, and not even his men seemed in any special hurry.