by Talbot Mundy
Lord! and weren’t we tired then. I dare wager that not one man of all those Bedouins, nor even any of our seventeen beaver-active thieves, had ever worked half as hard; no, not if you added all the work they had ever done, and set the total against that one performance. Grim and Ayisha did the whip-work; Grim smiling, and seeming to be everywhere at once; Ayisha cursing, coaxing, laughing, laying on the stick — and they stood it from her, Heaven knows why! They didn’t know of her divorce, and that meant something; they may have reckoned they must square accounts with Ali Higg if they struck back at her, and none of them got a close enough view of Grim in the dark to realize that he wasn’t the Lion of Petra. But there was more than that. She radiated and screamed courage; the spirit was infectious.
When the job was done, we spread and lit the bonfires. And if the Avenger, watching from his roof in Abu Lissan, hadn’t believed that there was an army camped against him then, he would have had less imagination than a piece of protoplasm in the radiolarian ooze. Some of the men were told off to keep moving in the firelight; and, seeing the general theory of the thing now readily enough, they danced and sang. It was pretty easy to imagine the Avenger’s feelings; adding to the anxiety of having to face what he supposed was a force of at least a thousand men, there was the natural disgust at seeing all that good store of wood go up in flame. And, of course, the more they danced around the fires, the more depressed he must have felt.
So far, good. A confident team is half the game; and a dejected opponent is a good proportion of the other half. But we had to be quick; for as surely as dawn should come the Avenger wouldn’t have to exercise his talents much in order to discover the deception. Grim called a midnight council under the stars, consisting of himself, Ayisha, Ibrahim ben Ah, Ali Baba, Narayan Singh and me; and he commenced proceedings by breaking his usual rule of not unfolding more than half of a plan at any time. There wasn’t anything to complain about on that occasion as far as frankness was concerned, although the plan would have suited Huckleberry Finn better than a man of my temperament. I like to be at hand-grips with the details of a thing. If it’s to be a gamble, I prefer to see the cards dealt, as it were; and I’m constitutionally averse to any game in which there is a joker running wild. The joker was Ali Higg, the Lion of Petra. None of us could even guess what he was doing.
However, I was the only member of the party who did not view the whole plan with enthusiasm; and having made up my mind not long before to back Grim to the limit, at least until such time as he should be proven to have lost his flair, I kept my opinion to myself.
Ibrahim ben Ah surprised us all with his oath-embellished praise of the scheme. So much depended on him that I suppose Grim would have had to change the plan in toto if the old pirate had been half-hearted. But he foresaw the opportunity of making a great name for himself as diplomatic peace-maker; and I think, too, that he wasn’t without secret suspicion that circumstances might possibly develop in such fashion as would leave him standing in the Lion of Petra’s shoes.
But nobody was half as enthusiastic as Ayisha. The names she called Grim would have made old King Nebuchadnezzar jealous. They made Ali Baba grunt contemptuously:
“Wallahi! I say that a woman’s flattery and the voice of the devil are one!”
At that, chiefly for the sake of drawing Ali Baba, Narayan Singh came out with one of his ponderous jests: “The woman’s tongue tells no more than the triumph in her heart. Was she not alone and wretched? And is she not now loved to distraction by a Pathan of the Orakzai?” He struck his chest as if it were a war-drum, and Ayisha almost spat at him. I think she would have done, if Grim had not been between them.
“Should I stoop to a pig-Pathan,” she sneered, “with a prince waiting for me?” And she flashed her eyes at Grim in a way that made me almost as uneasy as Ali Baba was. What had Grim promised her? He was not the kind of man to break a promise. I didn’t like the look of it, or of the triumph in her eyes. Neither did Grim’s enigmatic smile look reassuring, as he sat there silhouetted against the crimson of the nearest fire.
However, it was time to be up and doing, and the three of us whose task was to carry the first strategical assault examined our weapons and found our camels. Five minutes later, somewhere about one o’clock of a perfect, starry night, Ibrahim ben Ah, Narayan Singh and I rode out from behind the lines of fires and headed straight for Abu Lissan, with Grim’s last words resounding in our ears in Arabic:
“Peace ride with you! Remember our old friend Ali Baba’s motto: ‘Allah makes all things easy!’ Allah ysallmak! Tammu fi hiraset Allah!”
CHAPTER X. “Wallah! And you say she has a following of fifty men?”
The easiest thing in the world is to affect to look down on savages. We all do it. I’ve traveled, and looked and listened; but I’ve never found the savage yet who didn’t mock at someone, whose emotions he considered more primitive than his own. I never got beyond the firework stage myself, and I’m free to admit that the sight of those bonfires in a wide horseshoe curve thrilled me more thoroughly than any row of old masters that I ever gaped at in a picture-gallery.
Cultural standards are arbitrary anyhow, and mostly poppycock. A stark naked aristocrat, who had nineteen wives and no misgivings up in the Nandi Hills beyond Kapsabit, once told me that I was an obvious Philistine, because I blew my nose on a handkerchief. Ever since then I have chosen my own standard and gone forward under it; and I maintain — in the teeth of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Turner, and all the host who have amused themselves with paint — that what we had staged that night was Art. It was better than theirs, and there was more of it.
It was so good to look at, blazing irregularly up and down the outline of the hills, and in a straight, low string of crimson and orange splashes across the plain, that you couldn’t feel afraid — even though we were quite likely riding to our deaths. It was gorgeous; it was full of color; it made the shadows dance; it suggested the titanic shapes of those raw hills. And it was ours; we ourselves had done it. Even if another fellow had collected the material, it was we who spread that glowing paint.
Lord! How those fires did wink and dance behind us as we rode for Abu Lissan. I don’t see how any man who wasn’t a genius at divination could have guessed our force at as little as a thousand men. Knowing as I did how few we really were, I drew comfort from the sight of all those fires, and felt as if an actual army corps of friends was bivouacked in the hills. Far away over to our right there glowed a minor constellation, where Ayisha’s outpost kept vigil, and if that didn’t represent another thousand men at least, I don’t see how anyone in Abu Lissan was to know it. But there was this to consider: the more afraid our fires had made the Avenger and his men, the greater the danger to us in approaching. Men in a panic fire wildly at the slightest sound. Nor could we afford the time to creep up cautiously to the ruined walls and announce ourselves as white-flag bearers from some safe hiding-place among the shadows. Grim had made no secret of the fact that we were taking a horribly long chance.
But I suppose our time hadn’t come yet. Fortune favored us. Ibrahim ben Ah was, of course, a nominal fatalist by religion, and an opportunist by conviction and habit. I’m both or neither, I don’t know which; except that, as I’ve said, “I’ve observed” that fortune favors the right side as a rule. Narayan Singh is a soldier, which is not a profession but a creed, whoever maintains the contrary; his viewpoint was peculiar to the sub-denomination that he follows:
“Many a man has stumbled on good fortune in the dark simply because he dared go forward. It is only they who wait for chances to whom chances never come.”
Three points of view being superior to one, apparently, we rode together into a perfect trap that proved to be our salvation.
The Avenger, scared though he was, had retained a modicum of common sense. We discovered afterwards that he had tried to rally a skirmishing force that should unmask whatever might lurk behind those fires, but his men had threatened to mutiny at the first suggestion of it. So he
had had to content himself with minor precautions, and had managed to persuade a few score men that for the sake of their own skins it would be wise to go out on picket duty in the shadow of some sand-hills half a mile beyond the walls.
They were so appalled by our illuminations that they huddled all together in one dark spot. And they kept so quiet for fear of calling attention to themselves, that we never even suspected their presence, or we could very easily have given them a wide berth. As it was, they saw us, counted us, and held their fire, because bullets in the dark have a way of killing camel instead of rider. Camels taken alive are profitable loot; dead ones are only carrion. Dead men more often than not leave blood-feuds to be fought or settled with their relations; whereas living prisoners may be held to ransom (besides which, you can cut their throats at any time).
So we were swooped on suddenly in the utter darkness of a gap between two mounds, dragged from our camels, and would have been disarmed, if Ibrahim ben Ah hadn’t found his tongue and the voice of authority. Age has its recompenses, even in the dark. They respected his age where they might have gagged and bound Narayan Singh and me; and once he had a hearing experience made him convincing.
He called them sons of sixty dogs, of course. You begin most victorious arguments with that in Arabic. Then he cursed their mothers, wives, daughters and female relatives in general for several generations either way, before beginning on their fathers, brothers, uncles, sons and probable descendants — whom he pitied, because Allah wouldn’t. He then called down a murrain on their cattle, and a desecration on their grandsires’ graves, which he hoped would be used by imported sows as nests for raising families.
He was going on to tell them what would happen to their livers, hearts and kidneys in the world to come, when they implored him to desist, and asked him to explain what he was doing, and what he wanted.
So he assured them they were fools and heretics, without good sense in this world or any decent prospects in the world to come.
“Who but a son of a pig and a snake would dream of pulling me from a camel?” he stormed at them. “Who but the offspring of asses and thorns would suspect three men in such a place, riding straight forward, as possible enemies? Are ye the Avenger’s men? Wallahi, he is well served! What will he say when he learns that his invited guest has been put to this indignity by the sons of his dung-hill-builders in the dark under his very walls?”
They were impressed, but still suspicious. They asked him for further information, and he gave it:
“Ye shall be crucified to the last man! Ye shall be flayed and beaten! Ye shall be cast to the kites, without a grave between the lot of you for the jackals to come and desecrate! Who am I? By Allah! Take me to the Avenger, and ask him who I am! Hear what he says, ye sons of promiscuous mothers!”
Whatever his generalship in the field, he knew those ropes all right. They gave him back his camel, and us ours as a natural corollary. They apologized. They begged a blessing from him to offset the curses he had showered so liberally. They promised him protection as far as the Avenger’s door, and implored him to say a kind word for them to their tyrannical master.
Neither Narayan Singh or I said one word during the whole interlude, which I dare say cost us ten valuable minutes, but introduced us without further trouble to the Avenger’s front door. They gave us a guard of a dozen men, who rode before us shouting to the watchers on the walls to hold their fire; and the only opposition we encountered entering Abu Lissan was the snarling of about a hundred scavenger dogs that made enough noise to deafen you.
Ibrahim ben Ah was so careful to ride first, and so short with me when I called out to ask whether he had been hurt in any way when they dragged him from his camel, that I began to suspect him of contemplating treachery. We were going to be hard put to it in that case to find a way of putting through Grim’s plan, to say nothing of the individual risk to Narayan Singh and me. But it was too late then to stop and catechize him, and we rode in through a dark hole that might have been a gap in a wall, or a gate, or the mouth of hell itself, for all you could see of it. There were men on guard there, for we could hear them; and your nose informed you that the dogs hadn’t attended to the sanitation any too efficiently. A backward glance at those reassuring fires of ours was the only comfort to be had.
There wasn’t any reason that looked substantial just then why Ibrahim ben Ah should even regard as treachery the betrayal of Narayan Singh and me. True, he had eaten salt with Grim, not under duress, before witnesses, and likely had too high an opinion of himself to overlook that. But Narayan Singh and I were in different case. We had submitted him to violence, deprived him of his liberty, and — although we had been at pains to save his face for him before his own men — we hadn’t spared his private feelings much on that occasion. He had eaten no salt with us two — an omission for which I felt inclined to blame Grim in the circumstances.
People who attach such high importance to the ceremony are always splitters of fine hairs when it comes to interpreting the spirit of agreements. He might easily consider it within his privilege to denounce us, while going through the farce of loyalty to Grim.
So I did a thing I have often done in advance of awkward situations. I put my pistol out of sight. If Ibrahim ben Ah intended treachery, then I also had a right to my intentions. If any effort should be made to disarm me, I proposed to hand over my rifle, bandolier and knife without any argument. Thereafter, whatever else might happen subsequently, Ibrahim ben Ah was going to get one nickel-coated bullet through the brain.
I would have liked to caution him, as a matter of fair play. But as that would have called his attention to the fact that I had hidden the pistol, it was out of the question. Besides, it was wholly up to him. He was in no kind of danger from me as long as he behaved himself.
I got a chance to whisper to Narayan Singh as we rode through the stinking, narrow streets; but there wasn’t much that I could teach that man about taking care of himself. He had already hidden his revolver.
“If I am to die in this ill-smelling hole, the Avenger and some of his men will journey with me into the beyond, in addition to Ibrahim ben Ah!” he answered.
We halted in front of a stout wooden door set deep in a solid wall; and evidently word had gone ahead of us, for we were admitted without a moment’s delay, and were led up two flights of rickety stairs to a flat roof. The men who had brought us wanted to come, too, but were driven down from the roof by three of the Avenger’s staff with a storm of mixed invective and reproaches.
The Avenger, armed to the teeth, was sitting near the centre of the roof on a big chest covered with a rug. There was a lantern on a chair nearby that showed his features clearly, and the first thing that struck me about him was that he was handsome, and not ill-natured.
The scar, of which Ali Higg had boasted as having spoiled his face, was there, but not nearly so prominent as I expected. Perhaps three inches long, it crossed his right cheek as far as the nose; and though the cartilage of his nose seemed to have been severed, he had either had good luck or else the services of a skillful surgeon, for it had healed pretty neatly.
For the rest, he was a dark-bearded man of middle height, with dark, lustrous eyes and splendid shoulders, who sat upright, with no apparent tendency to take things easy. He had a carved silver cigarette-box on the rug beside him, but no water-pipe; and though his dress was of fine material, there was no display of jewelry — no effeminacy. His hands were strong and well-shaped, moving deliberately without unnecessary twitching of the fingers.
“Salamun alaik!” said Abrahim ben Ah bowing, very dignified.
He murmured something in reply, and asked why we had brought our weapons.
‘‘Who should take them from us? I am Ibrahim ben Ah, commander of the camel-corps of Ali Higg, the Lion of Petra.”
“Do you come in peace?”
“I come under the rules of warfare, relying on your honor’s honor. I come as a friend, if may be; but if my words find no approval,
I shall ask permission to return as I came, unmolested.”
The Avenger bowed his head slightly.
“Be seated. No, not in front of me; sit this way. There, now tell me what that means.”
He did not point; in fact, he made no unnecessary gestures. He nodded in the direction of our bonfires in the distance, and I decided that I liked him; there was something fine and manly about his bearing and whole attitude. The members of his staff were watching us from the stair-head with fingers on their triggers; but after that first question about our weapons the Avenger himself never referred to them again, nor acted as if he was aware of them.
“Who laid those fires?” he demanded.
“The Lion of Petra’s men,” said Ibrahim ben Ah.
“How many men has he, then?”
“By Allah, I haven’t counted.”
“He has received a reinforcement?”
“Behold! Surely a reinforcement!”
“Whence?”
“God give your honor long life. I am not allowed to say.”
“Malaish. From El-Kerak, I suppose, or possibly El-Maan. What have you come for?”
“Inshallah, to talk peace.”
“Peace? Why peace, with such an army at your back? Peace is it, or treachery?”
“Your honor has favored me more than once with overtures by messenger. Your honor invited me to cross over with all my men and take service under you.”
“You propose to do that?”
“God forbid! I have eaten the Lion’s salt. Nevertheless, I am not your honor’s enemy. It was fitting in the circumstances that I should carry offers of peace.”
The Avenger glanced once, swiftly, at Narayan Singh and me.
“Why do you bring Indians with you?” he demanded. That was Ibrahim ben Ah’s opportunity, if he had any idea in his head of squaring personal accounts with us two. We were simply there to keep an eye on him. A polite request to have us tossed off the roof would most likely be complied with, after which he would still be in position to go through with Grim’s plan. As for explanations afterwards, who was likely to make much fuss about the lives of a couple of Indians?
