by Talbot Mundy
The moon glistened on their faces, and he smiled at her exactly as if she were a child.
“That Miyan there,” she went on, “can make magic. He says he has stuff hidden among the loads that will turn the mountains into money and make men’s teeth fall out. Kill him before he makes magic against you and me; then we will take his stuff and send Jmil Ras some food that has been treated with it. When that is done, we will turn Abu Kem into money and bribe the British to go away from Palestine Then we will kill all the Jews, and Saoud the Avenger shall be king in Jerusalem. I will poison his other wives, and I shall be a great queen.”
“Suppose instead of that we make the Miyan work for us?” he suggested kindly. “I don’t know how to use that magic stuff of his. Do you?”
“Give him the bastinado then! Make him obedient! He is much too impudent and independent for a Miyan!” she insisted. “That is because he knows magic perhaps. All magicians are proud. Besides,” he added, smiling again, “I never bastinado anyone in advance. What were you and he quarreling about?” “I told you. I want some of his magic.”
“What for?”
“To poison Jmil Ras.”
“Why?”
“I hate him!”
“What harm has he done you?”
“He has set himself up against my husband the Avenger,” she answered, but not very promptly; there was a distinct pause while she considered what answer to make, and Grim noticed it all right.
“They say Jmil Ras is rather young and handsome,” he answered. “They also say he has ability, and isn’t married. Now, if he were to overthrow the Avenger, he might consider marriage with the youngest and best-looking of the Avenger’s wives. Isn’t that so?”
“What of it?”
“I am wondering why you should hate him so much in the circumstances.”
“I hate him because he is more insolent than this Indian Miyan of yours!”
“You spoke with him, and he insulted you?”
“No. How should I speak with him?”
“You have seen him, though?”
“Yes.”
“Now let’s have that all over again. Jmil Ras is good-looking and unmarried. He is clever, and you say he has set himself up against the Avenger, who is sufficiently afraid of him to send for me. Have you ever sent Jmil Ras any messages?”
She did not answer.
“Has it ever occurred to you, Ayisha, that your position as the Avenger’s fourth wife is perhaps a little insecure?”
“It was you, Jimgrim, who arranged my marriage to him; you ought to know.”
“Let me see — I think you can’t write, can you?”
“No.”
“That makes it awkward, doesn’t it. People who have to send messages by word of mouth are sometimes at the mercy of the messenger, eh? The Avenger sent you to me, so I take it he doesn’t suspect yet that you’ve been communicating with Jmil Ras. But I suspect it!”
“You would suspect the Prophet of Al-Islam!” she retorted. “That may be,” he answered, smiling. “He was a great man, but I’m familiar with his history. He and Julius Caesar and Napoleon were all on the watch for opportunity. Now, I’m not blaming you, Ayisha, for I know some of the circumstances; but if you want me to help you as I did once before, hadn’t you better take me into your confidence?”
“That Miyan is listening.”
“He’s a magician. Perhaps he could find out what you know in any case. Better not run the risk of his using that magic of his. Didn’t you offer to help Jmil Ras if he would marry you?”
I expect the accuracy of Grim’s deduction seemed pretty much like magic to her. Add to that the fact that he had helped her once before in dire extremity — his almost tender friendliness — the comfort of being held in the arms of a man with such a name as Jimgrim had earned for keeping other people’s confidences — then moonlight, and the whole romantic scene — and it would have been a wonder if she hadn’t ‘fessed up.
“It was Ibrahim ben Ah,” she admitted suddenly, rushing the story now, to get it over and done with.
“The old warrior who commanded the camel-corps of Ali Higg of Petra?”
“Yes. He deserted to the Avenger, but wasn’t treated with sufficient dignity, so he deserted again to Jmil Ras. Before he went away he talked with me. Wallahi! It was his fault. He swore he would make Jmil Ras a great one, and that if I would persuade the Avenger’s men to desert to Jmil Ras, he, Ibrahim ben Ah, would guarantee on his honor that I should be the first wife of Jmil Ras when the time came. So I agreed. But Jmil Ras sent me word by the mouth of a wife of one of his men that he would have nothing to do with any such arrangement — may Allah change his face!”
“And had you already persuaded any of the Avenger’s men to desert?”
“No. I had had no opportunity. Jmil Ras had the impudence to tell that woman to tell me to mind my own business! May Allah turn him into worms! I will teach him to despise me!”
Grim glanced in my direction.
“Does he sound like an Arab to you?” he asked.
“Or an Australian?” said I.
“What is an Australian?” Ayisha demanded.
“A member of a strangely free and independent, brave and disrespectful sect,” Grim answered, smiling pleasantly.
CHAPTER VIII. “Miyan, you are a great magician!”
THAT dawn we bivouacked in a fiumara, which, as I think I have explained before, is a formation peculiar to that country — part valley; part dry river-bed — a roaring torrent for a few days in the year, and all the rest of the time a waste of sand and boulders with a muddy water-hole or two at distant intervals. They wander across the land snake-fashion, roughly east and west, and what with the banks being high in places, so that men and camels can lie hidden, and the all-important water, they play no inconsiderable part in tribal warfare, which is endemic and deadly.
The water-holes being so scarce, the places where they are known to be are almost like a crossroads, and the hoof and human footprints give an erroneous suggestion of incessant traffic on a large scale. But traffic is actually scarce, no man being fool enough to travel except at the spur of need, since whatever superior force catches sight of a smaller one will certainly pursue and plunder, if not murder.
But being by that time near the indefinite boundary line of the ruling chief whom we were visiting by invitation, we pitched the little tents in an elbow of the fiumara near a water-hole without much anxiety, taking no more precaution than to post one man on either bank as soon as we had eaten breakfast, or supper, whichever you like to call the meal after a night march. And I’m fairly well convinced that both men fell asleep within five minutes, although they managed it sitting upright.
Grim went to sleep serenely in his tent, after putting Narayan Singh in charge, who was to make over in turn to me at the end of four hours; and it was the Sikh’s military instinct that saved us from ridicule, if nothing worse, and enabled us to turn the tables on fortune.
Within the length of a furlong there the fiumara curved exactly like the figure S, but there were so many bleached white boulders just above the spot where we pitched that the bed was impracticable, and anyone using the course for a road would be obliged to climb out and make a detour, unless he cared to risk breaking a camel’s legs.
I don’t think Narayan Singh heard anything. He was just so trained in military ways, and so suspicious of new ground that he couldn’t keep still. He came and shook me awake at the end of fifteen minutes instead of four hours, and instead of swearing at him, as I had indubitable right to do, based on inviolable custom, I sat up and laughed at the chorus of snores rising up to heaven from our bivouac like the music of a sawmill.
Grim, in the tent next mine, was snoring as loud as anyone; and the camels fifty yards away were making a weird row of their own; for, having only one more march ahead of us, we had fed them the remaining corn, and I suppose they thought they were singing songs. You never heard such a trombone-voiced menagerie.
When I had done laughing and had lit a cigaret, my friend the Sikh saw fit to explain himself.
“Even hogs need watching, sahib! Look at them! Some lie belly-upward, others belly-down, but it is all one whether a knife strikes before or behind. The hog dies when his blood flows.”
“I’ve heard you snore a time or two!” I answered.
“That is as maybe. Did you hear our Jimgrim put me in charge of this nightmare for four hours?”
“I did. The job’s yours. I’m not stealing it!”
“You heard, eh? Then you admit that my honor is involved? Well and good. Come and help me scout for a stone-throw or two.”
“Why? Are you afraid of ghosts?” I asked him.
“Neither of us two are men to whom fear should be lightly imputed,” he answered. “But call me an old woman if you will. Only come and scout with me. I have an intuition.”
Well, I believe in intuitions. I have had them. I believe that if a man can only school himself to follow intuition and not be turned aside by second thoughts or other folks’ opinions, he will be as safe in all circumstances as a dollar in. the U.S. Treasury. I put up no further argument, but rose with a yawn and followed him. Now I would have taken to the high bank, being naturally lazy and averse to scrambling over rough rocks when a shorter, smoother trail will serve. But the Sikh led straight on up the winding fiumara, and, when we reached the roughest maze of boulders, added difficulty on to inconvenience by warning me to make no noise. For all my size and weight I can go quietly when I choose, having learned that lesson painfully when stalking game for the pot in many hot lands. And a Sikh, of course, can make less noise than a shadow, as the Germans discovered in Flanders. We could have been seen from above quite easily, but not from in front, for we kept cover behind the stones as we advanced; and I think few animals, and no man not deliberately laying for us, would have heard a sound. The whole performance smacked more and more of the ridiculous to me, as we crawled around the turns and peered, and saw nothing but jumbled up white rocks. But Narayan Singh was set on his self-appointed task like a cheetah that winds black buck, and he never paused for more than a second or two to make sure. Most men can learn to scout slowly, but that fellow can go unseen over rough ground nearly as fast as a man walks on the level, and keeping up with him was no joke. We came within ten yards of a small panther and surprized him out of his sleep, which may give some idea of how much noise we made.
But nothing whatever happened, except that the panther spat at us and hesitated for a moment whether to show fight or run, until we reached the last bend of the figure S and could see nearly straight ahead up the bed of the fiumara for maybe half a mile. Then Narayan Singh, who was about two lengths ahead of me, suddenly lay quite flat, and whispered.
“Kabadar!” [“Take care!”]
I crawled up beside him, and he didn’t know I was there until he turned to look. Nobody ever gave me a medal for anything, so I don’t know what it feels like to be kissed on both cheeks on parade; but the smile of a good scout’s approval that he flashed at me was worth more than the stock certificate I bought with my first savings, and by the way subsequently burned as worthless. Now of course, we have all met folk who say there is nothing in intuition. They will argue about it endlessly; and, funnily enough, they are always the same ones who maintain that an animal has instinct and can’t think. Fortunately, in spite of all the modern means for clubbing, coaxing, perverting, and trapping us until we are willing to admit that black is white — or if not that it ought to be — there is still a remnant of the sweet old theory that each of us may have his own opinion without being slandered or imprisoned for it; and it suits my disposition to go down, if I must, with that ship firing all bow guns, I say that intuition is worth more than immediate evidence. I have proved it repeatedly to my own satisfaction, and I don’t care a damn what the prophets of all dreary science say.
* * * * *
THERE was nothing whatever in sight when we reached the end of that rock-pile and lay staring up the bed of the fiumara, nothing, I mean, from which a dogmatist could have deduced the neighborhood of danger. If I had wanted to, I might have laughed at Narayan Singh, or have called him to account for robbing me of the sleep I was entitled to.
But my intuition took the form of trusting his, and although a score of birds were going about their normal business, some wild pigs were rooting unconcernedly a hundred yards ahead, and even our friend the panther stopped to lick a paw and look back at us; I was satisfied, without reasoning at all about it, to lie there and watch.
We lay for fifteen or twenty minutes without speaking or moving, while the flies made breakfast off us, and the first reward of patience reached us from the rear. Ayisha could walk like a cat when she chose, but — equally cat and tigresslike — could make plenty of noise when she thought she wasn’t watched. A tiger going through the jungle, unless hunting, makes more noise than a buffalo. Knowing that she had escaped from the bivouac unseen, she was taking no further precautions, and we were aware of her clambering over the rock-pile from behind long before she had a chance of seeing us. It was a simple matter then to drop down between boulders and hide ourselves completely.
She followed the left-hand side of the fiumara, where most of the rocks were not so difficult to negotiate. She seemed in no hurry, and didn’t carry her rifle, which I took for proof that she intended to return to the bivouac after accomplishing her present mission; it seemed likely, too, that she was on her way to meet a friend or she would certainly have brought her weapon.
A little to the front of us on our left hand, on top of the bank of the fiumara, stood a dead thorn-tree, so blasted by age and hot wind that very little of it was left except the twisted trunk and one long branch sticking upward at an angle. However, there was another, shorter branch that apparently had fallen a long time ago from higher up and got caught in the big one, for it lay nearly parallel along it. I wouldn’t have noticed the tree and its branches particularly if Ayisha hadn’t glanced up at it more than once, as if she expected to keep her assignation there.
But, seeing she did look up at it with obvious interest, I studied the tree carefully through a crack under the bellies of two boulders. The only peculiarity except its age and withered branches was a filthy old rag, once white, that was tied and twisted to the upper end of the short branch that lay along the other.
And that wasn’t so very peculiar. It is customary in that part of the world when a man is buried to tie rags and similar personal souvenirs to the nearest place to which they can be attached. If the dead man was something of a saint, or in other ways important, his grave becomes in course of time a fluttering jumble of odds and ends. Murder being the usual thing, such graves are everywhere; so a soiled rag in a tree wasn’t anything to speculate about. However, Ayisha climbed the bank and went to the tree, but said no prayers, as she probably would have done if keeping tryst with a dead friend. Instead, she illustrated one of the soundest rules of scouting, which is that if you want to signal unobserved, it is better to remove an object that has been standing all along in clear view than to set up a new one. It applies with equal force to hunting. Animals as well as humans are so constituted that they notice new things much more readily than they miss the old. She didn’t wave the rag, but simply laid the branch on the ground and climbed back into the fiumara, where she sat down within thirty feet of us, with her back against a rock, so as to be unseen from the direction of our bivouac but visible at once to anyone coming toward us down the straight.
I could not see that the signal was answered in any way, but at the end of about five minutes thirty men on camels rounded the bend a furlong in front of us and came straight on, led by a fine looking, slim fellow, whom I presently recognized as the Avenger’s brother.
We had only met him once, when Grim checkmated the Avenger in the affair with Ali Higg at Abu Lissan; but he rode with a rather rare alertness and hair-trigger way of glancing to right and left that were unmistakable when consider
ed along with his gorgeously striped cloak and the red and green and gold bands on his head-dress.
He did not pay Ayisha any too much deference, and he and his men made their camels kneel and settled down comfortably in the shade of the high bank before any of them noticed her. Then one of the men called to her to approach; but the Avenger’s brother countermanded that, and when he had drunk his fill from one of the goat-skin water-bags he crossed over to where she sat. She remained seated, and he stood throughout the interview. There was no formal greeting of any kind, and as both of them dropped their voices low it was extremely difficult to catch what was said at a distance of thirty paces. I decided to take the risk of crawling closer, hoping that any sound I might make would be mistaken for that of some small animal. It was easy enough to manage without being seen, because of the way the stones were heaped on one another.
Seeing my intention, Narayan Singh made a gesture with his head in the direction of the bivouac, and started at once to crawl back and waken Grim. It didn’t need two of us to listen, but teamwork like that calls for something more than heathenism. I have heard Sikhs described as heathens, and have known folk who so describe them, who would have horned in — out of curiosity — to listen, leaving events to take care of themselves.
“I found Jimgrim,” I heard Ayisha say, “and he had received the Avenger’s message. He was on his way to answer the summons. But he has those thieves with him, and two Indian magicians, and the thieves have magic for Jmil Ras hidden in the camel-loads. If Jmil Ras ever gets that magic there will be no hope for the Avenger.”
“Where is Jimgrim?” he demanded after a moment’s pause, during which he may or may not have been reviewing with alarm the tribal tales of witchcraft and devilry. I could not see his face.
“He sleeps nearby — just down the fiumara behind me.”
“How many men has he?”
“Nineteen; but he himself is as good as nineteen more,” she answered.
