by Talbot Mundy
“Perhaps you need help to deal with those miscreants?” Grim suggested. “One friend should help another, and where there are miscreants there is no peace. I pray you, let me lend a hand.” “Nay! Your honor’s life is too important to be risked in such a little matter. Rather come down into the fiumara, and—”
The smile left the face of the Avenger’s brother suddenly. But he acted well. He kept his chin high, and his gaze at Grim did not falter for a second. Our men, stepping forward all in line, had reached the fiumara’s edge, and stood staring solemnly down at the three and the camels. Their rifles were cocked, but that is as normal in the desert as the old-time pirate custom of firing a shotted salute to another pirate ship.
There was no more than a hint yet, although a broad one, of reprisals in kind, but the Avenger’s brother and his two men were nervous, and kept their hands off their own weapons with an obvious effort. They were absolutely at Grim’s mercy, camels and all, but Grim offered no explanation, not even suggesting by a smile or gesture what the outcome was to be.
Grim is past master at that game of keeping silent until the other man commits himself; he plays his tune on the strings of human character, choosing carefully; for, as I have heard him say, there is always one string you can tune the others by. It was the Avenger’s brother’s turn to speak, and almost anything he might say — he being a chivalrous and honorable man according to his lights — was going to be a chord that Grim could use; and as a matter of fact he plucked the simplest string of all.
“Is it peace?” he asked, using Grim’s formula.
“That is for you to say,” Grim answered, looking rather stern, and wholly noncommittal. “It seems to me, I find you unprotected.”
“True. I claim your protection, Jimgrim!”
Grim saluted him in the graceful, lordly desert fashion, head bent and hand to forehead.
“These are my men,” he answered. “Their goods are my goods; their weapons my weapons; their honor my honor. Let it be their honor to protect both thee and me.”
Ali Baba is a wise old fox, quicker than most professional thieves to understand fine points of honor, and totally different from the Western sharp, in that he will observe the fine point, once agreed on, to the death. He is no slick-tongued shyster, pinning down a victim to rules that he himself won’t observe, although he is slick and slippery as well as an outrageous liar when it suits him. He made an instant signal down the line and held up his right hand in token of agreement to the bargain; every one of his sons and grandsons — except Mujrim, who was still keeping Ayisha out of sight — followed suit. They swore aloud then in the name of Allah that the Avenger’s brother’s life was in their keeping; and at a sign from Grim, Mujrim, leading Ayisha by the hand, came forward and did the same. thing.
“Jimgrim, thou art a prince of tricksters!” said Ali Baba, grinning sidewise at him with his old face screwed into a thousand wrinkles. “But have a care! One trick begets another!”
Under the unwritten desert law it would now be the unspeakable offense for either side to do the other an injury; but you can drive a coach and four horses between the provisions of any law that ever was made, unless there is means of enforcing it, and the greatest sticklers for law and etiquette are invariably splitters of fine hairs. It would have stretched imagination too far to pretend that we were absolutely safe now, but we were safer than we had been.
Ayisha was the weakest point remaining at the moment. She followed Grim down into the fiumara, and the black look flashed sidewise at her by the Avenger’s brother was no good sign; reasonably and rightly he regarded her as the cause of his predicament, and if she had not purposely betrayed him there was no way of his knowing that, nor much likelihood of his believing it.
But Grim didn’t propose to waste time over domestic squabbles just then. The men who had been sent to murder our crew were likely to draw blank any minute and come hurrying back, and although they would probably obey the Avenger’s brother, if he should have time to forbid their attacking us, that wasn’t much more than probable; they would see us between them and their camels — appraise the odds at three to two in their favor — and just as likely as not open fire on us from the cover of the jumbled fiumara rocks.
If they should return along the high ground, on the other hand, they might snap up Narayan Singh on the way and then pounce on our beasts with their valuable loads; and if there is one safe bet in the world it is this — that when plunder has once fallen into Arab hands it needs more than the orders of their Sheikh to make them give it up again.
* * * * *
SO Grim sent one man running for Narayan Singh, and ordered all our camels brought down into the fiumara. They came tumbling down like a lot of double-ended dummies, some of the loaded ones falling and rolling, and all roaring their fear of the goat-path loud enough to set the fiumara echoing and warn whomever it might interest a mile away.
But you can’t be discourteous to a man like the Avenger’s brother — not, that is to say, if you are wise and have a bargain with him that is based on desert etiquette, and whatever his secret impatience Grim spoke as courteously as they say the Spanish torturers used to in the days when one gentleman would invite another to be seated on the iron chair before the glowing coals.
“If your honor would be kind enough to agree, I would like to take all my men and all your honor’s camels about a mile farther up the fiumara.”
“In the name of the Prophet, why?”
“In order to wait there for your honor’s men.”
“But my men will expect to find me here!”
“Inshallah, we shall disappoint them. By your honor’s favor we will leave one man here to explain the circumstances to them. Otherwise, if they should come on us suddenly in this place there might be an accident.”
“Mashallah!” the Avenger’s brother retorted hotly. “You doubt my good faith?”
“Allah forbid! But since our mutual honor is involved, my good faith obliges me to protect yours. Let there be no chance for misunderstanding between your men and mine.”
The Avenger’s brother did not like it, but couldn’t refuse a command put so politely. He had the good taste to beg Grim’s pardon for not having thought of the plan first, and they spent at least two minutes paying each other compliments, while Ali Baba fumed inwardly, but stood still with a magnificently assumed air of patience.
The old fox, too, had manners, and although technically the Avenger’s brother was in no position to refuse any demand whatever, he waited for their owner’s personal permission before laying hand on the camels or letting his sons take a step toward them. So all the conventions were observed, and it was the Avenger’s brother, not Grim, who at last requested Ali Baba to take all the men and beasts and to honor the universe by casting his noble shadow on it about a mile farther up the fiumara.
Ali Baba answered at once that the Avenger’s brother’s lightest wish was a command to him, second only in importance to the law of Allah; and, taking one thing with another, I don’t believe two Western nations at daggers drawn could have saved each other’s faces more gracefully.
One of the two men who had stayed with the Avenger’s brother to welcome Grim was left behind to greet the returning men and take the sting out of their disappointment, and away the rest of us went to look for a better place in which to await them and, if necessary, defend ourselves against attack; for, having made no agreement with Grim or anyone else, they might elect to solve the problem in their own way by rescuing their master. As things turned out we never discovered what course they would have taken, for circumstances played into Grim’s hands in such fashion that all the Avenger’s brothers’ men became our debtors within the hour — circumstances and Jmil Ras. And we were to learn more about Jmil Ras before the unexpected happened.
Not much was said as we trailed up the fiumara, Grim and Ali Baba side by side with the Avenger’s brother bringing up the rear. But Ayisha ranged alongside me, and was by no means dumb.
“Now for thy magic, Miyan!” she commanded. “Thus far it has worked well and Jimgrim hasn’t quarreled with me; in which he shows wisdom, for I am his friend. But that Achmet Saoud, the Avenger’s brother, looked blackly at me. You must poison him. The son of sixty dogs suspected me of plotting with Ibrahim ben Ali, but could prove nothing. Now he will add that to this and make a mountain of it.
“He and the Avenger are not like ordinary brothers, for they do not hate each other, and what the one says the other agrees to; so there is trouble in store for me in Abu Kem unless you poison him. You say that magic stuff of yours will make the teeth fall out? Good. Do that for a beginning! I wish to see it work. Then, while he bewails his lost teeth, you may kill him altogether in some other way.”
I think I have said at least a dozen times that I am no diplomatist, my forte being patience and direct action; but it seemed best to me just then to divide the honors with Narayan Singh, who, excepting those rather rare intervals when bazaar whisky stirs bats in his belfry, is a master of Machiavellian finesse.
“I must confess to you that there are two of us magicians. I can’t work without consulting the Pathan,” said I, “nor he without consulting me. And you’ve made it difficult for me to cast spells for you by mocking the Pathan when he makes love to you, so that he is angry and will agree to nothing.”
Don’t you think that was passing the buck pretty smartly on the spur of the moment? I mean, for a man who hasn’t ever fooled himself that he was quick-witted. It convinced Ayisha by a process of inference not only that my magic powers were really so, but also that I should be treated more respectfully; for, where one magician might be dirked for disobedience, two, working in partnership would have to be managed gingerly.
“But his love is foolish,” she protested. “I wouldn’t be the wife of such a man if there were no men left! He makes himself ridiculous and me a scandal!”
Then, with a subtle sidewise smile at me and a lift of her arched eyebrows— “What a pity that the wrong magician vows he loves me!”
Well, there you are. You see, a man can’t pit his brains successfully against a woman’s, and you’ve got to use brute force, or run away, or else be defeated in the end. Grim is the only exception to that rule whom I have met, and I wouldn’t bet on Grim too far, if a woman once got half a real chance at him.
If mine was a quick-fire diplomatic shot, hers was twice as quick and twenty times as cunning. Having no intention in the world of yielding herself to any Indian — a race she openly despised — she proposed to flirt with both of us and play one off against the other. You may say I could refuse; that I might have claimed the prerogative of a darwaish, who is supposed to have turned his back on the delights of this world, flirting the very first among them.
But unless I should walk to some extent into her net, I would be depriving Grim of half my usefulness. He was counting on me for inside information, which only Ayisha could provide. So the only practicable opening she had left me was a mighty mean one, and I tried that, faute de mieux.
“If that Pathan were to catch me looking at you covetously, he would knife me in the back at the first chance,” I answered lamely.
She laughed delightedly at that. Nothing could have pleased her more than the notion of two magicians fighting to possess her, with the ultimate refusal hers in any case.
“I have seen you fight,” she answered. “You fought Mujrim, who is twice as strong as the Pathan; and I know your magic can protect you for, you remember, I stuck my dagger into you and it only grazed your leg.”
“That Pathan has killed a score of men in Palestine,” I answered, “and Allah knows how many more before he came here.”
“Twenty men to his hand? Good. Kill him then, and cut one-and-twenty notches on your rifle-butt!”
“I have to consider Jimgrim, who employs us both,” I answered, “and Jimgrim is considering Jmil Ras. Tell me about Jmil Ras. He is called a very great magician. If that is true, I mustn’t kill the Pathan, because it will take the two of us to overcome him. Tell me all you know about him.”
“Nobody knows anything about him, except that he is handsome and in league with the Devil! Some say this, and some say that. He can make the dead men talk in their graves.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he said there was gold in the mountain and began to dig for it. But there were graves of saints there, and the people said he should not desecrate the sacred ground. So he cast a spell, and each of the saints began to talk out of his tomb, commanding him to dig the gold out in order that they might have peace.
“The saints said that if the gold were once taken the devils would go away forever, having nothing left to stay there for. A hundred men who were present heard them say it, and the voice of each saint was different from the other, some speaking faintly, as if from far off, and others very loud, as if close at hand; but they all said the same thing, although some of them used different words.”
“That sounds like strong magic,” said I. “What else does he do?”
“Sometimes men begin to doubt him, because the mallims, who did not hear the saints speak, come and say that it is sacrilege to dig wherever saints’ tombs are. Then he does unbelievable things, turning bullets into money, gathering gold pieces from the air, discovering this and that thing in the clothing of men who never saw the things before. Moreover, he can make a camel talk; when it opens its mouth words like a man’s come forth, so that nowadays folk have a saying that you should ask the camel of Jmil Ras.”
“Who was his father?” I demanded, thinking that might lead to revelations.
“The father of insolence and cunning and all unexpectedness!” she answered. “None can foretell his next move or explain his last one; yet he foretells everything. Whenever men gather to attack him, he seems aware of it and makes the first attack, sometimes by night, dispersing the first-comers before they are reinforced, so that now men are unwilling to gather against him, saying that none can fight against the powers of darkness.”
We reached a bend in the fiumara where it would be possible for twenty men to render a good account of themselves against thirty, and I had just finished repeating that conversation word for word to Grim when a lot of intermittent, ragged firing broke out somewhere about a mile behind us in the direction from which we had come. Rifles always seem to me to have voices that express emotions in their own field as distinctly as those of men and animals; it’s one of those things you can’t explain, that nevertheless convince you after years of more or less promiscuous campaigning.
You can’t persuade me that the sound made, for instance, by a lost man firing to attract attention to himself is the same as that made by a hunter shooting game, and I am not alone in my conviction. Grim, for one, agrees with me, and so do most desert Arabs I have talked with.
That was desperate firing, done by men fighting for their lives, alternately taking careful aim and then blazing away furiously in a moment’s panic. Grim got out his glasses, and leaving the camels in the fiumara the whole lot of us followed him to the top of a sandy hillock that provided a good view of the countryside for miles.
We could all see what was happening, but Grim with the glasses was the only one who could make out details. The Avenger’s brother’s men — invisible among the stones in the bed of the fiumara — were being attacked by more than a hundred, who had arrived unseen from the eastward — for their camels were hobbled in a group on the east bank — and were now firing into the fiumara from both sides. It looked like a merciless effort at extermination; but having had experience of those jumbled boulders I was willing to bet that it couldn’t succeed unless the men on top were willing to go down and finish the business hand to hand.
Ali Baba was the first to speak, and he was all for flight, as usual. That was the fox instinct.
“Wallahi! Jimgrim, why wait! This whole business is a trap to get those goods of mine! Those are the Avenger’s men attacking, and they think it is we who
are down in the fiumara! This Avenger’s brother is a treacherous fellow sent to block this end of the trap while the others attacked from the rear. Trust me! I see through the whole plot! Now be wise, Jimgrim! Listen to an old man, who has come alive, thanks to Allah, out of a thousand tight places! Jmil Ras is the man to depend on; ride as the wind goes, then, for Jmil Ras!”
“What does Jmil Ras look like?” Grim asked casually.
“In the name of Allah! Who cares what he looks like?”
“Black mustache? No beard or whiskers? Does he wear a cock’s plume stuck in his head-dress?”
“Yes!” said Ayisha. “He makes magic with it!”
Grim returned the glasses to their case, and smiled at me.
“We’ve found your friend Jeremy,” he said. “D’you think he’d recognize you?”
“Not in this disguise, I’ll bet he wouldn’t.”
“Can you think of any way of making him recognize you? He’s out for trouble by the look of things, and there’ll be a mess if he divides his force and sends fifty or so to tackle us while he deals with that bunch in the fiumara. Think now!”
I’m not pretending to explain how thoughts come in a crisis. I only know that if they didn’t there’d be precious few of us alive to carry on this world’s affairs.
“Yes,” I said, “if I can get within a hundred yards of him, and if that’s Jeremy, I can call the fighting off and we’ll issue rain checks.”
“Good!” he answered. “Go and try.”
I tell you, I like that fellow Grim. He knows how to pick a man for a certain task, and then turn him loose without both ears chock-full of limiting instructions. He turned and drove our party back under cover without another word to me.
CHAPTER X. “You’re a fallen angel, Ramsden!”
I TOOK my rifle, not that I proposed to use it, but for old acquaintance sake, because all my stalking has been after big game and, say what you like, we humans are creatures of habit just as much as the animals we hunt. I once knew a man who couldn’t find his way in the city without an umbrella, and I was one of the very few who never laughed at him.
