Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  She came like the wife of Heber the Kenite, who slew Sisera, “bringing forth butter in a lordly dish.” She held in both hands a marvelous Persian rose-bowl half filled with clabber, saying she had prepared it for her lord herself, and offered it to him on bended knees.

  I could not see her face, for her back was toward me and she had her shawl over her head; but I thought of that little vial of croton oil Narayan Singh had given her instead of poison, and the Sikh caught my eye meaningly.

  Ali Higg was pleased to condescend. He took the bowl in both hands, muttered a blessing, and drank deep, swallowing about half the stuff before he noticed its strange flavor. Then he flung the priceless bowl away from him, smashing it to atoms, and picked up his rifle to take an aim at Ayisha.

  “By Allah, the bint has poisoned me!”

  She screamed and ran. He fired, but she was already past the corner, and the bullet grazed the rock. Moreover, croton oil is a drastic cathartic, and waits on no man’s convenience. He dropped the rifle, groaned — and I would rather not set down quite all the rest.

  Sufficient that it gave Narayan Singh and me our opportunity. It made him too weak to resist, and we took care of him. I let him go on believing he was poisoned, and gave him harmless doses that he presently believed had saved his life; so that even the tyrannical fanatic felt a kind of gratitude.

  Held like a baby in the Sikh’s enormous arms with no less than half a dozen terrified women looking on — for they had all run one way while Ayisha ran the other — he slowly recovered control of his emotions, while the women loudly praised my medicinal skill.

  And since I knew almost nothing at all of medicine, and therefore could say anything I chose without feeling guilty — like the fellow on a soapbox who harangues a crowd on politics — I told him he must have the boils lanced there and then, or otherwise the poison might get to them and inflame them beyond all hope.

  I suppose the men who had met us at the corner of the great flight of steps did not come and interrupt because they had had enough of his temper for one morning and did not choose to sample it again uninvited. The rifle-shot did not bring them, because it was nothing new for him to vent displeasure by shooting at folk; and if there were a corpse, and it had not fallen over the cliff or been kicked over, they would come and remove it when ordered, but certainly not sooner.

  Ali Higg has strength enough left to assure me that if I killed him he would wait for me in the next world and settle the account there. I told him what was perfectly true, that I would rather lose my hand than kill him, so he added that if I hurt him more than was reasonable four camels should be told off afterward to hurt me.

  Seeing he was to be sole judge of what was reasonable pain, and having no means of guessing whether Grim was still alive and able to protect me, I decided to give him a hypodermic, and put a shot into his arm that would have quieted a must elephant. Maybe I rather overdid that, but as I have no medical diploma nobody can call me to account.

  And the operation was successful, if unpleasant. I used one of the presentation razors.

  Then Grim came striding up the mountain-ledge, with Ali Baba and all the rest of the gang at his tail, but no sign anywhere of Jael Higg. He stood and boomed out a sonorous Arab blessing; and if ever a man felt and looked like a trapped wild beast it was that Lord of the Limits of the Desert and Lion of Petra, Ali Higg.

  However, Narayan Singh and I had played our part and got him weak enough; he could not even jump to grab his rifle. The rest was clearly up to Grim, who looked in no hurry at all.

  He stood in the cave entrance with the light behind him, turning slightly sidewise to let Ali Higg see him in profile. The Lion’s jaw dropped. Grim’s very head-dress was striped like Ali Higg’s. His cloak was the same color. He had been dressed rather differently when I last saw him, so he must have been doing some pretty careful spy-work.

  Of course, a close examination showed a dozen differences between the two men, but in his weak state following that drastic physic and the operation Ali Higg believed for a moment that he saw his own ghost! One or two of the women checked a scream, which helped matters, and the others shrank into a corner, staring with wild eyes. One woman laughed, but not from amusement.

  “Salamun alaik, O Ali Higg!” said Grim after a full minute’s silence.

  “Wa alaik issalam! Who are you, in the name of Allah?”

  Instead of answering Grim strode in, and Ali Baba lined up his sons across the cave-mouth. Unless Grim had left undone some precaution in the camp below it looked as if we had the Lion caged to rights, and you could tell by the look in Ali Baba’s usually mild old eyes that there would have been short shrift for somebody if his advice were taken. For a moment I caught sight of Ayisha peering timidly between the end man and the wall — to see, I suppose, whether the Lion was dead yet — but the minute I caught her eye she disappeared.

  Grim stooped down over Ali Higg, who was sprawling on his stomach on a Persian rug.

  “Has my hakim relieved Your Honor’s pain?” he asked.

  The Lion managed to sit upright. Three of the women piled cushions behind him and ran back again to their corner.

  “Who are you in my likeness?”

  “A friend, inshallah,” answered Grim.

  He squatted down cross-legged on the mat in front of him; for though the Lion’s neck was pretty nicely bandaged and the hypodermic had not lost its power, yet it hurt him quite a little to look up.

  “I had three brothers, but thou art none of them. I had one son, but neither art thou he. In the name of the All-Knowing, name thyself!”

  “I am he,” said Grim, “who brought Your Honor’s wife from El-Kalil.”

  “Oh! And a million curses on the bint! She tried within the hour to poison me. But for this Indian of thine I were a dead man now. Stay! Send for her!”

  He clapped his hands.

  “Let her be flung over the cliff. Go bring her!” But nobody moved to do his bidding, and it dawned on him a second time that he was cornered. He wasn’t a man who took such a discovery mildly.

  “Ayisha shall be dealt with at the proper time!” he snarled. “I have not accepted those gifts. Take them up! You who have entered Petra without my leave shall account to my men presently. Thereafter we will talk of gifts.”

  “Which men?” Grim asked him blandly. “Surely not the forty and four who went to raid the Beni Aroun? Nay, I took the liberty of sending them a message signed with Your Honor’s seal. They will not come for a day or two, so we can make friends undisturbed.”

  “Shu halalk? With my seal?”

  “With Your Honor’s seal. Observe; I have it.”

  “Then — then — Where is she into whose hands I gave it?”

  That was the first sign that Ali Higg had given of the slightest affection for anyone. His face looked ghastly at the thought of losing that strange, half-western wife of his.

  He had called Ayisha by her name in front of strangers, out of disrespect. Jael he would not name, even when confronted by the proof that she had broken trust and lost his precious seal.

  “I took another liberty,” said Grim. “I sent word by messenger, who bore a letter sealed with that same seal, to Ibrahim ben Ah. He will neither raid El-Maan nor return to Petra.”

  “He is defeated?” asked the Lion, dumbfounded. “And she — is she a prisoner?”

  Grim did not answer either question.

  “And I met a man named Yussuf. You know him?”

  “Naam.” (Yes).

  “He has been lying to Your Honor. He has said that the British are helpless. He brought Your Honor a report from Palestine that was a skein of falsehood hung up on little pegs of truth. He told you the British are not able to defend themselves, he knowing better; for he is one of those men who say always what the hearer would like to hear.”

  “What has that to do with thee?” demanded Ali Higg.

  He was looking about him furtively, and Narayan Singh picked up his rifle off the rug and sto
od it against the wall. Grim turned toward Ali Baba.

  “Bring Yussuf!” he ordered.

  The ranks opened, and Yussuf was thrust forward into the cave, where he stood looking like a felon awaiting sentence.

  “Did you speak the truth, or did you lie to the Lion of Petra?” Grim demanded.

  “Who am I that should know the truth of such matters?” the man whined, his voice squeaking like a cart-wheel. “I obeyed. I looked. I asked. Perhaps I did not understand all I saw and what was told me.”

  “Is the Lion of Petra with ten-score fighting men able to stand against the British with twenty thousand?” Grim asked him.

  “Inshallah. The Lion is brave. Who knows? Yet I forgot to speak of the twenty aeroplanes at Ludd, each having ten bombs of a hundred pounds weight that could make short work in an hour or two of ten score men.”

  “Why don’t they come?” snarled Ali Higg.

  “They take no delight in slaying the women and children,” answered Grim. “Those black tents below there would be an easy mark to aim at; but who would gain? It is better that peace were kept.”

  “Throw that Yussuf over the cliff!” commanded Ali Higg.

  But once more nobody moved to obey him, and Yussuf had the indecency to smirk, for which Grim cursed him with whiplash sarcasm.

  Then Ali Higg put both hands before his face and prayed aloud:

  “O Allah, Lord of mercies and of wisdom and rebuke, if I am in the hands of enemies and she who was the mother of good plans is taken away from me, have I not, nevertheless, smitten the heretic in thy name and raised thy banner over Petra? Give me, then, wisdom, that I deal with these men and confound thy enemies. La Allah illa Allah!”

  He dropped his hands and looked up with a hard, fanatical frenzy in his eyes. But they changed almost instantly. The ranks of Ali Baba’s men opened once more; and Jael Higg stepped through, dressed like a fighting Bedouin, bandolier and all. Grim had even let her have a rifle and cartridges. As he promised, he had put her to no indignity.

  CHAPTER 13. “There is a trick to ruling!”

  DON’T you hate a story with a moral in it? I do. This is an immoral story. And, remember, I said in the beginning that it had no end, but was no more than an episode in the career of Ali Higg. I would have liked to tell it from his viewpoint setting down what he thought of this unexpected stick thrown in his wheel, omitting most of the bad language for the censor’s sake.

  His first thought was that Jael had returned from the raid with a hundred and forty men. You could tell that by the light in his eyes, even before he spoke.

  “Allah reward you; you come in time! Have Ayisha and that Yussuf thrown over the cliff. Praised be Allah, I shall be obeyed at last!”

  It was his worst shock yet when even Jael did not start at once to carry out his order. Instead, she sat down on the rug, so that she and Ali Higg and Grim formed a triangle.

  “O Lion of Petra,” she said — for it would not have been manners to call him by his right name in front of strangers— “what was written has come to pass, and my foreboding was a true one. If we had let the tribes at El-Maan be, and if you had kept those forty men instead of sending them to raid the Beni Aroun, this could not have happened. Now twenty men have cornered us, while Ibrahim ben Ah eats up provisions to no purpose, sitting idly in the desert.”

  “Then the El-Maan men were not scattered to the winds?” groaned Ali Higg. “O Allah, may shame devour you as it tortures me! Those dogs will have looted a train and will say that Ali Higg no longer dares interfere! The sun rises, but it sets at evening, since Allah wills; but is my day so short?”

  “By no means,” answered Grim. “The El-Maan men saw me and believed I was the Lion of Petra. I forbade the looting of the train, and Your Honor’s wife Ayisha went to El-Maan to enforce obedience by her presence.

  “Later they saw me start for Petra when the train had passed; and now they will learn that Ibrahim ben Ah with seven score men is bivouacking in the desert. The world is round, O Ali Higg, so that where in one place it seems dark in another they say the sun is rising.”

  “In Allah’s name, who art thou?” asked the Lion.

  “James Schuyler Grim. Men call me Jimgrim.”

  “Allah! Wallahi haida fasl! Not he who fought under Lawrence against the Turks? Wallah! I fought on the other side, but we all feared Lawrence and admired him so that not a man would try to capture him, although Djemal Pasha put a great price on his head. And you were known far and wide as his man! There was a price on your head too — dead or alive — five thousand pounds Turkish — well I remember it. By the beard of the Prophet, you might have come here as a friend, O Jimgrim!”

  Grim laughed.

  “I come here as a friend in any case,” he answered. “Khajjaltni bima’rufak! You brought back a woman to poison me!”

  And this is where the immorality comes in. I told a lie, and don’t regret it. Nor did Grim regret it; and he backed me up. And Narayan Singh supported both of us.

  The lie was my own idea entirely, invented on the spur of the moment; and afterward, when old Ali Baba named me The “Father of Lies” on the strength of it I felt extremely proud, as he intended that I should do. The lie worked.

  I said:

  “O Ali Higg, men said of you that you are a fierce man, swift in wrath and slow to take advice. And others said that you are sick with burning boils; yet who shall go into the Lion’s den and heal him? And Ayisha said to me:

  “‘Thou art a hakim, yet he will never listen to thee. But he is my lord, and shall I see him linger in agony? Give me a potion that will weaken him. Then in his weakness he will call for help, and thou shalt heal the boils. And afterward that which is written shall come to pass. If in great wrath because I mixed the potion in his drink he shall have me slain, nevertheless the Lion will be whole again; and who am I compared to him?’ So said the lady Ayisha.”

  I know Grim would have given a hundred dollars for leave to laugh then right out in meeting; but he kept a straight face, and he had so contrived to make Jael Higg afraid of him that though she looked scandalized she held her tongue. And Narayan Singh, as I said, supported me.

  “These words are true, O Lion of Petra,” he boomed out. “I heard the lady Ayisha speak, and it was I who put the little vial in her hands. By the beard of the Prophet I swear the words are true.”

  But as he is a Sikh, and therefore believes that the prophet of El-Islam was a liar and impostor, with a beard as fit to be dishonored as his fiery creed, perhaps his perjury was scarcely technical. Anyhow, I am not the recording angel. And Grim said, being a more cautious liar than the rest of us:

  “Therefore, O Lion of Petra, mercy is due to the lady Ayisha, seeing that the end in view was good, although the means were questionable.”

  But Jael Higg looked daggers at her lord. She had made up her mind to reduce that establishment by one at least; and Ali Higg, looking in her eyes, read what all polygamous husbands have had to face ever since the day when Abraham was forced to drive out Hagar into the wilderness. So he pronounced one of those Solomon-like judgments that are the secret of a man’s rule over men in that land, granting to each contender the whole of what he asked, yet having his own way in the bargain.

  “I find she is not worthy of death,” he said, “since she played a trick that brought me comfort. Yet I will not endure a woman’s tricks, nor condone the offense. I divorce her. Before witnesses I say she is divorced.”

  It’s a simple affair in that land, isn’t it?

  But there were matters not so simple to attend to, and Grim saw fit to waste no further time.

  “I said I come as a friend,” he resumed.

  “I heard it!” the Lion answered dryly.

  “Without boasting, I have saved you from destruction, while delivering your purchases from El-Kalil. And I have done your name no harm, but good on the country-side.”

  “Allah! How have you saved me from destruction?”

  “By preventing that u
nwise raid on El-Maan.”

  “Wallahi! Do you think my men could not have accomplished it?”

  “Maybe. Do you think the British would be fools enough to let that go unpunished? The El-Maan people would surely have appealed to them. Aeroplanes would have been sent to bomb you out of Petra. Can you fight aeroplanes?”

  “The British do not pretend to rule on this side of the Jordan,” the Lion retorted.

  “No. Do you want them to pretend to?”

  “Allah forbid!”

  “Then take a friend’s advice, O Ali Higg, and keep the peace here rather than make war.”

  “That is good advice; but will the British make a treaty with me?”

  “No,” Grim answered, smiling. “By that they would recognize you as a ruler, which they will not do until they surely know you rule.”

  “Mashallah! How shall men know that I am a ruler unless I make war and enforce my will?”

  “Have I made war on you?” asked Grim. “Have I disarmed you, or killed one man? Yet I enforce my will, as you shall see.”

  “By a trick! You played a trick on me, or otherwise—”

  “There is a trick to ruling,” answered Grim.

  “By the beard of the Prophet, that is true! But show me a trick that can defeat eight hundred men. The Sheikh of Abu Lissan plans to come against me. Those El-Mann dogs had heard of it, and so had the Beni Aroun; therefore I planned to crush them first before dealing with Abu Lissan. Show me a trick that can defeat the Abu Lissan men, and surely I will call thee friend!”

  “Suppose we make a bargain, then,” said Grim.

  “Taib. I am ready.”

  “Giving pledges for fulfilment.”

  “You mean I shall give pledges to the British?”

  “Hardly,” Grim answered. “If they took a pledge from you that would be like signing a treaty, wouldn’t it? I have no authority to sign a treaty. This must be a bargain between me and thee.”

  “Taib.”

  “It is known,” said Grim, “that you have money on deposit with the Bank of Egypt.”

  “A lie! A lie!” snapped Ali Higg. “Who said it?”