The khan drew a rifle from his saddle boot and pumped five shots into the air. This was a needless formality to indicate that he waited on the bank with an empty weapon. Deever rose, long, lanky, and magnified by the sun behind him. He emptied his Mauser. And instinctively reloaded it, just as Jawan Khan was doing, ashore.
By the time Ayyub and Ilderim maneuvered the raft past jagged rocks, outwitted whirlpools, and slowly edged her toward the bank, the caravan men had unloaded the animals. Jawan Khan was stamping the caked dust from his scarlet boots. The khan’s uncle had no energy to waste. He stood there, very thin, lean-faced, sunken-eyed; top heavy from his oversized turban, and seemingly on the point of toppling over.
There was an exchange of salutations. Then tea was served in a shadowed angle, and cigarettes. Deever felt the old man’s disapproving, deep set eyes, but beyond inquiring about Tahir Beg’s health, there was no question that could be asked. Barring the lack of Christian food and drink, the way of these mountain clans was very much as it was back home.
Finally Jawan Khan said, “My uncle is making a pilgrimage to Samarra. In this weather, riding is too difficult. But it will be easy for him, on your raft.”
Deever had not counted on a passenger; only on merchandise. There was always danger of Arab raiders, attacking when the raft was moored by night. Tahir Beg would be a heavy responsibility. Deever said, “There is a feud between me and the Arabs, just north of Tikrit. I shot some of them instead of paying for the right to pass down the Tigris.”
Tahir Beg smiled bleakly. “That is why I want to go with you. You guard whatever you carry. And I must reach Samarra before I die. A saint came to me in a dream and commanded me.”
He folded his skinny old hands. Take it or leave it.
The men were loading Jawan Khan’s goods on the raft. Ayyub went around with a tube, blowing up goatskins which had leaked. Ilderim was directing the arrangement of the bales, so that there would be a sheltered place for a cooking fire, and a clear space amidships for free play of the sweeps.
Deever did not like the responsibility. A raft might break up from being swept by a treacherous squall against the bank. Raiders might overtake it by stealth, cut its lashings, and float ashore what little they could, while the crew scrambled. Even if the old man sickened and died from the murderous heat of the Tigris flatlands, that would reflect on Deever. He remembered his own kinsmen back home.
Someone would brood over the old man’s death, and finally take a shot. And since he could not go back to North Carolina, Deever wanted to stay with these people. They were white folks. Some had yellow hair, some red. They were blue eyed or gray-eyed, and many looked like Norsemen. Though Deever had no book knowledge of the kinship between Anglo-Saxon and Kurd, he instinctively knew them for kinfolk, and knew that his wife, Asima, was as white and proper a woman as any back home.
“Uncle, how will you come back? We break up the raft and ride. You know that.”
Tahir Beg had an answer. “I am not coming back. I am hurrying to Samarra to die, and be buried in holy ground.”
This was ironic. Samarra, the filthiest, most contemptible city in Iraq. More cutthroats, more thieves, more harlots, more ruffians. Yet, a place of pilgrimage; holy, from the burial of saints, to Shi’a and Sunni Moslem alike. As Deever put it, not with any great inaccuracy, “For Catholic or Protestant Mohammedans, it don’t make any difference.”
Jawan Khan seemed to read what was behind Deever’s long, narrow face, behind his bleak gray eyes, his slowly tightened, thin mouth. He said, “After what you did to that tax collector, we know that you do not fear any Jabaur Arabs!”
They had him there. A man can be forgiven fear—Allah does not make all men equally valiant, nor equally strong—but a man has an obligation to his neighbors. Obligations of doing, as well as not doing. The shot that had made Deever an exile had been fired purely as the fulfillment of a man’s duty to punish a breach of neighborliness.
“Your uncle has many enemies. He used to be a great raider. Someone may try to kill him before he can die peacefully.”
“We cannot get him to Samarra on horse,” Jawan Khan said. “And a saint commanded him to make the pilgrimage.”
All that Deever could say was, “Then come with us, Uncle. You are right welcome.”
CHAPTER 2.
It took two more days, going down the Zab. Two days of pitiless roasting. Whatever the position of the sun, the slow turning of the raft put the passengers so that both sides were exposed to whatever cliffs reflected the glare. At intervals, tiny melon patches were green against brown hillsides. Here and there, a water wheel creaked. But there was little cultivation. The people of the foothills feared the Kurds of the mountains.
At sunset of the second day, a forbidding range of red hills blocked the view. The sun sank red through a haze of dust, and the heat surged in quivering blasts to dry Deever’s eyeballs, sting his shaded cheeks, oppress him as a choking hand and a crushing weight. Old Tahir Beg was soaking cheese in river water. It was aged for two years or more, until it was like lumps of gray rock, so that it would not spoil. Half an hour’s soaking, however, would soften the cheese and extract the salt.
Deever asked, “How is your appetite, Uncle?”
“Well, praise Allah,” the old man said. The malicious twinkle of his eyes betrayed his pleasure at seeing Deever roasted.
The Zab was joining the Tigris, a very lake of a river, broad and muddy, and skirting the Jebel Hamrin range. Tahir Beg squinted across the water, and into the desolation of the red stone hills, “Verily, from hotness we go into fire, and out of fire into hell,” he cackled. “Pray, O Man, for Allah’s mercy.”
A thoroughly unpleasant fellow, this Tahir Beg, who was going to Samarra to die. There was a promise in his words. Deever became more and more uneasy. He fingered the simmering bolt of his Mauser, and narrowly eyed the hills that harbored the Jabaur Arabs. Deever’s blond wife, Asima, had predicted disaster. She blamed it on an evil dream, and begged him not to go to Bagdad. Let Ayyub take charge. Ayyub and Ilderim did all the work anyway. Now Deever began to feel that Asima was right. He should have followed her premonition. Some vague bit of gossip might have warned her of Tahir Beg’s plans, and without quite knowing just why, she had sensed danger.
That cackling old fellow with his sour mouth and hooked nose and deep set eyes. A doddering hawk. A falcon too old to strike, yet maliciously pecking at whatever was near. Deever said to himself, “He’ll outlive us all. He’s like grandpappy, taking more than forty years to die when he was a hundred and one.”
He wished the old man long life, but he was uncomfortable. He did not like that jingling proverb, “Verily, from hotness into fire, and from fire into hell.” It had a personal dig, the way Tahir spoke it. The old man knew he was unwelcome, and he resented it.
Deever began to see how true the words were. First that shooting back home. It had done no real good; the man’s testimony, even though not yet given in court, had nonetheless sent Uncle Stinson to Atlanta, for a bit of moonshining. But putting a bullet through the treacherous neighbor had been a man’s duty; a family that let other folks push its members around might as well be dead.
Then flight, and borrowing a distant relative’s papers, taking his place on an oil tanker. It docked at Bushire, and Deever jumped ship, as by then he had to. Shooting a Federal witness was a serious matter. He could not go back, so he went up the Tigris to Bagdad.
Mountaineer’s instinct and simplicity somehow got him past Bagdad, and into Kurdistan. He knew not a word of their language, but he looked like the rawboned Kurds, he had their temper and their stubbornness.
But a chain of vengeance never stops with one link. That was what Tahir Beg’s wry speech really meant. From hotness into the fire, from fire into hell. As grandpappy had put it, “When things get just so bad, they finally change. And get worse.” An unpleasant old cuss, very much like
Tahir Beg; a hellion for seventy-odd years, then he got religion and spent forty more as a saint.
Up the Tigris, a dozen years ago, to Jazira. Right where Syria and Turkey and Iraq met. A squad of Turkish soldiers came with a tax collector. One of Deever’s newly found friends lost some sheep and gained a fractured skull in the course of the collecting. So Deever went out with a borrowed rifle. He picked off the tax collector—which makes any mountaineer a hero, whether in Kurdistan or elsewhere—and six soldiers for good measure. Then Deever emigrated back into Iraq.
More than ever, he was a man of honor, but a price was on his head in two countries now. And Deever began to feel like fate’s tackling dummy. Doing the manly thing kept a fellow in hot water. If Tahir Beg was not a parcel of ill omen, nothing was. Already, the crew ceremoniously washed, gargling, sniffing, dabbling their ears with water; getting ready for prayer, even though travelers can claim exemption.
Tahir Beg’s presence was responsible for that.
And as the sun dipped behind the Jebel Hamrin, Tahir Beg droned his “intention” and so did the others, letting the raft float free; which it could, safely, at that point.
Then Deever saw the three little kuffas that shot from the dancing shadows of the western bank of the Tigris. They were tub-shaped boats, woven of the rushes that had concealed them, and caulked with the asphalt and bitumen that had for centuries vainly spoken of the presence of petroleum in Iraq. Lean, butter-smeared men with headcloths and headbands paddled out into the shadow of the Jebel Hamrin; they had rifles, and there was robbery in their hearts. They were Jabaur Arabs, and no one has found any Arab lower than these.
Deever, sitting in the shadow of a bale, saw the silent approach of the kuffas. “Damn my hide,” he always said when he looked at such a boat, “it’s like the Sunday school story about Moses in the bullrushes. Same kind of ark, all right.”
He grinned, cuddled the Mauser to his cheek. Just as Tahir Beg touched his forehead to the rug he had spread, Deever cut loose. A man jerked upright in the kuffa, toppled over the side. His companion yelled, and the boat capsized. The survivor swam under water. The two in the other kuffa opened fire. A third one pulled from shore.
The crew of the raft scrambled for guns. Tahir Beg continued praying. No Arab was going to nullify his start. In a way, he was right. Before Ayyub and the others could lay hold of a weapon, Deever’s second shot smacked over the water. That broke the raid.
When Tahir Beg finished the four-genuflection prayer he had “announced,” Deever said, “It is better not to pray when traveling.”
Tahir Beg answered, “They were slipping up on men at prayer, and Allah punished them as he saw fit.”
Except for Deever’s watchfulness, the old fanatic’s punctilious devotions would have caused a massacre and looting; the raiders had not challenged or demanded a “present” as they usually did. But Tahir Beg had justified himself with an argument that no one could refute. Ayyub and the others were impressed. Their respectful looks, not at Deever, but at Tahir Beg, indicated that it was better to trust Allah than marksmanship.
The next day, the bare red rock of Jebel Hamrin was behind the raft, while on the eastern bank, a similar bulwark rose out of the brown plain—a continuation of the range whose break made a gate for the Tigris. But ahead, as far as Deever could see, was flatness whose only trace of life or motion was the dancing of heat devils between baked earth and brazen sky.
Finally a great cliff cropped up out of that otherwise unbroken expanse of scorched brown. On its lee slope, Tikrit looked down on the broad Tigris. Tikrit, the fortress not even Hulagu Khan had captured, was now not worth sacking. A dozen tawdry shops, a few coffee houses; straight walled mud houses, rising in steps on the sloped crest of the cliff. Arab girls filed down the narrow path to the river. Their golden bracelets gleamed, their robes trailed in the dust as they glided with water jugs balanced on their heads.
Desert telegraph could easily outrace a horse, so Deever was not amazed when white smoke puffed from a parapet, high up on the cliff. Two hand cast slugs, weighing an ounce apiece, thudded into a bale of apricot paste. Another whistled overhead, and plunked into the brown water. Deever had not a chance of hitting the snipers; so he rose, fired a shot straight into the air, and turned his back to Tikrit.
Tahir Beg’s sour smile was begrudged appreciation of the contemptuous gesture. The infidel in the improper clothing did have his points.
They kept the raft in midstream that night, instead of pulling ashore to sleep. “It is cooler,” Tahir Beg said.
Deever corrected him. “No, Uncle, it is safer. Your life is on my head.”
The old man’s leathery face twitched, and would have reddened had there been enough blood in him. Deever was pleased, having finally made this irritating passenger uncomfortable, and without a violation of hospitality. It took a lot to get under Tahir Beg’s skin, and shake his complacence, his smug piety, his droning proverbs and his quotations from the Koran.
At dawn, the tall spire of Imam Daur reached high over a mud wall and the parched crowns of sickly palms. Here Nebuchadnezzar had made his golden image, someone had told Deever, and bade Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to worship or be thrown into the fiery furnace. As he came near, Deever always grinned thinly and cursed the barren plain and said to himself, “Don’t know as it took much gumption after all, Daniel telling his friends to walk into the furnace. Probably couldn’t tell the difference no-how.”
At times, miserable settlements broke the desolation. A clump of palms. A saint’s tomb, of whitewashed mud. Patches of melons. Things noticed only close at hand, for the eye had to cover too much emptiness to accommodate itself to variations. It was close to evening when a small coracle came from the second hamlet they had passed that day. Deever shouted, “Rub, ya kilab! Get desharda! Keupek ogblu!” It was doubtful that the man paddling the tub-shaped boat understood either the Turkish or the Arabic words that called him a descendant of dogs, and the son of a lewd mother, and advised him to go away quickly. Before Deever could make it clearer, Tahir Beg stayed his hand.
“He has cucumbers. Let us buy some.”
Ayyub looked up from his rice. “Cucumbers, by Allah!”
Ilderim did not speak, but his face was eloquent. Deever shrugged. One scrawny Arab, living with a starved family in a hovel near some stunted trees. Deever beckoned.
The pockmarked Arab was too servile to be convincing. Neither did he haggle as long as he should have, though he had plenty of time, having made his kuffa fast to the raft. But the cucumbers were cool, and the melons the fellow had were sweet. He made his sale, and paddled back to the bank.
Darkness came swiftly, with little twilight. Stars cropped out, large and very close; the lake-width of the Tigris made the evening cool. Deever was well fed and content. Two more days, and the old pest would be in Samarra.
Then Ayyub yelled. There was a creak, a snap, a surge of water. The deck sank beneath Deever. Tahir Beg screeched, and a blurred something threshed in the river. The raft was coming apart. Some of the carefully piled bales were separating, sinking, bobbing about in the water. Goatskins were escaping. A greasy, naked man flashed past Deever, who had scrambled toward more certain footing.
That wet contact in the gloom, and the momentary glimpse by the glow of the brazier further amidships told him the story. The kuffa had concealed one or more swimmers, river Arabs who had breathed through reeds thrust up through the woven rushes of the “tub.” During the peasant’s brief haggling, they had easily slipped to the shadows of the raft, and there waited for darkness.
“Watch out!” Deever shouted. “Arabs! Cutting the raft apart! Over there, Ayyub!”
He drew his revolver and fired at the first mark. A knife, gleamed, then was swallowed up by the black water, along with a man’s bare, buttered body. Eddies pulled the raft toward the bank. With all hands scrambling about, sometimes on firm footing, s
ometimes on a bale that sank underfoot, the sweeps were no longer manned.
Tahir Beg was threshing and screeching. His white beard marked him for a moment. Deever lunged, but a bale yielded, making his move fail for lack of footing. The brazier tipped into the water. A billow of steam, and a gust of ashes swallowed Deever when he bobbed up out of the water, just astern.
Two men were swimming toward the bank. Ilderim was cursing and blasting away at them. Deever shouted, “Never mind them, where’s Tahir?”
When he boarded the raft, he repeated, “Where’s Tahir Beg? Where’s the old man? Hold her in place! Get to the bank if you can!”
Ilderim and Ayyub manned the sweeps. The others took to the water and used the bindings of bales to secure what timbers and replace what goatskins they could. As long as too many of the blown up hides did not escape the confinement of the poplar trunks, the raft could be beached before she fell apart.
Deever peeled out of his wet clothes, and took to the water. His heart was heavy enough to pull him under. He was already certain that he was too late to help Tahir Beg. But he swam about, looking, until he was too tired to do anything else but return to the raft. Beyond any doubt, the old man had been pulled under by a whirlpool. Certainly there was no chance of finding and reviving him.
By then, Ayyub had learned that there was no need of pulling ashore and perhaps risking another encounter. “By Allah,” he said, “the load broke too fast for them, we were not surprised as they expected, we frightened them instead, and by Allah, they failed.”
No one asked about Tahir Beg. Finally Deever said, “Work toward the bank. And wrap up a bundle of food for me.”
When he stepped from the raft into shallow water, he said to Ayyub, “Sell the cargo in Bagdad, and on the way home, tell Jawan Khan I am looking for the men who caused his uncle’s death.”
There was a moment of silence, unbroken except by the sounds made by men who wanted to speak but did not know what to say. Finally Ayyub asked, “Which way will you hunt them? Toward Samarra, or back toward Imam Daur?”
E. Hoffmann Price's Exotic Adventures Page 16
