Deever understood only a few words, but they were enough. The Arabs thought that his wits were in Paradise, that Allah loved him, and had given him strange powers. The old man reminded him of Tahir Beg. But the old man did not know anyone named Amru.
Deever did not know when it was that he saw a thin-faced man hauled out of a hovel and toward a sled. He did not know exactly in what quarter of Samarra he was at the moment. He was not certain why he had left the hospital. But he was certain that this man was Amru. The scar, to be sure, was a strong hint; but Deever knew.
He said to the one who crouched, not ill but feigning illness, “Who is that man?”
For answer, a stare. Who cared about names now?
Deever booted the fellow to his feet. “Who is he?” He drew his gun. He had kept it, without any good reason beyond instinct. “Speak!”
“Wallah, sahib. That is Amru, the son of Musa!”
Deever raised his hand. “Steady, you two! Don’t stack on another one.”
“But he is dead, sahib,” the porters protested. “So are these.”
Deever stooped. There was no pulse. The wrist was ice cold. The scarred cheek was cold. Amru the son of Musa had outwitted vengeance. Deever gestured, and the sled dragged on, bump-bump-chunk.
“I’m in this pest hole. Can’t get out. Got to help these folks, anyway. Maybe that’s why it happened, they needed help for a spell.”
He watched the sled go down the cobble stone paving. One of the grisly cargo fell off. He shouted at the driver. The man did not hear. Deever cursed, would have run after him, but he was too tired. He watched the vehicle round the corner.
Better get back to work. An orderly stood there, listlessly, like a dead man who has forgotten to drop. The fellow had Deever’s kit, and was waiting, masked, fatalistic, weary.
“None in here, sahib,” he reported, coming out of the next house.
A second, third; and with the same report. Deever scarcely heard. The orderly stared at him, suddenly alert, and backed away. Abruptly, Deever said, “Wait here—no, come with me! Hurry, hurry, ya kalb!”
He staggered, then ran, stretching long uncertain legs. He knew the route of the sleds, and he overtook the jouncing vehicle before it passed the lines. He stopped it. Amru was on top of the heap. Deever said, “Get a stretcher bearer.”
The orderly grumbled, “He’s dead.”
The men who attended the drag said, “By Allah, the dead are dead.”
“Look, brother of a dog! His leg moved,” Deever shouted. “Take him off, take him off!”
The leg had moved, up, up, up; it touched the man’s chin. The attendants shook their heads. “Allah upon you, master! The dead often move, the soul is gone a moment before the life of the body, it is not well to bring back life into what is left. Wallah, we must bury it.”
Muscular contraction, a purely mechanical thing, was terrifying to the uninitiated.
“Take him off!” Deever’s voice rang, deep and commanding now. New life came to him. “Take him to the hospital!”
Wide-eyed, the man obeyed. They could not help but obey, for this infidel had strange powers and the light in his bloodshot eyes was fearsome. He was looking beyond the veil between life and death.
CHAPTER 5.
Two hours later, Amru the son of Musa developed a high fever. The chill of death had yielded; reaction set in, and internal fires parched the patient. But Deever scarcely knew this. He scarcely understood when the surgeon said, “By Jove, you were right!” His vision blurred. He began groping for support, trying to reach the wall of what had once been a stable. “You need rest, old man—the worst is over—fewer cases.”
Deever wanted to yell for help, but he was afraid to. If he needed help, then he had been finally stricken by cholera. If his weakness left him in a few moments, then he’d know it was merely rest that he needed; rest which he could now take, since the crisis was over, since Samarra would not be entirely depopulated. Legs were numb. “God, I’m stumbling!” He was afraid now. Mere uneasiness gave way to fear. He tried to yell, but cramps doubled him, and he did fall, into blackness interwoven with knives. They reached into his vitals.
He scarcely knew when they picked him up. The avenger and his victim were the toys of cholera. Vengeance had become a silly thing. Deever in the first stage, Amru the son of Musa in the last; either to live, to be burned to death by fever, or frozen in that cold blue stage.
When Deever finally realized that he was alive and in Samarra, the pestilence was under control. No new cases were coming in. And a rigid quarantine had kept river or caravan traffic from carrying the disease downstream to Bagdad.
In the days that followed, he gathered his strength, and collected his wits. Ayyub and the raft men must long since have sold the merchandise and set out on their return to the mountains. They must for some days have been home, and telling of his blind quest of vengeance in the desert.
Asima would be worrying. She probably considered herself a widow. While no one would know that the pursuit had led him to pestilential Samarra, it would readily enough be assumed that he would by now have returned, unless a desert ambush had accounted for him. Asima would be proud of him, and so would all his adopted tribesmen. He had died upholding a tradition, and more zealously than any native Kurd.
To correct that error, Deever dragged himself through the desolate streets of Samarra, asking each survivor for news of Amru the son of Musa. Somehow, he remembered the fellow. That sharp, thin face; that long scar, those large front teeth.
He had pursued him and he had overtaken him. Here, in Samarra. It was all hazy, confusing. Doctors had been relieved, new ones had come in. There were no records which would help. Deever’s only way was to hurry, hunt, find; and before the quarantine guards were disbanded, and the survivors were released.
The natives remembered Deever. They salaamed when he passed. “Ya sidi,” a woman cried, and tried to kiss his hand. “O my Lord! O Favored of Allah! My son lives!”
Deever gathered that she was trying to thank him for finding her son, who lay unconscious in an alley, unable to cry out for help. For the first time in his exile, he lost some of his contempt for Arabs. The woman’s tears were wet on the back of his hand. An old man knelt, kissed the skirt of Deever’s coat. “O thou servant of the Life-Giving! Thou servant of the Living!”
“Quit it,” he muttered in English. “Damn it, that’s not sanitary.”
Well, maybe it was. The coat had been disinfected and was all shrunk and wrinkled. Everything was sanitary. Creosote, chloride of lime, they made the air sting and reek. Every corner, every drain was sterile. But you can’t have people running around kneeling and slopping over like that. It embarrassed him. He had a man to kill, and he wanted to get it over with. As he broke from his grateful patients, he said half aloud, “Too much rumpus about it all. Damn fools, don’t know I didn’t come here to help them.”
A few paces brought him to the square, near the mosque whose golden dome he had seen from afar, days previous, guiding him to vengeance. Coming from a narrow alley, the sudden glare blinded him a little. He squinted, looked around for a place to sit down and rest. His legs were wobbly. To the right was the serai, and the horse market. First get a mount, then find Amru, then wait for the quarantine to end.
Another man was kneeling at his feet. Others, who had come with him, were still pointing at Deever and saying, “This is the hakim. Here he is, he who brought the dead back to life. Yea, this is the Servant of the Life-Giving, verily, Abd-ul-Hai!”
Then it came back to Deever, and all the confusion became order. He remembered the man he had taken from the sled. This was that man: Amru the son of Musa. Deever raised him to his feet. It was strange and rather dizzying, looking at that peaked face, that parchment skin stretched over high cheek bones; a beak of a nose, and sunken, dark eyes. Lips still black and cracked from fever. Deever thought,
“He looks a lot like me. I ought to look worse, but I guess it didn’t hit me so hard.”
Amru said, “My kinsmen in Samarra are dead, all dead. But I have a brother in Imam Daur. Give me the hire of a camel, ya hakim.”
This was the tradition and the custom: whoever directly saves a man’s life is henceforth responsible for his welfare. There was a difference between all those whom Deever and the doctors had treated as routine, and this Amru, whom Deever had singled out for an especial salvation. Thus, it was proper to demand food and necessities.
“I am going north,” Deever said, “when the guards let us out. I’ll get an extra donkey. Have you eaten?”
Amru pointed toward the field kitchen where rations were served to the survivors. Deever handed him some coins. “I have just eaten at the loqanda. There are cucumbers and pilou and eggplants stuffed with mutton. Go and eat, then wait at the serai.”
There were two reasons why Deever gave him coins. If he broke bread with him, he could not kill him for at least three days thereafter. This also was the tradition. Then, as a white missionary, he could not eat with an Arab. The emergency was over, and the officers would shake their heads and frown.
The following day, the quarantine was discontinued. The only mounts available were sorry specimens, and the demand was so high that Deever and Amru dared not waste any time bargaining, or looking for better donkeys. Most of the survivors, it seemed, wanted to get out of that ill-omened town. A haggard horde filed down the headland, then parted, some going toward the boat landing and Bagdad, others upstream, toward Tikrit, Mosul, or north into Armenia.
Deever was worried from the start. First, the crowd. Settling a true believer would be an insane trick. He could not risk it. He told himself this, and added, “And I can’t push these donkeys. They’ll drop in their tracks.”
He was weaker than he realized. He clung to the high pommel of the saddle, and with difficulty kept his seat. Amru was not faring much better. Men and beasts were hardly fit for travel. So Deever and his companion lost ground, for being among the last stricken, they were the last to recover. Bit by bit, the crowd thinned, going in twos and threes. Some followed obscure trails toward unmapped settlements in the plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
That evening, Deever had his chance, for no travelers were within sight or earshot. He drew his revolver. Amru watched, being too weary for much curiosity. “O Man,” Deever said, resting the heavy weapon on his knee, “there is a feud between you and the Shuan Kurds, for the death of one Tahir Beg, the uncle of Jawan Khan. You and a certain Saoud cut my raft apart. Tahir Beg drowned and his life is on your head.”
For a long moment Amru sat there, staring, color slowly receding. His skinny hands clenched, and he swayed a little. He looked about, wildly, scanning the gloom and finding neither light nor friend. He understood now that this was no missionary, but one of those merciless wild men from the Zagros Mountains. He knew all but one thing: whether he would die at once, or whether he would live until some kinsman of Tahir Beg could strike the stroke.
“There is no might and no majesty save in God,” he said. “Verily, Allah gave me into your hands to save me, and now he gave me again into your hands to slay me, and there is no help for it.”
A small bed of coals separated avenger and victim. He did not beg a moment for prayer, nor did he ask if the old man’s kinsmen would come to meet Deever and the victim of vengeance.
“The man who came out in the kuffa, hiding you and Saoud,” Deever went on, “told me, and it was easy for me after that. But do not curse him. He knew that if I did not find you quickly, I would return and kill him.”
Slowly Deever rose. The whole thing was crazy. He could not for a moment deny that Amru’s death was in order. That would be justice and honor, among his own people as well as among the Kurds who had adopted him. But now Deever knew that he could not deal justice; that he had himself blocked justice, by keeping Amru from burial, and by having that lingering flicker of life flame again.
He had faced the desert and he had faced pestilence to win this moment, and now he was wasting it. “Out of hotness into fire,” old Tahir Beg’s words rang in his ears. “Out of fire into hell.” Vengeance leads to vengeance, blood cries for blood, and there is no end to it. Pestilence and famine, flood and war, they do their work, and why need one man exact eye or tooth? Plague in Samarra, Deever decided, wiped out the feud between him and Amru. They had both been in the hands of Allah, and he had spared them both.
So he said, “Take this gun. It is well known among the Shuan Kurds. Give it to them and say that I, Yakoub, was still alive when you found me, after I had taken vengeance on Amru. Alive, but that no doctor could keep me from going where I was bound to go.”
Amru could not understand this. Deever went on, “No one knows but what I died honorably, slaying you as my duty ordered. Now rub your head and go your way, for I cannot kill you, since Allah spared us.”
Amru went. He was more than ever convinced that a saint or, what to him was the same, a madman had twice saved him. He would be afraid not to execute his mission. And Deever knew this, so he turned and went toward Bagdad.
The chain of vengeance was broken by the shattering of this one link. He was free again. And he would surrender to the United States Consul in Bagdad. He was hungry for the fumes of frying bacon, the odor of freshly baked corn bread, the tang of corn whiskey. And these would be waiting, finally. The music would not be too hard to face; not with voluntary surrender following twelve years of the freest life on earth. Perhaps the witnesses against him were scattered or dead. Perhaps the only charge that could stick would be one of obstructing justice.
Though these details scarcely occurred to Deever. He was not planning or calculating. He had qualms about leaving Asima, but after all, she was to all intents and purposes the widow of a man who had died upholding tribal honor. So his head was high and his heart was light as he rode south. He had news for his own people: a way of getting rid of the burden of vengeance. Grandfather was wrong, and someone had to set him right.
ISLAND TRAMP
Originally published in Spicy-Adventure Stories, December 1940.
McCabe was pleasantly dizzy, and he nearly toppled over as he squatted there, beside the homemade still from which palm toddy gin was dripping. When Barney McCabe heard the rustling of the banana leaves behind him, he started, apprehensively, his rugged face in a scowl, his unshaven chin thrust out. Then he recognized the girl who stepped into the moonlight.
“Oh, hello, Malia—what are you doing here?”
Malia’s red calico gown was drenched by the spray of surf; it clung to her splendid body, boldly displaying her beauty. Her brown skin gleamed from palm oil, and so did her heavy black hair. She was the loveliest creature on the island, unless one counted the newly arrived trader’s daughter, who was blonde and slender.
“I don’t hate you like the rest of them do,” Malia said. “And neither does my father. He just pretends to, so the trader gives him presents.”
McCabe chuckled; the sound was merry, but his eyes were bitter. Then he realized that the childlike Polynesians, most of them anyway, were merely trying to be agreeable to both parties of a feud.
“You’d better go home—” He gestured toward the village, which was beyond the headland that jutted into the Pacific. “Beat it!”
Malia’s presence disturbed him. A glamorous, splendid creature, but he was fed up with women. So he told himself, even after the moment of weakening caused by the gleam of her shapely legs and shoulders. He turned toward the primitive still, which was close to his palm thatched shack.
Two blocks of coral held a kerosene can over the fire; a short length of rusty pipe, supported on sticks, slanted downward from the can. When the cold metal condensed the vapors from the boiler, palm toddy gin dripped into the coconut shell bowl. Staying drunk in Pakalafa was just that simple; and as long as
McCabe’s head reeled, he forgot what a fool he’d been, losing his bankroll in Papeete, and then getting a laugh from the dame who had grabbed the dough.
And now, a white trader had arrived and had warned the islanders against associating with a tramp.
Malia’s eyes widened at his brusqueness. Then she came nearer, laid a soft hand on his shoulder, and fingered the tattered shirt. Being fed up with women had its limits. He sat down on an outcropping rock, and caught Malia in one arm. The jasmine blossom in her dark hair exhaled a heavy sweetness, and Malia, her head now pillowed on his broad shoulder, looked up contentedly. He did not need any more gin to intoxicate him. Her generous lips did that.
That kiss made him forget his grudge against women. As he held her closer, and squeezed her until she gasped, he was thinking. “It’s white women that’re no damn good… Malia’s grown up since I landed here…”
There was little doubt as to that last. The branches overhead swayed in the wind, and the leaves made splashes of silver and shadow on Malia’s drenched gown and sleek legs. She snuggled closer for another kiss, and McCabe forgot the hissing still…
* * * *
Later, she asked, “Aren’t you going to give me a drink of that stuff you’re cooking?”
“You won’t like it,” he said, gruffly. He fumbled under the wall of the thatched hut, and found a bit of carved coral which he handed Malia. “I made this for you.”
She got a close look at the little image. “Oh, isn’t it funny! Just like the trader—that awfully long nose and long jaw! But I want a little of what’s in the bowl. He says it’s not good for us, but you drink it, don’t you?”
“All right, try it.”
Malia sputtered, spat out the gin, and made a face. “It’s awful!” McCabe drained the bowl. To hell with Sam Parrish and his high nosed daughter, who thought an island tramp was a bad influence on the natives. His frown relaxed; he was forgetting that he had squandered the stake his father had given him to go to Papeete and open a plantation; he forgot for the moment that he was ashamed to go back to the States and confess that a glib dame in Papeete had taken him for a sucker.
E. Hoffmann Price's Exotic Adventures Page 18
