E. Hoffmann Price's Fables of Ismeddin MEGAPACK®

by E. Hoffmann Price

  The chief of the Companions took the trail toward Bir el Asad, and Ismeddin rode northward in the direction of Kuh-i-Atesh.

  * * * *

  A public scribe sat in the marketplace of Kuh-i-Atesh, acting as secretary to all who had petitions to present to the Amir, or letters to write to distant friends and relatives.

  “Write to my brother in Herat,” demanded a tall, fierce Afghan of the Durani clan. “He is ill, and not expected to live much longer. I am returning as soon as I have completed my business in this den of thieves.”

  “Very well,” agreed the scribe. “What shall I say?”

  “What shall you say?” growled the Afghan. “God, by God, by the Very God, you’re a letter-writer, aren’t you? Jackass, do you expect me to tell you what to write?”

  A hunchbacked ancient beggar, wooden bowl clutched in his grimy talons, pushed his way into the front rank of the circle about the scribe.

  “With your permission, O scribe! Say on behalf of this man, ‘From the percussion of the grave and from the interrogation of the grave, may Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate, deliver thee! I, thy brother’—what’s your name, O Afghan?—Achmed?—‘send thee greeting, and after, say that I will shortly leave Kuh-i-Atesh to return to Herat, if it so please Allah.’ Write thus, O scribe!”

  The Afghan’s teeth flashed in a broad smile.

  “Allah grant that thy kindness never grow less! There is a letter that sounds like a letter!”

  The scribe began writing in fine naskh script.

  “Wallah! There is a letter that will do you credit. Let me see it before you seal it,” demanded the beggar.

  He wiped his fingers on his greasy djellab, took the paper by its margin, and scrutinized it carefully. With his index finger he followed the script, spelling out each word as he read it. And then he nodded his approbation.

  “Very good. May your brother prosper, and his health improve!”

  Then, as the scribe attended to the correspondence of his next client, the beggar studied him as closely as he had the Afghan’s letter. One eye, or rather, the lack of one, was concealed by a patch; but the other was keen and piercing.

  The beggar had roamed about the city since morning, crying for alms, and prying and poking about the taverns and the market-places and coffee-houses; but nothing had attracted his attention until he saw the scribe sitting on a rug nearly twice as long as it was wide. When he learned that the scribe was the pious and learned Abdullah ibn Yusuf, the beggar’s interest quickened.

  “A man concealing his true mission,” reflected the beggar, “builds for himself a complete background and history. Now if this fellow were truly the scribe he claims to be, the gossips of Wadi el Ghorab and the other villages he passed through would not all be unanimous in remembering that Abdullah ibn Yusuf hails from al Yemen. Some few would have insisted that he was from Damascus, or Cairo…”

  Ismeddin the One-Eyed Beggar noted that the rug on which the scribe sat was old and thin, and woven in the days of his father’s grandfather: its deep reds and solemn greens, the intricate perfection of its pattern, its very dimensions and proportions had a vague significance to Ismeddin.

  “This may not be Captain Rankin, but this is a part that he might play…”

  The scribe was doing a good business. In addition to his harvest of coppers and small silver coins, he reaped the day’s crop of gossip, and the hope, and fear, and jest, and misery that stalked between the lines he wrote at the dictation of his clients.

  The correspondents by proxy had for the moment given the scribe a breathing spell. He yawned, stretched himself, and set aside the tile with its ink-saturated mass of silken threads that served as an inkwell.

  Ismeddin approached and squatted on the ground before the scribe.

  “Ya, Abdullah,” he began, “may Allah prosper you! Thy generosity is my evening meal!”

  The scribe tossed a copper coin into the ever-yawning bowl.

  “Allah requite thee, O scribe!” acknowledged Ismeddin.

  Then, hearing the tramp of feet and the sound of arms carried by men marching in cadence, he turned, and saw a squad of soldiers escorting a prisoner to the public square. Following them came an executioner and his assistants.

  “Some one is going to die an unpleasant death,” observed Ismeddin. “Judging by the implements that black fellow is carrying, it will be uncommonly savage.”

  “God alone is wise, all-knowing!” ejaculated the scribe, with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders.

  Ismeddin’s keen eye caught not a trace of the compassion or horror that even the most calloused infidel would betray at the sight of a man marching to a lingering barbarous doom. Nevertheless, there was something strikingly familiar about those eyes, and that nose.

  “He goes to a savage doom,” repeated Ismeddin. “For a trifling offense.”

  Then, staring fixedly at the scribe with his hard, glittering eye, “Captain Rankin, he goes to a feast compared with what you are facing.”

  “You call me by a strange name, O Grandfather,” replied the scribe. “Possibly you mistake Abdullah ibn Yusuf for some one else?”

  But for all his calmness, Captain Rankin knew then and there that he was in exceeding peril; and he knew also that the hunchback had penetrated his disguise.

  “There is no mistaking Captain Rankin,” answered Ismeddin. “And to steal the Holy Carpet is a hazardous enterprise…cease fingering the butt of that pistol…shooting an old beggar would by no means further your cause.”

  “I reached for a purse, not a pistol,” lied Rankin. “And suppose that you go with me to the Amir, to tell him that I am planning to loot the shrine of Imam Ismail.”

  The darwish smiled in recognition of an equal well met.

  “What would that get me? The Amir would doubt that you are an infidel, and wouldn’t believe that you were foolhardy enough to attempt such a mad feat. He would have me beaten, and you would go on with your scheme. By no means, sidi Rankin! I prefer to wait until you have committed yourself far enough to make my knowledge acceptable as truth.”

  “This,” thought Rankin, “is no fanatic, but a blackmailer.”

  And then, to Ismeddin, “And how would you gain by exposing me?”

  “A better chance to steal the Holy Carpet myself!” replied the darwish.

  “Here are a hundred tomans,” countered Rankin, producing a heavy purse. “And at the completion of my mission, another hundred, for your good will.”

  “I take refuge in Allah!” ejaculated Ismeddin piously, declining the purse.”I am seeking the Holy Carpet, and not a bribe!”

  “But,” protested Rankin, “we can’t both take it. And if we work against each other, we may both end by being sawed asunder between two planks.”

  “Let us cast lots then,” proposed Ismeddin, “so that one of us will withdraw and leave the other a clear field.”

  “Better yet,” replied Rankin, “let us make a wager: whoever shall hold the other’s life in his hands and yet refrain from exposing his rival, that one shall take the carpet. And the loser, for his good will, shall have from the winner a purse of a hundred tomans.”

  “Make it a thousand,” said the beggar, whom Rankin had by this time appraised as no more a beggar than he, Rankin, was a scribe.

  “Five hundred, and my blessing, Old Man!” countered Rankin.

  “Done, by Allah!” agreed Ismeddin. And then, as he picked up his wooden bowl, “I am starting on the quest this very hour. And since I knew you for Captain Rankin, it is but fair that you know that I am Ismeddin, and that I am neither hunchbacked nor one-eyed. W’as salaam!”

  Whereupon Ismeddin the Darwish limped toward the Herati Gate, crying to all true believers for alms.

  “Ismeddin no more wants the Holy Carpet than I want ball-bear
ing eyeteeth,” reflected Rankin. “And five hundred tomans is much more than he can get for my tanned hide, so he’ll not betray me, though he’ll probably waylay me on the road from here and take both the carpet and the purse. And that’s a chance I’ll have to take…”

  Rankin picked up the implements of his adopted profession and sought the caravanserai where he kept his baggage and stabled his mule.

  That afternoon, Rankin wandered about the bazaar, making sundry purchases. The horse and arms he left in charge of a venerable retired soldier—or brigand, Rankin couldn’t decide just which—whose hut was just outside the city wall, not far from the Herati Gate. Despite several flasks of potent ’araki which the old fellow drank like water, Rankin’s friendly inquisitiveness failed to uncover the grizzled raider’s history and background, or to spur him to boastfulness. That, and the promise of a second purse, payable when Rankin returned to claim his property, gave excellent assurance of fidelity and discretion.

  Late that night, Abdullah the Scribe mingled with the crowd that followed an outbound caravan past the city gate to wish it a safe trip, and a prosperous return. But the scribe was not with those who returned when the caravan had passed beyond earshot of the well-wishers.

  The next morning, when the gates opened, a brother of the order of dancing darwishes picked himself up from the dust where he had slept, performed the ritual of morning prayer, and entered the city. Rankin’s following in the trace of the caravan for several hours, and then marching back to the city, after assuming the costume of a dancing darwish, had made him convincingly travel-stained and weary: and the sentries enjoyed their fill of gossip from Damascus, with which the wandering brother regaled them before he sought the monastery.

  * * * *

  It was mid-afternoon of the day when the wandering brother from Damascus entered the city that the Amir of Kuh-i-Atesh sat beneath a striped awning on the flat roof of his palace, sipping Shirazi wine to his heart’s content and his soul’s damnation.

  He thrust aside the freshly replenished glass and pointed toward the city gate.

  “Mashallah!” he exclaimed. “What’s that?”

  Footmen armed with staves which they plied lustily were beating aside the crowd as they shouted, “Gang way, O uncle! Make way for the Holy Darwish, Ismeddin! Careful there, ya bint! The pious pilgrim, Ismeddin! Gang way! Watch yourself, grandfather!”

  Following the footmen, and filing through the Herati Gate, just past the guard, came eight camels, richly caparisoned and splendid with silken halters and silver bells. They bore on their backs musicians who alternately played Chinese and Hindustani music.

  “Wallahi! Yallahi! Billahi!” swore the Amir, as the wailing notes of pipes and the clang of gongs and the thump-thump-thump of kettle-drums mingled with the shouts of the footmen. “Look at that ragged loafer mounted like a prince on a blooded mare! Bring him in right away, Mansur.”

  Four horsemen arranged in a square were now clearing the Herati Gate, mounted on trim, spirited desert horses. Each carried in his hand a lance: and on the four lance-heads they supported a canopy of crimson brocade splashed with gold, and decked with clusters of plumes.

  Beneath the canopy, astride a bay mare with gilded hoofs, rode Ismeddin, arrayed in a ragged djellab and a turban even more disreputable. With one grimy talon he reined in the mare; and with the other he stroked his long beard, and half smiled to himself.

  “Make way!” shouted the footmen. “Gang way for Ismeddin!”

  Ismeddin dipped into his embroidered saddle-bags and scattered handfuls of silver coins to the right and left, raining largess on the loafers and beggars that crowded the city entrance.

  As the procession approached the palace, the footmen arranged themselves in two groups at the entrance. The musicians, still playing, countermarched; and Ismeddin’s mare, stung by her rider’s savage spurs, leaped with a great bound from beneath the canopy toward the entrance of the palace, where Ismeddin’s strong hand on the curb reined her back on her haunches.

  Ismeddin dismounted and tossed the reins to a groom.

  His retinue and their beasts were taken in charge by the Amir’s steward.

  “My lord,” announced Ismeddin as he was presented to the Amir in the reception hall, “I sought you empty-handed. But it pleased Allah that on the long march from Kabul I inherited various possessions.”

  “Allah alone is Wise, All-Knowing!” exclaimed the Amir piously. “I have heard of your heritages before.”

  “And therefore,” continued Ismeddin, “I am presenting to you the various beasts and trappings I acquired on the road that led me to the shadow of your magnificence.”

  “There is lavishness for you!” acknowledged the Amir.

  “Rather say that the splendor of my lord’s presence is better than horses and goods,” countered Ismeddin.

  And thus they exchanged compliments and gifts.

  Coffee was served, and bread, and lamb grilled on skewers, and stews and pilau.

  “El hamdu lilahi!” exclaimed the darwish as he stuffed home the last morsel of food. And then, “Ya Amir, I am a man of honor, and in the old days I ate your bread and salt; therefore I give you fair warning.”

  “There is neither might nor majesty save in Allah, the Great, the Glorious,” intoned the Amir gravely. “But what might this warning be, ya Ismeddin?”

  “Your city is favored by the presence of the shrine of the Imam Ismail, may Allah be pleased with him, and with the dancing darwishes who guard it. I have come from afar to seek the Holy Carpet that hangs before the tomb of Imam Ismail.”

  “Allah, by Allah, and again, by Allah!” swore the Amir. “Is it possible that you demand the Holy Carpet as a present?”

  “No, my lord,” replied the darwish. “I have come to steal it. And having eaten your bread and salt, I am bound in honor to declare my intention, so that you may be warned.”

  The Amir smiled, and stroked his beard for a moment. Then he struck his hands thrice together. An officer of the household advanced to the foot of the Amir’s dais.

  “Harkening and obedience, my lord!”

  “You, Mansur,” directed the Amir, “will give to Ismeddin a horse from my stables, and a brocaded robe, and a purse of a thousand pieces. And let Qasim give him ten cakes of bread, a measure of wine, a quarter of dressed meat, each day that Ismeddin is with us. Also detail ten slaves to wait on him as long as he honors us with his presence.”

  The Amir paused a moment, and then continued, “And you, Zayd, post a company of the guard about the monastery of the holy brethren. Draw a line skirting its walls at a distance of twenty paces. As for this Ismeddin, the guard will shoot him in his tracks if so much as the nail of his great toe or the tip of his little finger crosses the line.”

  Then, to Ismeddin: “See how I esteem your company. I have made the stealing a long task, even for one of your skill. Therefore take it if you can, and it is yours.”

  “Do you give me your word that if I can escape beyond three days’ ride, it will be mine, and that you will not hold it against me, or demand reprisal of whoever gives me protection?”

  “Even so, and let these be witnesses!” agreed the Amir, indicating the officers of the guard and the lords of the court.

  * * * *

  That night, the secret wine-bibbers and the public coffee-drinkers marveled over their bubbling pipes at the mad darwish who had proclaimed his intention of looting the shrine.

  The dancing darwishes were aghast at the blasphemy, and reassured by the presence of the guard, and the broad white streak of lime that marked the deadline that Ismeddin would have to cross in the face of rifle fire. They heard the mounted sentries riding their beats along the city wall, against which the monastery was built, and were further assured that the audacious looter could not climb from the wall into the monastery. And th
ere was one among the brethren, a new arrival from the college of dancing darwishes in Damascus who was likewise assured by the guard the Amir had posted. This holy brother’s assurance, however, was mixed with wonder at Ismeddin’s brazen announcement.

  “Ismeddin is certainly bent on winning the loser’s purse,” said Rankin to himself. “There’s absolutely nothing to be done in the way of refraining from exposing him! Unless he does the impossible and passes the sentries, so that I can nab him in the act of taking the carpet… I wonder if he’s allowed for my getting into the monastery at all, much less entering before they posted a guard!”

  On the whole, Rankin felt that even though Ismeddin’s demonstration might mask a subtle plan for looting the shrine, he, Rankin, had the advantage, since it would manifestly be easier to leave the monastery than to enter under the eyes of the guard. The theft of the carpet was, after all, nothing compared to observing the daily routine of the order of dancing darwishes, and carrying his life exposed to keen eyes ready to note the slightest false gesture, or word spoken out of character.

  * * * *

  Ismeddin spent the following day wandering about the city, loitering in the souk, smoking and drinking coffee, and basking in the wondering stares of the populace, every last man of whom had heard of his mad quest. And since madmen are favored of Allah, their infirmity being a sign of especial holiness, the darwish was received as a saint by the hangers-on of the coffee shops, and the upstairs rooms where true believers, following the Amir’s example, drank themselves drunk with wine and ’araki, in defiance of the Prophet’s precepts.

  That afternoon, not long before sunset, Ismeddin approached the monastery and took his place at the plainly marked deadline, twenty paces before the wall, and in front of the entrance. He could look in through the arched doorway, and see, at the farther end of the hall, the Holy Carpet hanging before the shrine of Imam Ismail, magnificent in the dim shadows, and shimmering silkily where bands of late sunlight crept through the barred windows and marched across its surface.