E. Hoffmann Price's Fables of Ismeddin MEGAPACK®

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Out of the blackness of that forbidden apartment came a breath of jasmine, and musk, and nenufar; then a misty, nebulous whiteness materialized, took form before his eyes; the Kashmiri, lovely beyond the maddest of all desires, was at the window, her slim fingers curled about the bars that kept him from her. She smiled graciously, as might a goddess at the adoration of a clown.

  Before that wondrous beauty Musa felt his courage evaporate. Who would dare aspire to such perfection?

  “You are the Emir Musa whom the sultan outbid in the souk?”

  She had mistaken him, a gardener, for an emir!

  “Even so, Lady of Beauty. And I am here to take you to Lacra-kai, where I have powerful friends.”

  “You will take me…if I will go.”

  “But you will go. For I love and desire you as no man ever desired any woman.”

  “But the danger…”

  “Hurry, and we are safe. Didn’t you smile at me as I made my bids, and weep when they took you to the sultan? Surely you will go…tonight.”

  “I might… I will…if…” she conceded.

  “If what?”

  “If you will first uproot those accursed apricot trees to leave a farewell token for that old wine-skin who named one of them after me! They mock me day and night, those female hyenas! Anywhere, Musa… The bars of this window have been sawed at the top. So destroy those trees and then release me.”

  “We have no time.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Then kiss me, Wondrous One.”

  “First uproot those wretched trees and I will deny you nothing. Hurry!”

  A low, rippling laugh, half of delight, half of mockery, urged the gardener to his task as he dropped from his perch upon the wall.

  Vengeance, and the Kashmiri, and then a fast horse…

  * * * *

  “My lord,” announced Absál, shortly after the hour of morning prayer of the following day, “there are numerous letters that require your personal attention.”

  “Write the answers yourself and have them ready for me when I return. I am going to inspect…”

  “A thousand years!” saluted the captain of the guard as he clanked to a halt at the foot of the dais.

  “Why this haste, Isa?” snapped the sultan. “Riots? Insurrection?”

  “Worse than that, my lord. A madman entered the gardens last night and uprooted…”

  “What? My apricots?”

  “Even so. I captured him last night as he was uprooting the last tree.”

  “Carve him in a thousand pieces; Impale him! Flay him alive!” sputtered the sultan. “Bring him in immediately.”

  And then and there the sultan rushed into the garden, cursing the earth, and the heavens, and the powers that made them both. Isa was right: not a tree had been left in place. Each of those precious apricot slips had been uprooted and broken, and now lay wilting in the fierce morning sun, ruined beyond all redemption.

  “All the way from Ispahan,” mourned Schamas-ad-Din as he staggered hack to the throne-room, stunned and dumb from the sight of that ruin.

  Coincident with the sultan’s return from the scene of destruction was the arrival of Isa, followed by a detachment of the guard.

  “The prisoner, my lord,” announced the captain, indicating the heavily shackled culprit.

  The sultan, upon recognizing Musa, exploded afresh.

  Realizing the enormity of his offense, the gardener knew that there remained but to learn the sultan’s fancy in unusual torments. There was no plea to be offered. With dumb resignation he faced the sultan’s frenzy. To say that the Kashmiri had urged him to the deed would but add to the sultan’s wrath.

  As from a great distance now came the sultan’s choking, apoplectic tirade. At the right of the dais stood the African executioner, fingering his crescent-bladed scimitar. And there was the astrologer who had caused him, Musa, to be humiliated before his subordinates. Very trivial it all seemed now. And to the left sat the scribe, calm, expressionless, placidly stroking his long, white beard; there was the man who had urged him to his madness. It all seemed unreal, phantasmal. And the sultan’s torrent of wrath rolled on, threatening torment without end for him, Musa.

  Then the scribe smiled as one viewing a spectacle that, though wearisome, still has its amusing features. Absál, the cause of it all, smiling!

  “It’s his fault, my lord! The Kashmiri told me to destroy them…”

  And thus, incoherently, he blurted forth the entire story.

  The astrologer’s exultation was boundless.

  “Did I not prophesy, my lord? What manner of chief wazir would this old traitor Absál have been?”

  The sultan choked; turned the color of an old saddle.

  The African glanced from one culprit to the other, wondering which would first need his attention.

  And then the captain of the guard put in a word.

  “My lord, this man is stark mad. Absál had nothing to do with it. In fact, it was he who informed me that a maniac was uprooting your trees, and sent me to capture him. But I was too late to save the apricots.”

  “Even so, my lord,” confirmed Absál, after crucifying the astrologer with a glance, “I found him in the caravanserai, drunk with wine and drugged with hashish. He babbled of the affront offered him when my lord with his own hands desired to plant those trees. And he raved of a Kashmiri girl. Look and see whether there are hoof-prints where he claimed that horses were waiting to take him and the girl to Lacra-kai. And see also whether the bars in that window are really sawed through. What? Am I to answer for the frenzy of a madman?”

  All of which convinced the sultan.

  “Anoint, him in boiling oil! Bathe him with molten lead!” coughed the prince, indicating Musa. “No, carve him in small pieces here and now!”

  Four members of the guard, each seizing a limb, dragged the gardener to his knees on the tiles before the dais.

  The African advanced, gauged the distance, twice stamped the tiles and set himself, all poised to strike. The great, two-handed blade rose high, paused an instant ere it began its shearing sweep…

  “Stop!”

  The clear voice of the old scribe startled the African with its note of command, so that the rhythm of his stroke was broken. He lowered his blade and glared at Absál.

  The sultan leaped to his feet.

  “He is not guilty,” declared the scribe.

  “What? Didn’t he admit his guilt?”

  “Even so, he is not guilty.”

  “Explain yourself,” snapped the sultan.

  “Mountain of Wisdom,” began the scribe, “why did you with your own hand set out those trees instead of letting Musa plant them?”

  The scribe’s calm insolence amazed the sultan into answering.

  “Because the learned astrologer had named a fortunate day for their planting. And then this imbecile uproots them, after they had been set out under favorable omens.”

  “Even so, Light of the World,” interposed the star-gazer. “The signs…”

  “Now, by the Prophet’s beard and by your life!” exulted Absál. “This astrologer is the true criminal! He said that such and such was the fortunate hour, and lo, behold them already dying! Uprooted and ruined! What manner of prophecy is this?”

  “My lord…”

  “Silence, fool! He is right. Son of an infidel pig, why did you name such an unfortunate hour?”

  The African renewed his grip on the hilt of his scimitar and sought the sultan’s eye. Two members of the guard advanced toward the stargazer.

  “Impale him in the square. Flay him alive and stretch his hide on the Eastern Gate,” directed the sultan. “And you, Absál, publish a proclamation banishing all astrologers from the city.”

>   “Spare his worthless carcass, my lord,” protested Absál. “Scourge him out of the city, but spare his life. For your apricots are safe and sound. I anticipated that this ass of an astrologer would cast a false horoscope, so I took your trees from the porters and in their place substituted nectarines, which you set out. And thus your apricots await your pleasure.”

  * * * *

  “Absál,” remarked the sultan that evening, as they watched Musa setting out the apricots from Ispahan, “this was all a most curious affair…this Kashmiri, by the way, is not really to my taste. Perhaps you would accept her as a token…”

  “Peace and prayer upon my lord, but forty years ago, when I served in the guard, I had my fill of strife and battle. Why not give her to Musa, so that each may be the other’s punishment?”

  “But you are a subtle man, Absál,” replied the admiring prince. “And now that you are chief wazir, I may be able to devote more time to my gardens.”

  THE HAND OF WRATH

  Originally published in Weird Tales, November 1935.

  “It is a tale they tell of the old days, Sidi, long before the land was infested with British Residents, and Russian agents, and other infidel dogs—saving your honor’s presence! It is a tale of the great wrath of Zahireddin Mahmud, whose vengeance even death could not thwart.

  “But first you must know that the remote ancestor of Zahireddin was Timur, who succeeded in all that he attempted; and though thinned by time, the blood of Genghis Khan’s successor still ran fierce in the veins of Zahireddin. Yet greatness was not written on his forehead, and his only fortune was a stout heart. His mother’s brother and his tall, bearded cousin pursued him from the scant remainder of his heritage; and his troops had forsaken him, since it is profitless to follow an unlucky captain.”

  Ferghana was in flames, a red, vengeful glow in the yawning blackness of midnight. The drumming of pursuing hoofs had died out to a faint mutter; but few and halting and broken were those who still kept faith enough to persist in flight.

  Zahireddin reined in his foaming, winded horse, wheeled about, drew his stained, nicked blade, and faced those few whose hearts were stout as his own. The treachery of kinsmen, having corroded him but for a day, had not yet made his mouth grim, but the drooping black mustaches hinted at its final direction. His nose was straight, and not the commanding beak of the conqueror. Only the implacable resolution of his slightly slanted eyes bespoke the iron heritage of that young man whose chain-mail and spiked helmet had all that night turned aside the weapons of former friends.

  All was gone—so Zahireddin could laugh, and sit erect in his blood-splashed saddle. His men slouched, and their beasts hung weary heads. For a long moment the captain of that battered remnant of the guard confronted his chief, eye to eye.

  “We can not clear the pass, my lord,” he said at last. “We are weary and wounded, and our horses are sinking beneath us. Our bowstrings are soggy, and our arrows are nearly gone. Our armor is ragged as the cloak of a darwish, and the sword’s haft turns in our frozen hands.”

  The captain’s eyes and the eyes of his men shifted as the steel-hard, narrowed eyes of Zahireddin measured them, man by man. The silence finally cried for words, so the captain spoke.

  “Where would you go, ya amir?” he muttered. “The world and the Uzbeks are your enemy. The mountains and the night are your slayers.”

  Zahireddin knew that his men had pronounced a doom. There was a shifting of uneasy horses, and a stirring of haggard men, the sodden jingling of curb chains and mail, scabbard, and quiver. But the captain had not yet wheeled his horse about.

  “My head is worth a helmet full of Uzbek gold,” mocked Zahireddin. The mockery of his voice lay in its softness, and the friendliness that was a reminder of past comradeship. “Take it with you. The Uzbeks will pay…and my cousin will pay them.”

  The battered captain neither paled nor flushed in that bitter moonlight. His head dropped lower, and his red spurs sank into the frozen sweat that caked the flanks of his horse. The beast lurched left, as though something of wood had been scourged to sluggish life by one of the Tartar devil-doctors of the north.

  “Allah is thy protector,” mumbled the captain. And as an apologetic afterthought, a touch of Persian courtesy to smooth the path of desertion, he added, “We return to hold the pass of Koh-i-Zend—to cover your escape toward Samarcand.”

  The captain’s horse stretched weary legs to overtake the retreating guard. The iron bitterness of Zahireddin’s heart crackled in a metallic laugh. He lifted his blade in salute, whipped it sharply to its scabbard, and turned to the slender, muffled figure that bestrode the horse at his side.

  He saw that the slant-eyed Tartar girl was smiling. He called her Jauhara because her name was beyond the limit of a tongue attuned only to Turki and Persian. He remembered the Tartar blood of Timur, his remote ancestor, and smiled back at the long-lashed eyes and golden skin of Jauhara. And then the bitterness returned a hundredfold. Zahireddin shook his head and said to the night; “The blood of the Last Conqueror is thinned by time…those whipped dogs would have followed him to the uttermost, slaying until they were backed to pieces. Me they desert.”

  “Twenty to one, my lord, and yet they feared to take your head for Uzbek gold,” said the Tartar girl. “All is not lost. There is still vengeance. And vengeance waits at the head of the pass.”

  Vengeance. The thought flamed in his weary brain. Zahireddin was young, and it was his favorite cousin who led the pursuit. He saw that Jauhara’s smile was carmine in the frosty moonlight, and that there was neither fear nor doubt in her eyes. He dropped the frozen reins. His lips moved soundlessly as he counted on his fingers, “Ahmad Shah… Mirza Abbas Khan… Nadir Ali the Lion…”

  When he completed the tale of traitors, he saw that Jauhara no longer smiled, but regarded him as though she were a bewildered child. He wondered if he had spoken aloud. Then he wondered what she had seen in the darkness to make her smooth golden features suddenly become so grave, and her wide eyes stare so far beyond the shroud of darkness. It seemed for an instant that the girl saw more than he possibly could see; and he forgot for a moment that he was Zahireddin Mahmud, Amir of Ferghana, and asked, “Which way?”

  Jauhara started, smiled, and gestured toward the ominous red glow far to the rear, the red glow of looted Ferghana.

  “From there, in any direction,” she replied. He laughed grimly at the gallant gesture.

  “Vengeance?” he wondered.

  “Vengeance,” she affirmed.

  Zahireddin gathered his weary horse, and they began the ascent into the black, frosty desolation of the impassable saber-slash that pierced the mountains and led at last toward the gates of Samarcand—golden Samarcand, where Timur, the last conqueror, had once reigned.

  “But even though we conquer the pass,” reflected Zahireddin, “death waits in Samarcand, where Uzbeks guard the gates…”

  But Zahireddin was weary of slaughter and futile flight. He was past pondering and it relieved the surging, roaring fires of his brain to follow for a while, since he had vainly led. There is nothing more futile than a captain whose stout heart has cracked. It made little difference where Jauhara led. The Amir remembered that Tartar women are versed in charms and spells, but he knew that no magic could deflect the hungry blades that lurked along the road. He wondered again what Jauhara had seen in the darkness to give her the faith to speak of vengeance; and then he dismissed all queries.

  The trail became strange, and difficult beyond measure. Zahireddin’s horse floundered, sank, struggled to his feet, then fell, not to struggle again. The Amir disengaged himself, shouldered his Boukharan saddle-bags, and seized Jauhara’s stirrup, to stumble along as best he could.

  Zahireddin, who would saddle a horse to ride a hundred paces, marched on foot. He laughed bitterly and said aloud, “How much lower can
the race of Timur sink?”

  The girl did not for a moment answer. Then she roused herself, sat erect in the saddle, shuddered from the cold that hit like Turki arrows, and said in a low voice, “Vengeance will be your next horse, Zahireddin. And vengeance is not sweet save it be dredged from dregs. Therefore walk, Zahireddin, so that you will never forget.”

  Zahireddin understood. In his weariness of heart and from the battering of his soul Zahireddin’s consciousness had expanded, so that he saw that it was fitting for him to walk rather than to double the load which weighted the Tartar girl’s exhausted horse. It was even fitting that Zahireddin the Amir should walk while a woman rode.

  Jauhara was now strangely silent. Zahireddin again wondered what she saw in the blackness that crowded to the edge of the narrow trail. Once she shuddered, and swayed in the saddle. But the night had become a madness, and Zahireddin feared to touch the Tartar girl. She had promised vengeance out of the dregs of defeat, and it was not fitting that Zahireddin should lay hands on one who had become possessed. A thought burned in his brain for an instant, and he was afraid. Then Jauhara recovered, sat erect again, and murmured in a low, strained voice, “Walk yet awhile, Zahireddin. Vengeance burns around the corner.”

  It was as she said. From the darkness came a feeble, reddish glow as of a fire smoldering behind a rock. And then from the frosty granite and its mantle of implacable snow he saw the irregular, low-arched mouth of a cavern and wondered what enemy awaited within.

  The Tartar girl, however, seemed to know. She slid lightly from the long-limbed horse that had followed Zahireddin’s black stallion through that hacking, arrow-riddled rear-guard action. She strode to the mouth of the cavern and saluted an old man who squatted beside the dull red glow of coals. She spoke, and he answered in the language of the far-off Tartar tribes. Zahireddin understood but dimly. It was scarcely worth understanding.