by Harold Lamb
Ayesha had disappeared for a few moments, and returned irresolutely with downcast eyes. She whispered angrily that there had been spies in the hills, who carried word of the raid down to Isfahan. The Bakhtiari had paid no attention to Gregory—had not even taken the two horses that he had led in and tied near the tent. Now, except for Ayesha, they had all vanished up the mountain. Three officers, seeing the lighted tent, came over to investigate, and Ayesha went back into the tent.
Gregory explained that he was an American, visiting the mountains for scientific research, and they asked for his passport. They were young men armed with ornate scimitars hung reversed and low on their hips. Excited and pleased by the combat and pursuit, they spoke affably in French:
“And the girl who was here, Monsieur; what is she?”
“That is my affair.”
“Then she is yours?”
“Yes.”
They smiled, and began to talk about the raid. Gregory went into the tent for a bottle of whisky, and saw that Ayesha had discarded her ornaments, thrusting them under his blanket. She had drawn the veil up over her head and cheeks and sat impassively in the darkest corner. When he told her there was no danger she did not answer.
After stiff drinks out of the American’s aluminum cups, the officers seated themselves and lighted cigarettes. They explained that some forty Bakhtiari riders had held up a convoy of motor lorries carrying rice and wheat. The Bakhtiari had rifles—a crime under the new law. But the soldiers had been forewarned of the raid, and their troop had trailed the lorries, coming up and firing at once. They had killed Muhammad Ali, the leader of the tribesmen, with half a dozen others, and had taken prisoner the most active of the raiders.
Gregory thought of Muhammad Ali, Ayesha’s father, who had welcomed him to the village. Probably Ayesha had known of his death, although she had not spoken of it.
BRING the prisoner,” one of the officers commanded; adding to Gregory, “He fought us all, when he was alone.”
An orderly standing by the horses saluted and went off, returning presently with another soldier who held his carbine unslung. Before them limped a young tribesman, his wrists roped in front of him. He seemed to be wounded in the leg, and dried blood from a scalp cut streaked his lean face. But his eyes gleamed savagely as he stared at the closed tent. His sheepskin coat hung loosely over his bare shoulders. Gregory remembered seeing him the first day in the ravine.
“He is a devil,” said the captain.
The tent flap opened and Ayesha came out, moving slowly to the American’s side. The officers exchanged glances, and said nothing.
“Barak,” she whispered.
The captive seemed to heed her not at all. He breathed deep, his head turned up to the clouds, and he crooned in his throat. Gregory caught the words of a song he had heard before among the tribes:
“Where the north wind whispers,
You have chained my feet,
And I wait. But never, never,
Will you chain my heart.”
Barak spat on the ground, and turned away from them to the soldier with the carbine. And Ayesha’s heart stirred in her. She had heard Barak singing this love song when he watched over the ravine, free as the eagles that circled above the rocks—and then had scattered her goats, calling her “Child.” In the glow of the lantern she saw the dried blood upon his cheek, and an agony of fear swept through her.
“Do something,” she whispered to Gregory. “Ai, soon they will take him away and shoot him. You are an Amrikai sahib—protect him.”
Gregory shook his head. There was nothing on earth he could do. Under the veil Ayesha caught a strand of hair between her teeth, to keep from crying out. Barak would not look at her, and if she spoke the soldiers would only be amused. She had never felt pain in her heart before, and all the other men faded into nothingness beside Barak, who loved her, and who would be shot dead.
Then her eyes smiled up at Gregory and she drew him into the darkness beside the tent. “Please,” she explained swiftly, “O Sarkar, do this for me. I am afraid of these soldiers. Saddle a horse, the fine white horse, and take me back to my people. Now, at once. Please!”
Gregory nodded and went to the white horse. Before he had untied the picket rope Ayesha staggered up with the saddle and headstall. In the darkness she worked more swiftly than he—forcing the bit between the horse’s teeth and buckling the earstrap, hissing soothingly. He tightened the cinch, and took the rein over his arm.
“First,” she warned him, “you must go to the officers and explain. Say you will be back soon—give them some more of the drink that makes them laugh and talk loud.”
“Do you wish to go away, Ayesha?”
“Certainly.” She tugged the rein over her arm. “I am frightened.”
“Then we’ll go,” Gregory responded slowly. When they came into the lamplight, Ayesha leading the horse, he made his apologies to the officers, and told them to help themselves to the whisky while he was gone.
“Please,” Ayesha whispered, as the officers took up the bottle with alacrity, “bring me Malikeh. The kitten.”
When Gregory reached the kitten’s box, he heard a stir behind him and the clank of a cup falling to the ground. Looking over his shoulder he saw a good many things happen at once. Ayesha had drawn the horse a little away from the tent, and she must have said something to Barak unheard by the others. For the stirrup was within his reach when the prisoner turned suddenly.
Flinging his roped arms over the saddle horn, Barak thrust his foot into the stirrup, and Ayesha clasped his waist, lifting the wounded man with all her strength. As Barak settled in the saddle, the white horse swerved, and Ayesha tossed the rein over the saddle horn, catching hold of the stirrup leather as she did so. In the next second, as Gregory ran out, the three were racing around the tent.
The officers reached after the girl in vain, while the soldier ran to one side and brought up his carbine. He fired once, before Gregory knocked up the weapon. A thudding of hoofs, a scattering of stones, and the white horse vanished behind the tent.
With all his nerves tense, Gregory walked to the tent ropes and searched the ground. But there was no sign of a wounded Ayesha. The hoof beat vanished into the darkness. He came back into a tumult of orders and cursing, while the nearest cavalrymen ran to their horses.
“Do you shoot down women?” he demanded of the captain.
The angry Persian glanced into the set face of the American, and shrugged. “You do not understand. You ought not to be in the Karatagh. Now you have lost a horse.”
THE troopers did not come up with Barak. Hours later the white horse was walking up a trail in the ravine of the Stone Riders. It moved slowly because Ayesha walked beside it. Behind her crowded the black goats that she had taken from the pen after hearing the soldiers turn back into the rain.
They plodded on in silence, and there was no longer any pain in Ayesha’s heart. Barak never took his eyes from the dark head that moved beside his knee. Once he leaned down until he could look into the girl’s face, dim in the half light before dawn. He drew a long breath of satisfaction and whispered:
“Eh, thou art brave, my heart. My life is in thy hand.”
“Nay”—she swallowed a sob—“mine is in thy hand. I—I am a child.”
Barak laughed softly. “Now,” he said, “O my loved one, thou art a woman.”
At sunrise, down below the ravine of the Stone Riders, John Gregory finished packing, piece by piece, the priceless jewelry that had once belonged to the favorite of a great king. He worked very slowly, a cold pipe between his teeth, and when he held the last strap in his hand he did not fasten it. From the box in the corner Malikeh whined, and he looked down at the gray kitten. “Damn!” he said heartily.
At Alexander's Palace
ANDY BEVAN put a fragment of pottery among a ring of other fragments. He shifted the pieces about until they assumed the shape of a broken bowl—a bowl that had been broken, he knew,
some twenty-two centuries ago. For more than two thousand years those pieces had waited under the heaping earth until Andy Bevan’s men had dug them up again at the four-foot level. To be exact, four feet below the surface of his excavation of the Kangavar mounds in the desert of northwestern Persia.
Only an expert could have reassembled the particles of that bowl from the mass of shattered potsherds on the canvas before him. To Andy Bevan, however, the bowl was just a detail of a long day’s work. Leisurely, because he was tired—having done the work of three men for the greater part of three years—he placed the fragments in a small bag and marked the bag, with an indelible pencil, D—7—4. D was the mound, 7 was the segment of the mound, and 4 the level in which the bowl had been found. Rising, he turned to a wall map of the excavation and marked the spot in red ink with a cross and a circle. These red crosses on the map all converged toward a blank corner where no digging had been done as yet. Bevan had been excavating Kangavar for three years and still the job was not done. He would not stop until it was done.
He was, you understand, that kind of man. He had sandy hair and a long chin and meditative eyes. Dust and sun and scanty food, bad water, fever and dysentery had thinned and made brittle all six feet of him. Under a mask of quiet he hid a flaming temper. When you have lived twenty out of twenty-eight years east of Suez you learn to be quiet. . . . Bevan had two dozen men and their families to feed and doctor and keep in a good humor—twenty Kurdish tribesmen who, like children, worked well only when driven; and the American drove them, impassively. Beside his desk stood a rack with five rifles locked in it. The key of the rack was on the ring in his pocket, and he had had no need of it.
The room in which he worked had a roof pieced out of canvas; the floor was priceless mosaic, the walls polished limestone. It had been the hall of the ruined palace that he had dug out of the earth, the small palace that he now knew had been built by Alexander the Great, that indomitable conqueror of Asia twenty-two centuries ago. The slender marble throne beside Bevan’s camp chair had been Alexander’s.
Beyond it on the table loaded with books and notes, lay dusty piles of personal letters, among them one particular letter from the university explaining with regret that owing to the change in financial conditions no more funds could be remitted to Bevan in Persia for the Kangavar expedition. After receipt of that letter, Bevan’s co-workers, the professor from the university and the French expert in Seleucid art, had gone home, perforce. But Bevan had stayed on.
A DIGGER, naked to the belt, with a bag on the back of his head, came striding in from the glare of sunlight.
“Ai Beg,” said the digger, smiling. “Oh, Master, now at last Hassan has come. Listen!”
An auto horn blared, and men shouted. Bevan leaned back, filling his pipe slowly. So Hassan had got in safely with the provisions from Aragh. Aragh was the nearest point of civilization one hundred and thirty-odd kilometers distant over the desert plain, with a British consulate and a telegraph office (messages in Persian only accepted). Bevan hoped that Hassan had been able to sell the saddle horses for a good price, and that he had not gambled away the money, or been waylaid by tribesmen on the return journey.
But when the stalwart Persian headman came in, he nodded casually. “Was it women or backgammon that kept thee this time, Hassan?”
“Ai Sarkar,” exclaimed Hassan. “O Lord, it was neither the one nor the other. I have news." He beamed triumphantly: “Two travelers have been carried off by the tribes. Two rich, lordly Americans—” he called them Amrikai—“like Your Lordship but in a beautiful new automobile, much finer than our old broken automobile.”
Rich Americans, Bevan reflected, had never ventured in automobiles within this desert before now, and news in Persia had a way of growing amazingly in the telling. Probably the genesis of the tale might be the breakdown of a car belonging to some member of the Aragh consulate.
HASSAN, however, was afire with the certainty of his innocence and the importance of the tidings.
“One of the Lurs told me. It is all true. He said the car lost its way when it was trying to find this place. Those Americans being without sense asked the way of a band of Lurs. The Lurs guided them into the hills to the house of Ali Khan. Now Ali Khan is holding them for a ransom of thousands and thousands of tomans. Otherwise, he will kill them.”
This, Bevan realized, had the ring of truth. The Lurs of the neighboring hills were childishly simple in such matters, especially the Sakvand Lurs under the leadership of the impulsive Ali Khan. They had a proverb that the uncaught thief is king, and Ali Khan reigned in his hills.
Under cross-examination Hassan added convincing details—one of the Americans had a picture-machine, the other was a lady without a hat or veil. The Inglisi consul-khanak (British consulate) knew nothing about it, and the amnieh, or road police, in Aragh said they knew nothing, although that was a lie. Unless an order came from Teheran, the road police would never risk their skins against Ali Khan’s bullets.
Bevan sighed. “All right. I’ll go up in the car this evening to talk to Ali Khan.”
The Persian overseer had an idea of his own. “These captive Americans are very rich, while we are eating poverty. Bring them here and make them pay us the ransom of millions of tomans.”
Bevan looked at him thoughtfully. “We might do it, at that," he said, but he said it to himself.
THE blinding eye of the setting sun guided Bevan into the foothills that began to turn from purple to gray in the moment when the sun’s rim dropped out of sight behind the higher peaks. The golden haze vanished, leaving the desert stark, revealing the skeleton of a donkey with bluish shreds of skin upon it. Jackals had eaten out the carcass of that donkey, and vultures had gorged on the jackals; by now perhaps ants had feasted on the dead vultures. Life sustained life, because there was no other source of life here. It was in obedience to this law of survival, older than any code of the Medes and ancient Persians, that men preyed upon men, Bevan mused.
A half moon stood in the sky behind him as he switched on his headlights, twisting among the rocks at a gully’s entrance. Bevan knew that the trail up to the Lur village started here—and he saw winding ahead of him the tracks of broad, new tires.
That trail had never been made for cars. Bevan crawled around the shoulder of a hill and began to zigzag up until a rifle flashed above him.
The bullet whined overhead, and after it came a wailing challenge:
“Anja bayad bemaneed. Stop there!” Bevan stopped the old car, switching off the noisy motor and the lights as well as a matter of precaution. “Nay,” he shouted at the moonlit hillside, "I go to the village. O fools, I am the guest of Ali Khan.”
And, since only seeing is believing with the tribes, he lighted his pipe with a match held close to his face. Presently two figures scrambled down from the rocks and bent over the car curiously. “What man art thou?”
“The Amrikai Sarkar of Kangavar camp. To the house of Ali Khan I go.” One figure said to the other: “Verily, it is so. I have seen his American Lordship of Kangavar palace, and this is he.”
Panting and shouting, they ran ahead, while he guided the car up the hillside to the gate of a walled village. Then, with their rifle butts, they beat back a throng of ragged hillmen that surged around Bevan. Veiled figures loomed upon the flat hut tops, and a boy ran up waving a torch. Smells of dirty wool, of cattle and of age-old drainage pierced the air with the sting of acids. Except for the rifles, Bevan might have walked into a village of two thousand years ago.
At the door of Ali Khan’s house, where Bevan removed his boots, a Lur with a blood-stained turban and two bandoliers of cartridges held off the crowd and eyed the American askance for an hour until the Khan was ready to see him. Then Bevan was ushered by two warriors into the room of state where Ali Khan sat on cushions against the wall with a score of his headmen, mullahs, and councilors ranged on either hand—looking like shaggy wolves sitting in judgment upon a stray dog.
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“The Peace,” boomed Ali Khan, “be upon thee, O Sarkar.”
He was as bulky as a bear, wrapped in a cloth-of-gold coat ornamented with an array of military medals impartially British and Russian—probably collected from the bodies of slain soldiers but very possibly earned. A blind white eye and a restless black eye flashed from a dark, pock-pitted face. A man of action, vain and hospitable and wayward as a child. So Bevan judged him. They had never met before, but the American had fed many of his Lurs who dropped in at the camp as a matter of course when they were hungry.
Bevan decided that argument would be wasted on Ali Khan, and it would also be a mistake to threaten him before his men.
“I have come,” he said bluntly, “to take away my two guests who are here.”
“Nay, what have I—?”
“Thou knowest that these two, Amrikai like myself, lost their way when seeking my house. Thou has sheltered them for a day and a night. Good. But they are my guests, under my protection. Now I will take them with me.”
Bevan paused to let the Lurs ponder this. Hospitality was one of the rigid laws of the hills. If a blood enemy entered the walls of Ali Khan, he would be entertained like any other guest until his departure, when he might be shot down conveniently upon the road outside the walls. Also, the feudal code was still binding in the hills. If harm came to any man under the protection of the Khan, the honor of the Lur chieftain would require that he be aided or avenged as the case might be. Now Bevan had claimed the two wayfarers as his own guests.
“THEY travel in thy face, O Sarkar?”