We needed help and here it was. The generosity of women was something I had come to trust, the younger ones most of all, for they are less calculating, more romantic. Any girl who turned her face to the rain was a romantic, even if she was in the Valley of the Assassins.
We were alone, and unobserved. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”
She turned sharply.
“I am the one who should be afraid,” I said. “I am hiding from them.”
“You hide from Shama?”
“Who is he?”
“You do not know Shama? He is Chief Eunuch. He brought me here.”
“We hide from them all.” Trusting this far, I must trust completely. “My father has been a slave here. I am helping him to escape, and trying to escape myself.”
“I wish you would help me. I wish to escape, too!”
“We can help each other.” I drew her back under the edge of the trees. “We must find a way out. Not the one through the fortress.”
“The gardener takes the leaves beyond the wall for burning. It is a small gate, very strong, hidden in a corner of the wall.”
“Could you take us there? After sundown?”
“We are not allowed in the garden after sundown. Shama himself locks all the doors. That is when the gardeners work and when the chief gardener takes leaves and dead grass outside the wall.”
“He is alone?”
“Two guards are with him. They are huge men, as he is, and very cruel. Everyone warns me I must never be near them. They have killed one girl and several slaves who came too close to that gate.”
Obviously, the gate was important. Why had I not considered the obvious—that in every garden there is debris to be disposed of?
“The eunuch has the key?”
“The only one. It is a very strong lock and a heavy door.”
“Good. Do not be locked in tonight. Get as near to the gate as you can, and wait there.”
“They will kill you!” Her wide blue eyes searched my face. She was young, this one. Too young and tender for such a place as this.
“Possibly. We will avoid fighting if we can, and if we cannot, then we will fight.”
She looked at my turban. “You are a khwaja, a member of the learned class? A wearer of the turban?”
“A physician at times, a student always, but only a beginner where women are concerned. Will you teach me?”
She flushed and said primly, “I doubt if you have much to learn. Go then; if I can, I shall meet you.”
Briefly, once more in our shelter, I explained the situation to my father. He looked at me with ironic amusement. “I see you have not neglected your lessons. I suppose when we go, she goes with us?”
“My father taught me to obtain some profit from each situation,” I said, “and she is lovely!”
The day moved upon leaden feet with no shadows to mark the hours. We shivered and were cold, but colder when six soldiers passed by, swords in their hands, searching. Sometimes the obvious is missed, and they did not investigate our shelter.
The rain helped, for a soldier is ever a soldier, and they wished to return to warm quarters and the games they had left rather than search for men they did not expect to find here, anyway.
Yet the first was a lucky man. Had he bent to look behind the stacked pipes, never guessing there was space behind there, he might have tasted a foot of steel in his throat, a most unappetizing piece of business.
The rain continued, and the thunder in the hollow gorges, growling and rumbling, a sullen brute of thunder, irritable over Allah knows what.
“Three men at the gate?” my father asked. “Three men. Well, I shall have two of them.”
“Two? I did not know you for a greedy man. The least you could do for a growing boy was to let him have the best of it. Two for me, I say.”
“You are a scholar, I the warrior,” my father said dryly. “Each to his trade.”
“You have much to learn of the cub you sired. I have had more to do with the giving of wounds than the healing of them. Do you look to your man, and I to mine, then we shall see who is better at his trade.”
He looked at me with hard, level eyes, amused eyes. Then he stretched out and slept, and I admired him for it, for a good fighting man will eat when there is food, and sleep when there is time, for he never knows when opportunity will come again.
“She is a beautiful girl,” I said as he closed his eyes.
“You think of women at a time like this?”
“Any time is a time for thinking of women,” I said, “and when they thrust the blade that takes my life I shall be thinking of women, or of a woman. If not, then death has come too late.”
The clouds grew heavier, blacker, and thunder rolled its drums to warn of the assault to come. I had a feeling it would be a bad night, a worse night than I had seen.
Yet I wiped the moisture from my blade and looked again at the golden words that said, Killer of enemies!
“Do you live up to your name this night,” I said, “or I shall have no more enemies and no more use for you!”
So saying, I drew my cloak about my ears and went to sleep.
Chapter 56
*
THE HAND OF my father touched my shoulder, and my eyes opened as my hand grasped the blade. “It is time,” he said, “and the storm grows.”
Rising from where I had been seated, I brushed my robe and gathered it about me.
“There was a time,” my father said, “when at the sack of a coastal city we who attacked threw our scabbards away, vowing never to sheathe our swords short of victory.”
“A noble sentiment, so consider mine thrown away; only as it is studded with gems, I shall keep it. Who knows when a ruby will be needed?”
We walked shoulder to shoulder, our blades drawn. When one has lost his freedom it is always a long walk back.
We stopped in the deeper shadows of a tree, looking to the torches that spat and sputtered in the rain. A huge man stood there, wide as the two of us together. “It will take more than a foot of sword to scuttle that ship,” my father whispered. “Let me have him.”
“You have too much appetite,” I said, “but do you take him if you reach him first.”
The huge man was striding about, bawling his displeasure. His was a brutal, bullying manner, and I had never seen a man it would give me more pleasure to bleed.
“Lazy!” he shouted. “Starve a slave and he sleeps; feed him and he fornicates!”
They were coming with baskets on their heads, a line of them moving toward the gate. Seeing no guards, I judged they would be outside, as there was a torch there, also.
A stir of movement in the shadows near the building. It was the girl whose advice had given us this chance, but the big eunuch saw the movement also.
“You, there! Come out from there! Allah, the Holy, the Compassionate, what have we here?”
A guard stepped through the gate. “Give her to us. She would be of no use to you, Laban.”
“Speak for yourself, soldier, and find your own women. In my case the operation was not complete, and I shall—!”
Stepping into the open, I said, “Then I shall complete the operation, Fat One, and open your belly to the rain!”
My father sprang past me, and the big eunuch screamed as he took the steel. Striking aside the blade of the soldier, I lunged, too swiftly! He caught me with but the tip of his point, and it drew blood, but my blade backhanded, and the razor-edge of it half severed his arm. He stumbled back, and seeing their chance the slaves dropped their burdens and rushed the gate.
The soldier I had slashed came at me, but my point pinned him, and my father was at the gate. “Too slow!” he shouted. “Come, take a lesson at this!”
Yet at the moment he would have passed through, the big guard swung it shut. The lock clicked shut. From far away there was a shout and a sound of running men.
The key was gone.
Our chances had gone with it, unless…
“Sta
nd back!” I said, and I jammed one of my sections of lead pipe behind the handle of the gate and close against the socket that held the bolt. Another I hung from a string to a hinge, then lighted both fuses.
“Back!” I shouted. “Stand back!”
“What is it?” My father grasped my arm. “What do you do?”
“The Chinese call it huo yao, the fire chemical,” I said.
The running feet were closer; outside, a guard pounded against the gate.
The strings hissed as the fire crept. My heart was pounding. Was it too wet? Was the book mistaken? Half frightened by the forces I might be loosing, I stepped back, moving my father and the girl with me.
Was it true? That which I read so long ago in Córdoba? That thunder, lightning, and destruction were hidden in that dust?
Armed men were running upon us, light from the torches reflected from their naked blades. Now they were coming through the garden, among the trees…
The night ripped apart with a shattering blast, and a tremendous flame shot up, then another. Something whizzed past my head with an angry snarl, and we were surrounded by a choking, billowing smoke.
Behind us, men stopped running, astonished by the blast of sound, the smoke, and the huge flashes of light. Through the smoke we could see the shattered gate, hanging only in fragments from the bottom hinge.
My father was first through the opening, and we were close behind. The outer guard’s head was blown away, an arm gone at the shoulder; that much I glimpsed as we fled, leaping and bounding down the storm-swept rocks of the mountainside, for as if envious of our blast, the storm broke in all its fury.
Lightning hurled its flaming lances against the mountainside, ripping apart the curtain of the sky with writhing fire-snakes that raced with incredible speed along the naked peaks of the mountains.
We ran shouting into the night, crazy with our joy at being free, and around and before us ran the slaves, free also.
We fell, we scrambled up, charging on, our madness unabated. The meadow was just below, and with Allah to be blessed, Khatib came riding from the shadows. Towering above us were the massive walls of Alamut, and then suddenly, as if from the ground, a dozen soldiers.
My father, berserk with freedom, the storm, and the feel of a sword in his hand at last, sprang to meet them, sweeping the head from the shoulders of the nearest, and then the slaves were upon them. One leaped to the shoulders of a soldier and began tearing at his eyes with long, raking fingers.
I saw only flashing blades weirdly lit by flashes of lightning while the thunder rolled massive drums against the walls of Alamut.
Blood soaked my shirt beneath the mail, blood from my neck wound. Sword in one hand, the girl in the other, we plunged on, and then the horses were there, and Khatib was shouting at us. We sprang to the saddle, my father on the stallion, and I upon Ayesha. The girl sprang barebacked upon the other mare.
We rode, running before the storm, following where Khatib led.
The hammer of the storm beat upon the anvil of the mountain; rain lashed our faces, pounded upon our backs. We switched this way and that across the meadow, dodging soldiers who would stop us and slaves cheering us on, and then we were in a canyon, out upon a narrow ledge that clung to the mountain only by imagination, riding through a cascade that poured down the mountain above us.
Suddenly, livid and white in a brilliant flash of lightning, the Throne of Solomon!
*
WHEN THE SUN of morning broke through the shattered storm, we were riding along a barren slope of rock, then a trail made by djinns, and then we came to a city where no city could be.
Khatib chuckled at my astonishment. “It was built as a refuge before Darius, perhaps by Daylamites…perhaps by whom?”
An ancient town with an ancient shrine on a mountain where men no longer ride. Then Khatib pointed his bony finger at tracks in the earth, fresh tracks. “No! It cannot be!”
We rode across the small valley, we four, and up to the broken wall. No gate remained, only a hollow arch, and towers beside from which stones had fallen. Our horses picked their way with dainty feet among the stones.
Under the wide and empty sky from which the clouds fled like scattered sheep lay the empty streets, the roofless halls, the hoofbeats of our horses echoing hollowly. Beyond the frame of an arch lay a temple poised against a tawny slope, a solitary pillar like an arresting finger against the sky. Then there was a rattle of other hooves, and we drew up.
We waited.
A dozen mounted men and Mahmoud.
Of her own will, Ayesha stepped out toward them, her head up nostrils distended.
“Mahmoud!” My challenge rang against the echoing walls. “Mahmoud! You and I…alone…now!”
“I shall kill you, Scholar! I was always the better man!”
Ayesha stepped toward them; she knew her business, that young lady did, just as she had on that day, long since, against Prince Yury.
He charged upon me, cloak billowing behind. He had always been a good man with a blade. I parried his blow, but he would not be put off and had at me again. He lifted his blade, and mine was too low. He started the downward swing, and death rode its edge.
“I am Kerbouchard,” I shouted, speaking out of our past, “a student and a drinker of wine!”
Involuntarily, his muscles seemed to catch, gripped by memory, by surprise. My own blade came up, and his struck, but the force was gone, and his blade slid harmlessly off mine.
My thrust followed through; our eyes locked, and then his falling body wrenched the sword from my hand, and he struck the pavement on his back, looking up at me. Stepping down from my saddle, I lay hold of my sword.
“When you withdraw that blade,” he said, “I shall die.”
“Yes, Mahmoud.”
“You always bested me. I was a fool to speak to you that day in the garden by the Guadalquivir. ‘A student and a drinker of wine.’ I remembered the words.”
He stared up at me. “How often I remembered them! I hated you!”
My hand tightened upon the sword hilt. “Draw it,” he said, “draw it, and be damned!”
I drew the sword.
Chapter 57
*
WE PAUSED UPON the high road where the sun lay with a white hot hand, and our four horses were restive in the heat.
Behind us, a few miles off, lay Hamadhan, a fair white city in a fertile lovely plain. It was said that long ago, under another name, it had been the capital of the Medes; at the moment I did not care.
Khatib and I faced my father, beside him, Zubadiyah.
“It is here then?” my father asked. “Is it here that we part?”
Two weeks had gone by since the death of Mahmoud on a shoulder of the Throne of Solomon, two weeks in which we had ridden down the mountain and to Hamadhan. From here my father would ride to Basra, on the Persian Gulf.
“And then?” I asked.
“A ship of my own, the broad sea. Men of my own kind.”
“You will find them here?”
His hard brown face broke into a smile, revealing white, strong teeth. “Where there is a sea,” he said, “there are corsairs. Pirates, if you will.”
When Mahmoud died upon the mountain we stood shoulder to shoulder, we two Kerbouchards, prepared to meet the others, but they lacked the will to face our steel, too many had died.
“My way lies to Hind,” I said, “to Rajastan.”
“And mine to the sea again.” He looked at me, understanding what I must do. “For two weeks I have had a son.”
“We shall meet again. Wherever you go, in time I shall find you again.”
We divided the purses of gold that had come from Mas’ud Khan and from Sinan. To my father I gave two mares. Zubadiyah would ride one to Basra. Her mother had been a Circassian, but her home lay near the Gulf.
We clasped forearms in the Roman fashion, and for an instant each stared into the eyes of the other. “You have the eyes of your mother,” he said roughly—and then
he smiled—“but my fist with a sword!”
“My destiny lies there”—I moved my head toward Hind—“you understand?”
“Go,” he said, “it is the way of sons, and better so. A knife is sharpened on stone, steel is tempered by fire, but men must be sharpened by men.”
We rode away then, and when a long way off, I looked back; they sat there yet, gazing after us.
Ayesha was impatient, bobbing her head and tasting the bit. She was ever the mare who loved the road.
Khatib waited, facing east.
“Sundari,” I whispered, “Sundari, I come! I come…!”
Author’s Note
*
I HAVE ALWAYS been fascinated by the period of history dealt with in The Walking Drum and have so enjoyed the writing and researching of this story that I am planning to continue Kerbouchard’s tale in at least two more adventures during the next few years, the first of which will follow Kerbouchard to Hind (India) in search of Sundari.
The place names, titles of books, authors, and dates are factual, the descriptions of places and people are based upon the best contemporary and historical sources, as well as personal observation. On occasion I have referred to places by names now in use for purposes of clarity.
Unhappily, history as presented in our schools virtually ignores two thirds of the world, confining itself to limited areas around the Mediterranean, to western Europe, and North America. Of China, India, and the Moslem world almost nothing is said, yet their contribution to our civilization was enormous, and they are now powers with which we must deal both today and tomorrow, and which it would be well for us to understand.
One of the best means of introduction to any history is the historical novel.
ABU-YUSUF YA’KUB: Succeeded his father in 1184, and ruled for about fifteen years.
ALAMUT: Only ruins are left in a remote corner of the Elburz Mountains in Iran. The fortress was destroyed by the Mongols under Hulegu who found it commanded by a weak ruler. After its surrender the fortress was destroyed with a thoroughness typical of the Mongols. The details of the destruction are provided by ‘Ata-Malik Juvaini in his History of the World Conqueror, translated from the Persian by John Andrew Boyle. Juvaini was a companion of Genghis Khan, and was with Hulegu at the time Alamut was taken.
Novel 1984 - The Walking Drum (v5.0) Page 43