But, at the time of the kidnaping, the only emotion he felt was worry. Dreadful worry. Why, he loved his wife—and ho, life without her, like a house without a light, a tree without a leaf…
As soon as Hossayn told him the news, he took all his money, all his jewels and whatever of Fathouma’s he could find. As an afterthought, he went to the shop of Baruch ben Isaac ben Ezechiel, the rich Jew.
Better too much treasure—he reflected—than too little. He told himself—since, after all, in spite of his worry, he was still the same Omar the Black—that loot was loot and would always come in handy. Therefore, courteously, he asked for credit; was courteously granted it—for was he not the husband of a Tartar Princess and a captain in the Khan’s palace guard?
The merchant salaamed.
“Do not worry about credit, lord. Take whatever you wish.”
Omar wished a lot, took a lot; and, within the hour, followed his wife and his twin brother up the Darb-i-Sultani, into the north.
All night he rode and all the following morning.
At first, near Gulabad, the land was fertile, with tight little villages and checkerboard fields folded compactly into valleys where small rivers ran. But, toward noon, the steppe came to him.
The heart of the steppe.
The heart of High Tartary.
* * * *
It came with orange and purple and heliotrope; with the sands spawning their monotonous, brittle eternities toward a vague horizon. It came with an insolent, lifeless nakedness; and when, occasionally, there was a sign of life—a vulture poised high on stiff, quivering wings, a jackal loping along like an obscene, gray thought, or a nomad astride his dromedary, his jaws and brows bound up in mummy-fashion against the whirling sand grains, passing with never a word of cheerful greeting—it seemed a rank intrusion, a weak, puerile challenge to the infinite wilderness.
A lonely land.
A harsh and arid land. No silken luxury here. No ease and comfort.
The heat was brutish, brassy. His rheumatic leg ached.
Yet, gradually, he became conscious of a queer elation.
It had been long years—he told himself—since he had left High Tartary. Nor had he ever wished to return. Still—why—it was his own land, his dear land.… “Yes, yes!” he cried; and, almost, he forgot what had taken him here, almost forgot Fathouma. “Here—rain or shine, cloudy sky or brazen sun—is my own land, my dear land! Here is freedom! And here, ever, the stout, happy heart!”
He put spurs to his horse and galloped on, grudging each hour of rest. And afternoon died; and evening brought a gloomy iridescence, a twilight of pastel shades, a distant mountain chain with blues and ochres of every hue gleaming on the slopes; and a few days’ ride beyond the range—he knew—was Nadirabad nestling in the shadows of the old, ancestral castle; and he dismounted and made a small campfire; and night dropped, suddenly, like a shutter, the way it does on the steppe; and out of the night came a mocking call:
“Welcome, brother!”
Omar the Red stepped from behind a rock; and Omar the Black jumped up, sword in hand.
“Dog with a dog’s heart!” he yelled.
“I shall fight you for Fathouma!”
“Fight? No, no! You shall pay me for her—and, by the same token, live up to our agreement.”
So, since curses and threats did not help matters, there was, presently, a deal of money thrown on the ground and a wealth of glittering jewels—some come by honestly, and some less so.
“Enough,” remarked Omar the Red “to pay back the debts to the Nadirabad merchants—and to lift the mortgage on the castle—and for Ayesha and me to live on comfortably for a number of years.”
“For more than a number of years,” announced Fathouma, stepping into the flickering light of the campfire. “Indeed until the end of your days—if you are ready to do your share of proper toil.”
She turned to her husband.
“The soil up yonder, your brother tells me, is fat,” she continued, “and the grass is green and sappy and the water pure. A fine chance, in your own country, for a man’s hard, decent work—even a man of your years—and there we shall live, the four of us, and thrive—God willing!”
“You,” stammered Omar the Black “you said—the four of us?”
“Ayesha and your brother—and you and I. Can you not add two and two?”
Now this—to live once more at home—had been the very thing which, deep in his soul, he had dreamed of and longed for, ever since he had come to the steppe. But it would not do for a man to give in too quickly to his wife.
“Nothing of the sort!” he replied. “We shall ride back to Gulabad and—”
“Listen!” she interrupted.
“Yes?”
She stepped up close to him.
“Would you want,” she demanded, lowering her voice, “your child to be born in an alien land?”
He gave a start.
“My—my child?”
“Mine too.” She smiled. “Our child, before the end of many months. Oh yes—my hair is gray. But,”—blushing a little—“I am not as old as all that.”
Then he took her tenderly into his arms. “By the Prophet the Adored!” he cried triumphantly. “Let it be a man-child, a little son, to you and me! A strong little son! The strongest in all High Tartary—”
“Except,” cut in Omar the Red, “for the son whom Ayesha shall bear to me.”
“Liar!”
“Liar yourself!”
“Drunkard!”
“Unclean pimple!”
Almost, they came to blows.
* * * *
And the end of the tale?
The end of the tale is not yet.
But, up there in the ancient castle in High Tartary, live two white-haired men. White-haired, too, their wives. And the latter exchanging winks when, occasionally, their husbands comment naggingly, querulously, about the morals of Islam’s younger generation, including their grandsons.…
THE STRONG MAN
Outside, solitude, the purple rush of evening; the dying sun spiking a crimson diadem across the snows of the Himalayas, shooting a wedge of light down the Khyber Pass, straight into the stony, sardonic heart of Afghanistan.
Inside, noise, life; coarse, lawless life of coarse, lawless men who squatted on pillows around tabourets, eating, drinking, smoking, chattering, laughing.
They were a picturesque riff-raff of this turbulent northern Indian border. Afghans, Baluchis, Tartars. More rogues than honest men; nor stewing with remorse for past sins—rather stewing with longing for sins yet to be sinned. Cameleers, caravan guides, stable crimps, horse traders, bazaar bullies. Too, a few soldiers of native battalions in the service of the British Raj, and Red Mustaffa himself, the owner of the coffee shop, nursing his paunch in a fragile, creaking English chair perilously tilted against the door jamb.
He smiled benignly and sleepily upon his customers. A pleasant place, he thought, giving him a pleasant living.
He liked it. Liked the odor of roast mutton and garlic and acrid tobacco, the mingling of shifting fire smoke and livid candle wraith, the steam of human vapor, all floating up, companionably enough, toward the low ceiling. Liked the tapestry of faces, scarred and bearded, grotesque and handsome, ruddy and swart and ribald. Liked the symphony of guttural voices swapping spiced news of gutter and barracks and caravan road…voices suddenly stilled as words peaked up, staccato, threatening:
“Silence, O you with the leaky tongue!”
The speaker rose. He stood there, six feet of muscle and brawn, scarlet regimental tunic gay with medals and decorations won on the battlefields of Flanders and Mesopotamia, turban cocked at an arrogant angle, features hawkish, with the chin sticking out like a battering-ram. Kara Yussef he was, soldier of the British Raj though Afghan by nation, with rank and pay of lance-daffadar in the 7th, King Edward’s Own, Frontier Cavalry.
“Your sisters are vile, O creature!” he went on, heaping abuse on salty abuse. “Wah�
��seventeen dirt-fed infidels were your mother’s lovers!”
His hairy hand stabbed down, pulled, brought up, a squirming, squealing Tartar cameleer. The latter twisted, tried to free himself, did not succeed.
“I do not even know you!” he protested.
“You will know me hereafter, O grandson of a wart!”
“But—what have I done?”
“You said things.”
“Just the gossip of the open road, no harm meant. What I heard in the hills—the price of cattle and fodder.…”
* * * *
“You also spoke of a girl,” Kara Yussef shook the other violently—“a girl of the Nadiri, my own tribe.…”
“I did not blacken her face. I only said that, when I passed through the village, there was a telling.…”
“Do not say it again!” yelled Kara Yussef; and, all at once, he planted a capable army boot on the seat of his victim’s loose patched breeches and kicked him across a couple of tabourets and over the outer threshold.
The Tartar picked himself up. He trembled with hate and fear. But distance, even so short a distance, lent a measure of courage.
“And yet it is true!” he shrieked. “I heard it with these ears—saw it with these eyes! Ah—” triumphantly, vindictively, since now he knew what scrap of news had enraged the Afghan—“it is Hajji Goor has the hugging of Jehanna’s slim waist! One week from today she will become his wife and.…”
He interrupted himself.
“Aie!” he gave a cry of terror.
For a dagger had leaped to Kara Yussef’s fingers. It described a shimmering curve; buried itself inch-deep in the door jamb a hair’s-breadth from the Tartar’s quickly ducked head—a hair’s-breadth, too, from the bullet-shaped head of Red Mustaffa, the owner of the coffee shop.
“The Lord His mercy!” he exclaimed. Ponderously, indignantly, while the Tartar ran away, he waddled up to Kara Yussef. “What manners be these; O assassin from the North!” he demanded.
“I lost my temper.”
“And I nearly lost an ear.” He drew the Afghan aside. “Have you, belike, been overly brisk with the bottle? Hah!” accusingly—“there is a hiccough in your throat!”
“I am sober as an angel.”
“But the dagger.…”
“Did you hear what the Tartar said?”
“Vaguely. I was half-asleep. Something about a girl.…”
“Whom I love.”
“Allah—you love so many!”
“Why not? Am I not the sturdy lad? But her I love best. And now.…”
“There seems to be another man—another snake in the cactus hedge.”
“Even so, why kill the Tartar—or me? Would it not be more reasonable to kill this other man?”
“I cannot.”
“Eh?”—incredulously.
“He is my brother.”
And Kara Yussef left the coffee shop. He walked down the street. He thought of Jehanna.
How could he ever forget her—he asked himself—with her slim, proud height, the waxen white of her skin, the ebony of her hair, and the look in her eyes to break young hearts and heal old ones.
How could he ever forget her?
Nearly three months ago he had met her. At that time, his term of enlistment ended, he had had his fill of fighting. So he had taken the long road home across the Afghan border to his tribe, the Nadiri, who tilled a valley east of the Kohee Baba Range; a rich valley that whispered silken to the winds with the swaying of green grasses and red millet, and the hillsides black with trees where dappled deer roamed and wild-birds chirped and ducked.
His parents were dead. Hajji Goor, his only brother, a young lad given to piety and gentle learning, had been away at a religious school in Persia, studying for the Moslem priesthood. But there had been many to wish him the hearty “Welcome home to the mountains, O neighbor of God!”; to tell him the simple news of the past years; to listen to his own epic telling of how he had wandered far, far, warring other men’s wars for the sport of it.
“This scar on my arm”—he had told them that first evening—“look—is where a bullet of the Allemani-log, the Germans, singed me. Stout fighters! But what chance had they when, at night, we crept from our trenches with the red storm of our long knives? And here”—baring his chest—“a wound made by a Turkish bayonet. That was the time I saved the colonel sahib’s life, and later on he gave me this!”—showing a medal and ribbon. “And now I am home, and here I shall abide until my feet itch again and my sword arm. Ah—for a while I shall put this handsome head of mine where I can find it in the morning, all safe and snug!”
The tribesmen had laughed. They were a peaceful folk, content with their narrow bailiwick. Let all the world swagger past with motley glories and truculent weapons…what did these peasants care? They had their fields, their cattle, their orchards. Still, they had enjoyed Kara Yussef’s clanking exploits—Kara Yussef, who even as a child, to quote his own mother, had always been like a snarling wolf-cub in a litter of mild hearth-bred puppies; they had exclaimed:
“Tell us more, O hero!”
Other tales then of Flanders and Mesopotamia. Nor all of them truthful, as, for instance, when he had related how he had challenged the Grand Khan of the Allemani-log, the German Emperor, to single combat, had defeated him and ignominiously kicked him all the way across No Man’s Land, crying:
“Begone, O low Egyptian! Back to your sty, O wearer of a verminous turban!”
Again applause. They had been proud of him.
Then, to an old woman’s question if he would marry, his reply:
“When the right girl comes along I shall whistle to her. In the meantime,” superbly, “it will be for me the kissing of other men’s wives…and is there finer kissing on earth?”
Bragging? Not altogether. For, during the next week or two, the forest might have whispered many a secret of golden words and crimson lips. Indeed he had a way with the women—a way, as we say in our hills, like the sword calling to the scabbard and the plough to the brown earth.
So it had always been with him. Women here and there; in war and peace; passing through his life, his heart, leaving no memory. A Belgian peasant girl in Flanders. A Jewish girl after the taking of Jerusalem. The wife of a Turkish Pasha when his regiment had garrisoned Damascus. Even now, in the city of Peshawar, where his enlistment had ended, a Hindu woman waited for him.
What was her name? Oh yes—Chandravati. So pretty—so faithful.
Let her wait! Let them all wait.
* * * *
At least for a time, the home winds had seemed best, the home women, the home kisses.
Then one morning, not long after his return, he had met Jehanna, the daughter of Abderrahman Terek, the caufila bashee, the caravan master. Her family, too, were of the Nadiri. But she had been born and brought up on the other side of the Kohee Baba Range where her father’s caravans were trading among the Durani clans; had only recently come to the village to look after her grandmother, who was growing old.
Kara Yussef had seen her before the open door of her house, pounding grain with a wooden pestle in a wooden mortar. He had stopped; had thought:
“Here is a new face, a sweet face, and—by Allah the Redeemer—how my heart throbs!”
Aloud he had asked:
“What is your name?”
“I am Jehanna, the daughter of Abderrahman Terek.”
“And I am Kara Yussef.”
“Two days ago I came—and already I have heard of you.”
“Of course,” he had replied, misreading her smile. “The plains know my fame and the bulging, rocky sides of the world.” And, after a pause: “May I tell you a truth?”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
“Words, I understand, frequently on your lips?”
“Words without meaning—until I saw you, and seeing you, loved you. Ah—your head on my pillow—and it is not the King-Emperor of the British himself I would envy!”
He
had been about to sweep her into his arms; had jumped back when her small fist had struck him across the cheek. He had broken into hooting laughter.
“I love you better because of your savagery,” he had said; and walked away—to return the next day and the next and the next—again and again telling her of his love which had grown steadily as he continued to find her chilly, indifferent, rather contemptuous.
No longer, by the end of the week, boasting and bullying. But pleading. Speaking, for once in his life, with humility; speaking to her as he might to a child or a saint; speaking gentle words pulsing with a high, driving tenderness.
“Do you like me—oh—a little?”—humbly, so humbly; until, one day, she had taken pity on him.
“I did not like you at first,” had come her honest reply. “But I like you now.”
“And—you love me?”
“No.”
“I thought you said…”
“To like is not to love. A flower is not a fruit.”
“A flower can ripen into a fruit. Perhaps you will love me some day?”
“Never!”
“But…”
“Never!”—with utter finality.
He had shaken his head. How could this be? He loved her. Why did she not love him? Oh—but she must—she must—some day…and he had thought!
“I know what to do. I shall go away. And she will miss me—will rush into my aims when I come back.”
So he had said to her:
“Tomorrow I leave these hills.”
“Where are you going?”
“To India, to fight again for the Raj. Ah”—he had smiled—“I am so filled with love that I shall have to walk slowly, warily, lest I jolt some of this love over the brimming edge of me.”
Then, suddenly, the Old Adam had risen in him.
* * * *
“Two years I shall be gone, O crusher of hearts,” he had added. “And if, in the meantime, another man should open the shrine of your soul…”
“Yes…?”
“My dagger across his throat—and a shroud for his wedding cloak!”
So, a few weeks earlier, he had returned to Peshawar. Once more he was a lance-daffadar in the 7th, King Edward’s Own, Frontier Cavalry; was once more spending his spare hours between Red Mustaffa’s coffee shop and the little house of Chandravati, the Hindu girl.
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 45