The Walking Drum

by Louis L'Amour

  I wanted to give him an excuse to keep me alive.

  Quickly, I discovered that I knew more than he, for he was the victim of his own isolation and knew little that had happened in alchemy since Jabir ibn-Hayyam, known to the Franks as Geber.

  He possessed the most complete library of the works of Jabir that I had seen, and Jabir's methods had been sound, his knowledge of alchemical relationships beyond the usual. Aside from his search for a means of making gold, he had studied the manufacture of bronze, steel, and the refinements of metals. He introduced new methods to the dyeing processes. He knew how to produce concentrated acetic acid by the distillation of vinegar, the use of manganese dioxide in glass manufacture, and much else.

  Several experiments of which Sinan had only heard, I reproduced for him ... or perhaps he was but testing my knowledge. Despite my restlessness, I enjoyed knowing him and enjoyed the work. I possess a deep respect for men of knowledge and of inquiring mind, and I am only impatient with those who allow themselves to vegetate.

  At last I had been escorted back to my quarters, and I lay down, thinking of the door.

  Twice that day, eunuchs had come into the workroom, and where eunuchs were there were usually women.

  And where was Sundari? Far and away upon the road to Hind, going to the land of her marriage. And here was I, virtually a prisoner. A stealthy step in the outer hall, a rattle of keys. Rising to my feet, in one swift movement I drew my sword.

  The door opened, and Mahmoud was there with two guards who were not those I remembered. "You will not need that"—he indicated the sword—"but bring it if you wish." He smiled in a way I did not like. "Bring your kit. Tonight we go on an errand of mercy."

  Sheathing my blade, I took up my bags and followed. We walked swiftly and silently along the passage, across the court where a few drops of rain were falling, and past the workroom where I had spent much of the day, and down the passage to that door, which I believed might lead to the hidden valley.

  A key rattled, the door swung wide, and a dark passage loomed beyond, sloping steeply downward. We walked for several minutes preceded by a guard bearing a torch. Then he paused before another door. It swung open, and I stepped inside.

  The room was brightly lit, and six guards stood about with drawn blades. Behind me the door closed with a clang, and a key turned in the lock. Glancing back, I saw that the guard who had followed us stood before the closed door with a drawn blade. With Mahmoud and a guard now lighting more lamps, there were nine. It was too many.

  On a table in the center of the room a figure lay, covered with a white spread. Around the room were implements, running water in a tank, and other things that told me this was a room used for surgical operations. The drawn swords I could not understand.

  Nor could I understand the fierce triumph in the eyes of Mahmoud.

  "Tonight you will perform the operation for which you were brought here. The man upon that table is needed in the Valley, but in his present condition he is no longer of use to us. Your operation will save his life." He was smiling now. "Take your sharpest knife," he said, "and make this man a eunuch. Castrate him."

  With a flip of his hand he swung away the sheet, and the man tied upon the table was my father.

  Cold ... I was icy cold. My eyes did not again go to the man on the table; they could not bear to meet those of my father.

  Slowly, I glanced around the room. Mahmoud stood back, smiling with triumph. Around stood eight men with drawn blades, and there was no doubt they intended to see I did what was ordered.

  Time seemed frozen in an awful stillness, and in the hollow of my skull, where no feeling seemed to exist, my brain struggled for escape, for a way out. He was bound with four stout cords, and had been tied so for some time. Even if cut free, he would be stiff from being so long immobile.

  Mahmoud was amused. "Come, come!" He smiled at me. "You are a physician, and you came prepared. However, if you do not perform the operation, one of my men will do it in your place, while you watch. But I am afraid he will not be so skillful as you."

  My eyes swept the room, mentally placing each man. It was a large room, but there was a chance. The fire under the water tank crackled in the silence. "Is the water hot?" I asked. "Is it boiling?"

  He glanced into the tank. Now I went up to the table for the first time and looked down into the eyes of my father. The eyes that met mine were the ones I knew, the strength was there. "Be ready." I spoke softly in our Breton tongue.

  At a table nearby I took out the knives necessary and laid them on the table. My hands were damp with sweat, but now my mind was working with icy clarity. We both might die here, but there was a chance, a slim chance.

  I took several dried plants from my bags and put them on the table.

  Once I glanced at the tank, which now stood on a table. There would be water enough. Taking a scalpel, I stepped to the table where my father lay and concealing the movement with my cloak, I slit the rope near his wrists with the razor-sharp scalpel.

  A guard stepped closer, and Mahmoud circled to see what I was doing, his eyes hot with eagerness. In that instant, as several of the other guards crowded closer, I hooked my toe behind the leg of the table on which sat the boiling water, and jerking back with the toe I suddenly threw my weight behind the tank.

  The tank and table went over with a crash spilling boiling water across the legs of the three nearest guards. Screaming with agony, they sprang back, one of them falling to the floor, entangling the others. Turning swiftly, I slashed another of the cords that bound my father, then I thrust the scalpel into his hands and drew my sword.

  The first came too quickly and stopped his rush too late; my point took him in the throat with a sharp twist to the side, and he staggered back, blood covering his chest. Then the outer door burst open, and a dozen men rushed into the room. In an instant it was filled with fighting as the men of Mahmoud turned to meet these, evidently the men of Sinan.

  Catching up my bags, I ran after my father who was already at the unguarded door. He stumbled on legs still numb from the binding, but he pointed with a blade caught up from a fallen guard. We rushed down the long passage, deeper and deeper into the mountain. Then he stopped suddenly, listening. We heard no sound.

  We walked on a dozen steps, catching our breath for what might lay before us. "I have been waiting for you." He spoke quietly. "Al-Zawila has tormented me for days with what he would do when you came."

  "Did he tell you about Mother?"

  "Do you think he would miss that? The man's a devil, Mat." Mat! I had not been called that in many a year. It was good to hear, and whatever lay before us, we had this moment. We were together again. "She was a fine woman, your mother. Better than I deserved. There was wildness in me, and she knew it when we married, but never did she try to hold me back until that last trip. She warned me not to go. She had the gift. Do you have it?"

  "I suppose so, but it is less a gift than a method. I have never tried to use it, but sometimes when the season is right it comes without warning."

  "In that sense I was not one of you, only by marriage, and that did not count with the Old Ones."

  We walked on together, two strong men, each with a blade, father and son. The world would be mine now, for my father was with me.

  "You taught me well," I said; "the years have proved it."

  "I tried."

  Behind us, we heard them coming. "Only a little further," he said, and we ran. "Do you know the Valley?"

  "Aye, they had me slaving there, working on the conduits. They are a marvel, I will say that for them, and nobody today knows them well unless it be Sinan, from the maps."

  The passage divided into three. He pointed ahead. "There lies the entrance, but the devil himself could not force it. Luckily, there is another way."

  We took the left branch and ran on. The hard work they had him doing had left him fit. He had always been enormously strong, and he was heavier than I, no broader in the shoulder but heavier in t
he chest and thigh.

  "Who killed your mother?"

  "It was Tournemine, after he heard you were killed."

  "Ah ... well, we shall go back, Mat. We've that to do, you and I."

  "It is done." I told him of it as we walked on, and of what I had done with the body, casting it with all its evil into the sulphurous bog of the Yeun Elez.

  He glanced around at me. "Now that was a thing! I should not have thought of it."

  The passage narrowed, and we heard running water. Our passage became a bridge, and below it ran dark, swift water. Our torches had burned down, and he led me to a small pile of them.

  He glanced at me as we lighted torches. "Can you stand a tight place? That's the aqueduct that takes water to the Valley."

  The water was waist high. We lowered ourselves into it and once in the tunnel we put out our torch. We moved forward, my father taking the lead. It was a long distance to travel in abysmal darkness, with no ray of light. Emerging suddenly, we heard water falling ahead of us. My father turned suddenly and grabbed the top of the wall and pulled himself up and over. I followed.

  Rain fell gently in the Valley of the Assassins. We could feel it, and hear the gentle patter on the leaves. In the distance, lightning flared. We leaned against the outer wall of the flume, shaking with cold.

  "Won't they come here?"

  "Yes, at last. But the gardens are empty at night. Come, I know a place."

  In a corner of the garden, on a shelf of rock, we waited. It would not be long until daybreak. "This was where we stored materials," my father explained. "These are sections of conduit pipe for new fountains and for repairs."

  We huddled shoulder to shoulder, sharing my cloak, and the thought came to me slowly, and only shaped itself when the first light appeared. Standing up, I looked about. Most of the pipe sections were too large and of fire-baked clay. The smaller pipes were of lead.

  Such piping was far from new and had been used all over the Arab world in the houses of the wealthy, as it had been used in Rome as well. Looking about, I chose several short lengths of pipe, obviously left over from construction. Taking several of these I began whittling wooden plugs to fit each end, then tamped them full of the prepared dust from my saddlebags.

  "Now what are you doing?" My father was curious. "Is this charcoal?"

  "Some of it." I completed filling every bit of space with fragments of lead lying about, pebbles, and some bent and discarded nails. From each pipe I led a piece of string rolled in melted fat from meat that had been served me and that I had carefully hoarded for the purpose. These strings I rolled in the dust packed into the short lengths of pipe. When completed I had three pieces of the prepared pipe.

  "What do you plan?" My father had watched my every move. "You seem to know what you are about."

  "A vain hope. Something learned from an old book. It is something they have done successfully in China."

  "They are a canny folk. I have known men from Cathay."

  Strangely, there was nothing to talk about. There was an odd constraint between us. Why is it much easier to talk to a stranger than one from one's own family?

  He slept, finally, but I did not. Soon searchers would be looking for us, and tonight Khatib, if still alive and free, would come to the meadow by the Shah Rud. We must be there to meet him.

  Day came to a clouded land. The peaks were lost in a cottony gray billowing of cloud. No birds sang today in the Valley of the Assassins.

  How long before they found us? My father slept, his great muscles relaxed, his strong, hard-boned face strangely gentle in the quietness of sleep. He looked older than I expected, and there were raw scars of burns on his shoulders, as if he had been touched with red-hot iron. The work of Mahmoud, no doubt.

  Mahmoud? Where was he? In the fierceness of the fight he must have fled. Had he escaped Alamut? Or was he now in command? Those must have been the men of Sinan who rushed in to attack his guards.

  Thunder grumbled sullenly, warning that the storm was not over. The trees in the garden were strangely green in the vague light. Peering around the piles of pipe and building materials that screened us, I could see pomegranate and walnut trees from where we lay. Fountains were playing; did some of them actually run with milk and wine?

  The Valley was longer than expected, concealed artfully in hills. Knowing something of mountains I could see there would be no way of looking into the valley from above, for the walls bellied out in such a way that if one tried to walk down to look over one would fall. An observer could only see across the canyon, not into it.

  Slipping out, I gathered pears from nearby trees, not the hard wild pears, but great luscious fruit as large as my two fists.

  Yet, from all I could see we were trapped. I could see no way out except back through the fortress of Alamut.

  55

  IT WAS A lowering, sullen day. Many times I had pictured the Valley of the Assassins, and always I saw it in sunlight and the dappled shadow of leaves. Beyond the roof of a pavilion I glimpsed a palace, white and lovely despite the grayness of the day. I ate of a pear and considered the situation without favor.

  To return through the fortress was madness, but I saw no alternative.

  Rain would restrict movement in the garden, and in this corner where a new palace was to be built there was unlikely to be anyone. How long before they suspected we had escaped through the aqueduct?

  It was an unlikely route, and I suspect my father had gone to some difficulty in exploring the way. It was even possible the present rulers of the castle knew nothing of the aqueduct. No doubt it was hundreds of years old.

  Somehow, before the day was over, we must plan our escape, and be prepared to move when darkness fell. Until then we must not be found.

  My sections of pipe with the prepared dust were not to be trusted. I knew them only from study and not experiment, and I had become a disciple of the trial and error method of the Arabs.

  Studying that part of the mountain visible to me, I thought it appeared impossible to climb out. Nor had I any desire to repeat my escape from the castle in Spain, nor to subject my father to such an ordeal.

  Once, I heard laughter. Gay laughter, of a young woman or girl, and I heard music. Undoubtedly, the sounds came from a window. No one would be out in this weather.

  Shivering, with no fire because of the smoke smell, I waited. My father slept, and no doubt needed it. It was midday when he opened his eyes, immediately alert.

  In whispers I explained the situation, and then he began to fill me in. He had only worked in the Valley under the lash of an overseer, yet he had located the various buildings. "There is another aqueduct under the mountain that has steps inside, under the water, but in such a rain as this it is probably running full and with force. It is all enclosed, and I have no idea where it emerges."

  While he ate a pear and finished the chapaties and fragments of meat, I studied the situation. Suppose I were Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah? Suppose, being the first of the Assassins, I took over the fortress of Alamut? Whoever the builders were, and it was built about 830 in our time, he would want an escape route. Any man who locks himself inside a fortress must consider the possibility of the fortress being taken. What then? Obviously, a secret escape route, and I had some familiarity with secret passages.

  Such an escape must be easily available, and more than one entrance necessary, in the event he was cut off from other parts of the castle. Surely, there must be an escape from the Valley of the Assassins.

  The same problem existed here as at the Castle of Othman, so long ago. Any passage must have a place where the escaper could emerge unseen. Where was Mahmoud? I feared the man. The weak can be terrible when they wish to appear strong, and he was such a man, darkly vengeful and unforgetting. If dying, he would strike out wickedly in all directions to injure all he could to his last breath.

  My father gestured toward the filled pipes. "You learned from a book? You read well, then?"

  "Latin," I said, "Greek, Arabic
, Persian, and some Sanskrit. In the Frankish tongue I cannot read, but I know of nothing written in that language as yet."

  "You are a physician, as they said?"

  "It is something I have learned, and practiced a little, not a profession. All knowledge is related, and I have learned what I could. Much of the sea and the stars, much of history, as well as the structure of land, and something of alchemy."

  "You have been busy," he said dryly.

  Outside, there was a stir of footsteps. A girl or woman wrapped in a burnoose came along a path under the trees, and when close to us she threw back the hood of her burnoose and turned her face up to the soft rain. She stood there a moment, as blond as some of our Frankish girls, lovely as a flower.

  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."