“Go on!” I interrupted him impatiently, rubbing his side with my rifle.
So we walked along, and every few seconds he would break into mad laughter, and the look of cunning would shine in his gray eyes. Suddenly he was quiet. Only he breathed noisily through his nostrils, and he rolled his head from side to side like a man who has taken too much bhang. And that also was strange, for, with his hands tied behind his back, he could not reach for his opium-box, and I could not make it out at all.
A few minutes later we came in sight of Ali-Khan. He was sitting on a stone ledge near a bend of the road, flowers about him, carefully wrapped in moist, yellow moss so that they would keep fresh for the longing of his beloved, and singing his old song, “O Peacock, cry again—”
Then he saw us, and broke off. Astonishment was in his eyes, and he turned a little pale.
“Ebrahim Asif,” he stammered, “what is the meaning of this?” And then to me, who was still covering the hillman with my rifle: “Take away your weapon from Ebrahim! He is blood-cousin to Bibi Halima, distant cousin to me.”
“Ho!” Ebrahim’s shout cut in as sharp as the point of an Ulwar saber. “Ho! ho! ho!” he shouted again and again. Once more the mad, high-shrilling laughter, and then suddenly he broke into droning chant.
I shivered a little, and so did Ali-Khan. We were both speechless. For it was the epic, impromptu chanting which bubbles to the lips of the Afghan hillmen in moments of too great emotion, the chanting which precedes madness, which in itself is madness the madness of the she-wolf, heavy with young, which has licked blood.
“Listen to the song of Ebrahim Asif, the Sulaymani, the Moustaffa-Khel,” he droned, dancing in front of us with mincing steps, doubly grotesque because his hands were tied behind his back; “listen to the song of Ebrahim Asif, son of Abu Salih Musa, grandson of Abdullah el-Jayli, great-grandson of the Imam Hasan Abu Talib, great-great-grandson of Abd al-Muttalib al-Mahz! I have taken my rifle and my cheray, and I have gone into the plains to kill. I descended into the plains like a whirlwind of destruction, leaving behind me desolation and grief. Blood is on my hands, blood of feud justly taken, and therefore I praise Allah, Opener of the Locks of Hearts with His Name, and—”
The words died in his throat, and he threw himself on the ground, mouthing the dirt like a jackal hunting for a buried corpse.
For a moment I stood aghast. Was the man really mad?
But no; I remembered the cunning look which had crept into his eyes when he had said that perhaps Ali-Khan would show him mercy. He was playing at being mad. There was no other way of saving his life, for in the hills madmen are considered especially beloved by Allah, and thus sacrosanct.
“Blood has reddened the palms of my hands,” came the droning chant as Ebrahim Asif jumped up again from the ground and began again his whirling dance.
“What has happened?” Ali-Khan whispered in my ear. “Has there been killing? Where? When?”
Instead of replying, I pressed my rifle into his hands.
“Shoot him!” I cried.
He looked at me, utterly amazed.
“Why should I shoot him?”
Again the droning chant of Ebrahim rose, swelling and decreasing in turns, dying away in a thin, quavery tremolo, then bursting forth thick and palpable.
“I give thanks to Allah the Just, the Withdrawer of the Veils of Hidden Things, the Raiser of the Flag of Beneficence! For He guided my footsteps! He led me into the plains. And there I took toll, red toll!” There came a shriek of mad laughter, then very softly he chanted: “Once a nightingale warbled in the villages of the Moustaffa-Khel, and now she is dead. The death-gongs are ringing in the city of the plains—”
“Shoot him,” I shouted again to Ali-Khan, “or, by Allah, I myself will shoot him.” And I picked up the rifle.
But he put his hand across its muzzle.
“Why, why?” he asked. “He is blood-cousin to Bibi Halima. Also does it seem that reason has departed his mind. He is a madman, a man beloved by Allah. Shall I thus burden my soul with a double sin because of your bidding? Why should I shoot him?” he asked again.
And then, before I found speech, the answer came, stark, crimson, in the hillman’s mad chant:
“Bibi Halima was her name, and she mated with a rat of the cities, a rat of an Herati speaking Persian. Now she is dead. I drew my cheray, and I struck. The blade is red with the blood of my loved one; the death-gongs are ringing—”
Then Ali-Khan understood.
“Allah!” he shouted. And the long, lean Afghan knife leaped to his hand like a sentient being. “Allah!” he said again, and a deep rattle was in his throat.
The grief in the man’s eyes was horrible to see. I put my hand on his arm.
“She is not dead,” I said.
“Is that the truth?” he asked; then, pitifully, as I did not reply, “we have spoken together with naked hearts before this. Tell me, is the tale true?”
“The child will be born,” I said, quoting the English doctor’s words, “but Bibi Halima will assuredly die.”
And then—and at the time it seemed to me that the great sorrow had snatched at the reins of his reason—Ali-Khan sheathed his knife, with a little dry metallic click of finality.
“It is even as Allah wills,” he said, and he bowed his head. “Even as Allah wills!” he repeated. He turned toward the east, spread out his long, narrow hands, and continued with a low voice, speaking to himself, alone in the presence of God, as it were:
“Against the blackness of the night, when it overtaketh me, I betake me for refuge to Allah, the lord of daybreak.”
There came a long silence, the hillman again rolling on the ground, mouthing the dirt after the manner of jackals.
Finally I spoke:
“Kill him, my friend. Let us finish this business, so that we may return to the city.”
“Kill him?” he asked, and there was in his voice that which resembled laughter. “Kill a madman, a man beloved by Allah the Just?” He walked over to Ebrahim Asif, touching him gently with the point of his shoe. “Kill a madman?” he repeated, and he smiled sweetly at the prostrate hillman, as a mother smiles at a prattling babe.
“The man is not mad,” I interrupted roughly; “he is playing at being mad.”
“No! no!” Ali-Khan said with an even voice as passionless as fate. “Assuredly the man is mad—mad by the Forty-seven True Saints! For who but a mad man would kill a woman? And so you, being my friend, will take this madman to the villages of the Moustaffa-Khel. See him safely home. For it is not good that harm should come to those whom Allah loves. Tell the head-man of the village, tell the priest, tell the elders, tell everybody, that there is no feud. Tell them that Ebrahim Asif can live out his life in peace. Also his sons, and the sons which the future will bring him. Safe they are in God’s keeping because of their father’s madness!”
I drew him to one side, and whispered to him:
“What is the meaning of this? What—what—”
He interrupted me with a gesture, speaking close to my ear:
“Do as I bid you for the sake of our friendship; for it is said that the mind of a friend is the well of trust, and the stope of confidence sinks therein and is no more seen.” He was silent for a moment, then he continued in yet lower voice: “Hold him safe against my claiming? Assuredly him and his sons—and—” then suddenly, “O Allah, send me a man-child!”
And he strode down the hill into the purple dusk, while I, turning over his last words in my mind, said to myself that he was a soft man indeed; but that there is also the softness of forged steel, which bends to the strength of the sword-arm, and which kills on the rebound.
So, obeying my friend’s command, I went to the villages of the Moustaffa-Khel. I delivered Ebrahim Asif safe into the hands of the jirgahs, giving them the message with which Ali-Khan had entrusted me.
There was a little laughter, a little cutting banter hard to bear, and some talk of cowards, of city-bred Heratis turnin
g the other cheek after the manner of the feringhees, of blind men wanting nothing but their eyes; but I kept my tongue safe between my teeth. For I remembered the softness of steel; I remembered Ali-Khan’s love for Bibi Halima; and thirdly I remembered that there is no love as deep as hate.
Four days later I knocked at the door of Ali-Khan’s house, and there was the moaning of women, and the ringing of the death-gong.
Ali-Khan was alone in his room, smoking opium.
“A son has been born me, praise Allah!” was his greeting.
“Praise Allah and the Prophet and the Prophet’s family, and peace and many blessings on them all!” I laid my left hand against his, palm to palm, and kissed him on both cheeks.
There was no need to ask after Bibi Halima, for still from the inner rooms came the moaning of women and the ringing of the death-gong. But another question was in my heart, and he must have read it. For he turned to me, smiling gently, and said:
“Heart speaks naked to heart, and the head answers for both. And I am an Herati and a soft man.”
There was peace in his eyes, at which I wondered, and he continued:
“Once I spoke to you of feud. I said that an unfinished feud is a useless thing, as useless as horns on a cat or flowers of air. For, if I kill my enemy, my enemy’s son, knowing my name and race, will kill me, and thus through the many generations. A life for a life, and yet again a life for a life. And where, then, is the balancing of lives? Where, then, is the profit to me and mine? So I have made peace between Ebrahim Asif and myself, cunningly, declaring him a madman, beloved by Allah, thus sacrosanct. And I shall sell my house here, and take my little son and go north to Bokhara. I shall sit under the shadow of Russia, and I shall prosper exceedingly; for I know Central Asia and the intrigues of Central Asia, and I shall sell my knowledge to the Russians. I shall be not without honor.”
“Do you, then, love the bear of the North that you are willing to serve him?”
“Love is of the mind and not of the heart,”—he flung out a bare palm—“unless it be the love of woman. And Bibi Halima is dead.”
“Then why serve Russia?” For be it remembered that in those days I served the Emir of Afghanistan, and that there was talk in the bazaars of a railway being built from Bokhara to Merv, within striking distance of Herat.
Again he smiled.
“Because I said that love is of the mind. What does me weal, that I love and serve. What does me harm, that I hate and fight. See? Years from now, if it be so written, my son, thanks to the honor which shall be mine under the shadow of Russia, will be a soldier of Russia in the north, in Bokhara. He will be trained after the manner of the North, and he will shoot as straight as a hawk’s flight. He will be the pride of the regiment, and he will wear the little silver medal on a green ribbon which is given to the best marksman in the army. And one day the young soldier, bearing a Russian name, even as will his father, will desert from his regiment for a week or a month, and the tale will be spread that he has gone north to Moscow because of his young blood’s desire to see new sights and kiss strange women. But he will not have gone north at all. No, by the teeth of God and mine own honor! He will have gone south, to these very hills, and there will be no desire in his heart but the desire to kill. He will kill Ebrahim Asif and his sons may he have as many as there are hairs in my beard! and also the women, at night, when they go to the brook to fetch water for the evening meal. He will kill from ambush, wasting no shots, being a soldier trained to war. Ahi! the carrion of the clan of Ebrahim Asif will feed the kites of the Salt Hills, and for many a day to come the jackals of the Nadakshi will not feel the belly-pinch of hunger. And the family of Ebrahim Asif shall be no more, and thus will the feud be stanched, if God be willing. And then my son will return to the north, to Bokhara. And tracking him will be like tracking the mists of dawn to their home. For what is one soldier more or less in the great land of Russia, where there are thousands and thousands and thousands of them? Also, will not the Government’s protection be his, since I, his father, too, will be serving Russia not without honor?”
He left the room and returned, a moment later, holding in his arms a little bundle of silk and linen.
“Look,” he said, baring carefully the head of the new-born infant. “See the eagle profile, the hooded brow, the creamy skin, the black, curly hair! An Afghan of Afghans! And see—he opens his right eye—has he not the eye of the killer?”
The child twisted and gave a little cry. Ali-Khan took a long, lean knife from the wall, offering its hilt to his son. The tiny hand gripped it, while the blade, point down, shone in the rays of the afternoon sun.
REPRISAL
He had kept his oath, Hadji Rahmet used to say, for wrong—or for right. He would give to the latter word the emphasis of a slightly lowered voice. For, clear beyond the depths of even subconscious sophistry, he knew that he had done right; and the hills knew it—and perhaps Dost Ali, the Red Chief.
The happening itself? What did it matter? Nothing mattered except the right and wrong of it. Be sides, the last word was not yet said; perhaps never would be. It was bigger than his life; bigger than Dost Ali’s life; bigger than the hills themselves.
“The hills!” he would repeat in a voice tinged and mellowed—by distance, as it were. They seemed to play a personal part in the telling; neither in the background nor in the foreground, but hovering enigmatical, fabulous—in a way, naive. It had an odd effect—his speaking of them, here, in the tainted, brooding heat of India; as if, by speaking of them, he was being carried out of a perplexing present into the austere simplicity of the Himalayas; as if, by leaving them, he had lost some of his own crushing simplicity. Yet, leaving them, he had not been actuated by that complicated emotion called Fear—in spite of Dost Ali’s threats, in spite of the leaky tongues of the Kabul market place.
The man did not understand fear. He had gone into the plains to find spiritual release from the memory of the thing. So he had visited the many shrines, true to the worship. Assiduously he had repeated the ninety-nine excellent attributes of Allah, and all his thought had been of forgetting, and of devotion to Him. He had wandered from the Khyber snows to the sour, sluggish swamps of Ceylon. He had talked with ascetics of many faiths in that land of many faiths. He had done bodily penance, gradually subduing his physical Self. But his memory had remained: an inky scrawl across his mind.
“For memory,” said the hadji, “is of the soul, and not of the dirt-clouted body.…”
Also there were the tongues the tongues which can crush though they have no bones, the tongues of Afghan traders who drift through the passes into Hind. They would babble of the thing, back yonder in the glitter of the hills.…
* * * *
It started with the day on which Hadji Rahmet crossed the Red Chief’s path for the first time. Perhaps even though that is a question for ethnologists to decide it had started many centuries earlier, when one of the hadji’s ancestors traveled from Persia through Seistan into Kabul, there to trade with smooth silk and flowered Kisbah cloth, to plant the damask roses of Ispahan, to give a soft philosophical twist to the harsh lessons of the Koran, and to break his heart—here—in the stony north; while the Red Chief’s ancestor, driven out of Tatary by squat, flat-nosed warriors who recognized no God, who fought on horseback, and who tore like mastiffs at lumps of raw flesh and quaffed down curdled milk poured from human skulls, crossed into Afghanistan from the north. There he sat himself on a sugarloaf-shaped hill, built a rough castle, and put his descendants, straight down to Dostall, on a pedestal to represent the power and arrogance of a race that will never grow old, that will never emerge from the sunlight of brazen freedom into the thrall and gloom of civilization.
Symbolic? In a way.
And that Hadji Rahmet should come into the Red Chief’s life was also symbolic—and necessary: like the shadow in a light, to emphasize its harsh brightness.
Take the Red Chief up there in his stronghold, the Mahattah Ghurab, the Raven’s S
tation, as the hill folk called it.
Above him the jagged, bitter rocks of the higher mountains where scrub oak met pine, and where pine—to use the chief’s words—met the naked heart of Allah. Still higher up the hard-baked, shimmering snows of the Salt Range, hooded and grim like the gigantic eye brow of some heathen Pukhtu god, a god mourning the clank and riot of the days before the Arabs pushed into Central Asia and whipped the land into the faith of Islam alone there with his pride and his clan; clear away from the twitter and cackle of the city marts, from the turrets and bell-shaped domes of Kabul, from the strangling lash of the Emir’s decrees; sloughing his will and his passion as snakes cast their skin; brooking no master but himself and the black mountain thunder.
At his feet a cuplike valley devoured by sunshine; farther up the slopes the lean mountain pasture, smooth and polished with the faint snow haze, and slashing through, straight as a blade, the caravan road which leads to Kabul; the caravan road which, centuries ago, had echoed to the footsteps of Alexander’s legions—the caravan road which is as old as strife and older than peace.
Dost Ali was a short, wide-shouldered man, with gray, ironic eyes, high cheek bones, his beard dyed red with henna juice. Like his ancestors, he had always greatly distinguished himself—that’s just how he would have considered it—by the cheerful and methodical ferocity of his fighting. He was a man who paid his enemies with the crackle of steel and slaughtered cattle and the red flames licking over hut and byre; a man who had scarred the valley for a week’s journey with torch and cord, and whose greatest trust—greater than the fierce desert Prophet by whose name he gave oath—was the Khyber sword, curved like the croup of a stallion.
“I judge by the word of the hand and not by the word of the mouth,” he put it in his own epic manner; and so he sat there on his mountain top and watched his breed increase, though they were daughters all but one. For his youngest child was a boy, Akbar Khan, seven years old, short and broad, with a tinge of red in his thick, curly hair—and Dost Ali loved him.
The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 6