“Thou art a flower in the turban of my soul,” he would say, picking up the lad and pressing him to his massive, fur-clad breast, “and my heart is a tasseled floor-cloth for thy feet. Ho, thou, my hero!” And then father and son would run through the gray old rooms of the castle, playing like children, frightening the women over their cook pots, screaming and yelling and laughing.
Dost Ali was easily moved to laughter—laughter cold as the hill winds—and he laughed loud and long when early one day, with the valley still waist-high in the clammy morning mist, he saw Hadji Rahmet wander down the slopes, driving a herd of sheep with a crooked staff, and followed by his little son.
He had heard about the hadji a few days earlier.
The blind mullah who ministered to the scant spiritual wants of the Raven’s Station had brought word of the stranger: the Kabuli merchant who, after his wife’s death, had bidden farewell to the mosques and bazaars of the city and had come to live in the hills—“to forget,” as he had told the sneering mullah, “to live mated to the clean simplicity of the hills, to bring up my little son away from the noisy toil of the market places, away from the smoke and strife of the city streets, here in the hills where there is nobody but God.”
“God—and the Red Chief!” the mullah had croaked through his broken, blackened teeth; and then the hadji had spoken of the faith that was his.
He had spoken of Allah, the God of Peace.
“A new Allah—by Allah!” the mullah had laughed as he repeated it to the Red Chief.
Suddenly his laughter had keyed up to a high, senile scream. For he was a man of stout orthodoxy, to whom a freethinking Sufi was worse than Christian or Jew. “A new Allah! A soft Allah! A sickly Allah wrapped in sweating cotton! An Allah who prates of forgiveness and other leprous innovations. And he—that foul, swine-fed Kabuli—said that he wanted his blood to bear witness to his faith! And I—” again mirth gurgled through the mullah’s fury—“I told him that all the faith in the world will not mend his bones when we stone him—as we should—for a blasphemer and a heretic!”
“God’s curse on him!” Dost Ali had chimed in—and here he saw the man in the flesh, walking along easily enough for all his city-soft feet, his lean body swinging with the long, tireless pull of a mountain pony, chanting as he walked:
“Peace upon Thee, Apostle of Allah, and the Mercy and the Blessings! Peace upon Thee, O Seal of the Prophets!”—his voice rose and sank in turn, dying away in a thin, quavering tremolo, again bursting forth in palpable fervor, massive, unashamed, sublimely unself-conscious amid the silence of the snows.
“By the Three, the Seven, the Forty-seven True Saints! By the horns of the Angel Israfil! Teach me to see after ignorance!”
The faith in his heart bubbled to his lips—a lonely prayer, but a prayer which was to him a trumpet call of God’s eternal laws, a rally clear around the world, a force in his heart to grip the everlasting meannesses of life and strife and smash them against the unchanging portals of peace.
“Peace!” He bit on the word. His lips savored it as a precious thing, then blew it free to lash the cool hill air with the sound of it. A light like a clear flame came into his eyes, illumining his face.
It was not altogether that of an ascetic, in spite of the downward furrows graven deep by long hours of meditation. For the nose beaked out bold and aquiline, with flaring, nervous nostrils, speaking of courage—unconscious, racial courage—scotched, it is true, by his Persian ancestry, by breeding and training and deliberate modes of thought, but always there, dark-smoldering, ready to leap.
Even Dost Ali read the signs, though he had never had cause to learn the kind of mental stenography known as character reading and psychology, preferring to judge men by the work of their hands and the venom of their tongues. But he had known fighters—fighters of many races—and this—
“Peace, O Opener of the Locks of Grief!” droned the hadji’s chant, with a trembling, throaty note of religious hysteria.
He had left the hard grist of worldly ambition behind him in Kabul, in the stench of bazaar and mart, in the burnished dome of the Chutter Mahal, the Audience Hall, where once he had sat at the right hand of the governor, giving of his stored wisdom to help rule the turbulent Afghan nation. Wealth and honor and fame he had flung behind him, like a limp, worn-out turban cloth, to bring peace to this land of strife, from village to village.
Peace! With the thought he forgot the grim, jagged rocks frowning above his head. He forgot the bastioned castle which blotched the snow blur of the slopes. He forgot the lank, rime-ringed pines which silhouetted against the sky like sentinels of ill omen. He even forgot the waddling sheep which gave him his simple living.
They turned and stared at him out of their flat, stupid eyes, helpless without the point of the staff to marshal their feeding.
“Peace!” came the word again—a strange word here, and to Dost Ali it seemed an affront an affront—to the sweep of the hills, an affront to his own free breed, to the Raven’s Station which had always garnered strife and fed on strife. Yes, an affront, and the Red Chief stepped square into the hadji’s path and shot forth his hatred and contempt in a few sharp-ringing words: “Ho! Abuser of the Salt!”
The deadly insult slashed clear through the other’s voice and thoughts. He looked up. Automatically—for there had been years of hot blood before the message of peace had come to him—his hand leaped to his side, fingering for the blade.
Dost Ali smiled at the gesture. Thank Allah, he thought, this babbling heretic was a man after all. He would not eat dirt. He would fight.
“Good!” he breathed the word, and his own sword flashed free. But the next moment the hadji’s hand dropped—dropped like a wilted, useless thing; and the Red Chief smiled again—a different smile, slow, cruel—and again he spoke.
He chose his words carefully, each a killing insult, and he spoke in an even, passionless voice to let their venom trickle deep. Moreover, such is the Afghan code with its strange niceties of honor and prejudice, that unless he who is insulted respond immediately with the point of the dagger, the consciousness of moral rectitude rests with him who insults; and so Dost Ali was shocked, morally as well as ethically, when the hadji stood there and smiled; in spite of the fact that he had called him a beggar, a cut-off one, the son of a, burnt father, a foreigner, and a Yahudi; though he had wished that his hands be withered and his fingers palsied; though he had compared him to the basest kinky-haired one that ever hammered tent-peg, and to one cold of countenance; though he had assured him—“ay wall’ ahi!” the Red Chief reenforced the statement, “by the teeth of God and mine own honor!”—that his head was as full of unclean thoughts as a Kabuli’s coat is of lice, and that he himself, though an impatient man, would rather hunt for pimples on the back of a cock roach than for manliness and decency in the heart of such a one—“as thou, O son of a hornless and especially illegitimate cow!”
And still the hadji was silent, passive, his sword-hand twisting the wooden beads of his rosary, only the slow red which mantled his cheeks telling that he had heard.
Dost Ali looked at him, open-eyed, puzzled. It was beyond his comprehension. If the other had thrown himself at his feet, imploring protection and mercy, or if he had run away, he would have understood. He would even have understood a sort of caustic placidity—a silent, minatory contempt which would presently leap into flame.
But—why—this man stood his ground. He stood his ground without righting, with no answering flow of abuse, and only a throaty “Peace! Peace!” uttered automatically, like the response in a litany, followed by an admonition to the mountaineer not to be impatient—“indeed thou seest through the whirling mists of passion, brother!”—and finally a few stammering, ragged words drawn across his helplessness when the Red Chief burst into another flood of invective.
Dost Ali was a simple man. He could not sift the hadji’s heart. He did not see the waves of passion which were lapping beneath the other’s smiling countenance and
soft words. He did not understand how the hadji, slowly, painfully, had purged his heart of lust and hatred how even now, with the terrible insults ringing in his consciousness, he was forcing his faith in God and Peace to buffet a road straight through the black wrath which was consuming him; how he was struggling with himself, finally doffing his worldly pride like a dirty garment.
A coward? Only in so far as he did not want realities to brush him too close. And here reality was bulking big—reality as expressed in the Red Chief’s squat mightiness, in his screaming abuse, the half-drawn sword flickering like a cresset of all the evil passions which he loathed and which he had set out to combat.
“Peace, brother!” he said again. His voice was steady; and then, even in Dost Ali’s slow-grinding mind, rose the conviction that this man—this man who suffered the most deadly insults without fight or flight—was not a coward. And his hatred grew apace. For he did not understand.
A man who fought—yes! Also, a man who feared and fled. He had met both sorts, had handled both sorts. But here was a man who neither feared nor fled. It was a new experience to the mountaineer’s naive brutality—a new experience to crush which he would have to devise new means. What means? He wondered. He jerked back his head as a racing stallion slugs above the bit.
He stood there, squat, wide-shouldered, his red beard flopping in the wind like a bat wing, looking with puckered, puzzled eyes toward the east where the farther fog banks were melting and rolling into nothingness and where a scarlet flush was shooting up in fantastic spikes—as if the east could give answer.
Should he kill—outright?
A sob of steel, a gurgle, blood caking on the ground—he knew the tale of it, oft repeated—and the fire of his hatred would be out; the heat thereof would be spent.
But to what profit?
Where was the satisfaction in killing a man who did not resist, who did not answer steel with the song of steel, flash for flash, and strength for strength? It would leave the mystery still unsolved, the riddle unread, the grape impressed. The fact that the hadji had once lived and, living, had been as he had been, would remain—like dregs; as salt as pain. Also, Dost Ali was a superstitious man. He could imagine the hadji’s ghost, after the death of the body, squatting on a mountain top like a lean, red-necked vulture, looking down at the Raven’s Station with flat, gray, indifferent eyes—perhaps smiling, perhaps still croaking about Peace.
Should he rob him? And what was there to rob? A muslin shirt, a rough khilat, a sheepskin coat, a pair of grass sandals—not enough to satisfy the greed of the meanest dancing girl from the south.
“Ho! man of great feet and small head!” he began again, then was silent. For the other had dropped on his knees.
“May the Lamp of Peace clear my path from hearth stone to byre,” he was praying, oblivious of man-made passion and man-made words; and the Red Chief trembled with rage. What—by the blood of God!—what was the use of a talker when there were no listeners; when nobody heard except the lank pines and the cursed, blinking, waddling sheep, and—ahi!—the hadji’s little son?
There he stood, looking on with wondering eyes, munching a wheaten cake with the solemn satisfaction of childhood; strong, good-looking with his father’s hawklike profile and deep-set eyes.
The hadji was still droning his prayer of peace, and the Red Chief laughed. The answer? The answer to the riddle of his hatred? He had it. It lay in the strength of his arms, the clouting strength of his will. It was the hills way—his own way.
He would pour the black brewage of fear down this stranger’s throat till it choked him and he squealed for mercy. He would drive him into the shadow of his love and cause him to whimper like a beaten dog—like a dog well beaten with thorn sticks.
This babbler of meekness had no fear of the Red Chief, no fear of the hills, but—“Pray!” laughed Dost Ali, “pray to me, a man of strife, O thou fool of peace! Pray, or thou shalt moan like the Bird of the Tamarisk which moaneth like the childless mother!” And with a quick gesture of his great hands he picked up the hadji’s little son by the waist shawl.
He held him high—the child was rigid with fear—he walked over to the edge of the precipice where, deep down, the lower mountains lay coiled and massive, offering their immense stillness to the fiery face of the sun. Still farther down the cataract of the Kabul River fluffed like some waxen, blatant tropical flower.
“Father!” screamed the child.
The hadji turned and at the moment of seeing he seemed to be struck blind. The second before, straight through the fervor of his prayers, he had vaguely realized the world about him—the peaks and the sunlight and the cold glitter of the snows.
Now, suddenly, a nothing—black.
All that was bright and light and good seemed to have leaped back. There was nothing—just a scream in the dark: “Father!” and the chief’s harsh bellow as he swung the lad by the twisted waist shawl around his head, with that savage, hairy strength of his.
A moment later vision returned to the hadji’s eyes. He saw everything. Absurdly, incongruously, the first thing he saw, the first impressions which his eyes graved on his brain, were the details, the petty, contemptible details of inanimate nature: the eastern sky, serenely cloudless, running from milky white into gold-flecked crimson with a purple-nicked edge near the horizon’s rim; farther south the sun rays racing in a river of fire and melting into the snows with a sort of rainbow-colored foam. He saw it. He understood it.
Often, in after years, he would speak of it. He would say that his first glimpse of his son, helpless in the mountaineer’s grip, at the verge of death, had seemed but another detail; a strange detail; a sudden, evil jest which he could not grasp.
He used to say that even after he had begun to comprehend the reality of it his immediate thoughts had not been of his son’s life, but of the waist shawl. He had remembered when he had bought it: in Kabul, in the Bazaar of the Silk Weavers. His son had liked the pattern and the bright blending of colors. So he had bought it, and—
Words had come to him. “Don’t! Don’t!”—just those words: weak, meaningless, foolish. But he spoke them solemnly, as if he had found a powerful formula, and then his little son gave a frantic, straining kick.
He jerked. His head shot down and his feet up, shifting the weight of the sturdy young body. The waist shawl snapped. Quite distinctly, for the fraction of a second, the hadji saw the broken silk strands. He saw their feathered ends ripping through the pattern, brushing up, then down in the wind which sucked from the precipice and his son’s body fell away from the Red Chief’s grip.
It turned a somersault. It plunged into space. Came a dull thud, from far down. Silence.
Dost Ali stood motionless. By the Prophet, he had not willed this—this thing. He had only meant to sport after the manner of the hills; and he had taken a child’s life—like a snake or a Hindu.
He must atone, somehow, according to the code of the hills.
But how? Blood money? Of course. But a life was a life, and a son was a son—and there was his own little son running and playing through the gray rooms of the Raven’s Station.
The hadji had fallen on the ground, his hands stretched out, clutching the short-stemmed, tufted grass, his body jerking and twitching.
“Hadji!” said the Red Chief. “Hadji!”—and, as the other did not reply, did not hear, “by Allah, I did not will—this!”
He was silent. His lips twisted oddly, and had the hadji looked up he would have seen a tear in the mountaineer’s beady, puckered eyes—a tear which, strangely, seemed to lift what was abominable into something not altogether unworthy; to overshadow, somehow, the drab, cruel, sinister fact of the broken body down there by the cataract of the Kabul River.
“Hadji!” the mountaineer called again. Then, as the other did not look up, did not reply, hardly seemed to breathe, he walked away, shrugging his broad shoulders. What was done was done, he thought, and he would pay blood money as the Koran demands it. Also, he would give
the hadji a wife from among his own people, and there would yet be another little boy, with hawklike profile and deep-set eyes, to prate about Peace.
And he took the road to the Raven’s Station, where he gave a sound beating to the blind mullah—who, according to the Red Chief’s simple logic, had been the cause of the whole trouble—while the hadji was knitting his riven soul to hold the pain in his heart.
* * * *
“Yes,” the hadji would say years later as he was wandering through the sun-stained plains of India, from shrine to carved shrine, searching for release from the memory of the thing—“yes, the Red Chief had prophesied right. Indeed I crept into the shadow of my fallen love, and I whimpered like a dog that has been beaten with thorn sticks!” And, with a flat, tortured laugh, he would add that God seemed to have answered his prayer for peace— “I had asked for Peace, don’t you see, and He sent me the final peace the peace of death, the peace of a hawk’s claw and a snake’s fang and a hill-bred’s heart.”
* * * *
An hour later, at the edge of the cataract, he found his son. Instinctively he folded his feet under his haunches, squatting by the side of the broken body, and his heart’s remembrance followed the little crushed life—followed it, followed it back through the narrow span of years, back to the day when the old Yusufzai nurse had come from the couch of his wife and had laid a tiny bundle into his arms—“a son, my lord, may life be wide to him!”
He remembered the first cry of that tiny, white, warm bundle. It had been like the morning cry of a wild bird.
He remembered his son’s last cry—strangled, frantic “Father! Father!”—drowned in the Red Chief’s harsh bellow. He would never forget it.
And the hadji sat there until the sun died in a sickly haze of coppery brown decayed, it seemed to him, like the sun on the Day of Judgment and the moon came up, stabbed on the outer horns of the world, dispassionate, calm, indifferent to the heart of man.
The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 7