He said to himself that these were his people, that they had put their grievances before his feet trusting to his wisdom and strength and their greatest grievance was the matter of the khirli fish, the matter of the River of Hate. Willing and ready he had been to help them, he continued his thoughts angrily, but they had tied his hands with their babble about the ancient tribal laws; he had tossed his rifle into the water—and—what did they want him to do?
They supplied him with food and tobacco and bhang as was his right, since he was their chief. But it was all done grudgingly, as a drab matter of duty.
Yet there was little open complaint; just an undercurrent of muttering and whining. Only the young 1 man, Babar, put it into words one day.
“You are the Chief,” he said. “You must help us!”
Simple enough words. But, somehow, they seemed to Ebrahim the final, unbearable stigma.
“Do you want me to attempt the impossible, O Abuser of the Salt, O Son of a Burnt Father?” he cried. “Do you want me to make noises with my ears and catch the wind of heaven with my bare hands, O Cold of Countenance?”—and he beat Babar with the flat of his saber till the blood came.
After that, the people of the village, his own people, trembled when he passed. And in all Kafiristan there was no man more lonely than he.
Thus he took to roaming the hills up and down the River of Hate, climbing to the higher range where, caught in crevices, the snow lay clean and stainless beneath the crisp air, down abrupt precipices, and into thick forests of spruce and beach where the dry leaves lay in intricate, wind-tossed, fox-red patterns fretted with delicate green shadows; and one day, returning past the natural bridge that marked the line between the two villages and where, years earlier, his father had been beaten by Yar Zaddiq, he saw a young girl standing there, poised lightly upon narrow, sandaled feet, and looking out upon the foaming River of Hate.
She turned as she heard his approach and stared at him fearlessly, and he stood still and stared back.
She was sixteen years of age. Her small slender body, just budding into the promise of womanhood beneath the thin, fringed, brown and gray striped fustian robe that covered her from her neck to just below her knees, was perfect in every line. Her parted, braided hair was light brown and as smooth as oil, her eyes were gray with intensely black pupils, and her nose straight and short. There was a sweet curve to her upper lip and a quick, smiling lift at the corners.
The smile rippled into low, gurgling laughter when she saw Ebrahim Asif bow deeply before her with clasped hands, as she had seen the men of her village salaam to the Emir’s swashbuckling emissaries.
He straightened up. With unconsciously graceful ease he put his hand on the heavy, carved silver hilt of his sword and looked at her squarely.
And his words, too, were square and clear, yet tinged with a certain reckless, boisterous good humor, a certain swaggering bravado.
“Your name,. Crusher of Hearts!”
Again the girl laughed.
“I am Kurjan,” she said. “I am the daughter of Yar Zaddiq, Chief of the Red Village, who, it is told, once gave your father a sound beating.”
“Then you know my name?” he rejoined, flushing darkly.
“Evidently, Ebrahim Asif!” came her mocking reply. “The fame of your splendor has traveled many miles, also the tale of how wisely you rule your own people, how you fill their stomachs with khirli fish how they love you, O great Afghan…”
But, suddenly, she checked the flow of words and turned to go when she saw the man’s insolent, black eyes fixed upon her with a calm, uncontrolled expression of admiration and desire, and instinctively she drew in her breath and clasped her right hand against her heart, as unhurryingly, he stepped up to her.
“Kurjan, daughter of Yar Zaddiq,” he said very gently, “I am not an Afghan, though my dress is that of the Kabuli and though my lips have forgotten the proper twist and click of my native tongue in the many years I have spent away from home. I am a Kafiri, a hillman of hillmen and—” suddenly his voice peaked up to a high, throaty note, like the cry of an eagle circling above a frightened, fluttering song bird “I love like a Kafiri!”
And, before she had time to run or defend herself, his great arms were about her, crushing her against his massive chest so that the long braids of her hair swept the ground behind her.
Very slowly, as if reluctantly, he released her.
“Go back to your father,” he continued as she stood there, panting, a rush of unknown sensations, shy ness, mixed with fear and a strange, tremulous, paining delight, surging through her body. “Tell him that a man has come to the River of Hate. Tell him that tonight I shall come to his house to demand you as my wife. And—as to you, Crusher of Hearts—tell yourself when you lie on your couch, that I love you—that there is a sweetness and strength in my soul which is known to your soul only!”
And he walked away, his saber clanking behind him; and he did not turn once to look back at her.
Kurjan did not know if it was the strange, sweet shyness which had come to her so abruptly, or fear of her father’s terrible, raging temper which sealed her lips. At all events, she did not say a word of what had happened to her when she reached home. Courteously she bowed to her father who was resting his huge old gnarled body on the earthen platform, and stepped through the curtain into the back part of the house where the women crouched over the crimson charcoal balls of the cooking fire.
Thus, hours later, when night had dropped as it does in the hills, quickly, like a black-winged bird, and when Ebrahim Asif had gone up the river, crossed the natural bridge, and passed through the silent Red Village to the house of Yar Zaddiq, he found the latter unprepared for his coming.
But his first words explained the purpose of his visit. “I am Ebrahim Asif, the son of Sabihhudin Achmat, Chief of the White Village,” he said with nonchalant dignity. “I have decided that your daughter shall be the mother of my sons. Hasten the wed ding, old Chief. For I am an impatient man who does not brook denial or contradiction, and my young blood is sultry with passion.”
And, calmly, he squatted down and helped himself to the other’s supply of finely shaved bhang, conscious, by the rustle of the curtain that shut off the back part of the house, that Kurjan was looking at him.
She was standing very still, her heart thumping violently. Quickly, imperceptibly, the knowledge floated down upon her that she loved him. Anxiously, she waited for her father’s reply.
When Yar Zaddiq looked up his words dropped smooth and even, as stones drop down a glacier.
“So you are Ebrahim Asif—” his lips curled in a crooked smile, exposing the toothless gums stained with opium and tobacco “the son of him whom once I beat grievously with sticks as a dog is beaten with thorn sticks—?”
“You—and your tribesmen! A dozen against one!”
“I could have killed him with my bare hands. I, alone! I was stronger than he!”
“But today you are old—and I am young. Your body is withered, while my body is bossed with muscles as the night sky is with stars,” Ebrahim Asif said in a gentle voice, while his fingers toyed with the crimson cord of his sword, an action the significance of which was not lost on the older man.
And so he smiled.
“It is thus,” he asked, “your wish to marry my daughter?”
“Yes.”
“But—there is the ancient enmity between Red Village and White—”
“Over a potful of stinking khirli fish. I know.” Ebrahim Asif waved a great, hairy hand. “But there will be no more babbling and jabbering and foolish quarreling after I have married your daughter. I am my late father’s only son, and she “ negligently, with his thumb on which shone a star sapphire set in crude silver, he pointed at the curtain where she stood “she is your only child. Let peace be the dowry of our wedding, peace between your village and mine, a forgetting of ancient hatreds, a splitting of future profits. Let us put aside the old enmities as a clean man puts aside soiled
linen. In the future we shall divide the khirli catch evenly between your people and mine.”
Yar Zaddiq laughed in his throat.
“Ahee!” he cried. “It is I who gives all the dowry. And what will you give, young Chief?”
“I?” Ebrahim Asif raised an eyebrow. “Where hate has died, no room is needed to wield a sword. Where strength goes to the making of peace, no violence is needed to strike a dagger blow. Where quarrel is buried, no fertilizer is needed with which to grow friendship. But—I am an honest man! I shall make the bargain even, so that nobody may complain and that none of your people may say that you are unwise. Your daughter shall be mine! Half the khirli catch shall be my people’s. And I, on my part, shall lend to your people the help of wisdom which I learned amongst the Afghans. And after your death which Allah grant be not for many years—I shall rule both villages.”
He rose and bowed with grave courtesy.
“I am an impatient man,” he went on. “My heart plays with my passion. Let the wedding be the next time I set foot in the Red Village. Come. Give oath.”
He stood still and looked at Yar Zaddiq who, too, had risen. For several seconds, the older man did not speak. His stubborn resolve that never, as long as he was alive, should Ebrahim Asif marry his daughter, that never, until the end of time, should his people cede to the White Village one tenth, not one hundredth part of the fishing rights which were theirs according to the ancient law, stood firm; but his opponent’s equal resolve hacked at his faith like a dagger.
“Give oath!” repeated the other, touching the hilt of his sword, and then Yar Zaddiq spoke.
“You shall wed my daughter the next time you set foot in the Red Village,” he said solemnly. “I swear it upon the Koran!”
But Ebrahim grinned boyishly.
“And yet I have heard,” he said very gently, “that you men of the older generation, converted to Islam at the point of the sword, are not the stout Moslems you claim to be. Thus—swear by the gods of our people, our own people! Swear by the ancient gods of the Kafiri!”
And again he toyed with his sword, and again the old chief, a great bitterness bubbling in his words—for the Moslem oath meant nothing to him—swore that the next time Ebrahim set foot in the Red Village, he should wed Kurjan. By Ogun, god of sunshine, he gave oath, and by the three thunder gods; by Woggun, the god of the mid-week, and by Khanli, the grim god on whose forehead is an ivory horn from which hangs the fates of men; and finally by Gagabudh, the jeweled god of the mountain glens who, alone of all the gods, is immortal and whom even Time cannot slay.
And Ebrahim Asif, well satisfied, went out into the night, courteously avoiding speech with Kurjan though, during the last words, she had stepped fully into the room.
She looked after him. “I shall follow him,” she said in a low voice. “I love him. He is brave and arrogant and cruel. There is passion in his heart and strength in his arms. I love him. He is brave.”
Quite suddenly, Yar Zaddiq laughed.
“Yes, little daughter,” he said. “He is brave. But—” he burst into high-pitched, senile cackle, “it is not wisdom he has learned amongst the Afghans! Not wisdom!”
“Except the wisdom of love!” murmured Kurjan as she left the house and looked into the dark. “The wisdom of love—which is simplicity—and arrogance and strength!”
Love had come to her. She knew the lore of the Red Village and of the White, the old feud, the bitter, sullen enmity; but, somehow, Ebrahim Asif was neither of the Red Village nor of the White. He seemed to her the very spirit of the land, serenely brutal, resolutely pagan to the core of him, but a man!
“A man of men!” she said to him one whirling, golden afternoon when she met him amongst the frayed basalt ridges of the farther hills and lay panting in his crushing embrace. “A man of men—with the bowels of compassion of a striped tiger!”
“You have spoken true words, Dispenser of Delights,” Ebrahim Asif agreed naively. “I am indeed a man such as with whom any other chief would be proud to have a quarrel.”
“And such as any other woman might—” she slurred and stopped; and he held her close.
“That, too, is the truth, little musk rose,” he said calmly. “Often have I dragged my crackling sword through the bazaars of Kabul, and black eyes of Afghan women and maids stared at me through close-meshed veils and, perhaps, there may have been hooded eyelids raised quickly in sign of promise and hope—and—ahee!—reward. But—” and with a great gesture he dismissed the past as if it had never existed “they passed into the dark, like gray djinns of evil. They left no trace, no heartache. There is only you in all the world, heart of my heart, and my soul is a carpet for your little feet. Step on it. Step on it with all your strength! For I am strong, strong!”
“My father, too, is strong. And he hates you. He speaks of you to me—though I do not reply. He curses you—”
“Allah!” Ebrahim Asif laughed and snapped his fingers. “Your father is a barren mule, bragging about the horse, his father. He is a toothless she-wolf—and presently I shall set foot on the soil of the Red Village and claim you.”
“When, heart o me?” she whispered.
And the answer came low and triumphant. “Tomorrow, Crusher of Hearts!”
And, the next day, in the White Village, the conches brayed and the gongs were beaten; the young men danced over crossed daggers, and the unmarried girls drowned their heads with the dowers of the hillside and the forest.
For that morning, Ebrahim Asif had called the villagers to full durbar and had given them the good news. There had been uncouth rejoicing.
Only Jarullah had struck a discordant note.
“Beware, young Chief,” he had said, following Ebrahim from the council hut. “Yar Zaddiq has a forked tongue. His father was a hyena, and his mother a she-devil,” so he warned.
“Possibly,” the other had laughed. “But, whatever his ancestry, his curse has not descended to his daughter. She is a precious casket filled with the arts of coquetry. Too, she is strong and well-turned of hip and breast. She will bear me stout men-children.”
And now he was in his house, adorning himself as becomes a bridegroom; for he had decided that he would wed Kurjan that very night.
He curled and oiled his beard; he drew broad lines of antimony down his eyelids; he heightened the color of his lips by chewing betel; he stained his fingertips crimson with henna; he wound an enormous green muslin turban around his fur cap; he arranged well the folds of his waistband; he perfumed his body from head to toes with pungent oil of geranium, a small bottle of which had cost him a year’s pay to Kabul.
Then he threw a peach-colored silk khalat, embroidered with cunning Persian designs in gold thread, over his broad supple shoulders, picked up his sword, and stepped out on the threshold where Jarullah was squatting.
“Jarullah,” he said, “to-morrow morning I bring home the bride. See that a feast is being prepared. I myself shall bring some fat khirli fish, the pick of the catch. As to you, have the women roast a sheep, well stuffed and seasoned with condiments. In there, amongst the boxes I brought from Kabul, you will find many things, spices of India and the far countries, strange sauces, and exquisite Chinese confections com pounded of rose leaves and honey. Let the feast be worthy of the bride—and do not steal too much.”
Jarullah overlooked the laughing insult of the young chief’s last words. He clutched the hem of Ebrahim’s khalat. He was terribly in earnest.
“Take care, young master,” he whined, “lest evil befall you. You are brave, and trusting. But neither with bravery nor with trust can you knit the riven, lying tongue of such a one as Yar Zaddiq. Take along a dozen stout fighting men. Do not go alone.”
Ebrahim smiled as he might at a babbling child.
“What avail is a rotten plow to a sound ox?” he asked casually. “What shall talkers do when there are no listeners? What is the good of lies when truth is the greatest lie?”
With which thoroughly mystifying words,
he walked away in the direction of the natural bridge that linked the two villages. Evening was dropping.
Steadily Ebrahim Asif kept on his way, along the northern bank of the river, well within sight of the southern, so that his peach-colored khalat flashed like a flame in the rays of the dying sun; and he laughed softly to himself at the thought that, doubtless, sharp eyes in the Red Village were watching his progress from boulders and trees.
Half a mile below the natural bridge, he disappeared behind the shoulder of a basalt ledge that jutted out from the river and entered a thick clump of dwarf acacia.
Five minutes later, the watchers of the Red Village saw once more the braggart sheen of peach-colored silk—and Yar Zaddiq whispered a last word to the Kafiri who crowded at his heels as jungle wolves to the tiger’s kill.
Another ten minutes. The sun was hissing out in a sea of blood. The heavens were melting into a quiet night of glowing dark-violet with a pale moon peaking its lonely horn in the North, and up at the natural bridge where the two villages met, there was the sudden yelling of war cries, the rattle of stones, the throwing of thorn sticks—and, above the noise, Yar Zaddiq’s voice stabbed out as, flanked by the pick of his fighting men, he hurled himself upon the peach-colored khalat before its wearer had had time to cross the bridge.
“When you set foot in the Red Village, Ebrahim Asif! I swore it! By the Koran did I give oath, and by the ancient gods of the Kafiri! When you set foot in the Red Village! True I am to the double oath!”—and his stick came down, tearing a great gash in the bridegroom’s silken finery, brought from far Kabul.
The men of the Red Village closed in, with exultant, savage shouts.
Night had dropped, suddenly, completely, as it does in the tropics, with a burnouse of black velvet.
Nothing was visible except the shadowy, fantastic outline of a dozen human bodies balled together into a tight knot, heaving, straining, wrestling, pulling down their lonely opponent as hounds pull down a stag.
But the lonely man fought well. Time and again he jerked himself loose. Time and again his sword flashed free and tasted blood.
The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 12