Yarmud gaped at him.
“I was born in another land,” Price explained. “I came here across the sea and the mountains.”
The Arab recovered, remonstrated excitedly:
“But you must be Iru! You are tall: you have the blue eyes, the flaming hair! Aysa went to seek you, found you. You yourself say that you broke from the tomb. You come from Anz with the ax of Iru, and whispering his ax-song.”
Price began an explanation of his life, and the expedition into the desert, of how he had come to meet Aysa.
“Yes, those strangers are here,” Yarmud agreed. “They camp across the lake. They take our food, and turn their camels on our pasture, and give us no pay. They wish my warriors to march with them against the golden folk. But none of them is, like you, the image of Iru.”
In the end, Price was unable to convince Yarmud that he was not the ancient king, returned. Like Aysa, the old man cheerfully admitted his story, but insisted that he was Iru, born again. And though he was unwilling to accept any theory that he was the reincarnation of a barbarian king, Price could find no effective argument against it.
“Promise me that you will say no more that you are not Ira,” at last Yarmud demanded, shrewdly, “for my warriors are eager to follow you against the golden folk.”
And Price, for Aysa’s sake, was glad enough to promise. After all, there might be something in Yarmud’s contention. He did not intend to trouble himself further about it. The problems of one life were proving quite enough for him, without any gratuitous assumption of the burdens of another.
Aysa, Price found, was the daughter of Yarmud’s brother, who had been sheikh of the Beni Anz, until Malikar had done away with him two harvest-seasons before, for refusal to send the annual tribute to the snake. Yarmud, then, his successor, was Aysa’s uncle—which fact further increased Price’s liking for the sternly proud old ruler.
Late that afternoon Price, for the first time, left the long room in which he had wakened.
“When Aysa escaped, Malikar demanded more tribute to the snake,” Yarmud told him. “A camel laden with dates and grain, and another maiden. The snake-men have come today to take them.”
Price expressed desire to watch the departure of the sacrifice.
“You may,” Yarmud agreed. “But you should dress as one of my warriors. It would not be well for Malikar to know you are here, before we strike.”
He arrayed Price in a long, flowing gumbaz, or inner garment, a brown abba, and a vivid green kafiyeh, which concealed his red hair; armed him with a long, two-edged bronze sword and a broad-bladed spear with a wooden shaft.
Mingling with a score of men similarly dressed, Price went out into El Yerim.
He found himself upon the dusty, irregular streets of a town half concealed in groves of date-palms. The clustered mud buildings, low and squat, were of the simple, massive adobe architecture old as Babylon. The streets were deserted save for groups of Arab warriors; an air of silent dread hung over them.
Hastening northward along the brown adobe walls, they came out of the town, upon the gravel shore of a tiny lake. Its crystal water was boiling up in the center, from the uprush of the great springs that fed it—and made possible this desert garden that Quadra y Vargas had called “the golden land.”
Green-tufted palms lined the opposite shore, and under them Price saw the camp of the expedition with which he had come into the desert. The trim khaki drill tents of Jacob Garth and the other whites. The black camel’s hair hejras of the sheik Fouad el Akmet and his Bedouins. The gray silent bulk of the army tank. Little groups of men were standing beneath the palms, watching; he recognized bulky Jacob Garth, and his enemy, Joao de Castro.
Then Price’s eyes went to what the others were watching.
Two hundred yards from where Price and the Arab warriors stood, along the broad bare strip of gravel between the adobe town and the little lake, stood a dozen white camels. Blue-robed men, armed with shimmering yellow yataghans, sat upon five of them, holding the halter-ropes of the others. One was loaded with wicker hampers; that, he supposed, was part of the tribute.
A thin, wailing shriek of agonized grief rose among the low mud houses. And the remaining six snake-men came into view, two of them dragging between them a young girl whose hands were lashed behind her. Behind followed a haggard woman, screaming and beating her flat breasts.
The girl seemed submissive, paralyzed with fear. She made no struggle as she was lifted to one of the mounted men, who laid her inert body across the saddle before him. The other men leapt upon their camels, and wheeled them, almost running down the grief-stricken woman.
Price ran forward impulsively as the eleven started around the lake, one of them leading the laden camel. Yarmud gripped his arm, stopped him.
“Wait, Iru,” he whispered. “You are not yet strong from your ride. Nor are we ready for battle. If we interfere, Malika will come and bathe El Yerim in blood. And Vekyra—she will hunt the human game! Wait, until we are ready.”
Price stopped, realizing the wisdom of the sheikh’s words. But hot rage filled him, the burning resentment he always felt when he saw the weak abused by the strong. And cold determination filled him to destroy utterly the golden beings—be they human or living metal—that had subjected this race to such base slavery. Before, he might have been satisfied with the rescue of Aysa. Now he was filled with a stern and passionless resolve to obliterate the beings who had taken her from him.
14. THE MENACE IN THE MIRAGE
THE Price Durand who rode around the little lake, five days later, and into the farengi camp, with Yarmud and twoscore warriors of the Beni Anz, was not the same restless wanderer who had set out with the expedition from the Arabian Sea, so many weary weeks before.
He felt completely recovered, now, from the suffering of his last cruel journey, and filled with a burning impatience to test his strength with Malikar that would brook no longer delay.
The desert sun had burned him to the brown of an Arab, had drawn every superfluous drop of moisture from his body. He was hard, lean, wiry. A new iron strength was in him, bred of the desert he had fought and mastered, a tireless endurance.
His spirit was hardened as much as his supple body. He had joined Jacob Garth, not in quest of gold, but a restless malcontent, a weary sportsman in search of a new game, a world-rover driven by vague and obscure longings, by indefinable desire for strange vistas.
In the Rub’s Al Khali he had found Aysa, strange, lovely girl, fugitive from weird peril. He had fled with her across the shifting sands… loved her in the hidden garden of a lost city… lost her to a power that he did not yet understand.
Now he was determined to find and free the girl, to blot out the beings that had taken her. It was as if the desert life had crystallized all his restless energy into a single driving power that would yield to no opposition, admit no failure.
He knew that very real and immediate danger faced the attempt. The powers of the golden beings, as he had glimpsed them, were vast and ominous, appalling. But it was not in Price to consider the consequences of defeat, save as challenge to another battle.
Jacob Garth came out of his tent, to meet Price and his bodyguard. Always an enigma, the huge man was unchanged. His puffy, tallow-white face was blandly placid, mask-like, as ever; pale, cold blue eyes still peered blankly and unfeelingly from above his tangle of curly red beard.
He stopped, and surveyed Price for a time, and then his voice rang out, richly sonorous, in casual greeting, free from hint of surprise:
“Hullo, Durand.”
“Good morning, Garth.”
Price looked down from his hejin—Yarmud’s gift—at the gross, bovinely calm man in faded, dusty khaki. He felt the cold eyes taking in his gleaming chain mail, his bright shield, the yellow ax.
“Where’ve you been, Durand?” Garth boomed suddenly.
Price met his searching, unreadable gaze. “We’ve a good deal to talk over, Garth. Suppose we adjourn somewhere out o
f the sun?”
“Will you come in my tent, over here under the palms?”
Price nodded. He dismounted and gave the halter-rope of his camel to one of Yarmud’s men. With a word to the old sheikh, he followed Jacob Garth to the tent, entered before him. Garth motioned to a blanket spread on the gravel floor; they squatted on it.
The big man stared at him, silently, rather grimly, then spoke suddenly:
“You understand, Durand, that you aren’t returning to your old place as leader of this expedition. I don’t know just how the men will want to dispose of you, since your—desertion.”
“That affair was revolt against my authority!” cried Price. “And against every law of human decency. I’m no deserter!” He caught himself. “But we needn’t go into that. And your men won’t be called upon to dispose of me.”
“You appear to be in cahoots with the natives,” Garth observed.
“They have accepted me as a leader. We are planning an attack on the mountain of the golden folk. I came to see if you would care to join the expedition.”
Jacob Garth seemed more interested. “They will actually follow you?” he demanded. “Against their golden gods?”
“I think so.”
“Then perhaps we can come to some agreement.” The deep voice was suave as ever, colorless. “We’ve been here for weeks. The men are rested, ready for action. We’ve been drilling. And scouting over the country.
“We’d have moved on the mountain already, but the natives refused to join me. And it appeared bad strategy to advance and leave them in control of the water. We didn’t trust them.”
“I’m sure,” Price said, “of the entire loyalty of the Beni Anz—or at least of Yarmud, the sheikh—to me. I propose that we join forces—until the golden people are smashed.”
“And then?”
“You and the men can help yourselves to the golden palace. All I want is Aysa’s safety.”
“You mean the woman you took away from de Castro?”
Price nodded.
“Well, Joao is going to have something to say about her. I promised him his choice of any women we take. But, for my part, I accept your terms.”
“We’re allies, then?”
“Until we have broken the power of the golden folk.”
Jacob Garth extended his white, puffy hand. Price took it, and was amazed again at the crushing strength beneath the smooth soft skin.
At sunrise the next morning a veritable army was winding through the palm groves of El Yerim, from the camp and the town beside the tiny lake. The clattering tank led the van. Behind rode men on camels, in a close, double column.
Jacob Garth and swart, sloe-eyed Joao de Castro, at the head of the farengi, a score of hard-bitten adventurers, their pack animals laden with machine-guns, the mountain artillery. Stokes mortars, and high explosives.
The sheikh Fouad el Akmet riding before his two-score nakhawilah or renegades, who were proudly girt with glittering cartridge belts and carrying new Lebel rifles.
Price Durand, resplendent in the golden mail of Iru, riding beside Yarmud at the head of nearly five hundred eager warriors of the Beni Anz.
As the interminable line of fighting-men crept out of the green palm groves of the fertile valley, to the desolate, fire-born plateau, they came in view of Hajar Jehannum, or Verl, as the Beni Anz named the mountain—a steep-walled, basaltic butte, the core of an ancient volcano, crowned with a towered palace ablaze with myriad splintering gleams of white and gold.
An exultant cheer rolled back along the columns, as each successive group came within view of the mountain, with the bright promise of its coronal of marble and yellow metal.
Price’s heart lifted. Involuntarily he urged his hejin to a faster gait, fondled the oaken helve of Korlu, the great ax. Aysa must be a prisoner within that scintillating castle. Aysa, the fair, brave girl of the desert.
“Great is the day!” Yarmud shouted beside him, kicking his own camel to make it keep pace. “Before sunset the castle of Verl is ours. At last the golden folk shall die—”
Fear stilled his voice. Silently, pale-faced, he pointed at the bleak mountain still fifteen miles away. The whole long column had abruptly halted; a dry whisper of terror raced along it.
“The shadow of the golden folk!” came Yarmud’s fear-roughened voice.
A brilliant fan of light was lifting into the indigo sky ahead. Narrow rays of rose and topaz mingled in an inverted, splendid pyramid of flame. The apex of the pyramid touched the highest golden tower. The colored rays were up-flung from the castle.
Above the fan of saffron and rosy glory a picture appeared. Vague at first, looming gigantic as if projected on the dome of the blue heavens, it swiftly took form, color, reality.
A gigantic snake, vast as a cloud, coiled in the air above the mountain. A heap of yellow coils, the evil head uplifted upon a slender gleaming aureate column. A serpent of gold. Each brilliant scale glinted like polished metal. The head dropped upon the upmost coil, and the snake’s eyes, glittering black, insidious, looked down upon the halted, fearful columns.
Beside the serpent was a woman—the same woman, Price knew, that he had seen upon the tiger, in the mirage above the mountain pass. A yellow coil, thick as her body, was looped about her feet, and she half reclined against the next, an arm caressingly over it.
The woman’s body was yellow as the snake, and it had something of the serpent’s slender, sinuous grace. A short, tight-fitting tunic of green encased it, hiding no undulating line. Red-golden, flowing loose and abundant, her hair fell over her yellow shoulders.
The woman looked down from the sky, a mockingly malefic smile upon her oval, exotic face. Her full lips, crimsoned, were voluptuous and cruel; the lids of her piquantly slanted eyes dark-edged; the shadowed orbs themselves tawny-green.
Price watched those greenish, oblique eyes rove the columns, questingly, and fasten suddenly upon himself. The woman, apparently, saw him as plainly as he did her, whatever the strange agency of her projection. She stared down at him, boldly. In her gaze was a curious intimacy.
Then puzzlement and vague alarm came into the tawny eyes, as they absorbed the golden mail, the oval buckler, the yellow ax. But still they held a taunting challenge, an enigmatic promise, too, oddly disturbing. The slim yellow body relaxed against the thick, heaped golden coils of the snake. Reddened fingers shook out the ruddy-golden hair until it rippled in shimmering cascades.
Price was swept with a surge of fierce desire for that full-curved, sinuous body. He felt swift will to meet the taunting mockery in the greenish, slanted eyes. Lust, not love. Nothing of the spirit, nothing reverent.
He laughed at the woman, derisively. She flung back the silken-gold net of hair, abruptly, and anger flashed in the tawny eyes. No doubt that she saw him.
He looked away from her, at the snake. Even by comparison with the looming shadow of the woman it was large, its golden-scaled body thicker than her own. Like an ominous cloud, it hung in the sky above the black mountain, above the outspread fan of arrowed rays. Flat, triangular, ugly, its great head watched.
Its glittering eyes were terrible; black with a hint of purple, unwinking, aflame with cold light. Price’s pulse slowed with instinctive fear as he met them, icy needles danced along his spine. The eyes of the snake were wells of cold evil, agleam with sinister wisdom older than mankind. They were hypnotic.
Price had wondered how a rabbit feels, frozen in fascinated trance, as the stalking snake writhes near. In that moment he knew. He felt the cold, deadly shock of resistless, malign power, intangible, inexplicable, yet terrifyingly real.
With an effort be dragged his gaze away from those motionless, hypnotic orbs. His body, to his surprise, was tense, covered with chill sweat.
Looking back along the columns, he saw that a strange quietness had fallen, a silence almost of death. Every man was gazing fascinated into the mirage. Clatter of voices was stilled. No outcry rose, even of wonder or fear.
“Attention!” he shouted. Then, in Arabic: “Don’t look at the snake. Turn away. Look back toward the oasis. The snake has no power unless you watch it.”
A deep sigh beside him. And Yarmud’s low voice:
“The snake threatens. We will win no easy victory. Its eyes can destroy us.”
“Let’s go on.” Price urged his camel forward.
“Then sing the ax-song. The men are afraid.”
Price lifted his voice in the battle-song of the ancient barbarian king whose armor he wore. A wave of cheering rolled back along the column, at first feeble and uncertain, but rising in volume.
And the long line crept forward again.
15. MIRRORS OF PERIL
AS THE hours went by and the camel-mounted columns wound onward, the weird mirage hung ominously in the sky ahead, tawny-green eyes of the golden woman and purple-black orbs of the snake gazing down. At times the phenomenon appeared curiously near. It seemed to draw steadily away, as the expedition advanced, keeping a uniform distance.
Price speculated upon possible scientific explanations of it, without arriving at any satisfactory conclusion. The mirage, he knew, must be simply the colossal reflection of real beings, produced by the application of optical laws unknown to the outside world.
The hypnotic or paralytic effect of the snake’s eyes was even more puzzling. He supposed that the golden reptile merely possessed the slight power of fascination of the ordinary snake, increased in proportion to its size, and perhaps intensified or amplified in the same manner as its body was magnified in the mirage.
The men remained subdued and frightened. The courage of Fouad and his Bedouins was maintained only by their confidence in the tank and the other invincible weapons of the farengi band. The Beni Anz were similarly sustained by a faith in Price as a supernatural deliverer.
Many times the column lagged. Price and Jacob Garth and Yarmud rode continually back and forth, encouraging the men, warning them not to look into the maddening mirage hanging ahead, where the snake’s eyes gleamed with the cold and deadly fascination of ancient and sinister wisdom.
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