El Borak and Other Desert Adventures

by Robert E. Howard

  “I feared you were dead,” Gordon said a bit unsteadily.

  “I deserve to be, because I failed in my mission,” said the Sikh contritely. “I should have reached the Gorge of the Kings before the Ghilzais. Sahib, at the western foot of the crags which surround this plateau, I came upon an old road-bed — the old caravan road which once ran through this country from Persia to India. It turns northward along the foot of the crags and comes into the Gorge of the Kings a mile or so to the west of the cleft where you killed the Mongol.

  “It was easy going after I struck the road — but as I climbed down toward it I slipped and fell and struck my head against a rock. I must have lain senseless for hours. When I came to myself and pressed on, and reached the Gorge of the Kings, it was already dawn, and the Ghilzais, who had almost killed their horses in an all-night ride, had already passed through the cleft. I came upon their horses which they had left in the gorge, with some boys to watch them. They told me that Yar Ali Khan had used your rope to get upon the ledge that hides the mouth of the cleft, and had gotten through the door and shot the man guarding the cleft before the fellow knew the Afridi was near him. The secrets of these Assassins have been safe for so long, the fools have grown careless. Not even your entry of the city put them on their guard. They never guessed that men would follow you.

  “Well, even as I started to follow the Ghilzais through the cleft, I heard firing from a point I knew to be the summit of the cliffs. I knew they were already on the plateau, for the firing receded as I listened. While I hesitated, not knowing what to do, and cursing myself for my failure to reach them in time, these fifty men rode into the gorge, following the Ghilzais. They are Waziris whom Baber Khan allowed to establish their village a few miles from Khor; hearing the Ghilzais were at war, they followed to aid in the fighting — and the looting. Seeing no better course I brought them with me, as you had planned for me to bring the main force of the Ghilzais. The horses were tired, but even so we made good time, for we followed the old road-bed to a point within half a mile from the hole where I crawled through the cliff. And now we await your orders!”

  “Shabash!” exclaimed Gordon. “There is man’s work for us all.”

  “What has occurred, sahib?” the Sikh asked eagerly, while the wild Waziris, who had followed him merely because they knew him to be El Borak’s comrade, crowded close eagerly. “We heard firing all the way, but of course could see nothing. And this Kurd, who opened the door for us, knows no more than we.”

  “The Ghilzais hold the orchard at the other end of the town,” Gordon answered. “Later I will tell you of the battle; now there is work to do in haste.” Turning to the three Kurds, he said: “Do you three men do as I have instructed you. Lal Singh, tell them where you left the Waziri horses.” This done, Gordon added: “Ride to Khor and wait for us. If the battle goes against us, I charge you to see that Azizun gets safely home.”

  They salaamed silently; the girl would have clung to him and wept, but there was no time, even for a woman’s tears. At his word the Kurds picked her up bodily though with clumsy gentleness, and bore her weeping through the secret panel.

  “And now out of this palace,” said Gordon. “We’re going to get in the fighting, but it will do Baber Khan no good for us to be hemmed up in that orchard with him. We’re going to try to make that garden across the road from the orchard — you know the plan of the city, Lal Singh. From that point we can rake the houses on either side of the street, and be in position to flank any charge that tries to come down the street. Come on!”

  Gordon set off along a corridor down which Musa had guided him the day before when he led him to be confronted by Ivan Konaszevski. The fifty tribesmen followed him, incongruous with their wild faces and ragged garments in that setting of rich tapestry and polished tile.

  They peered about suspiciously at the sound of the rifles at the front of the palace, cracking away like an anti-climax. A few moments later Gordon led them into the hallway from which he had escaped the day before. The window still showed the bent, hacked bars, the balcony displayed the splintered lattice. He paused a moment on the balcony, pointing out his plan to Lal Singh and the crowding tribesmen who pricked their ears for every word uttered by El Borak, as jewels dropped by an almost mythical hero.

  “You see how the gardens lie in a solid rank west of the houses, separated only by walls between? The trees grow thick. If we skirt those gardens, keeping close to the western walls, our chances of being seen by anyone in the houses will be slight. I believe we can come up behind the Garden of the Egyptian without being discovered; the Assassins will all be looking the other way. I don’t know how many men are in the Garden of the Egyptian, but a surprize attack from the rear ought to clear it. Come on now — through this broken lattice and over that wall. Nobody’s watching this side of the palace.”

  Man after man they dropped from the balcony, raced after him across the garden and slid over the wall from which he had tumbled into the ravine. They found themselves on the bare rocky plain which ran to the palace wall at that point; but a few moments later they had followed the wall around and darted across the space that separated it from the first of the city-gardens.

  The steady firing at the other end of the street indicated that the fighting was raging fiercely. Hundreds of rifles barking together made a deafening racket and Gordon winced at the thought of the storm of lead that must be sweeping through the orchard. It would take bloody toll of the defenders, despite the Ghilzais’ skill at taking advantage of every bit of cover. But at least the noise covered his advance. With all that racket going on at the north end of the town, nobody would be very likely to be watching in the other direction.

  And such must have been the case, for no alarm was raised as the swift and furtive band glided along the western edge of the gardens, bending low to keep beneath the wall as much as possible.

  As they approached the north end of the street possibilities for discovery increased, yet at the same time the attention of their enemies in that part of the town was fixed even more absolutely in the other direction. And though Gordon and his followers could not know it, events were shaping for a typhoonic climax.

  X

  THE BLOODY ANGLE

  Ivan Konaszevski, who had been directing the battle from the roof of the third house on the east side of the street, had already realized that it would take a charge in force to regain the orchard. He was a prey to doubts and uncertainties. He feared that reinforcements were expected by the Afghans, to defend the Stair against which he would have to divide his forces. He was haunted by the fear that Gordon, though trapped in the tower, might find a way to outwit the men who had been stationed to keep him there. The Cossack did not fear Gordon personally, but he sweat profusely at the thought of depending on wits less keen than his own to keep the American out of the fight. He feared that if the fight dragged on until nightfall, the Afghans might make a sally under cover of darkness and get into the houses near-by, from which it would be all but impossible to dislodge them. He feared the demoralizing effect of a long drawn-out battle on his men, whom he was already feeding hashish and whiskey to fire their zeal.

  So though he would rather have waited until the Afghan force had been decimated by hours of sniping by hidden marksmen, he decided to wind up the feud in a blaze of blood and glory. The taking of the orchard by the Ghilzais had shown that a small force could not hold the comparatively low wall against a determined charge of superior numbers.

  Leaving a few score riflemen on the roofs to keep the men in the orchard busy, Konaszevski drew most of his men out of the houses, and gathered them, four hundred strong, in the space between the third and fourth houses on the east side of the street, out of sight of the beleaguered Afghans. He detached a force of a hundred men to steal through the gardens that lay on the east side of the town and charge the orchard from the east at the auspicious moment, while he led three hundred hemp-maddened fanatics straight down the street, against the southwestern ang
le of the orchard-wall.

  The Cossack knew they would be protected by the houses up to the last few hundred feet, where a bare space separated the last house on that side from the orchard. Ivan knew that many men would die in that open space, but he believed enough men would survive to sweep over the wall in spite of the defenders’ fire. And dead warriors could always be replaced; human life was the cheapest commodity in the Hills. Ivan was ready to sacrifice three-fourths of his army if it took that to crush the invaders.

  The charge was signalled by a deafening roar from a dozen long bronze trumpets in the hands of Ivan’s Mongols. That maddening sound smote the ears of Gordon and his Waziris just as they slid, undetected, over the unguarded western wall of the Garden of the Egyptian. They were just raising their rifles to aim at the bare score of Assassins who crouched along the eastern wall, firing at the orchard across the way, and oblivious to anything behind them. That outrageous brazen clamor momentarily stunned and paralyzed them, and then a perfect hell-burst of yells followed the trumpets, and a mass of frenzied, weapon-brandishing humanity burst from between the houses across the way and swept up the street like a foaming torrent.

  The men on the roofs and in the garden laid down a perfect barrage along the orchard wall, and all hell seemed bursting at once.

  It was a moment where everything depended on a hair-trigger decision. And Gordon rose to the occasion, just as Baber Khan had risen earlier in the day. His eager but bewildered Waziris could not hear the order he shouted, but they understood him when he threw his rifle to his shoulder. In that raging hurricane of sound, the volley which cut down the twenty riflemen along the garden wall passed unnoticed. Those Assassins died looking the other way, without knowing what hit them. A few seconds later their slayers were kneeling among their bodies, sighting over the wall in their place. The men still on the roofs, firing madly over the heads of their charging comrades, never knew what had taken place in the Garden of the Egyptian.

  The Waziris had not yet reached the east wall when the frothing horde swept past the last house and lunged toward the orchard. A fearful volley met them; the wall was lined by jetting spurts of flame and smoke rolled up in a cloud. The whole first rank went down. In an instant the road was carpeted with dead men. Ivan had counted on the momentum of that headlong charge to carry it over the open space, but even his fanatics faltered in the tearing teeth of that blast. They reeled and wavered.

  But at that moment the hundred Ismailians who had circled through the gardens reached the east wall of the orchard and found it unguarded, because the Ghilzais had been forced to concentrate their forces in the southwest angle to meet the charge. Ivan had counted on that, too; but he had overlooked the density of the trees through which the hundred warriors would have to fire. So their volley into the backs of the men along the southwest walls, while murderous, was not as devastating as he had hoped it would be.

  Nevertheless it staggered the Ghilzais, and in that moment, as their fire wavered, the maddened Ismailians in the road sent up a roar that burst the very ear-drums of battle, and surged irresistibly on the barrier. It was at that instant that Gordon and his Waziris opened fire from behind them. A whole line of men dropped, shot in the back, but the rush was not checked in the slightest. Like a roaring wave the Assassins rolled against the wall and locked with the defenders. Rifles poked over the wall from either side were fired full into snarling faces. Tulwars lunged up or hacked down. Men were dragged from the wall into the road, men scrambling up on the wall from without tumbled or were knocked over into the orchard. The Ismailians, trampling their dead and dying underfoot, clustered in a straining, heaving mass against the wall, those in front crushed upon it by the pressure of those behind. They swarmed upon the barrier fighting like furies, and as fast as they fell others took their place from the shrieking horde.

  The Waziris in the garden fired again and again, and their slugs ripped into the rear flank of the mob, reaping a grisly harvest. But the frenzied horde was like a man who is so blood-madly intent on killing the foe before him that he is not aware that a knife is being plunged again and again into his back.

  The hundred Ismailians in the orchard came tearing through the trees to fall on the rear of the Ghilzais with knife and rifle-butt. Gordon’s Waziris, carried beyond themselves, leaped the garden wall and hurled themselves at the backs of the horde before the orchard, clubbing and stabbing. And the riflemen on the roofs deserted their posts to rush into the road and add their fury to the general frenzy.

  It was at this moment that the wall gave way under the impact of hurtling tons of straining human flesh, and the red tides which had been foaming against the barrier on each side flowed together and mingled in an awful welter.

  After that there was no semblance of order or plan, no chance to obey commands and no time to give them. It was all blind, gasping, sweating butchery, hand-to-hand, blood splashing the blossoms and straining feet stamping the grass to shreds. Mixed and mingled inextricably, the heaving mass of fighters surged and eddied all over the orchard and flooded the road. The firing ceased, gave way to the crunch of clubbed rifle butts and the rip of stabbing blades. There was not much difference in the numbers of the rival hordes now, for the losses of the Batinis had been appalling. The outcome hung in the balance and no man knew how the general battle was going. Each man was too busy with his own individual problem of keeping a whole skin and killing the man next to him to be able to see what was going on about him.

  Even Gordon, whose brain generally functioned crystal-clear in the reddest rages of battle, could obtain no distinct conception of that fight — the most savage of all the myriad unrecorded and unnamed battles fought out in the mystery of the Hills to decide the fate of empires.

  He did not waste his breath trying to command order out of chaos. Craft and strategy had gone by the board; the fight would be decided by sheer manpower and individual ferocity. Hemmed in by howling madmen, with no one to listen to orders if he gave them, and no breath to give them in any event, there was nothing to do but break as many heads as he could and let the gods of chance decide the general issue.

  Gordon remembered firing his last shot point-blank into a wild face. Then he clubbed his rifle and smote and smote and smote until the world became strange and red and hazy and he almost lost even his individuality in the tumult about him.

  He knew — without being conscious that he knew — that Lal Singh fought on one side of him and Yusuf bin Suleiman on the other; and behind them, all who were left of the Waziris hung doggedly at his heels, swinging dripping tulwars.

  And then, suddenly, as a fog thins when the wind strikes it, the battle was beginning to thin out, knotted masses splitting and melting into groups and individuals. Gordon knew that one side or the other was giving way; men were turning their backs to the slaughter. It was the Batinis who wavered, the madness inspired by the hemp they had eaten beginning to die out. Without the drug their fury was less absolute than the desperation of the Hillmen who knew they must conquer to survive. Besides, the Ismailians were a mongrel throng, lacking the racial unity of the Afghans.

  But the break did not come all at once. The edges of the battle crumbled away, but in the midst of the orchard the stubbornest fight of the whole day swirled and eddied about a dense clump of trees where the fiercest fighters of Shalizahr made their stand with their backs to the trees.

  Gordon led his men that way, hacking through the loose lines of individual combats. He saw a glitter of gilded corselets among a wave of sheepskin coats, and Yusuf ibn Suleiman croaked something, and sprang away from his side, toward a plumed helmet which waved above the turbans.

  And then Gordon saw Ivan Konaszevski. The Cossack was stripped to the waist, his cord-like muscles quivering and knotting to the lightning play of the saber in his hand. His dark eyes blazed and his thin lips wore a reckless smile. Three dead Ghilzais lay at his feet and his saber kept half a dozen blades in play at once. Right and left of him corseleted Arabs and squat Mongols
in lacquered leather smote and wrestled breast to breast with wild Ghilzai swordsmen. And into this carnage Gordon’s Waziris hurled themselves howling like wolves.

  Gordon saw Yar Ali Khan for the first time, looming above the mob as he glutted his berserk fury in stupendous blows. And he saw Baber Khan — reeling out of the melee, covered with blood. Gordon began beating his way through to Konaszevski.

  Ivan laughed, with a wild gleam in his dark eyes, as he saw the American coming toward him. Blood streamed down Gordon’s muscular breast, coursed in tiny rivulets down his corded brown arms. The butt of his clubbed rifle was clotted with blood and brains.

  “Come and die, El Borak!” laughed Ivan, and Gordon crouched for a charge, swinging the rifle butt above his head.

  “Nay, sahib, take this!” And Lal Singh thrust into his hand the hilt of his dripping saber. El Borak straightened, shook his head to clear it, and came in as a Cossack would come, in a blazing whirl of action. Ivan sprang to meet him, and they fought as Cossacks fight, both attacking simultaneously, stroke raining on stroke too swiftly for the eye to follow them. Time might have turned back three hundred years to a duel between Zaporoghian swordsmen on the shores of the Dneiper.

  And in a circle about them the panting, blood-stained warriors ceased their own work of slaughter to stare at the sight of two Western warriors settling the destiny of the East between them!

  “Aie!” It was a cry from a hundred throats as Gordon stumbled, lost contact with the Cossack blade.

  Ivan cried out ringingly, whirled up his sword — and felt Gordon’s saber in his heart before he realized the American had tricked him. He fell heavily, wrenching the hilt from Gordon’s hand. He was dead before he struck the ground, his thin lips twisted in a smile of bitter self-mockery.