El Borak and Other Desert Adventures

by Robert E. Howard

  Gordon was stooping to regain his sword when a shot cracked back among the trees; he stooped even lower as if to kneel to the dead man — and pitched suddenly across the corpse, blood oozing from his head. He did not hear the maddened yell that rose up to the hot blue skies, nor see the headlong rush of the frothing Afghans as they stormed past him and hurled themselves at the throats of their enemies.

  Gordon’s first sensation of returning consciousness was a lack of sensation — a numbness that held him helpless. He seemed to lie in soft darkness. Then he heard voices, mumbling and incoherent at first, growing more distinct as life grew stronger in him. He began to distinguish the voices, and to recognize them. One was Yar Ali Khan’s, and he was startled to realize that the giant was weeping — blubbering vociferously and without shame.

  “Aie! Ahai! Ohee! He is dead! His brains are pouring out of that hole in his head! Oh, my brother! Oh, prince of slayers! Oh, king among men! Oh, El Borak! Dead, for a mob of ragged hill-bastards! He whose smallest finger nail was worth more than all the Ghilzai horse-thieves in the Himalayas!”

  “He is not dead, Allah curse you! And how are the Ghilzais to blame? My warriors lie dead by scores!” That was Baber Khan.

  “Ohai! Would they had all died, and thou with them, aye, and I too, if so El Borak could have been saved alive.”

  “Oh, hush that ox-bellowing and hand me that bandage!” That was Lal Singh. “I tell you, his wound is not mortal. The bullet but grazed his skull, knocking him senseless, curse the cowardly Batini who fired it.”

  “I split the dog’s skull,” blubbered Yar Ali Khan. “But that can not restore life to our sahib. Here is the bandage. Sikhs have no hearts. They are a breed without bowels of compassion. Your friend and brother lies there dying, and you shed no tear! Nay, you mock me for my woe! By Allah, were it not that grief unmans me, I’d give you something to weep about!”

  Gordon’s awakening senses were then aware of a throbbing in his head, which was eased somewhat under the manipulation of strong, gentle, skillful fingers that applied something wet and cool. The darkness cleared from his brain and eyes, and he looked up into the anxious faces of his friends.

  “Sahib!” cried Lal Singh joyously. “Look, Baber Khan, he opens his eyes! Ali, if you were not blinded by those idiotic tears, you would see that El Borak lives, and is conscious!”

  “Sahib!” yelled the great hairy cutthroat, and forthwith fell to weeping for joy. Gordon lifted his bandaged head, and set his teeth as the movement started it to throbbing agonizingly again. He was lying in a corner of the orchard wall, and a peach tree bent its branches over him, green leaves against blue sky, and blossoms raining petals about him in a soft shower as the breeze blew. But the air reeked of fresh-spilt blood; there was blood on the grass, and a dead man lying face down a few yards away.

  The orchard was strangely quiet after the noise of battle, but he thought he heard men screaming somewhere in the distance. He could not be sure, for the roaring inside his head.

  “What happened?” he mumbled. “Is Ivan dead?”

  “Dead as man can be with a saber through his heart, sahib,” answered Lal Singh. “The devil himself would have bitten at the trick you played on the Cossack. My own heart was in my mouth when you seemed to stumble. A Batini skulking among the trees shot you an instant later. But the heart was gone out of the Assassins, and our Afghans went stark mad when they saw you fall. They fell on the Ismailians with a fury that could not be withstood, and those sons of dogs gave way and fled in every direction — those who lived to flee. Even now the Ghilzais harry them up and down the street. Hearken!”

  Gordon stared at Baber Khan.

  “I feared you were slain.”

  The chief grinned wryly. His beard was clotted with blood from a cut on the neck, and his leg was stuck out stiffly before him as he sat leaning against the wall.

  “A bullet in the thigh. It is nothing. We feared you were dead.”

  “Ha!” Yar Ali Khan smoothed his beard and stared scornfully at his friends. “Old women! Sahib, you should have heard them bellowing over you! Wallah! Did I not bid you cease your unmanly weeping? Did I not tell you that El Borak’s head was too hard for a bullet to break? Where are your manners? The sahib perhaps has orders!”

  Gordon struggled up to a sitting position and stared out over the orchard. What he saw there shook even his iron nerves. It was a garden of corpses. The dead lay like fallen leaves in wind-blown heaps and mounds and straggling lines. In the bloody angle and in the road outside the bodies were piled three deep, among the ruins of the wall.

  “God!” For a moment Gordon was speechless, his soul in revolt. “Baber Khan, send someone after your warriors. Ali will go. Tell them to stop the slaughter. Enough men have died. Tell them to spare all who will lay down their arms and surrender. And another thing — there are many captive women in Shalizahr who are not to be harmed. I intend to return them to their homes.”

  Yar Ali Khan swaggered off importantly to carry the orders, just as another man approached. Yusuf ibn Suleiman came toward Gordon, holding a broken scimitar. He spoke with difficulty because he had been slashed across the mouth and the bubbling blood choked him.

  “Effendi, my sword broke with the last stroke, but it was enough. Muhammad ibn Ahmed lies yonder among the corpses of his corseleted dogs. He will never insult a mountain-Kurd again. Have I not kept faith, El Borak?”

  “You have kept faith. But why ask me that question? I never expected anything but that you would keep faith.”

  Yusuf sighed deeply and seated himself cross-legged beneath the tree, the broken sword across his knees.

  A low moaning began to make itself manifest over the orchard — the wounded crying for water. Gordon grasped Lal Singh’s shoulder and rose stiffly.

  “Baber Khan, we’ve got to get the wounded into the houses and do what we can for them. The women can help. I can stand alone, Lal Singh, and in a few minutes I’ll be able to walk without help. You and Yusuf go to the nearest canal and bring water.”

  As the men set out, Gordon supported himself by grasping a peach limb; he had not yet fully recovered from the paralyzing shock of that bullet-wound. His legs still felt numb.

  “I have been thinking while sitting here holding a broken leg, El Borak,” said Baber Khan. “This city is easier to defend than Khor; with Ghilzai warriors guarding the outer cleft and the Stair, not even the Amir’s field-pieces could take Shalizahr. I will send for the women and children and we will hold this plateau. Stay with us, El Borak, and rule beside me! We will build a kingdom here!”

  “Are you touched with the madness that has led to the slaughter of hundreds this day?” retorted Gordon. “You see to what doom a like ambition has led the rulers of Shalizahr. They too plotted a kingdom among these Hills.”

  “But the Amir has doomed me anyway!”

  “You need not fear his displeasure now! Any man who has freed him of the fear of the Triple-Bladed Dagger is sure of the Amir’s pardon, regardless of his past offenses. My head upon it! Why do you think I summoned you to help me take this city? Merely to aid my own interests? You know me better than that. I knew that if we stamped out this nest of cobras together, it would win you the Amir’s pardon.”

  Baber Khan sighed gustily.

  “The sword is lifted from my neck by your words, El Borak. I have had no love for the life of an outlaw, but I was caught in a web of lies.”

  “We have broken that web. But at a bitter price. I wish it could have been done at lesser cost of brave men.”

  “All would have died, and me with them, if the Amir had come against us, as he planned,” grunted Baber Khan. “Those who died, died as a Ghilzai wishes to die. And there will be loot for the living, and the women of the dead.”

  “Let’s don’t be too hasty about plundering. We’ll have to deliver the city to the officers of the Amir, but I think I can persuade him to make you governor of the city. With these Ismailite thieves replaced by decent citizens fr
om other parts of the kingdom, this will make a city of which any king should be proud. The Amir will wish to reward me for my part in this affair. I will ask him to place you in charge of the city. Governor of Shalizahr — how does that sound, Baber Khan?”

  “Your generosity shames me,” said the Afghan chief, tugging at his beard in his deep emotion. “But what will you do, El Borak? You have provided for everyone except yourself.”

  “Well, just now I’m going to take water to those poor devils out there, and tie up their wounds the best I can. I see Lal Singh and Yusuf coming with water, and my legs are alive again.”

  “My men are coming back into the orchard. Let them do it. You are weary and wounded; you have been fighting all day, and all last night!”

  “I can help. I’m alright. A few hours sleep tonight will make a fresh man of me. Dawn must find me on my way.”

  “Whither, in the name of Allah?” ejaculated Baber Khan.

  “First to Khor, to pick up Azizun. Then to Kabul to tell the Amir what has occurred, and secure your pardon and appointment as Governor of Shalizahr.”

  “You will return to Shalizahr with it?”

  “I’ll send Lal Singh back with the Amir’s escort. I have business in India.”

  “Allaho akbar! Is there no rest or quiet about you? You are like a hawk roaming ever before the wind. What will you do in India?”

  “I’ve got to take Azizun to Delhi. And I have a score to settle in Peshawar with a fat swine named Ditta Ram. Three years ago he murdered a friend of mine. I never could prove it, and another friend, an English official, begged me for his sake not to take the law into my own hands. I’ve been waiting three years for the dog to make a slip, and now he’s made it, and I can prove he’s made it. He’s put himself outside the protection of the law, and I’m going to settle that old score.”

  “Allah!” marvelled Baber Khan. “And they say we Afghans are a relentless breed!”

  He was still shaking his head in wonder as Gordon limped away, a hand outstretched for the jugs of water Lal Singh and Yusuf ibn Suleiman were bringing across the orchard.

  Hawk of the Hills

  I

  To a man standing in the gorge below, the man clinging to the sloping cliff would have been invisible, hidden from sight by the jutting ledges that looked like irregular stone steps from a distance. From a distance, also, the rugged wall looked easy to climb; but there were heartbreaking spaces between those ledges — stretches of treacherous shale, and steep pitches where clawing fingers and groping toes scarcely found a grip.

  One misstep, one handhold lost and the climber would have pitched backward in a headlong, rolling fall three hundred feet to the rocky canyon bed. But the man on the cliff was Francis Xavier Gordon, and it was not his destiny to dash out his brains on the floor of a Himalayan gorge.

  He was reaching the end of his climb. The rim of the wall was only a few feet above him, but the intervening space was the most dangerous he had yet covered. He paused to shake the sweat from his eyes, drew a deep breath through his nostrils, and once more matched eye and muscle against the brute treachery of the gigantic barrier. Faint yells welled up from below, vibrant with hate and edged with blood lust. He did not look down. His upper lip lifted in a silent snarl, as a panther might snarl at the sound of his hunters’ voices. That was all.

  His fingers clawed at the stone until blood oozed from under his broken nails. Rivulets of gravel started beneath his boots and streamed down the ledges. He was almost there — but under his toe a jutting stone began to give way. With an explosive expansion of energy that brought a tortured gasp from him, he lunged upward, just as his foothold tore from the soil that had held it. For one sickening instant he felt eternity yawn beneath him — then his upflung fingers hooked over the rim of the crest. For an instant he hung there, suspended, while pebbles and stones went rattling down the face of the cliff in a miniature avalanche. Then with a powerful knotting and contracting of iron biceps, he lifted his weight and an instant later climbed over the rim and stared down.

  He could make out nothing in the gorge below, beyond the glimpse of a tangle of thickets. The jutting ledges obstructed the view from above as well as from below. But he knew his pursuers were ranging those thickets down there, the men whose knives were still reeking with the blood of his friends. He heard their voices, edged with the hysteria of murder, dwindling westward. They were following a blind lead and a false trail.

  Gordon stood up on the rim of the gigantic wall, the one atom of visible life among monstrous pillars and abutments of stone; they rose on all sides, dwarfing him, brown insensible giants shouldering the sky. But Gordon gave no thought to the somber magnificence of his surroundings, or of his own comparative insignificance.

  Scenery, however awesome, is but a background for the human drama in its varying phases. Gordon’s soul was a maelstrom of wrath, and the distant, dwindling shouts below him drove crimson waves of murder surging through his brain. He drew from his boot the long knife he had placed there when he began his desperate climb. Half-dried blood stained the sharp steel, and the sight of it gave him a fierce satisfaction. There were dead men back there in the valley into which the gorge ran, and not all of them were Gordon’s Afridi friends. Some were Orakzai, the henchmen of the traitor Afdal Khan — the treacherous dogs who had sat down in seeming amity with Yusef Shah, the Afridi chief, his three headmen and his American ally, and who had turned the friendly conference suddenly into a holocaust of murder.

  Gordon’s shirt was in ribbons, revealing a shallow sword cut across the thick muscles of his breast, from which blood oozed slowly. His black hair was plastered with sweat, the scabbards at his hips empty. He might have been a statue on the cliffs, he stood so motionless, except for the steady rise and fall of his arching chest as he breathed deep through expanded nostrils. In his black eyes grew a flame like fire on deep black water. His body grew rigid; muscles swelled in knotted cords on his arms, and the veins of his temples stood out.

  Treachery and murder! He was still bewildered, seeking a motive. His actions until this moment had been largely instinctive, reflexes responding to peril and the threat of destruction. The episode had been so unexpected — so totally lacking in apparent reason. One moment a hum of friendly conversation, men sitting cross-legged about a fire while tea boiled and meat roasted; the next instant knives sinking home, guns crashing, men falling in the smoke — Afridi men, his friends, struck down about him, with their rifles laid aside, their knives in their scabbards.

  Only his steel-trap coordination had saved him — that instant, primitive reaction to danger that is not dependent upon reason or any logical thought process. Even before his conscious mind grasped what was happening, Gordon was on his feet with both guns blazing. And then there was no time for consecutive thinking, nothing but desperate hand-to-hand fighting, and flight on foot — a long run and a hard climb. But for the thicket-choked mouth of a narrow gorge they would have had him, in spite of everything.

  Now, temporarily safe, he could pause and apply reasoning to the problem of why Afdal Khan, chief of the Khoruk Orakzai, plotted thus foully to slay the four chiefs of his neighbors, the Afridis of Kurram, and their Feringhi friend. But no motive presented itself. The massacre seemed utterly wanton and reasonless. At the moment Gordon did not greatly care. It was enough to know that his friends were dead, and to know who had killed them.

  Another tier of rock rose some yards behind him, broken by a narrow, twisting cleft. Into this he moved. He did not expect to meet an enemy; they would all be down there in the gorge, beating up the thickets for him; but he carried the long knife in his hand, just in case.

  It was purely an instinctive gesture, like the unsheathing of a panther’s claws. His dark face was like iron; his black eyes burned redly; as he strode along the narrow defile he was more dangerous than any wounded panther. An urge painful in its intensity beat at his brain like a hammer that would not cease: revenge! revenge! revenge! All the depths of
his being responded to the reverberation. The thin veneer of civilization had been swept away by a red tidal wave. Gordon had gone back a million years into the red dawn of man’s beginning; he was as starkly primitive as the colossal stones that rose about him.

  Ahead of him the defile twisted about a jutting shoulder to come, as he knew, out upon a winding mountain path. That path would lead him out of the country of his enemies, and he had no reason to expect to meet any of them upon it. So it was a shocking surprise to him when he rounded the granite shoulder and came face to face with a tall man who lolled against a rock, with a pistol in his hand.

  That pistol was leveled at the American’s breast. Gordon stood motionless, a dozen feet separating the two men. Beyond the tall man stood a finely caparisoned Kabuli stallion, tied to a tamarisk.

  “Ali Bahadur!” muttered Gordon, the red flame in his black eyes.

  “Aye!” Ali Bahadur was clad in Pathan elegance. His boots were stitched with gilt thread, his turban was of rose-colored silk, and his girdled khalat was gaudily striped. He was a handsome man, with an aquiline face and dark, alert eyes, which just now were lighted with cruel triumph. He laughed mockingly.

  “I was not mistaken, El Borak. When you fled into the thicket-choked mouth of the gorge, I did not follow you as the others did. They ran headlong into the copse, on foot, bawling like bulls. Not I. I did not think you would flee on down the gorge until my men cornered you. I believed that as soon as you got out of their sight you would climb the wall, though no man ever has climbed it before. I knew you would climb out on this side, for not even Shaitan the Damned could scale those sheer precipices on the other side of the gorge.

  “So I galloped back up the valley to where, a mile north of the spot where we camped, another gorge opens and runs westward. This path leads up out of that gorge and crosses the ridge and here turns southwesterly — as I knew you knew. My steed is swift! I knew this point was the only one at which you could reach this trail, and when I arrived, there were no boot prints in the dust to tell me you had reached it and passed on ahead of me. Nay, hardly had I paused when I heard stones rattling down the cliff, so I dismounted and awaited your coming! For only through that cleft could you reach the path.”