Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  So a man may rest in temporary peace even on the road to Khinjan, although Khinjan and peace have nothing whatever in common.

  It was at such a shrine, surrounded by tattered rags tied to sticks, that fluttered in the wind three or four thousand feet above Khyber level, that King drew Ismail into conversation, and deftly forced on him the role of questioner.

  “How can’st thou see the Caves!” he asked, for King had hinted at his intention; and for answer King gave him a glimpse of the gold bracelet.

  “Aye! Well and good! But even she dare not disobey the rule. Khinjan was there before she came, and the rule was there from the beginning, when the first men found the Caves! Some — hundreds — have gained admission, lacking the right. But who ever saw them again? Allah! I, for one, would not chance it!”

  “Thou and I are two men!” answered King. “Allah gave thee qualities I lack. He gave thee the strength of a bull and a mountain goat in one, and her for a mistress. To me he gave other qualities. I shall see the Caves. I am not afraid.”

  “Aye! He gave thee other gifts indeed! But listen! How many Indian servants of the British Raj have set out to see the Caves? Many, many — aye, very many! Again and again the sirkar sent its loyal ones. Did any return? Not one! Some were crucified before they reached the place. One died slowly on the very rock whereon we sit, with his eyelids missing and his eyes turned to the sun! Some entered Khinjan, and the women of the place made sport with them. Those would rather have been crucified outside had they but known. Some, having got by Khinjan, entered the Caves. None ever came out again!”

  “Then, what is my case to thee?” King asked him “If I can not come out again and there is a secret then the secret will be kept, and what is the trouble?”

  “I love thee,” the Afridi answered simply. “Thou art a man after mine own heart. Turn! Go back before it is too late!”

  King shook his head.

  “Be warned!”

  Ismail reached out a hairy-backed hand that shook with half-suppressed emotion.

  “When we reach Khinjan, and I come within reach of her orders again, then I am her man, not thine!”

  King smiled, glancing again at the gold bracelet on his arm.

  “I look like her man, too!”

  “Thou!” Ismail’s scorn was well feigned if it was not real. “Thou chicken running to the hand that will pluck thy breast-feathers! Listen! Abdurrahman — he of Khabul — and may Allah give his ugly bones no peace! — Abdurrahman of Khabul sought the secret of the Caves. He sent his men to set an ambush. They caught twenty coming out of Khinjan on a raid. The twenty were carried to Khabul and put to torture there. How many, think you, told the secret under torture? They died cursing Abdurrahman to his face and he died without the secret! May God recompense him with the fire that burns forever and scalding water and ashes to eat! May rats eat his bones!”

  “Had Abdurrahman this?” asked King, touching the bracelet.

  “Nay! He would have given one eye for it, but none would trade with him! He knew of it, but never saw it.”

  “I am more favored. I have it. It is hers, is it not?”

  “Does not she know the secret?”

  “She knows all that any man knows and more!”

  “Was she seen to slay a man in the teeth of written law?” asked King, and Ismail stared so hard at him that he laughed.

  “I was in Khinjan once before, my friend! I know the rule! I failed to reach the Caves that other time because I had no witnesses to swear they had seen me slay a man in the teeth of written law. I know!”

  “Who saw thee this time?” Ismail asked, and began to cackle with the cruel humor of the “Hills,” that sees amusement in a man’s undoing, or in the destruction of his plans. His humor forced him to explain.

  “The price of an entrance has come of late to be the life of an English arrficer! Many an one the English have dubbed Ghazi, because he crossed the border and buried his knife in a man on church parade! They hang and burn them, knowing our Muslim law, that denies Heaven to him who is hanged and burned. Yet the man they miscall ghazi sought but the key to Khinjan Caves, with no thought at all about Heaven! Thou art a British arrficer. It may be they will let thee enter the Caves at her bidding. It may be, too, that they will keep thee in a cage there for some chief’s son to try his knife on when the time comes to win admission! Listen — man o’ my heart! — so strict is the rule that boys born in the Caves, when they come to manhood, must go and slay an Englishman and earn outlawry before they may come back; and lest they prove fearful and betray the secret, ten men follow each. They die by the hand of one or other of the ten unless they have slain their man within two weeks. So the secret has been kept more years than ten men can remember!” (That estimate was doubtless due to a respect for figures and bore no relation to the length of a human generation.)

  “Whom did she kill to gain admission?” King asked him unexpectedly.

  “Ask her!” said Ismail. “It is her business.”

  “And thou? Was the life of a British officer the price paid?”

  “Nay. I slew a mullah.”

  The calmness of the admission, and the satisfaction that its memory seemed to bring the owner made King laugh. He found lawless satisfaction for himself in that Ismail’s blood-price should have been a priest, not one of his brother officers. A man does not follow King’s profession for health, profit or sentiment’s sake, but healthy sentiment remains. The loyalty that drives him, and is its own most great reward, makes him a man to the middle. He liked Ismail. He could not have liked him in the same way if he had known him guilty of English blood, which is only proof, of course, that sentiment and common justice are not one. But sentiment remains. Justice is an ideal.

  “Be warned and go back!” urged Ismail.

  “Come with me, then.”

  “Nay, I am her man. She waits for me!”

  “I imagine she waits for me!” laughed King. “Forward! We have rested in this place long enough!”

  So on they went, climbing and descending the naked ramparts that lead eastward and upward and northward to the Roof of Mother Earth — Ismail ever grumbling into his long beard, and King consumed by a fiercer enthusiasm than ever had yet burned in him,

  “Forward! Forward! Cast hounds forward! Forward in any event!” says Cocker. It is only regular generals in command of troops in the field who must keep their rear open for retreat. The Secret Service thinks only of the goal ahead.

  It was ten of a blazing forenoon, and the sun had heated up the rocks until it was pain to walk on them and agony to sit, when they topped the last escarpment and came in sight of Khinjan’s walls, across a mile-wide rock ravine — Khinjan the unregenerate, that has no other human habitation within a march because none dare build.

  They stood on a ridge and leaned against the wind. Beneath them a path like a rope ladder descended in zigzags to the valley that is Khinjan’s dry moat; it needed courage as well as imagination to believe that the animals could be guided down it.

  “Is there no other way?” asked King. He knew well of one other, but one does not tell all one knows in the “Hills,” and there might have been a third way.

  “None from this side,” said Ismail.

  “And on the other side?”

  “There is a rather better path — that by which the sirkar’s troops once came — although it has been greatly obstructed since. It is two days’ march from here to reach it. Be warned a last time, sahib — little hakim — be warned and go back!”

  “Thou bird of ill omen!” laughed King. “Must thou croak from every rock we rest on?”

  “If I were a bird I would fly away back with thee!” said Ismail.

  “Forward, since we can not fly — forward and downward!” King answered. “She must have crossed this valley. Therefore there are things worth while beyond! Forward!”

  The animals, weary to death anyhow, fell rather that walked down the track. The men sat and scrambled. And the heat rose up to m
eet them from the waterless ravine as if its floor were Tophet’s lid and the devil busy under it, stoking.

  It was midday when at last they stood on bottom and swayed like men in a dream fingering their bruises and scarcely able for the heat haze to see the tangled mass of stone towers and mud-and-stone walls that faced them, a mile away. Nobody challenged them yet. Khinjan itself seemed dead, crackled in the heat.

  “Sahib, let us mount the hill again and wait for night and a cool breeze!” urged Darya Khan.

  Ismail clucked into his beard and spat to wet his lips.

  “This glare makes my eyes ache!” he grumbled.

  “Wait, sahib! Wait a while!” urged the others.

  “Forward!” ordered King. “This must be Tophet. Know ye not that none come out of Tophet by the way they entered in? Forward! The exit is beyond!”

  They staggered after him, sheltering their eyes and faces from the glare with turban-ends and odds and ends of clothing. The animals swayed behind them with hung heads and drooping ears, and neither man nor beast had sense enough left to have detected an ambush. They were more than half-way across the valley, hunting for shadow where none was to be found, when a shotted salute brought them up all-standing in a cluster. Six or eight nickel-coated bullets spattered on the rocks close by, and one so narrowly missed King that he could feel its wind.

  Up went all their hands together, and they held them so until they ached. Nothing whatever happened. Their arms ceased aching and grew numb.

  “Forward!” ordered King.

  After another quarter of a mile of stumbling among hot boulders, not one of which was big enough to afford cover, or shelter from the sun, another volley whistled over them. Their hands went up again, and this time King could see turbaned heads above a parapet in front. But nothing further happened.

  “Forward!” he ordered.

  They advanced another two hundred yards and a third volley rattled among the rocks on either hand, frightening one of the mules so that it stumbled and fell and had to be helped up again. When that was done, and the mule stood trembling, they all faced the wall. But they were too weary to hold their hands up any more. Thirst had begun to exercise its sway. One of the men was half delirious.

  “Who are ye?” howled a human being, whose voice was so like a wolf’s that the words at first had no meaning. He peered over the parapet, a hundred feet above, with his head so swathed in dirty linen that he looked like a bandaged corpse.

  “What will ye? Who comes uninvited into Khinjan?”

  King bethought him of Yasmini’s talisman. He, held it up, and the gold band glinted in the sun. Yet, although a Hillman’s eyes are keener than an eagle’s, he did not believe the thing could be recognized at that angle, and from that distance. Another thought suggested itself to him. He turned his head and caught Ismail in the act of signaling with both hands.

  “Ye may come!” howled the watchman on the parapet, disappearing instantly.

  King trembled — perhaps as a racehorse trembles at the starting gate, though he was weary enough to tremble from fatigue. The “Hills,” that numb the hearts of many men, had not cowed him, for he loved them and in love there is no fear. Heat and cold an hunger were all in the day’s work; thirst was an incident; and the whistle of lead in the wind had never meant more to him than work ahead to do.

  But a greyhound trembles in the leash. A boiler, trembles when word goes down the speaking-tube from the bridge for “all she’s got.” And so the mild-looking hakim Kurram Khan, walking gingerly across her rocks, donning cheap, imitation shell-rimmed spectacles to help him look the part, trembled even more than the leg-weary horse he led.

  But that passed. He was all in hand when he led his men up over a rough stone causeway to a door in the bottom of a high battlemented wall and waited for somebody to open it.

  The great teak door looked as if it had been stolen from some Hindu temple, and he wondered how and when they could have brought it there across those savage intervening miles. With its six-inch teak planks and bronze bolts its weight must be guessed at in tons — yet a horse can hardly carry a man along any of the trails that lead to Khinjan!

  The wood bore the marks of siege and fracture repair. The walls were new-built, of age-old stone. The last expedition out of India had leveled every bit of those defenses flat with the valley, but Khinjan’s devils had reerected them, as ants rebuild a rifled nest.

  The door was swung open after a time, pulled by a rope, manipulated from above by unseen hands. Inside was another blind wall, twenty feet behind the first. To the right a low barricade blocked the passage and provided a safe vantage point from which it could be swept by a hail of lead; but to the left a path ran unobstructed for more than a hundred yards between the walls, to where the way was blocked by another teak door, set in unscalable black rock. High above the door was a ledge of rock that crossed like a bridge from wall to wall, with a parapet of stone built upon it, pierced for rifle-fire.

  As they approached this second door a Rangar turban, not unlike King’s own, appeared above the parapet on the ledge and a voice he recognized hailed him good-humoredly.

  “Salaam aleikoum!”

  “And upon thee be peace!” King answered in the Pashtu tongue, for the “Hills” are polite, whatever the other principles.

  Rewa Gunga’s face beamed down on him, wreathed in smiles that seemed to include mockery as well as triumph. Looking up at him at an angle that made his neck ache and dazzled his eyes, King could not be sure, but it seemed to him that the smile said, “Here you are, my man, and aren’t you in for it?” He more than half suspected he was intended to understand that. But the Rangar’s conversation took another line.

  “By jove!” he chuckled. “She expected you. She guessed you are a hound who can hunt well on a dry scent, and she dared bet you will come in spite of all odds! But she didn’t expect you in Rangar dress! No, by jove! You jolly well will take the wind out of her sails!”

  King made no answer. For one thing, the word “hound,” even in English, is not essentially a compliment. But he had a better reason than that.

  “Did you find the way easily?” the Rangar asked but King kept silence.

  “Is he parched? Have they cut his tongue out on the road?”

  That question was in Pashtu, directed at Ismail and the others, but King answered it.

  “Oh, as for that,” he said, salaaming again in the fastidious manner of a native gentleman, “I know no other tongue than Pashtu and my own Rajasthani. My name is Kurram Khan. I ask admittance.”

  He held up his wrist to show the gold bracelet, and high over his head the Rangar laughed like a bell.

  “Shabash!” he laughed. “Well done! Enter, Kurram Khan, and be welcome, thou and thy men. Be welcome in her name!”

  Somebody pulled a rope and the door yawned wide, giving on a kind of courtyard whose high walls allowed no view of anything but hot blue sky. King hurried under the arch and looked up, but on the courtyard side of the door the wall rose sheer and blank, and there was no sign of window or stairs, or of any means of reaching the ledge from which the Rangar had addressed him. What he did see, as he faced that way, was that each of his men salaamed low and covered his face with both hands as he entered.

  “Whom do ye salute?” he asked.

  Ismail stared back at him almost insolently, as one who would rebuke a fool.

  “Is this not her nest these days?” he answered. “It is well to bow low. She is not as other women. She is she! See yonder!”

  Through a gap under an arch in a far corner of the courtyard came a one-eyed, lean-looking villain in Afridi dress who leaned on a long gun and stared at them under his hand. After a leisurely consideration of them he rubbed his nose slowly with one finger, spat contemptuously, and then used the finger to beckon them, crooking it queerly and turning on his heel. He did not say one word.

  King led the way after him on foot, for even in the “Hills” where cruelty is a virtue, a man may be excused, on
economic grounds, for showing mercy to his beast. His men tugged the weary animals along behind him, through the gap under the arch and along an almost interminable, smelly maze of alleys whose sides were the walls of square stone towers, or sometimes of mud-and-stone-walled compounds, and here and there of sheer, slab-sided cliff.

  At intervals they came to bolted narrow doors, that probably led up to overhead defenses. Not fifty yards of any alley was straight; not a yard but what was commanded from overhead. Khinjan bad been rebuilt since its last destruction by some expert who knew all about street fighting. Like Old Jerusalem, the place could have contained a civil war of a hundred factions, and still have opposed stout resistance to an outside army.

  Alley gave on to courtyard, and filthy square to alley, until unexpectedly at last a seemingly blind passage turned sharply and opened on a straight street, of fair width, and more than half a mile long. It is marked “Street of the Dwellings” on the secret army maps, and it has been burned so often by Khinjan rioters, as well as by expeditions out of India, that a man who goes on a long journey never expects to find it the same on his return.

  It was lined on either hand with motley dwellings, out of which a motlier crowd of people swarmed to stare at King and his men. There were houses built of stolen corrugated iron-that cursed, hot, hideous stuff that the West has inflicted on an all-too-willing East; others of wood — of stone — of mud — of mat of skins — even of tent-cloth. Most of them were filthy. A row of kites sat on the roof of one, and in the gutter near it three gorged vultures sat on the remains of a mule. Scarcely a house was fit to be defended, for Khinjan’s fighting men all possess towers, that are plastered about the overfrowning mountain like wasp nests on a wall. These were the sweepers, the traders, the loose women, the mere penniless and the more or less useful men — not Khinjan’s inner guard by any means.

  There were Hindus — sycophants, keepers of accounts and writers to the chiefs (since literacy is at premium in these parts). In proof of Khinjan’s catholic taste and indiscriminate villainy, there were women of nearly every Indian breed and caste, many of them stolen into shameful slavery, but some of them there from choice. And there were little children — little naked brats with round drum tummies, who squealed and shrilled and stared with bold eyes; some of them were pretending to be bandits on their own account already, and one flung a stone that missed King by an inch. The stone fell in the gutter on the far side and, started a fight among the mangy street curs, which proved a diversion and probably saved King’s party from more accurate attentions.