Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  It was minutes before he satisfied himself that the man’s breast did not rise and fall under the bronze armor and that the woman’s jeweled gauzy stuff was still. Imagination played such tricks with him that in the stillness he imagined he heard breathing.

  After he was sure they were both dead, he went nearer, but it was a minute yet before he knew the woman was not she. At first a wild thought possessed him that she had killed herself.

  The only thing to show who he had been were the letters S. P. Q. R. on a great plumed helmet, on a little table by the bed. But she was the woman of the lamp-bowls and the frieze. A life-size stone statue in a corner was so like her, and like Yasmini too, that it was difficult to decide which of the two it represented.

  She had lived when he did, for her fingers were locked in his. And he had lived two thousand years ago, because his armor was about as old as that, and for proof that he had died in it part of his breast had turned to powder inside the breastplate. The rest of his body was whole and perfectly preserved.

  Stern, handsome in a high-beaked Roman way, gray on the temples, firm-lipped, he lay like an emperor in harness. But the pride and resolution on his face were outdone by the serenity of hers. Very surely those two had been lovers.

  Something — he could not decide what — about the man’s appearance kept him staring for ten minutes, holding his breath unconsciously and letting it out in little silent gasps. It annoyed him that he could not pin down the elusive thing; and when he went on presently to be curious about more tangible things, it was only to be faced with the unexplainable at every turn.

  How had the bodies been preserved, for instance? They were perfect, except for that one detail of the man’s breast. The air was full of the perfume he had learned to recognize as Yasmini’s, but there was no sniff about the bodies of pitch or bitumen, or of any other chemical. Nor was there any sign of violence about them, or means of telling how they died, or when, except for the probable date of the man’s armor.

  Both of them looked young and healthy — the woman younger than thirty — twenty-five at a guess — and the man perhaps forty, perhaps forty-five.

  He bent over them. Every stitch of the man’s clothing had decayed in the course of centuries, so that his armor rested on the naked skin, except for a dressed leather kilt about his middle. The leather was as old as the curtains at the entrance, and as well preserved.

  But the woman’s silken clothing was as new as the bedding; and that was so new that it had been woven in Belfast, Ireland, by machinery and bore the mark of the firm that made it!

  Yet, they both died at about the same time, or how could their fingers have been interlaced? And some of the jewelry on the woman’s clothes was very ancient as well as priceless.

  He looked closer at the fingers for signs of force and suddenly caught his breath. Under the woman’s flimsy sleeve was a wrought gold bracelet, smaller than that one he himself had worn in Delhi and up the Khyber — exactly like the little one that Yasmini wore on her wrist in the Cavern of Earth’s Drink! He raised the loose sleeve to look more closely at it.

  The sleeve overlay the man’s forearm, and the movement laid bare another bracelet, on the man’s right wrist. Size for size, this was the same as the one that had been stolen from himself.

  Memory prompted him. He felt its outer edge with a finger-nail. There was the little nick that he had made in the soft gold when he struck it against the cell bars in the jail at the Mir Khan Palace!

  That put another thought in his head. It was less than two hours since Yasmini danced in the arena. It might well be much less than that since she had taken off her bracelets. He laid a finger on the dead man’s stone-cold hand and let it rest so for a minute. Then, running it slowly up the wrist, he touched the gold. It was warm. He repeated the test on the woman’s wrist. Hers was warm, too. Both bracelets had been worn by a living being within an hour —

  “Probably within minutes!”

  He muttered and frowned in thought, and then suddenly jumped backward. The leather curtain near the bed had moved on its bronze rod.

  “Aren’t they dears?” a voice said in English behind him. “Aren’t they sweet?”

  He had jumped so as to face about, and somebody laughed at him. Yasmini stood not two arms’ lengths away, lovelier than the dead woman because of the merry life in her, young and warm, aglow, but looking like the dead woman and the woman of the frieze — the woman of the lamp — bowls — the statue — come to life, speaking to him in English more sweetly than if it had been her mother tongue. The English abuse their language. Yasmini caressed it and made it do its work twice over.

  Being dressed as a native, he salaamed low. Knowing him for what he was, she gave him the senna-stained tips of her warm fingers to kiss, and he thought she trembled when he touched them. But a second later she had snatched them away and was treating him to raillery.

  “Man of pills and blisters!” she said, “tell me how those bodies are preserved! Spill knowledge from that learned skull of thine!”

  He did not answer. He never shone in conversation at any time, having made as many friends as enemies by saying nothing until the spirit moves him. But she did not know that yet.

  “If I knew for certain why those two did not turn to worms,” she went on, “almost I would choose to die now, while I am beautiful! Think of the fogy museum men!” (She called them by a far less edifying name, really, for the East is frank in that way, especially in its use of other tongues.) “What would they say, think you, King sahib, if they found us two dead beside those two? Would not that be a mystery? Don’t you love mysteries? Speak, man, speak! Has Khinjan struck you dumb?”

  But he did not speak. He was staring at her arm, where two whitish marks on the skin betrayed that bracelets had been.

  “Oh, those! They are theirs. I would not rob the dead, or the gods would turn on me. I robbed you, instead, while you slept. Fie, King sahib, while you slept!”

  But her steel did not strike on flint. It was her eyes that flashed. He would have done better to have seemed ashamed, for then he might have fooled her, at least for a while. But having judged himself, he did not care a fig for her judgment of him. She realized that instantly and having found a tool that would not work, discarded it for a better one. She grew confidential.

  “I borrow them,” she explained, “but I put them back. I take them for so many days, and when the day comes — the gods like us to be exact! Once there was an Englishman to whom I lent the larger one, and he refused to return it. He wanted it to wear, to bring him luck. Collins, of the Gurkhas. A cobra bit him.”

  King’s eyes changed, for Collins of the Gurkhas had died in his two arms, saying never a word. He had always wondered why the native who ran in to kill the cobra had run away again and left Collins lying there after seeming to shake hands with him. Yasmini, watching his eyes and reading his memory, missed nothing.

  “You saw?” she said excitedly. “You remember? Then you understand! You yourself were near death when I took the bracelet last night. The time was up. I would have stabbed you if you had tried to prevent me!”

  Now he spoke at last and gave her a first glimpse of an angle of his mind she had not suspected.

  “Princess,” he said. He used the word with the deference some men can combine with effrontery, so that very tenderness has barbs. “You might have had that thing back if you had sent a messenger for it at any time. A word by a servant would have been enough.

  “You could never have reached Khinjan then!” she retorted. Her eyes flashed again, but his did not waver.

  “Princess,” he said, “why speak of what you don’t know?”

  He thought she would strike like a snake, but she smiled at him instead. And when Yasmini has smiled on a man he has never been just the same man afterward. He knows more, for one thing. He has had a lesson in one of the finer arts.

  “I will speak of what I do know,” she said. “No, there is no need. Look! Look!”

 
She pointed at the bed — at the man on the bed — fingers locked in those of a woman who looked so like herself.

  “You see — yet you do not see! Men are blind! Men look into a mirror, and see only whiskers they forgot to shave the day before. Women look once and then remember! Look again!”

  He looked, knowing well there was something to be understood, that stared him in the face. But for the life of him he could not determine question or answer.

  “What is in your bosom?” she asked him.

  He put his band to his shirt.

  “Draw it out!” she said, as a teacher drills a child.

  He drew out the gold-hilted knife with the bronze blade, with which a man had meant to murder him. He let it lie on the palm of his hand and looked from it to her and back again. The hilt might have been a portrait of her modeled from the life.

  “Here is another like it,” she said, stepping to the bedside. She drew back the woman’s dress at the bosom and showed a knife exactly like that in King’s hand. “One lay on her bosom and one on his when I found them!” she said. “Now, think again!”

  He did think, of thirty thousand possibilities, and of one impossible idea that stood up prominent among them all and insisted on seeming the only likely one.

  “I saw the knife in your bosom last night,” she said, “and laughed so that I nearly wakened you. Man! Are you stupid? Will that ready wit of yours not work? Have I bewildered you? Is it my perfume? My eyes? My jewels? What is it? Think, man! Think!”

  But if she wanted to make him guess aloud for her amusement she was wasting time. Had he known the answer he would have held his tongue. As he did not know it, he had all the more reason to wait indefinitely, if need be. But interminable waiting was no part of her plan. Words were welling out of her.

  “I gave a fool that knife to use, because he was afraid. It gave him courage. When he failed I knew it by telegram, and I sent another fool before the wires were cold, to kill him in the police-station cell for having failed. One fool has been stabbed and the English will hang the other. Then I sent twenty men to turn India inside out and find the knife again, for like the bracelets it has its place. And that is why I laughed. They are hunting. They will hunt until I call them off!”

  “Why didn’t you take it with the bracelet?” King asked her, holding it out. “Take it now. I don’t want it.”

  She accepted it and laid it on the man’s bronze armor. Then, however, she resumed it and played with it.

  “Look again!” she said. “Think and look again!”

  He looked, and he knew now. But he still preferred that she should tell him, and his lips shut tight.

  “Why, having ordered your death, did I countermand the order when your life had been attempted once? Why, as soon as Rewa Gunga had seen you, did I order you to be aided in every way?”

  Still he did not answer, although the solution to that riddle, too, was beginning to dawn on his consciousness. He suspected she would be annoyed if he deprived her of the fun of telling him, so that by being silent he played both her game and his own.

  “Why did I order your death in the first place?”

  The answer to that was obvious, but she answered it for him.

  “Because, since the sirkar insisted that one man must come with me to Khinjan, I preferred a fool, who could be lost on the way. I knew your reputation. I never heard any man call you a fool.”

  She laughed. He nodded. She was obviously telling truth.

  “Can you guess why I changed my mind about you — wise man?”

  She looked from him to the man on the bed and back to him again. Having solved her riddle, King had leisure to be interested in her eyes, and watched them analytically, like a jeweler appraising diamonds. They were strangely reminiscent, but much more changeable and colorful than any he had ever seen. They had the baffling trick of changing while he watched them.

  “Having sent a man to kill you, why did I cease to want you killed? Instead of losing you on the way to Khinjan, why did I run risks to protect you after you reached here? Why did I save your life in the Cavern of Earth’s Drink to-night? You do not know yet? Then I will tell you something else you do not know. I was in Delhi when you were! I watched and listened while you and Rewa Gunga talked in my house! I was in Rewa Gunga’s carriage on the train that he took and you did not! I have learned at first hand that you are not a fool. But that was not enough! You had to be three things — clever and brave and one other. The one other you are! Brave you have proved yourself to be! Clever you must be, to trick your way into Khinjan Caves, even with Ismail at your elbow! That is why I saved your life — because you are those two things and — and — one other!”

  She snatched a mirror from a little ivory table — a modern mirror — bad glass, bad art, bad workmanship, but silver warranted.

  “Look in it and then at him!” she ordered.

  But he did not need to look. The man on the bed was not so much like himself as the woman was like her, but the resemblance seemed to grow under his eyes, as such things do. It was helped out by the stain his brother had applied to his face in the Khyber. King was the taller and the younger by several years, but the noses were the same, and the wrinkled fore-heads; both men had the same firm mouth; both looked like Romans.

  “How did you get that scar?”

  She came closer and took his hand, holding it in both hers, and he felt the same thrill Samson knew. He steeled himself as Samson did not.

  “A Mahsudi got me with a martini at long range in the blockade of 1902,” he said dryly.

  “Look! Did he get his from a spear or from an arrow?”

  Almost in the same spot, also on the dead man’s left hand, was a scar so nearly like it that it needed a third and a fourth glance to tell the difference. They both bent over the bed to see it, and she laid a hand on his shoulder. Touch and scent and confidence, all three were bewitching; all three were calculated, too! He could have killed her, and she knew he could have killed her, just as she knew he would not. Yet what right had she to know it!

  “Athelstan!”

  She pronounced his given name as if she loved the word, standing straight again and looking into his eyes. There were high lights in hers that outgleamed the diamonds on her dress.

  “Your gods and mine have done this, Athelstan. When the gods combine they lay plans well indeed!”

  “I only know one God,” he answered simply, as a man speaks of the deep things in his heart.

  “I know of many! They love me! They shall love you, too! Many are better than one! You shall learn to know my gods, for we are to be partners, you and I!”

  She laughed at him, looking like a goddess herself, but he frowned. And the more he frowned the better she seemed to like him.

  “Partners in what, Princess?”

  “Thou — Ismail dubbed thee Ready o’ wit! — answer thine own question!”

  She took his hand again, her eyes burning with excitement and mysticism and ambition like a fever. She seemed to take more than physical possession of him.

  “What brought them here? Tell me that!” she demanded, pointing to the bed. “You think he brought, her? I tell you she was the spur that drove him! Is it a wonder that men called her the ‘Heart of the Hills’? I found them ten years ago and clothed her and put new linen on their bed, for the old was all rags and dust. There have always been hundreds — and sometimes thousands — who knew the secret of Khinjan Caves, but this has been a secret within a secret. Some one, who knew the secret before I, sawed those bracelets through and fitted hinges and clasps. The men you saw in the Cavern of Earth’s Drink have no doubt I am the ‘Heart of the Hills’ come to life! They shall know thee as Him within a little while!”

  She held his hand a little tighter and pressed closer to him, laughing softly. He stood as if made of iron, and that only made her laugh the more.

  “Tales of the ‘Heart of the Hills’ have puzzled the Raj, haven’t they, these many years? They sent me to find the source
of them. Me! They chose well! There are not many like me! I have found this one dead woman who was like me. And in ten years, until you came, I have found no man like Him!”

  She tried to look into his eyes, but he frowned straight in front of him. His native costume and Rangar turban did not make him seem any less a man. His jowl, that was beginning to need shaving, was as grim and as satisfying as the dead Roman’s. She stroked his left hand with soft fingers.

  “I used to think I knew how to dance!” she laughed— “For ten years I have taken those pictures of her for my model and have striven to learn what she knew. I have surpassed her! I used to think I knew how to amuse myself with men’s dreams — until I found this! Then I dreamed on my own account! My dream was true, my warrior! You have come! Our hour has come!”

  She tugged at his hand. He was hers, soul and harness, if outward signs could prove it.

  “Come!” she said. “Is this my hospitality? You are weary and hungry. Come!”

  She led him by the hand, for it would have needed brute force to pry her fingers loose. She drew aside the leather curtain that hung on a bronze rod near the bed, led him through it, and let it clash to again behind them.

  Now they were in the dark together, and it was not comprehended in her scheme of things to let circumstance lie fallow. She pressed his hand, and sighed, and then hurried, whispering tender words he could scarcely catch. When they burst together through a curtain at the other end of a passage in the rock, his skin was red under the tan and for the first time her eyes refused to meet his.

  “Why did they choose that cave to sleep in?” she asked him. “Is not this a better one? Who laid them there?”

  He stared about. They were in a great room far more splendid than the first. There was a fountain in the center splashing in the midst of flowers. They were cut flowers. The “Hills” must have been scoured for them within a day.

  There were great cushioned couches all about and two thrones made of ivory and gold. Between two couches was a table, laden with golden plates and a golden jug, on pure white linen. There were two goblets of beaten gold and knives with golden handles and bronze blades. The whole room seemed to be drenched in the scent Yasmini favored, and there was the same frieze running round all four walls, with the woman depicted on it dancing.