by Talbot Mundy
He understood. Some of her blood was Russian, some Indian.
“A friend is a friend, but a brother is a rival,” says the East, out of world-old experience, and in some ways Russia is more eastern than the East itself.
“Muhammad Anim shall answer to you for your brother’s head!” she said with a little nod, as if she were making concessions to a child. “At present we need him. Let him preach his jihad, and loose it at the right time. After that he will be in the way! You shall name his death — Earth’s Drink — slow torture — fire! Will that content you?”
“No,” he said, with a dry laugh.
“What more can you ask?”
“Less! My brother died at the head of his men. He couldn’t ask more. Let Bull-with-a-beard alone.”
She set both elbows on her knees and laid her chin on both hands to stare at him again. He began to remember long-forgotten schoolboy lore about chemical reagents, that dissolve materials into their component parts, such was the magic of her eyes. There were no eyes like hers that he had ever seen, although Rewa Gunga’s had been something like them. Only Rewa Gunga’s had not changed so. Thought of the Rangar no sooner crossed his mind than she was speaking of him.
“Rewa Gunga met you in the dark, beyond those outer curtains, did he not?”
He nodded.
“Did he tell you that if you pass the curtains you shall be told all I know?”
He nodded again, and she laughed.
“It would take time to tell you all I know! First, I think I will show you things. Afterward you shall ask me questions, and I will answer them!”
She stood up, and of course he stood up, too. So, she on the footstool of the throne, her eyes and his were on a level. She laid hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes until he could see his own twin portraits in hers that were glowing sunset pools. Heart of the Hills? The Heart of all the East seemed to burn in her, rebellious!
“Are you believing me?” she asked him.
He nodded, for no man could have helped believing her. As she knew the truth, she was telling it to him, as surely as she was doing her skillful best to mesmerize him. But the Secret Service is made up of men trained against that.
“Come!” she said, and stepping down she took his arm.
She led him past the thrones to other leather curtains in a wall, and through them into long hewn passages from cavern into cavern, until even the Rock of Gibraltar seemed like a doll’s house in comparison.
In one cave there were piles of javelins that had been stacked there by the Sleeper and his men. In another were sheaves of arrows; and in one were spears in racks against a wall. There were empty stables, with rings made fast into the rock where a hundred horses could have stood in line.
She showed him a cave containing great forges, where the bronze had been worked, with charcoal still piled up against the wall at one end. There were copper and tin ingots in there of a shape he had never seen.
“I know where they came from,” she told him. “I have made it my business to know all the ‘Hills.’ I know things the Hillmen’s great-great-great-grand-fathers forgot! I know old workings that would make a modern nation rich! We shall have money when we need it, never fear! We shall conquer India while the English backs are turned and the best troops are oversea. We will bring a hundred thousand slaves back here to work our mines! With what they dig from the mines, copper and gold and tin, we will make ready to buy the English off when they are free to turn this way again. The English will do anything for money! They will be in debt when this war is over, and their price will be less then than now!”
She laughed merrily at him because his face showed that he did not appreciate that stricture. Then she called him her Warrior and her Well-beloved and took him down a long passage, holding his hand all the way, to show him slots cut in the floor for the use of archers.
“You entered Khinjan Caves by a tunnel under this floor, Well-beloved. There is no other entrance!”
By this time Well-beloved was her name for him, although there was no air of finality about it. It was as if she paved the way for use of Athelstan and that was a sacred name. It was amazing how she conveyed that impression without using words.
“The Sleeper cut these slots for his archers. Then he had another thought and set these cauldrons in place, to boil oil to pour down. Could any army force a way through by the route by which you entered?”
“No,” he said, marveling at the ton-weight copper cauldrons, one to each hole.
“Even without rifles for the defense?”
“No,” he said.
“And I have more than a thousand Mauser rifles here, and more than a million rounds of ammunition!”
“How did you get them?”
“I shall tell you that later. Come and see some other things. See and believe!”
She showed him a cave in which boxes were stacked in high square piles.
“Dynamite bombs!” she boasted. “How many boxes? I forget! Too many to count! Women brought them all the way from the sea, for even Muhammad Anim could not make Afridi riflemen carry loads. I have wondered what Bull-with-a-beard will say when he misses his precious dynamite!”
“You’ve enough in there to blow the mountain up!” King advised her. “If somebody fired a pistol in here, the least would be the collapse of this floor into the tunnel below with a hundred thousand tons of rock on top of it. There is no other way out?”
“Earth’s Drink!” she said, and he made a grimace that set her to laughing.
But she looked at him darkly after that and he got the impression that the thought was not new to her, and that she did not thank him for the advice. He began to wonder whether there was anything she had not thought of — any loophole she had left him for escape — any issue she had not foreseen.
“Kill her!” a secret voice urged him. But that was the voice of the “Hills,” that are violent first and regretful afterward. He did not listen to it. And then the wisdom of the West came to him, as epitomized by Cocker along the lines laid down by Solomon.
“It isn’t possible to make a puzzle that has no solution to it. The fact that it’s a puzzle is the proof that there’s a key! Go ahead!”
It was the “Go ahead!” that Solomon omitted, and that makes Cocker such cheerful reading. King ceased conjecturing and gave full attention to his guide.
She showed him where eleven hundred Mauser rifles stood in racks in another cave, with boxes of ammunition piled beside them — each rifle and cartridge worth its weight in silver coin — a very rajah’s ransom!
“The Germans are generous in some things — only in some things — very mean in others!” she told him. “They sent no medical stores, and no blankets!”
Past caves where provisions of every imaginable kind were stored, sufficient for an army, she led him to where her guards slept together with the thirty special men whom King had brought with him up the Khyber.
“I have five hundred others whom I dare trust to come in here,” she said, “but they shall stay outside until I want them. A mystery is a good thing! It is good for them all to wonder what I keep in here! It is good to keep this sanctuary; it makes for power!”
Pressing very close to him, she guided him down another dark tunnel until he and she stood together in the jaws of the round hole above the river, looking down into the cavern of Earth’s Drink.
Nobody looked up at them. The thousands were too busy working up a frenzy for the great jihad that was to come.
Stacks of wood had been piled up, six-man high in the middle, and then fired. The heat came upward like a furnace blast, and the smoke was a great red cloud among the stalactites. Round and round that holocaust the thousands did their sword-dance, yelling as the devils yelled at Khinjan’s birth. They needed no wine to craze them. They were drunk with fanaticism, frenzy, lust!
“The women brought that wood from fifty miles away!” Yasmini shouted in his ear; for the din, mingling with the river’s voice, made a volca
no chord. “It is a week’s supply of wood! But so they are — so they will be! They will lay waste India! They will butcher and plunder and burn! It will be what they leave of India that we shall build anew and govern, for India herself will rise to help them lay her own cities waste! It is always so! Conquests always are so! Come!”
She tugged at him and led him back along the tunnel and through other tunnels to the throne room, where she made him sit at her feet again.
The food had been cleared away in their absence. Instead, on the ebony table there were pens and ink and paper.
She leaned back on her throne, with bare feet pressed tight against the footstool, staring, staring at the table and the pens, and then at King, as if she would compose an ultimatum to the world and send King to deliver it.
“I said I will tell you,” she sad slowly. “Listen!”
Chapter XIV
Nothing new! Nothing new!
Nowhere to hide when a reckoning’s due,
But right earns right, and wrong gets rue,
With nothing deducted or given in lieu;
And neither the War God, I, nor you
Ever could make one lie come true!
Vale, Ceasar!
As Yasmini herself had admitted, she headed from point to point after a manner of her own.
“You know where is Dar es Salaam?” she asked.
“East Africa,” said King.
“How far is that from here?”
“Two or three thousand miles.”
“And English war-ships watch the Persian Gulf and all the seas from India to Aden?”
King nodded.
“Have the English any ships that dive under water?”
He nodded again.
“In these waters?”
“I think not. I’m not sure, but I think not.”
“The grenades you have seen, and the rifles and cartridges were sent by the Germans to Dar es Salaam, to suppress a rising of African natives. Does it begin to grow clear to you, my friend?”
He smiled as well as nodded this time.
“Muhammad Anim used to wait with a hundred women at a certain place on the seashore. What he found on the beach there he made the women carry on their heads to Khinjan. And by the time he had hidden what he found and returned from Khinjan to the beach, there were more things to find and bring. So they worked, he and the Germans, for I know not how long — with the English watching the seas as on land lean wolves comb the valleys.
“Did you ever hear of the big whale in the Gulf?”
“No,” said King. That was natural. There are as a rule about as many whales as salmon in the Persian Gulf.
“A German who came to me in Delhi — he who first showed me pictures of an underwater ship — said that at that time the officers and crew of one such ship were getting great practise. Do you suppose their practise made whales take refuge in the Gulf?”
“How should I know, Princess?”
“Because I heard a story later, of an English cruiser on its way up the Gulf, that collided with a whale. The shock of hitting it bent many steel plates, and the cruiser had to put back for repair. It must have been a very big whale, for there was much oil on the sea for a long time afterward. So I heard.
“And no more dynamite came — nor rifles — nor cartridges, although the Germans bad promised more. And orders for Muhammad Anim that had been said to come by sea came now by way of Bagdad, carried by pilgrims returning from the holy places. I know that because I intercepted a letter and threw its bearer into Earth’s Drink to save Muhammad Anim the trouble of asking questions.”
“What were the terms of the German bargain?” King asked her. “What stipulations did they make?”
“With the tribes? None! They were too wise. A jihad was decided on in Germany’s good time; and when that time should come ten rifles in the ‘Hills’ and a thousand cartridges would mean not only a hundred dead Englishmen, but ten times that number busily engaged. Why bargain when there was no need? A rifle is what it is. The ‘Hills’ are the ‘Hills’!
“Tell me about your lamp oil, then,” he said. “You burn enough oil in Khinjan Caves to light Bombay! That does not come by submarine. The sirkar knows how much of everything goes up the Khyber. I have seen the printed lists myself — a few hundred cans of kerosene — a few score gallons of vegetable oil, and all bound for farther north. There isn’t enough oil pressed among the ‘Hills’ to keep these caves going for a day. Where does it all come from?”
She laughed, as a mother laughs at a child’s questions, finding delicious enjoyment in instructing him.
“There are three villages, not two days’ march from Khabul, where men have lived for centuries by pressing oil for Khinjan Caves,” she said. “The Sleeper fetched his oil thence. There are the bones of a camel in a cave I did not show you, and beside the camel are the leather bags still in which the oil was carried. Nowadays it comes in second-hand cans and drums. The Sleeper left gold in here. Those who kept the Sleeper’s secret paid for the oil in gold. No Afghan troubled why oil was needed, so long as gold paid for it, until Abdurrahman heard the story. He made a ten-year-long effort to learn the secret, but he failed. When he cut off the supply of oil for a time, there was A rebellion so close to Khabul gates that he thought better of it. Of gold and Abdurrahman, gold was the stronger. And I know where the Sleeper dug his gold!”
They sat in silence for a long while after that, she looking at the table, with its ink and pens and paper, and he thinking, with hands clasped round one knee; for it is wiser to think than to talk, even when a woman is near who can read thoughts that are not guarded.
“Most disillusionments come simply,” King said at last. “D’you know, Princess, what has kept the sirkar from really believing in Khinjan Caves?”
She shook her head. “The gods!” she said. “The gods can blindfold governments and whole peoples as easily as they can make us see!”
“It was the fact that they knew what provisions and what oil and what necessities of life went up the Khyber and came down it. They knew a place such as this was said to be could not be. They knew it! They could prove it!”
Yasmini nodded.
“Let it be a lesson to you, Princess!”
She stared, and her fiery-opal eyes began to change and glow. She began to twist her golden hair round the dagger hilt again. But always her feet were still on the footstool of the throne, as if she knew — knew — knew that she stood on firm foundations. No sirkar ever doubted less than she, and the suggestions in King’s little homily did not please her. She looked toward the table again — then again into his eyes.
“Athelstan!” she said. “It sounds like a king’s name! What was the Sleeper’s name? I have often wondered! I found no name in all the books about Rome that seemed to fit him. None of the names I mouthed could make me dream as the sight of him could. But, Athelstan! That is a name like a king’s! It seems to fit him, too! Was there such a name, in Rome?”
“No,” he said.
“What does it mean?” she asked him.
“Slow of resolution!”
She clapped her hands.
“Another sign!” she laughed. “The gods love me! There always is a sign when I need one! Slow of resolution, art thou? I will speed thy resolution, Well-beloved! You were quick to change from King, of the Khyber Rifle Regiment, to Kurram Khan. Change now into my warrior — my dear lord — my King again!”
She rose, with arms outstretched to him. All her dancer’s art, her untamed poetry, her witchery, were expressed in a movement. Her eyes melted as they met his. And since he stood up, too, for manner’s sake, they were eye to eye again — almost lip to lip. Her sweet breath was in his nostrils.
In another moment she was in his arms, clinging to him, kissing him. And if any man has felt on his lips the kiss of all the scented glamour of the East, let him tell what King’s sensations were. Let Ceasar, who was kissed by Cleopatra, come to life and talk of it!
King’s arm i
s strong, and he did not stand like an idol. His head might swim, but she, too, tasted the delirium of human passion loosed and given for a mad swift minute. If his heart swelled to bursting, so must hers have done.
“I have needed you!” she whispered. “I have been all alone! I have needed you!”
Then her lips sought his again, and neither spoke.
Neither knew how long it was before she began to understand that he, not she, was winning. The human answer to her appeal was full. He gave her all she asked of admiration, kiss for kiss. And then — her arms did not cling so tightly, although his strong right arm was like a stanchion. Because he knew that he, not she, was winning, he picked her up in his arms and kissed her as if she were a child. And then, because he knew he had won, he set her on her feet on the footstool of the throne, and even pitied her.
She felt the pity. As she tossed the hair back over her shoulder her eyes glowed with another meaning — dangerous — like a tiger’s glare.
“You pity me? You think because I love you, you can feed my love on a plate to the Indian government? You think my love is a weapon to use against me? Your love for me may wait for a better time? You are not so wise as I thought you, Athelstan!”
But he knew he had won. His heart was singing down inside him as it had not sung since he left India behind. But he stood quite humbly before her, for had he not kissed her?
“You think a kiss is the bond between us? You mistake! You forget! The kiss, my Athelstan, was the fruit, not the seed! The seed came first! If I loosed you — if I set you free — you would never dare go back to India!”
He scarcely heard her. He knew he had won. His heart was like a bird, fluttering wildly. He knew that the next step would be shown him, and for the present he had time and grace to pity her, knowing how he would have felt if she had won. Besides, he had kissed her, and he had not lied. Each kiss had been a tribute of admiration, for was she not splendid — amazing — more to be desired than wine? He stood with bowed head, lest the triumph in his eyes offend her. Yet if any one had asked him how he knew that he had won, he never could have told.