by Talbot Mundy
“Thou art a shameless one!” said the mullah, shaking his head like a bear.
“I am what Allah made me!” answered King, and then, for the sake of the impression, he went through the outward form of muslim prayer, spreading a mat and omitting none of the genuflections. When he had finished he unfolded his own blankets that a woman had thrown down beside the chest and spread them carefully on the rock-shelf. But though he was allowed to climb up and lie there, he was not allowed to sleep — nor did he want to sleep — for more than an hour to come.
The mullah came over from the fire again and stood beside him, glaring like a great animal and grumbling in his beard.
“Does she surely love thee?” he asked at last, and King nodded, because he knew he was on the trail of information.
“So thou art to ape the Sleeper in his bronze mail, eh? Thou art to come to life, as she was said to come to life, and the two of you are to plunder India? Is that it?”
King nodded again, for a nod is less committal than a word; and the nod was enough to start the mullah off again.
“I saw the Sleeper and his bride before she knew of either! It was I who let her into Khinjan! It was I who told the men she is the ‘Heart of the Hills’ come to life! She tricked me! But this is no hour for bearing grudges. She has a plan and I am minded to help.”
King lay still and looked up at him, sure that treachery was the ultimate end of any plan the mullah Muhammad Anim had. India has been saved by the treachery of her enemies more often than ruined by false friends. So has the world, for that matter.
“A jihad when the right hour comes will raise the tribes,” the mullah growled. “She and thou, as the Sleeper and his mate, could work wonders. But who can trust her? She stole that head! She stole all the ammunition! Does she surely love thee?”
King nodded again, for modesty could not help him at that juncture. Love and boastfulness go together in the “Hills.”
“She shall have thee back, then, at a price!”
King did not answer. His brown eyes watched the mullah’s, and he drew his breath in little jerks, lest by breathing aloud he should miss one word of what, was coming.
“She shall have thee back against Khinian and the ammunition! She and thou shall have India, but I shall be the power behind you! She must give me Khinjan and the ammunition! She must admit me to the inner caves, whence her damned guards expelled me. I must have the reins in my two hands so! Then, thou and she shall have the pomp and glitter while I guide!”
King did not answer.
“Dost understand?”
King murmured something unintelligible.
“Otherwise, I and my men will storm Khinjan, and she and thou shall go down into Earth’s Drink lashed together!”
King shuddered, not because he felt afraid, but because some instinct told him to make the mullah think him afraid. He was far too interested to be fearful.
“Ye shall both be tortured before the plunge into the river! She shall be tortured in the Cavern of Earth’s Drink before the men!”
King shuddered again, this time without an effort. He could imagine the thousands watching grimly while the flayer used his knife.
“I have men in Khinjan! I have as many as she! On the day I march there will be a revolt within. She would better agree to terms!”
King lay looking at him, like a prisoner on the rack undergoing examination. He did not answer.
“Write thou a letter. Since she loves thee, state thine own case to her. Tell her that I hold thee hostage, and that Khinjan is mine already for a little fighting. In a month she can not pick out my men from among her own. Her position is undermined. Tell her that. Tell her that if she obeys she shall have India and be queen. If she disobeys, she shall die in the Cavern of Earth’s Drink!”
“She is a proud woman, mullah,” answered King. “Threats to such as she — ?”
The mullah mumbled and strode back and forth three times between King’s bed and the fire, with his fists knotted together behind him and his head bent, as Napoleon used to walk. When he stood beside the bed again at last it was with his mind made up, as his clenched fists and his eyes indicated.
“Make thine own terms with her!” he growled. “Write the letter and send it! I hold thee; she holds Khinjan and the ammunition. I am between her and India. So be it. She shall starve in there! She shall lie in there until the war is over and take what terms are offered her in the end! Write thine own letter! State the case, and bid her answer!”
“Very well,” said King. He began to see now definitely how India was to be saved. It was none of his business to plan yet, but to help others’ plans destroy themselves and to sow such seed in the broken ground as might bear fruit in time.
The mullah left him, to squat and gaze into the fire, and mutter, and King lay still. After a while the mullah went and carried a great water bowl nearer to the fire and, as King had done, stripped himself. Then he heaped great fagots on the fire — wasteful fagots, each of which had cost some woman hours of mountain climbing. And in the glow of the leaping flame he scrubbed himself from head to foot with King’s soap. Finally, with a feat of strength that nearly forced an exclamation out of King, he lifted the great water bowl in both hands and emptied the whole contents over himself. Then he resumed his smelly garments without troubling to dry his body, and got out a Quran from a corner and began to read it in a nasal singsong that would have kept dead men awake. King lay and watched and listened.
Reading scripture only seemed to fire the mullah’s veins. For him sleep was either out of reach or despicable, perhaps both. He seemed in a mood to despise anything but conquest and strode back and forth up and down the cave like a caged bear, muttering to himself.
After a time he went to the mouth of the cave, to stand and stare out at the camp where the thousand fires were dying fitfully and wood smoke purged the air of human nastiness. The stars looked down on him, and he seemed to try to read them, standing with fists knotted together at his back.
And as he stood so, six other mullahs came to him and began to argue with him in low tones, he browbeating them all with furious words hissed between half-closed teeth. They were whispering still when King fell asleep. It was courage, not carelessness, that let him sleep — courage and a great hope born of the mullah’s perplexity.
He dreamed that he was writing, writing, writing, while the torturers made a hot fire ready in the Cavern of Earth’s Drink and whetted knives on the bridge end while the organ played The Marseillaise. He dreamed Yasmini came to him and whispered the solution to it all, but what she whispered he could not catch, although she whispered the same words again and again and seemed to be angry with him for not listening.
And when he awoke at last he had fragments of his blanket in either hand, and the sun was already shining into the jaws of the cave. The camp was alive and reeked of cooking food. But the mullah was gone, and so was all the money the women had brought, together with his medicines and things from Khinjan.
Chapter XVII
When the last evil jest has been made, and the rest
Of the ink of hypocrisy spilt,
When the awfully right have elected to fight
Lest their own should discover their guilt;
When the door has been shut on the “if” and the “but”
And it’s up to the men with the guns,
On their knees in that day let diplomatists pray
For forgiveness from prodigal sons.
Instead of the mullah, growling texts out of a Quran on his lap, the Orakzai Pathan sat and sunned himself in the cave mouth, emitting worldlier wisdom unadulterated with divinity. As King went toward him to see to whom he spoke he grinned and pointed with his thumb, and King looked down on some sick and wounded men who sat in a crowd together on the ramp, ten feet or so below the cave.
They seemed stout soldierly fellows. Men of another type were being kept at a distance by dint of argument and threats. Away in the distance was Muhammad Anim
with his broad back turned to the cave, in altercation with a dozen other mullahs. For the time he was out of the reckoning.
“Some of these are wounded,” the Pathan explained. “Some have sores. Some have the belly ache. Then again, some are sick of words, hot and cold by day and night. All have served in the army. All have medals. All are deserters, some for one reason, some for another and some for no reason at all. Bull-with-a-beard looks the other way. Speak thou to them about the pardon that is offered!”
So King went down among them, taking some of the tools of his supposed trade with him and trying to crowd down the triumph that would well up. The seed he had sown had multiplied by fifty in a night. He wanted to shout, as men once did before the walls of Jericho.
A man bared a sword cut. He bent over him, and if the mullah had turned to look there would have been no ground for suspicion. So in a voice just loud enough to reach them all, he repeated what he had told the Pathan the day before.
“But who art thou?” asked one of them suspiciously. Perhaps there had been a shade too much cocksureness in the hakim’s voice, but he acted faultlessly when he answered. Voice, accent, mannerism, guilty pride, were each perfect.
“Political offender. My brother yonder in the cave mouth” — (The Pathan smirked. He liked the imputation)— “suggested I seek pardon, too. He thinks if I persuade many to apply for pardon then the sirkar may forgive me for service rendered.”
The Pathan’s smirk grew to a grin. He liked grandly to have the notion fathered on himself; and his complacency of course was suggestive of the hakim’s trustworthiness. But the East is ever cautious.
“Some say thou art a very great liar,” remarked a man with half a nose.
“Nay,” answered King. “Liar I may be, but I am one against many. Which of you would dare stand alone and lie to all the others? Nay, sahibs, I am a political offender, not a soldier!”
They all laughed at that and seizing the moment when they were in a pliant mood the Orakzai Pathan proceeded to bring proposals to a head.
“Are we agreed?” he asked. “Or have we waggled our beards all night long in vain? Take him with us, say I. Then, if pardons are refused us he at least will gain nothing by it. We can plunge our knives in him first, whatever else happens.”
“Aye!”
That was reasonable and they approved in chorus. Possibility of pardon and reinstatement, though only heard of at second hand, had brought unity into being. And unity brought eagerness.
“Let us start to-night!” urged one man, and nobody hung back.
“Aye! Aye! Aye!” they chorused. And eagerness, as always in the “Hills,” brought wilder counsel in its wake.
“Who dare stab Bull-with-a-beard? He has sought blood and has let blood. Let him drink his own.”
“Aye!”
“Nay! He is too well guarded.”
“Not he!”
“Let us stab him and take his head with us; there well may be a price on it.”
They took a vote on it and were agreed; but that did not suit King at all, whatever Muhammad Anim’s personal deserts might be. To let him be stabbed would be to leave Yasmini without a check on her of any kind, and then might India defend herself! Yet to leave the mullah and Yasmini both at large would be almost equally dangerous, for they might form an alliance. There must be some other way, and he set out to gain time.
“Nay, nay, sahibs!” he urged. “Nay, nay!”
“Why not?”
“Sahibs, I have wife and children in Lahore. Same are most dear to me and I to them. I find it expedient to make great effort for my pardon. Ye are but fifty. Ye are less than fifty. Nay, let us gather a hundred men.”
“Who shall find a hundred?” somebody demanded, and there was a chorus of denial. “We be all in this camp who ate the salt.”
It was plain, though, that his daring to hold out only gave them the more confidence in him.
“But Khinjan,” he objected. The crimes of the Khinjan men were not to the point. Time had to be gained.
“Aye,” they agreed. “There be many in Khinjan!” Mere mention of the place made them regard Orakzai Pathan and hakim with new respect, as having right of entry through the forbidden gate.
“Then I have it!” the Pathan announced at once, for he was awake to opportunity. “Many of you can hardly march. Rest ye here and let the hakim treat your belly aches. Bull-with-a-beard bade me wait here for a letter that must go to Khinjan to-day. Good. I will take his letter. And in Khinjan I will spread news about pardons. It is likely there are fifty there who will dare follow me back, and then we shall march down the Khyber like a full company of the old days! Who says that is not a good plan?”
There were several who said it was not, but they happened to have nothing the matter with them and could have marched at once. The rest were of the other way of thinking and agreed in asserting that Khinjan men were a higher caste of extra-ultra murderers whose presence doubtless would bring good luck to the venture. These prevailed after considerable argument.
Strangely enough, none of them deemed the proposition beneath Khinjan men’s consideration. Pardon and leave to march again behind British officers loomed bigger in their eyes than the green banner of the Prophet, which could only lead to more outrageous outlawry. They knew Khinjan men were flesh and blood — humans with hearts — as well as they. But caution had a voice yet.
“She will catch thee in Khinjan Caves,” suggested the man with part of his nose missing. “She will have thee flayed alive!”
“Take note then, I bequeath all the women in the world to thee! Be thou heir to my whole nose, too, and a blessing!” laughed the Pathan, and the butt of the jest spat savagely. In the “Hills” there is only one explanation given as to how one lost his nose, and they all laughed like hyenas until the mullah Muhammad Anim came rolling and striding back.
By that time King had got busy with his lancet, but the mullah called him off and drove the crowd away to a distance; then he drove King into the cave in front of him, his mouth working as if he were biting bits of vengeance off for future use.
“Write thy letter, thou! Write thy letter! Here is paper. There is a pen — take it! Sit! Yonder is ink — ttutt — ttutt! — Write, now, write!”
King sat at a box and waited, as if to take dictation, but the mullah, tugging at his beard, grew furious.
“Write thine own letter! Invent thine own argument! Persuade her, or die in a new way! I will invent a new way for thee!”
So King began to write, in Urdu, for reasons of his own. He had spoken once or twice in Urdu to the mullah and had received no answer. At the end of ten minutes he handed up what he had written, and Muhammad Anim made as if to read it, trying to seem deliberate, and contriving to look irresolute. It was a fair guess that he hated to admit ignorance of the scholars’ language.
“Are there any alterations you suggest?” King asked him.
“Nay, what care I what the words are? If she be not persuaded, the worse for thee!”
He held it out, and as he took it King contrived to tear it; he also contrived to seem ashamed of his own clumsiness.
“I will copy it out again,” he said.
The mullah swore at him, and conceiving that some extra show of authority was needful, growled out:
“Remember all I said. Set down she must surrender Khinjan Caves or I swear by Allah I will have thee tortured with fire and thorns — and her, too, when the time comes!”
Now he had said that, or something very like it, in the first letter. There was no doubt left that the Mullah was trying to hide ignorance, as men of that fanatic ambitious mold so often will at the expense of better judgment. If fanatics were all-wise, it would be a poor world for the rest.
“Very well,” King said quietly. And with great pretense of copying the other letter out on fresh paper he now wrote what he wished to say, taking so long about it (for he had to weigh each word), that the mullah strode up and down the cave swearing and kicking things ove
r.
“Greeting,”’ he wrote, “to the most beautiful and very
wise Princess Yasmini, in her palace in the Caves in
Khinjan, from her servant Kurram Khan the hakim, in
the camp of the mullah Muhammad Anim, a night’s march
distant in the hills.
“The mullah Muhammad Anim makes his stand and demands
now surrender to himself of Khinjan Caves; and of all
his ammunition. Further, he demands full control of
you and of me and of all your men. He is ready to
fight for his demands and already — as you must well
know — he has considerable following in Khinjan Caves.
He has at least as many men as you have, and he has
four thousand more here.
“He threatens as a preliminary to blockade Khinjan
Caves, unless the answer to this prove favorable,
letting none enter, but calling his own men out to
join him. This would suit the Indian government,
because while the ‘Hills’ fight among themselves
they can not raid India, and while he blockades
Khinjan Caves there will be time to move against him.
“Knowing that he dares begin and can accomplish what
he threatens, I am sorry; because I know it is said
how many services you have rendered of old to the
government I serve. We who serve one raj are One — one
to remember — one to forget — one to help each other in
good time.
“I have not been idle. Some of Muhammad Anim’s men
are already mine. With them I can return to India,
taking information with me that will serve my government.
My men are eager to be off.
“It may be that vengeance against me would seem sweeter
to you than return to your former allegiance. In that
case, Princess, you only need betray me to the mullah,