by Talbot Mundy
“She is on our side!” That was a sheer guess. “She has kept our man and sent another as hostage for him in token of good faith! Listen! Ye saw this man’s eyes healed. Let that be a token! Be ye the men with new eyes! Give it out! Claim the title and be true to it and see me guide you down the Khyber in good time like a regiment, many more than a hundred strong!”
They jumped at the idea. The “Hills” — the whole East, for that matter — are ever ready to form a new sect or join a new band or a new blood-feud. Witness the Nikalseyns, who worship a long-since dead Englishman.
“We see!” yelled one of them.
“We see!” they chorused, and the idea took charge. From that minute they were a new band, with a war-cry of their own.
“To Khinjan!” they howled, scattering through the camp, and the mullah came out to glare at them and tug his beard and wonder what possessed them.
“To Khinjan!” they roared at him. “Lead us to Khinjan!”
“To Khinjan, then!” he thundered, throwing up both arms in a sort of double apostolic blessing, and then motioning as if he threw them the reins and leave to gallop. They roared back at him like the sea under the whip of a gaining wind. And Ismail disappeared among them, leaving King alone. Then the mullah’s eyes fell on King and he beckoned him.
King went up with an effort, for he ached yet from his struggle of the night before. Up there by the ashes of the fire the mullah showed him a letter he had crumpled in his fist. There were only a few lines, written in Arabic, which all mullahs are supposed to be able to read, and they were signed with a strange scrawl that might have meant anything. But the paper smelt strongly of her perfume.
“Come, then. Bring all your men, and I will let you and them enter Khinjan Caves. We will strike a bargain in the Cavern of Earth’s Drink.”
That was all, but the fire in the mullah’s eyes showed that he thought it was enough. He did not doubt that once he should have his extra four thousand in the caves Khinjan would be his; and he said so.
“Khinjan is mine!” he growled. “India is mine!”
And King did not answer him. He did not believe Yasmini would be fool enough to trust herself in any bargain with Muhammad Anim. Yet he could see no alternative as yet. He could only be still and be glad he had set the camp moving and so had forced the mullah’s hand.
“The old fatalist would have suspected her answer otherwise!” he told himself, for he knew that he himself suspected it.
While he and the mullah watched the tents began to fall and the women labored to roll them. The men began firing their rifles, and within the hour enough ammunition had been squandered to have fought a good-sized skirmish; but the mullah did not mind, for he had Khinjan Caves in view, and none knew better than he what vast store of cartridges and dynamite was piled in there. He let them waste.
Watching his opportunity, King slipped down the ramp and into the crowd, while the mullah was busy with personal belongings in the cave. King left his own belongings to the fates, or to any thief who should care to steal them. He was safe from the mullah in the midst of his nearly eighty men, who half believed him a sending from the skies.
“We see! we see!” they yelled and danced around him.
Before ever the mullah gave an order they got under way and started climbing the steep valley wall. The mullah on his brown mule thrust forward, trying to get in the lead, and King and his men hung back, to keep at a distance from him. It was when the mullah had reached the top of the slope and was not far from being in the lead that Ismail appeared again, leading King’s horse, that he had found in possession of another man. That did not look like enmity or treachery. King mounted and thanked him. Ismail wiped his knife, that had blood on it, and stuck his tongue through his teeth, which did not look quite like treachery either. Yet the Afridi could not be got to say a word.
Two or three miles along the top of the escarpment the mullah sent back word that he wanted the hakim to be beside him. Doubtless he had looked back and had seen King on the horse, head and shoulders above the baggage.
But King’s men treated the messenger to open scorn and sent him packing.
“Bid the mullah hunt himself another hakim! Be thou his hakim! Stay, we will give thee a lesson in how to use a knife!”
The man ran, lest they carry out their threat, for men joke grimly in the “Hills.”
Ismail came and held King’s stirrup, striding beside him with the easy Hillman gait.
“Art thou my man at last?” King asked him, but Ismail laughed and shook his head.
“I am her man.”
“Where is she?” King asked.
“Nay, who am I that I should know?”
“But she sent thee?”
“Aye, she sent me.”
“To what purpose?”’
“To her purpose!” the Afridi answered, and King could not get another word out of him. He fell behind.
But out of the corner of his eye, and once or twice by looking back deliberately, King saw that Ismail was taking the members of his new band one by one and whispering to them. What he said was a mystery, but as they talked each man looked at King. And the more they talked the better pleased they seemed. And as the day wore on the more deferential they grew. By midday if King wanted to dismount there were three at least to hold his stirrup and ten to help him mount again.
Chapter XVIII
By the sweat of your brow; by the ache of your bones;
In the sun, in the wind, in the chill of the rains,
Ye sowed as ye knew. And ye know it was blown
To be trodden and burned — aye, and that by your own
Who sneered at lean furrows and mocked at the stones.
But ye stayed and sowed on. And a little remains.
Ye shall have for your faith. Ye shall reap for your pains.
Four thousand men with women and children and baggage do not move so swiftly as one man or a dozen, especially in the “Hills,” where discipline is reckoned beneath a proud man’s honor. There were many miles to go before Khinjan when night fell and the mullah bade them camp. He bade them camp because they would have done it otherwise in any case.
“And we,” said King to his all but eighty who crowded around him, “being men with new eyes and with a great new hope in us, will halt here and eat the evening meal and watch for an opportunity.”
“Opportunity for what?” they asked him.
“An opportunity to show how Allah loves the brave!” said King, and they had to be content with that, for he would say no more to them. Seeing he would not talk, they made their little fires all around him and watched while their women cooked the food. The mullah would not let them eat until he and the whole camp had prayed like the only righteous.
When the evening meal was eaten, and sentries had been set at every vantage point, and the men all sat about cleansing their beards and fingers the mullah sent for the hakim again. Only this time he sent twenty men to fetch him.
There was so nearly a fight that the skin all down King’s back was gooseflesh, for a fight at that juncture would have ruined everything. At the least he would have been made a hopeless helpless prisoner. But in the end the mullah’s men drew off snarling, and before they could have time to receive new orders or reinforcements, King’s die was cast.
There came another order from the mullah. The women and children were to be left in camp next dawn, and to remain there until sent for. There was murmuring at that around the camp, and especially among King’s contingent. But King laughed.
“It is good!” he said.
“Why? How so?” they asked him.
“Bid your women make for the Khyber soon after the mullah marches tomorrow. Bid them travel down the Khyber until we and they meet!”
“But—”
“Please yourselves, sahibs!” The hakim’s air was one of supremest indifference. “As for me, I leave no women behind me in the mountains. I am content.”
They murmured a while, but they gave
the orders to their women, and King watched the women nod. And all that while Ismail watched him with carefully disguised concern, but undisguised interest. And King understood. Enlightenment comes to a man swiftly, when it does come, as a rule.
He recalled that Yasmini had not done much to make his first entry into Khinjan easy. On the contrary, she had put him on his mettle and had set Rewa Gunga to the task of frightening him and had tested him and tried him before tempting him at last.
She must be watching him now, for even the East repeats itself. She had sent Ismail for that purpose. It might be Ismail’s business to drive a knife in him at the first opportunity, but he doubted that. It was much more likely that, having failed in an attempt to have him murdered, she was superstitiously remorseful. Her course would depend on his. If he failed, she was done with him. If he succeeded in establishing a strong position of his own, she would yield.
All of which did not explain Ismail’s whisperings and noddings and chin strokings with King’s contingent. But it explained enough for King’s present purpose, and he wasted no time on riders to the problem. With or without Ismail’s aid, with or without his enmity, he must control his eighty men and give the slip to the mullah, and he went at once about the best way to do both.
“We will go now,” he said quietly. “That sentry in yonder shadow has his back turned. He has over-eaten. We will rush him and put good running between us and the mullah.”
Surprised into obedience, and too delighted at the prospect of action to wonder why they should obey a hakim so, they slung on their bandoliers and made ready. Ismail brought up King’s horse and he mounted. And then at King’s word all eighty made a sudden swoop on the drowsy sentry and took him unawares. They tossed him over the cliff, too startled to scream an alarm; and though sentries on either hand heard them and shouted, they were gone into outer darkness like wind-blown ghosts of dead men before the mullah even knew what was happening.
They did not halt until not one of them could run another yard, King trusting to his horse to find a footing along the cliff-tops, and to the men to find the way.
“Whither?” one whispered to him.
“To Khinjan!” he answered; and that was enough. Each whispered to the other, and they all became fired with curiosity more potent than money bribes.
When he halted at last and dismounted and sat down and the stragglers caught up, panting, they held a council of war all together, with Ismail sitting at King’s back and leaning a chin on his shoulder in order to hear better. Bone pressed on bone, and the place grew numb; King shook him off a dozen times; but each time Ismail set his chin back on the same spot, as a dog will that listens to his master. Yet he insisted he was her man, and not King’s.
“Now, ye men of the Hills,” said King, “listen to me who am political-offender-with-reward-for-capture-offered!” That was a gem of a title. It fired their imaginations. “I know things that no soldier would find out in a thousand years, and I will tell you some of what I know.”
Now he had to be careful. If he were to invent too much they might denounce him as a traitor to the “Hills” in general. If he were to tell them too little they would lose interest and might very well desert him at the first pinch. He must feel for the middle way and upset no prejudices.
“She has discovered that this mullah Muhammad Anim is no true muslim, but an unbelieving dog of a foreigner from Farangistan! She has discovered that he plans to make himself an emperor in these Hills, and to sell Hillmen into slavery!” Might as well serve the mullah up hot while about it! Beyond any doubt not much more than a mile away the mullah was getting even by condemning the lot of them to death. “An eye for the risk of an eye!” say the unforgiving Hills.
“If one of us should go back into his camp now he would be tortured. Be sure of that.”
Breathing deeply in the darkness, they nodded, as if the dark had eyes. Ismail’s chin drove a fraction deeper into his shoulder.
“Now ye know — for all men know — that the entrance into Khinjan Caves is free to any man who can tell a lie without flinching. It is the way out again that is not free. How many men do ye know that have entered and never returned?”
They all nodded again. It was common knowledge that Khinjan was a very graveyard of the presumptuous.
“She has set a trap for the mullah. She will let him and all his men enter and will never let them out again!”
“How knowest thou?” This from two men, one on either hand.
“Was I never in Khinjan Caves?” he retorted. “Whence came I? I am her man, sent to help trap the mullah! I would have trapped all you, but for being weary of these ‘Hills’ and wishful to go back to India and be pardoned! That is who I am! That is how I know!”
Their breath came and went sibilantly, and the darkness was alive with the excitement they thought themselves too warrior-like to utter.
“But what will she do then?” asked somebody.
King searched his memory, and in a moment there came back to him a picture of the hurrying jezailchi he had held up in the Khyber Pass, and recollection of the man’s words.
“Know ye not,” he said, “that long ago she gave leave to all who ate the salt to be true to the salt? She gave the Khyber jezailchis leave to fight against her. Be sure, whatever she does, she will stand between no man and his pardon!”
“But will she lead a jihad? We will not fight against her!”
“Nay,” said King, drawing his breath in. Ismail’s chin felt like a knife against his collar bone, and Ismail’s iron fingers clutched his arm. It was time to give his hostage to dame Fortune. “She will go down into India and use her influence in the matter of the pardons!”
“I believe thou art a very great liar indeed!” said the man who lacked part of his nose. “The Pathan went, and he did not come back. What proof have we.”
“Ye have me!” said King. “If I show you no proof, how can I escape you?”
They all grunted agreement as to that. King used his elbow to hit Ismail in the ribs. He did not dare speak to him; but now was the time for Ismail to carry information to her, supposing that to be his job. And after a minute Ismail rolled into a shadow and was gone. King gave him twenty minutes start, letting his men rest their legs and exercise their tongues.
Now that he was out of the mullah’s clutches — and he suspected Yasmini would know of it within an hour or two, and before dawn in any event — he began to feel like a player in a game of chess who foresees his opponent mate in so many moves.
If Yasmini were to let the mullah and his men into the Caves and to join forces with him in there, he would at least have time to hurry back to India with his eighty men and give warning. He might have time to call up the Khyber jezailchis and blockade the Caves before the hive could swarm, and he chuckled to think of the hope of that.
On the other hand, if there was to be a battle royal between Yasmini and the mullah he would be there to watch it and to comfort India with the news.
“Now we will go on again, in order to be close to Khinjan at break of day,” he said, and they all got up and obeyed him as if his word had been law to them for years. Of all of them he was the only man in doubt — he who seemed most confident of all.
They swung along into the darkness under low-hung stars, trailing behind King’s horse, with only half a dozen of them a hundred yards or so ahead as an advance guard, and all of them expecting to see Khinjan loom above each next valley, for distances and darkness are deceptive in the “Hills,” even to trained eyes. Suddenly the advance guard halted, but did not shoot. And as King caught up with them he saw they were talking with some one.
He had to ride up close before he recognized the Orakzai Pathan.
“Salaam!” said the fellow with a grin. “I bring one hundred and eleven!”
As he spoke graveyard shadows rose out of the darkness all around and leaned on rifles.
“Be ye men all ex-soldiers of the raj?” King asked them.
“Aye!” they g
rowled in chorus.
“What will ye?”
“Pardons!” They all said the word together.
“Who gave you leave to come?” King asked.
“None! He told us of the pardons and we came!”
“Aye!” said the Orakzai Pathan, drawing King aside. “But she gave me leave to seek them out and tempt them!”
“And what does she intend?” King asked him suddenly.
“She? Ask Allah, who put the spirit in her! How should I know?”
“We will march again, my brothers!” King shouted, and they streamed along behind him, now with no advance guard, but with the Orakzai Pathan striding beside King’s horse, with a great hand on the saddle. Like the others, he seemed decided in his mind that the hakim ought not to be allowed much chance to escape.
Just as the dawn was tinting the surrounding peaks with softest rose they topped a ridge, and Khinjan lay below them across the mile-wide bone-dry valley. They all stood and stared at it, leaning on their guns. All the “Men with New Eyes” saw it now for the first time, and it held them speechless, for with its patchwork towers and high battlements it looked like a very city of the spirits that their tales around the fire on winter nights so linger on.
And while they watched, and the Khinjan men were beginning to murmur (for they needed no last view of the place to satisfy any longings!) none else than Ismail rose from behind a rock and came to King’s stirrup. He tugged and King backed his horse until they stood together apart.
“She sends this message,” said Ismail, showing his teeth in the most peculiar grin that surely the Hills ever witnessed. And then, omitting the message, he proceeded first to give some news. “Many of her men who have never been in the army, are none the less true to her, and she will not leave them to the mullah’s mercy. They will leave the Caves in a little while and will come up here. They are to go down into India and be made prisoners if the sirkar will not enlist them. You are to wait for them here.”