Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Kagig wrote the terms in Turkish by the light of the holocaust in Monty’s ancestral keep, and Mahmoud signed the paper in the presence of ten witnesses. But whether he, or his brother Turks, have kept, for instance, the last clause of the agreement, history can answer.

  Chapter Twenty-two “God go with you to the States, effendim!”

  ARMENIA

  First of the Christian nations; the first of us all to feel

  The fire of infidel hatred, the weight of the pagan heel;

  Faithfullest down the ages tending the light that burned,

  Tortured and trodden therefore, spat on and slain and spurned;

  Branded for others’ vices, robbed of your rightful fame,

  Clinging to Truth in a truthless land in the name of the ancient Name;

  Generous, courteous, gentle, patient under the yoke,

  Decent (hemmed in a harem land ye were ever a one-wife folk);

  Royal and brave and ancient — haply an hour has struck

  When the new fad-fangled peoples shall weary of raking muck,

  And turning from coward counsels and loathing the parish lies,

  In shame and sackcloth offer up the only sacrifice.

  Then thou who hast been neglected, who hast called o’er a world in vain

  To the deaf deceitful traders’ ears in tune to the voice of gain,

  Thou Cinderella nation, starved that our appetites might live,

  When we come with a hand outstretched at last — accept it, and forgive!

  The fighting lasted nearly until dawn, because of the difficulty of conveying Mahmoud’s orders to the Turks, and Kagig’s orders to our own tree-hidden firing-line. But a little before sunrise the last shot was fired, at about the time when most of the castle walls fell in and a huge shower of golden sparks shot upward to the paling sky. The cease fire left all Zeitoon’s defenders with scarcely a thousand rounds of rifle ammunition between them; but Mahmoud did not know that.

  An hour after dawn Fred joined us. He had the news of Monty’s death already, and said nothing, but pointed to something that his own men bore along on a litter of branches. A minute or two later they laid Rustum Khan’s corpse beside Monty’s, and we threw one blanket over both of them.

  I don’t remember that Fred spoke one word. He and Monty had been closer friends than any brothers I ever knew. No doubt the awful strain of the fighting at the corner of the woods had left Fred numb to some extent; but he and Monty had never been demonstrative in their affection, and, as they had lived in almost silent understanding of each other, hidden very often for the benefit of strangers by keen mutual criticism, so they parted, Fred not caring to make public what he thought, or knew, or felt.

  Kagig, not being in favor with the elders, vanished, Maga following with food for him in a leather bag, and we saw neither of them again until noon that day, by which time we ourselves had slept a little and eaten ravenously. Then he came to us where we still sat by the great rock with Mahmoud under guard (for nobody would trust him to fulfil his agreement until all his troops had retired from the district, leaving behind them such ammunition and supplies as they had carried to the gorge below the ramp).

  We had laid both bodies under the one blanket in the shade, and

  Kagig pointed to them.

  “I have found the place — the proper place, effendim!” he said simply.

  “Maga has made it fit.”

  Not knowing what he meant by that last remark, we invited some big Armenians to come with us to carry our honored dead, and followed Kagig one by one up a goat track (or a bear track, perhaps it was) that wound past the crumbled and blackened castle wall and followed the line of the mountain. Here and there we could see that Kagig had cleared it a little on his way back, and several times it was obvious that there had been a prepared, frequented track in ancient days.

  “It took time to find,” said Kagig, glancing back, “but I thought there must be such a place near such a castle.”

  Presently we emerged on a level ledge of rock, from a square hole in the midst of which a great slab had been levered away with the aid of a pole that lay beside it. All around the opening Maga had spread masses of wild flowers, and either she or Kagig had spread out on the rock the great banner with its ships and wheat-sheaves that the women had made by night in Monty’s honor.

  We could read the motto plainly now — Per terram et aquam — By land and sea; and Kagig pointed to some marks on the stone slab. Moss had grown in them and lichens, but he or else Maga had scraped them clean; and there on the stone lay the same legend graven bold and deep, as clear now as when the last crusader of the family was buried there, lord knew how many centuries before.

  The tomb was an enormous place — part cave, and partly hewn — twenty feet by twenty by as many feet deep at the most conservative guess; and on four ledges, one on each side, not in their armor, but in the rags of their robes of honor, lay the bones of four earlier Montdidiers — all big men, broad-shouldered and long of shin and thigh.

  We did not need to go down into the tomb and break the peace of centuries. Under the very center of the opening was a raised table of hewn rock, part of the cavern floor, about eight feet by eight that seemed to have been left there ready for the next man, or next two men when their time should come.

  Down on to that we lowered Monty’s body carefully with leather ropes, and then Rustum Khan’s beside him, Rustum Khan receiving Christian burial, as neither he nor his proud ancestors would have preferred. But his line was as old as Monty’s, and he died in the same cause and the selfsame battle, so we chose to do his body honor; and if the prayers that Fred remembered, and the other cheerfuller prayers that Gloria knew, were an offense to the Rajput’s lingering ghost, we hoped he might forgive us because of friendship, and esteem, and the homage we did to his valor in burying his body there.

  We covered Monty’s body with the banner the women had made, and Rustum Khan’s with flowers, for lack of a better shroud; then levered and shoved the great slab back until it rested snugly in the grooves the old masons had once cut so accurately as to preserve the bones beneath.

  Then, when Gloria had said the last prayer:

  “What next, Kagig?” Will demanded.

  Kagig was going to answer, but thought better of it and strode away in the lead, we following. He did not stop until we reached the open and the smoking ruins of the castle walls. When he stopped:

  “Has any one seen Peter Measel?” I asked.

  “Forget him!” growled Will.

  “Why?” demanded Maga. “Will you bury him in that same hole with them two?”

  “Has any one seen him?” I asked again, uncertain why I asked, but curious and insistent.

  “Sure!” said Maga. “Yes. Me I seen ‘im. I keel ‘im — so — with a knife — las’ night! You not believe?”

  Whether we believed or not, the news surprised us, and we waited in silence for an explanation.

  “You not believe? Why not? That dog! ‘E make of me a dam-fool! ‘E tell me about God. ‘E say God is angry with Zeitoon, an’ Kagig is as good as a dead man, an’ I shall take advantage. ‘E ‘ope ‘e marry me. I ‘ope if Kagig die I marry Will Yerkees, but I agree with Measel, making pretend, an’ ‘e run away to talk ‘is fool secrets with the Turks. Then I make my own arrangements! But Mahmoud is not succeeding, and I like Kagig better after all. An’ then last night in the darkness Peter Measel he is coming on a ‘orse with Mahmoud because Mahmoud is not trusting him out of sight. An’ I see him, an’ ‘e see me, an’ ‘e call me, an’ I go to ‘im through all the fighting, an’ ‘e get off the ‘orse an’ reach out ‘is arms to me, an’ I keel ‘im with my knife — so! An’ now you know all about it!”

  “What next?” Will demanded dryly.

  “Next?” said Kagig. “You effendim make your escape! The Turks will surely seek to be revenged on you. I will show you a way across the mountains into Persia.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  “Int
o hiding!” he answered grimly. “Maga — little Maga, she shall come with me, and teach me more about the earth and sky and wind and water! Perhaps at last some day she shall make me — no, never a king, but a sportman.”

  “Come with us,” said Will. “Come to the States.”

  “No, no, effendi. I know my people. They are good folk. They mistrust me now, and if I were to stay among them where they could see me and accuse me, and where the Turks could make a peg of me on which to hang mistrust, I should be a source of weakness to them. Nevertheless, I am ever the Eye of Zeitoon! I shall go into hiding, and watch! There will come an hour again — infallibly — when the Turks will seek to blot out the last vestige of Armenia. If I hide faithfully, and watch well, by that time I shall be a legend among my people, and when I appear again in their desperation they will trust me.”

  Will met Gloria’s eyes in silence for a moment.

  “I’ve a mind to stay with you, Kagig, and lend a hand,” he said at last.

  “Nay, nay, effendi!”

  “We can attach ourselves to some mission station, and be lots of use,”

  Gloria agreed.

  “Use?” said Kagig, cracking his fingers. “The missions have done good work, but you can be of much more use — you two. You have each other. Go back to the blessed land you come from, and be happy together. But pay the price of happiness! You have seen. Go back and tell!”

  “Tell about Armenian atrocities?” said Will. “Why, man alive, the papers are full of them at regular intervals!”

  Kagig made a gesture of impatience.

  “Aye! All about what the Turks have done to us, and how much about us ourselves? America believes that when a Turk merely frowns the Armenian lies down and holds his belly ready for the knife! Who would care to help such miserable-minded men and women? But you have seen otherwise. You know the truth. You have seen that Armenia is undermined by mutual suspicion cunningly implanted by the Turk. You have also seen how we rally around one man or a handful whom we know we dare trust!”

  “True enough!” said Will. “I’ve wondered at it.”

  “Then go and tell America,” Kagig almost snarled with blazing eyes, “to come and help us! To give us a handful of armed men to rally round! Tell them we are men and women, not calves for the shambles! Tell them to reach us out but one finger of one hand for half a dozen years, and watch us grow into a nation! Preach it from the house-tops! Teach it! Tell it to the sportmen of America that all we need is a handful to rally round, and we will all be sportmen too! Go and tell them — tell them!”

  “You bet we will!” said Gloria.

  “Then go!” said Kagig. “Go by way of Persia, lest the Turks find ways of stopping up your mouths. Monty has died to help us. I live that I may help. You go and tell the sportmen all. Tell them we show good sport in Zeitoon — in Armenia! God go with you all, effendim!”

  GUNS OF THE GODS

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The first edition’s title page

  Old Troy reaped rue in the womb of years

  For stolen Helen’s sake;

  Till tenfold retribution rears

  Its wreck on embers slaked with tears

  That mended no heart-ache.

  The wail of the women sold as slaves

  Lest Troy breed sons again

  Dreed o’er a desert of nameless graves,

  The heaps and the hills that are Trojan graves

  Deep-runneled by the rain.

  But Troy lives on. Though Helen’s rape

  And ten-year hold were vain;

  Though jealous gods with men conspire

  And Furies blast the Grecian fire;

  Yet Troy must rise again.

  Troy’s daughters were a spoil and sport,

  Were limbs for a labor gang,

  Who crooned by foreign loom and mill

  Of Trojan loves they cherished still,

  Till Homer heard, and sang,

  They told, by the fire when feasters roared

  And minstrels waited turns,

  Of the might of the men that Troy adored,

  Of the valor in vain of the Trojan sword,

  With the love that slakeless burns,

  That caught and blazed in the minstrel mind

  Or ever the age of pen.

  So maids and a minstrel rebuilt Troy,

  Out of the ashes they rebuilt Troy

  To live in the hearts of men.

  Yasmini

  “Set down my thoughts not yours if the tale is to be worth the pesa.”

  The why and wherefore of my privilege to write a true account of the Princess Yasmini’s early youth is a story in itself too long to tell here; but it came about through no peculiar wisdom. I fell in a sort of way in love with her, and that led to opportunity.

  She never made any secret of the scorn with which she regards those who singe wings at her flame. Rather she boasts of it with limit-overreaching epithets. Her respect is reserved for those rare men and women who can meet her in unfair fight and, if not defeat her, then come close to it. She asks no concessions on account of sex. Men’s passions are but weapons forged for her necessity; and as for genuine love-affairs, like Cleopatra, she had but two, and the second ended in disaster to herself. This tale is of the first one that succeeded, although fraught with discontent for certain others.

  The second affair came close to whelming thrones, and I wrote of that in another book with an understanding due, as I have said, to opportunity, and with a measure of respect that pleased her.

  She is habitually prompt and generous with her rewards, if far-seeing in bestowal of them. So, during the days of her short political eclipse that followed in a palace that had housed a hundred kings, I saw her almost daily in a room — her holy of holies — where the gods of ancient India were depicted in three primal colors working miracles all over the walls and where, if governments had only known it, she was already again devising plans to set the world on fire.

  There, amid an atmosphere of Indian scents and cigarette smoke, she talked and I made endless notes, while now and then, when she was meditative, her maids sang to an accompaniment of rather melancholy wooden flutes. But whenever I showed a tendency to muse she grew indignant.

  “Of what mud are you building castles now? Set down my thoughts not yours,” she insisted, “if your tale is to be worth the pesa.”

  By that she referred to the custom of all Eastern story-tellers to stop at the exciting moment and take up a collection of the country’s smallest copper coins before finishing the tale. But the reference was double-edged. A penny for my thoughts, a penny for the West’s interpretation of the East was what she had in mind.

  Nevertheless, as it is to the West that the story must appeal it has seemed wiser to remove it from her lips and so transpose that, though it loses in lore unfortunately, it does gain something of directness and simplicity. Her satire, and most of her metaphor if always set down as she phrased it, would scandalize as well as puzzle Western ears.

  This tale is of her youth, but Yasmini’s years have not yet done more than ripen her. In a land where most women shrivel into early age she continues, somewhere perhaps a little after thirty, in the bloom of health and loveliness, younger in loo
ks and energy than many a Western girl of twenty-five. For she is of the East and West, very terribly endowed with all the charms of either and the brains of both.

  Her quick wit can detect or invent mercurial Asian subterfuge as swiftly as appraise the rather glacial drift of Western thought; and the wisdom of both East and West combines in her to teach a very nearly total incredulity in human virtue. Western morals she regards as humbug, neither more nor less.

  In virtue itself she believes, as astronomers for example believe in the precession of the equinox; but that the rank and file of human beings, and especially learned human beings, have attained to the very vaguest understanding of it she scornfully disbelieves. And with a frankness simply Gallic in its freedom from those thought-conventions with which so many people like to deceive themselves she deals with human nature on what she considers are its merits. The result is sometimes very disconcerting to the pompous and all the rest of the host of self-deceived, but usually amusing to herself and often profitable to her friends.

  Her ancestry is worth considering, since to that she doubtless owes a good proportion of her beauty and ability. On her father’s side she is Rajput, tracing her lineage so far back that it becomes lost at last in fabulous legends of the Moon (who is masculine, by the way, in Indian mythology). All of the great families of Rajputana are her kin, and all the chivalry and derring-do of that royal land of heroines and heroes is part of her conscious heritage.

  Her mother was Russian. On that side, too, she can claim blood royal, not devoid of at least a trace of Scandinavian, betrayed by glittering golden hair and eyes that are sometimes the color of sky seen over Himalayan peaks, sometimes of the deep lake water in the valleys. But very often her eyes seem so full of fire and their color is so baffling that a legend has gained currency to the effect that she can change their hue at will.