Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  A second maid volunteered, but Yasmini would have none of that plan. First and last the great outstanding difference between her and the ordinary run of conspirators, Western or Eastern, was unwillingness to sacrifice faithful friends even in a pinch — although she could be ruthlessness itself toward half-hearted ones. Both those habits grew on her as she grew older.

  By the time they reached the little curtained outer hall the maids were on the verge of hysteria. Tess had herself well in control, and was praying busily that her husband might only be near enough to hear the racket at the gate. She was willing to be satisfied with that, and to ask no further favors of Providence, unless that Dick should have Tom Tripe with him. Outwardly calm enough, she could not for the life of her remember to stride like a man. Yasmini turned more than once to rally her about it.

  Yasmini herself looked unaccountably meek in the Western dress, but her blue eyes blazed with fury and she walked with confidence, issuing her orders in a level voice. The gateman had come to the door again to announce that Gungadhura had issued a final warning. Two more minutes and the outer gate should be burst in by his orders.

  “Tell the maharajah sahib that I come in person to welcome him!” she retorted, and the gateman hurried back into the dark toward his post.

  There were no lights at the outer gate. One could only guess how the stage was set — the maharajah hooded lest some enemy recognize him — the eunuchs behind him with cords concealed under their loose outer garments — and the guard at a respectful distance standing at attention. There was not a maharajah’s sepoy in Sialpore who would have dared remonstrate with Gungadhura in dark or daylight.

  Only as they passed under the yellow light shed by the solitary lantern on the iron bracket did Tess get an inkling of Yasmini’s plan. Light glinted on the wrought hilt of a long Italian dagger, and her smile was cold- uncompromising — shuddersome.

  Tess objected instantly. “Didn’t you promise you’d kill nobody? If we’d a pistol we could fire it in the air and my husband would come in a minute.”

  “How do we know that Gungadhura hasn’t killed your husband, or shut him up somewhere?” Yasmini answered, and Tess had an attack of cold chills that rendered her speechless for a moment. She threw it off with a prodigious effort.

  “But I’ve no weapon of any kind, and you can’t kill Gungadhura, three eunuchs and the guard as well!” she argued presently.

  “Wait and see what I will do!” was the only answer. “Gungadhura caused my pistols to be stolen. But the darkness is our friend, and I think the gods — if there are any gods — are going to assist us.”

  They walked to the gate in a little close-packed group, and found the gateman stuttering through the small square hole provided for interviews with strangers, telling the maharajah for the third or fourth time that the princess herself was coming. Gungadhura’s voice was plainly audible, growling threats from the outer darkness.

  “Stand aside!” Yasmini ordered. “I will attend to the talking now.”

  She went close to the square hole, but was careful to keep her face in shadow at the left-hand side of it.

  “What can His Highness, Gungadhura Singh, want with his relative at this strange hour?” she asked.

  “Open the gate!” came the answer. He was very close to it — ready to push with his shoulder the instant the bolt was drawn, for black passion had him in hand. But in the darkness he was as invisible as she was.

  “Nay, how shall I know it is Gungadhura Singh?”

  “Ask the guard! Ho, there! Tell her who it is demands admission!”

  “Nay, they might lie to me! The voice sounds strange. I would open for Gungadhura Singh; but I must be sure it is he and no other.”

  “Look then!” he answered, and thrust his dark face close to the opening.

  Even the utterly base have intuition. Nothing else warned him. In the very nick of time he stepped back, and Yasmini’s long dagger that shot forward like a stab of lightning only cut the cheek beneath the eye, and slit it to the corner of his mouth.

  The blood poured down into his beard and added fury to determination.

  “Guards, break in the gate!” he shouted, and Yasmini stood back in the darkest shadow, about as dangerous as a cobra guarding young ones. With her left hand she signed to all six women to hide themselves; but Tess came and stood beside her, minded in that minute to give Gungadhura Western aftermath to reckon with as well as the combined present courage of two women. Wondering desperately what she could do to help against armed men she suddenly snatched one of the long hat-pins that she herself had adjusted in her own hat on Yasmini’s head.

  Yasmini hugged her close and kissed her.

  “Better than sister! Better than friend!” she whispered.

  Gungadhura had not been idle while he waited for his message to reach Yasmini, but had sent some of the guard to find a baulk of timber for a battering-ram. The butts of rifles would have been useless against that stout iron.

  The gate shook now under the weight of the first assault, but the guards were handling the timber clumsily, not using their strength together. Gungadhura cursed them, and spent two valuable minutes trying to show them how the trick should be worked, the blood that poured into his beard, and made of his mouth a sputtering crimson mess, not helping to make his raging orders any more intelligible.

  Presently the second crash came, stronger and more elastic than the first. The iron bent inward, and it was plainly only a matter of minutes before the bolt would go. The gateman came creeping to Yasmini’s side, and, with yellow fangs showing in a grin meant to be affectionate, displayed an Afghan tulwar.

  “Ismail!” she said. “I thought you were afraid and ran to hide!”

  “Nay!” he answered. “My life is thine, Princess! Gungadhura took away all weapons, but this I hid. I went to find it. See,” he grinned, feeling the edge with his thumb, “it is clean! It is keen! It will cut throats!”

  “I will not forget!” Yasmini answered, but the words were lost in the din of the third blow of wood on iron.

  The odds began not to look so bad — two desperate women and a faithful Northern fighting man armed with a weapon that he loved and understood, against a wounded blackguard and three eunuchs. Perhaps the guard might look on and not interfere. There was a chance to make a battle royal of it, whose tumult would bring Dick Blaine and Tom Tripe to the rescue. What was the dog doing? Tess wondered whether any animal could be so intelligent after all as Tom pretended his was. Perhaps the maharajah had seen the dog and killed him.

  “Listen!” she urged. “Tell your maids to stampede for the street the instant the door breaks in. That will give the guard their work to do to hold them. Meanwhile—”

  “Thump!” came the timber on the gate again, and even the hinges shook in their stone setting.

  “Listen!” said Yasmini.

  There was another noise up-street — a rushing to and fro, and a trumpeting that no one could mistake.

  “I said that—”

  “Thump!” came the baulk of timber — not so powerfully as before. There was distraction affecting the team-work. The scream of an elephant fighting mad, and the yelp of a dog, that pierces every other noise, rent the darkness close at hand.

  “I said that the gods—”

  There came the thud of a very heavy body colliding with a wall, and another blood-curdling scream of rage — then the thunder of what might have been an avalanche as part of a near-by wall collapsed, and a brute as big as Leviathan approached at top speed.

  There was another thud, but this time caused by the hulk of timber falling on the ground, as guard, eunuchs and Gungadhura all took to their heels.

  “Allah! Il hamdul illah!” swore the gateman. (Thanks be to God!)

  “I said that the gods would help tonight!” Yasmini cried exultantly.

  “O Lord, what has happened to Dick?” groaned Tess between set teeth.

  The thunder of pursuit drew nearer. Possessed by some instinct she
never offered to explain, Yasmini stepped to the gate, drew back the bolt, and opened it a matter of inches. In shot Tom Tripe’s dog, with his tongue hanging out and the fear of devils blazing in his eyes. Yasmini slammed the gate again in the very face of a raging elephant, and shot the bolt in the nick of time to take the shock of his impact.

  It was only a charge in half-earnest or he would have brought the gate down. An elephant is a very short-sighted beast, and it was pitch-dark. He could not believe that a dog could disappear through a solid iron gate, and after testing the obstruction for a moment or two, grumbling to himself angrily, he stood to smell the air and listen. There was a noise farther along the street of a stampede of some kind. That was likely enough his quarry, probably frightening other undesirables along in front of him. With a scream of mingled frenzy and delight he went off at once full pelt.

  “Oh, Trotters! Good dog, Trotters!” sobbed Tess, kneeling down to make much of him, and giving way to the reaction that overcomes men as well as women. “Where’s your master? Oh, if you could tell me where my husband is!”

  She did not have long to wait for the answer to that. It took the two men a matter of seconds to get the horse on his feet, and no fire-engine ever left the station house one fraction faster than Dick tooled that dog-cart. The horse was all nerves and in no mood to wait on ceremony, which accounted for a broken spoke and a fragment of the gate-post hanging in the near wheel. They forgot to unlash the wheels before they started, so the dog-cart came up-street on skids, as it were, screaming holy murder on the granite flags — which in turn saved the near wheel from destruction. It also made it possible to rein in the terrified horse exactly in front of the palace gate; another proof that as Yasmini said, the gods of India were in a mood to help that night. (Not that she ever believed the gods are one bit more consequential than men.)

  Yasmini drew the bolt, and the gate creaked open reluctantly; the shock of the elephant’s shoulder had about ended its present stage of usefulness. Tom Tripe, dismounting from his horse in a hurry and throwing the reins over the dog-cart lamp, was first to step through.

  “Where’s my dog?” he demanded. “Where’s that Trotters o’ mine?

  Did Akbar get him?”

  A cold nose thrust in his hand was the answer.

  “Oh, so there you are, you rascal! There — lie down!”

  That was all the ceremonial that passed between them, but the dog seemed satisfied.

  Tess was out through the gate almost sooner than Tom Tripe could enter it. They brushed each other’s shoulders as they passed. Up in the dog-cart she and her husband laughed in each other’s arms, each at the other’s disguise, neither of them with the slightest notion what would happen next, except that Dick knew the dog-cart wheels would have to be unlashed.

  “How many people will the carriage hold?” Yasmini called to them, appearing suddenly in the lamp-light. And Dick Blaine began laughing all over again, for except for the golden hair she looked so like the wife who sat on his left hand, and his wife so like a Rajput that the humor of the situation was its only obvious feature.

  “I must not take my carriage, for they would trace it, and besides, there is too little time. Can we all ride in your carriage? There are six of us.”

  “Probably. But where to?” Dick answered.

  “I will direct. Ismail must come too, but he can run.”

  It was an awful crowd, for the dog-cart was built for four people at the most, and in the end Tess insisted on riding behind Tom Tripe because she was dressed like a man and could do it easily. Ismail was sent back to close the gate from the inside and clamber out over the top of it. There was just room for a lean and agile man to squeeze between the iron and the stone arch.

  “Let the watchmen who feared and hid themselves stay to give their own account to Gungadhura!” Yasmini sneered scornfully. “They are no longer men of mine!”

  “Now, where away?” demanded Dick, giving the horse his head. “To my house? You’ll be safe there for the present.”

  “No. They might trace us there.”

  Yasmini was up beside him, wedged tightly between him and Hasamurti, so like his own wife, except for a vague Eastern scent she used, that he could not for the life of him speak to her as a stranger.

  “Listen!” she said excitedly. “I had horses here, there, everywhere in case of need. But Gungadhura sent men and took them all. Now I have only one horse — in your stable — I must get that tonight. First, then, drive my women to a place that I will show you.”

  Away in the distance they could hear the trumpeting of Akbar, and the shouts of men who had been turned out to attempt the hopeless task of capturing the brute. At each scream the horse trembled in the shafts and had to be managed skillfully, but the load was too heavy now for him to run away with it.

  “If that elephant will continue to be our friend and will only run the other way for a distraction, so that we are not seen, one of these days I will give him a golden howdah!” vowed Yasmini.

  And Akbar did that very thing. Whoever was awake that night in Sialpore, and was daring enough to venture in the dark streets, followed the line of destruction and excitement, gloating over the broken property of enemies or awakening friends to make them miserable with condolences. The dog-cart threaded through the streets unseen, for even the scarce night-watchmen left their posts to take part in the hunt.

  Yasmini guided them to the outskirts of the town in a line as nearly straight as the congenital deviousness of Sialpore’s ancient architects allowed. There was not a street but turned a dozen times to the mile. At one point she bade Dick stop, and begged Tess to let Tom Tripe take her home, promising to see her again within the hour. But Tess had recovered her nerve and was determined to see the adventure through, in spite of the discomforts of a seat behind Tom’s military saddle.

  They brought up at last in front of a low dark house at the very edge of the city. It stood by itself in a compound, with fields behind it, and looked prosperous enough to belong to one of the maharajah’s suite.

  “The house of Mukhum Dass!” Yasmini announced.

  “The money-lender?”

  “Yes.”

  Dick made a wry face, for the man’s extortions were notorious. But Yasmini never paused to cast up virtue when she needed assistants in a hurry; rather she was adept at appraising character and bending it to suit her ends. Ismail, hot and out of breath from running at the cart-tail, was sent to pound the money-lender’s door, until that frightened individual came down himself to inquire (with the door well held by a short chain) what the matter was.

  “I lend no money in the night!” was his form of greeting. He always used it when gamblers came to him in the heat of the loser’s passion at unearthly hours — and sometimes ended by making a loan at very high interest on sound security. Otherwise he would have stayed in bed, whatever the thunderous importunity.

  Yasmini was down at the door by that time, and it was she who answered.

  “Nay, but men win lawsuits by gathering evidence! Are title-deeds not legal in the dark?”

  “Who are you?” he demanded, reaching backward for a little lamp that hung on the wall behind him and trying to see her face.

  “I am the same who met you that morning on the hilltop and purchased silence from you at a price.”

  He peered through the narrow opening, holding the lamp above his head.

  “That was a man. You are a woman.”

  For answer to that she stood on tiptoe and blew the lamp out. He would have slammed the door, but her foot was in the way.

  “By dark or daylight, Mukhum Dass, your eyes read nothing but the names on hundis (notes)! Now, what does the car say? Does the voice tell nothing?”

  “Aye, it is the same.”

  “You shall have that title-deed tomorrow at dawn — on certain terms.”

  “How do I know?’

  “Because I say it — I, who said that Chamu would repay his son’s loan, — I, who knew from the first all
about the title-deed, — I, who know where it is this minute, — I, who know the secrets of Jinendra’s priest, — I, whose name stands written on the hundred-rupee note with which the butler paid his son’s debt!”

  “The princess! The Princess Yasmini! It was her name on the note!”

  “Her name is mine!”

  The money-lender stood irresolutely, shifting his balance from foot to foot. It was his experience that when people with high-born names came to him by night mysteriously there was always profit in it for himself. And then, there was that title-deed. He had bought the house cheap, but its present value was five times what he gave for it. Its loss would mean more to him than the loss of a wife to some men — as Yasmini knew, and counted on.

  “Open the door and let me in, Mukhum Dass! The terms are these—”

  “Nay, we can talk with the door between us.”

  “Very well, then, lose thy title-deed! Dhulap Singh, thine enemy, shall have it within the hour!”

  She took her foot out from the door and turned away briskly. Promptly he opened the door wide, and called after her.

  “Nay, come, we will discuss it.”

  “I discuss nothing!” she answered with a laugh. “I dictate terms!”

  “Name them, then.”

  “I have here five women. They must stay in safety in your house until an hour before dawn.”

  “God forbid!”

  “Until an hour before dawn, you hear me? If any come to inquire for them or me, you must deny any knowledge.”

  “That I would be sure enough to do! Shall I have it said that Mukhum

  Dass keeps a dozen women in his dotage?”

  “An hour before dawn I will come for them.”

  “None too soon!”

  “Then I will write a letter to a certain man, who, on presentation of the letter, will hand you the title-deed at once without payment.”

  “A likely tale!”

  “Was it a likely tale that Chamu would repay his son’s debt?”