by Talbot Mundy
“You are under arrest.” Gup answered. Not wanting a scene, then, in that place, he added: “No immediate harm will happen to you.”
“I am ill,” she exclaimed.
“You may be carried if you wish.”
“By whose orders?”
“Mine.”
“Leave me,” she commanded, “while I get dressed.” But he did not doubt she had a pistol somewhere in the room and he did not propose to be shot in the back. He strode to the bed and seized the bedding.
“Are you coming?” he asked. “Or shall!”
She accepted that hint, nodding to Marwarid who began tossing toilet things into a bag.
“Haven’t you the decency to tell me where I am going or how long I’m to be gone?” Harriet Dover demanded. “How do I know what things I need?”
“It doesn’t much matter,” said Gup. “You will need no ball-dress.”
“No use telling a cad he is one. I am ready.” She pulled on a cloak with a hood like a monk’s and tossed another to Marwarid. Jonesey took the bag. Gup signed to the women to walk in front of him.
“You will both be gagged if you make any outcry.”
Two guards marched in front. Two more followed with the Russian between them. Then the women — Gup and Jonesey — two more guards. Silence, and only the tramp of footsteps echoing down long tunnels — almost endless tunnels, that rose and descended and twisted and turned, until electric light ceased, but the guards had electric torches. At last they reached a cavern hung with stalactites, in which the rest of Gup’s guard and the stallion and mules were waiting. Gup chose two mules that were lightly loaded and ordered the women lifted on to them.
“Lead on,” he commanded.
And now Jonesey led, along echoing winding passages from cavern to cavern, until at last they came to a ramp that had been a waterfall, where four men had to hold the stallion, leaning against him, and the mules slid down with all four feet together. There were guards at the top of that ramp, who challenged, but accepted Jonesey’s password, and then vanished into a cave where a fire was burning. And at the bottom of the ramp they found themselves under the stars in a narrow gulley between cliffs so high that the stars seemed to be set in purple glass that rested on their ragged summit.
One vow — one Vow Inviolable stands,
And none can break it. Neither life nor death
Nor devils; no thing made with hands,
Imagin’d or imbued with living breath,
Nor all eternity can alter it. Not sun nor stars,
Nor mob’s opinion, nor law, nor learned lies;
No sin, lack, punishment, nor prison bars
Can change God’s word: Who tries, shall rise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“He’ll live for ever. He’s too mean for the devil to let him die.”
GUP trusted Jonesey to show him a place where he could camp without interference, yet without being too inaccessible or too far from the central stage on which the coming crisis must be set. He knew that Jonesey -was suffering ecstasy of curiosity. He enlightened him enough to keep that curiosity alert and alive, while Jonesey strode along beside him, clinging to a stirrup-leather.
“To empty a tank of difficulties, pull the plug,” he remarked. “I’ve pulled it. Now watch things happen.”
“Only Allah can guess what will happen,” said Jonesey. “But are you such a fatalist?”
“No.”
“You’d call yourself an opportunist?”
“No. I’m a man with a job. I’m the plug; I have pulled myself.”
“I have heard of pulling camels’ noses, and one’s own leg. Well — I’ll put you where you can look down like an eagle. But of what use are your prisoners?”
“None,” said Gup. “I am satisfied if they are no use to the enemy.”
“Which enemy?”
But Gup was neither to be drawn so easily nor disposed to let good curiosity go to waste. “I wish I knew,” he answered.
“May I talk to them?”
“Talk all you like. Say what you like. But tell me what you learn.”
Soon Jonesey vanished, making his excuse that the track was too narrow to cling to the stirrup. But that did not prevent him from walking beside a burdened mule. Gup could hear him, chattering to Harriet Dover as if there were nothing else to talk about beneath those quiet stars, than poets and the difference between Welsh hymns and purely pagan mysticism. He was asking no questions, doing all the talking, offering a frantic woman something else to think about than her own despair. As far as Gup could overhear he dropped no hint of what was really on his mind. He flattered her intellectuality; he made her feel there was no philosophy, no knowledge that she would not fathom. When he asked her a question at last, it was: “Which stirs your soul more: the cry of the muezzin from a minaret, or organ music?”
Gup could not hear her answer, a mule’s stumbling interrupted, but her voice seemed to have lost its strained antagonism.
Hour after hour the trail led upward, along sightless ledges, around shoulders of enormous spurs that upheld ponderous, looming cliffs against a moonlit sky, skirting shadowy ravines in which a night-wind moaned of loneliness, until, soon after midnight, they reached a level place, an acre in extent, where once there had been cultivation and a spring wept musically. Once there had been a sangar — one of those rock-built fortress-houses in which Hillmen are weaned on wind and barley, but the Indian troops had burned it in a border-war. It was a cairn now, blackened with smoke. Along the ragged front there was a sheer drop of a thousand feet, but a wall had been built partly for privacy, partly to break the wind and keep cattle safe, but principally for defense against neighbors. Silver and luminous black in the moonlight, less than rifle range away across a grim gorge, was a similar ledge where a sangar once had been. There was a track, such as goats might use, connecting the two ledges, but it was more than two miles long, ribboning in moonlight, like a zigzag pen-stroke, all along the flank of the gorge and back along the farther side.
They pitched the tents. Gup went to the wall, when he had blanketed the stallion, and leaning on its breast-high bulwark, stared at the valley before him, opening a mile away between the edges of a broken range. An earthquake probably had done that havoc. Mile on mile, between enormous hills, there lay a moonlit plain, level and strewn with boulders, two dry rivers wandering across its face. Heaped around its rim there lay the wreckage of shaken hillsides, taking on fantastic shapes in the slow flow of a fluffy mist. And it seemed that under almost every boulder was a crimson fire. Dark shapes, that in the distance seemed like insects, moved in the manner of men in bivouac. No other movement in the world resembles that. They were not big fires; fuel was being husbanded. Gup tried to count them and to estimate the numbers of the lashkar lurking there, but beyond that there were several thousand men he could not guess their number.
Jonesey stole up silently and leaned beside him, spreading his splay-beard on the wall until his head looked like a battle-trophy stuck there to grin at the gates of death.
“I swear there is no god but God,” he exclaimed, quoting the Moslem formula. “But what is God? And who are we? Look what a woman’s idea can do to men who never saw her! If there is one man there, there are ten thousand. Fuel, food, ammunition — each man has carried his own from some hungry valley, or from some eerie such as the sangar on this ledge once was. You can stir men with the hope of loot. You can summon them with empty promises. But you can’t hold them and keep them silent and obedient with less than an idea — an idea that is over their heads, but not too far over them, or they will call you a heretic. Have you a better idea than she had? If so, India is yours, my son. There are the men who will present it to you, seethed in its own red gravy!”
“What have you learned?” Gup asked him.
“Not much yet, except that she thinks you smarter than you are. She accuses you of having intercepted letters she expected from Peshawar.”
“Wish I had,” Gup answered.
“And she wants to talk to you,” said Jonesey. “May I come and listen?”
Gup pondered it, drumming his fingers on the dew-damp stone. “Is she alone in her tent?” he asked at last. “All right. Crawl up behind the tent.” He had a notion that the more that Jonesey knew, the more likely he would be able to trap him.
Noisily he summoned guards and posted them just out of earshot of low voices, taking care that Harriet Dover heard him order them to keep every one else at a distance. He whispered to them to let Jonesey do exactly what he pleased. Then he strode up to her tent, where she lay on a cot by the light of a candle-lantern.
“Care to talk to me?” he asked her.
“I may as well,” she said. “You are the last card left. It’s you or suicide.”
“People who really mean suicide don’t talk about it,” Gup assured her.
“True. But you’re the only alternative. That’s why I consent to talk to you.”
He sat on a mule-pack in the tent-door, where he could watch the camp and see her at the same time. His back was against the tent-pole. Moonlight spread the shadow of the tent in a pool of velvet-black behind him and he supposed that Jonesey lurked there — not that he really cared or thought that Jonesey was important at the moment.
“You are a much smarter man than I thought you were,” said Harriet Dover. But Gup had not brought her for that sort of conversation.
“Shall I have that Russian brought up here,” he asked, “or would you prefer to talk frankly without his assistance?”
“Are you bluffing?” she asked.
“Try me.”
“What do you want to know?”
“About your sending poison to Kabul — and why you did it.”
She paused so long that Gup began to suspect his bluff had failed. He heard a movement in the darkness at his back and wondered whether she, too, heard it.
“Oh, well, what difference does it make?” she said at last. “I sent a woman to Kabul with some poison for the Amir’s wife.”
“Why?”
“What an idiotic question! So that he might make Lottie his queen. Why else?”
“But why?”
“You know her now. You have talked with her. She is as hopeless as you are! Kind — too kind — sentimental. Is there anything worse? She can dream, but she isn’t ruthless, and she dreads the mud and blood that make dreams come true. She would make a nice good-looking queen, but as a kingdom-builder she is a disastrous failure. Let the Amir have her!”
There was another long pause, broken by the noisy prayers of a Hillman of Gup’s body-guard, who had seen the bivouac fires in the Valley of Doab and remembered what the Koran has to say about the baleful flames of hell.
“It appears to me,” Gup said at last, “that in spite of your superior brains and ruthlessness, and her excess of sentiment, you are not so well off as she is. What do you suppose is going to happen to you?” Harriet Dover laughed mirthlessly. “I know you’re not going to kill me, if that’s what you mean! You’re another of life’s bitter disappointments. When you first came, what with Rahman’s account of you, and your eyes and your great freckled fists and your shoulders, I almost hoped! It took me five whole minutes to undeceive myself. I was right when I called you a blond beast. You are a mere Nordic animal, full of hypocrisy that you think is your soul! Oh, you despiser of opportunity! Can’t I tempt you even yet to sin like a hero? Take Lottie if you want to! Seize her — seize her goods and cut loose! I could make you conqueror of half a world. Or take me, if you like. I could never love you, but I could make you love me — and I could turn you into the man you will never be otherwise! But no, you won’t — you can’t. You have morals. I would rather have measles! Jonesey would be likelier than you — at least he has no morals. But he isn’t a man; if he had been, he would have knifed you when you stole his maps.”
Again Gup heard quiet movement in the deep black shadow behind him. He hoped Jonesey had heard that comment.
“What would you call failure?” Gup asked tartly.
Harriet Dover sneered: “Oh, I broke down. I know it. But it was too much work and worry, not stupidity such as yours and Lottie’s that made me crack at last. But I’ll get over it — I’m over it now. Are you the cad I’ve called you — or don’t you kick a person when she’s down?”
“What do you suggest?” Gup asked her.
It was her turn to be silent. She lay on her chest with her head toward him and the candle shining near her face. His face was as clear as a cameo in moonlight. He had laid aside his turban; she could study the shape of his head as well as his profile.
“You have imagination,” she said at last. “You are a smasher, too, when you once get started. But you get drunk on romance like an imbecile! You are drunk on it now! Try to get sober and listen to me.”
“I listen.” He was listening again to noises in the shadow at his back, wishing that Jonesey would keep still.
“I am not romantic and not a natural born fool. Ten minutes after you came I knew we were done for! I saw ruin staring at us, with your great fists and feet making it worse every minute. Do you think I was such an idiot as to count only on the Amir, or to trust the Amir? I have taken every possible means of playing safe, and I will save you, even now, if you will listen to me. The Amir is on the move! I know it! That isn’t guesswork; I know it! I have written a letter to Glint in Peshawar. I have offered to do what he wants in return for an amnesty. I can include you in that, if you can only intercept Glint’s answer before it reaches Lottie’s guards.”
Gup looked relaxed, but every sinew in his body was ready to leap into instant action. Those sounds in the darkness behind him had become too noticeable not to make him nervous. It seemed impossible that Harriet Dover did not hear them too, although they were not loud. Perhaps she was trying to hold his attention while something happened. She began speaking louder: “Resignation is no refuge for my spirit! I can not be defeated as long as I breathe!”
There came a sudden sound of struggling in the darkness at Gup’s back — then a gasp — then a voice: “I knew ut! Look at her knife — a yard long! Might have stuck me with ut! Damn all Afghan womun! Lie still, or I’ll brain you with the hilt of ut!”
Gup did not move, except to rest his elbow on his knee. If Tom O’Hara was there, there was nothing to worry about. “Cheerio, Tom!” he said quietly. “Want any help?”
There came the sound of a terrific kick. Bibi Marwarid crawled on hands and knees into the tent in front of Tom O’Hara, who had stuffed her shawl so far into her throat that she was strangling; she got rid of it at last and lay gasping on the tent floor. Tom O’Hara squatted in front of Gup, his nose broadening and descending as he smiled. He was unshaven; reddish hair and wrinkles stirred in whirls around his owl’s eyes.
“Where is Jonesey?” Gup asked.
“Slumberland. I hit um. Bad egg — lucky I didn’t kill um. Should have. He knew her game. Fixed it up between um — stick you in the back and steal the works!”
“Where were you, Tom?”
“On my way from that other ledge to this one — half-way around the gorge when you arrived on the scene. Sick o’ that place — no grub. Got a bite to eat?”
Gup summoned the guard, who commanded the cook, who abused the pot-and-kettle person, who apostrophized a wood-and-water-Joey. Presently a fire was lighted and the smell of coffee stole on the mountain air.
“She said ut,” said Tom O’Hara, staring at Harriet Dover, whose face in the lantern-light looked wanly poetic. Her hair had come down; its dark coils shaded away into shadow; she was oval face and thin hands, nothing else — a phantom. “It’s true she wrote ut. I saw ut — I’ve a copy of ut. She wrote ut to Glint and he answered ut. Here’s his answer — see the blood on ut? My man Ismail stuck a knife into the runner. I’ve eleven men out scouting. News of the Amir, too — he’s on the move behind a screen o’ cavalry — they’re half-way to the Khyber.”
“Indian army napping?” Gu
p asked.
“Not much. Plenty o’ news comes down the Khyber. A man told me this afternoon — he was hurrying hot-foot to join the Amir, but I think he’s one of our men taking a long chance, though he didn’t admit ut — told me our crowd acted rough at Amritsar — shot a thousand of ’em with machine-guns. He said it was a general was drunk. But I see ut. I see through ut. Shoot a thousand and save a hundred thousand — maybe a million. Hell to pay — and think of the foreign newspapers! — but they’ve got the Punjaub meek and afraid to lift a finger. Same with the rest of India — they think they’ll get shot if they ask a question! The country’s quiet. They can move the army. Dirty work, but I see through ut. Had to do ut. Glad it wasn’t me that gave the order, that’s all. I’d ha’ done ut, though. I said they’d have to do ut — said ut a year ago. I wrote ut — doubt if anybody read ut, but I turned ut in — the report’s in Delhi.”
“Tell me about Glint.”
“He’s nasty. He’ll live for ever, that man will; he’s too mean for the devil to let him die. She wrote him offering to turn loose poison-gas and empty the Ranee’s roost — wrote she has a Russian who will do ut if she says so. Stipulates a pardon for herself and any other woman she cares to name, also a hundred thousand rupees and a clean bill for Jonesey. Wants that all in writing, and reserves the right to settle in Kabul if she sees fit.”
“Nothing about the Ranee?”
“Not a word. Forgot her, maybe! Glint writes back — see? — here’s his letter. Tells her to do ut and trust him — trust him, mind you! Says he’ll see she gets paid by results. Reminds her there’s a reward for you dead or alive.”
“Sure you knocked Jonesey out?”
“Stunned him good. What are you going to do with this young woman?”
“Two of them,” said Jonesey. He appeared within the tent; he had crawled in through the far end.
“He has an automatic,” Gup said quietly.
“So’ve I. So’ve you,” said Tom O’Hara. “One of us’ll get him. Had he two automatics? I’ve got the one was in his cummerbund.”