Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Can you bring him here alive?” I asked.

  He hesitated, looking straight into my eyes.

  “Let that be the test of thy good faith,” I said. “Wherever we go, follow, and bring that youth alive to us.”

  “Good. I will do it. Ye will not go far among these hills,” he answered with a note of irony.

  Then Grim came, and I gave him King’s message.

  “Shall I let this fellow go?” I asked, explaining why.

  Grim nodded, and I cut the thong, then gave Akbar the knife. He held it out for Grim and me to touch the hilt, hesitated in front of Joan Angela, and after a moment held it out for her to touch too — a prodigious concession, for it is not thought manly to show a woman too much courtesy in that land. Then he was gone, running like the wind up the track away from us.

  The rifle-firing was as furious as ever. Now and again there would come half a dozen fairly steady volleys from the far side of the ravine, as if King was trying to instil some system into the Waziris. Then there would be a riot of independent shots, followed by silence, and volleys again at intervals. Kangra Khan’s men were wasting ammunition as if it were the easiest stuff to come by in the world, instead of having to be stolen from the British or bought for its weight in coined silver. “We’re beaten,” said Grim, “and I don’t know what to do.” It was the first time in all my knowledge of him that he had ever admitted that. “King can’t get to us, nor we to him. The tribes will have heard this shindy, and when morning comes they’ll surround us all. Then goodbye!”

  But Joan Angela, who should have been the most discouraged, laughed.

  “Why will the tribesmen wait until the morning?” she asked, with a woman’s flair for questions.

  “They dread the dark. Unless they’re caught out, they stay in and stir late,” Grim answered.

  “Then we’ve hours ahead of us. Anything might happen. Let’s try our luck. Mine’s always good.”

  Grim was racking his brains, and it was no use my proposing anything. I knew the language well enough, but did not know the hills; nor did he know them nearly as well as King, who was out of reach. Whatever we might elect to do, there would be no means of getting word of it across that ravine in time to give King a chance to follow up.

  “If we wait until dawn we can signal,” Grim said, scratching his chin. “King and I both know the Morse code.”

  “How many men are hurt?” I asked him.

  “Several...eight or nine. I know of four dead. We can’t leave the wounded here.”

  “I’ll bet you King does something clever!” said Joan Angela. “He has the most men. He’ll realize it’s up to him.”

  “If he don’t we’re all done for,” Grim answered gloomily.

  But it did not sound as if King were being clever. His Waziris, yelling imprecations, started suddenly to squander ammunition more furiously than ever. The edge of the ravine along the far side became a line of spurting flame. He seemed to have persuaded his men to space themselves along a wider front, and perhaps a scout or a false alarm had put them in fear of a rush by Kangra Khan’s contingent. Shot answered shot across the impenetrable darkness, and I wondered how long the cartridges would last, when suddenly Narayan Singh leapt up and shouted: “Ahah! See them! Ahah! King sahib, thou art a king, a great one! Ho! A head is worth a hundred thousand rifles! Jimgrim sahib! Rammy sahib! Come and see!”

  CHAPTER 4. “What the hell do you know about women?”

  THE moon had shifted to the westward far enough to uncover Kangra Khan’s position, and because of the shape of the Gibraltar rock our corner now was more obscure. We were still exposed in a hazy light, but the table was turning rapidly. All the advantage of light was coming our way...and King’s. Outline by outline, Kangra Khan’s predicament disclosed itself; and suddenly the moonbeams touched with silver a long ledge, higher than the Pathans’ position, and we all knew what Narayan Singh was exulting about.

  I could see King...knew it must be he. No man on earth stands exactly as he does when he is himself, not playing parts. His unself-consciousness seems absolute then, so utterly absorbed in what he sees and hears that neither danger nor convenience exist for him. He stood like a statue beyond the ravine, on a crag that overhung that moonlit ledge, directing his Waziris, half of whom had crawled to the new position and were pouring a galling fire down into the sangar Kangra Khan was holding. [ A fortress of stones]

  There was still the ravine between them, but at that point it curved in Kangra Khan’s direction and grew considerably narrower, so that the utmost range was not more than two hundred yards. Kangra Khan’s men were forced to crouch close to their stone wall, which put them almost out of action, although there was possibly room for twenty of them in a square stone tower at one corner, from which they were answering the Waziris fire. The others, under the wall, had to content themselves with yelling, and by the noise they made I judged there were several hundred of them; but numbers don’t mean much (except to increase the problem) when the tide of fortune turns.

  The moonlight track that led from us to the sangar was still covered by about a third of King’s men, who had practically ceased fire, sending only an occasional warning shot to serve notice that the way was barred, and notifying us that it was a “one way street.” A one-eyed charwoman could have recognized that opportunity.

  Grim pulled out his Prophet’s tooth and acted like a regimental chaplain showing Irish troops a crucifix. We had about twenty men still fit for action, and they began their chant “Allaho Akbar... Allaho Akbar,” gaining and gaining in speed and noise until it sounded like the tumult of a hundred, and the echo went grinding and clamoring away into the hills, cannoning back and forth from crag to crag. We may have sounded like a thousand to the Pathans up there in the sangar, already desperate under the slanting hail of Waziri bullets.

  I shouted to Joan Angela to stay where she was, and rushed forward to get in the front rank with Grim and Narayan Singh. (There was no room for more than three or four abreast at any point along that track.) In a second I was passed by half a dozen of our Waziris, so I practically led the rearguard, stumbling over lumps of shale that had been shot down from the cliff wall on our right hand.

  I believe we might have made the sangar wall unnoticed by Kangra Khan’s men, in spite of the yelling and the noise of the loose shale underfoot; for they, too, were yelling, and the echoes were so confusing that our particular din might have been coming from anywhere. But King’s Waziris saw us, and opened a supporting fire too soon, so that we rushed with a screaming stream of bullets overhead, and the pat-pat-patter of their hail on the sangar wall preceded us.

  One huge Pathan leapt up on the wall waving a tulwar and crumpled up backwards under a hail of bullets. Another took his place, and was run through the belly by Narayan Singh’s long sabre. Half a dozen more leapt over the wall, engaging Grim, Narayan Singh and several of our men long before I could come on the scene, for it was a straggling rush we made, not timed to meet the exigencies of the slowest. Then we of the rearguard came up breathless, and a man beside me lent me the use of his knee to leap the wall.

  I was first over, yelling, I don’t doubt, like two or three men. Only Grim was silent. Narayan Singh roared for a dozen. He and Grim were over close behind me. I stumbled over a dead Pathan and seized his tulwar. In a second we were backed against the stone wall in the shadow fighting for dear life, with fifty of Kangra Khan’s contingent at our throats, and our own men scrambling over one by one to drop down and hack and thrust before their feet touched ground.

  That was a fight! One of our men was drilled clean through the head by a Waziri bullet from over the ravine as he crossed the wall, for King’s men did not cease fire soon enough. But I think nineteen got over unscathed, and the odds against them, and the utter hopelessness of quarter, made them fight like devils on the slag. To our left front King never ceased his hail of fire against the tower and the wall on that side, so we would have been mowed down if we had left our co
ver; and many of Kangra Khan’s Pathans who tried to get at us by taking a short cut across the midst of the enclosure fell before they came half-way.

  It was knife-work — butt and blade and pistol. The Pathan falls back on his natural weapon and tactics in a tight place, and none of us had time to load, or even to aim, for they came at us in the shadow of the wall in a series of spurts and rushes, and when a man was down that was not by any means the end of him. A Pathan with hardly life left in him would crawl in close and try to thrust his knife home before Allah beckoned him.

  We lost nine of our nineteen, all dead, for there was no chance for a wounded man except to fight on...no quarter...no appeal for it. I broke the tulwar on a rifle-barrel thrust up by a Pathan to guard his head, and the broken half of the blade went half-way through his skull between the eyes. Then I emptied the pistol, and after that I ducked to avoid a blow, and grabbed a dead man’s rifle, using butt and thrust like an old-time quarterstaff.

  Once, and then again, I was saved by a pistol-shot that flashed up from under my arm when three Pathans attacked at once. I had the outside berth, on the edge of the line of moonlight, where the hail of King’s Waziri bullets swept within a yard of me, and there were men who went down under my clubbed butt who were nearly shot to pieces as they lay; so I was easier for the Pathans to see than any other of our party, and well for me that singlestick and gloves have always been my favorite pastime! Fifty times in half as many minutes I was dead but for the training of hand and eye those sports had given me.

  And more than a dozen times, from under my legs or arms, or over my shoulder, something — someone — that I had no time to turn and see, created a diversion. It was swift, wild, savage work, brute instinct up, with Karma signifying who were to be slain and who the survivors. Luck, some fellows call it. Law, say I. Neither my time, nor Grim’s, nor Narayan Singh’s had come. No flinching yet on either side. Nothing but a shambles in the dark. And King’s move next.

  The firing over our heads ceased, and a yell as from the emptying graves on judgment Day came up from the ravine, announcing that King’s Waziris were making a second attempt to cross. And this time they came like the wind, for half of King’s men kept up such a withering hail of fire from the new position on the ledge that none could man the walls to make the ravine impassable...and besides, there were we who had to be dealt with before any man dared turn his back on us. Once, from the stone tower, Kangra Khan in desperation turned his fire in our direction; but his riflemen, already wild and wavering, could not see us in the shadow. They mowed down half a dozen of their own side, and then had to turn again to rake the flanks of the ravine.

  Then the show was over, with the sudden swiftness of a hailstorm. How the word spread among the ranks of the defenders I don’t know. There was a last savage rush in our direction...a last melee breast to breast, with long knives thrusting upward from behind between the legs of those in front and the curses hot in your face as a man’s life winged to its account — then almost silence! They melted. They flitted away like ghosts. They vanished over the rear wall of the sangar like a string of shadows cast by magic-lantern rays, leaving nothing but a lot of dead men and some broken, empty cartridge-boxes. One wounded man sat up in the midst of the open space, laughed like a ghoul, fired at me point-blank, missed by an inch, and fell backward stone dead. That was the last shot fired that night.

  I turned to see who stood behind me, and looked straight into Joan Angela’s grey eyes! She held an empty pistol in one hand, and in the other a long tulwar that had blood on the end of the blade.

  “You fight like a man, Jeff!” she said with a little nervous laugh. “I’m sorry I’m only a woman, but I was useful once or twice.”

  Her overcoat was torn, and stained with blood where she had knelt to guard my legs. Her lips were parted, and her eyes wild with excitement. She did not seem afraid, but the hand that held the tulwar was shaking.

  “Are you hurt at all?” I asked her.

  “No,” she answered. “How’s your head?”

  I had forgotten my head. It was bleeding. The cut had opened, and the bandage was a sticky mess. I think it was that, and the exertion, that saved me from a protracted spell of illness, for my brain was clear again and there was no more numbness. Joan Angela took a dead man’s turban and began to look for a clean piece to make a new bandage. I was pulling off the old one, turning at the same time to see where Grim and Narayan Singh might be, when the next thing happened.

  Our men were all leaning over the wall to watch King’s Waziris come climbing out of the ravine, yelling jokes at them and boasting. I had dropped my clubbed rifle to attend to the bandage. Suddenly two of Kangra Khan’s Pathans rushed out from a shadow, and one of them aimed a blow at me with a tulwar that made my skin tingle as I ducked. The other seized Joan Angela around the waist.

  I yelled for help, and closed with my man, crushing the breath out of him before he could recover and swing the tulwar a second time. I got his wrist and twisted it until he let the weapon fall, and that took only seconds, but it gave the other fellow time enough. He carried Joan Angela away into the shadow, seizing her from behind with great hairy arms like an orang-outang’s. She could not scream, but she kicked and nearly tripped him. He had his hands full.

  I shouted, and some of our men and Narayan Singh came running. I hurled my prisoner into the midst of them backwards and don’t know what happened to him. When I saw him again he was dead. I heard Joan Angela gasp in the darkness somewhere. There was a struggle, for the man gasped too, and swore. We rushed for the sound, and cornered the two of them between two inside buttresses, and the Pathan realised the game was up, for he spoke. You could not see anything...not even his eyes.

  “By the blood of my father, I will choke her if you move another step!” he snarled. So he had no weapon. That was something. (Pathans don’t strangle people if they have a knife available.) Joan Angela did not speak; he had his hand over her mouth; but I could hear her heels cracking against his shins. Then she gurgled, and I knew he was choking her. Narayan Singh and I rushed in simultaneously. The Pathan took to his heels, and we missed him in the dark, cannoning into each other. We had to stop and listen. Then we heard him dragging her body along the stones, and he had reached the corner of the wall before we overhauled him. Then he had to step into the moonlight, and we saw he had her by the coat-collar. She seemed either dead or unconscious, and he had the nerve to try to vault the wall and hoist her over before we reached him. Narayan Singh jumped for him and I grabbed the girl; but he kicked Narayan Singh in the jaw and slipped down out of sight over the wall, taking the overcoat with him, minus one sleeve.

  The girl’s tongue was out between her teeth, and it took several minutes’ hard rubbing before the muscles of her throat and neck began to function properly and she opened her eyes. By that time there was no more hope of catching the Pathan, nor for that matter much object to be gained by it. King’s Waziris were swarming over the wall, and I helped Joan Angela along toward the tower, meaning to carry her up the outside steps to the upper part of it, out of harm’s way; for those Waziris were allies rather by accident than design, and there was no guessing yet what their attitude might be toward a valuable prisoner. We were at their mercy absolutely, and they might see fit to compensate themselves for their heavy losses in the night’s engagement. They were savages to a man, with a savage sense of justice...honor of a kind, and elemental decency no doubt; but elements are unconventional. If they in their predicament should assert their own right now to hold Joan Angela to ransom, no other argument than force was likely to have much weight.

  So I carried her up the irregular steps that formed an outside support to the tower on two sides, and into the draughty square chamber, pierced for rifle-fire. There was no roof — only burned beams where a roof had once been, and most of the stones that had formed the roof were still littered about the floor, which in one place had broken under the weight. In the midst was a square hole above the deep wel
l that gave the tower its excuse for being and made it tenable against attack. There was no windlass or rope and bucket, but a ladder made of sticks lashed clumsily with hide, up and down which whoever wanted water had to climb. I tested the ladder with my own weight, and told Joan Angela to get down into the dark hole and hide there if I should give the alarm.

  Then I climbed to the crazy wooden platform at the stairhead outside and waited, hoping nobody had missed me and that none had seen me carrying the girl across the moonlit enclosure. It was a wild hope, I admit, but a man throws reason overboard when it argues only pessimism in a tight place; and besides, our small party of Waziris were celebrating victory with their friends who swarmed over the wall, chanting a battle-song, greeting friends, exchanging boasts, and some searching the bodies of the dead for loot. I could see Grim and Narayan Singh trying to persuade some of them to mount guard on the defenses. King had not appeared over the wall yet, and it was impossible to guess what he was doing in the dark, but I could hear voices somewhere midway down our flank of the ravine.

  My perch on the platform gave me a view of all of the enclosure that was not in shadow, and of acres of darkness and moonlight to the northward beyond the wall. Crags like glistening teeth arose in irregular rows and curves out of silvery mist that seemed to float on a coal-black sea. If Kangra Khan were half a leader, and his men not more than half beaten, our position was likely to become as untenable as his had been — and that before we should have much time to make our dispositions. Daylight would see us helpless. The well in all likelihood was all that had persuaded natural warriors to fortify such an unpromising place. It was true it overlooked the track up which we had come, but in turn it was overlooked from three directions, and unless the surrounding heights were held in force it would be worse than useless as a point of vantage. But there were circumstances connected with the well that I did not know yet, and there is always more than meets the eye when a savage’s reason for taking laborious pains is not immediately obvious.