Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “I make no bargain,” Grim answered. “I told you that. If you are a knave and a liar — a man untrue to his salt — forgetful of his friends — a mere desert jackal, changing sides at every opportunity, I will have nothing to do with you. If that is what you are, I will give you your camel and turn you loose, to die with the other jackals when your time comes.”

  “That is a hard saying,” said Ibrahim ben Ah.

  “Nevertheless, a true one!” answered Grim. “But if you are a man true to his salt — a friend of Feisul — unwilling to betray the Lion of Petra without first giving him fair warning face to face, then I will make you an offer.”

  “Wallahi! You look like the Lion in countenance, but you talk like an honest fellow, Jimgrim! If the Lion had thy spirit, as he has thy face, I would never have considered leaving him.”

  “You can leave him now, if you wish,” Grim answered. “None will prevent you. There kneels your camel. Take it, if you will.”

  “But Ali Higg is not for Feisul,” Ibrahim ben Ah objected.

  “Any man is for Feisul who prevents the Avenger from growing too great and fouling Feisul’s rightful nest,” Grim answered. “So if you continue to serve Ali Higg, you will be working in behalf of Feisul until Feisul comes.”

  “But how can I serve Ali Higg without the army you have taken from me by a trick?”

  “Just at present much better than with it.”

  “How?”

  Grim turned toward Ali Baba, with one of those business smiles of his that make you wonder why he isn’t a millionaire, or at least the representative of one.

  “Bring bread and salt,” he ordered.

  That took a minute or two, for one of Ali Baba’s sons had to go and unfasten a camel-load and take the remains of breakfast from the top. Ibrahim ben Ah had plenty of time to weigh in his mind what was going to happen next.

  “Your camel waits,” said Grim. “You may go free. None will fire at you. There is no dishonor in refusing to eat salt.”

  But Ibrahim ben Ah made no move until Mahommed gave bread and salt to Ali Baba, who handed it in turn to Grim. Thus it had full significance — son’s hand into father’s; captain of the gang’s hand into Grim’s. It was official salt, produced under the eyes of witnesses. Grim broke a piece of bread and dipped it in the salt in front of Ibrahim ben Ah, who followed suit. Each man ate his morsel in silence. Then:

  “I have eaten thy salt, O Jimgrim,” said Ibrahim ben Ah. “I bear witness!” announced Ali Baba. “I, with sixteen sons and grandsons, bear witness that Ibrahim ben Ah, commander of the host of Ali Higg, the Lion of Petra, has eaten the salt of Jimgrim!”

  “We bear witness!” they chorused after him.

  “And now?” asked Ibrahim ben Ah, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

  “I will show you how to turn a trick for Feisul,” answered Grim. “You are a man, I take it, who loves truth?”

  “None better! But the stuff is rare!”

  “And I dare say it amuses you to tell the truth and see the fool who listens twist it to his own undoing?”

  “That is the essence of all humor, Jimgrim! Aye, Wallahi! I am good at that!”

  “And are you afraid to go to the Avenger?”

  “Tfu! Why should I be? Has not the Avenger sent me messages to win me over to his side?”

  “Then, if it can be shown afterwards that you served Ali Higg’s cause well by doing so; so that after the event Ali Higg must needs trust you more than ever, as a man of exceeding courage and wisdom in extremity, will you go to the Avenger and tell him truth with which he may confound himself?”

  “By God, Jimgrim, you ask a lot, don’t you?”

  “Not a bit of it! I ask nothing. I offer you an opportunity. But if you are afraid —

  “In the name of the Prophet, on whom be peace, don’t talk to me of fear, thou foreigner! If you, who are a stranger from a land of cursed infidels, can risk your bold neck for Feisul, am I less than you?”

  “Let us admit you are the greater,” answered Grim.

  “Taib. It is nothing but the truth; for my men are a hundred and forty — yours but a score.”

  That was too much for Narayan Singh’s self-control; he broke out into a smile such as you can see on the faces of the gargoyles of Notre Dame, or some of the temple images of India. And as for Ali Baba, there was no containing his disgust.

  “Jimgrim may admit what he pleases,” he declared scornfully. “As for me, I am an insect under Allah’s heel. But behold my sons and grandsons! There are not their like in all the continents! Are we only a score all told? Then we are better than a hundred score of dogs like thine!”

  “Prodigies, no doubt!” said Ibrahim ben Ah.

  “Aye, by Allah’s favour prodigies! Look at this one — my eldest born.” He took Mujrim by the arm and pulled him forward. “Have you such a giant in all your army of cattle-lifters? Look at him! Judge of his strength! And here,” he said, grabbing hold of me, “is one who had the better of him in a bout! These two alone could beat thy army of camp-scavengers!”

  It was a relief to me to know that the old man had taken the defeat of Mujrim in that spirit; I had rather dreaded the outcome. But it isn’t exactly comfortable to be led forth by the arm like a professional pugilist and have your horn blown by someone who can boast as he pleases and then leave you to make good the vaunts. As I’ve said, I enjoy a stand-up fight on equal terms, but there are limits.

  However, Grim was fortunately in no mood for side-issues of that sort.

  “We must get the better of a bigger force than Ali Higg’s, and boasting beforehand isn’t going to help much. Let us start now, and sing songs about it afterwards.”

  He suited action to the word by walking to his camel; but he did not mount until Ibrahim ben Ah had mounted — an act of courtesy that, I think, went a long way to confirm the old pirate’s newly pledged friendship. What was more, he gave Ibrahim the place of honors by his side, and we had ridden up out of the ravine and traveled several miles in a more or less southerly direction before I had any chance to talk with him privately. At last, though, Ibrahim ben Ah fell back with the perfectly obvious intent of satisfying curiosity by drawing into conversation whoever might feel disposed that way; and I seized the opportunity to range alongside Grim.

  “You’re the devil,” said I, and he laughed.

  “How so?”

  “I’ve had how many adventures with you? Quite a number. All the while I’ve supposed you were a sort of volunteer policeman, satisfied to keep the peace and let history shape itself.”

  “So I am.”

  “Not you! I’ve found you out. What beats me is why you never told me you’re gunning for Feisul all this time. I know Feisul,” I said, “and I like him. He assays pounds to the ton of pure gold. Why in thunder couldn’t you tell me that all this lonely, dangerous business is in Feisul’s behalf? I’d have been twice as keen.”

  The hot wind was excuse enough for not answering at once. There came a sudden blast of it that whirled the dust into our faces, obliging a man to tuck his chin down into the face-cloth and lean forward. But he was silent for several minutes after the squall had passed. For he is a strange fellow; I think it strains him somewhere inside to be obliged to make confession of his deepest thoughts.

  He is the exact opposite, in fact, of a propagandist. I think he feels that the airing of desire and parading of convictions is indecent. He smiles at other men’s and makes a secret of his own. To some extent, too, he treasures ultimate purpose as if its very secrecy were half its strength, permitting only momentary glimpses of it under the stress of circumstance.

  “You wouldn’t have been half as keen,” he said at last. “Tell me why you have come as far as this with me.”

  I chewed the cud on that before I answered. Few men can explain their real motives at a moment’s notice.

  “Because I consider you a white man who can show me sport,” I answered after a minute.

  “Have you change
d your mind?” he answered.

  “No.”

  “But if I had told you in the first place that I’m bent on putting Humpty- Dumpty back on a wall that he hasn’t been knocked from yet, you’d have put me down as a visionary and, even supposing you’d still come for the sport of the thing, you’d have hung back all the time, and argued; and sooner or later you’d have discovered that your own affairs are more important to you than my dreams.”

  “But I’ve told you I like Feisul,” I said.

  “All right. Has your discovery that I’m working for him changed your judgement in any way?”

  “Of course not. I’m glad to know that you think as highly of him as I do.”

  “Well then, what’s the trouble?”

  “I’m not troubled. I’m interested. You’re the first man I ever met who had a cause and wouldn’t talk about it. Most men get on soap-boxes, or into pulpits, or sit at a desk, and yell.”

  “Let ’em!” he answered. “Any man may waste his time who feels like it. I don’t like noise, and don’t believe it gets you anywhere. Each man’s opinions are his own affair; goats, sheep, rats, camels, fish have opinions, too, I dare say. I have mine, but I don’t inflict ’em on other folk. Who was it said we’re faced by circumstances, not by theories?”

  “Very well,” I answered, “here’s a circumstance. If you had told me to begin with that you are out for Feisul, I would have jumped at the opportunity to help.”

  “Seems to me you’ve helped quite a bit as things are,” he answered smiling. “But anyhow, I hate that kind of thing — despise it! No man has any right to cajole me into risking my life, or risking anything else for that matter, in his cause. I’ve no right to play such a dirty trick on you, or anyone. You wanted adventure. You asked for it. Have I proved a niggard host?”

  “Ha-ha!”

  “Besides, I’m out for Feisul with reservations. It’s not my job to foist him on to the Arabs. That’s up to them. I saw them root for him during the War, and after the Armistice. I’ve watched every underhanded, dirty, lowdown trick in the process of getting rid of Feisul from outside; and if I loathe anything on God’s green earth it’s control of other people by so-called interests. I’m more against the foreign politicians than for Feisul. If Feisul can come back, and the Arabs still want him, I’ll do my bit to make things easy for him and them, that’s all. I won’t preach for him. I won’t argue. I won’t betray the uniform I sometimes wear, or the Administration that pays my salary. But when I come across people here and there, who happen to think the same way I do, and want to see Feisul back, I’ll work with them like a beaver, and that’s all.”

  It seemed about enough for me. I made up my mind there and then to let private affairs in America go hang, and to see Grim through on his rather original, perhaps Quixotic, quite unselfish, and possibly unprofitable quest.

  CHAPTER IX. “Should I stoop to a pig-Pathan, with a prince waiting for me?”

  There are two outstanding peculiarities of that ancient land of Edom, wherein we were adventuring; for that matter, they apply to all Arabia, most of Palestine and Syria, and to the desert places in between that are any man’s land or nobody’s according to the seasons, and disease, and the ebb or flow of politics.

  One is that warfare is governed and restricted absolutely by the water- holes. An army can only move from one hole to another, as in a game of checkers. Consequently a man like Allenby, who was daring enough to import American iron pipe and pump his water-supply along behind the army, was able to upset all calculations. (The Turks swore first and last that it wasn’t fair, and the German General Staff agreed with them.) Failing an efficient force of modern engineers, whoever makes war in the desert moves by water-holes.

  The other outstanding feature is a mental peculiarity of the inhabitants. They are first-class fighting men in most ways, but utterly unreliable when reporting numbers. Not even the Bulgarian General Staff, when counting prisoners of war, was half as wild in its estimate as any Bedouin invariably is when speaking of his own force or the enemy’s.

  Tribes that can put seventy rifles in the field boast glibly of seven hundred. Opposed to a hundred men, they will describe them as a thousand, and after a victory will sing about ten thousand (which perhaps accounts for some of the swollen returns in Old Testament history).

  We knew the strength of Ali Higg’s force, now led by Ayisha, pretty accurately. A hundred and forty was about the right figure. But Saoud the Avenger probably believed them to be seven or eight hundred at least; and he may have supposed them more numerous that that.

  It followed that, although the Avenger’s force was reported to number eight hundred rifles and a thousand camels, that estimate might safely be cut in half by any conservative strategist. Probabilities are dangerous things to play with, but it was no worse than a fair guess that the Avenger had with him in the field twice or three times the number of men that we could dispose of, but no more.

  A little army like that, however, can swell in numbers after a victory in much the same way that a mountain torrent overflows its banks. So, if the Avenger should by any stroke of fortune or flash of generalship out-maneuver Grim, hundreds more from scattered settlements were likely to flock to his standard within a day or two; and to feed them he would have to carry on, seeing there is no such food-consuming, unproductive Frankenstein Monster as a victorious army that sits still.

  We soon were to have a chance to form our own estimate of the real strength of the rival forces. In front of us was a sugar-loaf hill, cut sheer on the northern side. Grim led straight towards it. In the distance on our right, cut off from us by two or three deep wadys and a waste of rock-strewn sand, was Ayisha’s column kicking up a cloud of dust like the smoke-trail of an ocean liner.

  We left our camels at the foot of the sugar-loaf hill, where there wasn’t a vestige of water, by the way, and Ibrahim ben Ah, Mujrim, Ali Baba, Narayan Singh, Grim and I struggled painfully to the top on foot. The rocks, and even the sand in places, were hot enough to burn you through the soles of thick shoes.

  From the top we had a good view of Abu Lissan in the distance — apparently a cluster of mud and stone roofs, with a minaret or two and a good-sized patch of green that betokened date trees.

  “Good plundering yonder!” was Ibrahim ben Ah’s sole comment as soon as he had recovered breath. Ali Baba and Mujrim echoed him. It didn’t look like good anything to me from that distance; a more discouraging landscape, or a meaner lot of squalid buildings, wouldn’t be very easy to imagine. But I suppose such experts in the art of acquiring other men’s belongings would know where to dig for treasure that the mean surroundings were deliberately planned to mask.

  We could see for many miles in every direction — even as far as the fiumara behind us, in which we had camped the previous night. The hill, with three wells in the crook of its elbow, where Ayisha had taken charge and we had made a “guest” of Ibrahim ben Ah, cast a long blue shadow to our right rear. Over on our left, extending in a ridge like a monster’s backbone for endless miles until it ran into the sky at the horizon, lay one of the mountain chains of Edom, with a much lower, broken range at its feet, running very nearly parallel, so that the two were like a double earthwork on titanic scale. In two or three places many miles apart between breaks in the lower range were patches of bright green, indicating water.

  From that mountain range, all the way across our front as far as Abu Lissan, was dry desert blown here and there into humps like a camel’s. At a guess, that part of the plain was fifteen miles across, measured in a straight line from Abu Lissan in any direction, so that the town, which itself was a smirch on the face of a hillside, stood as it were a hub in the centre of a half-wheel, because the chain of hills on our left had a pronounced curve.

  The nearest water-hole to Abu Lissan that we could see where we stood lay about five miles away from us on our left hand. No buildings were visible, but there were enough trees to suggest ample supplies of water, and it was obvious at a
glance that an army advancing on Petra would have its choice of two routes. The longer, north-westerly way on our right hand, as we stood facing Abu Lissan, would lead by the wells where Ibrahim ben Ah had bivouacked. That to the north-east, on our left hand, would follow the foot-hills, providing water at the end of fifteen miles, and a further, scant supply in the bed of the fiumarain which we spent the night.

  A commander might divide his force, for sake of the time that would save at the water-holes, sending half his men by either route, rendezvousing in the fiumara for a march on Petra. Alternatively, anyone attacking Abu Lissan might converge simultaneously from two water holes, and be secured against that bugbear of an army, a congested, dry line of retreat.

  The Avenger had seized the water-hole to our left, for we could see an advance-guard of his camel-men taking it easy there. Grim swore he could make out a machine-gun through the glasses, and Ibrahim ben Ah confirmed that with a discouraged nod. But as Narayan Singh said promptly:

  “A machine-gun in the hands of such folk works while it is new. Thereafter it impedes them, for they wait on it, and dance about it, and swear, and, pray; and then, because it continues jammed, they waste time trying to hide it from the enemy, who naturally make it as hot for them as possible. And presently, because their faith was in the machine-gun, they lose courage and run. I know, for I have seen.”

  Another force of the Avenger’s, of, I should say, two hundred men, was advancing rather leisurely behind a sand-ridge two by two, to join the advance-guard at the water-hole. We could see their heads and their spears and rifles over the top of the ridge. They might be going to spend the night at the water-hole (for they don’t as a rule make a long march on the first day out); or possibly they intended to rest there, and make a forced march by night on Petra, which in that case would bring them into the entrance gorge somewhere about dawn.

  We looked for a long time before we detected signs of the Avenger’s other wing, which, as a matter of fact, had started on its way toward the three wells by which Ibrahim ben Ah had bivouacked. For several minutes we could not even make out Ayisha’s column, which had taken cover far to our right in a wady. She had placed nine or ten men on a high mound near its rim to keep watch, and they lay low; but the sun gleaming on their rifle-barrels gave the clue to the column’s whereabouts.