by Harold Lamb
To refuse Subai Ghazi would be to anger him, and to allow him to look once upon the face of the girl would make him eager to possess her. Swiftly—there was need of swift thought—Sir Bruce fashioned in his mind a frail defense of words.
“Koudsarma,” he responded gravely—“Lord, thy power is great indeed. There is a command above thine, unutterably great. It is written that the face of a woman must be veiled. Are ye kin to her, to lift the veil?”
The Tatar struck his fist upon his mailed thigh. “What words are these words? By Allah, will thou say she is thine—thy woman?”
Sir Bruce, striving for time in which to think and to divert the attention of the Tatars, had invoked one of the oldest laws in Islam. He looked at the slender figure, so bravely erect, that had drawn closer to his side.
“Aye, so,” he said, and his voice rang true and certain. He knew, in that instant when death was so close, that he loved Marie of Rohan.
He stretched out his hand and placed it upon her shoulder, and when he did this the thing that he most dreaded happened. At his touch Marie turned quickly to meet his eyes, and her hands—that had clasped the edges of the hood about her throat—slipped down to his fingers and gripped them. The velvet hood fell back.
Subai Ghazi leaned forward with an exclamation of triumph.
“What is it?” she whispered, for she had understood no word of their talk.
The flicker of a smile passed over his set face. “Cover your eyes, my lady. I would not have you look upon weapon play.”
The deep voice of the Tatar chieftain broke in upon his words:
“Thou hast lied, dog of a Nazarene. Allah, thou hast lied! Of the Nazarenes in Tana I asked this—that they bring forth to me a gift. This day, at the hour when the shadows turn, a warrior with a red beard came to my tent from Tana, saying that the Prince of Tana would send forth to me a maiden, his sister, to this well.”
He looked about him calmly and nodded. “Surely here is the well and the tent with the banner, as the Nazarene prince promised. Besides, the maiden was to be protected by a man of valor until she came under my hand. What other art thou? And where is the letter?”
Sir Bruce glanced at the embers of the fire, where the red wax had long since disappeared. So Messer Andrea had sent Piculph out to the Tatars at midnight! And Messer Andrea had yielded Marie to him, knowing that the Tatars would never believe that a fair woman could make even the journey of a day without an armed guardian. Indeed, the Counter had bought his own safety cheaply—at the price of a girl and a few ribalds, some horses and a pavilion.
“I have not lied,” he cried—aware now that the issue was at hand. “Be ye witnesses that she is mine.” His left hand dropped from Marie’s shoulder and gathered up his reins.
Subai Ghazi made a gesture as if casting something from him. “Strike!” he commanded.
The officers nearest him freed their swords and pulled up their horses’ heads. But Sir Bruce did not let them rush in upon him. He drove in his spurs and the gray Arab leaped forward, toward Subai Ghazi.
Sir Bruce had no chance to escape or defend himself. The ring of warriors broke and closed in, as wolves leap at a stag. An arrow crashed against his helmet and sent it spinning underfoot. He heard the whistle of steel at his ear and flung up his left arm—and felt the edge of a saber bite into the mesh of his mail.
He rose in his stirrups and lashed down with his sword. The long blade caught the Tatar in front of him and cut through the man’s up-tossed shield and arm and shoulder, crushing the bones of his chest. Sir Bruce freed his sword with a wrench as a second rider shouldered aside the rearing pony of the dying man. He had not time to strike again, but ho leaned forward, dashing the iron pommel of his heavy sword into the scowling forehead of the Tatar.
No one was between him and Subai Ghazi.
The Tatar chieftain might have pulled back among his men; instead, he reined forward, his broad face alight with eagerness. His scimitar flashed down at the knight’s uncovered head. But the long blade parried his cut, and Subai Ghazi half wheeled his rearing horse, to take Sir Bruce upon the left hand.
And then he flung himself back, only warding with a desperate twist of his wrist the point of the long blade that leaped at his throat.
Before Subai Ghazi could recover his seat in the saddle—before anyone could come between them—Sir Bruce caught the Tatar’s right forearm in the mailed fingers of his left hand and thrust back. Subai Ghazi’s knees bent, and his shoulders were forced down to the rump of his horse. Under the red coat his massive body tensed and strained against the arm that held him helpless on his back. He slipped his feet from the stirrups and would have slid to the ground, but in that instant the point of Sir Bruce’s long sword darted down, through his beard, through the skin under his chin—and stopped, with half an inch of steel in his throat muscles.
Subai Ghazi’s big body lay passive. The Tatars who had been about to cut down the solitary swordsman checked their horses. Blunt fingers released taut bow cords slowly. A warrior on foot stepped forward and grasped the reins of the white horse, holding him quiet, lest he swerve or rear.
“Two lives for thine, Subai Ghazi!” Sir Bruce said deep in his throat. “Mine and the Khanim’s!”
“Ahai!” the Tatar grunted. Blood was trickling from his beard.
A flashing thought had stayed the knight’s hand. He held the life of Subai Ghazi in his fingers. If he freed the savage chieftain, there was a chance that Subai Ghazi might release the girl and himself—without him she would be lost. Somewhere he had heard that Subai Ghazi’s word would stand.
The green eyes glared up at him malevolently, and the muscles in the Tatar’s throat worked. Suddenly he gave his answer in his own way. He spat weakly toward the tense face above him, and growled a single word “Strike!”
A clamor of amazement, rage and sorrow burst from his followers. Then there was utter silence. Sir Bruce had lifted his sword and sheathed it in its scabbard.
“Subai Ghazi bahator,” he smiled. “A brave man, thou.”
The Tatar, who had once sworn that he would never yield to a foe sat up in the saddle, found his stirrups—took up his reins and lifted the scimitar that he still grasped. Curiously he gazed at his foe, indifferent to the blood dripping down his beard,
“Thou hast sheathed thy sword!” he exclaimed. “Thy head is bare—and,” he added grimly, “I did not pledge thee life!”
“Nay,” Sir Bruce assented gravely, “but now thou art witness that my word was true. This woman is mine. Would I stand between thee and—a gift?”
Sir Bruce smiled, because he had played his last stake and the game was out of his hands.
“Kai!” the Tatar growled. “The dog-born dog in Tana sent out to me another man’s wife. Veil thy wife and go!”
At the end of that night sitting on a height by the pavilion, where Marie slept, Sir Bruce kept watch over a camp deserted by all but the horses. He looked back into the darkness along the way they had come. Leagues distant, against the faint glimmer of the sea, a point of flame rose and sank. Smoke drifted against the stars.
Subai Ghazi had galloped far that night. And now at dawn, in Tana, the red cock crowed.
* * * *
Sir Bruce needed no guide to follow the edge of the sea, over the dry steppe. With Marie at his side, he rode through the barren land where only the eagles of the sky and the wild marmots watched them—until the girl saw a long dust line moving across their path, and in the dust the nodding heads of beasts. “The caravans!” she cried.
“Aye, the caravans.” The eyes of Sir Bruce kindled and he smiled. “And now ye’ll be after coming home—wi’ me.”
THE ROGUE’S GIRL (1932)
The sun was going down behind the roofs of Paris. A chill wind came up from the river, whispering over the bridge of Notre Dame. One after the other, far-off bells clanged and chimed for vespers, and Jeanne put away her fiddle. That is, she tied a cloth round it and started homew
ard—a slight ragged girl with slim legs thrust into muddy slippers.
The wind tossed the tangle of red hair upon her shoulders, as she bent to count the day’s earnings in her hand. Six copper coins she had, a clipped piece of silver, an old ring with a broken moonstone in it, and a link from a gold chain. A great lord had thrown her this link as he rode past, but Jeanne doubted it was gold.
At a money-changer’s stall she held it out, and a claw-like hand reached for it—felt of it and rang it down upon the counter. And thrust it back to her contemptuously.
“Brass!” The money-changer sneered. “Not the value of a sol.”
“But,” cried Jeanne, her gray eyes innocent, “a seigneur with six spears and a trumpeter to follow him gave it me.”
“Eschec! Will the like of him cast gold to a rogue’s girl? Now that ring you have is worth a chip—”
“Don’t burn your fingers.” Jeanne had been looking at the pale moonstone all afternoon and she liked it.
“Half a crown.”
“My faith,” she grimaced, “do you think to buy a crown jewel for silver? I’ll be wearing it myself.”
With a toss of her head she was off across the bridge, pausing only to bargain for cheese and bread. She nibbled at her supper as she edged around a veiled leper who sounded his clacker mournfully. It was late—almost dark between the leaning houses—and she circled wide where men-at-arms loitered over a watch fire. Jeanne was sixteen years old and she knew well where harm and where safety lay for a fair fiddling girl in the alleys of Paris. Humming to herself, she tossed a copper into the basket of a begging woman, mimicking as she did so the air of the seigneur who had thrown her brass for gold. Then she shrank against the wall, hiding her face in her hood.
* * * *
The horsemen splashed through the mud of the alley, heedless of the women. The leader, a bearded man in red Burgundian colors, carried two shields and Jeanne saw that one had been broken. Down toward the river galloped the riders, swinging away from the watch fire.
“My faith,” Jeanne muttered, “they go apace!”
She wondered, as she turned from the alley into another, why a led horse with empty saddle had been with the men, and why they chose a way to darkness and water instead of a lighted square. But she had seen much of the feuds and the fighting of the lords of Paris.
Abruptly she stopped, peering into the dimness before her. A man lay there, outstretched and motionless. A tall youth with yellow hair darkened by running blood. Jeanne knelt down and touched his chest, her fingers feeling the iron rings of mail. But he was breathing.
Quickly the girl glanced about her. No one else was in the alley and the walls were blank and silent. Jeanne bent over the white face of the wounded man, and it seemed to her he must be dying. She drew a long, helpless breath, and hurried to the end of the alley—through an archway to the black void of a stair.
“Giron!” she called, and whistled melodiously.
After a moment a figure broad as a bear appeared before her, and another followed, bearing a candle. They had shaggy heads and they smelled of the wine cellar from which they had come.
“There’s a poor dupe,” she cried, “turning up his toes yonder.”
The two rogues grunted and followed her to the wounded man, where they blew out the candle and searched the ground by him.
“Thunder of God,” whispered the broad fellow, “he’s been stripped by them that laid him down. Ay, pouch and rings, all gone.”
“And belt and cloak,” added the other. “Sword and knife gone—like a peeled turnip he is.”
But before the candle had been put out, Jeanne had caught a glimpse of a lean, proud head and gentle lips twisted by pain. “Nay, Giron,” she exclaimed, “carry him down to the cellar and look to his hurts.”
“Let him lie,” muttered the big man with an oath. “See you not, Jeanne, he is a high Mark? He’ll be cold in another hour, belike, and if he be found in our hands, they will e’en hie us off to the Big Jump.”
He meant that this was a seigneur, whose death in their cellar would mean hanging for all of them. Giron was one of the most skilled dice coggers and picklocks in the city, while his companion, Pied-á-Botte, was a veteran mock-monk and mumper. They felt aggrieved that the fallen man had not even a belt worth taking on him, and they had no mind to set their necks in a noose to help him in his dying.
“Nay, he will live,” cried Jeanne. “See ye not how strong he is, and a stranger, by his dress? And if he is a lord’s son, ye will not lack pay for this hour’s work. Be quick, before he bleeds his life away.”
She kept at the rogues until they bore the man down to their fire in the abandoned wine cellar, and laid him on the straw. But they had neither clean clothes to bind up his hurts, nor water. Jeanne tried to wash away the blood with wine, in vain.
“Wait!” she cried. “I will bring one to tend him.”
* * * *
Ten minutes later she was climbing to the top of a dark stair, with her pulse throbbing. At the landing she found a lantern that cast specks of light upon a black curtain, disclosing curious writing embroidered in gold upon the cloth. Jeanne could not read, but she knew this writing was not honest French—since she had come to stare at it once before. And at the curtain she hesitated.
Behind it lived Ibn Athir, the Arab. Some said he was an alchemist who knew the art of drawing the essence of gold out of quicksilver. Others said he was a sorcerer who could summon to him the demiurges of Satan in the fire of his furnace. Surely the great ladies visited him to buy spells for their beauty, or secret potions. Yet Jeanne had seen him give medicine to a wine crier who had a fit in the street below.
“Maitre Athir!” she called, crossing her fingers before her eyes. A strip of light showed beneath the curtain, and she heard slippers moving over stone.
Then the light vanished, and Jeanne almost turned and fled as the curtain was drawn aside and a tall figure confronted her within the gloom of the doorway. “Who seeks?” a deep voice asked.
“’Tis Jeanne, the fiddling girl,” she explained. “Oh, Master Athir, will you come now, at once, and bring a medicine to save a young lord who has been cracked on the scrag—on the head?”
“Who is this seigneur?”
“I know not. I found him in the alley, and he can say no word.”
Athir disappeared from the doorway and after a moment came out on the landing wrapped in a long, gray caftan, the hood drawn over his head. In one of his wide sleeves he carried a bundle, and he nodded to her—she thought that his dark eyes were not evil, but only amused. “Lead,” he said briefly.
The two rogues and the girl watched while the Arab drew the mail shirt from the wounded lad and ran a lean finger over the wounds—for the silvered mail had been hacked through across the chest. He felt the faint pulse beat in the wrists, and drew the slashed flesh together, applying an aromatic gum that stopped the bleeding. Then he bound up the wounds, and skillfully poured a little fluid down the throat of the unconscious man.
“Will he live,” Jeanne asked, “now that you have worked this magic upon him?”
Athir shook his head. “Verily, little demoiselle, I have worked no sorcery. The drink will bring sleep to him presently. Such a blow on the head may do great harm, but this youth is strong as a colt, and—inshallah—if God wills it, he may yet live with a clear mind.”
“Yonder whack on the scrag,” observed Giron from the fire “was a foul blow. Ay, ’twas dealt him when the poor lordling lay outstretched on the ground.”
“And how so?” demanded Pied-á-Botte.
“Did I not see the cut o’ the blade in the mud? Ay, right against this young cock’s comb. Now bend thy peepers on this.”
Giron pointed out the line of a red bruise running across the forehead of the wounded man. “’Tis the mark,” he said, “of the steel cap that kept him from being cracked open like a melon.”
“And where,” Pied-á-Botte inquired, “is this helmet? It lieth
not i’ the alley. Nay, who would carry off a split cap?”
“Why, them that stripped his gear from him. See ye not, addle-head, that they took every mark of his name and rank, and left him for dead?”
Suddenly Jeanne bethought her of the three riders with the riderless horse and the broken shield galloping toward the river. “Then,” she exclaimed, “I saw them, and they were followers of My Lord of Burgundy, with a red-bearded lord leading them.”
“A red beard close-clipped upon his chin?” demanded Giron. “A hawk’s beak and a roving eye?”
Jeanne nodded.
“God’s thunder! That will be Renault. Ay, the Duke’s lieutenant he is.”
The name of Renault was well known to the rogues of Paris. They called him the Gardener, saying that he kept the gallows-tree loaded down with fruit, and the grave diggers ever busied at turning up the soil. This red Renault was the confidential agent of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. So if Renault had struck down this stranger secretly, the Duke had desired his death. And it was not safe to cross the path of John the Fearless.
“Here we be,” muttered Pied-á-Botte, “a-nursing of this wight.”
A shadow of dread fell upon the two rogues. That day they had seen the archers of Burgundy mustering at the street corners, while the butchers came forth from the markets with pole-axe and knife to join them. Rumors ran through the alleys that the Duke had become master of the city. Certainly he held the gates, while the retinue at his house—the Hôtel St. Pol—was more like an army. Both Giron and stout Pied-á-Botte could not help wondering how much Renault would pay to hear that the man he had thought slain was lying alive in a certain cellar. And Jeanne read their thoughts.
“Asses, with long ears!” she cried. “You would flit off to the Duke’s men, and gab for a silver pound. And then, what would befall you? Why, Renault, who hath taken pains to hide this deed, would swing you up to dance in the air, to still your tongues.”