E. Hoffmann Price's Fables of Ismeddin MEGAPACK®

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Fierce, narrow eyes at last shifted from the girl’s face and regarded Zahireddin, who saw that the cave-dweller was seamed and wrinkled and leathery, with a scanty, straggling wisp of a beard; skin like smoky parchment was stretched over high cheek-bones; and his nose was wide and flat. A devil-doctor, a shaman from High Asia—but it made little difference to Zahireddin, until the hermit began to speak, and pronounced a word that aroused the Amir.

  “I will give you vengeance, young man. One by one you will overtake them, flay them alive, and impale them in the public square. All, that is, save one.”

  Zahireddin was not grasping; yet he could not but wonder which that one might be, and what would be his fate.

  “That one,” said the hermit, “you must die to slay. You have your choice. But is vengeance worth the cost?”

  “Mir Abbas Khan… Nadir Ali the Lion…” And thus he named them, one by one completing the tale of wrath; but he paused at the name of his cousin, Ahmad Shah.

  “Neither steel nor fire can touch you until vengeance is complete,” the old man said. “No pomp and no power can be denied you, neither the arms to smite nor the men to overwhelm them, one by one. You who have walked tonight will ride tomorrow. But the last vengeance you will not live to see.”

  Zahireddin had believed Jauhara—why doubt the hermit? In that abyss of despair nothing seemed more incredible than that the descendant of Timur should walk. And then Zahireddin saw a compromise, and reckoning swiftly to himself, he thought, “Flay all but that one, then hold my hand until old age overtake me…and the last vengeance will be none the worse for being deferred…it will give a purpose to my life, and be a monument at my death…ay, wallah, I will cherish that last vengeance.…”

  It may be that the hermit read the silently moving lips, or perhaps the very thought of the Amir. He smiled craftily; and for a moment Zahireddin trembled. It seemed that shapes and presences were lurking in the shadows beyond the fire; and the fumes of that red smoldering had become acrid and stifling, dizzying and overwhelming. Yet through the reeling of his senses Zahireddin saw that it would be foolish to die so that the last traitor’s hide would be nailed to the gate of some city perhaps not yet finished. To die slaying him, hand to hand—that would be only the day’s work of any man; but there was something unspeakably evil and uncanny in that old man’s promise, so that it seemed rather a threat. It savored of a trick. Like all else it was a madness and a mockery. The weariness of his body and the ache of his wounds and the batterings that his spirit had endured that day made all save oblivion seem vanity: and to make the choice that the hermit demanded was too much for one who again stood before a warm fire, and was once more sheltered from the Turki arrows that had rattled like hail against his armor.

  Zahireddin’s eyes shifted to catch the eyes of the Tartar girl. Whether it was Tartar magic, or woman’s intuition, she had led him far from the pass that the pursuit would follow, and had cheated someone of a bag of Uzbek gold. He saw that her golden skin had become pale, and that her face was tense, and her lips a thin line. And even as he regarded her, she swayed, and but for his supporting arm would have collapsed. Zahireddin then noted what he had not thus far suspected: he knew now what Jauhara had seen in that darkness into which his last troop of horse had retreated. Jauhara had seen death. She had mocked the arrow that had drunk her life, and had led the way to vengeance before that red froth which now trickled from her lips surged forth once too often and choked her.

  For an instant the slanted Tartar eyes focused clearly on Zahireddin, and she smiled as she had in those pleasant gardens of Ferghana. The turquoise and jade pendants of her head-dress mocked the pallor of her cheeks. The too-red lips murmured, “Vengeance, Zahireddin. The old man will tell you the way. He is one of that brotherhood of adepts from High Asia. Do as he bids—”

  Her voice was clear and unfaltering to the last abrupt stop. Then as Zahireddin knew that Jauhara was dead, he turned to the leather-faced hermit and made his choice: “To the end and to the uttermost, old man. My uncle’s son, Ahmad Shah, led the pursuit. It was one of his archers—”

  The old man smiled bleakly and nodded. Perhaps Jauhara had told him whose archers had aimed so well.

  “Bury her in that clearing some dozen paces from the entrance. There are loose rocks not yet sunk in snow. Then return, Zahireddin, and I will make you Lord of Vengeance, Lord of the Conquering Wrath.”

  The red lights that flickered in the old man’s narrowed eyes burned into Zahireddin, and for an instant frost raced through his veins, and thunder muttered in his ears, and he trembled at facing the knowledge that he had met destiny at the crossroads. He had learned how fearful it is to hold fate in one’s hand, to know that one can bind or loose, slay or spare, master of destiny, and writer of doom.

  It was still his to accept or reject. Finally he forced his fascinated eyes aside and saw the Tartar girl; and seeing, he no longer dared fear. He stooped, gathered Jauhara in his arms, and stalked into the bitter night.

  Presently Zahireddin returned, empty-handed and lonely, incredulous, and corroded by the last poisonous drops of treachery. Far down in the pass he had seen a long line of blackness against the snow, heard the clank of steel and the mutter of troops on the march. They were pursuing along the road they were certain he must have taken.

  “I am here with my choice,” he said to the hermit. “Therefore do that which is to be done before I ride on the road of vengeance, to overtake the forgotten of God!”

  “It is written how Zahireddin, single-handed, by craft and by stealth and mountain-madness looted a caravan; how, single-handed, with gold and steel he beguiled and slew until at his back he had a troop of men who knew that that iron-hearted lad would ride far. That much is written, and more also, concerning the cities be plundered and the thrones he took—and then there is that which my grandfather’s father told me of the wrath of Zahireddin Mahmud, whose vengeance not even death could thwart.”

  One by one he rode them down, those kinsmen of his, until Zahireddin became the very self of vengeance. Mir Abbas Khan’s still live body stirred most of that first day it lay redly in the rubbish heap not far from the gate to which the soldiers had nailed his hide; but Nadir Ali the Lion they did not flay, for in fighting with the savagery of his race there remained unbroken not enough skin to be worth the stripping…

  But Zahireddin devised fittingly to account for that exception; and those who saw contend that the doomed man must have envied his predecessors.

  One by one he rode them down, and with each hunting the power of Zahireddin increased; but there was one who evaded him. That one was Ahmad Shah. At first Zahireddin raged and redoubled his efforts; then, bit by bit, the memories of that night of despair and that old hermit’s juggling, jingling words returned to the Amir, and he began to doubt that those contradictions could have meaning. And pomp and power at last seemed good; so that in the end Zahireddin let vengeance slumber, and saw no reason why a middle-aged ruler should rack his brain about the hide of his one surviving renegade kinsman.

  And when wrath at times did reawaken, Zahireddin recollected what the hermit had whispered into his ear, and his weather-beaten, sharp features lengthened perceptibly. Keep that last vengeance as a goal…

  Zahireddin’s hair was now white, and so likewise his scanty, straggling beard. The skin that stretched in a hollow curve from his high cheek-bones to the craggy line of his jaw was like the leather of an old saddle. His fingers, from gripping of reins and buckler, sword-haft and bowstring, mace and wine flagon, had become talons that could no longer entirely straighten; and since he limped from an arrow-shattered ankle that had healed awry, all eyes were averted when he hobbled from his throne to the saddle in which from force of habit he still spent most of his waking and many of his sleeping moments.

  There was much that Zahireddin had learned in these fierce years, and much that h
e had forgotten; yet there was also that which he remembered. In town or in camp, there was always at his side a Tartar girl whose turquoise and jade pendants tinkled as she patted her tall coiffure and looked up to smile at that fierce old man whose one remaining eye still burned with undimmed fire. The girl’s name was Jauhara. She was the last of a succession of Tartar girls, each of a certain age, and each of whom Zahireddin had for a while called Jauhara, which in the language of the Koran means “a jewel,” but to Zahireddin had come to signify “vengeance.”

  The years had blown away the ashes of burnt-out desires, and the redness of ancient wrath glowed bright again; for Jauhara reminded him of what an aging Sultan might otherwise have forgotten. He questioned her incessantly concerning the lore of her people, for Tartar women are versed in charms and spells.

  Yet in the end it seemed that Zahireddin must have learned things that no Tartar girl, and certainly not Jauhara, could have taught him: and it befell as the old hermit had said.

  The end came with the reawakening of drowsy vengeance. Ahmad Shah still lived, and the white-haired traitor spoke of friendship. Zahireddin took the field; and golden-skinned, oblique-eyed Jauhara accompanied him, even as, years ago, another Jauhara had left pleasant gardens to ride at his side. The vast, closed curve of time was doubling back upon itself, and despite the forty-two great scars that seamed Zahireddin’s leathery skin, it seemed that his memories had prevailed over his age.

  One day’s march separated him, finally, from Ahmad Shah; and then camp fire and guard fire marked that day’s end. Swift as the falcon’s stroke—swift as the cheetah’s lunge—and Ahmad Shah was trapped. Nothing but the morrow’s battle remained; and that would start long before dawn, and be a rout at sunrise. Ahmad Shah could neither withdraw nor push through.

  “Vengeance and the day of Vengeance, O Lord of Vengeance.…” The slant-eyed girl sang one of the hundred verses that Zahireddin had composed in Persian to the great wrath. Then she paused for breath, and drained a flagon of Shirazi wine at a single draft, as was the old Tartar custom: and Zahireddin drained two.

  It is exceedingly doubtful that the wine was poisoned, or the savory stew, or the lamb grilled over a bed of coals; but the pastries drenched with honey, or the apples, may have contained the bitter crystals that froze Zahireddin’s muscles into rigid cords, so that his fists clenched and his face set in a hideous grin. His back arched like a bow, as if in the end his heels might touch the back of his head.

  Zahireddin knew the symptoms, and so also did Jauhara: and the physicians were not vain enough to speak of antidotes. The sultan had swallowed a doom; and from afar came the pulsing of drums that mimicked the pounding heart of Zahireddin.

  The poisoner’s art is such that no man knows who struck him; yet Zahireddin had knowledge that comes from more than the senses, and he was certain that Ahmad Shah, hunted for forty years, had at last struck back; that some spy had achieved what the traitor’s maneuvering could not.

  “There is neither might nor majesty save in Allah, the Great, the Glorious,” intoned Zahireddin in an interval between the convulsions that racked his lean old body. He knew that it would be hours before he died; he knew that there was no doubt that he would die; and the drums that muttered reviled him from afar.

  Vengeance had deserted Zahireddin. Fear stalked through the encampment. The great captain’s illness was a guarded secret; yet within the hour that exultant army was muttering of retreat rather than of loot. And all the while Zahireddin’s mind remained crystal-clear in the paralyzing grip of that poison. Not one shade of perception was dulled by anguish. He began to envy those whom his red vengeance had utterly destroyed; and he wondered at the misery in Jauhara’s eyes until he realized that it was but the shadow of that which was tormenting him.

  “Mirza Abbas Khan… Nadir Ali the Lion…” He counted them on his fingers, one by one, as a thousand deaths closed in upon him, span by span. Jauhara at his side and all those other Jauharas had become one with that first Tartar girl who had fled with him from Ferghana.

  She seemed again to smile at him from the shadows, and murmur something which at first Zahireddin could not quite understand, despite the clarity of his senses. He listened, straining his ears, so that finally in the intensity of concentration he shut out the thunder of distant drums and the surging of his own roaring pulse. And then at last he heard.

  Zahireddin heard, and understood.…

  Then as in a blaze of light he saw that only the last Jauhara was beside him, and that the grizzled, fierce old man beside the fire was no hermit but Temuchin, his favorite captain of the guard; and that he, Zahireddin, was in a silken pavilion and not a smoky cavern.

  Zahireddin was fully alive and aware again. He knew what must happen before he died and won freedom from all vengeance. And yet the poison had come upon him so swiftly, and the convulsions had ravaged him so fiercely, that thus far he had not been able to speak of the ultimate retribution. He no longer dared move, lest the least exertion bring the terrific spasmodic contractions back again; but finally he forced his lips to take soundless forms, and shape words without disturbing the delicate balance of poisoned nerves and poisoned body.

  The most trivial gesture reacts to affect every other nerve and tendon and muscle; and when the balance has been upset, the lift of an eyelash could start the deadly convulsions anew. But Zahireddin conquered.

  Jauhara and the old captain watched and read the silent command. Temuchin muttered and shook his head.

  “He can’t mean that! He’s out of his head—”

  But Jauhara knew otherwise. She knew that one so close to death must be wise and sane and gifted beyond those about to mourn him. Thus she drew the crescent-bladed scimitar from its tattered, shabby scabbard. It was an old blade without a single jewel to grace its haft of carved bone; and endless honing had narrowed it, and almost obliterated the line of Kufic script that ran from guard to point. Temuchin’s incredulous eyes sought the haggard eyes of his chief, and read affirmation. He accepted the ancient blade, tested its balance—then flung it ringing against the rocks that cropped up in a corner of the pavilion.

  “No, by Allah!”

  “Then I will,” declared the Tartar girl as she retrieved the scimitar. It was marvelously light for the slaughter it had wrought. It was a thin, warped moonbeam, remorseless, and hard as that old man who in the face of death still drove his will toward vengeance.

  Zahireddin’s lips twitched, perhaps from poison, perhaps from striving to smile. Then he forced them to articulate.

  “Let her strike, Temuchin. And obey her as you would me—she knows.”

  As he spoke, he extended that slender, corded arm, worn by strife and age to bone and sinew and leathery skin. The talon-fingers were clenched for an instant.

  Zahireddin forced them to open. Then the deadly tetanic convulsions seized him.

  “Strike!” he cried in a great voice. Only that, and no more. His face froze in a hideous grin, and corded muscles struggled to burst through the parchment skin. Zahireddin’s tense body was arching, like a crescent standing on its two horns; and he lay there on his heels and the nape of his neck, rigid and frozen. Yet by some wonder of will, that right hand resisted that terrific contraction.

  Time had ceased in that silken pavilion. Jauhara swayed for an instant. Old Temuchin wondered if her Tartar courage could fail as his own had. The Boukhariot hangings still trembled from Zahireddin’s last command. The girl’s crimson lips were now a thin, straight streak, and her cream-hued hands had become white…

  And then the slender body made a single fluent motion. That curved sliver of steel for an instant seemed a part of her rippling swiftness; shearing so fast that its gleam was untinged by the blood that followed the severed right hand of Zahireddin to the Herati carpet…

  Zahireddin was dead, and his face was not good to see. His lips we
re set in a grin that made the Tartar girl and the grizzled captain wonder if the Sultan truly was dead. No living thing could be so malignant of expression. For a long time the gray-bearded Temuchin and golden-skinned Jauhara regarded each other.

  “Why?” he at last demanded. “Was that some…some old magic?”

  He could offer no other reason. He hoped that there was some other; and he knew that madness was not the answer.

  “No, Uncle,” said Jauhara. Her eyes seemed permanently to have widened, and at times she glanced curiously at her hands as if she still wondered whether they could indeed have severed Zahireddin’s wrist.

  “Then why?”

  “Because he wished it,” then, after a long silence: “And maybe he was planning a sending. He used to question me, hours at a time, about the magic of my people. But what could I know of the true magic? And he died just before he expressed—something which none of us can ever know. Had he lived only another moment, he might have told me. I could not have heard, but I could have watched his lips.”

  “But you struck?” said Temuchin.

  “Yes. You heard his voice. It was like a war trumpet. It was more important for me to strike than to know. He had but few words left in him. And you disobeyed his first command, and wasted a word,” she reproached. “But I knew that a doom was on him—so I struck.” Temuchin nodded. He was abashed at the reproof. Then his face became stern.

  “Nevertheless there is this matter of vengeance. Ahmad Shah, may Allah not bless him, surely poisoned the master. Those drums prove it—prove that he knows that he is saved. And there is no one to avenge Zahireddin. In the morning, this army will be a flying rabble. And in the evening, what will remain of the splendor of Zahireddin?”