by Harold Lamb
Badr watched the passing warriors critically, with hunger in his dark eyes.
With surprise, Jacob noticed their fine bodies. They balanced themselves rhythmically, their young faces vacant yet stirred by an intangible delight in movement and in being together. Their faces shone with sweat and with delight, because they were following a road that might lead to battle.
They wore homespun dyed in the hills; they sat on homemade saddles ornamented by women's hands. The only things about them that came from the West were the rifles they carried. Jacob's experienced eye picked out long Mausers, relics of the older war, squat Italian carbines, stolen Enfields, and even a few light machine guns obtained he knew not where. The possessors of such weapons wore bandoliers of heavy cartridges about their shoulders. He thought of last-century Zouaves with baggy trousers, of Boer commandos. He heard the village women chanting.
"What is that?" Michal whispered.
Spectacled Mr. Parabat listened doubtfully. "It is something they sing, Miss Michal, about their boys the Kurds. You know"—and the plump man brightened at the thought—"like boys carrying home their shields, or being carried defunct upon them."
Michal pulled suddenly at Jacob's arm, still keeping her scarf up. "Do something, can't you! Stop them."
"Those men?" Jacob was estimating that they numbered less than two thousand and had no means of facing artillery. "With what, Michal?"
Suddenly Badr pointed up the road. "Mullah Ismail amad."
Catching at Mr. Parabat, Michal cried, "Mr. Bigsby! If he could talk to the Mullah! He can't, so you must make the Mullah go up to Mr. Bigsby."
To Jacob's surprise, the scent manufacturer hopped into the road. No one made way for him, and he dodged under horses' noses to the rein of a rider without a rifle.
Instead of an old man in robes and voluminous turban, as Jacob had fancied him, the Mullah Ismail, leader of this warband, proved to be a middle-aged tribesman in a worn jacket who had, however, Daoud's intensity shadowed in his eyes. Reining in, he listened carefully to Mr. Parabat. He spoke a few words, while the riders around him edged closer to listen; then he passed on. Not once had he glanced toward the foreign woman.
By the same zigzag process Mr. Parabat worked his way back to the gate, panting and wiping dust from his spectacles.
"That is what you call a holy man," he remarked impassively. "He says he has no house for his head, he has no wealth. He asks nothing, except the air and the earth of these hills. If the British officers wish to talk, they can come to him."
"Damn!" said Michal.
Strings of cattle, pack mules, and a few laden camels followed in the wake of the armed riders, in the thickening dust. Walking wearily, or riding on the laden beasts, women appeared carrying babies, older children running by them. Jacob wondered if the first crusaders who had followed the hermit Peter had taken their families with them.
The storm must have come up after dark. The hands of his watch pointed at nearly three when Jacob woke, hearing the surging clatter of rain on the roof. Wind eddies from the open door tugged at his quilts, and after a drowsy moment he got up, and, closing the door, wrapped himself more securely.
He was half asleep, listening to the tattoo on the roof, when he sensed movement in the room. Something—a chair—scraped, although the air in the room was still.
Quietly Jacob found his lighter and snapped it on. The point of flame showed nothing changed in the room. In the chair by the bedroom door Michal sat with her head back against the wall.
"Do you mind if I stay here for a while?" she said quickly.
Getting up again, he went over to the chair. She wore some kind of a mandarin robe and she kept her eyes closed, her hands clasped tight together. The moving flame threw the shadow of her hair dark against the white of her throat.
"I shut the door," Jacob assured her, "on account of the wind. Want it open again?"
She shook her head.
"Are you cold, Michal?"
"No." After a moment she looked up, her eyes empty, at the light. "It's only the gunfire down the valley. I'll be all right when it stops."
Jacob listened carefully. "There are no guns going; it's the rain."
Again she shook her head. "It's not that. I can hear it, Jacob. I ought to know. Ever since that ravine, and the people caught——"
"What ravine?"
"To Argos, in the night. I've been jittery since the Kurds came by. Of course they weren't refugees."
Argos had been a port of Greece, one of the evacuation ports. Five years before. He saw that her lips were twisting under the clamp of her teeth. It didn't do her any good to talk, or listen to him. Quickly he snapped out the light, picked her up clumsily, and sat in the chair holding her, surprised that she weighed so little.
Her hands and cheek were cold. Through the softness of her breast he felt her heart pounding, and that meant fear. So he gripped her hands, listening to the sharp breathing she tried to control. "There's no firing going on, Michal. This is Mr. Parabat's bungalow you're in, with a whopper of a shower sounding off. Isn't it?"
She relaxed a little, her hair caught across her face. Lifting a hand, he pushed it back, feeling her head against his shoulder, feeling the pulse throbbing in her throat. Whatever old fear or obsession gripped her held her motionless. The warmth of her ran through his body, and his hand pressed her throat. She wanted that, he thought, and certainly had wanted to be carried to her bed by the other men. Then he felt her hand pull at his.
He could not carry her to the door. But he could go there himself. She was trying to free herself from his hand, and he moved so that she could rest in the chair while he reached for his stick. Unsteadily, feeling weakness in his limbs from the desire for her, he felt his way to the door and opened it to the cold breath of the wind.
Then he laughed, not steadily. "Now you can hear it, Michal. That water wheel is your artillery."
Under the flooding of the storm the primitive wheel was thudding heavily. After waiting a minute, he went to the table and lit the lamp. She sat in the chair, her feet gathered under her now, not looking at him.
"You are doing a fine job, Jacob—comforting a damsel in distress."
"No."
"Yes, you are. You lie very well, Jacob, because I keep expecting you to be truthful. Only you always look away when you lie, and now I've caught on to you. I almost believed my cannon were your water wheel."
Her voice rose a little, as if she were trying to keep from laughing. Jacob cursed the distant thudding of the wheel.
Fishing in his coat pocket, he held a package of cigarettes out to her, and she lit one absently from the lamp. Then he felt the weight in his pocket, and put the bronze Pegasus abruptly in front of her, on the table.
"Shut up!" he exclaimed. "And look at that."
Michal laughed. "So there is a bronze horse. Jacob, I never believed until this minute there was a bronze horse."
Seizing upon her interest, he said emphatically, "It's not just a bronze horse. This is a proto-Pegasus, with a pedigree seven thousand years old." And he started to tell her how the statuette had been identified.
She stirred restlessly, dropping the cigarette and picking it up again. "I'm sorry, Jacob, but I'm not fond of archaeology. Digging things up seems like uncovering a cemetery and opening up graves long before Judgment Day. Even cities look like skeletons when you uncover them," drowsily her voice checked. "Babylon did. They have taken everything away from Babylon except the one stone lion to mark the spot where Babylon lay." She nodded earnestly. And Jacob wondered what the fear could be that gripped her so hard. "Jacob, I must take you to Mr. Bigsby tomorrow. He knows all the secrets buried in the earth around here. That's because he has lived here for three generations. Yes, Mr. Bigsby's your man."
Jacob winced, starting to speak.
"But tomorrow, not today. Today has been a bad day from beginning to end. Now we've finished with today, tell me another story, not necessarily a true story, but of some high and f
ar-off thing."
In desperation he searched his memory. "When I'm tired at night, I go sailing in a sloop on a river."
When he stopped, aware of the absurdity of his words, she nodded encouragement. "On what river? Go on."
It had been his grandfather's sloop, beating up the Hudson through the vagrant winds around Storm King. The hilltops had been dark against the moonrise, and, as a boy, he had watched for the appearance of the ship in the sky that might be a warning. He told her all that had happened during a voyage of the sloop.
"It's nice to be there," she muttered sleepily. "You steer very skillfully, Jacob. Only my cannon are not any portent, like your spectral ship. They are real."
Soon she was asleep, her head against his shoulder. When he was certain of that, he blew out the lamp and waited for daylight. When the rain came down hard, the water wheel churned noisily, groaning as if in human pain, and often then Michal whimpered in her sleep.
By midmorning the sky had cleared and the garden breathed moistly under a blazing sun. Badr and Jemail gossiped, squatting at a respectful distance from the veranda steps where Jacob waited. Girls who looked like truant children emerged to hang around the workshop doors. This concourse of the garden had the appearance of waiting for Michal Thorne to come forth and join it. Something was radically wrong, he told himself, with this perfume factory; granting that a shrewd mind like Mr. Parabat's could distill scents and concentrates here and market them via the black car and Kirkuk—and Jacob had to admit that labor must be cheap here, while the perfumes could bring fantastic prices—still that did not seem to be reason enough for a man of Parabat's taste to sequester himself so far from Bombay or Baghdad.
Michal came out. The servants stopped their interlude, the workwomen edged out into the garden. Jacob noticed how she merely moved from one group to the other, letting the servants discuss their problems, allowing the shy girls to gather around her with children holding to them. They had brought out their children for her to see and to exclaim over. She was dressed as if she were going to pay a morning call in the Avenue Kleber, even carrying gloves.
She is coming out of her feudal manor, Jacob told himself irritably, to mingle with the villagers; she is fastidious and tolerant of them only because they serve her, and they admire her for it.
Michal moved toward him, attentive to the patter of a girl child, slender herself and walking with the balance of a dancer or climber.
"I'm very nervous about this," she observed, coming to rest at the steps, "because I'm taking you unannounced to call on Clement Bigsby. Shall we go?"
So she had not forgotten her assurance of the night before. Surprisingly, she showed no trace of weariness, unless to screw up her eyes against the sun's glare. She moderated her step easily to his.
When they had left Badr behind at the gateway, Jacob asked abruptly what had happened during her escape from Argos.
"It wasn't mine. It was Miss Thorne's."
"I know. But what happened to her?"
For a moment Michal occupied herself in avoiding the mud in the street. "It was quite accidental, if you must know. I had moved over from Napoli long before—remember the time when Italy had not yet decided to march her legions upon Greece?—and stayed at the British Embassy in Athens. I liked the Temple of the Winds because it had no priests and of course no tourists were visiting it then. I felt the usual glow when Greece began to resist, and volunteered to nurse anything and everything, being not even a student nurse. I was then a very young person and thought myself important, and I suppose I was difficult."
"And so. . ."
"Not one shell or bomb burst came near me." Michal breathed deep, flinging up her head. "It was the train of the casualties that burned at Corinth. It was the burning up of those severely wounded, and we all clothed in white just looking on. They carried in burned bodies that moved and were alive." Michal nodded. "That was the start of my journey to Argos, where the Australians took care of me and I couldn't manage to do anything except look on. Shall we skip the journey?"
Politely, she was answering his questions. Carrying the copy of Spengler, he maneuvered morosely through the mud, until she turned into the path that climbed to the stone cottage.
"I haven't announced you, Mr. Ide," she confided, "because Sir Clement has a horror of visitors now that he is dying, I think chiefly of malaria but also because he has no visible motive for living. He is very restrained. He has many initials like FRGS and medals from things like the Royal Academy. Once he was a brigadier at Gallipoli, and he lost his son in some other place. He lives and breathes innermost Asia—not the foyers we know—but he is a darling." She reflected fleetingly. "His household gods, which he could not have seen for years, were blasted in London five years ago. That's all the briefing."
At the screened veranda she greeted a bearded Indian servant who looked like a cavalry officer. Without surprise this servant ushered them in.
Clement Bigsby, in an immaculate dressing gown, was lying among piled-up books. He seemed not at all disturbed by Jacob's intrusion (and Jacob reflected moodily that this was because Michal brought him). His dark eyes barely passed over the American, and he said that he was much obliged for the quinine Mr. Ide had sent by Michal's hand. Would they have a vermouth or coffee?
And in the library-sickroom Michal bloomed, waited upon by the deft Indian. Jacob noticed among the volumes flanking Sir Clement a set of Stein's Serindia and many German works he could not read.
"Mr. Ide," the woman of Riyat explained in a breath, "is a very persistent man. He wants information, and you may as well be good-natured and give it to him, about bronze horses and all the archaeological hoards of Kurdistan." She grinned at Jacob. "Produce the image. I know you've got it."
Like Daoud, Clement Bigsby exclaimed at sight of the winged horse. "A beautiful thing." He turned the small horse to the light, his eyes intent. "I've never seen one like it. You could sell it for a very large sum of money, Mr. Ide."
"I'm not selling it."
"He's looking for more like it," Michal amended. "Ambitious man."
Sir Clement raised his brows. "You've come to Riyat for that?"
"Americans don't always buy things," Michal put in firmly, "to sell for a profit."
Although fascinated by the Pegasus, the sick man avoided speaking of it. When he heard Jacob's account of the discussion of the bronzes at the museum, he only said that if Daoud ibn Khalid had set their date at seven millenniums, it must be correct.
Sensitive to impressions, Jacob felt that his appearance had disturbed the elderly scholar. Sir Clement devoted his attention to Michal. Evidently he counted on her visits—so much so that Jacob wondered if she might have come to Riyat to be with him. The game of pretense they played, that Sir Clement was an important person—a VIP, Michal called it, a very important person—gave proof of an old friendship.
"He relishes my marked attentions," she confided in Jacob; "they flatter his self-love and remind him that he is one to whom many women pay tribute of adoration."
It was an old-fashioned game, Jacob thought, and Michal could play it well.
"They remind me, Michele, that you are one among many women."
"And so he ministers to my self-esteem."
Deftly, Sir Clement had barred Jacob from the friendly interchange without seeming to do so. When Michal complained that Aurel Leicester had been ordered away from Riyat, he was silent.
"You know that someone ought to be with the Kurds," she urged. "It ought to be someone they know—and you can't go out to them."
"I knew Shaikh Mahmoud of Sulaimani," he murmured, "but the Mullah Ismail is one of the younger zealots and distrusts our politicians."
"With excellent reason. But you have long ceased to be a politician; you are the author of a forthcoming important book."
Sir Clement only smiled.
"The book," Michal prompted, "about the Kurds—the people forgotten by the world, you called them."
With a sharp surprise,
Jacob realized that Michal had brought Sir Clement to speak of what he wanted to hear.
"They are not forgotten by the world, my dear. They were never remembered."
"That's better." Michal nodded. "I was afraid you were going to. be difficult."
Sir Clement regarded her with mild distrust.
"What do you know of them in America, Mr. Ide?"
"Almost nothing"—Jacob avoided disclosing what he might possess in the way of knowledge; Sir Clement had a trick of probing with sudden questions—"except that they are savage tribes* expert in brigandage."
Sir Clement sighed. He spoke clearly, with an effort, drawing in few words a picture that Jacob had perceived only obscurely.
"On the contrary, they happen to be one of the most unfortunate people on earth, although unlisted by UNRRA or the omniscient UNO. Kurdistan has become the world's largest concentration camp. This happened by an accident of geography, of course, and by the political need of certain great nations as well. The truth about the Kurds is incredible simply because no one has imagined it could happen so."
"Go on," purred Michal. "What happened?"
"It happened quite a long time ago. The Kurds still call these mountains the Land of the Dawn. They call themselves the holders of the hills and keepers of the tongue—of the original language, of course. The dialect of the Mukri Kurds today has close affinity to Sanskrit."
"Please don't be too technical."
"Quite. But we recognize very clearly that Kurdish is Aryan speech in one of the purest forms existing today, older, I believe, than the original Greek. You see what that means, of course?"
"The Kurdish tribes are our kinsmen in a way," Jacob agreed.
"In a very real way, Mr. Ide." Sir Clement's weak voice strengthened as he spoke of a belief that he seemed to feel emotionally. Michal, interested, was silent for once.
The Kurds, he went on, had been isolated in their homeland. Dwelling in these mountains, they had remained apart from the cross-currents of migration and the fertilization of trade and war. They had been divided into tribes by the roadless mountain ridges; in their separate upland valleys these tribes had developed different dialects and habits. Here they had tended on the heights the altar fires which had been originally the flame of some petroleum deposit—these mountains yielded the petroleum that fed, nowadays, the great oil fields at Baku, Kirkuk, and Masjidi-Sulaiman.