Little Lost Lambs at the Post
Page 29
I was sure the boy would take the money. So, I think, was MG, as he opened his checkbook. How cleverly he’d managed to display tangible money beside the solitary violet stone of unknown value! To me it was simply a rare specimen of Hittite artistry. For some reason it fascinated Miss Pike, who watched the faces of the two men. To MG it was merely a collector’s prize. But what value could it have for the boy, more than five hundred dollars?
Curran put his clenched hand down on the checkbook. "I told you," he said unsteadily. “I wouldn't sell it.”
He had not said that, exactly. But MG's dark eyes narrowed as if the boy had reneged on a bet. “Suppose you tell me”—temper spaced his words—“why not—if you really own it?"
“If you really picked it up in a snowstorm," added Miss Pike skeptically, “it didn’t cost you anything, did it?”
He looked at her over his clenched fist. “You wouldn't believe," he said slowly, “that a person exists who'd never sell this—he gave it away.”
Because this girl had hinted he was lying, Dave Curran explained hard facts in few words. Last winter as a captain in the American Military Mission to Turkey, he’d been posted on the eastern, mountain frontier, based at Erzerum. Being a specialist in meteorology, he’d had the job of charting the atmospheric pattern over those mountains which rise to the snowy Caucasus, the sky over which is claimed by the U.S.S.R.—as some wandering American planes had discovered to their cost. He’d been inspecting instruments atop an 11,000-foot summit when the snow struck suddenly, he said, with a shift of wind to the north. A blizzard, we would call it in the States. The temperature dropped under zero.
So Dave Curran started to find his way down, alone in a jeep with full power. The road, however, was a wagon track, soon obscured by swirling snow, and before long the vehicle slipped off into a clump of boulders where it had no traction. Curran didn’t worry, because he knew the terrain. He pulled up his parka hood and started walking down the track, keeping the wind on his back. About a thousand feet down there was a village called Akbaba, or White Daddy, where he could find shelter.
Then he saw the light through the murk of the storm, on the slope side. It was only a glimmer, but it had to be in a house of some kind, and it turned out to be in a stone hut set into the slope to withstand wind and cold. Instead of glass, an old sheepskin flapped in the window. When he wrestled open the door he found no fire. A clay lamp flickering on a bench showed some straw piled into one corner, and a grizzled Turkish peasant curled up in the straw with a six-year-old boy in his arms. Smoking charcoal under the roof hole meant they’d burned the last of their wood and the room was almost as cold as the slope outside. No place, Curran decided. to wait out a blizzard.
But he had to think about the man, who said his name was Buran, and the kid, named Anda. The man was weak—no food could be seen in the place—and already stiffening with the piercing high-altitude cold. Buran said he couldn’t walk, outside. He was trying to keep the child warmed inside their one big sheepskin coat. The worst of it was, however, that Buran had made up his mind he would die; and when an old Turkish peasant makes up his mind about that, it’s almost impossible to get him to think otherwise. He wanted the American to carry the boy Anda down to the village, which might possibly be done.
Curran then studied the situation with a view to keeping the two of them alive. If he made a fire out of the straw, it would flame up for no more than a minute. He knew Turkish a bit because he’d been two years in the area, and he also had explored the mountains for meteorological reasons, finding some huge stones of vanished Hittite palaces. He remembered a curiosity of nature in a gully nearby, where caves opened up the limestone cliffs. Deep in one of the caverns he'd come on sulphur springs, steaming hot. That seemed to him to be the only solution of the problem of keeping both father and son alive for the hours until aid might reach them from the village of White Daddy.
Mind you, Curran must have made some careful calculations of the degree of warmth in that sheltered cavern, and of Buran’s state of mind. And it must have taken some doing, to carry the youngster while he searched out the cavern mouth, and then to repeat the journey with the hopeless Buran on his back. But, as he calculated, the warmth of the springs kept the inner end of the low cave livable. Curran managed to stoke the father and son up a bit by fetching some canned meat and brownbread from the stranded jeep.
When he came back with food, it did something to the man Buran, who livened up when he saw the child eating—which Anda did without any inhibitions. Buran began to talk a lot, and the soldier could not understand all he said. About something stronger than fate. It seemed that he thought it had brought the soldier into his door in the storm, and brought food to the cave where no food existed. Curran only thought the peasant had recovered from his complex about dying.
“Haroush," said Curran, meaning that was good.
Sensing that he wasn’t understood too well, Buran wiped his scarred hands and dug into the cloth that served him for a belt. He pulled out the carved amethyst and put it into Curran’s hand, closing the soldier’s fingers over the ancient gem. Then, as they watched Anda stoking in brownbread, Buran said a lot more.
He said his father had found the stone in a ruin, and it had protected his pop, and him too. It had brought the American out of the storm when nobody journeyed over a mountain road. Now—so said Buran—it belonged to the soldier. It would protect him against death in the mountains. (And, Curran thought, Buran fancied the charm might take him down safely to the village, to make sure that the boy Anda lived.)
In any case, it happened that way. Curran reached White Daddy before dark, and the next day a rescue party went back with him to the grotto, to take Buran and his boy out on a stretcher, and haul up the stranded jeep. Buran was not willing to take back his charm. The villagers said he was stubborn, and superstitious like all the older peasants. Curran thanked him and said he’d carry the violet stone for a lucky piece.
The loud-speaker rasped just then and Captain Schmidt's voice sounded quickly: “Everyone, please fasten your seat belts. We're going into a cloud and you will be a little uncomfortable for a quarter of an hour.”
The sign above us flicked on: FASTEN SEAR BELTS. NO SMOKING, PLEASE.
The mass of metal around us fell away. Miss Pike had started toward the passengers and she spun on her feet like a marionette. Curran moved quickly to catch the girl, and she cried out, “Let me alone.”
Instead, he eased her down to the floor, which was heaving up against us. I remember that MG caught at his checkbook sliding off the magazine cover. He used both hands.
It took me a minute to bump and slide into my seat and fumble for the ends of the safety belt. Then I realized that the cabin lights had flashed on. Flight Nine was speeding between darkening masses of writhing cloud. The reverberation of the motors broke into a crash of thunder.
Across from me, MG had trouble with his hands, over the clasp of his seat belt. Back in the lounge space, Curran, who seemed to expect worse trouble, was still holding Miss Pike down on the floor. Those two youngsters fought each other, no matter what happened.
That was the last clear thought I had. Looking out the round seat window, I saw a ghostly light glowing far ahead between the cloud masses, and the plane sped toward the faint sunlight. For the first time in hours, I was conscious of the plane’s speed.
The murk ahead shattered into a pattern of incredible light, as lightning flashed across our path. The air exploded in a gigantic crash.
In that second, fear numbed me. The plane ceased to be a comfortable living room moving across the sky; it became a tossing mass of metal, hurtling toward the wrath of the sky, more than three miles above the rain-drenched earth. A single spark in the fumes of gas in the churning wings could burst it into fragments.
Above and below and around us played the fissionable energy of the heavens, charged with celestial electricity—discharging from cloud to cloud, from cloud to earth. No living pilot could dodge lightning. And it was com
ing.
The plane tilted drunkenly in a turn. Darkness closed in and a torrent of rain seethed along the sides of the cabin. Lightning blinded me, with a deafening rending of sound. The framework of metal around me leaped as if alive.
An immense force had touched the plane, and passed on. The cabin lights went out. A stink of hot metal came into my nose.
Some women screamed, and across from me a man shrieked—a strange sound. Nothing more could be heard over the seething of water outside us. We might be falling through miles of space, but my hands were still clutching the arms of my seat. At the front and the rear of the cabin, small bulbs flickered on.
Again the outer space whitened, dazzling in the rain, and thunder reverberated, farther off. Someone gripped my shoulder unsteadily. Miss Pike was braced in the aisle. “Keep your seats, folks,” she called out clearly. “We’ll be out of this in a minute."
It was a long minute, in that dimmed-out, tossing cabin. Miss Pike dropped into the seat by me. “Did you see him take it?” she asked, in my ear.
“Take—what?”
“The jewel. I saw him scoop it up with his checkbook.”
She was speaking, evidently, of MG and worrying because I hadn’t noticed him and the amethyst! She worried because on her say-so alone she couldn’t call in the air-terminal police to search a passenger. So—how could he be searched at the plane? After that, nothing could be done. He’d wanted that violet stone, and got it.
"The dirty thief!” she said.
Actually, I hardly heeded the girl. Ahead of us the cloud thinned and daylight revealed the faces around me.
Miss Pike jumped up. “Don’t smoke! Anyone!”
Across the aisle MG had a packet of cigarettes in his fingers, trying unsteadily to shake one out. He stared at us, his flesh white around his dark eyes, and drops of perspiration gleaming. If ever a man showed stark fear, he was that man. His eyes blinked at the girl. Then he licked his clamped lips. “Bring me a drink, a double Scotch,” he muttered.
Miss Pike looked at him closely and said, “Come and get it—you.”
It took him a while to unfasten his belt and when he reached the stewardess’ serving deck she had extracted a miniature bottle from a metal door. She kept a glass in her hand. They stood there, not two yards from me. Miss Pike's chin went up.
"Now give me that jewel," said she.
He hardly heard her. He wiped his left shirt sleeve across his face, and stared.
“Give me the amethyst you took.”
This time it registered. He must have forgotten what happened before the lightning struck the plane. Without a word he felt in the turned-up cuff of his left sleeve. While he fumbled at it I wondered if any casual search would have found the Hittite gem in such a hideaway.
“Take the damn thing," he said hoarsely. “It almost did for me.”
Superstition, bred of his fear, must have made him say that. Miss Pike gripped the violet stone and then handed him his bottled drink. MG gulped it down without water, and color came back in his face.
After studying the girl for a minute he said, "It must have caught in my sleeve when I picked up my things."
Miss Pike started to say something, then closed her small lips, turning her shoulder to the big fellow and going back to the lounge compartment. There Dave Curran was on his knees, feeling under the seats anxiously.
"Here," she told him abruptly, "is what you're looking for."
Sunlight came into the cabin then, and the violet stone shone when she handed it to him without any explanation. For the first time Curran smiled, like a boy who'd found one of his pocket treasures. “I'd hate to lose it," he said gratefully.
"It’s really something, isn't it?" she said, without any fighting edge to the words. "Beautiful, I mean."
It was strange how the clear light restored the passengers to their ordinary spirits. After shock, most people talk. Women who hadn’t spoken to each other before gabbled about how exciting it was, to pass through lightning. Everyone began to talk. Flight Nine steadied, drawing away from the menace of the clouds, passing the mountains. When people see ordinary things around them they stop being afraid. The stewardesses began to fasten in the trays, to bring cocktails and snacks to the first-class passengers. The NO SMOKING PLEASE sign was dark, and when Captain Schmidt came back, without speaking on the P.A., he told them anyone could smoke who wanted to—that we'd be in Los Angeles in an hour.
By the time he reached the lounge everything in the plane seemed to be routine again. Only Curran was in back with me, turning over the pages of the magazines, as if to sample the environment of the States he had come back to. And he glanced up at the veteran captain with appreciation. "Nice going," he said.
"Going? I'm afraid you had an uncomfortable time."
The boy grinned. "I did indeed, until you turned into the rainfall. Nobody's ever been able to tell where and why lightning leaps the gaps between the stored-up charges of the sky, have they? My books said the discharge from cloud to cloud was more frequent than within the clouds. Anyway, that was all I could think of."
"It was a near miss."
Miss Pike had eased up to listen to the two men. They spoke her language, because, of all of us in the plane, they knew what the danger was really like, the danger of the atmosphere over the earth. I thought of the boy figuring in his mind how to outguess a blizzard up at the cloud level.
Then Dave Curran asked an odd question, softly. "How’s your radio doing?"
Captain Schmidt glanced at the girl and at me, an elderly busybody. “Mind if I tell you that later?" he asked Curran.
And it was an hour later before I understood what he meant by that cryptic remark. We ordinary passengers did not realize, of course, that the collision with the lightning bolt had put the plane’s radio out of action. So we made quite a spectacular landing at International Airport, Los Angeles, circling the field until down below us they cleared the main runway, and lined it with fire-fighting machines. We hardly noticed, because the landing came almost without a jolt.
Only after we filed out down the landing steps we saw the brown streaks that were burns on the gray metal surface of the plane. But by then Captain Schmidt and the crewmen had gone off with their suitcases, and after staring awhile, we passengers hurried off to claim our bags at the baggage rack.
I noticed that Dave Curran hauled out his flight bag, and went to stare at the buses and taxis as if he didn't have any clear idea where to go next. I didn't offer to help. Habit is strong when we creatures of routine are safe on the city pavements again. But I did wonder—because it's my hobby—if that ancient image of Teshup, the Hittite weather god, had not something to do with protecting us in the intangible danger of the sky.
It came into my mind again. It was a month later, when I returned to my teaching post in the East. My eastbound flight touched down at Chicago, as it happened, for an hour, and at the field exit another crew was coming out to another plane. I recognized one of the slim stewardesses, chatting together as they hurried out. It was the pretty Miss Pike, of Flight Nine, showing the other girl a bangle on her wrist. Her companion exclaimed that it was beautiful.
The stone on the bracelet had the familiar violet gleam of the amethyst in the sunlight.
"Dave wants me to wear it," explained Miss Pike; "he wants me to wear it as long as I'm flying. He thinks it brought him luck."
Source acknowledgements
This is a complete listing of Harold Lamb's appearances in The Saturday Evening Post. The 4 stories included in the Bison collections - Swords from the Steppes (*1), Swords from the West (*2) and Swords from the Sea (*3) - have been italicized and indented.
Oracle by Hafiz, May 25 1946
Snowbound Interlude, July 6 1946
The Major Meets an Enchantress, Sept. 21 1946
Witch Woman, Oct. 5 1946 (*1)
The Devil’s Visit, Nov. 29 1947
Lost City, Apr. 17 1948
The Mysterious Knife, Oct. 16 1948
Onslaught of Terror, Jan. 28 1950
Gallant Gesture, Mar. 18 1950
The Lady And The Pirate, Apr. 29 1950 (*3)
The Admiral Declares War, Feb. 24 1951
Thief Trap, July 21 1951
Amateur Spy, Jan. 12 1952
Queen of the Mountains, Dec. 13 1952
Among The Missing, Feb. 7 1953 (*3)
Secret Of Victory, Mar. 14 1953 (*2)
Iron Curtain Incident, July 6 1957
Panic on Flight Nine, Mar. 14 1959
Articles
Can The Arabs Unite, July 01 1944
How Lebanon Won Its Flag—And Freedom, Aug. 05 1944
The Middle East Explodes, Aug. 18 1945
The Mystery of the Middle East, Mar. 21 1953