REPRISAL
He had kept his oath, Hadji Rahmet used to say, for wrong—or for right. He would give to the latter word the emphasis of a slightly lowered voice. For, clear beyond the depths of even subconscious sophistry, he knew that he had done right; and the hills knew it—and perhaps Dost Ali, the Red Chief.
The happening itself? What did it matter? Nothing mattered except the right and wrong of it. Besides, the last word was not yet said; perhaps never would be. It was bigger than his life; bigger than Dost Ali's life; bigger than the hills themselves.
"The hills!" he would repeat in a voice tinged and mellowed—by distance, as it were. They seemed to play a personal part in the telling; neither in the back ground nor in the foreground, but hovering enigmatical, fabulous—in a way, naïve. It had an odd effect—his speaking of them, here, in the tainted, brooding heat of India; as if, by speaking of them, he was being carried out of a perplexing present into the austere simplicity of the Himalayas; as if, by leaving them, he had lost some of his own crushing simplicity. Yet, leaving them, he had not been actuated by that complicated emotion called Fear—in spite of Dost Ali's threats, in spite of the leaky tongues of the Kabul market place.
The man did not understand fear. He had gone into the plains to find spiritual release from the memory of the thing. So he had visited the many shrines, true to the worship. Assiduously he had repeated the ninety-nine excellent attributes of Allah, and all his thought had been of forgetting, and of devotion to Him. He had wandered from the Khyber snows to the sour, sluggish swamps of Ceylon. He had talked with ascetics of many faiths in that land of many faiths. He had done bodily penance, gradually subduing his physical Self. But his memory had remained: an inky scrawl across his mind.
"For memory," said the hadji, "is of the soul, and not of the dirt-clouted body. …"
Also there were the tongues—the tongues which can crush though they have no bones, the tongues of Afghan traders who drift through the passes into Hind. They would babble of the thing, back yonder in the glitter of the hills. …
It started with the day on which Hadji Rahmet crossed the Red Chief's path for the first time. Perhaps even—though that is a question for ethnologists to decide—it had started many centuries earlier, when one of the hadji's ancestors traveled from Persia through Seistan into Kabul, there to trade with smooth silk and flowered Kisbah cloth, to plant the damask roses of Ispahan, to give a soft philosophical twist to the harsh lessons of the Koran, and to break his heart—here—in the stony north; while the Red Chief's ancestor, driven out of Tatary by squat, flat-nosed warriors who recognized no God, who fought on horse back, and who tore like mastiffs at lumps of raw flesh and quaffed down curdled milk poured from human skulls, crossed into Afghanistan from the north. There he sat himself on a sugarloaf-shaped hill, built a rough castle, and put his descendants, straight down to Dost Ali, on a pedestal to represent the power and arrogance of a race that will never grow old, that will never emerge from the sunlight of brazen freedom into the thrall and gloom of civilization.
Symbolic? In a way.
And that Hadji Rahmet should come into the Red Chief's life was also symbolic—and necessary: like the shadow in a light, to emphasize its harsh brightness.
Take the Red Chief up there in his stronghold, the Mahattah Ghurab, the Raven's Station, as the hill folk called it.
Above him the jagged, bitter rocks of the higher mountains where scrub oak met pine and where pine—to use the chief's words—met the naked heart of Allah. Still higher up the hard-baked, shimmering snows of the Salt Range, hooded and grim like the gigantic eye brow of some heathen Pukhtu god, a god mourning the clank and riot of the days before the Arabs pushed into Central Asia and whipped the land into the faith of Islam—alone there with his pride and his clan; clear away from the twitter and cackle of the city marts, from the turrets and bell-shaped domes of Kabul, from the strangling lash of the Ameer's decrees; sloughing his will and his passion as snakes cast their skin; brooking no master but himself and the black mountain thunder.
At his feet a cuplike valley devoured by sunshine; farther up the slopes the lean mountain pasture, smooth and polished with the faint snow haze, and slashing through, straight as a blade, the caravan road which leads to Kabul; the caravan road which, centuries ago, had echoed to the footsteps of Alexander's legions—the caravan road which is as old as strife and older than peace.
Dost Ali was a short, wide-shouldered man, with gray, ironic eyes, high cheek bones, his beard dyed red with henna juice. Like his ancestors, he had always greatly distinguished himself—that's just how he would have considered it—by the cheerful and methodical ferocity of his fighting. He was a man who paid his enemies with the crackle of steel and slaughtered cattle and the red flames licking over hut and byre; a man who had scarred the valley for a week's journey with torch and cord, and whose greatest trust—greater than the fierce desert Prophet by whose name he gave oath—was the Khyber sword, curved like the croup of a stallion.
"I judge by the word of the hand and not by the word of the mouth," he put it in his own epic manner; and so he sat there on his mountain top and watched his breed increase, though they were daughters all but one. For his youngest child was a boy, Akbar Khan, seven years old, short and broad, with a tinge of red in his thick, curly hair—and Dost Ali loved him.
"Thou art a flower in the turban of my soul," he would say, picking up the lad and pressing him to his massive, fur-clad breast, "and my heart is a tasseled floorcloth for thy feet. Ho, thou, my hero!" And then father and son would run through the gray old rooms of the castle, playing like children, frightening the women over their cook pots, screaming and yelling and laughing.
Dost Ali was easily moved to laughter—laughter cold as the hill winds—and he laughed loud and long when early one day, with the valley still waist-high in the clammy morning mist, he saw Hadji Rahmet wander down the slopes, driving a herd of sheep with a crooked staff, and followed by his little son.
He had heard about the hadji a few days earlier.
The blind mullah who ministered to the scant spiritual wants of the Raven's Station had brought word of the stranger: the Kabuli merchant who, after his wife's death, had bidden farewell to the mosques and bazaars of the city and had come to live in the hills—"to forget," as he had told the sneering mullah, "to live mated to the clean simplicity of the hills, to bring up my little son away from the noisy toil of the market places, away from the smoke and strife of the city streets, here in the hills where there is nobody but God."
"God—and the Red Chief!" the mullah had croaked through his broken, blackened teeth; and then the hadji had spoken of the faith that was his.
He had spoken of Allah, the God of Peace.
"A new Allah—by Allah!" the mullah had laughed as he repeated it to the Red Chief.
Suddenly his laughter had keyed up to a high, senile scream. For he was a man of stout orthodoxy, to whom a freethinking Sufi was worse than Christian or Jew. "A new Allah! A soft Allah! A sickly Allah wrapped in sweating cotton! An Allah who prates of forgiveness and other leprous innovations. And he—that foul, swine-fed Kabuli—said that he wanted his blood to bear witness to his faith! And I"—again mirth gurgled through the mullah's fury—"I told him that all the faith in the world will not mend his bones when we stone him—as we should—for a blasphemer and a heretic!"
"God's curse on him!" Dost Ali had chimed in—and here he saw the man in the flesh, walking along easily enough for all his city-soft feet, his lean body swinging with the long, tireless pull of a mountain pony, chanting as he walked:
"Peace upon Thee, Apostle of Allah, and the Mercy and the Blessings! Peace upon Thee, O Seal of the Prophets!"—his voice rose and sank in turn, dying away in a thin, quavering tremolo, again bursting forth in palpable fervor, massive, unashamed, sublimely unself-conscious amid the silence of the snows.
"By the Three, the Seven, the Forty-seven True Saints! By the horns of the Angel Israfil! Teach me to see after ignorance!"
The faith in his heart bubbled to his lips—a lonely prayer, but a prayer which was to him a trumpet call of God's eternal laws, a rally clear around the world, a force in his heart to grip the everlasting meannesses of life and strife and smash them against the unchanging portals of peace.
"Peace!" He bit on the word. His lips savored it as a precious thing, then blew it free to lash the cool hill air with the sound of it. A light like a clear flame came into his eyes, illumining his face.
It was not altogether that of an ascetic, in spite of the downward furrows graven deep by long hours of meditation. For the nose beaked out bold and aquiline, with flaring, nervous nostrils, speaking of courage—unconscious, racial courage—scotched, it is true, by his Persian ancestry, by breeding and training and deliberate modes of thought, but always there, dark-smoldering, ready to leap.
Even Dost Ali read the signs, though he had never had cause to learn the kind of mental stenography known as character reading and psycology, preferring to judge men by the work of their hands and the venom of their tongues. But he had known fighters—fighters of many raceshadji and this—
"Peace, O Opener of the Locks of Grief!" droned the hadji's chant, with a trembling, throaty note of religious hysteria.
He had left the hard grist of worldly ambition behind him in Kabul, in the stench of bazaar and mart, in the burnished dome of the Chutter Mahal, the Audience Hall, where once he had sat at the right hand of the governor, giving of his stored wisdom to help rule the turbulent Afghan nation. Wealth and honor and fame he had flung behind him, like a limp, worn-out turban cloth, to bring peace to this land of strife, from village to village.
Peace! With the thought he forgot the grim, jagged rocks frowning above his head. He forgot the bastioned castle which blotched the snow blur of the slopes. He forgot the lank, rime-ringed pines which silhouetted against the sky like sentinels of ill omen. He even forgot the waddling sheep which gave him his simple living.
They turned and stared at him out of their flat, stupid eyes, helpless without the point of the staff to marshal their feeding.
"Peace!" came the word again—a strange word here, and to Dost Ali it seemed an affront—an affront to the sweep of the hills, an affront to his own free breed, to the Raven's Station which had always gar nered strife and fed on strife. Yes, an affront, and the Red Chief stepped square into the hadji's path and shot forth his hatred and contempt in a few sharp-ringing words: "Ho! Abuser of the Salt!"
The deadly insult slashed clear through the other's voice and thoughts. He looked up. Automatically—for there had been years of hot blood before the message of peace had come to him—his hand leaped to his side, fingering for the blade.
Dost Ali smiled at the gesture. Thank Allah, he thought, this babbling heretic was a man after all. He would not eat dirt. He would fight.
"Good!" he breathed the word, and his own sword flashed free. But the next moment the hadji's hand dropped—dropped like a wilted, useless thing; and the Red Chief smiled again—a different smile, slow, cruel—and again he spoke.
He chose his words carefully, each a killing insult, and he spoke in an even, passionless voice to let their venom trickle deep. Moreover, such is the Afghan code with its strange niceties of honor and prejudice, that unless he who is insulted respond immediately with the point of the dagger, the consciousness of moral rectitude rests with him who insults; and so Dost Ali was shocked, morally as well as ethically, when the hadji stood there and smiled; in spite of the fact that he had called him a beggar, a cut-off one, the son of a, burnt father, a foreigner, and a Yahudi; though he had wished that his hands be withered and his fingers palsied; though he had compared him to the basest kinky-haired one that ever hammered tent peg, and to one cold of countenance; though he had assured him—"ay wall'ahi!" the Red Chief reënforced the statement, "by the teeth of God and mine own honor!"—that his head was as full of unclean thoughts as a Kabuli's coat is of lice, and that he himself, though an impatient man, would rather hunt for pimples on the back of a cockroach than for manliness and decency in the heart of such a one—"as thou, O son of a hornless and especially illegitimate cow!"
And still the hadji was silent, passive, his sword hand twisting the wooden beads of his rosary, only the slow red which mantled his cheeks telling that he had heard.
Dost Ali looked at him, open-eyed, puzzled. It was beyond his comprehension. If the other had thrown himself at his feet, imploring protection and mercy, or if he had run away, he would have understood. He would even have understood a sort of caustic placidity—a silent, minatory contempt which would presently leap into flame.
But—why—this man stood his ground. He stood his ground without fighting, with no answering flow of abuse, and only a throaty "Peace! Peace!" uttered automatically, like the response in a litany, followed by an admonition to the mountaineer not to be impatient—"indeed thou seest through the whirling mists of passion, brother!"—and finally a few stammering, ragged words drawn across his helplessness when the Red Chief burst into another flood of invective.
Dost Ali was a simple man. He could not sift the hadji's heart. He did not see the waves of passion which were lapping beneath the other's smiling countenance and soft words. He did not understand how the hadji, slowly, painfully, had purged his heart of lust and hatred—how even now, with the terrible insults ringing in his consciousness, he was forcing his faith in God and Peace to buffet a road straight through the black wrath which was consuming him; how he was struggling with himself, finally doffing his worldly pride like a dirty garment.
A coward? Only in so far as he did not want realities to brush him too close. And here reality was bulking big—reality as expressed in the Red Chief's squat mightiness, in his screaming abuse, the half-drawn sword flickering like a cresset of all the evil passions which he loathed and which he had set out to combat.
"Peace, brother!" he said again. His voice was steady; and then, even in Dost Ali's slow-grinding mind, rose the conviction that this man—this man who suffered the most deadly insults without fight or flight—was not a coward. And his hatred grew apace. For he did not understand.
A man who fought—yes! Also, a man who feared and fled. He had met both sorts, had handled both sorts. But here was a man who neither feared nor fled. It was a new experience to the mountaineer's naïve brutality—a new experience to crush which he would have to devise new means. What means? He wondered. He jerked back his head as a racing stallion slugs above the bit.
He stood there, squat, wide-shouldered, his red beard flopping in the wind like a bat wing, looking with puckered, puzzled eyes toward the east where the farther fog banks were melting and rolling into nothingness and where a scarlet flush was shooting up in fantastic spikes—as if the east could give answer.
Should he kill—outright?
A sob of steel, a gurgle, blood caking on the ground—he knew the tale of it, oft repeated—and the fire of his hatred would be out; the heat thereof would be spent.
But to what profit?
Where was the satisfaction in killing a man who did not resist, who did not answer steel with the song of steel, flash for flash, and strength for strength? It would leave the mystery still unsolved, the riddle unread, the grape impressed. The fact that the hadji had once lived and, living, had been as he had been, would remain—like dregs; as salt as pain. Also, Dost Ali was a superstitious man. He could imagine the hadji's ghost, after the death of the body, squatting on a mountain top like a lean, red-necked vulture, looking down at the Raven's Station with flat, gray, indifferent eyes—perhaps smiling, perhaps still croaking about Peace.
Should he rob him? And what was there to rob? A muslin shirt, a rough khilat, a sheepskin coat, a pair of grass sandals—not enough to satisfy the greed of the meanest dancing girl from the south.
"Ho! man of great feet and small head!" he began again, then was silent. For the other had dropped on his knees.
"May the Lamp of Peace clear my path from hearth-stone to byre," he was praying, oblivious of man-made passion and man-made words; and the Red Chief trembled with rage. What—by the blood of God!—what was the use of a talker when there were no listeners; when nobody heard except the lank pines and the cursed, blinking, waddling sheep, and—ahi!—the hadji's little son?
There he stood, looking on with wondering eyes, munching a wheaten cake with the solemn satisfaction of childhood; strong, good-looking with his father's hawklike profile and deep-set eyes.
The hadji was still droning his prayer of peace, and the Red Chief laughed. The answer? The answer to the riddle of his hatred? He had it. It lay in the strength of his arms, the clouting strength of his will. It was the hills way—his own way.
He would pour the black brewage of fear down this stranger's throat till it choked him and he squealed for mercy. He would drive him into the shadow of his love and cause him to whimper like a beaten dog—like a dog well beaten with thorn sticks.
This babbler of meekness had no fear of the Red Chief, no fear of the hills, but—"Pray!" laughed Dost Ali, "pray to me, a man of strife, O thou fool of peace! Fray, or thou shalt moan like the Bird of the Tamarisk which moaneth like the childless mother!" And with a quick gesture of his great hands he picked up the hadji's little son by the waist shawl.
He held him high—the child was rigid with fear—he walked over to the edge of the precipice where, deep down, the lower mountains lay coiled and massive, offering their immense stillness to the fiery face of the sun. Still farther down the cataract of the Kabul River fluffed like some waxen, blatant tropical flower.
"Father!" screamed the child.
The hadji turned and at the moment of seeing he seemed to be struck blind. The second before, straight through the fervor of his prayers, he had vaguely realized the world about him—the peaks and the sunlight and the cold glitter of the snows.
Now, suddenly, a nothing—black.
All that was bright and light and good seemed to have leaped back. There was nothing—just a scream in the dark: "Father!" and the chief's harsh bellow as he swung the lad by the twisted waist shawl around his head, with that savage, hairy strength of his.
A moment later vision returned to the hadji's eyes. He saw everything. Absurdly, incongruously, the first thing he saw, the first impressions which his eyes graved on his brain, were the details, the petty, contemptible details of inanimate nature: the eastern sky, serenely cloudless, running from milky white into gold-flecked crimson with a purple-nicked edge near the horizon's rim; farther south the sun rays racing in a river of fire and melting into the snows with a sort of rainbow-colored foam. He saw it. He understood it.
Often, in after years, he would speak of it. He would say that his first glimpse of his son, helpless in the mountaineer's grip, at the verge of death, had seemed but another detail; a strange detail; a sudden, evil jest which he could not grasp.
He used to say that even after he had begun to comprehend the reality of it his immediate thoughts had not been of his son's life, but of the waist shawl. He had remembered when he had bought it: in Kabul, in the Bazaar of the Silk Weavers. His son had liked the pattern and the bright blending of colors. So he had bought it, and—
Words had come to him. "Don't! Don't!"—just those words: weak, meaningless, foolish. But he spoke them solemnly, as if he had found a powerful formula, and then his little son gave a frantic, straining kick.
He jerked. His head shot down and his feet up, shifting the weight of the sturdy young body. The waist shawl snapped. Quite distinctly, for the fraction of a second, the hadji saw the broken silk strands. He saw their feathered ends ripping through the pattern, brushing up, then down in the wind which sucked from the precipice—and his son's body fell away from the Red Chief's grip.
It turned a somersault. It plunged into space. Came a dull thud, from far down. Silence.
Dost Ali stood motionless. By the Prophet, he had not willed this—this thing. He had only meant to sport after the manner of the hills; and he had taken a child's life—like a snake or a Hindu.
He must atone, somehow, according to the code of the hills.
But how? Blood money? Of course. But a life was a life, and a son was a son—and there was his own little son running and playing through the gray rooms of the Raven's Station.
The hadji had fallen on the ground, his hands stretched out, clutching the short-stemmed, tufted grass, his body jerking and twitching.
"Hadji!" said the Red Chief. "Hadji!"—and, as the other did not reply, did not hear, "by Allah, I did not will—this!"
He was silent. His lips twisted oddly, and had the hadji looked up he would have seen a tear in the mountaineer's beady, puckered eyes—a tear which, strangely, seemed to lift what was abominable into something not altogether unworthy; to overshadow, somehow, the drab, cruel, sinister fact of the broken body down there by the cataract of the Kabul River.
"Hadji!" the mountaineer called again. Then, as the other did not look up, did not reply, hardly seemed to breathe, he walked away, shrugging his broad shoulders. What was done was done, he thought, and he would pay blood money as the Koran demands it. Also, he would give the hadji a wife from among his own people, and there would yet be another little boy, with hawklike profile and deep-set eyes, to prate about Peace.
And he took the road to the Raven's Station, where he gave a sound beating to the blind mullah—who, according to the Red Chief's simple logic, had been the cause of the whole trouble—while the hadji was knitting his riven soul to hold the pain in his heart.
wandering through the sun-stained plains of India, from shrine to carved shrine, searching for release from the memory of the thing—"yes,—the Red Chief had prophesied right. Indeed I crept into the shadow of my fallen love, and I whimpered like a dog that has been beaten with thorn sticks!" And, with a flat, tortured laugh, he would add that God seemed to have answered his prayer for peace—"I had asked for Peace, don't you see, and He sent me the final peace—the peace of death, the peace of a hawk's claw and a snake's fang and a hill-bred's heart"}}
An hour later, at the edge of the cataract, he found his son. Instinctively he folded his feet under his haunches, squatting by the side of the broken body, and his heart's remembrance followed the little crushed life—followed it, followed it back through the narrow span of years, back to the day when the old Yusufzai nurse had come from the couch of his wife and had laid a tiny bundle into his arms—"a son, my lord, may life be wide to him!"
He remembered the first cry of that tiny, white, warm bundle. It had been like the morning cry of a wild bird.
He remembered his son's last cry—strangled, frantic—"Father! Father!" drowned in the Red Chief's harsh bellow. He would never forget it.
And the hadji sat there until the sun died in a sickly haze of coppery brown—decayed, it seemed to him, like the sun on the Day of Judgment—and the moon came up, stabbed on the outer horns of the world, dispassionate, calm, indifferent to the heart of man.
He sat there silent and stony, while some friendly hillmen carried his son's body away, decently wrapped in a white fringed death shroud, a kindly old woman's blue turquoise beads forced between the rigid little fingers so that the hand of Ali, which had not protected his body during life, might protect his fluttering soul after death.
He sat there till the wind came driving the dusk toward the East; till the sky flushed with the green of the tropics, like a curved slab of thick, opaque jade; till the afternoon sun glared hot and golden; till once more the mists of evening rose and coiled. The mists of the hills—the mists in his soul! They echoed this day to the scream and toll of the death gongs, and from his heart there beat up a sob which all his faith could not still.
He sat the next night through and watched the hiving stars swarm and swirl past the horizon. He watched them die one by one. He watched the young sun shoot up, racing along the rim of the world in a sea of fire, with shafts of purple light that put out the paling moon. He watched a long streamer of north bound birds, wild parrots tumbled out of their southern home by the moist sweep of the Punjab monsoon; they flopped about the lank pines, screeching dismally, their motley finery of feather bedraggled with the snow chill of the Himalayas.
A scout bird detached itself, flew down, then up, flanking the packed crowd of its comrades in long, graceful evolutions, finally leading them toward the Raven's Station, which etched the sky line, peaked and hooded, jeering like a face, extending its somber, scarred walls like a grim jest hewn out of stone, evilly infinite, like the very stronghold of the night and the hills, like a sooty smudge on the crimson and gold blaze of day—and Hadji Rahmet's thoughts whirred on the parrot's wings: up to the Raven's Station.
Up there was the patter of little hard feet tapping the stone flags; a curly head, tinged with red; a sturdy little nut-brown body: Akbar Khan, the Red Chief's son, blood of his blood and bone of his bone.
Up there was childish laughter, as the old women whispered Persian fairy tales—of the flea who tried to lighten the camel's load, of Oguun, the god of little babes, whose fingers and toes are made of sugar cane and whose heart is a monstrous ball of pink sweetmeat that was baked in far China.
A child's laughter!
The thought tore the hadji's heart, ragged, paining, like a dull knife.
"O Lord!" the prayer came automatic and meaning less, "pardon and pity and pass over what Thou knowest, for Thou art the most dear and the most generous—" He was silent. He bent his head as if listening. At his feet the cataract gurgled away to the darkness of the deep-cleft passes—lap-lap-lap—mocking.
"And then," the hadji would say afterward, "the dagger of grief pricked the bubble of my faith." And a great turmoil surged in his heart, beyond control, beyond prayer even; running into something molten, finally emerging into the solid fact of his hatred, his desire for revenge.
It seemed to bring up from his heart and brain unexpected, rather forgotten qualities, as a storm-whipped wave brings up mud and gravel from the ground bed of the shore. …
That night Hadji Rahmet turned thief. He stole a tiny trotting bullock belonging to Ram Chander Dass, the Hindu who picked up a scant living by lending badly chipped silver rupees to the hillmen and, as the mullah said, by praying every night for the swag-bellied and bestial god of the Hindus, which same god is the guardian angel of Compound Interest.
He stole the bullock. For he had decided to kill the Red Chief's son, and he knew that, while sharp eyes would detect a stranger wandering up the slopes to the Raven's Station, none would bother about a bullock—in a land where bullocks mean money and food and clothes—nor would sharp eyes, looking from above, see a man clinging to the bullock's shaggy belly, his hands buried in the thick pelt of the wabbly hump.
His long, lean body tortured into a grotesque angle and now and then bumping against the sharp stones of the rock path, the hadji hung on precariously while the bullock lashed out right and left, lowering its head, snorting, bellowing, stamping, whisking its tufted tail, dancing about as if stung by a bramra beetle in its efforts to shake off the strange burden that clung to its nether side; at last settling into a resigned, bovine trot and reaching the horses paddock which stretched beyond the Red Chief's sheep corral just after daybreak.
Already, down in the valley, the night mists were twisting into baroque spirals, tearing into gauzelike arabesques that burned like the plumage of a gigantic peacock in every mysterious blend of green and purple and blue.
Once in the paddock, the hadji dropped to the ground while the bullock trotted away to join its mates that were dipping their ungainly noses into a stone bin half buried beneath the crimson, feathery foliage of a squat manna bush. There was nobody about the inner courtyards this time of early day. The watchmen were pacing above, on the crenelated, winglike battlements that flushed out sharp and challenging under the rays of the young sun, farther on, where the sun had not yet penetrated, melting into the great pine woods that poured down the steep slopes and running together into a single sheet of purplish black, stippled white here and there with a sudden glisten of snow.
The hadji stood still and listened. There was no sound except the occasional click-clank-click of a metal scabbard tip dragged along the stones of the battlements or the creaking of a grounded rifle butt.
The watchmen were looking across the valley. It was there that, a week earlier, the Red Chief had lifted the slate-blue, mottled Kabuli stallion belonging to Jehan Tugluk Khan, the great naib of the Uzbek Khel; it was thence that the Uzbek Lances might pour toward the Raven's Station to take toll. The sentinels had seen the bullock dance up the paddock, stamping and lashing and roaring. But what harm was there in a bullock, mad with spring fever?
Hadji Rahmet looked about him. To the left, separated from the paddock by a stone wall, was a garden, transplanted painfully tree for tree and shrub for shrub from the Persian lowlands, and challenging the eternal snows in an incongruous, stunted, scraggly maze of crotons and mangoes, teak and Mellingtonia, poinsettias and begonia creepers—all frozen, homesick, out of place. The Red Chief had slaughtered a hundred head of cattle and sold their hides to pay for the exotic plants on the day when his little son had first repeated after him the words of the Pukhtunwali, the ancient Afghan code of honor and conduct: "As to him who does me harm, may I be permitted a full measure of revenge. May I cause his hands to drop away, and his feet. May his life pass into the dark like a sheet of foam. …"
Beyond the garden, a little higher up, stretched the gray stone stables of the blooded horses. The hadji could hear the strangely human cry of a mare heavy with foal, a stallion's answering whinny.
He crossed the paddock toward the castle itself. It towered in massive outlines over a hundred feet high, built of rough granite and shiny quartz blocks set in concrete, swinging out in a great semicircle, its flanks resting upon the naked rock of the hills. Directly in front of him he saw a door, doubtless stolen generations ago during a raid into India. For it was made of a single, solid, age-darkened, adz-hewn teak slab, with dowels that fitted into a fretted ivory frame. No Afghan hand—clumsy except with martingale and tempered steel—had carved this door. No Afghan hand had fashioned the bossed, jewel-crusted silver plaque set in the center. But it was Afghan carelessness which had let the door warp, which had caused the delicate bayonet lock to crack away from the wood, leaving room for a narrow, nervous hand to slip inside and finger the bolt.
The hadji sucked in his breath. His fingers moved noiselessly. Another short jerk and the bolt would slide from its groove—
He stood quite still, his heart beating like a hammer.
Faint, from the other side of the door, came a rustle of silken garments, the noise of bare feet pattering away. The zenana, the women's quarter, doubtless, he thought; and there would be an old nurse about, with sharp ears and shrill, lusty tongue.
He shut his teeth with a little dry click. His heart felt swollen, as if he had washed it in brackish water, and he asked God—it seemed a personal issue between him and God—if he should be cheated of his revenge because an old woman, thin of sleep, was rummaging about the zenana in search of charcoal and hubble-bubble and Latakia tobacco spiced with rose water and grains of musk.
And, steadily, as he waited, his finger immobile on the bolt of the door, undecided what to do, the sun was rising, striking the jagged cliffs with dusted gold, tumbling broken-rayed into the courtyard and drinking the newly thawed snow. Already the east was flushing with pink and orange as the mists drifted through the valley, shearing a glittering crimson slice from the morning sun. Already, looking nervously over his shoulder, he saw down the path one of the Red Chief's peasants carrying a rough, iron-tipped milking yoke across his shoulders. Still he stood, undecided, ears and eyes tense.
The thousand noises of the waking day were about him. Somewhere a tiny koel bird was gurgling and twittering. A little furry bat cheeped dismally. A peacock-blue butterfly flopped quick—quick as the shadow of a leaf through summer dusk. A mousing owl rustled in the byre thatch.
The stallions whinnied. There was a metallic buzzing of flies around a gnarled siris tree.
Then, through the drowsy canticle of waking day, straight through the cheeping and rustling and whinnying and buzzing, the hadji heard another sound—a cry—faint, then louder, decreasing, then stabbing out sharp and distinct: "Father!"
A human cry, calling for human help; rising to an intolerable note of appeal, half choked, accompanied by a rattling and crackling of steel, a crunching and stamping and snorting—curious, flat, dragging noise—and for a moment the hadji's heart was as still as freezing water. "Father!" came the cry again, and again: "Fa" cut off in mid-air. Like his son's last cry, the cry of a dead soul trying to span the gulf of consciousness to the living heart!
Then once more the snorting and stamping, the steely jar, coming from the stables of the blooded horses.
The hadji gulped his fear and looked.
Beyond the stunted garden he saw a little curly, red-tinged bullethead peep above the wall, a small brown leg stretching up, the heel, helpless, foolish, trying to find hold on the smooth stone coping. Once more the cry, agonized—the little head jerking, the little heel slipping—a soft thud … and the hadji, the hair on his neck bristling as though Death had whispered in his ear, ran across courtyard and garden. He cleared the stone wall at a jump.
Inside, at the open door of the stables, he saw the Red Chief's son, a small, huddled bundle, the neck strangely twisted, the hands grasped clawlike about the left front fetlock of a slate-blue, mottled stallion. It was clear to the hadji what had happened.
The boy had sneaked out, very early, to take a look at the Kabuli stallion which his father had lifted from Jehan Tugluk Khan. He had tried to undo the steel chain by which the horse was fastened. The animal had become frightened, had reared and plunged and kicked; the boy had become entangled in the steel halter, had tried to jerk himself free; the stallion had become more frightened than ever.
"Patience, little Moslem. Patience, little brother!" said the hadji. He approached the stallion sidewise, hand held high and open to show that he carried neither bit nor martingale, soothing with soft voice, then with cunning palm, rubbing the high, peaked withers, the soft, quivering muzzle, the tufted ears, leaning for ward and blowing warm into the dilated nostrils, finally loosing the steel halter chain.
The headstall dropped. The stallion jumped back, and the little boy fell on the ground, flopping grotesquely—and something reached out and touched the hadji's soul, leaving the chill of an undescribable uneasiness.
He bent to pick the boy up. The little body lay still, lifeless.
He looked. He saw a blue mark across the lad's windpipe where the steel chain had pressed—and he thought that his own son was dead, and that dead was the Red Chief's son. He thought that the hand of man had killed the former, the hand of God the latter, thus evening the score.
But—was the score even?
For a full minute he considered.
His mind resisted from the spontaneous passivity bred by long-continued meditations on Peace. But his hand surrendered to the brain's subconscious, driving will. His hand acted.
He drew the dagger from the waist shawl. He cut across the blue mark which the steel chain had graved on the boy's windpipe, obliterating it with torn flesh and a rush of blood. He left the dagger sticking in the wound. His name was cut in the ebony hilt. The Red Chief would find, and read, and—yes!—thus the score would be even!
The hadji never knew how he reached safety. He had a vague memory of a sentinel challenging him, of a bullet whistling above his head, of how he went down the path scudding on his belly like a jackal to the reek of carrion. He remembered how, as he reached the valley, the western tower of the Raven's Station seemed like a spire away on the world's rim—a spire of hope and lost hope. He remembered the sudden gusts of snow coming down like hissing spears, with the moon reeling above him through the clouds like a great, blinding ball of light and with a lonely southern peak pointing at the mute stars like a gigantic icicle, frozen, austere, desolate.
He remembered vaguely how he traveled day and night, day and night, and it was only gradually, slowly, as his mind jerked free from fleshly thrall and buffeted its road back through the mists of passion to God's Peace, that there came to him knowledge of why he was fleeing from that thing in the glitter of the hills as from a thing accursed.
It was not fear of the Red Chief. Nor was it remorse that he had mutilated the dead body. For the hadji was an Afghan, and there was no worth nor dignity to him in a lifeless thing.
What weighed on his soul, like a sodden blanket, was the doubt of what he would have done had he found the Red Chief's son alive.
He had gone to the Raven's Station to kill. But would he have killed? Would he have broken God's covenant of Peace—and, killing, would he have done right or wrong?
The doubt was on his soul like a stinging brand; and so the hadji took stick and wooden bowl and lived on alms and went through the scorched Indian plains, from shrine to shrine, seeking release from doubt, release from memory.
He did bodily penance, gradually subduing his physical Self. He submitted to the ordeal of fire, walking barefoot through the white-hot charcoal, uncovering his shaven head to the burning fire bath. And he felt not the pain of the body. Only his soul trembled to the whip of doubt.
Then he met a Holy Man from Gujrat who told him that to clear his vision and fatten the glebe of understanding he must do penance with his head hanging downward. True, the other was a Hindu infidel whose gods were a monkey and a flower. But he himself was a Sufi, an esoteric Moslem, taking the best of all creeds and despising none, and he did as the fakir told him.
He swung with his head to the ground and shut his eyes. When he opened them again he saw all upside down, and the sight was marvelous beyond words. The blue hills had lost their struggling height and were a deep, swallowing, mysterious void. Against them the sky stood out, bold, sharp, intense, immeasurably distant; and the fringe of clouds at the base of the sky seemed a lake of molten amber with billows of tossing sacrificial fire.
He gazed. He gazed himself into stupefaction. But his memory remained: an inky scrawl across his soul.
"For memory," said the hadji, "is not of the body, but of the soul!"