CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XX

Ortho and his fellow prisoners spent the next thirty-nine hours in one of the town mattamores, a dungeon eighteen feet deep, its sole outlet a trap-door in the ceiling. It was damp and dark as a vault, littered with filth and crawling with every type of intimate pest. The omniscient Puddicombe told Ortho that such was the permanent lodging of Government slaves; they toiled all day on public works and were herded home at night to this sort of thing.

More than ever was Ortho determined to forswear his religion at the first opportunity. He asked if there were any chances of escape from Morocco. Puddicombe replied that there were none. Every man’s hand was against one; besides, Sidi Mahomet I. had swept the last Portuguese garrison (Mazagan) off the coast six years previously, so where was one to run? He went on to describe some of the tortures inflicted on recaptured slaves—such as having limbs rotted off in quick-lime, being hung on hooks and sawn in half—and counseled Ortho most strongly, should any plan of escape present itself, not to divulge it to a soul. Nobody could be trusted. The slave gangs were sown thick with spies, and even those who were not employed as such turned informer in order to acquire merit with their masters.

“Dogs!” cried Ortho, blazing at such treachery.

“Not so quick with your ‘dogs,’ ” said Puddicombe, quietly. “You may find yourself doin’ it some day—under the bastinado.”

Something in the old man’s voice made the boy wonder if he were not speaking from experience, if he had not at some time, in the throes of torture, given a friend away.

On the second day they were taken to the market and auctioned. Before the sale took place the Basha picked out a fifth of the entire number, including all the best men, and ordered them to be marched away as the Sultan’s perquisites. Ortho was one of those chosen in the first place, but a venerable Moor in a sky-blue jellab came to the rescue, bowing before the Governor, talking rapidly and pointing to Ortho the while. The great man nodded, picked a Dutchman in his place and passed on. The public auction then began, with much preliminary shouting and drumming. Prisoners were dragged out and minutely inspected by prospective buyers, had their chests thumped, muscles pinched, teeth inspected, were trotted up and down to expose their action, exactly like dumb beasts at a fair.

The simile does not apply to Mr. Puddicombe. He was not dumb; he lifted up his voice and shouted some rigmarole in Arabic. Ortho asked him what he was saying.

“Tellin’ ’em what I can do, bless you! Think I want to be bought by a poor man and moil in the fields? No, I’m going to a house where they have cous-cous every day—y’understan’? See what I mean?”

“Ahoy there, lords!” he bawled. “Behold me! Nine years was I in Algiers at the house of Abd-el-Hamri, the lawyer in Sidi Okbar Street. NoNesranidog am I, but a Moslem, a True Believer. Moreover, I am skilled in sewing and carpentry and many kindred arts. Question me, lords, that ye may see I speak the truth. Ahoy there, behold me!”

His outcry brought the buyers flocking. The auctioneer, seeing his opportunity, enlarged on Mr. Puddicombe’s supposed merits. Positively the most accomplished slave Algiers had ever seen, diligent, gifted and of celebrated piety. Not as young as he had been perhaps, but what of it? What was age but maturity, the ripeness of wisdom, the fruit of experience? Here was no gad-about boy to be forever sighing after the slave wenches, loitering beside the story-tellers and forgetting his duty, but a man of sound sense whose sole interests would be those of his master. What offers for this union of all the virtues, this household treasure? Stimulated by the dual advertisement, the bidding became brisk, the clamor deafening, and Mr. Puddicombe was knocked down, body and soul for seventeen pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence (fifty-three ducats) to a little hunch-back with ophthalmia, but of extreme richness of apparel.

Prisoner after prisoner was sold off and led away by his purchaser until only Ortho remained. He was puzzled at this and wondered what to do next, when the venerable Moor in the blue jellab finished some transaction with the auctioneer and twitched at his sleeve. As the guards showed no objection, or, indeed, any further interest in him, he followed the blue jellab. The blue jellab led the way westwards up a maze of crooked lanes until they reached the summit of the town, and there, under the shadow of the minaret, opened a door in an otherwise blank wall, passed up a gloomy tunnel, and brought Ortho out into a courtyard.

The court was small, stone-paved, with a single orange tree growing in the center and arcades supported on fretted pillars running all round.

A couple of slave negresses were sweeping the courtyard with palmetto brooms under the oral goadings of an immensely stout old Berber woman, and on the north side, out of the sun, reclining on a pile of cushions, sat Captain Benjamin MacBride, the traditional picture of the seafarer ashore, his pipe in his mouth, his tankard within reach, both arms filled with girl. He had a slender, kindling Arab lass tucked in the crook of his right arm, his left arm encompassed two fair-skinned Moorish beauties. They were unveiled, bejeweled and tinted like ripe peaches; their haiks were of white silk, their big-sleeved undergarments of colored satin; their toes were painted with henna and so were their fingers; they wore black ink beauty spots on their cheeks. Not one of the brilliant little birds of paradise could have passed her seventeenth year.

Captain MacBride’s cherry-hued countenance wore an expression of profound content.

He hailed Ortho with a shout, “Come here, boy!” and the three little ladies sat up, stared at the newcomer and whispered to each other, tittering.

“I’ve bought you, d’ y’ see?” said MacBride.

“An’ a tidy penny you cost me. If the Basha wasn’t my very good friend you’d ha’ gone to the quarries and had your heart broken first and your back later, so you’re lucky. Now bestir yourself round about and do what old Saheb (indicating the blue jellab) tells you, or to the quarries you go—see? What d’ y’ call yourself, heh?”

Ortho told him.

“Ortho Penhale; that’ll never do.” He consulted the birds of paradise, who tried the outlandish words over, but could not shape their tongues to them. They twittered and giggled and wrangled and patted MacBride’s cheerful countenance.

“Hark ’e,” said he at last. “Tama wants to name you ‘Chitane’ because you look wicked. Ayesha is for ‘Sejra’ because you’re tall, but Schems-ed-dah here says you ought to be called ‘Saïd’ because you’re lucky to be here.” He pressed the dark Arab girl to him. “So ‘Saïd’ be it. ‘Saïd’ I baptize thee henceforth and forever more—see?”

Break-of-Dawn embraced her lord, Tama and Ayesha pouted. He presented them with a large knob of colored sweetmeat apiece and they were all smiles again. Peace was restored and Ortho stepped back under his new name, “Saïd”—the fortunate one.

From then began his life of servitude at the house on the hill and it was not disagreeable. His duties were to tend the captain’s horse and the household donkey, fetch wood and water and run errands. In the early morning MacBride would mount his horse (a grossly overfed, cow-hocked chestnut), leave the town by the Malka Gate, ride hell-for-leather, every limb in convulsion, across the sands to the shipyards at the southeast corner of the town. Ortho, by cutting through the Jews’ quarter and out of the Mrisa Gate as hard as he could run, usually managed to arrive within a few minutes of the captain and spent the rest of the morning walking the horse about while his master supervised the work in the yards. These were on the bend of the river under shelter of a long wall, a continuation of the town fortifications. Here the little xebecs were drawn up on ways and made ready for sea. Renegade craftsmen sent spars up and down, toiled like spiders in webs of rigging, splicing and parceling; plugged shot holes, repaired splintered upper works, painted and gilded the flamboyant beaks and sterns, while gangs of slaves hove on the huge shore capstans, bobbed like mechanical dolls in the saw-pits, scraped the slender hulls and payed them over with boiling tallow. There were sailmakers to watch as well, gunsmiths and carvers; plenty to see and admire.

The heat of the day MacBride spent on the shady side of his court in siesta among his ladies, and Ortho released the donkey from its tether among the olive trees outside the Chaafa Gate and fetched wood and water, getting the former from charcoal burners’ women from the Forest of Marmora. He met many other European slaves similarly employed—Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, Dutchmen, Portuguese, Greeks and not a few British. They spoke Arabic together and a lingua franca, a compound of their several tongues, but Ortho was not attracted by any of them; they were either too reticent or too friendly. He remembered what Puddicombe had said about spies and kept his mouth shut except on the most trivial topics. Puddicombe he frequently encountered in the streets, but never at the wells or in the charcoal market. The menial hauling of wood and drawing of water were not for that astute gentleman; he had passed onto a higher plane and was now steward with menials under him.

His master (whom he designated as “Sore-Eyes”) was very amiable when not suffering from any of his manifold infirmities, amiable, not to say indulgent. He had shares in every corsair in the port, fifteen cows and a large orchard. The slaves had cous-cous, fat mutton and chicken scrapings almost every day, butter galore and as much fruit as they could eat. He was teaching Sore-Eyes the King’s Game and getting into his good graces. But, purposely, not too deep. Did he make himself indispensable Sore-Eyes might refuse to part with him and he would not see Sidi Okbar Street again—a Jew merchant had promised to get his letter through. Between his present master and the notary there was little to choose, but Sallee was a mere rat-hole compared with Algiers. He enlarged on the city of his captivity, its white terraces climbing steeply from the blue harbor, its beauty, wealth and activity with all the tremulous passion of an exile pining for home.

Many free renegades were there also about the town with whom Ortho was on terms of friendship—mutineers, murderers, ex-convicts, wanted criminals to a man. These gentry were almost entirely employed either as gunners and petty officers aboard the corsairs or as skilled laborers in the yards. They had their own grog-shops and resorts, and when they had money lived riotously and invited everybody to join. Many a night did Ortho spend in the renegado taverns when the rovers were in after a successful raid, watching them dicing for shares of plunder and dancing their clattering hornpipes; listening to their melancholy and boastful songs, to their wild tales of battle and disaster, sudden affluence and debauch; tales of superstition and fabulous adventure, of phantom ships, ghost islands, white whales, sea dragons, Jonahs and mermaids; of the pleasant pirate havens in the main, slave barracoons on the Guinea coast, orchid-poisoned forests in the Brazils, of Indian moguls who rode on jeweled elephants beneath fans of peacock feathers, and the ice barriers to the north, where the bergs stood mountain-high and glittered like green glass.

Sometimes there were brawls when the long sheath knives came out and one or other of the combatants dropped, occasionally both. They were hauled outside by the heels and the fun went on again. But these little unpleasantnesses were exceptional. The “mala casta” ashore were the essence of good fellowship and of a royal liberality; they were especially generous to the Christian captives, far more kindly than the slaves were to each other.

The habitual feeling of restraint, of suspicion, vanished before the boisterous conviviality of these rascals. When the fleets came, banging and cheering, home over the bar into the Bou Regreg and the “mala casta” were in town blowing their money in, the Europeans met together, spoke openly, drank, laughed and were friends. When they were gone the cloud descended once more, the slaves looked at each other slant-wise and walked apart.

But Ortho cared little for that; he was at home in the house on the hill and passably happy. It was only necessary for him to watch the Government slaves being herded to work in the quarries and salt-pans, ill-clad, half-starved, battered along with sticks and gun butts, to make him content with his mild lot. Not for nothing had he been named “Saïd,” the fortunate.

He had no longer any thought of escape. One morning returning with wood he met a rabble in the narrow Souika. They had a mule in their midst, and dragging head down at the mule’s tail was what had once been a man. His hands were strapped behind him so that he could in no way protect himself but bumped along the ruts and cobbles, twisting over and over. His features were gone, there was not a particle of skin left on him, and at this red abomination the women cursed, the beggars spat, the children threw stones and the dogs tore.

It was a Christian, Ortho learnt, a slave who had killed his warder, escaped and been recaptured.

The rabble went on, shouting and stoning, towards the Fez Gate, and Ortho drove his donkey home, shivering, determined that freedom was too dear at that risk. There was nothing in his life at the captain’s establishment to make him anxious to run. The ample Mahma did not regard him with favor, but that served to enhance him in the eyes of Saheb, the steward, between whom and the housekeeper there was certain rivalry and no love lost.

The two negresses were merely lazy young animals with no thoughts beyond how much work they could avoid and how much food they could steal. Of the harem beauties he saw little except when MacBride was present and then they were fully occupied with their lord. MacBride was amiability itself.

Captain MacBride at sea, at the first sign of indiscipline, tricing his men to the main-jeers and flogging them raw; Captain MacBride, yard-master of Sallee, bellowing blasphemies at a rigger on a top-mast truck, laying a caulker out with his own mallet for skimped work, was a totally different person from Ben MacBride of the house on the hill. The moment he entered its portals he, as it were, resigned his commission and put on childish things. He would issue from the tunnel and stand in the courtyard, clapping his hands and hallooing for his dears. With a flip-flap of embroidered slippers, a jingle of bangles and twitters of welcome they would be on him and he would disappear in a whirl of billowing haiks. The embraces over, he would disgorge his pockets of the masses of pink and white sweetmeats he purchased daily and maybe produce a richly worked belt for Ayesha, a necklace of scented beads for Tama, fretted gold hair ornaments for Schems-ed-dah, and chase them round and round the orange tree while the little things snatched at his flying coat-tails and squealed in mock terror.

What with overseeing the yards, where battered corsairs were constantly refitting, and supervising the Pilot’s School, where young Moors were taught the rudiments of navigation, MacBride was kept busy during the day, and his household saw little of him, but in the evenings he returned rejoicing to the bosom of his family, never abroad to stray, the soul of domesticity. He would lounge on the heaped cushions, his long pipe in his teeth, his tankard handy, Schems-ed-dah nestling against one shoulder, Tama and Ayesha taking turns with the other, and call for his jester, Saïd.

“Hey, boy, tell us about ole Jerry and the bear.”

Then Ortho would squat and tell imaginary anecdotes of Jerry, and the captain would hoot and splutter and choke until the three little girls thumped him normal again.

“Rot me, but ain’t that rich?” he would moan, tears brightening his scarlet cheeks. “Ain’t that jist like ole Jerry—the ole rip! He-he! Tell us another, Saïd—that about the barber he shaved and painted like his own pole—go on.”

Saïd would tell the story. At first he had been at pains to invent new episodes for Captain Gish, that great hero of MacBride’s boyhood, but he soon found it quite unnecessary; the old would do as well—nay, better. It was like telling fairy stories to children, always the old favorites in the old words. His audience knew exactly what was coming, but that in no way served to dull their delight when it came. As Ortho (or Saïd) approached a well-worn climax a tremor of delicious expectancy would run through Schems-ed-dah (he was talking in Arabic now), Tama and Ayesha would clasp hands, and MacBride sit up, eyes fixed on the speaker, mouth open, like a terrier ready to snap a biscuit. Then the threadbare climax. MacBride would cast himself backwards and beat the air with ecstatic legs; Schems-ed-dah clap her hands and laugh like a ripple of fairy bells; Ayesha and Tama hug each other and swear their mirth would kill them.

When they recovered, the story-teller was rewarded with rum and tobacco from that staunch Moslem MacBride, with sweetmeats and mint tea from the ladies. He enjoyed his evenings. During the winter they sat indoors before charcoal braziers in which burned sticks of aromatic wood, but on the hot summer nights they took to the roof to catch the sea breeze. Star-bright, languorous nights they were.

Below them the white town, ghostly glimmering, sloped away to the coast and the flats. Above them the slender minaret, while on the lazy wind came the drone of breakers and the faint sweet scent of spice gardens. Voluptuous, sea-murmurous nights, milk-warm, satin-soft under a tent of star-silvered purple.

Sometimes Schems-ed-dah fingered a gounibri and sang plaintive desert songs of the Bedouin women, the two other girls, snuggling, half-asleep, against MacBride’s broad chest, crooning the refrains.

Sometimes Ayesha, stirred by moonlight, would dance, clicking her bracelets, tinkling tiny brass cymbals between her fingers, swaying her graceful body backwards and sideways, poising on her toes, arms outstretched, like a sea-bird drifting, stamping her heels and shuddering from head to toe.

Besides story-telling, Ortho occasionally lifted up his voice in song. He had experimented with his mother’s guitar in times gone by and found he could make some show with the gounibri.

He sang Romany ditties he had learnt on his travels, and these were approved of by the Moorish girls, being in many ways akin to their own. But mostly he sang sea songs for the benefit of MacBride, who liked to swell the chorus with his bull bellow. They sang “Cawsand Bay,” “Baltimore,” “Lowlands Low” and “The Sailor’s Bride,” and made much cheerful noise about it, on one occasion calling down on themselves the reproof of the muezzin, who rebuked them from the summit of the minaret, swearing he could hardly hear himself shout. Eleven months Ortho remained in congenial bondage in Sallee.

Then one morning MacBride sent for him. “I’m goin’ to set you free, Saïd, my buck,” said he.

Ortho was aghast, asked what he had done amiss.

MacBride waved his hand. “I ain’t got nothin’ against you as yet, but howsomdever I reckon I’d best turn you loose. I’m goin’ to sea again—as reis.”

“Reis!” Ortho exclaimed. “What of Abdullah Benani?”

“Had his neck broken by the Sultan’s orders in Mequinez three days ago for losin’ them three xebecs off Corunna. I’m to go in his place. I’ve settled about you with the Basha. You’re to go to the Makhzen Horse as a free soldier. I’ll find you a nag and gear; when you sack a rich kasba you can pay me back. You’ll make money if you’re clever—and don’t get shot first.”

“Can’t I go with you?”

“No. We only take Christians with prices on their heads at home. They don’t betray us then—you might.”

“Well, can’t I stop here in Sallee?”

“That you cannot. It has struck me that you’ve been castin’ too free an eye on my girls. Mind you, I don’t blame you. You’re young and they’re pretty; it’s only natural. But it wouldn’t be natural for me to go to sea and leave you here with a free run. Anyhow I’m not doin’ it.”

Ortho declared with warmth that MacBride’s suspicions were utterly unfounded, most unjust; he was incapable of such base disloyalty.

The captain wagged his bullet head. “Maybe, but I’m not takin’ any risks. Into the army you go—or the quarries.”

Ortho declared hastily for the army.

A fortnight later MacBride led his fleet out over the bar between saluting forts, and Ortho, with less ceremony, took the road for Mequinez.

That phase of his existence was over. He had a sword, a long match-lock and a passable Barb pony under him. Technically he was a free man; actually he was condemned to a servitude vastly more exacting than that which he had just left. A little money might come his way, bullets certainly, wounds probably, possibly painful death—and death was the only discharge.

He pulled up his horse at the entrance of the forest and looked back. His eye was caught by the distant shimmer of the sea—the Atlantic. He was going inland among the naked mountains and tawny plains of this alien continent, might never see it again.

The Atlantic!—the same ocean that beat in blue, white and emerald upon the shores of home, within the sound of whose surges he had been born. It was like saying good-by to one’s last remaining friend. He looked upon Sallee. There lay the white town nestling in the bright arm of the Bou Regreg, patched with the deep green of fig and orange groves. There soared the minaret, its tiles a-wink in the sunshine. Below it, slightly to the right, he thought he could distinguish the roof of MacBride’s house—the roof of happy memories. He wondered if Schems-ed-dah were standing on it looking after him. What cursed luck to be kicked out just as he was coming to an understanding with Schems-ed-dah!

CHAPTER XXI

Ortho sat on the bare hillside and watched his horses coming in. They came up the gully below him in a drove, limping from their hobbles—grays, chestnuts, bays, duns and blacks, blacks predominating. It was his ambition to command a squadron of blacks, and he was chopping and changing to that end. They would look well on parade, he thought, a line of glossy black Doukkala stallions with scarlet trappings, bestridden by lancers in the uniform white burnoose—black, white and scarlet. Such a display should catch the Sultan’s eye and he would be made a Kaid Rahal.

He was a Kaid Mia already. Sheer luck had given him his first step.

When he first joined the Makhzen cavalry he found himself stablemates with an elderly Prussian named Fleischmann, who had served with Frederick the Great’s dragoons at Rossbach, Liegnitz and Torgau, a surly, drunken oldsabreurwith no personal ambition beyond the assimilation of loot, but possessed of experience and a tongue to disclose it. In his sober moments he held forth to Ortho on the proper employment of horse. He did not share the common admiration for the crack askar lances, but poured derision upon them. They were all bluster and bravado, he said, stage soldiers with no real discipline to control them in a tight corner. He admitted they were successful against rebel hordes, but did they ever meet a resolute force he prophesied red-hot disaster and prayed he might not be there.

His prayer was granted. Disaster came and he was not there, having had his head severed from his shoulders a month previously while looting when drunk and meeting with an irritated householder who was sober.

Ortho was in the forefront of the disaster. The black Janizaries, the Bou Khari, were having one of their periodic mutinies and had been drummed into the open by the artillery. The cavalry were ordered to charge. Instead of stampeding when they saw the horse sweeping on them, the negroes lay down, opened a well-directed fire and emptied saddles right and left.

A hundred yards from the enemy the lancers flinched and turned tail, and the Bou Khari brought down twice as many more. Ortho did not turn. In the first place he did not know the others had gone about until it was too late to follow them, and secondly his horse, a powerful entire, was crazy with excitement and had charge of him. He slammed clean through the Bou Khari like a thunderbolt with nothing worse than the fright of his life and a slight flesh wound.

He had a confused impression of fire flashing all about him, bullets whirring and droning round his head, black giants springing up among the rocks, yells—and he was through. He galloped on for a bit, made a wide detour round the flank and got back to what was left of his own ranks.

Returning, he had time to meditate, and the truth of the late (and unlamented) Fleischmann’s words came back to him. That flesh wound had been picked up at the beginning of the charge. The nearer he had got the wilder the fire had become. The negroes he had encountered flung themselves flat; he could have skewered them like pigs. If the whole line had gone on all the blacks would have flung themselves flat and been skewered like pigs. A regiment of horse charges home with the impact of a deep-sea breaker, hundreds of tons.

The late Fleischmann had been right in every particular. The scene of the affair was littered with dead horses and white heaps, like piles of crumpled linen—their riders. The Bou Khari had advanced and were busy among these, stripping the dead, stabbing the wounded, cheering derisively from time to time.

Ortho had no sooner rejoined his depleted ranks than a miralai approached and summoned him to the presence of Sidi Mahomet himself.

The puissant grandson of the mighty Muley Ismail was on a hillock where he could command the whole field, sitting on a carpet under a white umbrella, surrounded by his generals, who were fingering their beards and looking exceedingly downcast, which was not unnatural, seeing that at least half of them expected to be beheaded.

The Sultan’s face was an unpleasant sight. He bit at the stem of his hookah and his fingers twitched, but he was not ungracious to the renegade lancer who did obeisance before him.

“Stand up,” he growled. “Thou of all my askars hast no need to grovel. How comes it that you alone went through?”

“Sidi,” said Ortho, “the Sultan’s enemies are mine—and it was not difficult. I know the way.”

Mahomet’s delicate eyebrows arched. “Thou knowest the way—ha! Then thou art wiser than these . . . these”—he waved his beautiful hand towards the generals—“these sorry camel cows who deem themselves warriors. Tell these ass-mares thy secret. Speak up and fear not.”

Ortho spoke out. He said nothing about his horse having bolted with him, that so far from being heroic he was numb with fright. He spoke with the voice of Fleischmann, deceased, expounded the Prussian’s theory of discipline and tactics as applied to shock cavalry, and, having heard themad nauseam, missed never a point. All the time the Sultan sucked at his great hookah and never took his ardent, glowering eyes from his face, and all the time in the background the artillery thumped and the muskets crackled.

He left the royal presence a Kaid Mia, commanding a squadron, a bag of one hundred ducats in his hand, and a month later the cavalry swept over the astonished Bou Khari as a flood sweeps a mud bank, steeled by the knowledge that a regiment of Imperial infantry and three guns were in their rear with orders to mow them down did they waver. They thundered through to victory, and the Kaid Saïd el Ingliz (which was another name for Ortho Penhale) rode, perforce, in the van—wishing to God he had not spoken—and took a pike thrust in the leg and a musket ball in his ribs and was laid out of harm’s way for months.

But that was past history, and now he was watching his horses come in. They were not looking any too well, he thought, tucked-up, hide-bound, scraggy—been campaigning overlong, traveling hard, feeding anyhow, standing out in all weathers. He was thoroughly glad this tax-collecting tour was at a close and he could get them back into garrison. His men drove them up to their heel-pegs, made them fast for the night, tossed bundles of grass before them and sought the camp fires that twinkled cheerily in the twilight. A couple of stallions squealed, there was the thud of a shoe meeting cannon-bone and another squeal, followed by the curses of the horse-guard. A man by the fires twanged an oud and sang an improvised ditty on a palm-tree in his garden at Tafilet:

“A queen among palms,Very tall, very stately,The sun gilds her verdureWith glittering kisses.And in the calm night time,Among her green tresses,The little stars tremble.”

“A queen among palms,Very tall, very stately,The sun gilds her verdureWith glittering kisses.And in the calm night time,Among her green tresses,The little stars tremble.”

“A queen among palms,Very tall, very stately,The sun gilds her verdureWith glittering kisses.And in the calm night time,Among her green tresses,The little stars tremble.”

“A queen among palms,

Very tall, very stately,

The sun gilds her verdure

With glittering kisses.

And in the calm night time,

Among her green tresses,

The little stars tremble.”

Ortho drew the folds of his jellab closer about him—it was getting mighty cold—stopped to speak to a farrier on the subject of the shoe shortage and sought the miserable tent which he shared with his lieutenant, Osman Bâki, a Turkish adventurer from Rumeli Hissar.

Osman was just in from headquarters and had news. The engineers reported their mines laid and the Sari was going to blow the town walls at moonrise—in an hour’s time. The infantry were already mustering, but there were no orders for the horse. The Sari was in a vile temper, had commanded that all male rebels were to be killed on sight, women optional—looting was open. Osman picked a mutton bone, chattering and shaking; the mountain cold had brought out his fever. He would not go storming that night, he said, not for the plunder of Vienna; slung the mutton bone out of doors, curled up on the ground, using his saddle for pillow, and pulled every available covering over himself.

Ortho ate his subordinate’s share of the meager repast, stripped himself to his richly laced kaftan, stuck a knife in his sash, picked up a sword and a torch and went out.

The general was short of cavalry, unwilling to risk his precious bodyguard, and had therefore not ordered them into the attack. Ortho was going nevertheless; he was not in love with fighting, but he wanted money—he always wanted money.

He walked along the camp fires, picked ten of the stoutest and most rascally of his rascals, climbed out of the gully and came in view of the beleaguered kasba. It was quite a small place, a square fortress of mud-plastered stone standing in a gorge of the Major Atlas and filled with obdurate mountaineers who combined brigandage with a refusal to pay tribute. A five-day siege had in no wise weakened their resolve. Ortho could hear drums beating inside, while from the towers came defiant yells and splutters of musketry.

“If we can’t get in soon the snow will drive us away—and they know it,” he said to the man beside him, and the man shivered and thought of warm Tafilet.

“Yes, lord,” said he, “and there’s naught of value in thatroua. Had there been, the Sari would have not thrown the looting open. A sheep, a goat or so—paugh! It is not worth our trouble.”

“They must be taught a lesson, I suppose,” said Ortho.

The man shrugged. “They will be dead when they learn it.”

A German sapper slouched by whistling “Im Grünewald mein Lieb, und ich,” stopped and spoke to Ortho. They had worked right up to the walls by means of trenches covered with fascines, he said, and were going to blow them in two places simultaneously and rush the breaches. The blacks were going in first. These mountaineers fought like devils, but he did not think there were more than two hundred of them, and the infantry were vicious, half-starved, half-frozen, impatient to be home. Snow was coming, he thought; he could smell it—whew!

A pale haze blanched the east; a snow peak gleamed with ghostly light; surrounding stars blinked as though blinded by a brighter glory, blinked and faded out. Moon-rise. The German called “Besslama!” and hurried to his post. The ghost-light strengthened. Ortho could see ragged infantrymen creeping forward from rock to rock; some of them dragged improvised ladders. He heard sly chuckles, the chink of metal on stone and the snarl of an officer commanding silence.

In the village the drums went on—thump, thump; thump, thump—unconscious of impending doom.

“Dogs of the Sultan,” screamed a man on the gate-tower. “Little dogs of a big dog, may Gehenna receive you, may your mothers be shamed and your fathers eat filth—a-he-yah!” His chance bullet hit the ground in front of Ortho, ricocheted and found the man from Tafilet. He rolled over, sighed one word, “nkhel”—palm groves—and lay still.

His companions immediately rifled the body—war is war. A shining edge, a rim of silver coin, showed over a saddle of the peaks. “G mare!” said the soldiers. “The moon—ah,now!”

The whispers and laughter ceased; every tattered starveling lay tense, expectant.

In the village the drums went on—thump, thump; thump, thump. The moon climbed up, up, dragged herself clear of the peaks, drenching the snow fields with eerie light, drawing sparkles here, shadows there; a dead goddess rising out of frozen seas.

The watchers held their breath, slowly released it, breathed again.

“Wah! the mines have failed,” a man muttered. “The powder was damp. I knew it.”

“It is the ladders now, or nothing,” growled another. “Why did the Sari not bring cannon?”

“The Tobjyah say the camels could not carry them in these hills,” said a third.

“The Tobjyah tell great lies,” snapped the first. “I know for certain that . . . hey!”

The north corner of the kasba was suddenly enveloped in a fountain of flame, the ground under Ortho gave a kick, and there came such an appalling clap of thunder he thought his ear-drums had been driven in. His men scrambled to their feet cheering.

“Hold fast! Steady!” he roared. “There is another yet . . . ah!” The second mine went up as the débris of the first came down—mud, splinters, stones and shreds of human flesh.

A lump of plaster smashed across his shoulders and an infantryman within a yard of him got his back broken by a falling beam. When Ortho lifted his head again it was to hear the exultant whoops of the negro detachments as they charged for the breaches. In the village the drums had stopped; it was as dumb as a grave. He held his men back. He was not out for glory.

“Let the blacks and infantry meet the resistance,” he said. “That man with a broken back had a ladder—eh? Bring it along.”

He led his party round to the eastern side, put his ladder up and got over without dispute. The tribesmen had recovered from their shock to a certain extent and were concentrating at the breaches, leaving the walls almost unguarded. A mountaineer came charging along the parapet, shot one of Ortho’s men through the stomach as he himself was shot through the head, and both fell writhing into a courtyard below.

The invaders passed from the wall to a flat roof, and there were confronted by two more stalwarts whom they cut down with difficulty. There was a fearful pandemonium of firing, shrieks, curses and war-whoops going on at the breaches, but the streets were more or less deserted. A young and ardent askar kaid trotted by, beating his tag-rag on with his sword-flat. He yelped that he had come over the wall and was going to take the defenders in the rear; he called to Ortho for support. Ortho promised to follow and turned the other way—plunder, plunder!

The alleys were like dry torrent beds underfoot, not five feet deep and dark as tunnels. Ortho lit his torch and looked for doors in the mud walls. In every case they were barred, but he battered them in with axes brought for that purpose—to find nothing worth the trouble.

Miserable hovels all, with perhaps a donkey and some sheep in the court and a few leathery women and children squatting in the darkness wailing their death-song. Ornaments they wore none—buried of course; there was the plunder of at least two rich Tamgrout caravans hidden somewhere in that village. His men tortured a few of the elder women to make them disclose the treasure, but though they screamed and moaned there was nothing to be got out of them. One withered hag did indeed offer to show them where her grandson hid his valuables, led them into a small room, suddenly jerked a koummyah from the folds of her haik and laid about her, foaming at the mouth.

The room was cramped, the men crowded and taken unawares; the old fury whirled and shrieked and chopped like a thing demented. She wounded three of them before they laid her out. One man had his arm nearly taken off at the elbow. Ortho bound it up as best he could and ordered him back to camp, but he never got there. He took the wrong turning, fell helpless among some other women and was disemboweled.

“Y’ Allah, the Sultan wastes time and lives,” said an askar. “The sons of such dams will never pay taxes.”

Ortho agreed. He had lost two men dead and three wounded, and had got nothing for it but a few sheep, goats and donkeys. The racket at the breaches had died down, the soldiery were pouring in at every point. It would be as well to secure what little he had. He drove his bleating captures into a court, mounted his men on guard and went to the door to watch.

An infantryman staggered down the lane bent under a brass-bound coffer. Ortho kicked out his foot; man and box went headlong. The man sprang up and flew snarling at Ortho, who beat him in the eyes with his torch and followed that up with menaces of his sword. The man fled and Ortho examined the box which the fall had burst open. It contained a brass tiara, some odds and ends of tarnished Fez silk, a bride’s belt and slippers; that was all. Value a few blanquils—faugh!

He left the stuff where it lay in the filth of the kennel, strolled aimlessly up the street, came opposite a splintered door and looked in.

The house was more substantial than those he had visited, of two stories, with a travesty of a fountain bubbling in the court. The infantry had been there before him. Three women and an old man were lying dead beside the fountain and in a patch of moonlight an imperturbable baby sat playing with a kitten.

An open stairway led aloft. Ortho went up, impelled by a sort of idle curiosity. There was a room at the top of the stair. He peered in. Ransacked. The sole furniture the room possessed—a bed—had been stripped of its coverings and overturned. He walked round the walls, prodding with his sword at suspicious spots in the plaster in the hopes of finding treasure. Nothing.

At the far end of the gallery was another room. Mechanically he strolled towards it, thinking of other things, of his debts in Mequinez, of how to feed his starved horses on the morrow—these people must at least have some grain stored, in sealed pits probably. He entered the second room. It was the same as the first, but it had not been ransacked; it was not worth the trouble. A palmetto basket and an old jellab hung on one wall, a bed was pushed against the far wall—and there was a dead man. Ortho examined him by the flare of his torch. A low type of chiaus foot soldier, fifty, diseased, and dressed in an incredible assortment of tatters. Both his hands were over his heart, clenching fistfuls of bloody rags, and on his face was an expression of extreme surprise. It was as though death were the last person he had expected to meet. Ortho thought it comical.

“What else did you expect to find, jackal—at this gay trade?” he sneered, swept his torch round the room—and prickled.

In the shadow between the bed end and the wall he had seen something, somebody, move.

He stepped cautiously towards the bed end, sword point forwards, on guard. “Who’s there?”

No answer. He lowered his torch. It was a woman, crouched double, swathed in a soiled haik, nothing but her eyes showing. Ortho grunted. Another horse-faced mountain drudge, work-scarred, weather-coarsened!

“Stand up!” he ordered. She did not move. “Do you hear?” he snapped and made a prick at her with his sword.

She sprang up and at the same moment flung her haik back. Ortho started, amazed. The girl before him was no more than eighteen, dark-skinned, slender, exquisitely formed. Her thick raven hair was bound with an orange scarf; across her forehead was a band of gold coins and from her ears hung coral earrings. She wore two necklaces, one of fretted gold with fish-shaped pieces dangling from it, and a string of black beads such as are made of pounded musk and amber. Her wrists and ankles were loaded with heavy silver bangles. Intricate henna designs were traced halfway up her slim hands and feet, and from wrist to shoulder patterns had been scored with a razor and left to heal. Her face was finely chiseled, the nose narrow and curved, the mouth arrogant, the brows straight and stormy, and under them her great black eyes smoldered with dangerous fires.

Ortho sucked in his breath. This burning, lance-straight, scornful beauty came out of no hill village. An Arab this, daughter of whirlwind horsemen, darling of some desert sheik, spoil of the Tamgrout caravans.

Well, she was his spoil now. The night’s work would pay after all. All else aside, there was at least a hundred ducats of jewelry on her. He would strip it now before the others came and demanded a share.

“Come here,” he said, dropping his sword.

The girl slouched slowly towards him, pouting, chin tilted, hands clasped behind her, insolently obedient; stopped within two feet of him and stabbed for his heart with all her might.

Had she struck less quickly and with more stealth she might have got home. Penhale’s major asset was that, with him, thought and action were one. He saw an instantaneous flicker of steel and instantaneously swerved. The knife pierced the sleeve of his kaftan below the left shoulder. He grabbed the girl by the wrist and wrenched it back till she dropped the knife, and as he did this, with her free hand she very nearly had his own knife out of his sash and into him—very nearly. But that the handle caught in a fold he would have been done. He secured both her wrists and held her at arm’s length. She ground her little sharp teeth at him, quivered with rage, blazed murder with her eyes.

“Soldier,” said Ortho to the dead man behind him, “now I know why you look astonished. Neither you nor I expected to meet death in so pretty a guise.”

He spoke to the girl. “Be quiet, beauty, or I will shackle you with your own bangles. Will you be sensible?”

For answer the girl began to struggle, tugged at his grasp, wrenched this way and that with the frantic abandon of a wild animal in a gin. She was as supple as an eel and, for all her slimness, marvelously strong. Despite his superior weight and power, Ortho had all he could do to hold her. But her struggles were too wild to last and at length exhaustion calmed her. Ortho tied her hands with the orange scarf and began to take her jewelry off and cram it in his pouch. While he was thus engaged she worked the scarf loose with her teeth and made a dive for his eyes with her long finger nails.

He tied her hands behind her this time and stooped to pry the anklets off. She caught him on the point of the jaw with her knee, knocking him momentarily dizzy. He tied her feet with a strip of her haik. She leaned forward and bit his cheek, bit with all her strength, bit with teeth like needles, nor would she let go till he had well-nigh choked her. He cursed her savagely, being in considerable pain. She shook with laughter. He gagged her after that, worked the last ornament off, picked up his sword and prepared to go. His torch had spluttered out, but moonlight poured through the open door and he could see the girl sitting on the floor, gagged and bound, murdering him with her splendid eyes.

“Msa l kheir, lalla!” said he, making a mock salaam. She snorted, defiant to the end. Ortho strode out and along the gallery. His cheek stung like fire, blood was trickling from the scratches, his jaw was stiff from the jolt it had received. What a she-devil!—but, by God, what spirit! He liked women of spirit, they kept one guessing. She reminded him somewhat of Schems-ed-dah back in Sallee, the same rapier-tempering and blazing passion, desert women both. When tame they were wonderful, without peer—when tame. He hesitated, stopped and fingered his throbbing cheek.

“What that she-devil would like to do would be to cut me to pieces with a knife—slowly,” he muttered. He turned about, feeling his jaw. “Cut me to pieces and throw ’em to the dogs.” He walked back. “She would do it gladly, though they did the same to her afterwards. Tame that sort! Never in life.” He stepped back into the room and picked the girl up in his arms. “Wild-cat, I’m going to attempt the impossible,” said he.

Even then she struggled.

The town was afire, darting tongued sheets of flame and jets of sparks at the placid moon. Soldiers were everywhere, shouting, smashing, pouring through the alleys over the bodies of the defenders. As Ortho descended the stairs a party of Sudanese broke into the courtyard; one of them took a wild shot at him.

“Makhzeni!” he shouted and they stood back.

A giant negro petty officer with huge loops of silver wire in his ears held a torch aloft. Blood from a scalp wound smeared his face with a crimson glaze. At his belt dangled four fowls and a severed head.

“Hey—the Kaid Ingliz,” he said and tapped the head. “The rebel Basha; I slew him myself at the breach. The Sari should reward me handsomely. El Hamdoulillah!” He smiled like a child expectant of sweetmeats. “What have you there, Kaid?”

“A village wench merely.”

“Fair?”

“So so.”

The negro spat. “Bah! they are as ugly as their own goats, but”—he grinned, knowing Ortho’s weakness—“she may fetch the price of a black horse—eh, Kaid?”

“She may,” said Ortho.

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