El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (30 page)

Sounds came to him from beyond the curtain that masked the balcony-alcove — a woman sobbing in pain or terror, and the voice of Othman.

Peering through the hangings he saw the Shaykh lolling on the throne under the pearl-sewn canopy. The guards no longer stood like ebon images on either side of him. They were employed before the dais, in the middle of the floor — employed in whetting daggers and heating irons in small glowing braziers. Azizun was stretched out between them, naked, spread-eagled on the floor, her wrists and ankles lashed to pegs driven in the floor. No one else was in the room, and the bronze doors were closed and bolted.

“Tell me how the Sikh escaped from the cell,” commanded Othman.

“No! No!” gasped the girl, too terrified to withhold her pitiful reason for silence. “El Borak might suffer were I to speak.”

“Little fool! El Borak is —”

“Here!” Gordon snapped as he stepped from the alcove. The Shaykh jerked about, went livid — shrieked and toppled from the throne, sprawling on the edge of the dais. The Sudanese straightened, snarling like beasts, whipping out knives. Gordon fired from the hip and one black spun on his heel and crumpled. The other sprang toward the girl, lifting his scimitar, intent on slaying their victim before he died. Gordon’s slug caught him in mid-spring, drilling him through the temples. He slumped down almost upon the girl. Outside men were yelling and hammering at the door.

The Shaykh sprang up, babbling incoherently. His eyes were almost starting from his head as he glared at the grim, blood-stained white man and the smoking gun in his hand.

“You are not real!” he shrieked, throwing out his hand as if to ward off a dreadful apparition. “You are a dream of the
hashish!
No, no! There is blood on the floor! You were dead — they told me you had been given to the ape! But you
have come back to slay me! You are a fiend! A devil, as men say! Help! Help! Guard! To me! The devil El Borak has returned to slay and destroy!”

Screaming like a mad thing Othman plunged from the dais and ran toward the door. Gordon waited until the Persian’s fingers were clawing at the bolts; then coldly, remorselessly he ripped a bullet through the man’s body. The Shaykh staggered, whirled to face his enemy and fell back against the door, shrieking his fear, until his voice was silenced forever by a bullet that crashed through his mouth and blasted his brains.

Gordon looked down at his victim with eyes as relentless as black iron. Beyond the door the clamor was growing, and out in the garden the Kurds were bawling to know if he were safe, and vociferously demanding permission to follow him into the palace. He shouted for them to be patient and hurriedly
freed the girl, snatching up a piece of silk from a divan to wrap about her. She sobbed hysterically, clasping his neck in a frenzy mingled of fright and overpowering relief.

“Oh,
sahib
, I knew you would come! I knew you would not let them torture me! They told me you were dead, but I knew they could not kill you —”

Carrying her in his arms he strode through the balcony and handed her down through the window to the Kurds. She screamed when she saw their fierce bearded faces, but a word from Gordon soothed her, as he swung down beside her.

“And now,
effendi
?” the warriors demanded, eager to be at more desperate work, now that they were fully fired to the game at hand. Most of this zeal resulted from a growing admiration for their leader; such men as Gordon have led hopeless armies chanting to snatch impossible victories out of the jaws of defeat.

“Back the way we came, to the tunnel where Yusuf waits.”

They started at a run across the garden, Gordon carrying the girl as if she had been a child. They had not gone forty feet when ahead of them a clang of steel vied with the din in the palace behind them. Lusty curses mingled with the clangor, a door slammed like a clap of thunder, and a figure came headlong through the shrubbery. It was the Kurd they had left on guard at the gilded door. He was swearing like a pirate and wringing blood drops from a slashed forearm.

“A score of Arab dogs are at the door!” he yelled. “Someone saw us kill the Sudanese, and ran for Muhammad ibn Ahmed! I sworded one in the belly and slammed the door in their accursed faces, but they’ll have it down in a few minutes!”

“Is there a way out of this garden that does not lead through the palace, Azizun?” asked Gordon.

“This way!” He set her down and she seized his hand and scurried toward the north wall, all but hidden in masses of foliage. Across the garden they could hear the gilded door splintering under the onslaught of the desert men, and Azizun started convulsively at each blow as if it had impacted on her tender flesh. Panting with fright and excitement she tore at the fronds, pulling and pushing them aside until she disclosed a cunningly masked door set in the wall. Gordon had two cartridges left in the big pistol. He used one in blowing the antique lock apart. They burst through into another, smaller garden, lit with hanging lanterns, just as the gilded door gave way and a stream of wild figures with waving blades flooded into the Garden of the
Houris
.

In the midst of the garden into which the fugitives had come stood the slim minaret-like tower Gordon had noticed when he first entered the palace.

“That tower!” he snapped, slamming the door behind them and wedging it with a dagger — that might hold it for a few seconds at least. “If we can get in there —”

“The Shaykh often sat in the upper chamber, watching the mountains with a telescope,” panted a Kurd. “He allowed none other but Bagheela in that upper chamber, but men say rifles are stored there. Arab guards sleep in the lower chamber —”

But there was nothing else for it. The Arabs had almost reached the door behind them, and from the racket that was being kicked up in every other direction, it would only be a matter of minutes before men would be swarming into the Garden of the Tower from every gate that opened into it. Gordon led his men in a run straight toward the tower, the door of which opened as five bewildered guards came out seeking the cause for the unwonted disturbance. They yelped in astonishment as they saw a knot of men racing toward them, teeth bared, eyes blazing in the light of the hanging lanterns, blades flashing. The guards, shaking the cobwebs of sleep from their brains, went into action just a second too late.

Gordon shot one and brained another with his gun butt an instant after the Arab had drilled one of the Kurds through the heart. The other Kurds swarmed over the three remaining Arabs, glutting ancient tribal hates in a wild burst of blood-letting, slashing and hacking and stabbing until the gay-clad figures lay still in a puddle of crimson.

Vengeful yells reached a crescendo behind them and the dagger-wedged door splintered inward, and the aperture was crowded with wild faces and waving arms as Muhammad’s men jammed there in their frantic eagerness to reach their prey. Gordon caught up a rifle an Arab had dropped and poured a stream of lead into that close-packed mass. At a hundred yards it was slaughter. One instant the gate was crowded with furious straining bodies, the next it was a shambles of gory, writhing, shrieking figures from which the living gave back aghast.

The Kurds howled deliriously and stormed into the tower — wheeled about to meet a charge of maddened Druses who had stolen unnoticed into the garden through another gate and rushed into the doorway before the door could be closed. For a few seconds the open doorway was a hell of whickering steel and spurting blood, in which Gordon did his part with a rifle butt, and then the Druses staggered dazedly away, leaving three of their number lying in their blood before the door, while another hitched himself away on his elbow, blood spurting from severed arteries.

Gordon slammed the bronze door, and shot home a bolt that would have held against the charge of an elephant.

“Up the stairs! Quick! Get the guns!”

They rushed up, eyes and teeth gleaming, all but one who collapsed halfway up from loss of blood. Gordon half-dragged, half-carried him the rest of the way, laid him on the floor and ordered Azizun to bandage the ghastly gash
made by a Druse saber, before he turned to take stock of their surroundings. They were in the upper chamber of the tower, which had no windows; but the walls were pierced with loop-holes of varying sizes and at every conceivable angle, some slanting downward, and all furnished with sliding iron covers. The Kurds chanted gleefully as they snatched the modern rifles which lined the walls in racks from which hung bandoliers of cartridges. Othman had prepared his aerie for defense as well as observation.

Every man was wounded more or less badly, but they all swarmed to the loop-holes and began firing gleefully down into the mob which surged about the door. These had come from every direction, while the besieged party was climbing the stair. Muhammad ibn Ahmed was not visible, but a hundred or so of his Arabs were, and a welter of men of a dozen other races. They swarmed the garden, yelling like fiends. The lanterns, swinging wildly under the impact of stumbling bodies against the slender trees, illuminated a mass of contorted faces, white eyeballs rolling madly upward. Blades flickered lightning-like all over the garden and rifles were discharged blindly. Bushes and shrubs were shredded underfoot as the mob milled and eddied. They had obtained a beam from somewhere and were using it as a ram against the door.

Gordon was surprized at the celerity with which he and his party had been pursued and trapped, until he heard Ivan Konaszevski’s voice lifted like the slash of a saber above the clamor. The Cossack must have learned of Othman’s death within a matter of minutes after it had occurred, and taken instant charge. His instant understanding of the situation, coupled with the chance that had caused Muhammad ibn Ahmed to block their escape, had undone the fugitives.

But if they were trapped they were not helpless. Yelping joyously the Kurds poured lead through the loop-holes. Even the sabered man, his bleeding stanched by a crude bandage, crawled to a loop-hole, propped himself on a divan and began firing wastefully down on his former associates. There was no missing at that range, and the leaden blasts tore lanes through the close-packed mob. Not even Ismailians could endure such slaughter. The throng broke in all directions, scattering for cover, and the Kurds whooped with frantic glee and dropped the fugitives as they ran.

In a few moments the garden was empty except for the dead and dying, and a storm of lead came whistling back from the walls and the windows of the palace which overlooked the Garden of the Tower, and from the roofs of houses that stood near the wall, outside in the square.

Lead flattened against the walls with a vicious spat! like a hornet smashing itself against a window in full flight. The tower was of stone, braced with bronze and iron. Bullets from outside seldom found an open loop-hole. Gordon did not believe it could be taken by storm, as long as their ammunition held
out, and there were thousands of rounds in the upper chamber. But they had neither food nor water. The man who had been slashed with the saber was tortured by thirst, particularly, but, with the stoicism of his race, he made no complaint but lay silently chewing a bullet.

Gordon took stock of their position, looking through the loop-holes. The palace, as he knew, stood surrounded by gardens, except in the front where there was a wide courtyard. All was enclosed by an outer wall, and lower, inner walls separated the gardens, somewhat like the spokes of a wheel, with the higher outer wall taking the place of the rim. The garden in which they were at bay lay on the north-west side of the palace, next to the courtyard, which was separated from it by a wall; another wall lay between it and the next garden to the west; both this garden and the Garden of the Tower lay outside the Garden of the
Houris
, which was half-enclosed by the walls of the palace itself. The courtyard wall connected with the wall of the Garden of the
Houris
, so that the Garden of the Tower was completely enclosed.

The north wall was the barrier which surrounded the whole of the palace grounds, and beyond it he looked down on the lighted roofs of the city. The nearest house was not over a hundred feet from the wall. Lights had been extinguished in it and in the other houses nearby, and men were crouching behind the parapets, sniping at the tower in the blind hope of hitting something besides stone. Lights blazed in all the palace windows, but the court and most of the adjoining gardens were dark.

Only in the besieged garden did the lighted lanterns still hang. It seemed strange and unreal, that lighted garden with the tower in the midst, deserted except for the sprawling bodies of the dead, while on all sides lurked unseen but vengeful multitudes.

The volleys ripping from all sides reflected a touch of panic, and the Kurds cursed venomously because they saw nothing to shoot back at. But suddenly there came a lull in the bombardment, and the men inside the tower likewise ceased firing, without orders. In the tense silence that followed Ivan Konaszevski’s voice was raised from behind the courtyard wall.