El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (90 page)

“Ya kalb!”
yelped Yusuf ibn Suleiman and glutted his resentment in a swipe that shattered the captain’s helmet and stretched him dead on the floor. An instant of raking steel and snarling, straining effort — an Arab blade licking like a jet of blue lightning through a Kurdish heart — blades biting and men falling — and then Gordon and his people were fleeing down the corridor, leaving a huddled welter of writhing or motionless figures behind them. Only five Kurds now, and one of them was bleeding from a gashed shoulder.

Into the corridor behind them burst a throng of wild figures that came pelting after them, a frantic vision of blazing eyes, gaping mouths and waving blades. Guns banged and bullets spatted venomously on the wall. Ahead of the fugitives a stair led upward. Beyond the stair more men were rushing to head them off, as swordsmen from all over the palace came in answer to the unwonted din.

“Up the stair!” Gordon had his arm about Azizun’s waist, sweeping her along with her toes scarcely touching the floor, almost crushing her with the unconscious strength of his grasp. They swarmed up the stair as the mob came down the passage in full cry. They had almost reached the head when the crack of a Luger split the din and one of the Kurds groaned, stumbled and fell backward headlong down the steps like a bundle of old clothes. The limp body crashed against the legs of the men just leaping on to the lower steps, and they went down in a blaspheming heap.

Ivan Konstantine was running down the corridor, firing as he came. Lal Singh whirled on the top step and snapped the empty pistol at him. Ivan instinctively
dodged, leaping behind another man. Before he could fire again his targets had gained the upper landing and were out of sight and range for the moment.

They emerged into a broad hallway, and veiled women shrieked and scattered. But from the doorways came more menacing figures — tall blacks with broad scimitars. From all sides except one they converged on the invaders. These fled the only way open to them — down the hall, toward a bronze door at the end. Gordon had no idea what it concealed, but that did not matter; there was no other place to go. The door stood partly open.

Another realized their plight and their intention. A figure ran out of a side-door just ahead of them and darted toward the bronze portal, with a huge key in his hand.

“The Master of the Girls!” yelled Yusuf furiously. “He will lock the door in our faces, for us to be butchered —”

Behind them a dozen Sudani swordsmen were coming in long bounds, and the first of the horde from below were swarming into the hall from the stair. The Master of the Girls had accurately grasped the situation, and acted boldly. If he could get into the chamber ahead of them, and lock them out — but he did not reckon with the long legs of Lal Singh which hurled the Sikh along at a speed not even the burdened Gordon could approximate. The Persian reached the door — then wheeled snarling and lifting a knife. But before he could strike, the heavy pistol, swinging like a battle-axe in Lal Singh’s hand, crushed his skull and hurled him dead to the floor, and over his twitching body the panting, sweat-soaked fugitives stumbled across the threshold.

Not until the bronze door had been locked and bolted did Gordon look about, shaking the sweat from his eyes. And then he realized they were in a trap. They were in an enclosed balcony which hung above the pillared portico. Through a wide casement he could see the courtyard with its fountain and fluttering pigeons, the wall with its bronze-barred gate open, and beyond that the square and the broad, shaded street of Shalizahr. Men were running down this street, weapons in their hands. Men were swarming through the open gate. The courtyard was a milling mass of furious humanity. The babel of voices was dominated by a many-throated shout that rose again and again, howling that the Shaykh was slain! the Shaykh was slain!

Yusuf ibn Suleiman came to the window and stood beside Gordon. He spat, wiping blood from his beard. He had thrown away the plumed helmet.

“What man can avert his Fate?” he inquired without emotion. “We be seven men and a chit of a girl. Seven swords against five hundred.”

“Is there any way out of here?” asked Gordon.

The Kurd pointed toward the door, now re-echoing with the assault of steel-shod rifle butts. “Through that door and the swords outside.” He nodded toward the window. “Or down those columns and through that pack of wolves in the courtyard. Nay, El Borak, we die here.”

Gordon nodded in silent agreement. The sun was setting. It would be at least an hour before Yar Ali Khan could possibly reach Khor. If he and the Ghilzai started back at once they could not reach Shalizahr before dawn. And Gordon knew that as far as he and his companions were concerned the game would be played out long before midnight.

“Look!” Yusuf laughed and pointed. “We Kurds are not the only careless fools! Here come the men who at sunset relieve the guard watching the Stair!”

Far down the street, where it emerged into the plain, a group of men, small in the distance, had turned about and were hastening back toward the city. The setting sun struck glints from their rifles. Some distance behind them hastened another group.

“The men they were to have relieved!” Yusuf laughed sardonically. “They wish to be in at the slaughter! They fear they are missing sport! Fools, to leave the Stair unguarded! Yet what foe need they fear, with El Borak hemmed in the palace like a trapped wolf?”

He sprang back as a volley rattled in the courtyard below. The bullets ripped through the sandal-wood lattice work about the window. The mob had discovered the hiding place of their prey.

“They will be climbing up on ladders next!”

“Doubtless. They’ll have to climb to the window, or break down the door to get to us,” answered Gordon. “That door looks pretty solid.”

“They will break it with a ram,” said Yusuf ibn Suleiman.

Gordon shrugged his shoulders impatiently. There was no fatalism in his nature. He meant to fight to the last, bitter end. But he knew that the Kurds would fight, too, while they could stand or see, simply because they trusted him and were proud of his leadership.

An insistent knock banged the door, and Konstantine called: “Gordon, you’re trapped! You’re surrounded by five hundred fighting men, crazy mad because you killed their Shaykh! I’m the supreme power in Shalizahr right now. I know you’ve got no ammunition. I’ve sent for a timber to batter down this door, and then we’ll simply swamp you with numbers. Why don’t you come out and surrender? I’ll promise you a quick death instead of slow torture.”

“And I promise you a knife in your guts,” snarled Gordon. “Come and get us if you can!”

Konstantine swore, then laughed. They heard muttering voices, the quick
pad of feet outside the door, the jangle of weapons. Suddenly there came a gust of firing, a spattering of bullets against the door, and then Ivan’s angry voice cursing his followers for wasting ammunition.

Down in the courtyard the crowd milled and raved, dark arms upflung brandishing clenched fists or weapons, dark faces upturned to howl imprecations. They filled the small courtyard, and men massed thickly in the square outside the gate. These fired sporadically at the balcony and some of their bullets smashed into windows above it, bringing feminine screams. A voice yelling angrily from the portico below put a stop to the shooting.

Gordon glanced at his men. Their eyes burned wolfishly and they grinned without mirth, thumbing their red-stained blades. They knew they were going to die, but they were not afraid. He did not insult them by reminding them that they might have escaped while he was fighting with the Shaykh’s men in the chamber where he confronted Konstantine. He did ask: “How did you get there so quick? The fight had been going on only a few moments when you were at the door.”

Azizun, crouched shivering on a divan, answered him: “I saw Musa leading you to the chamber where Bagheela waited. I had never seen him, but I heard a slave speak his
Feringhi
name — Ivan Konstantine. I knew him, then, and knew that he knew you and would expose you as an imposter. So I ran to the tunnel and told the men.”

Lal Singh, looking down into the courtyard, spoke casually: “They rear ladders against the pillars.”

Simultaneously the door began to jerk and quiver as a heavy timber, swung between brawny arms, smashed against it.

“Drag the heaviest divan across the door to brace it,” directed Gordon. “It’s a strong door. It won’t be easy to break it with a wooden ram.”

He bound up the wounded Kurd’s shoulder with strips torn from his shirt, and told him to watch the door; with the others Gordon took his stand at the window.

The sun had set and twilight was darkening into blue dusk. Men were scrambling up the ladders with knives in their teeth. The ladders were too short. Men climbed on the shoulders of their comrades, balancing precariously, while they thrust up at the men in the window and tried to get a hold on the ledge. The Sikh prodded them with his long saber and they lost their footing and tumbled, three or four together, down upon the heads of the mob. The others fell back sullenly, and the defenders saw them pull the ladders down and begin the job of fastening them together, end to end.

No more shots were fired. With the palace full of their people, the men in the courtyard dared not risk bullets. Gordon was content that his last great fight should be fought out with naked steel.

The men in the hall finally decided that the timber they were using for a ram was too light to have any effect on the thick bronze portal and the massive lock and hinges. Gordon heard Konstantine ordering someone to go search for a heavier ram. There came a lull in the fighting that was like a moment of quiet in the middle of a hurricane. Down in the courtyard the roar of the mob had sunk to a sullen muttering, punctuated by the banging of hammers. The warriors in the balcony took advantage of the interlude to catch their breath and bind up wounds.

Azizun crept to Gordon’s side, her eyes dilated with fear. Little of comfort he could offer her from his great store of pity for her. He had cast the dice and lost, for himself, for them all. There was nothing he could do for her now, except to interpose his body between her’s and their enemies in the last charge, and save a merciful sword-stroke for her in the end. Sensing the desperation of their position she lay like a child face down on the divan beside him, clasping his hands and pressing her cheeks against them. Gordon sat quietly, awaiting the last grapple with the patience of the wild in which he had spent so much of his life, and though his expression was composed, his eyes burned like the reflection of flame on black water.

Dusk deepened quickly into darkness. Below in the courtyard torches tossed, redly limning fierce faces, streaming crimson on blades that would be stained with a redder smear before midnight. The hammers had ceased. The voice of the mob was a sustained, wordless roar, deep with menace and edged with hate. Azizun thrust her fingers in her ears to shut it out.

Feet pounded down the hall, fierce voices shouted, and the door staggered under an impact that made the walls vibrate, and brought every man in the balcony to his feet, tense with the realization that the death-grip was imminent. The door would not stand long under such blows.

The end of a ladder appeared at the window, swayed erratically and crashed against the ledge. A Kurd caught at it, but Lal Singh checked him.

“Wait till they get on it!”

The clamor rose deafeningly, a high-pitched wolf-pack yell of exultation. In the glare of the wildly tossing torches Gordon saw men detaching from the mass below and swarming up the ladder, like spray tossed up by a foaming tide. Their upturned eyes gleamed whitely in the glare.

The bronze door thundered to the assault on the other side. It was iron meeting bronze now, and the upper hinge began to give way, the bolts to bend, the metal panels to crack. Azizun shrank and quivered as if each blow impacted on her tender body. The only light in the balcony-chamber was the dim reflection of the torches outside. In that gloom Gordon saw Lal Singh’s white teeth flash a grin of farewell. The eyes of the Kurds burned weirdly in the shadows.

The giant Sikh leaned out of the window, laughing down in the contorted faces of the men below him, just out of reach of their uplunging blades. He gripped the ends of the ladder, one in each hand, pulling at one, pushing against the other. His legs were braced, the muscles stood out in ridges on his mighty forearms. Slowly, with all its dead weight of wood and clinging men, the ladder began to revolve in his hands. One end swung out from the wall, and the climbers screamed, dropped knives and caught at rungs. Lal Singh gasped in the agony of supreme muscular exertion, and the ladder swayed, toppled sidewise and rushed earthward with its howling cargo, to crash into the packed mob below. Lal Singh’s laughter mocked the screams that welled up from the courtyard where writhing figures, penned under the fallen beams, clawed at the tiles.

With a thunderous crash a great piece broke out of the door, giving a glimpse of wild faces and dark arms swinging a long timber capped with iron. Another smashing blow and the upper half of the door gave way and broke off raggedly, leaving an aperture that was instantly filled with flashing steel and snarling visages, as the attackers dropped the ram and strove to thrust open the remnant of the door with their bare hands, or, failing that, to clamber over the lower part of the door. This, wedged by the divan, formed a jagged barrier, breast-high. And at this rampart the defenders met the attackers.

Steel glinted back and forth in swift flickerings over the jagged metal edge. Dark hands, gripping the broken door, fell from wrists under the bite of swift steel. Men howled like mad dogs. A Kurd, leaning out too far to thrust, fouled his steel and had his skull split before he could twist it clear. Every man in the balcony-chamber was streaming blood.

“Back, you fools!” yelled Ivan, standing behind the warriors. “Take the ram and break away the lower half of the door!” He snapped his empty pistol at the men beyond the door, then threw it away with a curse. The Cossack’s fury seemed tinged with madness. Too long had this handful of men kept his slayers at bay.