King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure by Talbot Mundy (fiction novels to read TXT) 📖

“Aye! Well and good! But even she dare not disobey the rule. Khinjan was there before she came, and the rule was there from the beginning, when the first men found the Caves! Some--hundreds--have gained admission, lacking the right. But who ever saw them again? Allah! I, for one, would not chance it!”

“Thou and I are two men!” answered King. “Allah gave thee qualities I lack. He gave thee the strength of a bull and a mountain goat in one, and her for a mistress. To me he gave other qualities. I shall see the Caves. I am not afraid.”

“Aye! He gave thee other gifts indeed! But listen! How many Indian servants of the British Raj have set out to see the Caves? Many, many--aye, very many! Again and again the sirkar sent its loyal ones. Did any return? Not one! Some were crucified before they reached the place. One died slowly on the very rock whereon we sit, with his eyelids missing and his eyes turned to the sun! Some entered Khinjan, and the women of the place made sport with them. Those would rather have been crucified outside had they but known. Some, having got by Khinjan, entered the Caves. None ever came out again!”

“Then, what is my case to thee?” King asked him “If I can not come out again and there is a secret then the secret will be kept, and what is the trouble?”

“I love thee,” the Afridi answered simply. “Thou art a man after mine own heart. Turn! Go back before it is too late!”

King shook his head.

“Be warned!”

Ismail reached out a hairy-backed hand that shook with half-suppressed emotion.

“When we reach Khinjan, and I come within reach of her orders again, then I am her man, not thine!”

King smiled, glancing again at the gold bracelet on his arm.

“I look like her man, too!”

“Thou!” Ismail's scorn was well feigned if it was not real. “Thou chicken running to the hand that will pluck thy breast-feathers! Listen! Abdurrahman--he of Khabul--and may Allah give his ugly bones no peace!--Abdurrahman of Khabul sought the secret of the Caves. He sent his men to set an ambush. They caught twenty coming out of Khinjan on a raid. The twenty were carried to Khabul and put to torture there. How many, think you, told the secret under torture? They died cursing Abdurrahman to his face and he died without the secret! May God recompense him with the fire that burns forever and scalding water and ashes to eat! May rats eat his bones!”

“Had Abdurrahman this?” asked King, touching the bracelet.

“Nay! He would have given one eye for it, but none would trade with him! He knew of it, but never saw it.”

“I am more favored. I have it. It is hers, is it not?”

“Does not she know the secret?”

“She knows all that any man knows and more!”

“Was she seen to slay a man in the teeth of written law?” asked King, and Ismail stared so hard at him that he laughed.

“I was in Khinjan once before, my friend! I know the rule! I failed to reach the Caves that other time because I had no witnesses to swear they had seen me slay a man in the teeth of written law. I know!”

“Who saw thee this time?” Ismail asked, and began to cackle with the cruel humor of the “Hills,” that sees amusement in a man's undoing, or in the destruction of his plans. His humor forced him to explain.

“The price of an entrance has come of late to be the life of an English arrficer! Many an one the English have dubbed Ghazi, because he crossed the border and buried his knife in a man on church parade! They hang and burn them, knowing our Muslim law, that denies Heaven to him who is hanged and burned. Yet the man they miscall ghazi sought but the key to Khinjan Caves, with no thought at all about Heaven! Thou art a British arrficer. It may be they will let thee enter the Caves at her bidding. It may be, too, that they will keep thee in a cage there for some chief's son to try his knife on when the time comes to win admission! Listen--man o' my heart!--so strict is the rule that boys born in the Caves, when they come to manhood, must go and slay an Englishman and earn outlawry before they may come back; and lest they prove fearful and betray the secret, ten men follow each. They die by the hand of one or other of the ten unless they have slain their man within two weeks. So the secret has been kept more years than ten men can remember!” (That estimate was doubtless due to a respect for figures and bore no relation to the length of a human generation.)

“Whom did she kill to gain admission?” King asked him unexpectedly.

“Ask her!” said Ismail. “It is her business.”

“And thou? Was the life of a British officer the price paid?”

“Nay. I slew a mullah.”

The calmness of the admission, and the satisfaction that its memory seemed to bring the owner made King laugh. He found lawless satisfaction for himself in that Ismail's blood-price should have been a priest, not one of his brother officers. A man does not follow King's profession for health, profit or sentiment's sake, but healthy sentiment remains. The loyalty that drives him, and is its own most great reward, makes him a man to the middle. He liked Ismail. He could not have liked him in the same way if he had known him guilty of English blood, which is only proof, of course, that sentiment and common justice are not one. But sentiment remains. Justice is an ideal.

“Be warned and go back!” urged Ismail.

“Come with me, then.”

“Nay, I am her man. She waits for me!”

“I imagine she waits for me!” laughed King. “Forward! We have rested in this place long enough!”

So on they went, climbing and descending the naked ramparts that lead eastward and upward and northward to the Roof of Mother Earth--Ismail ever grumbling into his long beard, and King consumed by a fiercer enthusiasm than ever had yet burned in him,

“Forward! Forward! Cast hounds forward! Forward in any event!” says Cocker. It is only regular generals in command of troops in the field who must keep their rear open for retreat. The Secret Service thinks only of the goal ahead.

It was ten of a blazing forenoon, and the sun had heated up the rocks until it was pain to walk on them and agony to sit, when they topped the last escarpment and came in sight of Khinjan's walls, across a mile-wide rock ravine--Khinjan the unregenerate, that has no other human habitation within a march because none dare build.

They stood on a ridge and leaned against the wind. Beneath them