King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure, Talbot Mundy [ebook smartphone TXT] 📗

nothing of its lines. His Roman nose and steady, dark, full eyes suggested no compromise. Yet he was good to look at. She had not lied when she said she loved him, and he understood her and was sorry. But he did not look sorry, nor did he offer any argument to quench her love. He was a servant of the raj; his life and his love had been India's since the day he first buckled on his spurs, and Yasmini wouldn't have understood that.

Nor did she understand that, even supposing he had loved her with all his heart, not on any conditions would he have admitted it until absolutely free, any more than that if she crucified him he would love her the same, supposing that he loved her at all. Nor did she trust the “old gods” too well, or let them work unaided.

“Come with me, Athelstan!” she said. She took his arm--found little jeweled slippers in a closet hewn in the wall--put them on and led him to the curtains he had entered by. She led him through them, and, red as cardinals in lamplight on the other side, they stood hand-in-hand, back to the leather, facing the unfathomable dark. Her fingers were so strong that he could not have wrenched his own away without using the other hand to help.

“Where are your shoes?” she asked him.

“At the foot of these steps, Princess.”

“Can you see them yonder in the dark?”

“No.”

“Can you guess where the darkness leads to?”

“No.”

He shuddered and she chuckled.

“Could you return alone by the way Ismail brought you?”

“I think not.”

“Will you try?”

“If I must. I am not afraid.”

“You have heard the echo? Yes, I know you heard the echo. Hear it again!”

She raised her head and howled like a wolf--like a lone wolf that has found no quarry--melancholy, mean, grown reckless with his hunger. There was a pause of nearly a minute. Then in the hideous darkness a phantom wolf-pack took up the howl in chorus, and for three long minutes there was din beside which the voice of living wolves at war would be a slumber song. Ten times ghastlier than if it had been real, the chorus wailed and ululated back and forth along immeasurable distances--became one yell again--and went howling down into earth's bowels as if the last of a phantom pack were left behind and yelling to be waited for.

When it ceased at last King was sweating.

“Nor am I afraid,” she laughed, squeezing his hand yet tighter.

She led him down the steps, and at the foot told him to put on his slippers, as if he were a child. Then, hurrying as if those opal eyes of hers were indifferent to dark or daylight, she picked her way among boulders that he could feel but not see, along a floor that was only smooth in places, for a distance that was long enough by two or three times to lose him altogether.

When he looked back there was no sign of red lights behind him. And when he looked forward, there was a dim outer light in front and a whiff of the cool fresh air that presages the dawn!

She led him through a gap on to a ledge of rock that hung thousands of feet above the home of thunder, a ledge less than six feet wide, less than twenty long, tilted back toward the cliff. There they sat, watching the stars. And there they saw the dawn come.

Morning looks down into Khinjan hours after the sun has risen, because the precipices shut it out. But the peaks on every side are very beacons of the range at the earliest peep of dawn. In silence they watched day's herald touch the peaks with rosy jeweled fingers--she waiting as if she expected the marvel of it all to make King speak.

It was cold. She came and snuggled close to him, and it was so they watched the sparkle of dawn's jewels die and the peaks grow gray again, she with an arm on his shoulder and strands of her golden hair blown past his face.

“Of what are you thinking?” she asked him at last.

“Of India, Princess.”

“What of India?”

“She lies helpless.”

“Ah! You love India?”

“Yes.”

“You shall love me better! You shall love me better than your life! Then, for love of me, you shall own the India you think you love! This letter shall go!” She tapped her bosom. “It is best to cut you off from India first. You shall lose that you may win!”

She got up and stood in the gap, smiling mockingly, framed in the darkness of the cave behind.

“I understand!” she said. “You think you are my enemy. Love and hate never lived side by side. You shall see!”

Then in an instant she was gone, backward into the dark. He sat and waited for her, cross-legged on the ledge. As daylight began to filter downward he could dimly make out the waterfall, thundering like the whelming of a world; he sat staring at it, trying to formulate a plan, until it dawned on him that he was nearly chilled to the bone. Then he got up and stepped through the gap, too.

“Princess!” he called. Then louder, “Princess!”

When the echo of his own voice died, it was as if the ghoul who made the echoes had taken shape. A beard--red eye-rims--and a hook nose came out of the dark, and Ismail bared yellow teeth.

“Come!” he said. “Come, little hakim!”