“Possibly. We will avoid fighting if we can, and if we cannot, then we will fight.”
She looked at my turban. “You are a khwaja, a member of the learned class? A wearer of the turban?”
“A physician at times, a student always, but only a beginner where women are concerned. Will you teach me?”
She flushed and said primly, “I doubt if you have much to learn. Go then; if I can, I shall meet you.”
Briefly, once more in our shelter, I explained the situation to my father. He looked at me with ironic amusement. “I see you have not neglected your lessons. I suppose when we go, she goes with us?”
“My father taught me to obtain some profit from each situation,” I said, “and she is lovely!”
The day moved upon leaden feet with no shadows to mark the hours. We shivered and were cold, but colder when six soldiers passed by, swords in their hands, searching. Sometimes the obvious is missed, and they did not investigate our shelter.
The rain helped, for a soldier is ever a soldier, and they wished to return to warm quarters and the games they had left rather than search for men they did not expect to find here, anyway.
Yet the first was a lucky man. Had he bent to look behind the stacked pipes, never guessing there was space behind there, he might have tasted a foot of steel in his throat, a most unappetizing piece of business.
The rain continued, and the thunder in the hollow gorges, growling and rumbling, a sullen brute of thunder, irritable over Allah knows what.
“Three men at the gate?” my father asked. “Three men. Well, I shall have two of them.”
“Two? I did not know you for a greedy man. The least you could do for a growing boy was to let him have the best of it. Two for me, I say.”
“You are a scholar, I the warrior,” my father said dryly. “Each to his trade.”
“You have much to learn of the cub you sired. I have had more to do with the giving of wounds than the healing of them. Do you look to your man, and I to mine, then we shall see who is better at his trade.”
He looked at me with hard, level eyes, amused eyes. Then he stretched out and slept, and I admired him for it, for a good fighting man will eat when there is food, and sleep when there is time, for he never knows when opportunity will come again.
“She is a beautiful girl,” I said as he closed his eyes.
“You think of women at a time like this?”
“Any time is a time for thinking of women,” I said, “and when they thrust the blade that takes my life I shall be thinking of women, or of a woman. If not, then death has come too late.”
The clouds grew heavier, blacker, and thunder rolled its drums to warn of the assault to come. I had a feeling it would be a bad night, a worse night than I had seen. Yet I wiped the moisture from my blade and looked again at the golden words that said, Killer of Enemies!
“Do you live up to your name this night,” I said, “or I shall have no more enemies and no more use for you!”
So saying, I drew my cloak about my ears and went to sleep.
56
The hand of my father touched my shoulder, and my eyes opened as my hand grasped the blade. “It is time,” he said, “and the storm grows.” Rising from where I had been seated, I brushed my robe and gathered it about me. “There was a time,” my father said, “when at the sack of a coastal city we who attacked threw our scabbards away, vowing never to sheathe our swords short of victory.”
“A noble sentiment, so consider mine thrown away; only as it is studded with gems, I shall keep it. Who knows when a ruby will be needed?”
We walked shoulder to shoulder, our blades drawn. When one has lost his freedom it is always a long walk back.
We stopped in the deeper shadows of a tree, looking to the torches that spat and sputtered in the rain. A huge man stood there, wide as the two of us together. “It will take more than a foot of sword to scuttle that ship,” my father whispered. “Let me have him.”
“You have too much appetite,” I said, “but do you take him if you reach him first.”
The huge man was striding about, bawling his displeasure. His was a brutal, bullying manner, and I had never seen a man it would give me more pleasure to bleed.
“Lazy!” he shouted. “Starve a slave and he sleeps; feed him and he fornicates!”
They were coming with baskets on their heads, a line of them moving toward the gate. Seeing no guards, I judged they would be outside, as there was a torch there, also.
A stir of movement in the shadows near the building. It was the girl whose advice had given us this chance, but the big eunuch saw the movement also.
“You, there! Come out from there! Allah, the Holy, the Compassionate, what have we here?”
A guard stepped through the gate. “Give her to us. She would be of no use to you, Laban.”
“Speak for yourself, soldier, and find your own women. In my case the operation was not complete, and I shall—!”
Stepping into the open, I said, “Then I shall complete the operation, Fat One, and open your belly to the rain!”
My father sprang past me, and the big eunuch screamed as he took the steel. Striking aside the blade of the soldier, I lunged, too swiftly! He caught me with but the tip of his point, and it drew blood, but my blade backhanded, and the razor-edge of it half severed his arm. He stumbled back, and seeing their chance the slaves dropped their burdens and rushed the gate.
The soldier I had slashed came at me, but my point pinned him, and my father was at the gate. “Too slow!” he shouted. “Come, take a lesson at this!”
Yet at the moment he would have passed through, the big guard swung it shut. The lock clicked shut. From far away there was a shout and a sound of running men.
The key was gone.
Our chances had gone with it, unless …
“Stand back!” I said, and I jammed one of my sections of lead pipe behind the handle of the gate and close against the socket that held the bolt. Another I hung from a string to a hinge, then lighted both fuses.
“Back!” I shouted. “Stand back!”
“What is it?” My father grasped my arm. “What do you do?”
“The Chinese call it huo yao, the fire chemical,” I said.
The running feet were closer; outside, a guard pounded against the gate. The strings hissed as the fire crept. My heart was pounding. Was it too wet? Was the book mistaken? Half frightened by the forces I might be loosing, I stepped back, moving my father and the girl with me.
Was it true? That which I read so long ago in Córdoba? That thunder, lightning, and destruction were hidden in that dust? Armed men were running upon us, light from the torches reflected from their naked blades. Now they were coming through the garden, among the trees …
The night ripped apart with a shattering blast, and a tremendous flame shot up, then another. Something whizzed past my head with an angry snarl, and we were surrounded by a choking, billowing smoke.
Behind us, men stopped running, astonished by the blast of sound, the smoke, and the huge flashes of light. Through the smoke we could see the shattered gate, hanging only in fragments from the bottom hinge.
My father was first through the opening, and we were close behind. The outer guard’s head was blown away, an arm gone at the shoulder; that much I glimpsed as we fled, leaping and bounding down the storm-swept rocks of the mountainside, for as if envious of our blast, the storm broke in all its fury.
Lightning hurled its flaming lances against the mountainside, ripping apart the curtain of the sky with writhing fire-snakes that raced with incredible speed along the naked peaks of the mountains.
We ran shouting into the night, crazy with our joy at being free, and around and before us ran the slaves, free also. We fell, we scrambled up, charging on, our madness unabated. The meadow was just below, and with Allah to be blessed, Khatib came riding from the shadows. Towering above us were the massive walls of Alamut, and then suddenly, as if from the ground, a dozen soldiers.
My father, berserk with freedom, the storm, and the feel of a sword in his hand at last, sprang to meet them, sweeping the head from the shoulders of the nearest, and then the slaves were upon them. One leaped to the shoulders of a soldier and began tearing at his eyes with long, raking fingers.