King--of the Khyber Rifles: A Romance of Adventure by Talbot Mundy (ink ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Chapter XI Long slept the Heart o' the Hills, oh, long! (Ye who have watched, ye know!) As sap sleeps in the deodars When winter shrieks and steely stars Blink over frozen snow. Ye haste? The sap stirs now, ye say? Ye feel the pulse of spring? But sap must rise ere buds may break, Or cubs fare forth, or bees awake, Or lean buck spurn the ling!

“Kurram Khan!” the lashless mullah howled, like a lone wolf in the moonlight, and King stood up.

It is one of the laws of Cocker, who wrote the S. S. Code, that a man is alive until he is proved dead, and where there is life there is opportunity. In that grim minute King felt heretical; but a man's feelings are his own affair provided he can prove it, and he managed to seem about as much at ease as a native hakim ought to feel at such an initiation.

“Come forward!” the mullah howled, and he obeyed, treading gingerly between men who were at no pains to let him by, and silently blessing them, because he was not really in any hurry at all. Yasmini looked lovely from a distance, and life was sweet.

“Who are his witnesses?”

“Witnesses?” the roof hissed.

“I!” shouted Ismail, jumping up.

“I!” cracked the roof. “I! I!” So that for a second King almost believed he had a crowd of men to swear for him and did not hear Darya Khan at all, who rose from a place not very far behind where had sat.

Ismail followed him in a hurry, like a man wading a river with loose clothes gathered in one arm and the other arm ready in case of falling. He took much less trouble than King not to tread on people, and oaths' marked his wake.

Darya Khan did not go so fast. As he forced his way forward a man passed him up the wooden box that King had used to stand on; he seized it in both hands with a grin and a jest and went to stand behind King and Ismail, in line with the lashless mullah, facing Yasmini. Yasmini smiled at them all as if they were actors in her comedy, and she well pleased with them.

“Look ye!” howled the mullah. “Look ye and look well, for this is to be one of us!”

King felt ten thousand eyes burn holes in his back, but the one pair of eyes that mocked him from the bridge was more disconcerting.

“Turn, Kurram Khan! Turn that all may see!”

Feeling like a man on a spit, he revolved slowly. By the time he had turned once completely around, besides knowing positively that one of the two bracelets on her right arm was the one he had worn, or else its exact copy, he knew that he was not meant to die yet; for his eyes could work much more swiftly than the horn-rimmed spectacles made believe. He decided that Yasmini meant he should be frightened, but not much hurt just yet.

So he ceased altogether to feel frightened and took care to look more scared than ever.

“Who paid the price of thy admission?” the mullah howled, and King cleared his throat, for he was not quite sure yet what that might mean.

“Speak, Kurram Khan!” Yasmini purred, smiling her loveliest. “Tell them whom you slew.”

King turned and faced the crowd, raising himself on the balls of his feet to shout, like a man facing thousands of troops on parade. He nearly gave himself away, for habit had him unawares. A native hakim, given the stoutest lungs in all India, would not have shouted in that way.

“Cappitin Attleystan King!” he roared. And he nearly jumped out of his skin when his own voice came rattling back at him from the roof overhead.

“Cappitin Attleystan King!” it answered.

Yasmini chuckled as a little rill will sometimes chuckle among ferns. It was devilish. It seemed to say there were traps not far ahead.

“Where was he slain?” asked the mullah.

“In the Khyber Pass,” said King.

“In the Khyber Pass!” the roof whispered hoarsely, as if aghast at such cold-bloodedness.

“Now give proof!” said the mullah. “Words at the gate--proof in the cavern! Without good proof, there is only one way out of here!”

“Proof!” the crowd thundered. “Proof!”

“Proof! Proof! Proof!” the roof echoed.

There was no need for Darya Khan to whisper. King's hands were behind him, and he had seen what he had seen and guessed what he had guessed while he was turning to let the crowd look at him. His fingers closed on human hair.

“Nay, it is short!” hissed Darya Khan. “Take the two ears, or hold it by the jawbone! Hold it high in both hands!”

King obeyed, without looking at the thing, and Ismail, turning to face the crowd, rose on tiptoe and filled his lungs for the effort of his life.

“The head of Cappitin Attleystan King--infidel kaffir--British arrficer!” he howled.

“Good!” the crowd bellowed. “Good! Throw it!”

The crowd's roar and the roof's echoes combined until pandemonium.

“Throw it to them, Kurram Khan!” Yasmini purred from the bridge end, speaking as softly and as sweetly, as if she coaxed a child. Yet her voice carried.

He lowered the head, but instead of looking at it he looked up at her. He