Private preserves? New Notions?
Measure me a quart of honesty,
And I will trade it for a pound weight of my thoughts.
Then you and I shall go and dream together
A brand-new dream of things that never happened,
Nor ever can be. Come, trade with me!
What Yasmini had been doing in the minutes while King stared from the
ledge in the dawn was unguessable. Perhaps she had been praying to
her old gods. At least she had given Ismail strict orders, for he said
nothing, but seized King's hand and led him through the dark as a rat
leads a blind one--swiftly, surely, unhesitating. King had no means
whatever of guessing their direction. They did not pass the two lights
again with the curtain and the steps all glowing red.
They came instead to other steps, narrow and steep, that led upward in a
semicircle to a rough hole in a rock wall. At the top there was a little
yellow light, so dim and small that its rays scarcely sufficed to show
the opening.
“Go up!” said Ismail, giving King a shove and disappearing at once. One
side-step into blackness and he might have been a mile away.
So King went up, stooping to feel each next footing with a cautious
hand. He was beginning to be sleepy, and to suspect that Yasmini had
taken him to view the dawn with just that end in view. Nothing can make
tired eyes so long for sleep as a glimpse of waking day--Sleepy eyes are
easiest to trick.
It was not many minutes before he was sure his guess was right.
The opening at the head of the stairs led into a tunnel. He followed
it with a hand on either wall and reached another of Khinjan's strange
leather curtains. His face struck the leather unexpectedly, and at that
instant, as if his touch were electric, the curtain sprang aside and his
eyes were dazzled by the light of diamonds.
It was Aladdin's Cave, with her acting spirit of the lamp! It needed
effort of self-control to know that the huge, white, cut crystals that
sparkled all about the hewn cell could not be diamonds. They were as big
as his head, and bigger--at least a hundred of them, and they multiplied
the light of half a dozen little oil lamps until the cave seemed the
home of light.
Yasmini had not a jewel on her. She was in a new mood and new garments
to suit it. Her feet were still bare, but she was robed from head to
heel in pure white linen, on which her long hair shone as if it were
truly strands of gold. She received him with an air of mystic calm,
gracious and dignified as the high-priestess of a Grecian temple. She
seemed devout--to have forgotten that she ever killed a man, or made a
threat or plotted for a kingdom.
“Be still,” she said, raising a finger. “The old gods talk to us in
here. It is not for us to answer them in words, but in deeds. Let us
listen and do!”
There were two cushions--great billowy modern ones, covered in gold
brocade--on the floor in the midst of the cave. Between them was a stand
of ivory, some two feet high, whose top was a disk, cut from the largest
tusk that ever could have been. On the disk resting in a little hollow
in the ivory, was a pure, perfect crystal sphere of a foot diameter.
He could see his reflection in it, and Yasmini's, too, the moment he
entered the cave, and whichever way they moved both images remained
undistorted. He suspected that the lighting and the crystal reflectors
had not been arranged at random.
In each corner of the four-square cave there was a brazier of bronze,
and from each rose incense smoke, straight upward. The four streams of
smoke met at the ceiling and converged into a cloud that hung almost
motionless.
Yasmini stepped very reverently to a cushion by the crystal in the
middle, and signed to King to imitate her. They stood facing. She seemed
to pray, for her eyes were hidden under the long lashes. Then she knelt,
and King did the same, his knees sinking deep into another cushion. So
they knelt eye to eye above the crystal for many minutes without either
saying a word. It was Yasmini who spoke first.
“The old gods have showed me the past many and many a time in this,” she
said. “It is, their way of speaking to me. Now, to-day, I have prayed to
them to show me the future. Look! Look, Athelstan! Do as I do--so!”
There seemed nothing to be gained by disobeying her. To obey her might
be to win new insight into the ramifications of her plans. Men who have
experience of the East are the last to deny that there is method in
Eastern magic; they glimpse the knowledge that belonged to Pharaoh's
men, although unlike Moses they are not always able to confound it. The
East forgets nothing. The West ignores. But there are men from the West
who are willing to look and to listen and to try to understand; like
King, they go high in the Service. There are others who look on at the
magic with an understanding eye and are caught by it. Their end is not
good to contemplate. The East is fettered in her own mesmeric spell and
must suffer until she wakes.
Yasmini held the upright column of the ivory stand with both hands,
close under the disk at the top. He copied her, placing his hands below
hers. Hers slipped down and covered his, soft and warm; and so they
stayed.
“Look!” she said. “Look!”
Her own eyes were grown big and round, and she gazed at the crystal ball
as she had looked into King's eyes that night, with the very hunger of
her soul. Her lips were parted. Watching her, King grew expectant, too.
His eyes followed hers, to stare into the middle of the crystal, no
longer feeling sleepy, and in less than a minute he could not have
withdrawn them had he tried.
The crystal clouded over. Yasmini's breath came steadily, with a little
hissing sound between her teeth, and the crystal, or else the whole
world, seemed to sway in time to it. Then the man in Roman armor strode
out of a mist, and all was steady again and easy to understand. When the
man in armor opened his lips to speak, one knew what he had said. When
he frowned, one knew why he frowned. When he smiled, one knew that she
was coming.
And she did come, dancing out of the mist behind him, to fling soft arms
round his neck and whisper praises in his ear. He stood like a king who
has come into his own, with an arm round her and his chin held high. She
kissed him on his proud chin, and laughed into his face.
There were troubles--difficulties, all in the mist behind, but he stood
and despised them then while she caressed him!
Just as spoken words had no part in the vision, yet the whole was
understood, so time did not enter into it. There was no connecting link
between each scene; each dissolved into the other, and all were one.
She faded into mist, in a swirl of graceful drapery, and he frowned
again. A long line of men-at-arms stood before him, grim as he and as
discontented. They leaned on spears, at ease, and that seemed to annoy
him most of all. A spokesman stood out from the ranks and addressed him,
with gesticulations and a head so far thrown back that his helmet-plume
stood out like a secretary's pen behind him. He was not a Roman,
although there was something Roman about his attitude and armor. None of
the men-at-arms was a Roman.
They demanded to be led home, wherever home was. (It was as plain as if
their spokesman had shouted it into King's ear aloud.) And he refused
them bluntly, proudly.
Two men brought him a native woman, each holding an arm and thrusting
her forward between them. She was not at all unlike a native woman of
to-day, either in dress or sullenness; she had the beak and the keen
eyes and the cruel lips of the “Hills.” They showed her to him, and it
was quite clear that they compared her to their own women, left behind;
the comparison was plainly to her disadvantage.
He wasted no argument on them, but his scorn made the two men fade away,
and the woman with them. Yet he had no scorn for his lined-up fighting
men, and so could act none. He ordered the spokesman back to the ranks,
and the man obeyed. He gave another order, and the long lines stood at
attention, spears straight up and down, and their round sheilds like
great medallions on a wall. He ordered them away, but they stood still.
Then he did a truly Roman thing. He got his harness off--unbuckled and
took off the great bronze corselet, in which he lay dead in another
cave. He threw it down--tore open the white shirt underneath--and held
his arms out. He bade them come and kill him. He bade them drive their
spears into his unprotected breast.
There was not a movement down the line of men. They stood
as a cliff looks at the tide. He dared them. He called them
cowards--women--weaklings afraid of blood. But they stood still. He
strode up and down the line, seeking a man with heart enough to plunge a
spear into him, and no man moved.
Then he stood still before them all again and wept, because they loved
him and he loved them. And then she came, not dancing this time, but
barefooted and walking like a poem of the early days of Greece. She
picked up his corselet and buckled it on him, making him hold up
his arms and kneel while she slipped it over his head. And the grim
men-at-arms hove their long spears up into the air and roared her an
ovation, bringing down their right feet with a thunder all together.
“Ave!”
But the mist closed up and then the crystal was clear again. It was
Yasmini's voice that spoke, King looked up into her eyes, and they
made him shudder, for he had never seen eyes like them. Her hands still
clasped his own, burning hot. She was more terrible than Khinjan.
“I never saw that before,” she said. “It is because you are here! We
shall see it all now! We shall know it all! We shall know whether it
was she who killed him, or whether his own men took him at his word. We
shall know! Look again! Look again!”
His eyes seemed unable to obey his own will any longer. They obeyed
her voice. He gazed again into the crystal, and it clouded over. But
although he obeyed her, the crystal obeyed him and answered at least in
part the questions his imagination asked. He was not conscious of asking
anything, but being a soldier his curiosity followed a more or less
definite line.
Yasmini's breath began to come and go again with the little hissing
sound. Her hot hands pressed his own. The mist suddenly dissolved. There
was a road--a long white road, across a plain, and the men-at-arms
fought their way along it. They were facing east.
Archers opposed them--archers on foot, and cavalry--Parthians. The
Parthians were wild, but the drill of the men-at-arms was a thing to
marvel at. When the flights of arrows came they knelt behind their
shields. When the horsemen charged they closed in solid phalanx, and
the inner ranks hurled javelins at ten-yard range. When the fury of the
onslaught died they formed in column and went forward, gaining furlongs
at a time while their enemy watched them and wondered.
It was plain that the enemy expected them to retreat sooner or later,
for the archers and cavalry were at great pains to get behind them, so
that before long the road ahead was less well defended than that behind.
It did not seem to occur to the enemy that they were pressing toward the
distant line of hills and did not seek to return at all.
They had no baggage to impede them. It was absurd to suppose they would
not try to fight a way back soon. They must be a Roman raiding party,
out to teach Parthians a lesson. Yet they pressed ever forward, and the
hills grew ever nearer; while he sat a great brown charger calmly in
their midst and gave them not too many orders, but here and there a word
of praise, and once or twice a trumpet shout of encouragement. He seemed
to own the knack of being wherever the fight was fiercest. His mere
presence seemed better than a hundred men when the phalanx bent before
charging cavalry.
She rode a little white horse, beside him always and utterly scornful
of the risk. She wore no armor--carried no shield. Her bare feet showed
through the sandal straps, and the outlines of her lissom body were
quite visible through the muslin stuff she wore. She might have just
come from the dancing. She had a flower in her hand, and a wreath of
flowers in her hair. She shouted more encouragement than he. She shouted
too much. Once he laid a strong brown hand across her mouth, and she
held it there and kissed it.
They lost men--five or six or ten or twenty at each onslaught. Perhaps
they had been a thousand strong in the beginning. Their own men--the
regimental surgeons probably--cut the throats of the badly wounded, to
save them from the enemy's attentions; and by this time they were not
more than seven or eight hundred strong.
But they went forward--ever forward--and the line of hills drew near.
Then he began to stir himself, and she with him. He shouted to them to
charge, and she echoed him, leaving his side at last to take command
of a wing and sting the tired-out men-at-arms into new enthusiasm. In
a minute they were a roaring tide that swept forward to the foot of the
hills and surged upward without a check. In a little while they were
hurling boulders down on an enemy that seemed inclined to parley.
Then, like a shadow of the incense cloud above, the mist closed up in
the crystal again, and in a moment more King and Yasmini were looking
into each other's eyes again above it.
“I have seen that before,” she said, shaking her, head. “I am weary of
their battles. They won; that is enough! I must know how they failed, so
that we make no such mistakes!”
Her face was flushed, and her eyes glowed with the fire that is not lit
by ordinary passion. She was being eaten by ambition--burned by her own
fire--by ambition not totally selfish, for she yearned to shepherd King
as she seemed to think this woman of the vision had not shepherded the
man in armor.
“Look again!” she said. “Look again! And oh, ye old gods, show--show me
wherein she failed!”
They stared again, and once more the crystal clouded. Out of the cloud
came a city in the middle of a plain, and the city was besieged. It was
not a very great city, but from the outside it looked rich, for domes
and roofs and towers showed above the wall, all well built and well
preserved. He and she, sitting their horses out of arrow range from the
main gate seemed confident of taking it and eager to get it over with.
They no longer had only six or seven hundred men, but men by the
thousand. Their veterans in Roman armor were in command of others now,
and they had a human pack-train with them, heavily burdened captives who
sulked in chains under a guard.
The mist cleared further, and the gate gave in under the blows of an
improvised battering-ram, covered by showers of arrows from short
range. Then, like a river breaking down a dam, the thousands stormed in,
howling. Smoke rose. There were screams of women. A great tower near the
gate, that was half wood, half stone, crackled and curled up in yellow
and crimson flame. He and she rode in together as modern men and women
ride through a gate to the covert side at a fox-hunt. They chatted and
laughed together, and their horses pranced, responding to the humor of
their riders.
King would have liked to tear his eyes away from the scenes that
followed in the tree-lined streets, but the crystal ball held him as
if in a trance--that and Yasmini's hands that clasped his own like hot
torture chamber clamps. Animals fighting to the death are not so vile,
nor so inhuman as men can be in the hour of what they call victory. Even
the little children of that city paid the penalty for having closed the
gate.
Time was no measure to the crystal ball. In minutes it showed the
devil's work of hours. The city went up in smoke and flame, and from
the far side through a great breach in the wall the conquerors went
out, with their plunder and such prisoners as had been saved to drag and
carry it.
Now there were wagons and camels and horses. Now there were tents and
furniture. Now each man of the fighting force had as much as he himself
could carry, as well as what was loaded on the prisoners.
Only he and she seemed to care nothing for the loot and rode as if each
was all the other needed. Still he wore nothing but his armor, and
she no more than her dancing dress and sandals. But now she had eight
prisoners to hold a panoply above her horse and keep the sun from her.
She had flowers woven in her hair, and others in her hand, as if she
rode from a bridal feast and were not in mourning for a plundered,
butchered city. They were headed northward now, toward distant
mountains, and the dust of their long column went up like a river of
smoke, flowing from the holocaust behind.
Yasmini shook her head impatiently. The crystal clouded over, and King's
eyes were free.
“I am tired of it,” she said. “I have seen that so many times. I know
they won. I know they found their way to Khinjan. I know they began to
build an empire here. I have seen all that a hundred times. What I must
know is what mistake they made. What did they do wrong? How did they
come to fail? Look again! Let us look again!”
She never once let King's hands go, but pressed them tighter and
tighter until the circulation nearly stopped and they grew numb. Her own
strength seemed endless--to grow rather than to wane in proportion as
her yearning to look into the past grew. Her attitude would have
been more understandable if she had believed herself and King to be
reincarnations of those forgotten conquerors; but she was too original
for that. She had said the old gods wished, and the man and the woman
were; the old gods wished the same wish again, and she and King were.
Why then, if the old gods were contriving it all, should she seek to
steady the ark for them? But down at bottom there is no logic connected
with gods many. She clutched King's fingers as if to hold him there, and
to make him see and understand the distant past, were the only way to
save him from mistakes.
“Look!” she insisted. “Look again!” And he obeyed her. By this time
obedience was much the easiest course. Between times his eyes were so
weary he could hardly hold them open, and it was only when he gazed into
the crystal that he could rest them and feel easy. He knew well that
she was winning control over him in some sort, and he fought against it
grimly. Soon he became weirdly conscious of being two men--one, whom she
had grasped and overcome, a physical man who did not matter much, and
another, mental man who was free from her, who could understand her,
whom she could not reach or touch.
“Look!” she insisted. “Look!” And the crystal clouded over.
He strode out of the mist again, frowning, with his chin hung low and
fists clenched tight at his sides. Four of his own men came out of the
mist to him and greeted him respectfully, yet not without a touch of
irony.
They spoke to him and pointed westward. One laid a hand on his shoulder,
but he shook it off and the man reeled back as if he had been struck.
Another man took up the argument, but he shook his head. They all spoke
together, gesticulating and growing angry; but he stood calm among them,
as a rock stands in a storm. He folded his arms across his breast after
a while and listened, saying nothing.
Then as if to end the argument for good and all, he drew his sword and
held it out toward them, hilt first, telling them again to kill him
and have done with it. They refused. He laughed at them, but they still
refused; so he put his sword back in the sheath.
One of the men stepped into the mist and disappeared. Presently he
came again, with two others, helping a wounded man along between them.
Whoever the wounded man might be he was treated with respect. Prouder
than Lucifer, he who had struck another man's hand from off his shoulder
knelt to give this wounded man a knee and seemed pained when the man
refused him.
The wounded man pointed to the westward too and argued in short
clipped-off sentences. He had a day or two to live--certainly not
longer, for the blood flowed slowly from a wound that would not stanch;
yet he argued as a man who has lost no interest in life, but rather sees
its problems truly now that his own are near an end.
He demanded something almost truculently. He took his helmet off and
passed it down to him. With fingers that were growing feeble the wounded
man held it and traced out the letters S. P. Q. R. on the front.
“Go home!” he said, passing it back to him. “Fight your way back home!”
What he said was as distinct as if a voice in the cave had spoken it.
Then, vision within a vision--dream within a dream--there was a view of
the Via Appia, with gaunt grim gallows set along it in a row and on them
a regiment's commander crucified along with the remnant of his men.
“So Rome treats traitors!” said a voice, that might have been either
man's.
But instantly there was another vision, of ten thousand wolves baying
down a Himalayan gorge in winter-time, the sleet frozen stiff on their
fur and their tongues hanging. Eye and fang flashed altogether and made
one gleam.
“Choose!” said a voice.
So he chose. He nodded. The men saluted him, and the wounded man was
helped away to die. And then she came, angry as a flash of lightning, to
spring at him and cling to him and call him names--begging, demanding,
ordering, crying--abusing him and praising him in turn. He shook his
head. She sobbed, but he shook his head again and pointed westward.
Then she took him by the hand and led him away, not looking at his face
again.
The crystal ball grew clouded. Yasmini's breath came and went as if she
were running in a race, and her pressure on King's fingers was actually
painful. The mist dissolved, and King forgot the pressure--forgot
everything. The man in armor lay dead on his back in the cave on the
wooden bed, and she bent over him, dagger in hand.
“Ah!” said Yasmini, her teeth chattering. “But what else could she do?”
The mist closed in again and the crystal grew opaque. “The future!” she
begged. “It is the future I must know! Ye old gods, tell me! Show me!”
The mist turned red. The crystal ball became as it were a ball of fire
revolving within itself. The fire turned to blood, and the blood to
fire again. The very cavern that they knelt in seemed to sway. Yasmini
screamed and moaned. She loosed King's hands to cover her own eyes.
And as she did that King sank, like a sack half-empty and toppled over
sidewise on the floor asleep.
He neither dreamed nor was conscious of anything, but slept like a dead
man, having fought against her mesmerism harder than he knew.
Statesmen, generals, outlaws, all make their big mistakes and manage to
recover. Very nearly always it is an apparently little mistake that does
most damage in the end, something unnoticeable at the time, that grows
in geometrical proportion, minus instead of plus.
Yasmini made her little mistake that minute in believing King was
utterly mesmerized at last and utterly in her power. Whereas in truth he
was only weary. It may be that she gave him orders in his sleep, after
the accepted manner of mesmerists; but if she did, they never reached
him; he was far too fast asleep. He slept so deep and long that he was
not conscious of men's voices, nor of being carried, nor of time, nor of
anxiety, nor of anything.