Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures Read online

  Only armed men now traversed the streets. The great wooden, iron-bound gates of the quarters were locked, as in times of civil war. Through the lowering arch of the great gate of Zuweyla, cantered troops of black horsemen, the torchlight crimsoning their naked scimitars. Their silk cloaks flowed in the wind, their black arms gleamed like polished ebony.

  De Guzman had not broken his oath to Al Afdhal. Sure that the Turk would betray him to the Moslems if he did not seem to comply with the other’s demand, the Spaniard had ridden out of the city, and into the Mukattam hills, before the sun was high. But he had not sworn he would not return. Sunset had seen him riding into the crumbling suburbs, where thieves and jackals slunk with furtive tread.

  Now he moved on foot through the streets, entering the shops where girdled warriors gorged themselves on melons and nuts and meat, and surreptitiously guzzled wine, and he listened to their talk.

  “Where are the Berbers?” demanded a moustached Turk, cramming his jaws with a handful of almond cakes.

  “They sulk in their quarter,” answered another. “They swear that el Ghazi was slain by the Sudani, and display Zaman’s ring to prove it. All men know that ring. But Zaman has disappeared. The black emir Othman swears he knows naught of it. But he can not deny the ring. Already a dozen men had been killed in brawls when the caliph ordered us Memluks to beat them apart. By Allah, this has been a day of days!”

  “The madness of Al Hakim has brought it about,” declared another, lowering his voice and glancing warily around. “How long shall we suffer this Shiite dog to lord it over us?”

  “Have a care,” cautioned his mate. “He is caliph, and our swords are his – as long as Es Salih Muhammad so orders it. But if the revolt breaks out afresh, the Berbers are more likely to fight against the Sudani than with them. Men say that Al Hakim has taken Zaida, el Ghazi’s concubine, into his harim, and that angers the Berbers more, making them suspect that el Ghazi was slain, if not by the order of Al Hakim, at least with his consent. But Wellah, their anger is naught beside that of Zulaikha, whom the caliph has put aside! Her rage, men say, is that of a desert storm.”

  De Guzman waited to hear no more, but rising, he hastened out of the wine-shop. If anyone knew the secrets of the royal palace, that one was Zulaikha. And a discarded mistress is a sure tool for vengeance. De Guzman’s mission had become more than a private hunt for the life of a personal enemy. Even now out of the mysterious fastnesses of the caliph’s palace rumors crept, and already in the bazaars men spoke of an invasion of Spain. De Guzman knew that the ferocious fighting ability of the Spaniards would not, in the end, avail them against such a force as Al Hakim might be able to hurl against them. Perhaps only a madman would entertain the idea of world empire, but a madman might accomplish it; and whatever the ultimate fate of Europe, the doom of Castile was sealed if the hordes of Africa rolled up the mountain passes. De Guzman thought little of Europe; the lands beyond the Pyrenees were dim and shadowy to him, not much more real than the empires of Alexander and the Caesars. It was Castile of which he thought, and the fierce passionate people of the savage uplands, than which no other blood beat hotly through his veins.

  Skirting el Mansuriya, he crossed the canal and made his way to the grove of palms near the shore. Groping in the darkness among the marble ruins, he found and lifted the slab. Again he advanced through pitch blackness and dripping water, stumbled on the other stair and mounted it. His fingers found and worked a metal bolt, and he emerged into the now unlighted corridor. The house was silent but the reflection of lights elsewhere indicated that it was still occupied, doubtless by the slain emir’s servants and women.

  Uncertain as to which way led to the outer air, he set off at random, passed through a curtained archway – and found himself confronted by half a dozen black slaves who sprang up glaring, sword in hand. Before he could retreat he heard a shout and rush of feet behind him. Cursing his luck, he ran straight at the bewildered black men. A flickering whirl of steel and he was through, leaving a writhing, bleeding form behind him, and was dashing through a doorway on the other side of the broad chamber. Curved blades were whickering at his back, and as he slammed the door behind him, steel rang on the stout oak, and glittering points showed in the splintering panels. He shot the bolt and whirled, glaring about for an avenue of escape. His gaze fell on a gold-barred window nearby.

  With a headlong rush and a straining gasp of effort, he launched himself full into the window. With a splintering crash the soft bars gave way, the whole casement was torn out before the impact of his hurtling body. He shot through into empty space, just as the door crashed inward and a swarm of howling figures flooded into the room.

  V

  In the Great East Palace, where slave-girls and eunuchs glided on stealthy bare feet, no echo reverberated of the hell that raged outside the walls. In a chamber whose dome was of gold-filigreed ivory, Al Hakim, clad in a white silk robe that made him look even more ghostly and unreal, sat cross-legged on a couch of gemmed ebony, and stared with his wide unblinking eyes at Zaida the Venetian who knelt before him.

  Zaida was no longer clad in the rags of a slave. Her dolyman was of crimson Mosul silk, bordered with cloth-of-gold, her girdle of satin sewn with pearls. The fabric of her wide bag drawers was sheer as gossamer, seeming to glow softly with the pink flesh it scarcely veiled. Her ear-rings were set with great pear-shaped jewels. Her long lashes were touched with kohl, her fingers tipped with henna. She knelt on a cloth-of-gold cushion.

  But amidst all this splendor, which outshone anything even this play-thing of princes had ever known, the Venetian’s eyes were shadowed. For the first time in her life she found herself actually to be a plaything. She had inspired Al Hakim’s latest madness, but she had not mastered him. A night, an hour, she had expected to bend him to her will. Now he seemed withdrawn from her, and there was an expression in his cold inhuman eyes which made her shudder.

  Suddenly he spoke, ponderously, portentously, like a god voicing doom: “It is not meet that gods mate with mortals.”

  She started, opened her mouth, then feared to speak.

  “Love is human and a weakness,” he continued broodingly. “I will cast it from me. Gods are beyond love. And weakness assails me when I lie in your arms.”

  “What do you mean, my lord?” she ventured fearfully.

  “Even the gods must sacrifice,” he answered somberly. “Love of a human is blasphemy to the godhead. I give you up, lest my divinity weaken.”

  He clapped his hands deliberately, and a eunuch entered on all-fours – a newly instituted custom.

  “Send in the emir Othman,” ordered Al Hakim, and the eunuch bumped his head violently against the floor and backed awkwardly out of the presence.

  “No!” Zaida sprang up in a frenzy. “Oh my lord, have mercy! You can not give me to that black beast! You can not – ”

  She was on her knees, catching at his robe, which he drew back from her fingers.

  “Woman!” he thundered. “Are you mad? Would you draw doom upon yourself? Would you assail the person of God?”

  Othman entered uncertainly, and in evident trepidation; a warrior of barbaric Darfur, he had risen to his present high estate by wild fighting and a brutal form of diplomacy.

  Al Hakim pointed to the cowering woman at his feet and spake briefly: “Take her!”

  The Sudani never questioned the commands of his monarch. A broad grin split his ebon countenance, and stooping, he caught up Zaida, who writhed and screamed in his grasp. As he bore her out of the chamber, she twisted in his arms, extending her white hands in passionate entreaty. Al Hakim answered not; he sat with hands folded, his gaze detached and impersonal as that of a hashish eater. If he heard the screams of his erstwhile favorite, he gave no sign.

  But another heard. Crouching in an alcove, a slim brown-skinned girl watched the grinning Sudani carry his writhing captive up the hall. Scarcely had he vanished when she fled in another direction, garments caught up above her twinkling bro
wn legs.

  Othman, the favored of the caliph, alone of all the emirs dwelt in the Great Palace, which was really an aggregation of palaces united in one mighty structure, which housed thirty thousand servants of Al Hakim. He dwelt in a wing that opened on to the southern quarter of the Beyn el Kasreyn. To reach it, it was not necessary for him to emerge from the palace. Following winding corridors, crossing an occasional open court paved with mosaics and bordered with fretted arches supported on alabaster columns, he came to his own house.

  Black swordsmen guarded the door of black teak, banded with arabesqued copper which separated his quarters from the rest of the palace. But even as he came in sight of that door, down a broad panelled corridor, a supple form glided from a curtained doorway and barred his way.

  “Zulaikha!” The black recoiled in almost superstitious awe; the woman’s slim white hands clenched and unclenched in a refinement of passion too subtle and deep for his brutish comprehension; and over the filmy yasmaq her eyes burned like gems from hell.

  “A servant brought me word that Al Hakim had discarded the red-haired slut,” said the Arab. “Sell her therefore to me! For I owe her a debt that I fain would pay.”

  “Why should I sell her?” objected the Sudani, fidgeting in animal impatience. “The caliph has given her to me. Stand aside, woman, lest I do you an injury.”

  “Have you heard what the Berbers shout in the streets?” she asked.

  He started, greying slightly. “What is that to me?” he blustered, but his voice was not steady.

  “They howl for the head of Othman,” she said coolly and with venom. “They call you the murderer of Zahir el Ghazi. What if I went to them and told them that what they suspect is true?”

  “But I had naught to do with it!” he exclaimed wildly, like a man caught in an unseen net.

  “I can produce men to swear they saw you help Zaman cut him down,” she assured him.

  “I’ll kill you!” he whispered.

  She laughed in his face.

  “You dare not, black beast of the grass lands! Now will you sell me the red-haired jade, or will you fight the Berbers?”

  His hands slipped from their hold and let Zaida fall to the floor.

  “Take her and begone!” he muttered, his black skin ashen.

  “Take first your pay!” she retorted with vindictive malice, and hurled a handful of coins full in his face. He shrank back like a great black ape, his eyes burning red, his dusky hands opening and closing in helpless blood-lust.

  Ignoring him, Zulaikha bent over Zaida, who crouched dazed with sick helplessness, crushed by the realization of her impotence against this new conqueror, against whom, as a member of her own sex, all the witchery and wiles she had played against men were helpless. Zulaikha gathered the Venetian’s red locks in her fingers and forcing her head brutally back, stared into her eyes with a fierce and hungry possessiveness that turned Zaida’s blood to ice.

  The Arab clapped her hands and four Syrian eunuchs entered.

  “Take her up and bear her to my house,” Zulaikha ordered, and they laid hold of the shrinking Venetian and bore her away. Zulaikha followed, her pink nails sinking into her palms, as she breathed softly between her clenching teeth.

  VI

  When Diego de Guzman plunged through the window, he had no idea of what lay in the darkness beneath him. He did not fall far, and he crashed among shrubs that broke his fall. Springing up, he saw his pursuers crowding through the window he had just shattered, hindering one another by their numbers. He was in a garden, a great shadowy place of trees and ghostly blossoms. The next instant he was racing among the shadows, weaving in and out among the shrubbery. His hunters blundered among the trees, running aimlessly and at a loss. Unopposed he reached the wall, sprang high, caught the coping with one hand, and heaved himself up and over.

  He halted and sought to orient himself. He had never been in the streets of El Kahira before, but he had heard the inner city described so often that a mental map of it was in his mind. He knew that he was in the Quarter of the Emirs, and ahead of him, over the flat roofs, loomed a great structure which could be only the Lesser West Palace, a gigantic pleasure house, giving onto the far-famed Garden of Kafur. Fairly sure of his ground, he hurried along the narrow street into which he had fallen, and soon emerged on to the broad thoroughfare which traversed El Kahira from the Gate of el Futuh in the north to the Gate of Zuweyla in the south.

  Late as it was there was much stirring abroad. Armed Memluks rode past him; in the broad Beyn el Kasreyn, the great square which lay between the twin palaces, he heard the jingle of reins on restive horses, and saw a squadron of Sudani troopers sitting their steeds under the torchlight. There was reason for their alertness. Far away he heard tom-toms drumming sullenly among the quarters. Somewhere beyond the walls a dull light began to glow against the stars. The wind brought snatches of wild song and distant yells.

  With his soldier’s swagger, and saber hilt thrust prominently forward, de Guzman passed unnoticed among the mailed and weapon-girded figures that stalked the streets. When he ventured to pluck a bearded Memluk’s sleeve and inquire the way to the house of Zulaikha, the Turk gave the information readily and without surprize. De Guzman knew – as all Cairo knew – that however much the Arab had regarded Al Hakim as her special property, she had by no means considered herself the exclusive possession of the caliph. There were mercenary captains who were as familiar with her chambers as was Al Hakim.

  Zulaikha’s house stood just off the broad street, built closely adjoining a court of the East Palace, to the gardens of which indeed it was connected, so that Zulaikha, in the days of her favoritism, could pass between her house and the palace without violating the caliph’s order concerning the seclusion of women. Zulaikha was no servitor; she was the daughter of a free shaykh, and she had been Al Hakim’s mistress, not his slave.

  De Guzman did not anticipate any great difficulty in obtaining entrance into her house; she pulled hidden strings of intrigue and politics, and men of all creeds and conditions were admitted into her audience chamber, where dancing girls and opium offered entertainment. That night there were no dancing girls or guests, but a villainous looking Yemenite without question opened the arched door above which burned a cresset, and showed the false Moor across a small court, up an outer stair, down a corridor and into a broad chamber into which opened a number of fretted arches hung with crimson velvet tapestries.

  The room was empty, under the soft glow of the bronze lamps, but somewhere in the house sounded the sharp cry of a woman in pain, accompanied by rich musical laughter, also in a woman’s voice, and indescribably vindictive and malicious.

  But de Guzman gave it little heed, for it was at that moment that all hell burst loose outside the walls of El Kahira.

  It was a muffled roaring of incredible volume, like the bellowing of a pent-up torrent at last bursting its dam; but it was the wild beast howling of many men. The Yemenite heard too, and went livid under his swarthy skin. Then he cried out and ran into the corridor, as there sounded the swift padding of feet, and a laboring breath.

  In a nearby chamber, straightening from a task she found indescribably amusing, Zulaikha heard a strangled scream outside the door, the swish and chop of a savage blow, and the thud of a falling body. The door burst open and Othman rushed in, a wild and terrifying figure, white eyeballs and bared teeth gleaming in the lamplight, blood dripping from his broad scimitar.

  “Dog!” she exclaimed, drawing herself up like a serpent from its coil. “What do you here?”

  “The woman you took from me!” he mouthed, ape-like in his passion. “The red-haired woman! Hell is loose in Cairo! The quarters have risen! The streets will swim in blood before dawn! Kill! kill! kill! I ride to cut down the Sunnite dogs like bamboo stalks. One more killing in all this slaughter means nothing! Give me the woman before I kill you!”

  Drunk with blood-hunger and frustrated lust, the maddened black had forgotten his fear of Zulaikha. Th
e Arab cast a glance at the naked, quivering figure that lay stretched out and bound hand and foot to a divan. She had not yet worked her full will on her rival. What she had already done had been but an amusing prelude to torture, mutilation and death – agonizing only in its humiliation. All hell could not take her victim from her.

  “Ali! Abdullah! Ahmed!” she shrieked, drawing a jeweled dagger.

  With a bull-like roar, the huge black lunged. The Arab had never fought men, and her supple quickness, without experience or knowledge of combat, was futile. The broad blade plunged through her body, standing out a foot between her shoulders. With a choked cry of agony and awful surprize she crumpled, and the Sudani brutally wrenched his scimitar free as she fell. At that instant Diego de Guzman appeared at the door.

  The Spaniard knew nothing of the circumstances; he only saw a huge black man tearing his sword out of the body of a white woman; and he acted according to his instincts.

  Othman, wheeling like a great cat, threw up his dripping scimitar, only to have it beaten stunningly down on his woolly skull beneath de Guzman’s terrific stroke. He staggered, and the next instant the saber, wielded with all the power of the Spaniard’s knotty muscles, clove his left arm from the shoulder, sheared down through his ribs, and wedged deep in his pelvis.

  De Guzman, grunting and swearing as he twisted his blade out of the prisoning tissue and bone, sweating in fear of an attack before he could free the weapon, heard the rising thunder of the mob, and the hair lifted on his head. He knew that roar – the hunting yell of men, the thunder that has shaken the thrones of the world all down through the ages. He heard the clatter of hoofs on the streets outside, fierce voices shouting commands.

  He turned toward the outer corridor when he heard a voice begging for something, and wheeling back into the chamber, saw, for the first time, the naked figure writhing on the divan. Her limbs and body showed neither gash nor bruise, but her cheeks were wet with tears, the red locks that streamed in wild profusion over her white shoulders were damp with perspiration, and her flesh quivered as if from torture.