The Mating of the Blades/Chapter 1
THE MATING OF THE BLADES
CHAPTER I
A prologue—yet quite necessary to the tale—switching incongruously and illogically from the heart of Asia to the gray heart of London Town. Also introducing a dead Ameer, two oily, shuffling Babus out of Bengal, and a sandy-haired gentleman who likes the view of Poultney's Inn.
Thus, on an auspicious day in the dark half of the sacred month of Dhu'l-Hijja, did they bear to his last resting-place Syyed Mazud Mirza Ahmet Nazredeen el-Arabi el-Husseinyieh Kajar Gengizkhani, Ameer of Tamerlanistan and thirty-ninth of his dynasty, while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while the conches brayed and the tomtoms sobbed and reed pipes shrieked, while white robed, green turbaned Moslem priests chanted the liturgy, and while the smoke from many ceremonial fires ascended to the lapis blue sky in thick, wispy streamers and hung in a ruddy, bloodshot cloud that lit up the palace and told to all Central Asia that the last male member of the Gengizkhani family—Zi'l-Ullah, “Shadow of Allah,” was their arrogant, hereditary title—had gone to join the spirits of his kinsmen in the seventh hall of Mohammed's paradise.
Out of the palace, that crowned the basalt hillside with turrets and bartizans and bell-shaped domes and swung down into the dip of the valley with an avalanche of bold masonry, they carried the dead Ameer; through the western gate, a crumbling marble structure, incrusted with symbolistic figures and archaic terra-cotta medallions, and topped by a lacy, fretted lotus-bud molding; through the maze of the town, with its crooked streets, its low, white houses, its cool gardens ablaze with peach and almond and scarlet flowering peepul trees; through the main bazaar that stretched like a Suruk rug dimmed by the Hand of Time into smoky purple and dull orange; on toward the river where the young sun had crumpled the morning mists into torn gauze veils.
Bolt upright, as during life, the corpse sat on a chair of state that spread up and out like the tail of a peacock. He was attired in his most splendid costume: the arms encircled by jeweled bracelets, shimmering necklaces of pearls and garnets and moonstones and yellow Poonah diamonds hanging to the waist shawl, a huge, carved emerald falling like a drop of green fire from the small, twisted turban, the face painted and powdered, the pointed beard care fully curled and dyed a vivid blue with indigo, between his feet his favorite kalian waterpipe, an immense affair of iron, inlaid with gold arabesques and studded with uncut rubies.
Almost grim, by contrast, was the naked, straight, six-foot blade which lay across his knees. Simple, it was, blue-gray, without engravings or ornaments of any sort.
All the dignitaries of the land were there to speed his soul.
There was Tagi Khan, Master of Horse, in purple silk, his wicked, shriveled old face topped ludicrously by a coquettish turban in pale cerise, beard and finger nails dyed a bright crimson with henna; Koom Khan, the sipar salar—the commander-in-chief, who had left behind his silver-tipped staff of office and was holding in his bony, brown right hand a large cluster of those dark violet lilies which the Persians call First Born Buds, to put upon the grave; the Sheik-ul-Islam, in green silk from head to foot, a miniature Koran bound in red and silver Bokharan leather stuck in his waist shawl; Gulabian, the Armenian treasurer, in sober black, fur capped; Tugluk Khan, the court architect, thinking morosely that his last work—the mausoleum of olive-veined Yezd marble which would house the Ameer by the side of his ancestors—was done.
Came Nedjif Hassan Khan, governor of the eastern marches, whispering to his twin brother and worst enemy, the sheik Abderrahman Yahiah Khan, governor of the western marches; came pipe bearer and slipper bearer and fan bearer; the palace eunuchs, huge, paunchy, plum-colored Nubians, arrogant, sneering; the chief executioner in motley red and black; and many, many others, with bowed head and dragging feet, in token of mourning.
Too, envoys from the neighboring lands; from the East, the Ameer of the Afghans, until thirty years earlier the hereditary foes of the Tamerlanis, had sent his youngest brother, Nasrullah Nadir Khan el-Durani; Persia was fittingly represented by lisping, mincing Mirza Markar Khan, who ogled the women, old and young, veiled and unveiled, as the cortège passed through the bazaar; the stony, cruel North had sent Bokharan chief, Khivan noble, and Turkoman grandee; while, from the South, Sir Craven Elphinstone, C.B., G.C.S.I, deputy resident at the court of Kashmere, slightly self-conscious, slightly nostalgic amidst the thousands of Asiatics, had crossed the Himalayas to tender the condolences of the Raj, the British-Indian government.
Everybody was there, except the late king's only child, the Princess Aziza Nurmahal who, according to the ancient custom, was sitting alone in the tower room of the palace harem, mumbling endless prayers and clicking off the ninety-nine holy names of Allah on her amber rosary; and the Ameer's best, oldest friend and prime minister, Hajji Akhbar Khan, on whom, a year before his death, he had conferred the honorable title of Itizad el-Dowleh—“Grandeur of the State.”
The cortège passed on, out to the willow fringed banks of the Ghulan River that lay across the mauve and rose mosaic of the town like a ribbon of watered silk.
River of grim tragedies!
River of sinister reputations; so sinister that there was not a Tamerlani who ever, knowingly, allowed a drop of it to pass his lips!
River which, for centuries, had been the grave of the thousands of Tamerlanis and raiding Afghans massacred in the narrow streets of the city or slain in fierce combats outside its brown, bastioned walls. Sorrowing widows, disgraced courtiers, vanquished pretenders, and fanatical dervishes had sought the solace of oblivion beneath its placid surface. Faithless wives and dancing girls had been hurled into its depths from a nearby tower that had been erected centuries before and for a reason known to but few had always been called “The Englishman's Boast."
On the river's farther bank stood the mausoleum.
And there they buried the last male member of the Gengizkhani family, while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while the conches brayed and the tomtoms sobbed, while the Princess Aziza Nurmahal cried her heart out, and while, in an opium shop near the bazaar of the mutton butchers on the northern outskirts of the town, the Babu Bansi, a typical Bengali from his round, greasy, chocolate-brown face to his openwork white socks, patent leather pumps, and striped cotton umbrella, bent over the prone form of his countryman, the Babu Chandra.
He made sure that the latter had succumbed completely to the bland, philosophic poppy drug, pressed half a golden toman into the grimy, much beringed fingers of the dancing girl who had filled and refilled the other's opium pipe and, if the truth be told, had made assurance doubly sure by doctoring the sizzling, acrid cubes with asclepias juice and dawamesk-hashish, slipped his hand into the unconscious man's waist shawl, brought out a key, and flitted into the street like an obese and nervous shadow.
As fast as his wobbly calves would let him, he ran to the office of the Anglo-Asian Cable Company of which his countryman was manager, clerk, despatcher, messenger, and factotum in general, opened the door with the stolen key, and busied himself with the telegraph board for half an hour.
Click-clack-clicketty-clack went his nimble fingers, sending a triumphant message across land and sea and land again.
After which, from a mysterious hiding-place about his stout person, he drew a sharp-edged hatchet and smashed the delicate telegraph instruments into a chaotic mass of wooden splinters and twisted copper wires.
Six hours and twenty minutes later, in a dingy, cobwebby office on the top floor of an architectural infamy on Upper Thames Street, just beyond the Fishmongers Hall, in the reeking heart of the City of London, a short, stocky, blue-eyed, sandy-haired man stepped away from the fly-specked window where he had been admiring the deceptively romantic outlines of Poultney's Inn.
“Half a jiff, old cockywax!" he called in answer to the insistent knocking at the door, opened it, and admitted a red-faced, red-capped, impudent messenger boy.
"Cyble, sir,” said the latter, “for—right-oh!—party by name of Gloops!”
“Right you are, young fellow-my-lad. That's our cable address. Hand it over. What you waitin' for? Eh? Tip? Chase yourself!”
“Aw—chyse yer own ruddy self!”
“Out you go!”
And the messenger boy made a hurried and undignified exit propelled by a square-toed, number nine and a quarter blucher whose owner the next second opened the cablegram.
“Gloops, London, England,” he read; and the message continued, in a typical Babu jumble of mixed metaphors and martyrized slang:
“Regret to report old Ameer jolly well popped underground. But ripping old silver lining to proverbial thunderstorm. Have discovered bloody cinch of pinching whole bally swag if Gloops uses gray matter. Do not cable here as have smashed expensive instruments into smithereens and cocked hat to annoy and harass the competition. Cable instead to Teheran using code. Am hot-legging it there like a sizzling whirlwind. Beg to repeat that collaring of swag is no end of ripping old cinch. Am writing particulars. Tell Gloops meanwhile should look up Burke's Peerage find bally old nobility family whose escutcheon is double headed lion and establish with them jolly old social relations.
“My sainted grandaunt Priscilla Mary Jane!” murmured the sandy-haired man. “The whole swag! My word! Won't the guv'nor be pleased though! But what in the name of the three-cornered dooce does that Bansi lad mean by his allusion to Burke's Peerage? Well—I fancy the guv'nor will know.”
And he lit a rank woodbine cigarette and resumed the inspiring study of Poultney's Inn, drumming loudly, at rhythmic intervals, on the window pane.