Ortho sat on the bare hillside and watched his horses coming in. They came up the gully below him in a drove, limping from their hobbles—grays, chestnuts, bays, duns and blacks, blacks predominating. It was his ambition to command a squadron of blacks, and he was chopping and changing to that end. They would look well on parade, he thought, a line of glossy black Doukkala stallions with scarlet trappings, bestridden by lancers in the uniform white burnoose—black, white and scarlet. Such a display should catch the Sultan’s eye and he would be made a Kaid Rahal. He was a Kaid Mia already. Sheer luck had given him his first step.
When he first joined the Makhzen cavalry he found himself stablemates with an elderly Prussian named Fleischmann, who had served with Frederick the Great’s dragoons at Rossbach, Liegnitz and Torgau, a surly, drunken old sabreur with no personal ambition beyond the assimilation of loot, but possessed of experience and a tongue to disclose it. In his sober moments he held forth to Ortho on the proper employment of horse. He did not share the common admiration for the crack askar lances, but poured derision upon them. They were all bluster and bravado, he said, stage soldiers with no real discipline to control them in a tight corner. He admitted they were successful against rebel hordes, but did they ever meet a resolute force he prophesied red-hot disaster and prayed he might not be there.
His prayer was granted. Disaster came and he was not there, having had his head severed from his shoulders a month previously while looting when drunk and meeting with an irritated householder who was sober.
Ortho was in the forefront of the disaster. The black Janizaries, the Bou Khari, were having one of their periodic mutinies and had been drummed into the open by the artillery. The cavalry were ordered to charge. Instead of stampeding when they saw the horse sweeping on them, the negroes lay down, opened a well-directed fire and emptied saddles right and left.
A hundred yards from the enemy the lancers flinched and turned tail, and the Bou Khari brought down twice as many more. Ortho did not turn. In the first place he did not know the others had gone about until it was too late to follow them, and secondly his horse, a powerful entire, was crazy with excitement and had charge of him. He slammed clean through the Bou Khari like a thunderbolt with nothing worse than the fright of his life and a slight flesh wound.
He had a confused impression of fire flashing all about him, bullets whirring and droning round his head, black giants springing up among the rocks, yells—and he was through. He galloped on for a bit, made a wide detour round the flank and got back to what was left of his own ranks.
Returning, he had time to meditate, and the truth of the late (and unlamented) Fleischmann’s words came back to him. That flesh wound had been picked up at the beginning of the charge. The nearer he had got the wilder the fire had become. The negroes he had encountered flung themselves flat; he could have skewered them like pigs. If the whole line had gone on all the blacks would have flung themselves flat and been skewered like pigs. A regiment of horse charges home with the impact of a deep-sea breaker, hundreds of tons.
The late Fleischmann had been right in every particular. The scene of the affair was littered with dead horses and white heaps, like piles of crumpled linen—their riders. The Bou Khari had advanced and were busy among these, stripping the dead, stabbing the wounded, cheering derisively from time to time.
Ortho had no sooner rejoined his depleted ranks than a miralai approached and summoned him to the presence of Sidi Mahomet himself.
The puissant grandson of the mighty Muley Ismail was on a hillock where he could command the whole field, sitting on a carpet under a white umbrella, surrounded by his generals, who were fingering their beards and looking exceedingly downcast, which was not unnatural, seeing that at least half of them expected to be beheaded.
The Sultan’s face was an unpleasant sight. He bit at the stem of his hookah and his fingers twitched, but he was not ungracious to the renegade lancer who did obeisance before him.
“Stand up,” he growled. “Thou of all my askars hast no need to grovel. How comes it that you alone went through?”
“Sidi,” said Ortho, “the Sultan’s enemies are mine—and it was not difficult. I know the way.”
Mahomet’s delicate eyebrows arched. “Thou knowest the way—ha! Then thou art wiser than these . . . these”—he waved his beautiful hand towards the generals—“these sorry camel cows who deem themselves warriors. Tell these ass-mares thy secret. Speak up and fear not.”
Ortho spoke out. He said nothing about his horse having bolted with him, that so far from being heroic he was numb with fright. He spoke with the voice of Fleischmann, deceased, expounded the Prussian’s theory of discipline and tactics as applied to shock cavalry, and, having heard them ad nauseam, missed never a point. All the time the Sultan sucked at his great hookah and never took his ardent, glowering eyes from his face, and all the time in the background the artillery thumped and the muskets crackled.
He left the royal presence a Kaid Mia, commanding a squadron, a bag of one hundred ducats in his hand, and a month later the cavalry swept over the astonished Bou Khari as a flood sweeps a mud bank, steeled by the knowledge that a regiment of Imperial infantry and three guns were in their rear with orders to mow them down did they waver. They thundered through to victory, and the Kaid Sa?d el Ingliz (which was another name for Ortho Penhale) rode, perforce, in the van—wishing to God he had not spoken—and took a pike thrust in the leg and a musket ball in his ribs and was laid out of harm’s way for months.
But that was past history, and now he was watching his horses come in. They were not looking any too well, he thought, tucked-up, hide-bound, scraggy—been campaigning overlong, traveling hard, feeding anyhow, standing out in all weathers. He was thoroughly glad this tax-collecting tour was at a close and he could get them back into garrison. His men drove them up to their heel-pegs, made them fast for the night, tossed bundles of grass before them and sought the camp fires that twinkled cheerily in the twilight. A couple of stallions squealed, there was the thud of a shoe meeting cannon-bone and another squeal, followed by the curses of the horse-guard. A man by the fires twanged an oud and sang an improvised ditty on a palm-tree in his garden at Tafilet:
“A queen among palms,
Very tall, very stately,
The sun gilds her verdure
With glittering kisses.
And in the calm night time,
Among her green tresses,
The little stars tremble.”
Ortho drew the folds of his jellab closer about him—it was getting mighty cold—stopped to speak to a farrier on the subject of the shoe shortage and sought the miserable tent which he shared with his lieutenant, Osman Baki, a Turkish adventurer from Rumeli Hissar.
Osman was just in from headquarters and had news. The engineers reported their mines laid and the Sari was going to blow the town walls at moonrise—in an hour’s time. The infantry were already mustering, but there were no orders for the horse. The Sari was in a vile temper, had commanded that all male rebels were to be killed on sight, women optional—looting was open. Osman picked a mutton bone, chattering and shaking; the mountain cold had brought out his fever. He would not go storming that night, he said, not for the plunder of Vienna; slung the mutton bone out of doors, curled up on the ground, using his saddle for pillow, and pulled every available covering over himself.
Ortho ate his subordinate’s share of the meager repast, stripped himself to his richly laced kaftan, stuck a knife in his sash, picked up a sword and a torch and went out.
The general was short of cavalry, unwilling to risk his precious bodyguard, and had therefore not ordered them into the attack. Ortho was going nevertheless; he was not in love with fighting, but he wanted money—he always wanted money.
He walked along the camp fires, picked ten of the stoutest and most rascally of his rascals, climbed out of the gully and came in view of the beleaguered kasba. It was quite a small place, a square fortress of mud-plastered stone standing in a gorge of the Major Atlas and filled with obdurate mountaineers who combined brigandage with a refusal to pay tribute. A five-day siege had in no wise weakened their resolve. Ortho could hear drums beating inside, while from the towers came defiant yells and splutters of musketry.
“If we can’t get in soon the snow will drive us away—and they know it,” he said to the man beside him, and the man shivered and thought of warm Tafilet.
“Yes, lord,” said he, “and there’s naught of value in that roua. Had there been, the Sari would have not thrown the looting open. A sheep, a goat or so—paugh! It is not worth our trouble.”
“They must be taught a lesson, I suppose,” said Ortho.
The man shrugged. “They will be dead when they learn it.”
A German sapper slouched by whistling “Im Grünewald mein Lieb, und ich,” stopped and spoke to Ortho. They had worked right up to the walls by means of trenches covered with fascines, he said, and were going to blow them in two places simultaneously and rush the breaches. The blacks were going in first. These mountaineers fought like devils, but he did not think there were more than two hundred of them, and the infantry were vicious, half-starved, half-frozen, impatient to be home. Snow was coming, he thought; he could smell it—whew!
A pale haze blanched the east; a snow peak gleamed with ghostly light; surrounding stars blinked as though blinded by a brighter glory, blinked and faded out. Moon-rise. The German called “Besslama!” and hurried to his post. The ghost-light strengthened. Ortho could see ragged infantrymen creeping forward from rock to rock; some of them dragged improvised ladders. He heard sly chuckles, the chink of metal on stone and the snarl of an officer commanding silence.
In the village the drums went on—thump, thump; thump, thump—unconscious of impending doom.
“Dogs of the Sultan,” screamed a man on the gate-tower. “Little dogs of a big dog, may Gehenna receive you, may your mothers be shamed and your fathers eat filth—a-he-yah!” His chance bullet hit the ground in front of Ortho, ricocheted and found the man from Tafilet. He rolled over, sighed one word, “nkhel”—palm groves—and lay still.
His companions immediately rifled the body—war is war. A shining edge, a rim of silver coin, showed over a saddle of the peaks. “G mare!” said the soldiers. “The moon—ah, now!”
The whispers and laughter ceased; every tattered starveling lay tense, expectant.
In the village the drums went on—thump, thump; thump, thump. The moon climbed up, up, dragged herself clear of the peaks, drenching the snow fields with eerie light, drawing sparkles here, shadows there; a dead goddess rising out of frozen seas.
The watchers held their breath, slowly released it, breathed again.
“Wah! the mines have failed,” a man muttered. “The powder was damp. I knew it.”
“It is the ladders now, or nothing,” growled another. “Why did the Sari not bring cannon?”
“The Tobjyah say the camels could not carry them in these hills,” said a third.
“The Tobjyah tell great lies,” snapped the first. “I know for certain that . . . hey!”
The north corner of the kasba was suddenly enveloped in a fountain of flame, the ground under Ortho gave a kick, and there came such an appalling clap of thunder he thought his ear-drums had been driven in. His men scrambled to their feet cheering.
“Hold fast! Steady!” he roared. “There is another yet . . . ah!” The second mine went up as the débri............