The Witch of Aleppo/Chapter 7

N IDEA once planted in Ayub’s mind stuck as a burr sticks to lamb’s wool. He was sure that the young witch had suffered a change of heart since her talk with him. Had not the Cossacks been well received by the mountain folk, and given shelter in a large hut that was more than half a cave—so steep was the side of the valley on which the hamlet perched?

Had not these goat-like people brought to them a goodly pot of mutton and rice, and bottles of really excellent red wine? And straw to sleep on? True, the Cossacks had taken much of this to rub down the ponies, and bed the tired beasts beside the fire within the earth hut. They had done this before eating themselves, and refused to give over the horses to the care of the village folk, for Demid had promised a vivid unpleasantness to the warrior who lost a horse.

Demid himself had gone off at sundown to the cabin of Ibnol Hammamgi, leaving the detachment in the hands of Ayub and Michael. They had slept all through the day, having come in the night before on the heels of the storm, and, being rested and fed, Ayub was moved to give tongue to the idea that possessed him.

“It would be a great miracle, Mikhail, lad, if the singing girl mends her ways and uses her arts to aid true men. Aye, a mighty miracle. Yet she touched me—all the kunaks saw her touch me—and here I am with a whole hide and a full belly.”

Now, being quick of wit and having the gift of tongue, Michael of Rohan understood a little of the simple speech of the Cossacks, especially the military commands.

“When you sleep at an inn, keep one eye open for the innkeeper,” he responded, in his own language.

“Eh?”

Ayub bent his head down, for the cavalier’s hat came only to his shoulder. He had grown attached to the youngster, who always listened to his remarks at times when Demid, who used few words, was uncommunicative.

“Why here she comes, the dove!”

Lali in fact was passing the wide mouth of that hut where they leaned at ease, but it was a changed Lali. Her veil and cloth-of-silver had disappeared and her face was pallid under a high lace head-dress. A tight-fitting bodice sewn with silver coins and a voluminous over-skirt of black velvet failed to hide the girl’s natural grace. She saw the two men and made a quick sign for them to follow her.

Ayub coughed and glanced covertly at Michael, who was fastening his collar and adjusting his sword-sling at a more becoming angle.

“It is said among my people,” the Cossack ruminated, “that a Syrian can cheat two Jews, and an Armenian can lift the shirt from a Syrian—but still she looks like a dove.”

The two followed Lali through a dog infested alley, past a donkey-pen and up winding steps where the hovels of the tribesmen could be touched by the hand on either side. Up more steps where children ran out to stare at the girl and to run from the warriors. Sivas was a nest of refuge for the harassed Armenians, hidden in the higher gorges near the caravan tracks. Michael wondered how human beings could exist there in such squalor, not knowing that the clay and the earth of the huts and the grime and the grease of the children all served to insure them gainst [sic] the visits of Turkish collectors and janizaries.

Above and beyond Sivas towered the mighty crests of the Caucasus, bathed in the purple and scarlet of sunset—as for bidding and awe-inspiring that day as when the priests of Armenia had walked openly in the footsteps of the Christian saints, who for a brief generation had been the monarchs of men and the counselors of kings.

“Now what is this?” Ayub clutched his arm.

Lali had slowed her steps and turned into a shallow ravine up which ran a broad flight of marble flags, broken and chipped by age and frost. Once she cast back at them a glance mocking and searching, then she fell to working at something in her hand, and when she pressed forward again into the shadows she carried a lighted candle.

They were aware of muffled voices close at hand and a glow from some hidden source. Lali rounded another comer in the rocks, and they halted in their tracks.

Before them uprose the portico of a chapel, but such a one as Michael had never seen before. Columns of blue marble supported it, and within a hundred candles glimmered upon glazed tiles, and images wrought in gold. Lali bowed her head and stepped into the throng of people that stood facing the altar. Every one held a taper, except the watchers in the portico who stared out into the shadows to give word of the coming of intruders.

Ayub, however, thrust past the guards and fixed his eyes on the black figure at the altar—an aged man with a white beard falling down the wide collar that covered his shoulders, who leaned upon the arms of two acolytes as if wearied by the weight of the white stole and black robe.

The patriarch was intoning a chant, in a high, clear voice, while the people sang responses. Ayub listened with open mouth.

“Eh—eh,” he whispered, “here is a batko, a holy father, like ours who was cut up by the Moslems. I will rouse up our lads; they will want to set eyes on the batko.”

With that he hastened off, leaving Michael in the shadow of a pillar. Unobserved, the cavalier watched Lali. When the prayers were ended the girl pressed forward, and there was a stir among the Armenians, when she knelt before the, patriarch. The aged man asked a brief question, and cast the smoke of incense upon her. Out of the white wraiths of vapor the delicate face of the girl appeared, and Michael saw her lips quiver as the priest touched her forehead and shoulder.

With a sudden motion she pressed to her cheek the edge of his robe and then drew back to her place. The heads of the Armenians nodded over their tapers understandingly.

When the singing began again, it was reinforced by the deep voices of the Cossacks, who crowded in eagerly from the portico. Michael now caught the words, which were indeed old and familiar—

“Kyrie elieson.”

It seemed to him that Lali was taking the sacrament, and that in some way she was bidding farewell to the people of Sivas.

He was puzzled by this, for Lali’s nature appeared many sided, and he managed to ask Ayub about it as they made their way back through the snow. A cold wind swept the heights about them, and overhead the stars gleamed like jewels in imperial purple.

“Why,” the big Cossack explained, “the girl was incensed and took a blessing from the patriarch, because she is going to her fate. That is, to Aleppo. Aleppo, they say, is and there the friend has his court. It was well we met with such a fine batko—he is the patriarch of Armenia come up from Antioch, in the Holy Land.”

The Cossacks were indeed in vast good humor and the visit to the church seemed to remove all suspicion of them from the minds of the folk. Michael, too, felt at ease and ready for the next turn of affairs. The splendid edifice struck him as something of a marvel, and he did not know that he had been within a chapel built by a Roman emperor, Theodosius, in bygone days.

But he felt a stirring of the pulse, an intimacy with ancient and mighty things. He stood on the threshold of an older world and perhaps within his memory was awakened the pageant of ancestors of his line who had stood upon this ground when the hosts of the crusaders moved about the Holy Land.

Even Ayub was somewhat reflective.

“Well, I did not know that the maiden had changed so much, from a few words of mine. Still, I argued with her amain, and she listened.”

At the entrance to the hut, one of the younger warriors took Michael’s hand with a smile—

“Eh, will you frolic with us this night, Frank?”

“Why this night?”

The Cossack stared, and laughed artlessly as a child:

“Eh, the day after, the ataman, Demid, leads us forth to a long road. It is our custom to frolic before the road.”

So Michael went about with them, and heard the note of fiddles and harps, drank of the red wine, and gazed at the whirling throngs of the young girls who danced before the warriors, encouraged by the shouts of the Cossacks—he shared the bread dipped in wine, and studied the lined faces from which care had fallen away for a few hours.

But most of all he watched the girl Lali, hearing for the first time her voice freed from all restraint, hearkening to the song that had come from her lips on the galley, beholding the grace of her light figure in the dance. And as he watched he frowned a little, repeating under his breath Ayub’s words—

“She goes with us to Aleppo.”

HEN Demid entered the dwelling of Ibnol Hammamgi he bore with him two heavy sacks that clanked as he set them down near the tiled stove. A dozen pairs of eyes flew instantly to the sacks and lingered desirefully. They were hard, bleared eyes, those of the headmen of the tribe of Sivas—aye, sharp and penetrating withal. They pierced inside the heavy leather sacks and a dozen minds, shrewd as foxes, probed at the value of the things that clanked.

Beards wagged upon the breasts of ancient kaftans, shiny with grease, and the eyes, by a common impulse, travelled to the face of the young Cossack.

It was an open, weather-beaten face, that of Demid. The corded muscles of the bare throat and the slow-moving hands were evidence of lean strength not at first noticeable in that slender figure.

The headmen were satisfied. With half a glance they could pick out a man whose thoughts did not dwell on money values. It was well, they thought, that the stranger was such, because they meant to have some gain out of the windfall. Ibnol Hammamgi, their cral, had saved the thick necks of the Cossacks, and something was owing to the tribe for that—if not gifts, then some horses stolen, a few weapons pilfered by boys—a purse slit here and there by the young women

Methodically Demid emptied out the contents of the sacks. Gold armlets, a silver head-band] for a horse studded with sapphires, bits of ambergris, poniards from India with ivory hilts, odds and ends of coral. He had gathered together the pickings of the warriors on their ride up from the coast—some hasty plundering, done at his command.

Now, to give the headmen time to weigh the value that was scattered on the rug by their knees, he paused to light his pipe. This served, too, to stifle the smells of the hut, for overhead on the rafters were drying woolen pantaloons, and salted fish, and the stove hinted at goose feathers and bones in the fire—distasteful to the Don Cossack, who had no liking for the odors of a house, especially a dirty one.

But long before he had replaced the booty in the bags, a dozen agile brains had guessed the value of his takings to a copper drachma in the markets of Trebizond or Sinope.

“I leave these sacks in your keeping,” he said to Ibnol Hammamgi, in the Turkish that the Armenians understood, “until we ride back from our raid. If we are successful all this shall be yours. If we fail we will take them again, having need of them.”

“Whither will the noble lord raid?”

“To the castle of Sidi Ahmad, in Aleppo.”

“Impossible!”

The headmen drew back into their fur-lined caftans like birds ruffling their plumage at a sudden alarm.

“That is madness!”

“How, madness?” Demid pushed the sacks away from him. “Is not Rurik, our cral, captive at the Imperial City, with many Cossack knights? Does not the sultan demand ten thousand ducats for his ransom alone? Well then, we must lay our hands on a treasure and surely there is a treasure at Aleppo.”

The elders all began to talk at once, lifting their hands, and raising their voices, one above the other until Ibnol Hammamgi shrieked louder than the rest and shrieked for silence.

“What do you want of us?” he demanded, and now the headmen were quiet, seeking to weigh Demid as they had his booty. But this they found more difficult.

“A guide—horses—information.”

“How many horses?”

“Two tens. But they must be good ones, Kabarda breed, or Kabulis.”

“Not to be thought of! The horses would be lost to us, because you will never come back.”

“Some of us will come back, Ibnol Hammamgi, and you will do well to aid us because one of your blood rides with us.”

“To Aleppo?”

The bald head of the chief shook with a dry chuckle.

“We do not visit the stronghold of Sidi Ahmad, the Turk. Once I visited Aleppo, and they took a toll from me—thus.”

He shut his good eye and opened the red socket of his blind side.

“Lali, daughter of Macari, goes with us.”

“Ekh! Does a clipped hawk fly back to the hunter? The daughter of Macari is not one in heart with the Moslems; in her veins is the blood of her people. Does the noble lord think that now, when she is restored to us, she will be off at once to that demon’s place, Aleppo?”

The noble lord looked at Ibnol Hammamgi thoughtfully. To tell the truth he had not reflected much upon Lali. The singing girl, that evening, had assured him that she would journey with the Cossacks to the castle of Sidi Ahmad, and Demid had found it a fruitless task to try to reason out why a woman—Lali especially—did things.

“Perhaps the distinguished captain,” went on Ibnol Hammamgi, “does not know that Lali el Niksar is the child of a line of kings. Like a wild goose she is not to be tamed; her forefather was Kagig the First, who was monarch of a thousand spears when Greater Armenia was free, when the Frankish crusaders passed under our mountains and our chivalry fought at their side, and the ravines ran blood in rivers. Christos vokros! That was a day of days.”

A gleam came into his sunken eye and his fingers clawed restlessly at his wisp of a beard.

“Blood will flow again before our horses turn their heads, O cral. Bid the girl stand before you, and you shall hear the promise she made.”

Ibnol Hammamgi muttered over his shoulder and a tousled lad upheaved from a nest of sheep-skins, to run out of the hut in quest of Lali.

Meanwhile the fire had departed the pallid face of the chief and the habitual mask of caution descended upon it. It would not do at all, he reflected, for the Cossacks to make trouble for the tribe of Sivas.

“It is quite clear to me,” he said, “that the noble sir does not know Sidi Ahmad at all. Except only the Sultan Mustapha, himself—may the dogs litter on his grave—the pasha of Aleppo is the greatest of Moslems. He has a heavy hand and a quick wit, and his treasury is full as a squirrel’s nest in autumn.”

Here Ibnol Hammamgi sighed, thinking of the vast wealth of the pasha.

“He has bled our people white, and he has taken a third from all the caravans that must cross his province; he took prisoner some of the finest amirs of Persia and no one can count the ransom he had of them. Besides that, he is overlord of Jerusalem, and has raised the admission fee to the Holy Sepulcher to four zecchins a pilgrim, not to speak of the entrance toll to the city for a Christian, of another six, and the certificate of visitation. Besides that, he has farmed out to the Arab chiefs the privilege of plundering the Frank pilgrims, at three thousand sultanons a year”

“Dog of the !” Demid growled. “Why do not the Franks make their pistols talk to these usurers?”

Ibnol Hammamgi shrugged philosophically.

“Eh, the Franks are pilgrims, not warriors. A pilgrim pays money to keep his hide whole, a soldier is paid to have his cut up. Verily, Sidi Ahmad is the father of stratagems.”

Suddenly the Cossack’s white teeth flashed in a smile.

“A trafficker such as this pasha can not be a man of battle.”

“Then the handsome captain does not know the repute of Sidi Ahmad. It is said that he was whelped during a sea-fight, on a galley. They call him a sword-slayer, another Rustam”

“Good! Then he will be worth cutting down.”

The old Armenians glanced at each other and threw up their arms, thinking that Demid had been drinking, which was not the case.

“The noble lord jests,” remarked Ibnol Hammamgi sourly. “The pasha is the worst of all foes because he is ghazi—a conqueror of Christians, who has sworn on oath to keep his hand raised against them. Moreover, as I said, he is a very fox. Before he was appointed to the pashalik by his master the Grand Signior, he roamed the seas and the land like a tempest, bringing wo upon the enemies of the Moslems. But the minute he stepped inside the gates of Aleppo he shut himself up in his palace. The palace is shut up inside a wall, and the wall rests on a hill in the city. In the palace is a tower called the Wolf’s Ear.”

Demid nodded, listening attentively.

“Within the Wolf's Ear, Sidi Ahmad holds his divan—his judgment seat. There he receives his officers. About the tower is a garden, and there he takes his relaxation. He is gathering together a veritable thundercloud of men.”

“And yet he sits in the tower.”

“Always. It is said in the bazaars that in the Wolf’s Ear is the treasury of the province. But, because he distrusts all men, the pasha allows few besides himself to dwell in the palace; moreover—” Ibnol Hammamgi lowered his voice from habitual caution—“some say that no one is allowed sight of the face of Sidi Ahmad.”

Demid merely puffed at his pipe, assuming lack of interest, knowing that this was the quickest way to draw forth truth.

“Since he came to Aleppo, the pasha has given his judgments and tortured his prisoners at night, and the lights in the tower are kept away from him. Why is that? There is something hidden here. At times is heard the voice of another man behind the pasha and always this voice laughs.

It was the way of the Grand Signior to send officers to his governors who picked quarrels with the pashas or hired others to do so, and—when an official was dead, the sultan by virtue of the Moslem law became master of his possessions. In such fashion the treasure of the two predecessors of Sidi Ahmad had fallen to Constantinople. But the present pasha had guarded himself effectively until now, when his power was such that Mustapha did not dare do away with him. Moreover, Sidi Ahmad had been a favorite at court, and was ghazi.

This was late January and in some four months the passes of the Caucasus would be clear of snow. Then the forces of Aleppo would move to join Mustapha, and the united strength of the Turks and Tatars would go against Christian Europe. This meant the Cossacks would be the first to face invasion!

“It is strange,” Demid said slowly. “A fanatic, a warrior—and now a miser in his own prison. Is Sidi Ahmad tall and powerful of build?”

Ibnol Hammamgi shook his head.

“Nay, slight as a bird, and quick as a fox. How will you attempt to raid such a place?”

“By a trick.”

“Ah!” The Armenian was stirred to interest. “By what trick?”

“I will walk through the gates, and they will all open to me.”

“Riddles! By what key will you open the gates?”

“There is the key.”

Demid nodded toward the door of the hut and the elders started, beholding Lali leaning against the doorpost. No one except Demid had heard her enter.

“Ai-a!” Ibnol Hammamgi glared. “Daughter of Macari, will you ride to that place of all abomination with this Frank?”

“Aye, so.”

A tumult of protest and reproof arose, heads wagged, and sleeves were rolled up that lean brown arms might gesture the better; foam started on the bearded lips of the headmen. They agreed that Lali had eaten shame by dwelling in the palaces of the Imperial City. By leaving her people for the seraglio of Sidi Ahmad, she would make that shame memorable, they cried.

“I have been incensed and blessed by the patriarch, O fathers,” she cried at them. “I am ready for what is unseen and unguessed.”

“But to go to the man who cut open your father, like a fish!”

The white face of the girl stood out, a cameo against the shadows of the hut, and seeing that their words were unheeded, the Armenians ceased their outcry. Lali, being the child of a chieftain, and her parents dead, was free to follow what path she would. She even smiled, for Demid glanced at her with frank approval.

The young warrior could deal with the shrewd brains of the Armenians, perhaps because his life had been spent until now in the wilderness where his friends and enemies were beasts, the man from the Don could see through the schemes of men; because of nights passed in riding herd and sitting by the lair of a stag, he had learned how to rely upon instincts that warned of danger.

But he could not judge what was in the soul of Lali, nor did any instinct warn him against the danger that dwelt in the passion of the girl for him.

On the next day Michael of Rohan vanished from Sivas as if the caves in the hillside had swallowed him up. He left not a trace, and Ibnol Hammamgi was as astonished as the Cossacks.

But Lali had never been merrier than on that eve of her setting out for Aleppo.