Two days later the force struck camp, leaving the town behind them a shell of blackened ruins, bearing on lances before them the heads of thirty prominent citizens as a sign that C?sar is not lightly denied his tribute. They streamed northeast through the defiles, a tattered rabble, a swarm of locusts, eating up the land as they went. The wounded were jostled along in rough litters, at the mercy of camp barbers and renegade quacks; the majority died on the way and were thankful to die. The infantry straggled for miles (half rode donkeys) and drove before them cattle, sheep, goats and a few women prisoners. What with stopping to requisition and pillage they progressed at an average of twelve miles a day. Only among the negroes and the cavalry was there any semblance of march discipline, and then only because the general kept them close about him as protection against his other troops.
Beside Ortho rode the Arab girl, her feet strapped under the mule’s belly. Twice she tried to escape—once by a blind bolt into the foothills, once by a surer, sharper road. She had wriggled across the tent and pulled a knife out of its sheath with her teeth. Osman had caught her just as she was on the point of rolling on it. Ortho had to tie her up at night and watch her all day long. Never had he encountered such implacable resolve. She was determined to foil him one way or the other at no matter what cost to herself. He had always had his own way with women and this failure irritated him. He would stick it as long as she, he swore—and longer.
Osman Baki was entertained. He watched the contest with twinkling china blue eyes—his mother had been a Georgian slave and he was as fair as a Swede.
“She will leave you—somehow,” he warned.
“For whom? For what?” Ortho exclaimed. “If she slips past me the infantry will catch her, or some farmer who will beat her life out. Why does she object to me? I have treated her kindly—as kindly as she will allow.”
Osman twirled his little yellow mustache. “Truly, but these people have no reason, only a mad pride. One cannot reason with madness, Kaid. Oh, I know them. When I was in the service of the deys . . .”
He delivered an anecdote from his unexampled repertoire proving the futility of arguing with a certain class of Arab with anything more subtle than a bullet.
“Sell her in Morocco,” he advised. “She is pretty, will fetch a good sum.”
“No, I’m going to try my hand first,” said Ortho stubbornly.
“You’ll get it bitten,” said the Turk, eying the telltale marks on Ortho’s face with amusement. “For my part I prefer a quiet life—in the home.”
They straggled into Morocco City ten days later to find the Sultan in residence for the winter, building sanctuaries and schools with immense energy.
Ortho hoped for the governorship of an outlying post where he would be more or less his own master, get some pig-hunting and extort backsheesh from the country folk under his protection; but it was not to be. He was ordered to quarter his stalwarts in the kasba and join the Imperial Guard. Having been in the Guard before at Mequinez, having influence in the household and getting a wind-fall in the way of eight months’ back pay, he contrived to bribe himself into possession of a small house overlooking the Aguedal Gardens, close to the Ahmar Gate.
There he installed the Arab girl and a huge old negress to look after her.
Then he set to and gave his unfortunate men the stiffening of their lives.
He formed his famous black horses into one troop, graded the others by colors and drilled the whole all day long.
Furthermore, he instituted a system of grooming and arm-cleaning hitherto unknown in the Moroccan forces—all on the Fleischmann recipe. Did his men show sulks, he immediately up-ended and bastinadoed them. This did not make him popular, but Osman Baki supported him with bewildered loyalty and he kept the mokadem and the more desperate rascals on his side by a judicious distribution of favors and money. Nevertheless he did not stroll abroad much after dark and then never unattended.
They drilled in the Aguedal, on the bare ground opposite the powder house, and acquired added precision from day to day. Ortho kept his eye on the roof of the powder house.
For two months this continued and Ortho grew anxious. What with household expenses and continued douceurs to the mokadem his money was running out and he was sailing too close to the wind to try tricks with his men’s rations and pay at present.
Just when things were beginning to look desperate a party appeared on the roof of the powder house, which served the parade ground as a grand-stand.
Ortho, ever watchful, saw them the moment they arrived, brought his command into squadron column, black troop to the fore, and marched past underneath.
They made a gallant show and Ortho knew it. Thanks to the grooming, his horses were looking fifty per cent better than any other animals in the Shereefian Army; the uniformity added another fifty. The men knew as well as he did who was looking down on them, and went by, sitting stiff, every eye fixed ahead.
The lusty sun set the polished hides aglow, the burnished lance-heads a-glitter. The horses, fretted by sharp stirrups, tossed their silky manes, whisked their streaming tails. The wind got into the burnooses and set them flapping and billowing in creamy clouds; everything was in his favor. Ortho wheeled the head of his column left about, formed squadron line on the right and thundered past the Magazine, his shop-window troop nearest the spectators, shouting the imperial salute, “Allah y barek Amer Sidi!” A good line too, he congratulated himself, as good as any Makhzen cavalry would achieve in this world. If that didn’t work nothing would. It worked.
A slave came panting across the parade ground summoning him to the powder house at once.
The Sultan was leaning against the parapet, sucking a pomegranate and spitting the pips at his Grand Vizier, who pretended to enjoy it. The fringes of the royal jellab were rusty with brick dust from the ruins of Bel Abbas, which Mahomet was restoring. Ortho did obeisance and got a playful kick in the face; His Sublimity was in good humor.
He recognized Ortho immediately. “Ha! The lancer who alone defied the Bou Khari, still alive! Young man, you must indeed be of Allah beloved!” He looked the soldier up and down with eyes humorous and restless. “What is your rank?”
“Kaid Mia, Sidi.”
“Hum!—thou art Kaid Rahal now, then.” He turned on the Vizier. “Tell El Mechouar to let him take what horses he chooses; he knows how to keep them. Go!”
He flung the fruit rind at Ortho by way of dismissal.
Ortho gave his long-suffering men a feast that night with the last ready money in his possession. They voted him a right good fellow—soldiers have short memories.
He was on his feet now. As Kaid Rahal, with nominally a thousand cut-throats at his beck and nod, he would be a fool indeed if he couldn’t blackmail the civilians to some order. Also there was a handsome sum to be made by crafty manipulation of his men’s pay and rations. El Mechouar would expect his commission out of this, naturally, and sundry humbler folk—“big fleas have little fleas . . .”—but there would be plenty left. He was clear of the financial thicket. He went prancing home to his little house, laid aside his arms and burnoose, took the key from the negress, ran upstairs and unlocked the room in which the Arab girl, Ourida, was imprisoned. It was a pleasant prison with a window overlooking the Aguedal, its miles of pomegranate, orange, and olive trees. It was the best room in the house and he had furnished it as well as his thin purse would afford, but to the desert girl it might have been a tomb.
She sat all day staring out of the barred window, looking beyond the wide Haouz plain to where the snow peaks of the High Atlas rose, a sheer wall of sun-lit silver—and beyond them even. She never smiled, she never spoke, she hardly touched her food. Ortho in all his experience had encountered nothing like her. He did his utmost to win her over, brought sweetmeats, laughed, joked, retailed the gossip of the palace and the souks, told her stories of romance and adventure which would have kept any other harem toy in shivers of bliss, took his gounibri and sang Romany songs, Moorish songs, English ballads, flowery Ottoman kasidas, ghazels and g?listans, learned from Osman Baki, cursed her, adored her.
All to no avail; he might have been dumb, she deaf. Driven desperate, he seized her in his arms; he had as well embraced so much ice. It was maddening. Osman Baki, who watched him in the lines of a morning, raving at the men over trifles, twisted his yellow mustache and smiled. This evening, however, Ortho was too full of elation to be easily repulsed. He had worked hard and intrigued steadily for this promotion. Three years before he had landed in Morocco a chained slave, now he was the youngest of his rank in the first arm of the service. Another few years at this pace and what might he not achieve? He bounded upstairs like a lad home with a coveted prize, told the girl of his triumph, striding up and down the room, flushed, laughing, smacking his hands together, boyish to a degree. He looked his handsomest, a tall, picturesque figure in the plum-colored breeches, soft riding boots, blue kaftan and scarlet tarboosh tilted rakishly on his black curls. The girl stole a glance at him from under her long lashes, but when he looked at her she was staring out of the window at the snow wall of the Atlas rose-flushed with sunset, and when he spoke to her she made no answer; he might as well have been talking to himself. But he was too full of his success to notice, and he rattled on and on, pacing the little room up and down, four strides each way. He dropped beside her, put his arm about her shoulders, drew her cold cheek to his flushed one.
“Listen, my pearl,” he rhapsodized. “I have money now and you shall have dresses like rainbows, a gold tiara and slave girls to wait on you, and when we move garrison you shall ride a white ambling mule with red trappings and lodge in a striped tent like the royal women. I am a Kaid Rahal now, do you hear? The youngest of any, and in the Sultan’s favor. I will contrive and scheme, and in a few years . . . the Standard!—eschkoun-i-araf? And then, my honey-sweet, you shall have a palace with a garden and fountains. Hey, look!”
He scooped in his voluminous breeches’ pockets, brought out a handful of trinkets and tossed them into her lap. The girl stared at him, then at the treasures, and drew a sharp breath. They were her own, the jewelry he had wrenched from her on that wild night of carnage three months before.
“You thought I had sold them—eh?” he laughed. “No, no, my dear; it very nearly came to it, but not quite. They are safe now and yours again—see?”
He seized her wrists and worked the bangles on, snapped the crude black necklace round her neck and hung the elaborate gold one over it, kissed her full on the quivering mouth. “Yours a............