a price that will cause the Tsar to count his change in the Kremlin palace!'
Sahib Khan chimed in again: 'So runs the proverb: 'While the gun-barrel lies in its stock, and the blade is unbroken'. It will be all that is left to us, Yakub.'
Yakub Beg sighed, and then smiled at me. He was one of your spirited rascals who can never be glum for more than a moment. 'It may be. If they overrun us, I shall not live to see it; I'll make young bones somewhere up by Ak Mechet. You understand, Flashman bahadur, we may buy you a little time here, in Syr Daria—no more. Your red soldiers may avenge us, but only God can help us.'
'And He has a habit of choosing the winning side, which will not be ours,' says Kutebar. 'Well, I'm overdue for Paradise; may I find it by a short cut and a bloody one.'
Ko Dali's daughter spoke for the first time, and I was surprised how high and yet husky her voice was—the kind that makes you think of French satin sofas, with the blinds down and purple wall-paper. She was lying prone now, tickling the kitten's belly and murmuring to it.
'Do you hear them, little tiger, these great strong men? How they enjoy their despair! They reckon the odds, and find them heavy, and since fighting is so much easier than thinking they put the scowl of resignation on the face of stupidity, and swear most horribly.' Her voice whined in grotesque mimicry. ''By the bowels of Rustum, we shall give them a battle to remember—hand me my scimitar, Gamal, it is in the woodshed. Aye, we shall make such- and-such a slaughter, and if we are all blown to the ends of Eblis—may God protect the valorous!—we shall at least be blown like men. Eyewallah, brothers, it is God's will; we shall have done our best.' This is how the wise warriors talk, furry little sister—which is why we women weep and children go hungry. But never fear—when the Russians have killed them all, I shall find myself a great, strong Cossack, and you shall have a lusty Russian tom, and we shall live on oranges and honey and cream forever.'
Yakub Beg just laughed, and silenced Kutebar's angry growl. 'She never said a word that was not worth listening to. Well, Silk One, what must we do to be saved?'
Ko Dali's daughter rolled the kitten over. 'Fight them now, before they have moved, while they have their backs to the sea. Take all your horsemen, suddenly, and scatter them on the beach.'
'Oh, cage the wind, girl!' cries Kutebar. 'They have thirty thousand muskets, one-third of them Cossack cavalry. Where can we raise half that number?'
'Send to Buzurg Khan to help you. At need, ask aid from Bokhara.'
'Bokhara is lukewarm,' says Yakub Beg. 'They are the last to whom we can turn for help.'
The girl shrugged. 'When the Jew grows poor, he looks to his old accounts. Well, then, you must do it alone.'
'How, woman? I have not the gift of human multiplication; they outnumber us.'
'But their ammunition has not yet come—this much we know from your spies at Fort Raim. So the odds are none so great—three to one at most. With such valiant sabres as Kutebar here, the thing should be easy.'
'Devil take your impudence!' cries Kutebar. 'I could not assemble ten thousand swords within a week, and by then their powder and cartridge ships will have arrived.'
'Then you should have assembled them before this,' was the tart rejoinder.
'Heaven lighten your understanding, you perverse Chinese bitch! How could I, when I was rotting in jail?'
'That was clever,' says she, 'that was sound preparation, indeed. Hey, puss-puss-puss, are they not shrewd, these big strong fellows?'
'If there were a hope of a surprise attack on their camp succeeding, I should have ordered it,' says Yakub Beg. 'To stop them here, before their advance has begun …' He looked at me. 'That would solve your need as well as ours, Englishman. But I see no way. Their powder ships will arrive in a week, and three days, perhaps four thereafter, they will be moving up Syr Daria. If something is to be done, it must be done soon.'
'Ask her, then,' says Kutebar sarcastically. 'Is she not waiting to be asked? To her, it will be easy.'
'If it were easy, even you would have thought of it by now,' says the girl. 'Let me think of it instead.' She rose, picking up her cat, stroking it and smiling as she nuzzled it. 'Shall we think, little cruelty? And when we have thought, we shall tell them, and they will slap their knees and cry: 'Mashallah, but how simple! It leaps to the eye! A child could have conceived it.' And they will smile on us, and perhaps throw us a little jumagi, *(*Pocket-money.) or a sweetmeat, for which we shall be humbly thankful. Come, butcher of little mice.'
And without so much as a glance at us, she sauntered off, with those tight white pants stirring provocatively, and Izzat cursing under his breath.
'Ko Dali should have whipped the demons out of that baggage before she grew teeth! But then, what do the Chinese know of education? If she were mine, by death, would I not discipline her?'
'You would not dare, father of wind and grey whiskers,' says Yakub genially. 'So let her think—and if nothing comes of it, you may have the laugh of her.'
'A bitter laugh it will be, then,' says Kutebar. 'By Shaitan, it will be the last laugh we have.'
Now their discussion had been all very well, no doubt, but it was of no great interest to me whether they got themselves cut up by the Russians now or a month hence. The main thing was to get Flashy on his way to India, and I made bold to raise the subject again. But Yakub Beg disappointed me.
'You shall go, surely, but a few days will make no difference. By then we shall have made a resolve here, and it were best your chiefs in India knew what it was. So they may be the better prepared. In the meantime, Flashman bahadur, blood brother, take your ease among us.'
I couldn't object to that, and for three days I loafed about, wandering through the camp, observing the great coming and going of couriers, and the arrival each day of fresh bands of horsemen. They were coming in from all parts of the Red Sands, and beyond, from as far as the Black Sands below Khiva, and Zarafshan and the Bokhara border—Uzbeks with their flat yellow faces and scalp-locks, lean, swarthy Tajiks and slit-eyed Mongols, terrible- looking folk with their long swords and bandy legs—until there must have been close on five thousand riders in that valley alone. But when you thought of these wild hordes pitted against artillery and disciplined riflemen, you saw how hopeless the business was; it would take more than the Silk One to think them out of this.
An extraordinary young woman that—weeping passionately over Yakub's wounds on the night of the rescue, but in council with the men as composed (and bossy) as a Mayfair mama. A walking temptation, too, to a warm- blooded chap like me, so I kept well clear of her in those three days. She might be just the ticket for a wet week- end, but she was also Yakub Beg's intended—and that apart, I'm bound to confess that there was something about the cut of her shapely little jib that made me just a mite uneasy. I'm wary of strong, clever women, however beddable they may be, and Ko Dali's daughter was strong and too clever for comfort. As I was to find out to my cost—God, when I think what that Chinese-minded mort got me into!
I spent my time, as I say, loafing, and getting more impatient and edgy by the hour. I wanted to get away for India, and every day that passed brought nearer the moment when those Russian brutes (with Ignatieff well to the fore, no doubt) came pouring up the Syr Daria valley from Fort Raim, guns, Cossacks, foot and all, and spread like a tide over the Khokand country. I wanted to be well away before that happened, bearing the glad tidings to India and reaping the credit; Yakub Beg and his hairy fellows could fight the Russians how they liked, for although I'll own I'd conceived an affection for him and his Tajiks and Uzbeks, and wished them no harm, it was all one to me how they fared, so long as I was safely out of it. But Yakub still seemed uncertain how to prepare for the fight that was coming; he'd tried his overlord, Buzurg Khan, for help, and got little out of him, and egged on by Kutebar, he was coming round to the Silk One's notion of one mad slash at the enemy before they had got under way from Fort Raim with their magazines full. It was a doomed enterprise, of course, but he figured he'd do them more damage on the beach than when they were upcountry on the march; good luck, thinks I, just give me a horse and an escort first, and I'll bless your enterprise as I wave farewell.
And it would have fallen out like that, too, but for the infernal ingenuity of that kitten-tickling besom—Kutebar was right: Ko Dali should have whaled the wickedness out of her years ago.
It was the fourth day, and I was lounging in the camp's little market, improving my Persian by learning the ninety-nine names of God (only the Bactrian camels know the hundredth, which is why they look so deuced superior) from an Astrabad caravan-guard-turned-murderer, when Kutebar came in a great bustle to take me to Yakub Beg at once. I went, thinking no evil, and found him in the pavilion with Sahib Khan and one or two others, squatting round their coffee table. Ko Dali's daughter was lounging apart, listening and saying nothing, feeding her kitten with sweet jelly. Yakub, whose limbs had mended to the point where he could move with only a little stiffness, was wound up like a fiddle-string with excitement; he was smiling gleefully as he touched my hand in
