moment, as only a coward can when he hears the truth to his face, and I didn't have to look far to see how to vent my spite on her.
'If I'm honest, it's more than you are. All this fine talk of not failing your precious Yakub Beg—we know how much that's worth! You pretend to be devoted to him—but it doesn't stop you coupling like a bitch in heat with the first chap that comes along. Hah! That shows how much you care for him!'
She didn't even blush, but smiled down at the kitten, and stroked it. 'Perhaps it does, eh, puss? But the angliski would not be pleased if we said as much. But then -'
'Stop talking to the blasted cat! Speak plain, can't you?'
'If it pleases you. Listen angliski, I do not mock—now, and I do not seek to put shame on you. It is no sin to be fearful, any more than it is a sin to be one-legged or red-haired. All men fear—even Yakub and Kutebar and all of them. To conquer fear, some need love, and some hate, and some greed, and some even—hasheesh. I understand your anger—but consider, is it not all for the best? You are here, which is what matters most to you—and no one but I knows what fears are in your heart. And that I knew from the beginning. So -' she smiled, and I remember it still as a winning smile, curse her. ''Lick up the honey, stranger, and ask no questions'.'
And that was all I could get from her—but somewhere in it I detected a tiny mite of consolation. I've got my pride in one direction, you know—or had then. So before I left her, I asked the question:
'Why did you goad me into making love to you?'
'Call that a drug, too, if you will—to make certain you ate my kefir.'
'Just that, eh? Lot of trouble, you Chinese girls go to.'
She laughed aloud at that, and gave a little pout. 'And I had never met an angliski before, you remember. Say I was curious.'
'May I ask if your curiosity was satisfied?'
'Ah, you ask too much, angliski. That is one tale I tell only to my kitten.'
I daresay I've no cause to remember her with much affection, but I do, like the old fool I am. As indeed I do all my girls, now that they're at a safe distance. Perhaps she was right, and I owed it to her that I'd come out with a whole skin—but that was blind luck, and anyway, she had plunged me into the stew in the first place. But it's all by now, and I have only to hold that faded flower scarf that she gave me as a parting gift, and I'm back in the bright garden behind the ranges, looking into those black almond eyes, and feeling the sun's warmth and those soft lips against my cheek, and—aye, but she knew too much, the Silk One. Kutebar was decidedly right.
Still, I had no cause for complaint, once I'd recovered from the shock of realizing that I'd fought a do-or-die action by means of a bellyful of some disgusting Oriental potion. I've often wondered since, if chaps like Chinese Gordon and Bobs and Custer always went about feeling the way I did that night—knowing what fear was? It would account for a lot, you know. But God help anyone who's born that way; I'm sorry for 'em. You can't know real peace of mind, I think, unless you've got a windy streak in you.
But I didn't think too long about it just then. The danger was past, all right, I was safe out of the Russians' reach, and among friendly folk who thought I was the best thing to come their way since Tamburlaine—but I'd no wish to linger. When I took stock of what I'd been through in the past year, from the hell of Balaclava and the snow-sodden nightmare of Russia, with its wolves and knouts and barbarous swine like Ignatieff, to the shocking perils of Fort Raim and the go-down (I shudder to this day at the mention of Guy Fawkes), I had only one notion in my head: India, and a hero's welcome, no doubt, and after that home, and the sounds of London and Leicestershire, and the comfort of clubs and taverns and English bed-clothes and buttered toast, and above all my beautiful blonde Elspeth—who didn't have the wit to converse with kittens, and could be relied on not to lace my kidneys and bacon with opium. By God, though, I wondered if Cardigan had been mooching round in my absence—unless he'd got himself killed, with luck? For that matter, was the war over, or what? Decidedly I must get back to civilization quickly.
Yakub Beg was deuced good about it—as well he might have been, considering the risks I'd run on his behalf- and after a tremendous feast in the Kizil Kum valley, at which we celebrated the Russians' confusion, and the salvation of Khokand—oh, and India, too—we set out for Khiva, where he was moving his folk out of reach of Russian reprisals. From there we went east to Samarkand, where he had promised to arrange for some Afghan pals of his to convoy me over the mountains and through Afghanistan to Peshawar. I wasn't looking forward, much, to that part of the journey, but our trip to Samarkand was like a holiday outing. It was clear air and good horses, with Kutebar and Yakub snarling happily at each other, and Ko Dali's daughter, though I never entirely trusted that leery glint in her eye, was as cheerful and friendly as you could wish. I tried to board her at Khiva, but the caravanserai was too crowded, and on the Samarkand road there wasn't the opportunity, which was a pity. I'd have liked another tussle with her, but Yakub Beg was too much with us.
He was a strange, mad, mystic-cheery fellow, that one. I don't know how much he knew, or what Ko Dali's daughter told him, but for some reason he talked to me a good deal on our journey—about Khokand, and whether the British would help him maintain its independence, and his ambitions to found a state of his own, and always his talk would turn to the Silk One, and Kashgar, far over the deserts and mountains, where even the Russians could never reach. The very last words he said to me were on that score.
We had passed the night in Samarkand, in the little serai near the market, under the huge turquoise walls of the biggest mosque in the world, and in the morning they rode out with me and my new escort a little way on the southern road. It was thronged with folk—bustling crowds of Uzbeks in their black caps, and big-nosed hillmen with their crafty faces, and veiled women, and long lines of camels with their jingling bells shuffling up the yellow dust, and porters staggering under great bales, and children underfoot, and everywhere the babbling of twenty different languages. Yakub and I were riding ahead, talking, and we stopped at a little river running under the road to water our beasts.
'The stream of See-ah,' says Yakub, laughing. 'Did I say the Ruskis would water their horses in it this autumn? I was wrong—thanks to you—and to my silk girl and Kutebar and the others. They will not come yet, to spoil all this'—and he gestured round at the crowds streaming by—'or come at all, if I can help it. And if they do— well, there is still Kashgar, and a free place in the hills.'
''Where the wicked cease from troubling,' eh,' says I, because it seemed appropriate.
'Is that an English saying?' he asked.
'I think it's a hymn.' If I remember rightly, we used to sing it in chapel at Rugby before the miscreants of the day got flogged.
'All holy songs are made of dreams,' says he. 'And this is a great place for dreams, such as mine. You know where we are, Englishman?' He pointed along the dusty track, which wound in and out of the little sand-hills, and then ran like a yellow ribbon across the plain before it forked towards the great white barrier of the Afghan mountains. 'This is the great Pathway of Expectation, as the hill people say, where you may realize your hopes just by hoping them. The Chinese call it the Baghdad Highway, and the Persians and Hindus know it as the Silk Trail, but we call it the Golden Road.' And he quoted a verse which, with considerable trouble, I've turned into rhyming English:
To learn the age-old lesson day by day: It is not in the bright arrival planned,
But in the dreams men dream along the way, They find the Golden Road to Samarkand.
'Very pretty,' says I. 'Make it up yourself?'
He laughed. 'No—it's an old song, perhaps Firdausi or Omar. Anyway, it will take me to Kashgar—if I live long enough. But here are the others, and here we say farewell. You were my guest, sent to me from heaven: touch upon my hand in parting.'
So we shook, and then the others arrived, and Kutebar was gripping me by the shoulders in his great bear- hug and shouting: 'God be with you, Flashman—and my compliments to the scientists and doctors in Anglistan.' And Ko Dali's daughter approached demurely to give me the gift of her scarf and kiss me gently on the lips—and just for an instant the minx's tongue was half-way down my throat before she withdrew, looking like St Cecilia. Yakub Beg shook hands again and wheeled his horse.
'Goodbye, blood brother. Think of us in England. Come and visit us in Kashgar some day—or better still, find a Kashgar of your own!'
And then they were thundering away back on the Samarkand road, cloaks flying, and Kutebar turning in the saddle to give me a wave and a roar. And it's odd—but for a moment I felt lonely, and wondered if I should miss them. It was a deeply-felt sentimental mood which lasted for at least a quarter of a second, and has never returned, I'm happy to say. As to Kashgar, and Yakub's invitation—well, if I could get guaranteed passports from
