The Making of the Morning Star

 

CHAPTER I

From the Roof of the World we led out our steeds, to follow the wind for a little play.
Where the banners of Islam were unfurled on the ramparts of Sarai.
Not for wall or door did we draw our reins, till the last of the banners were laid away,
And the shout of “Allah” was heard no more on the ramparts of Sarai.—The minstrel's song.

IT WAS a year of many omens. Lightning made the sign of the Cross in the sky, and meteors fell along the road to Jerusalem. When the dry season began, locusts came and destroyed the vineyards.

In that year, early in the thirteenth century of our Lord, the mailed host of the crusaders was idle. There was a truce between it and the Saracens who had reconquered Jerusalem and all of the cities of Palestine except the sea coast and the rich province of Antioch.

Before the truce the crusaders had suffered heavily in an attempt to take the port of Egypt, Damietta, and its triple wall. And the retreat over the desert to Ascalon had taken its further toll of the lives of peers and men-at-arms alike. Meanwhile, on three sides of the strip of sea coast, the Moslems gathered their power for the blow that would send the Croises back into the sea from which they had come.

So the omens were interpreted as a warning.

The veriest springald of a squire of dames, new come from Venice or Byzantium and gay with curled ringlets and striped hose, knew that the truce would not last. The older men-at-arms who had fought under the banner of Richard of England, a generation ago, shook their heads and spent their days in the taverns.

Why not? The omens were evil—so the monks said. And the truce had been arranged by the paynim Saracens—an interval before the storm. The monks also said, it is true, that the locusts had eaten the vineyards but had spared the corn, and that this was a warning to drunkards. But the older warriors preferred to drown thought in their wine cups.

In the great northern province of Antioch, the nobles took refuge from the heat of the dry season. Led by Hugo, marquis of Montserrat and lord of Antioch, they crossed the long valley of the Orontes and made their way to a castle on the western march, a stronghold in the hills where they might hunt and listen to the tales of minstrel and troubador.

ROBERT, castellan of Antioch, made his way out of a labyrinth of clay gullies and gave his bay charger the rein. A glance to right and left revealed no human being astir on the yellow desolation of sand over which he was passing to gain the thicket of reeds ahead.

These withered rushes, he knew, bordered the Orontes River, now low in its bed. The horse lengthened its stride as it scented the water, and Sir Robert urged it on with knee and voice. The bay was dark with sweat, for the knight had pushed on at a round pace since sun-up, when they left the last mud hovels of Port St. Simeon, and lost sight of the sea.

But they had still far to go before nightfall, and the valley of the Orontes was an ill place to linger—without a strong following of spears. And Sir Robert rode alone.

He had landed the day before at St. Simeon with his horse and little else. Two years ago he had been wounded in the Egyptian campaign and had been made prisoner by the Mamelukes at the wall of Damietta. It had taken many a month to arrange for his release, for among his enemies Sir Robert bore a name that set him apart from his fellows. By reason of the great sword he carried—a straight, tapering blade, a full four feet of blue steel—they called him Longsword.

And so did the minstrels name him when they made a song about him thereafter.

As he entered the rushes he drew rein sharply and turned in the saddle to stare down at a fresh trail that ran athwart the path he was following. Many a man would have passed it by with a casual glance. But the castellan had been born in the hills that towered over Antioch, and he knew the sandy wastes of the Orontes as his father before him had known the courtyard of an earl's hold in England.

The trail was a narrow one, yet possibly a hundred horses had passed over it. The tracks were made by unshod hoofs, so the riders must have come in from the desert. And they had kept to the rushes instead of the main path, higher up where the clay was firmer.

They had wished to hide their tracks as far as possible, yet they had chosen a route in the open where they would be easily observed, unless—the castellan fancied they had traveled at night.

He would have liked to follow the trail. But a sound from the heights he had just left caused him to glance up quickly. The faint drumming of hoofs was unmistakable. An arrow's flight distant he noticed dust rising above the red clay ridges that lined the gullies.

Waiting long enough to be sure that only one rider was coming after him, he put the bay at the ford and crossed over the river, restraining the horse from stopping to drink. Nor did he look back as he rode slowly up the far bank.

Entering a dense growth of gray tamarisk, higher than the crest of his helm, Sir Robert halted and wheeled his horse to face the back trail where it turned sharply. Pulling the long, triangular shield from its loop over his shoulder, he slid his left arm through its bands and took his sword in his right.

Sir Robert smiled, and his gray eyes, under the steel of the helm, lighted with pleasure. The day's ride, that had been dull and hot until now, promised entertainment.

When he heard hoofs thudding softly over the sand he pricked the flanks of the bay with his spurs and the two horses met shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the tamarisks. And the castellan, leaning forward, thrust the top of his shield over the stranger's sword hilt, gripping the weapon in the fingers of his left hand.

The other rider was not slow to act. A twist of the reins, and his horse lunged aside. But the weapon, held by Sir Robert under the shield, slipped from its scabbard and remained in the hand of the knight.

“Ma kaharani!” said the stranger under his breath. “And what now?”

He was a man gray-haired and massive of limb, clad in splendor of embroidered vest and kaftan, and his brown eyes were shrewd. A Moslem by his garments and turban, yet a Moslem who did not sit in the saddle like a Turk or Arab.

Slung over his shoulder, instead of a shield, was a lute. Behind his saddle, a prayer rug. Sir Robert thought him to be a wandering minstrel.

“Your name!” he demanded, for he ever liked plain words.

Arabic came easily to his tongue, as he had been raised among his father's slaves.

“I am Abdullah ibn Khar, the teller of tales, the cup-companion of the emperor.”

The castellan considered him and saw that he was not afraid, though disarmed. The horse Abdullah bestrode was a remarkably fine one, a black Kabuli stallion.

“When does a minstrel of Islam follow the shadow of a Nazarene?” Sir Robert asked curtly.

The white teeth of the stranger flashed through the black tangle of his beard.

“Wallah! You ride with a loose rein. Surely a penned tiger is kin to the young warrior who is freed from camp. Not otherwise was I, in another day. To a woman or a battle, a man should ride boldly.”

“And you?”

“I followed to see your face.”

He studied the dark features of the Norman, the thin, down-curving nose and the powerful neck. Sir Robert had his mother's hair of tawny gold that fell to the mail coif on his shoulders. The hot temper of his race was his, yet the quiet, as well, of those who have great physical strength.

“Aye, a woman could summon you across the Orontes,” nodded the minstrel, “if you chose to come. A battle is another thing. Are you the palladin of the Franks—the Longsword?”

“Aye, so.”

“In the village by the sea a saddle-maker pointed you out and said that you were he, although many thought you dead. So I found my horse and sought you, for company on the road. There is a truce between our peoples.”

“So that your spies may enter our walls.”

“And your great lords may hawk and dice at leisure. Many things have I seen—your men-at-arms picking their noses, having no better thing to do—your king holding court on an island, because his foes can not ride over the paths of the sea. Yet I have not seen a leopard change his skin, nor a spy look otherwise than faithless. Allah kerim! Do I look like a pryer?”

Sir Robert thought that the man was bold enough. The horse under his hand might have been the gift of an ameer.

“You do not look like a minstrel,” he laughed.

The man's words rang unpleasantly true. The Christian barons spent their days in bickering with each other. They were a weaker breed than the first crusaders who had fought their way over the desert to Jerusalem aid left their bones in the land they conquered. Venetians, Genoese, Bavarians and French—the new lords were more apt at gleaning profit from trade than at defending the fiefs they held.

In the last years the men who had been the heroes of Sir Robert's childhood had passed elsewhere, some stricken by the plague, some thrust into the torture chambers of the neighboring Saracens. Others had sailed back to the courts of Europe.

Now the galleys brought to Palestine disorderly throngs of pilgrims who were more than willing to pay a fee to the Saracens to visit the Sepulcher and bear away a palm.

This troubled Sir Robert, who had known no other land, and no fellowship other than that of the Croises.

While he mused Abdullah had been studying his face. Now the minstrel leaned down swiftly and caught up a fistful of sand.

“My lord,” he said, “I can read what passes in your mind. Who can change a book that is written, if that book be fate? No one among the Franks can keep Palestine for long, and your people will go again upon the sea whence they came. And their empire will pass—so!”

He loosed his fingers, letting fall the sand, and the castellan started.

“In the Fiend's name, mummer, did you ride from the sea to tell me this?”

“Nay, am I a fool?”

Abdullah's thick chest rumbled with laughter.

“I sought the Longsword, and I found a youngling,” he added. “Did you, in truth, hold the wall of Antioch against Nasr-ud-deen and his spears?”

“Now that you have found me, seek another with your tricks. I have no largess to give.”

Abdullah glanced reflectively at the castellan's faded surcoat and weather-stained shield from which the armorial device had long since been battered out.

“Largess, my lord, awaits me in the hall of Montserrat, whither I think you draw your reins—unless,” he added gravely, “you fear to have Abdullah for refik—companion on the road.”

Robert frowned and tossed the Moslem his simitar.

“Go where you will, knave!”

Turning the bay aside, he passed by the minstrel and let his horse go down to the river to drink. Meanwhile his glance swept the Orontes and the bare, red hills that pressed down upon it, for signs of other riders who might have followed Abdullah, and lain concealed during the talk. But the far side of the river, shimmering through the heat haze, was empty of life.

Abdullah had followed his example, and when the stallion had lifted its fine head to let the water run out between its teeth, he turned in the saddle.

“Will the lord grant one boon to his servant? Your word that I shall not be harmed by the Nazarenes at Montserrat?”

Robert shook his head. He had been taught by his father never to break his word, whether given to a Moslem or one of his own peers. Abdullah, however, seemed satisfied with this response, and rode ahead up the trail of his own accord.

They had no more than entered the tamarisks again, when both reined to a halt, and the horses fidgeted. From up the hill loud voices drew nearer, with a clattering of iron, a yapping of dogs, a braying of asses and a creaking of wheels that made a small bedlam of the quiet of the valley.

FROM between the gray bushes emerged a gaunt man, stumbling under the weight of a tall banner of soiled samite upon which was embroidered a crimson cross. On his heels tramped a throng ragged and filthy, living scarecrows with feverish eyes.

Drawing aside from the trail, Robert watched the company pass. Some carried bundles slung to pike or staff—bundles that jingled and clanked, spoil beyond a doubt snatched from some native village. Many lay sick in the lumbering ox carts, and a leper walked alone at a cart tail, his bell clinking when he stumbled.

In another araba lay a woman, suckling a child scarcely a month old. A lad whose only garment was a torn shirt peered up through the dust at the knight and the minstrel.

“Good my lord, is't far to Jerusalem?”

“Too far for a springald such as you,” Robert responded gruffly. “What company is this?”

The boy pointed proudly to the red cross sewn on his shirt.

“Messire,” he piped, “I am from Provence, like the demoiselle herself. We heard the blessed de Courgon preach, and we are come to deliver the city of Christ out of paynim duress.”

He trotted on, and an English yeoman in green jerkin and feathered hood stopped to scowl blackly at Abdullah, and spit.

“A murrain upon yon infidel! When we set forth we e'en had forty thousand such as that”—nodding after the boy—“and now, by the shadow of ——, we have but two. Aye, he and the lass.”

“——'s wounds!” cried Robert. “Was this a crusade of the children?”

“Ah, that it was, tall my lord! Verily the mob did betake itself to divers paths from Byzantium, some adventuring upon the sea—and St. Giles and St. Dunstan ha' mercy on them—some upon the coast, where they did fall to quarreling and warring with the Armenians, and are no better this day than crow's meat, drying i' the wind. Our company was five hundred strong when we left Byzantium behind. And now ——” He leaned on his staff and jerked a thumb at the rear of the party. The pilgrims numbered no more than fivescore.

“A black malison on the infidels, say I.”

Robert wondered who the lass of this array might be, but just then some dozen men began to crowd around Abdullah, cursing him and fingering the axes at their belts. Some one flung a stone that made the black horse rear, the minstrel keeping his seat in the saddle with easy grace.

“Salvation awaits him who sheds the blood of a Saracen!” cried a giant with a pocked face.

“Seize his horse for Father Evagrius!” suggested another.

“Send him to pare the ——'s hoofs!”

Taking up his reins, Robert urged the bay between the angry throng and his companion. Whatever the mission upon which Abdullah of Khar had been sent, the man was of gentle blood, and the nobles of Palestine had sworn a truce with the Moslems, giving hand and glove upon it. This oath Robert felt to be binding unless the enemy broke the truce.

“Back, ribalds,” he commanded. “Pass on. This is a minstrel who rides with me.”

The mob seemed made up of villains, of commoners, and the knight did not feel called upon to voice reasons for his action to them. As some men in rusty haburgeons drew their swords, he rose in his stirrups to peer through the dust.

“Ho, the leader of this pack! The chief of these rogues, I say—call hence your varlets or it will be the worse for them.”

At this the throng parted, and an old priest rode up on a white donkey led by a young girl. Flinging back the hood of her gown, she looked up angrily at Robert.

“Messire! Unsay what you have said, and that without ado.”

She took the charger's rein in a gloved hand, and stamped a slender foot angrily and a little awkwardly, for it was clad in an Armenian red leather boot several sizes too large. Robert glimpsed a white face pinched by hunger and eyes shadowed by ripples of hair dark as a raven's wing.

“This is our patriarch, Sir Lout,” went on the maid in a clear voice, “and Father Evagrius is blind. Climb down from your big horse and kneel and ask his pardon and blessing.”

“Nay, Ellen,” put in the patriarch, “it is not seemly that a stranger and a man-at-arms should kneel——”

“I say he shall! Nay, he is no sergeant-at-arms but a spurred lordling. His companion is a black-browed Moslem, and surely that is not seemly.”

Against the crowd of grease- and vermin-ridden men the slight figure of the maid stood out in bold relief. The pulse throbbed in her delicate throat, and the circles darkened under her eyes that blazed with the tensity of long suffering. Abdullah glanced from her to Robert with some amusement.

“Father Evagrius,” observed the knight, “if you are verily the leader of this company you do ill to turn your back on the castle of Montserrat. The river is scarce a safe abiding-place.”

“Messire,” responded the maid Ellen quickly, “the lord of Montserrat hath seen fit to order us away from his hold to the river.”

“How? His Grace, the marquis——”

“—doth lack of courtesy, even as you. Perchance he feared lest the ribalds trample his coverts or disturb the sleep of his hunting-hounds.”

“Demoiselle,” explained Robert calmly, “I am the vassal of Hugo of Montserrat, and even now I seek his hold, above in the border mountain chain. And I do maintain that he would not send a Christian company into hazard of their lives.”

“Sir Stiff-and-Stuffy, I do maintain that your Hugo hath turned us off.”

While Robert stared at her, perplexed, yet finding an unexpected pleasure in meeting the glance of a girl of his own race after years spent without sight of a woman, he heard the gentle voice of the priest.

“The good marquis hath given his word that he will protect us against all foes upon his marches. And the Orontes, where we will pass the night, doth lie within his border.”

“Then are you safe,” nodded Robert. “Montserrat, having given his pledge, will keep it.”

“And now, Sir Vassal,” added the girl Ellen, “do you kneel to the patriarch. Ah, he is a very saint, and his spirit dwells near to the throne of God—Whom you miscalled a moment ago.”

Robert, looking down upon her youthful rage—the maid scarce numbered more than fifteen years—tried in vain to stifle a hearty laugh. At this she flushed from throat to eyes and slipped off the hawking gauntlet upon her hand. Standing on her toes, she struck him swiftly across the lips.

The force of the blow knocked the glove from her grasp. Robert swung down from his stirrup and picked it up. When he stepped toward her she did not draw back, but clenched thin hands and stood her ground. Her followers, who had time to take in Robert's spread of shoulder and the length of his sword, made no move to molest him—though he paid no heed to them.

“I give you back your glove, demoiselle,” he said, smiling at her boldness. “And I would that you and the good father would turn back with me to Montserrat.”

“You mock us! Never—we would never go with you.”

“By the saints! I meant no ill to you or the blind priest,” denied the knight gravely.

“Come, Ellen,” said Evagrius, “you have delayed our march, and I feel that the sun is sinking near the earth. A week from this hour we shall bathe in the Jordan, and you shall see the Mount of Olives.”

His lined face was lighted by inward rejoicing as he felt for the donkey's halter. But the girl bent her head, and Robert heard her sob as she moved away. Frowning, he watched them pass into the dust cloud.

Why, he wondered, had the maid wept? Surely there was pride in her, and gentleness, for she tended the helpless Evagrius.

“Yah refik,” observed Abdullah, “you know little of a woman's spirit. That was a comely child and—I had fancied, lord, that you rode in such haste to meet with a woman.”

“There are none in the castle we seek.”

“Wallah! Can it be?”

He looked more than a little skeptical, yet the other's response appeared to give him satisfaction. As they passed up into the rocky gorges of the foot-hills Abdullah swung his lute around to his saddle-peak and began to sweep his fingers across the strings, chanting in his fine voice.

He sang of the joy of racing the stag over the hills, and of watching the falcon stoop, and of wandering under the dome of the stars. Robert, harkening despite himself, felt the magic of the other's gift of song. In his mind's vision he went back to boyhood, riding with his father over the desert floor, calling to stag-hounds. He knew again the thrill of loosing a hawk against the mid-day sky, and the cheer of the fire when the hunt was done and the wine-cup made the rounds.

Abdullah sang on, and Robert's memory changed to the days of stark hunger when a Moslem city was beleaguered; he watched the men fashioning great mangonels and massive siege towers—for he had been taught the arts of the siege engines when most boys were playing at jousting.

Lean years thronged into his mind. Years spent in the saddle with the nucleus of the mailed host that had struggled to keep the banner of the Croises upon the walls of Jerusalem. Days of hideous din, when streets under the eyes of the lad had run with blood until the very bodies were washed into the gutters.

As the minstrel sang on, he felt a restlessness in his veins. A craving to wander, as he had often done with his comrades, beyond the border and try his strength against foes.

“Faith!” he cried, spurring on the big bay. “We loiter apace.”

Abdullah put aside his lute and brought up the black stallion, bridle to bridle.

“Aforetime,” he observed, “I made that song for my master, who is master of all men.”

Robert did not ask him who this might be, because at that moment they heard rising from the depths behind and below them a hum of human voices.

“Te Deum laudamus. We praise Thee, O Lord—we praise and magnify Thee forever.”

It was the chant of the pilgrims, who were visible only as a thin line of dust moving into the maw of the Orontes, where, the network of gorges was shadowed by the early sunset in royal purple, the pinnacles crowned with red and gold. The two men paused to look back.

“See, how Allah hath hung in the sky the crimson banners of death,” remarked Abdullah. “And we—who knows what days are before us?”

CHAPTER II

A YEAR AND A DAY

THE glory of the sunset had dwindled when the two riders halted without the barbican gate of the castle of Montserrat. In the western sky the afterglow ran the length of the horizon, forming the semblance of a dull-red river flowing above the earth.

Light glimmered from the upper embrasures of the black donjon. The wall behind the moat shut out the courtyard from the travelers' sight; but they heard voices and the clinking of bowls on wooden tables and a snatch of song.

Robert, who was mightily hungry, struck the bars of the peep-hole with his mailed fist. In the hall of the main keep he knew that Hugo, his liege lord, Marquis of Montserrat and master of Antioch, sat at table with a goodly company. And the castellan was eager to greet his peers, who thought him dead after an absence of two years in Egypt, and to satisfy his hunger.

“Ho, the gate!” he shouted. “Open in the name of Montserrat.”

But the face of the warder that peered through the barred opening in the portal did not withdraw.

“Thy name! And thy companion's name! Small thanks would be ours, I trow, if we unbarred to a Saracen after sundown.”

“Sir Robert, castellan of Antioch, am I—Longu' espée, Longsword, forsooth. And he with me is a paynim minstrel with a song for the marquis. What now?”

Robert's mustache twitched in a grin of amusement as he heard an exclamation, followed by whispered voices. Other faces pressed to the bars to scrutinize him in the dim light.

“Out upon thee for a lying wight,” growled one. “Sir Robert was racked, carted and buried by the accursed Mamelukes.”

Behind the gate was heard the grinding clink of a cross-bow, wound up to speed a shaft. Robert turned to Abdullah.

“Minstrel, are you resolved to enter this hold? Methinks they give but an ill welcome to wayfarers—though Hugo loves well a good tale and a tuneful voice. Forget not that I stand in no way your protector, and what befalls is e'en your hazard.”

“So be it.”

“——'s death!”

Robert kicked the gate impatiently.

“Set wide the gate and make an end of words. Fetch a cresset, varlets, or I'll set the pack of you aswim in the moat.”

Some one remarked that this sounded rarely like the Longsword, and a torch was brought while they examined the visitors. Then the bars were let down slowly, and Robert pushed inside, followed by Abdullah.

A bearded captain of the warders crossed himself with a muttered—

“Mary preserve us—'tis he!”

The men who were lowering the drawbridge glanced at each other and whispered behind their hands, and it was several moments before the castellan and his companion dismounted in the courtyard and were greeted by a staring squire.

Word of their arrival had passed to the main hall before them. A slim poursuivant who bowed low at the door seemed to share the general hesitation in announcing them, and Robert was fain to chuckle again at the bewilderment of those who greeted him. At the end of the lofty hall candles gleamed on the table set on a dais for the master of the castle and his guests, and here a man stood up to peer over the candles as the knight strode forward between the long tables of the henchmen and commoners.

“Madre a Dios!”

His broad, olive face paled, and he grasped the arm of his chair.

“If ye be a spirit, why—why, know then that I have mourned you right hardily, having given to the shave-pates a ten shekels, aye, and thirty soldi for clank of bell and patter of prayer for this your soul. If ye be Sir Robert, lad, i' the flesh, why——”

“That am I, and sharp-set with hunger into the bargain.”

“Ha, that would be the Longu' espée. Why—boil me, lad, but we heard that you were cut down at the gate of Damietta. Aye, a Templar saw you carried within, and shortly thereafter your bare body hung out on the wall headless, to despite your comrades.”

Hugo shook his head doubtfully—a craggy head, yet covered with curled ringlets, oiled after the fashion of his native Italy. His broad, stooped body was clad in silk, covered with a damask mantle, fur-trimmed, that fell below the toes of his velvet shoes, which were turned up in the latest style and held by silver chains running from his girdle. His near-sighted eyes blinked at Abdullah, and Robert made known the minstrel.

“A fair greeting have we,” quoth the marquis, fingering his chin, “for trouvère and déchanteur, for makers and tellers of tales. But a noose and a fire beneath for spies. Bid him to the lower board.”

He turned to his companions.

“Messires, give greeting to this Englishman who is well come, having cheated the Saracens yet another time—though I vow to St. Bacchus my spleen rose to my gullet, when he fronted us.”

After removing his bascinet and handing his shield to a squire-at-arms, Robert hooked his sword over a chair and seated himself, to wash his hands in a silver bowl offered by a serving knave. Hugo divided his attention between his foot-gear and his guest impatiently until Robert had stayed his hunger.

“Olá, knaves—wine of Cyprus for our guests. Come, lad, the tale! Messer Guiblo—” he nodded at a thin, handsome Venetian whose rich velvets were the envy of the poorer liegemen—“made search for you in the camp of the king, and all reports had you dead.”

He bent forward to lean on the table addressing the other guests.

“Know, messers, that Sir Robert, called Longu' espée, did once save for us our city of Antioch, being rarely skilled at the making of stone-casters and fire-throwers, aye, at counterwalls and curtains, chat-castels and all the engines of siege.”

Besides the Venetian, Guiblo, a young Provençal, sat at the side of the marquis. Hugo spoke of him as the Sieur de la Marra, a Hospitaler. On the far side of the knight of the Marra was a dark-faced Lombard whom Robert knew as Hugo's seneschal. Other warriors and a scattering of Venetian merchants he did not know. No other Englishmen sat at the table. But Robert had noticed a woman who had the chair on the right of the marquis.

“The Madonna del Bengli—” Hugo followed his glance—“honors our poor dwelling of Montserrat for sake of the hunting and hawking in the hills.”

Robert rose and bowed courteously, wondering why such a woman should come over the valley of the Orontes for the sake of a little sport. She was a Venetian undoubtedly, and, he learned later, the cousin of the man Guiblo. Certainly she was beautiful and aware of it, for her bronze-red hair was scented and coiled skilfully on her bare shoulders; her white skin gave no evidence of the sun's touch.

“Equally honored are we,” she added lightly, “in such a visitor and his grace of Montserrat in such a vassal.”

Her curving lips accented the word vassal, and she turned to stare at Robert out of clear blue eyes. Guiblo leaned back to pick his teeth and exchange a word with the seneschal. Robert was little skilled in the manners of a court, or in play of words, yet it struck him that his welcome at Montserrat lacked of heartiness.

“By Venus, her girdle,” lisped the young knight of the Hospital, whose cheeks were warmed by wine, “would we had a Provençal to make song out of Longu' espeé's tale. Nay, his name is already known from Antioch to Ascalon. Didst bind the infidel jailers with their own fetters, Sir Robert—or win the heart and abetment of some fair Saracen maid, as the fashion is?”

“Not so,” made answer Robert bluntly. “Your Grace, I bring but two words. One a warning, one a request.”

Hugo set down his cup.

“Then let us have the warning.”

“A hundred Saracens armed and mounted for war passed through your border within the day.”

“Now by the slipper of our fair madonna, that could not be. Out watchers on the borderland have seen no foray pass. Nay——”

“I saw the tracks, across the river.”

The marquis pursed his lips and shook his head, then signed for a servant to fill the Longsword's cup.

“I pray you, Messer Englishman,” put in Guiblo incredulously, “how could you discern from tracks in the sand what manner of men passed over?”

“How? The hoofs were small—blooded Arabs or Turkomans. They were unshod—and so from the desert. To my thinking no pack-animals were among them, and so each horse had its rider.”

Mistress Bengli raised slim fingers in polite surprize, and by so doing displayed gleaming sapphire and turquoise rings, rarely fashioned.

“Truely we have a magician with us. Do they not say that the Egyptians are masters of the black arts?”

“Some band of villagers,” scoffed Hugo, “chanced to wander along the river. And now your boon. Hawk or horse, or—a fair maid of Circassia for your beguilement; 'tis granted ere asked.”

“My life it is,” Robert smiled, “I seek at your hand.”

“Misericordé—how?”

“At the Damietta wall I was struck down by a Mameluke's mace. It is true they pulled my body within the gates; but the hurt mended, and in time I could mount a horse. Being captive, they held me for ransom, yet could no letter be sent in the turmoil until truce was made between Saracens and Croises. Then did the paynim ameers grant me a year and a day to journey to my overlord and raise the payment for the freedom of my body.”

Some of the Venetians looked skeptical, for seldom did the enemy put trust in the crusaders to this extent. Yet they were aware that the Longsword had before this kept his promises to the Moslems.

“Well,” observed Hugo, “you are here, and you are free. The Cairenes can not lay hand on you now. On my life, I was not aware that you had a tongue to trick those unshriven dogs.”

“I gave my word to return to their camp if the ransom is not in their hands within a year and a day.”

“Oho, a prayer and a gold candlestick to the cathedral at Antioch will eke shrive you of a pledge to infidels. So say the monks.”

Robert shook his head gravely. “My word was passed.”

“But, fool, the Mamelukes would tie you to horses and split you. You have emptied too many of their saddles and wrought them wo too often for them to forego the pleasure of torturing you.”

He glanced sidewise at the set face of the youth and emptied his goblet, then laid his hand on the shoulder of the woman.

“Do you make shift to alter the mind of our stubborn vassal; perchance he will listen to reason from other lips than ours——”

Seeing that Robert frowned, he thought for a moment.

“What then is the sum of your ransom?”

“Two thousand broad pieces of gold.”

“Horns of the fiend! Tis the release of a baron of the realm.”

A smile touched the lips of the knight.

“My lord, having fought against Longsword, it chances that the Saracens do hold me to be greater than I am."

THE demand of the vassal was a just one. By the feudal laws Robert was bound to serve in the wars of Montserrat, and to come mounted and fully armed at the summons of his lord. For this service, instead of a fief and lands, Hugo had appointed him castellan of Antioch, granting him the payment and perquisites of his office—for though the Englishman was young for such responsibility he had shown his ability to handle the defense of a stronghold against siege. If Hugo had been taken captive, Robert would have been obliged to raise his share of the marquis' ransom. So he had sworn when he placed his hands between the knees of Hugo, and his lord was equally bound.

The marquis flung himself back in his chair with an oath, and Mistress Bengli studied the jewels on her fingers, a slight frown creasing her smooth forehead.

“Two thousand bezants!” he muttered. “It passes reason—to raise such a sum for a mere punctilio, a splitting of hairs. Mort de ma vie! Shall we mortgage our souls to swell the wallets of filthy unbelievers. Eh?”

The woman close to his ear spoke softly, and the Italian shrugged.

“You went to Egypt on no mission of mine, Longsword; and, now I think of it, you are cursed with wandering. Let the matter stand for the nonce, and we will talk of it at a better time.”

“Not so, lord,” objected Robert at once. “If you can not advance to me the entire sum, I must make shift to find a share of it, and perchance sell my office of castellan.”

“Pardon, messire,” put in the Venetian, Guiblo, “you are no longer castellan, for the king hath appointed another.”

“Who?”

“Aye, now it comes to my mind,” laughed the marquis, “our new monarch out of France hath brought with him a vassal who hath rendered loyal service to the State. Believing you dead, he did appoint Messer Guiblo here castellan.”

The thin Venetian bowed.

“I regret the mischance suffered by the youth, and I would that he had seen fit to endeavor to advise his liege of his situation while in Egypt.”

“I give you thanks for your courtesy,” responded Robert, frowning; and Guiblo's eyes narrowed.

The Englishman had not kept his disappointment out of his voice. True, he could not quarrel with the turn matters had taken. The king whose standard he had followed, Baldwin, had died in the last years when Jerusalem had been lost, and the baron who had been chosen to succeed him was a favorite of the French king. But now, unless the marquis aided him, as he was bound to do, Robert would have no means of raising his ransom in Palestine. And not a man present at the table doubted that the Englishman would keep his promise to return to Damietta and his captors if the sum were not raised.

“My lord,” he asked, “what is your answer—yea or nay?”

Hugo curled an oiled ringlet around his forefinger and sucked in his lips. Silence fell on the company, and Mistress Bengli exchanged a quick glance with Guiblo.

“Alas,” she sighed audibly, “our table doth lack of gaiety since the coming of Sir Robert. Will your Grace permit me to answer the Englishman?”

“Aye,” quoth Hugo, pleased. “Let us hear the judgment of Diana. Pardi, Sir Robert, it would have availed you more to urge your suit more gallantly. Then the madonna might have smiled upon you—for you are comely enough to win favor with the fair.”

“The fairest face in Palestine,” murmured the Hospitaler a little vaguely.

“And now,” she added, “having heard the plea of the vassal, we must take counsel of the learned. How now, O seneschal and merchants—are not we in the hands of the money-lenders? Hath his Grace of Montserrat such a sum where it can be called in and rendered into gold?”

Piculph, the Lombard seneschal, had gaged the pleasure of the marquis and made answer accordingly.

“Nay, donna, the very jewels of the rings you wear are paying usury to the Jews.”

“Then must we pawn our very lives, that this dour Englishman——”

A chuckle from Hugo interrupted her, and she wrinkled her brows in pretended displeasure. The marquis lolled in his chair, delighted with the word-play of his favorite, while he stroked the feathers of a favorite hawk perched beside him.

“—be safe,” she concluded, “unless he dare seek his ransom with his sword from the hands of those Moslems about whom he doth prate so roundly.”

It became clear to Robert that they were mocking him, for the marquis was lord of wide lands and great treasure. Guiblo disliked him, realizing that the former castellan of Antioch might urge his claim upon the king. Hugo, indifferent to everything that did not minister to his pleasure, had little desire to grant a small store of gold to the knight for what he held to be merely a quirk of conscience.

“And so,” said Mistress Rengli, smiling full upon Robert, “it is our pleasure that you should seek to gain your treasure from the castles of the paynims—a worthy quest for the Longu' espée——”

“Aye, let the wild boar root i' the thicket,” shouted Piculph.

“—for a year and a day,” cried the wo man shrilly above the maudlin merriment of the feasters, “and that is the sentence of the court of his peers.”

“Is it yours, my lord?”

Robert leaned forward to address his host.

“It is so,” responded Hugo without looking up.

But up from the table rose the Sieur de la Marra unsteadily, yet with a purpose in his bleared eyes.

“By the throne of Antichrist, by the palladium of the Horned One, 'tis a foul wrong so to mischief a warrior of the Cross. Has your Grace forgotten that he kept your wall of Antioch against the Saracen spears when the waters of the moat were red with blood?”

Alone of those present the knight of the Marra was not bound to the fortunes of Montserrat by ties of ambition, and Guiblo frowned at his words. The recent truce had altered the situation in Palestine, and the mastery of the rich coast cities was passing into the hands of the Lombards and Venetians who had no wish to see the barons of England or France return to the court. Knowing that Hugo wished to be rid of the Longsword, Guiblo made answer accordingly:

“Hast wooed the cup too long this night, Sir Hospitaler. Art a fool to give belief to the tale of this wanderer. If my lord of Montserrat had not deemed his tale a lie, he would have granted the Longu' espée his boon. But two thousand pieces of gold for a vassal's ransom passes belief—when the asker rides with a Moslem.”

“Now by Venus, her girdle,” cried the Sieur de la Marra, reaching a quivering hand for his sword, “that touches upon mine honor——”

“I give you thanks, Sir Hospitaler,” broke in Robert, “for your abetment, but no man's aid seek I.”

The red lips of Mistress Bengli curled, for here was a quarrel brewing, and she loved well to see men put themselves to the hazard of drawn steel. She did not fear for Guiblo, knowing that her cousin was well able to make shift for himself, and as for Hugo—a vassal might not strike or miscall his lord. But she was more than a little puzzled when Robert signed for his cup to be filled and waited until Hugo had done likewise.

“My lord,” he said slowly, “I greet you with this, my stirrup cup. In this hour I ride from Montserrat, and my allegiance is at an end. No vassal am I, but my own man henceforth, by your will. With Messer Guiblo and the seneschal I shall have other speech.”

He emptied his goblet and Hugo did the same. Then the Englishman beckoned to Abdullah at the lower table, and in the silence that had fallen upon the company his summons was clearly heard.

“O minstrel, a song for the people of the castle. We have had our dinner, it seems, and the wine thereof, and in this place a man must pay a reckoning for all that is bestowed upon him. Sing, O Abdullah, of gold and gear and treasure, that they may be pleasured, for my entertainment was but indifferent and dull.”

At this the marquis flushed, while his followers fingered the poniards in their belts; but Mistress Bengli laughed musically, for the Englishman promised to be entertaining after all. Abdullah rose without comment and salaamed fro the marquis and the woman. Advancing to the edge of the dais, he lifted his lute and plucked softly at the strings.

“In the name of Allah, the All-Compassionate, the All-Wise,” he began in liquid Arabic, “will the illustrious lords harken to the tale of a poor wayfarer?”

His powerful hand swept over the lute, and he chanted, deep-voiced:

“With Allah are the keys of the unseen, and who is bold enough to take in hand the keys? Doth lack of gold, O king, or jewels for the hilts of swords, or horses fleeter than the desert storm or garments softer than the petals of flowers? Then harken to my tale of Khar, the Land of the Throne of Gold.”

Those of the listeners who understood Arabic, and they were many, glanced up in some surprize. The legend of Khar had come to their ears before this, but never in the same guise.

They had heard that beyond the eastern mountain wall was a wide desert and beyond this a sea of salt water. Far to the east lay the greatest of the Moslem kingdoms, so it was said. This was known as Khar or Khorassan,^[1] and many were the tales of its wealth.

Like Cathay or the land of Prester John, the myth was voiced by wandering minstrels, and no man knew the truth of it, and no warrior of the Croises had penetrated farther to the east than the city of Damascus.

“Know, O Auspicious Lord,” chanted Abdullah, “that it hath been my lot to follow the path of a wayfarer. From the Roof of the World I have looked down upon a land fairer than moonlight on a mountain lake; I have walked through gardens where roses were wrought of rubies, with emeralds for leaves; I have sat in a marble tower and beheld the passing of a monarch who hath more riders to his command than the Sultan of Damascus hath stones in his highways. Verily, as grains of sand is the number of warriors in this land. They walk in silvered mail with the plumes of birds upon their heads; their weapons are of blue steel, and the power of their host is such that the Mamelukes of Egypt would bow down to them, even as grass before a rising wind.”

Some of the guests smiled, and the Venetians, who were the wisest of the assemblage, sneered openly as at a palpable lie.

“Ya maulaya, O my lord, this is truth. The very trees of the palace gardens in this place are silver; and the monarch thereof hath a lake within his city—a lake built by the hands of his slaves. Within the courtyard of his castle stands a fountain, casting forth water perfumed with musk and aloes.”

Hugo of Montserrat sighed and curled the lock of hair upon his forehead.

“In this land the lords are carried about by their slaves; save to mount a horse they do not set foot to earth. When the king drinks nakars and trumpets sound; when he walks in his chambers, rolls of silk are spread before him. He dwells in a city so great that the eye can not measure it from one place. The women of his court are the fairest in the world, for they are brought from every land that his riders can adventure to.

“Verily,” said the teller of tales slowly, “this king is the lord of life and death, for men seeking the joys of his court oft-times perish in the journey thither. But, having come, their joys are the fullest that life can measure out.”

CHAPTER III

THE RIDERS FROM KHAR

“WITH Allah are the keys of the unseen.”

Abdullah ceased his say and took his hand from his lute.

“But who will seek them out?” he added.

The listeners glanced at each other, and Mistress Bengli, chin on hand, smiled and watched the gleaming jewels on her fingers. Many had come to Palestine believing that it held the lure of the fabulous Khar and had found it otherwise.

“I have not heard the tale related so,” observed Hugo. “Ha, minstrel, you are skilled in your craft—for you make us think you have dwelt in Khar.”

“Sire, I have.”

Guiblo shook his head.

“Then, rogue; you must have crossed the great desert and passed through the Iron Gates of which your folk prate.”

Abdullah bowed assent.

“The road is no easy one. Nay, a full three moons must a man sit in the saddle, and the horse should be of good blood. In an elder day one of the heroes of the Franks led his host over the desert and saw the salt sea that lies in the desert.”

“His name?”

“Iskander.”

From the end of the table a monk who had not spoken until now looked up with a gleam of interest.

“By your leave, my lord, that should be Alexander, King of Macedon. Aye, the misguided scholasticists do relate in their profane books the deeds of the Macedonian.”

“And how did Alexander pass the Iron Gates?”

“With his sword,” Abdullah said calmly. “And yet—did he live to set foot in his own land again? Nay; the Iron Gates take their toll.”

“What manner of thing are they?”

“In the books of the cosmographers, Strabo and Herodotus, Messer Guiblo,” explained the monk, “there is a mark on the road to the east inscribed with the words Caspiæ Pylæ, or Gates of the Caspian. Their nature is unknown, for since the day of the Cæsars no Christian hath ventured there.”

“Riddles,” scoffed Hugo in his own speech. “'Tis a myth that holds no profit for us.”

Abdullah appeared to grasp his meaning.

“O king,” he observed gravely, “riders have come out of Khar on a foray, and the traces of their horses can be seen within your borders.”

“My watchers beheld them not.”

“Who can behold the stars in broad day, or the djinn folk who ride upon the winds at night? Does the lord of the castle wish to see a talsmin—a token that his servant's word is true?”

Thrusting his hand into his girdle, the minstrel drew forth something that flashed in the flickering candle-light—a neck-chain of rubies cut into the semblance of roses, strung on a cord of finely wrought gold.

“Such jewels as these the women of Khar wear on their throats.”

Mistress Bengli caught up the chain in her white fingers, and the others crowded close to stare from the gleaming rubies to Abdullah, who seemed inwardly amused by the excitement he had caused.

Now, considering him narrowly, Longsword thought that no playing of the lute could fashion such muscular hands, and no warbling of nights could give such note of command to a voice. Abdullah bore himself more like an atabeg—a leader of a host—than a minstrel.

“Here is a strange rogue forsooth,” muttered the seneschal, Piculph, “with a baron's ransom in his belly-band.”

Robert frowned, for he wished no ill to the teller of tales, and Abdullah might as well have cast his valuable chain into the Orontes as to have shown it to the woman of the Montserrat. Hugo would cheerfully slit open a hundred natives on the chance that one had swallowed a single ruby like these. But Abdullah seemed no whit fearful of the fate he had called down on himself, for he had ceased to watch Mistress Bengli and was eying the great tapestries that shook and bellied upon the walls as the gusts of a rising wind buffeted the castle walls and whined through the cracks. The man, heedless of the company at the table, was listening to the sounds of the night beyond the walls.

At that moment there was heard a mutter of voices at the entrance to the hall, the clank of a long scabbard on the stone flagging of the floor, and the captain of the warders stood within the curtain with uplifted hand.

“Pardon, good my lord, I bear tidings. On the river road we have seen an array of Moslems. At midnight I went forth beyond the hamlet to overlook the valley, and in the lower gorge armed men do assemble in ranks. Wilt give command to man the walls, or sally forth?”

“Ha—so!”

Hugo stroked his heavy chin and glanced at his companions.

“Sir Robert had the right of it, methinks—and the watchers upon the hill towers shall taste of the strappado. What is your counsel, messires?”

The young Sieur de la Marra struck the table with his fist and set the flagons dancing.

“By the Cross, messires, the paynims do challenge us. My men and I fare forth to seek them.”

Hugo exchanged a low word with Messer Guiblo, and the Hospitaler caught the mention of Longu' espée's name.

“Let it be so. Ho, armiger—my helm and shield. Without there, sound the oliphant to muster our followers.”

Mistress Bengli put her hand to her throat to stifle a scream, and the chain of rubies fell to the table and slid down upon the rushes, whence Abdullah picked them up without being observed. This done, the minstrel made his way quietly to the wind-whipped tapestries in a dim corner.

An ivory horn sounded a mellow note in the courtyard, and the clatter of horses, led from the stables, made answer. When Hugo's helm was laced on by a squire-at-arms, he summoned the captain of the guard and peered around the hall.

“In the fiend's name, where went the infidel? Seek him out—you, and you—and retrieve me his chain, or Piculph shall strip and flay you. He stood here but a moment agone——”

“The knave hath a rare trick of foretelling the mind of your Grace,” muttered Guiblo. “And his crony the English boar hath forsaken us as well. Methinks he bears you ill intent.”

“Nay, the youth is a wildling no more. You dared much when you miscalled him. The man's courage is proof, and he will seek you out ere he parts from us.”

With a smile the Venetian pulled on his mailed gloves and tightened his belt.

“Grant me leave to deal with him—else he will hie him to the court and brew trouble for our quaffing. Harken, lord—there be too many eyes and tongues in this hall. Once in the gullies by the river, ere the search for the infidels is ended, my men will attend the Englishman. A blow from an ax, and he will lack his right hand. Thereafter will he bray less loudly of his wrongs.”

The marquis shrugged.

“I'll hear no more. Yet must I ride forth lest the cursed Hospitaler suspect something amiss.”

Pausing at the donjon gate to tell off a score of men-at-arms to remain and secure Abdullah, he strode to his horse and signed for the clarion to sound the march. Flaring cressets on the walls cast a smoky light over the courtyard and the lance streamers of the knights. Behind these dark masses of pikemen and archers were forming under Piculph's orders.

Under the lifted portcullis the Hospitaler and the Longsword sat their powerful chargers impatiently, having put aside their private grievances in the presence of the common foe. Hugo glanced around and saw that Abdullah could not have left the donjon without being seen; nor was he visible in the courtyard. Satisfied of this, the master of the castle called for his standard to be lifted, and the first line of riders lowered their lances to pass under the portcullis, following the Sieur de la Marra over the drawbridge.

THE great hall was being ransacked by servants and men-at-arms, who turned over tables and peered into chests, clustering upon the stairs that led to the chambers above, while Mistress Bengli cried to her serving women to lead the search for the Moslem and his jewels into the kitchen and cellars. Eagerly she urged on the men and ran to one of the doorways to listen to the tumult above-stairs.

Standing here in the shadow, a powerful hand closed over her mouth, holding firm her chin.

“O lady,” whispered the voice of the minstrel, “would you live to greet the king, your lover, this night? Ai-a, life is sweet, is it not? Nay, do not lift your hands, but walk between me and the light—so—and seek the way that leads to the kitchen—so!”

Rigid with fright, Mistress Bengli stumbled along the swaying arras and turned into an archway that brought them to a narrow hall. From the corners of her eyes she saw that Abdullah had his simitar in his left hand, and the gleam of bare steel sent a chill into her veins.

“It is not fitting, lady,” went on the minstrel, “that a man of Khar should loiter in the hall of the feasters when a battle is joined. So, pray that no man of yours shall meet with us, and lead me to the stables—nay, not into the light!”

While she grasped little of his speech, his intention was clear and Mistress Bengli breathed a sigh of relief when they stood in the shadow of the horse sheds. Abdullah whistled softly, and somewhere a charger neighed. Drawing the woman with him, he found and saddled his horse, taking his time; for the sheds were deserted after the departure of the riders. He had noticed a small gate in the outer wall, and toward this he walked the black stallion and tapped the bars with his sword.

Trembling, she lifted the bars and set them aside, then turned the key and tugged open the gate. Abdullah glanced out and saw that the moat did not extend to this angle. Mistress Bengli stepped back, only half believing she was to suffer no hurt from the wayfarer.

“Say to your lord,” he laughed, “that Abdullah ibn Khar rode to Montserrat upon a mission. Aye, to find one among the Franks who was worthy to adventure to the Throne of Gold. Say that he found not such a man within Montserrat, and so—the peace!”

AT THE edge of the wooded land the Montserrat archers who were the advance of the marquis' array halted and studied the open valley below them. The remnant of a moon hung over the hills to the south, lighting the expanse of rolling sand that extended to the river bed. In a hollow by the water glowed the embers of a half-dozen camp-fires.

A raven croaked from the shadows, and the screaming snarl of a panther made response. Listening, the archers heard stealthy rustling in the dry brush on either side. They had come upon no sign of the Moslems in the march of a full league, down from the castle. And they saw nothing amiss in the camp of the pilgrims below them.

So they reported to Longsword and the Hospitaler who rode up presently, followed by the main body. After scanning the valley carefully Sir Robert surprized his companion by putting spurs suddenly to the bay and galloping out upon the sand.

He rode into the camp unchallenged and halted by the ox-carts that were ranged near the fire. The Sieur de la Marra paused to look down at the pilgrims who lay in scattered groups in the hollows, and to swear under his breath.

“——! Montserrat feared an ambushment, yet methinks naught lies in wait here save Death.”

At the coming of the crusaders jackals and snarling four-footed things slipped out of the camp into the shadows. Even the oxen had been cut down, and one man still gripping an ax was prone in the ashes of the fire, his head half-burned away.

Torches were kindled by the archers while the riders quieted their horses, made rest less by the penetrating smell of blood. Some stared at the carts where a score of bodies lay about the woman who still held the baby in her arms—all pierced by arrows. In the shallows of the rivers the standard-bearer sprawled, the shaft of the banner floating beside his head. In all quarters the sand was trampled by horses' hoofs, yet the pilgrims had had no horses. The Hospitaler dismounted to examine one of the arrows and announced that it was a kind he had not seen before—a short shaft, unbarbed but with long feathering.

“It smacks of an Arab bow. Ha, messires, I wot well the minstrel spoke the truth! The riders who did this pretty business came from the desert, and mayhap from Khar.”

Whoever they were, the raiders had taken the camp by surprize and had wrought fearful havoc with small loss to themselves. No bodies of Saracens were to be seen, and if any had been slain they were borne off by their comrades. The attack—judging by the numbers of beasts that gathered about the scene—had taken place some hours before, so the Montserrat watchers must have beheld the foray riding back from the river to one of the trails that led through the mountains.

Pursuit was not to be thought of. The Croises had learned after bitter experiences that their heavily armed, warriors and sturdy chargers could not deal with the swift-moving Saracens in broken country.

“A fair riddance, messires,” mouthed Hugo, turning over the body of a ragged lad with his lance point. “We need no longer feed the rabble, though we must e'en bury it—Fra Anselmo will see to't. Come, who is for the castle?”

The archers and pikemen who had been combing over the scattered packs of the pilgrims, already pillaged by the raiders, began to move toward their officers, while Guiblo and his following with Piculph the Lombard and Hugo's squire drew closer about the three.

But the young Hospitaler stooped to the stained sand and held up a slender gauntlet embroidered with silk initials.

“E. de I.—requiescat in pace, whosoever ye be—a woman's hawking-gauntlet, or I'm a turn-spit. What—how now?”

Robert had taken the glove from him and turned to face the marquis.

“Messire,” said he, “it lingers in my memory that you did give your knightly word to the rabble that you would defend them against all foes upon this, your land.”

As Hugo was silent, in surprize he added—

"Those who utter what they will not defend with their bodies, I do hold arrant cowards, recreant to their vows.”

Whipping out his sword, he placed the glove near its point and, leaning forward, tossed it deftly on Hugo's saddle-peak.

“By this do I challenge your grace, Hugo Amardis of Montserrat, to try by combat in this hour which of us be true and which be false.”

Now at this the liegemen of Montserrat stared and muttered and drew closer, so that a ring of armed men was formed about the group, and there fell a silence in which the snuffling breathing of the horses was clearly heard. Passion darkened the swarthy face of the marquis, but before he could frame an answer Robert spoke again.

“My lord, the laws of Palestine do not permit one who hath been a vassal to summon his liege into the combat of justice. So, will your Grace name from among your vassals a champion to take your place?”

Hugo knew well that he could not have withstood the Englishman's sword, but his anger flared the higher with the thought. Snatching up the gauntlet and casting it down on the sand, he shouted hoarsely:

“Piculph—Guiblo—Sir Curthose, to me! Wilt suffer this upstart to badger me? A thousand ——, I say—to me!”

“Nay, one will suffice, your Grace,” laughed the Hospitaler, who had recovered from his surprize at Robert's plain speaking after his self-control in the castle hall. “It were a foul wrong, meseems, to set three devils on one Englishman.”

Two retainers of the Venetian who had been hovering close to the Longsword's flank, drew back when spectators thronged about them. Messer Guiblo urged his horse close to the powerful form of the Lombard and whispered to him swiftly. Piculph gnawed his lip, then nodded assent.

“I'll cut his comb, my lord,” he said aloud, “then he'll crow less loud, I ween.”

“Good!” cried Robert. “'Twas my wish to bid you farewell in this fashion.”

Hugo reined back his horse to glance questioningly at Messer Guiblo, who nodded reassuringly and slipped back among his men. The Sieur de la Marra also retreated to leave the ring clear for the fighters.

In the half-light of the low moon it was easily seen that the two were a match in bigness of bone and height, though the Englishman had the better horse. Piculph glanced about him once and swung down from his stirrup, choosing to fight on foot.

It was in the code of the law that in the lists of justice the two combatants should be armed equally in all particulars. Robert dismounted without hesitation, trying the firmness of the sand with a mailed foot and letting fall his shield—as the Lombard carried none.

But when Piculph drew his sword a grim laugh went up from the Montserrat liege men. The Lombard's weapon was no longer than his adversary's yet it tapered hardly at all, being blunt at the tip and heavier by half than the Longsword's brand. It was a sword to be wielded by two hands, and so Piculph had no need of a shield.

The watchers pressed closer, jostling one another and muttering between set teeth. The hollow where the camp lay was in a natural amphitheater that held the heat of the day, and they sweated under the weight of armor, their veins warmed by the late drinking. Many stood on the huddle of the slain to see the better.

Piculph was no loiterer. Striding forward, he swung the two-handed blade in circles, his muscular arms cracking.

“A purse of gold that he slays the Longsword or makes him cry mercy,” offered Sir Curthose of Var to the young Sieur de la Marra.

But the Hospitaler gnawed his lip in silence as he watched Robert, who stood erect in his tracks, his sword held close to his chest, the point upraised.

With a grunt Piculph struck down and sidewise at his foe's throat, and steel sang against steel. The Lombard's sword flashed in a circle that ended high above his own head. Robert, by moving his arms quickly, had deflected the heavy blade so that it passed harmlessly over his helmet.

Piculph recovered and smote again, straight down at the Englishman's head. Robert planted his feet and whirled up his blade, turning the other's aside and into the sand.

“Thy purse likes me well, Sir Curthose,” cried the Hospitaler. “Ha—treachery!”

Near at hand his quick eye had distinguished one of the Lombards kneeling with a short battle mace drawn back to throw. In that elusive light the iron club might have been cast unseen, and at such short range it could not fail to reach the Longsword. Drawing his sword, the young knight ran at the front of the circle of men-at-arms; midway in a stride he faltered and flung up his arm.

A dagger, wielded by one he had passed, had struck fair into the side of his throat, and gasping, he sank on his knees, choking out his life. The quick movement had caught the eye of Robert, who cried out and sprang aside from Piculph.

“A deed most foul!” he grated through set teeth. “Montserrat——”

Picking out the man who had stabbed the knight and who was trying to work back into the throng, he slashed him full between neck and shoulder and used his point on the henchman who still balanced the mace.

“——, Montserrat, since when have you plied the trade of cutthroat? Ah, Piculph!”

Whirling to meet a fresh onset from the seneschal, Robert gave back the Lombard blow for blow, until the clashing of steel drowned the shouts of the aroused liege men. Sweat gleamed on the Lombard's broad cheeks, and his breath labored as he exerted all his strength, fearing now for his life. Robert whipped his sword over the other's guard, and the edge of the blade thudded against Piculph's neck under the ear.

It struck upon the fold of the mail coif and glanced up, biting through the chain mail and stripped the end of the jaw-bone and the ear from the side of the man's head. The Lombard plunged down upon the sand, and Robert ran to his horse. The bay, trained to stand where he had been left, was in motion before the warrior had settled in the saddle.

An arrow whistled through the air, and Robert put his horse to a trot, making the round of the circle once, seeking Guiblo, the Venetian. But Guiblo had withdrawn far into the ranks of his men, and Sir Curthose and many of the older liegemen stood their ground, unwilling to draw weapon against the man who had once been castellan of Antioch.

“What, my lord,” Robert gibed, “do you lack of murderers? Then summon up your hunters and the hounds and so—fare well!”

He had reached one end of the irregular cleared space; now he wheeled the bay and raked its flanks with rowels. The charger leaped forward, gained pace, and the throng gave way in haste before horse and rider, permitting Longsword to pass through. He headed for the nearest gully amid the foot-hills, and the voice of the marquis roared after him.

“After him! A cap full of gold to the wight who brings him down.”

The bay charger, wise and swift of foot, swung clear of the running men and gained the shadows of the rocks before the riders could draw near him. Guiblo, his swarthy cheeks pallid, stared down at the lifeless eyes of the young knight whose white cross was slowly obscured by a dark tide. Beside him was the hawking-gauntlet.

“A good plan,” murmured the Venetian. “Aye—but three lie slain and a fourth maimed and another hunted by the liegemen, for so slight a thing as a ribald's glove.”

CHAPTER IV

A fat hound does not hunt well—Chinese Proverbs.

ROBERT had hunted a fleeing foeman too often not to know that a fugitive who rides blindly is soon overtaken or cut off. So he galloped up the twisting gully, scanning the ground on either hand and when he was barely within the shadow of the hills turned sharply to the left.

The bay pricked up its ears, braced its forefeet and half slid on its haunches down into the rocky bed of a dry watercourse. Here a stand of gnarled cedars hid them from view, and Robert was out of the saddle and holding the horse's muzzle before the last pebbles had stopped rolling.

His forehead was bleeding and his head was ringing from a glancing blow of the two-handed sword that had ripped off his helmet. And black bitterness clouded his thoughts. To be baited, like a buffoon at table, to be hunted over the glens like a runagate cut-purse! To be tricked by the man who no longer had use for his services!

True, he could endeavor to make his way to Cyprus, where the new king held court—Jerusalem being in the hands of the Saracens. There, however, the influence of the Montserrats and the Venetians would be at work against him, and a poniard in the back in some tavern or alley would make an end of him. As for raising his ransom in Palestine under the shadow of Hugo's enmity—that was out of the question.

If he escaped pursuit—and the people of Montserrat would spare no pains to silence the voice that might be raised against them in accusation of the murder of the Hospitaler—he must seek the road that led to the eastern mountain wall and there make shift as best he could in the hills until the hue and cry had died away.

“And look ye, Sir Charger,” he observed under his breath, “we do lack the services of squire and valeret, likewise of shield and helm and purse—which last is a sad matter, for we stand bound to garner us a many broad pieces of gold before the year is told. Yet hath the year still many moons, and we have been in a worse strait than this—Holá, softly, softly!”

Gripping the nostrils of the horse, he looked up as a rider plunged off the trail overhead, plowing recklessly through the sand until he reined to a sudden halt amid the cedars. And then came a new thudding of hoofs along the ridge and a clanking of steel. Men shouted back and forth and passed on, unseen. Neither Robert nor the stranger moved until the detachment had galloped out of hearing, and they were certain that no others followed.

“By Allah, do the Franks of this country never sleep? The gullies are a swarm with them, and I have all but broken my leg on these rocks. Bi al-taubah—they do me too much honor.”

“Abdullah!”

Robert walked over to the minstrel.

“How came you from the castle?”

“The red-haired woman unbarred a gate for me. When you would enter a dwelling seek out for companion a man with a sword; when you would leave unseen, ask a woman. But honor is due first to Allah and then to you. I watched from the height and saw you cut down those who came against you. Before that I observed you in the hall of the feasters, when the wine went the rounds and a woman would have smiled upon you. Ohai, my heart was cheered and I said to myself—

“‘There is one who hath the bearing of a bahator, a prince of warriors.'”

“Nay, these Franks do not search for you. They ride to seek me out.”

“Wherefore?”

“To bind me and make an end of my doings.”

Abdullah laughed, running his fingers through his beard.

“What is written is written, and who shall say otherwise? For I was sent hither to find among other things a Frank who was indeed a warrior, and to bring him back with me to my king.”

“What lord is that?”

“The master of all men.”

“His name and place?”

“Nay, in time you will know that as well as other things. We will ride to Khar, for I have come from there. Have you heart to cross the desert and scale the Iron Gates?”

Abdullah was silent a moment.

“The path is one of peril,” he went on. “If you live to reach Khar you will never come back—to this. Whosoever ventures to Khar abides there. But this I can promise you; before the Summer is past you will behold a mighty warring of peoples, and a treasure uncovered. Of this you shall claim a share that will suffice to build a castle like yonder hold and fill it with a thousand slaves and as many steeds——”

Robert smote the stallion's saddle softly with his fist.

“Words—words!”

The breath of the minstrel hissed through his lips.

“I read you not aright if you are one to seek talsmins and surety for a venture such as this. Yet if you fear, turn aside now. I have seen the Iron Gates crush a trembler——”

“Faith!”

The knight gripped Abdullah's shoulder. “Wherever you dare set foot, I would go beyond you.”

“Oh-o-ho!”

Abdullah rocked with inward mirth, as at a huge joke.

“The young cub growls—the fledgling lifts its beak. Ohai—hai!”

“Mount then and show the path. For I will adventure with you into paynimry.”

“Aye, bunayyi, little son. The young warrior would level his spear at an elephant! O most darling fool; had I a son he would be like you, yet wiser. Think ye, Nazarene, I will not betray you at the first Moslem village beyond the hills?”

“Nay, for you are no Moslem.”

In the deep gloom under the trees Abdullah leaned closer to peer into his companion's eyes.

“How? What words are these?”

“And you were not always a minstrel. Though you carry a prayer rug, Abdullah, you have no use for it. I have not seen you pray the namaz gar, and in the castle you shared forbiden wine and meat.”

Abdullah was silent for a full minute, pondering this.

“Then you think I am atabeg of the Kharesmian raiders?”

“Not so. For you warned the baron of their approach, and you did not seek them when you won free of the castle.”

“True, O father of ravens. Had I led the raiders I would have stormed the Nazarene hold, for there was a woman more to be desired than the white-faced maid of the pilgrims—and a lord to be held for ransom.”

The minstrel paused to take the saddle from the stallion and let him roll in the sand, though it meant risk for himself.

“Many things have I seen, O youth, but not this thing—that a babbler of secrets lived to be white of hair. Remember that I am Abdullah, the teller of tales, no more.”

“Then we ride alone—we twain?”

“Not alone.”

Abdullah laughed softly.

“Upon our road we shall have a brave company. Your Iskander and the hero Rustam—aye, and one of the Cæsars of Rome—will be our road companions. They who died, seeking the treasure of the Throne of Gold, which we may seize and keep.”

Leaning on his sword, Longsword listened in silence. The minstrel could have said nothing better suited to his mood. Robert never hesitated over a decision, and when he felt that he could trust Abdullah he thought no more about it.

Meanwhile the minstrel was busied about his saddle-bags.

“And if we die,” he muttered into his beard, “we will spread such a carpet of slain about us that men will not forget our names. O Nazarene, you may not venture beyond the hills without a name, and garments to fit. Hai, you are dark enough in the skin to pass for an Egyptian, being lighter than the Arabs. You speak the language easily—yet not like an Arab. So you must be a Lion of Egypt: Alp Arslan, the sword slayer, the cloud-scattering, the diamond sheen of all warriors—the Ameer Alp Arslan. And remember to pray the namaz gar,” he added under his breath.

PRESENTLY Robert stood in changed garments. Abdullah had cast away the knight's surcoat and mailed thigh-pieces, sleeves and mittens. From his pack he had produced a loin cloth, baggy cotton trousers and slippers. Over the youth's mail he had slipped a flowing khalat of silk and bound it in at the waist with a shawl, working skilfully in the dark. Lastly he gave Robert a light Saracen steel headgear with peak and nasal and mailed drop that hung about ears and shoulders.

“The horse and saddle may pass for spoil taken from the Nazarenes,” he pronounced, “likewise the long sword; In the first village we will seek out a barber, and when he has shaved your head and mouth we will cut him open lest he talk too much. What now?”

Robert stooped and found his gold spurs on the ground. Feeling about for a large boulder in the gully, he put forth his strength and rolled it aside. Then, dropping the spurs in the hollow, he thrust back the stone upon them;

“So that no other may wear them,” he said calmly. “For here doth Sir Robert, castellan of Antioch, end his days; and from here doth Robert the Wayfarer step forth.”

TAKING advantage of the dawn mists, they worked out of the foot-hills into a cattle path known to Robert, and sunrise found them well away from the castle. Avoiding the main road to the east, they climbed steadily until they were past the line of the Montserrat watch towers, Abdullah remarking grimly that the warders of the marquis would pay little attention to two Moslem riders when they were seeking a fugitive of their own race upon whose head a reward had been placed.

Here they turned back into the trail that had been taken by the raiders, as they judged from the hoof-marks. Abdullah started to give the stallion his head when he swerved in the saddle and reined in sharply. An arrow whistled between them, and another shaft grazed Robert's ear as he urged his horse forward.

Crashing into the underbrush, he drew his sword and slashed at a tamarisk bush behind which a man was crouched. The archer turned to flee, but caught his foot and fell headlong. Robert swung from his stirrups and stood over him, surprized to see that it was the lanky bowman who had marched with the pilgrims. The man snarled up at him, unarmed—for his bow had fallen from his hand.

Robert sheathed the long sword and signed to Abdullah to do the man no hurt. The bowman must have thought them stragglers of the raiders, and Robert had no desire to make himself known, until he noticed a handsome pony with a Moslem saddle tethered to a near-by tree.

“Which way went the raiders from Khar?” he asked in English, for Abdullah desired to avoid the path taken by the foray. “You have one of their horses, methinks.”

The bowman sat up, his close-set eyes agleam with hatred and suspicion.

“Aye, that have I, Saracen. And no aid wilt thou have from me to find the unshriven dogs, thy companions. Ha, by token of that long sword and high horse thou hast slain a Christian knight that did bespeak me a day agone upon the road to Jordan.”

He spat on the ground in front of Robert and sprang to his feet, palpably astonished that he should have been left alive so long.

His tousled red hair stood up from his freckled skin, and the shagreen hood upon his bony shoulders was rent by thorns, so it barely concealed the greasy leather jerkin beneath. His thin face was defiant.

“Heave up thy hacker, Moslem, and make an end—for Will Bunsley o' Northumberland will ask no mercy from a black-avised knave. Had I my good long bow I'd spit me the twain of ye. Ah, that I would. This lewd Moslem bow, seest thou, carries wide o' the mark.”

He kicked contemptuously at the short Moslem bow with its looping arch and silk cord that lay near at hand. In some way he had lost his own weapon and had found him another, less satisfactory. And his failure to bring down the two riders seemed to irk him deeply.

“Nay,” Robert smiled, “the feathers of your shaft tickled my ear. And that is close enough.”

“Close, quotha!” the bowman sneered. “Why, lookee, my rogue—with my yew bow I'd split thee thy forehead fair and featly at fifty paces.”

His jaw dropped, and he fell back a pace.

“St. Dunstan be my aid! Thou art the knight himself in paynim garb. Aye, that yellow hair——”

He scratched his head, looking from Robert to Abdullah suspiciously.

“And I would have slain thee in quittance of my revenge.”

“Your revenge, bowman?”

“Ah. Three lives I seek of the Saracens that fell upon our company, to wit: One for the blind priest, good Father Evagrius, that they carried off to torture; another for the maid Ellen that they seized and bound upon a horse—may they sup in purgatory, may their tongues rot out and the kites beak their eyes!”

“And the third?”

“I vowed to St. Dunstan to feather me a shaft in the losel that smote me a dour ding upon the sconce.”

Will Bunsley rubbed a lump on his skull ruefully.

“Aye, a knavish clout it were on this my mazzard.”

“Tell me the story of the affray.”

Robert sheathed his sword slowly. He had thought all the pilgrims slain, but here was news of two taken captive.

“Affray, quotha!”

The archer shook his head.

“Nay, 'twas a shambles and we the sheep.”

The surprize, he explained, had been complete, for the pilgrims thought themselves safe on the Montserrat lands. The raiders must have been concealed in the gullies near the river, and they rode into the camp plying their bows on all sides. Those who stood up to them were shot down before sword or pike could be used, and Bunsley had barely time to string his bow before he saw the patriarch and the girl snatched up and placed on one of the horses.

He sent a shaft into one of the riders and ran after the captives, who were led away at once. Before he reached them he had been struck down by a club or mace from behind, and when he came to his senses the slaughter was over. After washing his head in the river he was able to catch a riderless pony that was circling the camp.

Without delaying Bunsley had set forth on the trail taken by the raiders. This was before the coming of the Montserrat men, and he pushed up into the mountains, be coming weary and confused on the descent, until he dismounted and sought some sleep, being awakened by the tread of Abdullah's horse. The Moslem bow he had picked up when he left the camp.

“And if thou be'st true man, thou wilt seek out the infidel dogs and prevail upon them to release the maid and priest. If not, then for love of the Cross thou didst wear, bear me company until we come up with them.”

“You would not go far, bowman.”

Robert liked the stubborn courage of the yeoman, yet knew that Bunsley would not live to see the sun set if he kept on as he planned.

“Turn back and seek service with the Montserrat, who hath an eye for a man who pulls a good bow.”

“Nay, I'll seek no service with him. Ah, he is too glib with promises and too sparing of deeds. 'Tis a good lass and loves me well.”

Bunsley heaved a deep sigh.

“What says the redbeard?” asked Abdullah.

Robert explained, and the minstrel studied the archer curiously.

“Take me with thee, lord,” Bunsley begged doggedly, “and, God willing, I'll cry a greeting to the lass and strike a blow for her ere she be lost to Christian folk.”

The girl, he added eagerly, was no more than a child when, a year and more ago, she had listened to the preaching of the monk de Coupon in Blois, where Bunsley happened to be stationed. She was Ellen d'lbelin, daughter of a knight, and she had had schooling with the nuns.

At Blois she took the Cross with many youths and children, for the monk declared that Jerusalem might be delivered by the children. Will Bunsley fell under the spell of the crusade preacher—also he confessed to a mighty fondness for the girl—and adventured with the pilgrims through many barren and hostile lands to Byzantium.

“And 'tis gold I seek,” cried Robert. “Nor will I turn me aside for any maid, captive though she be.”

It irked him that the men from Khar should have borne off prisoners from the lands of the Croises, and he spoke bitterly, for his warning to Hugo and to the pilgrims had gone unheeded. Having formed a purpose, he would not swerve from it. Moreover the red archer was the last man he wished to take with him on his venture. It was impossible to disguise that raw-boned figure and stentorian voice; yet to leave Will Bunsley to follow the trail alone——

“I'll tend the horses, good my lord,” insisted the yeoman, “and draw thee wine at every inn, aye, and keep watch o'nights for slit-throats——”

“Ho!” Robert chuckled. “Fare with us then, an' you will. If my companion——”

But Abdullah gave his assent without ado. The redbeard, he said, could go as he was, and they would claim that he was Robert's captive. So should the Ameer Arslan have more honor. Bunsley's appearance would be enough to make the Arabs, through whose country they must pass, think him a simpleton, afflicted by Allah.

Clearly Robert explained to the yeoman the hardships they would face, first in the desert, then in the heart of Moslem power. But Will Bunsley merely grinned—although he grimaced when told he must cast aside his weapons to play the part of captive.

“Ha, for the land of gold—and the fair damsels of paynimry. How sayeth the song?”

He chanted in a tuneful roar—

“Though I have a man i-slaw
And forfeited the king's law,
I shall guiden a-man of law,
Will take my penny and let me go.”

Robert harkened with relish to an English voice, yet felt grave misgiving at taking the archer, thinking that the man could not survive for many days. Before long, however, Will Bunsley of Northumberland proved to be a man of many surprizes.

Although Abdullah pushed forward at a furious pace, the archer kept up with his nag, grumbling and groaning, but never allowing the two wanderers out of sight. The heat and the scanty fare stretched the skin taut on his bones, and he came to look like a scarlet skeleton, so that when they stopped at a village, the men of the desert thronged to stare at the red Frank captive in astonishment.

Robert noticed that the minstrel rode in a strange fashion with a longer stirrup than the Arabs and with his weight eased well forward. He picked his course by the stars—for they covered most of their way at night. Robert had a habit of watching the constellations and judged by the position of the Great Bear that they were working steadily east. The Milky Way—which Abdullah called the Path of the Wild Geese—was directly overhead as they dropped down into a country of baked clay, where the tents of the desert tribes were no longer to be seen.

Here when the moon waned they crossed by swimming a sluggish, reed-bordered river that Abdullah called the Frat and Robert thought was the Euphrates. It was well for the knight that long years in the saddle had hardened him for such a journey. Abdullah seemed to be made of iron, and Will Bunsley, ever on the lookout for traces of the raiders whom they followed, moaned and cursed with the weariness of the saddle and the plaguing of midges and huge flies.

Abdullah had bartered in a Kurd village another pony for the archer and Bunsley changed saddle from one to the other, complaining bitterly that it was a sin to ask one man to do the work of two nags. Yet the hope of coming up with the men from Khar kept him from falling behind. Once they passed around a hamlet of merchants on the river that had been sacked and burned by the raiders, and Robert waxed thoughtful at seeing that the riders from Khar took spoil from Moslem and Christian alike. But in those days upon the desert floor he gave little heed to aught but the necessity for keeping pace with the minstrel, who rode recklessly through the night, and while the two Nazarenes slept, utterly wearied in the mid-day hours, played softly upon his lute and sang in a guttural speech that Robert had never heard before.

And this flight across a strange and barren land did much to ease the bitterness that had been in Robert. They hunted where they could and avoided the villages, and daily covered stretches that the crusader would not have thought possible. So the three rode from Palestine, one seeking the price of his life, another searching for a captive girl and the third intent on keeping a rendezvous with his master, whose name he would not reveal.

Unexpectedly, late one afternoon, they came to a muddy stream swift running between low, sandy banks—the boundary line of Khar, Abdullah said; and, pointing to clusters of skin tents on the far bank where some hundred horses were turned loose to graze, he added—

“The riders from Khar.”

CHAPTER V

THE REDBEARD

IT WAS too late to go back out of sight, for watchers on the other bank had seen them, and their horses were too weary to escape pursuit. Hesitation would have been fatal, and Robert urged his horse into the river, to be followed promptly by the minstrel.

Once they had climbed out on the sand drifts they were surrounded by dark-skinned warriors in silvered helmets—lean, slow-moving men who swaggered in crimson and white kaftans and polished hauberks, who took in every detail of the newcomers' steeds and trappings at a single glance and bared their teeth at Bunsley—who returned their scowls with interest.

“Kankalis, these,” whispered Abdullah meaningly, “hillmen, Turkomans and the best of the light cavalry of the master of Khar—our companions on the road to the Iron Gates, O Arslan. Be wily in talk, O Egyptian, and think before each word. Do not try to aid the redbeard if they seek him out for sport for their long knives.”

Two mounted warriors who had been posted at the river pushed in between the strangers and the crowd, heedless of the insults hurled at them by those who were jostled by the ponies. Commanding Robert to follow, they conducted the three to a large tent where sat the leader of the band—an old man with a beak of a nose, his sword girdled high on his middle. He knelt on a silk carpet, casting knuckle-bones idly, and though he appeared scarcely to notice the strangers he looked them over carefully.

Abdullah related the tale agreed upon, that he, a minstrel wandering from Khar, had fallen in with an ameer out of Cairo who journeyed to the court of the Throne of Gold, and with him one Nazarene, a captive taken in the valley of the Orontes. Inalzig Khan, as the leader of the Kankalis was called, did not see fit to ask them to sit as yet, although they had dismounted.

“Where are your followers, O valiant lion,” he demanded of Robert ironically.

“Ask the kites and the wolves. They were slain in affrays with the Nazarenes and the Bedawans.”

“Allah, can it be so? What do you seek of me?”

“Guidance and protection through the Iron Gates.”

The khan bared long teeth in a mocking smile.

“Nay, you know not the Gates. Who can protect a stranger who lacks the right to enter?”

Knowing that a display of temper was expected of him, at this, Robert touched his sword-hilt.

“By the ninety and nine holy names, does a son of the Seljuks and a great-grandson of a caliph take grass between his teeth to bespeak a gatekeeper?”

Months of dwelling with the nobles of Cairo enabled him to imitate the mincing temper of a high-born Egyptian; with his mustache and head shaven and his bare feet blackened by the sun of the plains, he had little to fear. Yet Inalzig was not satisfied, although his tone became more courteous.

“Upon what mission do you ride to the Shah, O Cairene?”

Abdullah threw in carelessly, as if explaining to a friend—

“None leave the Sialak, the Gates, or enter to the great city except they go or come upon an order of Muhammad Shah—on whom be peace—the Emperor of Khar and the shield of Islam.”

“Does the jackal ask of the wolf, 'Why are ye here?'” Robert took his cue. “I will speak of my mission to the governor of the great city, and to you, Inalzig Khan, I say—” he thought swiftly—“that the Sultans of Cairo and Damietta have withstood the Nazarenes and send word of their deeds to Muhammad Shah.”

The Kankali nodded without emotion, and made room for the twain on the carpet.

“Hamaian—contentment be upon you, O ameer. I care naught for such matters, being sent on a foray to fetch a quota of maidens and spoil from the accursed Nazarenes and the desert tribes. If you can pass the Gates you will have fair greeting in Bokhara, the city of which I spoke. For the Shah draws his sword and mounts for war.”

“With whom?” demanded Abdullah with sudden interest.

“Mashallah—have I been within the walls of Bokhara this last year, that I should know? Some tribe of unbelievers from the north dares to withstand the emperor.”

Will Bunsley had been staring about eagerly at the piles of wicker baskets holding the fruits of the foray, and certain tents set apart for the captives, without seeing any sign of the girl or the priest.

“It is my wish,” remarked the chief of the Kankalis, leaning back on his cushions, “that the infidel be stripped and bound and stretched out for some of my men to try the edge of their simitars. Is it not written that he who causes the death of an unbeliever will not fail of paradise?”

A glance from Abdullah warned Robert that this request was not to be lightly refused. The khan had halted his men for a day's rest, and a curious throng had gathered about the archer, who had forgotten to mumble and gape as usual.

“It would bring ill fortune upon us to slay him, O captain of many,” objected Robert, heedless of the minstrel's concern.

“How?”

“He is djinn-infested. The devil of madness is in him.”

Inalzig signed for a slave to bring wine-cups and shook his head indifferently.

“I am no servant of the priests and herder of the afflicted of Allah. The Frank could not pass the Gates, so why weary two horses in bearing him thither?”

“Do you see the color of his hair and skin?”

“Aye, red as heart of fire.”

“When a man is blind, what is the color of his eyes?”

“White.”^[1]

“True. Allah hath set his seal on the eyes. Now when the devil entered this man, his skin turned red. Verily, it is a strange devil. The infidel, being mad, believes that he can overthrow any warrior with all weapons. Yah ahmak, the simpleton will bring mirth to your heart.”

“Allah!”

The Kankali smiled and sipped at his cup.

“Let us see what he does. Nay, do not give him a bow—” as Robert reached for one in a corner of the tent—“for the —— might send the shaft this way. Let him try his skill with a spear, a stabbing-spear.”

Robert glanced at Bunsley and risked speaking to the archer.

“Canst withstand one of these fellows with a quarterstaff?”

“Aye, by all the saints, that can I, lord brother.”

The yeoman grinned cheerfully.

“Last Martinmas I won a silver shilling for a bout——”

“The Moslem will have a long stabbing-spear, and he will not stop at the first blood. You stand in dire peril, Master Will, and it will go hard if you do not prevail.”

The archer declared that he would hold his own with anything on two legs at brawling or dicing and desired nothing better than to crack the skulls of his tormentors.

“The fool,” Robert explained to the Kankali, “will think that a stout stick is a spear, so let him have one. Yet if he is victor, will you permit him to ride with me unharmed?”

“Verily,” laughed the warrior, who was studying Robert curiously. “Have you also a devil that you speak the language of the infidel?”

“He dwelt at their court for a year and more,” put in Abdullah quickly, “and learned much of their ways. For this was he chosen to ride to the Shah with his story.”

Saying that it was all one to him and that he fancied there were three fools instead of one at his tent, Inalzig called for one of his men to stand forth with a spear. A thin warrior with a huge, knotted turban stepped into the cleared space, carrying a five-foot weapon. Will Bunsley cast about until he found a spare tent-pole of teak as long as he was tall and as large around as his two thumbs joined together.

Tossing up the staff, he caught it in the fingers of one hand and twirled it around his head. Then, setting his long legs, he gripped the quarterstaff with both hands widely separated, well in front of him. To the onlookers this seemed the merest bombast, and the eyes of the Kankali glittered as he advanced on the archer and thrust at Bunsley's ribs, meaning to wound the red man a few times before killing him. Instead the yeoman warded the blow by lowering one end of his pole. Again the Kankali thrust with no better result.

Angered by the gibes of his companions, the spearman shortened his grasp and feinted, minded to end the matter out of hand. But Will halted him abruptly by bringing up one arm and jabbing wickedly at the throat. Choking, the Kankali staggered back and the yeoman smote him on either ear so quickly that the two thuds sounded as one.

Blood flowed down the warrior's jaw, and he rocked dizzily, then crumpled down on the sand.

“The fool is strong in the arm, observed Inalzig. “Now we will try his skill.”

He barked an order, and a stocky warrior sprang out from the growing throng of watchers. The khan tossed him a javelin—a throwing-spear no more than a yard long with a small, barbed point.

“Send him to jehannum or taste a hundred lashes.”

Robert, who had watched English yeomen practising with the quarterstaff in Antioch, had known that Will could make a long spear look ridiculous, but a javelin was not to be warded so easily. Nor could he come to the archer's aid, for such a move would mean drawn weapons and a swift end for them both.

But Will, watching his adversary keenly, yelped cheerfully.

“So-ho, here be a dog with sharp teeth, so give heed, Master Robert, to some pretty work.”

Leaping about in front of the Kankali, he whirled the quarterstaff in the man's eyes until the warrior decided that the Frank was not going to attack, and launched the javelin. Will, having waited for just this, dodged alertly, and the short spear did no more than glance from one shoulder, cutting it to the bone.

The warrior snarled and drew a curved dagger. Rushing in, he slashed at the archer's ribs, only to drop like a log and lie where he had fallen. Will had stepped aside and slid one hand down to the other, swinging lustily with the full weight of the staff upon the Kankali's skull.

“Now St. Dunstan send that he be the one that cracked my pate in the battle,” he remarked.

To the Moslems his skill with the staff savored of the marvelous, for they were men who used none but edged weapons. Even the khan was stirred to interest and asked if the red man could do tricks with any thing but a stick.

“Put a bow into his hands and set the best of your archers against him,” suggested Robert.

After some hesitation Inalzig agreed and had one of the short Turkish bows brought out for Will, who took it with misgivings, saying that it might do to use from a horse's back but was no thing to tickle the fancy of a Northumberland lad. He selected his arrows with care, choosing the longest he could find.'

Thus equipped he outdid the best of the Kankalis, who withdrew from the contest with as much dignity as they could muster, explaining loudly that the Frank was surely djinn-infested. Indeed Will was strutting about with a lop-sided grin, for he had more than his share of vanity. Inalzig had fallen into a rage and nursed his wine-cup sullenly until Abdullah, who had followed the archery with mild interest, arose and declared that he had come from a country where men used bows otherwise.

“Then put the fool to shame, O minstrel,” grunted the chief.

“Nay,” responded the minstrel, “I lack his skill, yet have I learned a trick that your men know not.”

Taking a small turban cloth, he walked to the nearest tree. Rolling the cotton strip tightly, he wrapped it around the bole of the tree so that a strip some two fingers in breadth showed white against the dark trunk.

Then, calling for a saddled pony, he chose a short powerful bow and a quiver with six arrows. Mounting and riding off, he wheeled the pony some two hundred paces from his mark and set it to a gallop. One after the other he loosed three shafts rapidly as he rode, gripping the ends of the arrows between thumb and forefinger.

Abreast the tree Abdullah swiftly unstrung the bow and used the flying cord on his pony as a whip. Then, stringing it taut again, he emptied his quiver as he drew away from the mark. It was no easy feat to loose the shafts over the pony's rump, and the Kankalis raised a shout of gratification when it was seen that all but one of Abdullah's arrows had struck the bole of the tree, and three were within the cotton band.

“Such nimble finger work is not our way,” remarked Will, studying the hits made by the minstrel, “for we pull a long bow and draw each shaft to the head. Yet no man can say Will Bunsley gave ground to him in honest yeoman sport.”

The warriors crowded closer when they saw that the Frank would attempt to equal the minstrel's feat. They had been weaned from boyhood with bows in their hands, but like Abdullah were accustomed to shoot from the saddle.

Will signed for the bow Abdullah used to be brought him, and again selected a half-dozen arrows. Instead of standing, he knelt this time about a hundred yards from the trees and stuck the heads of the arrows lightly in the sand in a half-circle under his right hand. After testing the pull of the new bow, he thumbed the silk string and fitted an arrow, holding it in place between his first and second fingers which gripped the string. He let it fly and caught up another deftly. His long arms worked smoothly, and he set his jaw stubbornly.

It seemed to Robert that two arrows were in the air at once as his eye followed the first to the mark before looking for the second. When the last shaft was sped he shouted approval. Although Will had not tried his skill from a saddle, he had bettered Abdullah's hits. All the arrows were in the tree and four in the white band.

“Good!” grunted Inalzig. “The fool may live if he can; and it will be your turn, O ameer, to think of a trick when we stand at the Gates.”

CHAPTER VI

THE WORD ON THE ROCKS

{{di|R|4.75em}OBERT frequently pondered the warning of the khan as they made their way at a rapid pace through the wooded uplands that lay beyond the river. And he had other things to think about.

To Will's chagrin there was no sign of the maid or the priest in the raiding-party; nor would Abdullah give them any word of the fate of the captives. The minstrel fell into a moody silence, broken only by his harsh songs sometimes at evening when they lay at ease in the tent openings and listened to the gambling and gossip of the Kankalis.

Abdullah became impatient at any delay—though these were few, because each day brought Inalzig fresh tidings of impending warfare and the chief was anxious to reach his destination, Bokhara, as quickly as possible.

“The maid and the monk live yet,” he assured Robert, “and it may fortune that you will see them again. But who can foretell what the turn in the road will bring? By the host of the dead! Only fools prophesy before the event!”

He studied the face of the young warrior as a wise man might read a book, sheet by sheet. And the finely wrought lips and candid gray eyes made him shake his head.

“Nay, you pray as a Moslem, and you walk as one—a little slowly—and you sit the saddle like a Seljuk and an ameer, but your eyes and mouth say otherwise. Why, by the white horse of Kaidu, do your thoughts dwell on a Christian child, scarce a woman?”

Robert merely nodded at Will Bunsley, who jogged ahead on his nag, heedless of the inevitable dust-cloud and the midges that swarmed about his eyes.

“Ha, the redbeard!” Abdullah smiled. “A skilled bowman and a man without fear. Yet he rides on a vain quest with room in his skull for no more than the idea that brought him forth. Allah, do we draw rein again!”

He shaded his eyes to gaze where Inalzig had halted the head of the column to let a string of camels pass. They were racing Bactrians, and the riders jeered at the weary ponies of the Kankalis. Robert, who had an eye for weapons and the men who bore them, observed that the camel-riders wore splendid, silvered mail under black khalats, that their targets were bossed with gold and their voluminous turbans crested with peacock feathers.

“Warriors of the Caliphs of Bagdad,” muttered Abdullah under his mustache. “Mark the white camel of the leader. Ha, it will be a great war if the caliphs are sending men to the Shah. Verily the Moslems are gathering their might, like a leopard crouching to spring.”

On other days they sighted detachments of furtive hillmen, who kept well away from Inalzig's standard, and horsemen mounted on splendid Arabs, who raised the shrill ululation of the Saracens at sight of friends. These were heading through the villages, tending in the same direction as Inalzig, which was toward a line of blue summits that rose each day a little higher upon the horizon, with one great peak bearing a snow cap standing upon the travelers' right hand.^[1]

“To the Iron Gates,” Abdullah nodded. “All who ride to Khar from the west must pass the Gates and give surety to the warders of their purpose. These arrays are no more than the outlying detachments, bound for the main armies at the great cities.”

“I had thought them a mighty force,” observed Robert.

Abdullah smiled.

“The puppy thought the jackal was a wolf! Nay, the master of the Throne of Gold hath five times a hundred thousand riders to his command.”

This, Robert fancied a jest, for such numbers were incredible: In Palestine the host of the crusaders amounted to no more than fifteen thousand.

“If the red archer,” quoth Abdullah, his eyes gleaming, “would see vengeance at work, he has come in good time. Aye, he shall see what will fill his eyes. And you, O young warrior, will taste the mead of a man.” With that he urged his horse up close to the heels of a pair of Kankalis until the dust nearly choked them and hid the rest of the detachment somewhat from view. Thrusting out his hand suddenly, the minstrel gripped Robert's fingers and when he drew away something hard and cold was in the knight's hand. Realizing that he was not to attract attention to himself, Robert did not look down for a moment. When he did so, he recognized within his fingers the chain of rubies that Abdullah had carried; carved in the semblance of roses.

“Place it within thy girdle,” whispered the minstrel, “and show it only at the Sialah. The talsmin will pass you through."

He glanced about and reined closer.

“You will have need of all your wit if you live to reach Bokhara. Remember that no Kharesmian has proof against you, and you are fairly safe if you do not betray yourself—so beware of tricks. Remember, too, that it is ever best to face forward and to shun no risk. The Moslems are a folk cf many tribes and quarrels—and that is their bane. If a man mocks you, cut him down; if a spy is sent, laugh at him. By all the gods, I have not brought you so far, to find you a weakling!”

Robert reflected that a good Moslem does not swear by more than one god.

“And you?” he asked.

“Whatever happens, I will seek you out in Bokhara. Ya bunnayi—O little son, tomorrow we climb the Sialak.”

In the minstrel's dark eyes was something like concern for the youth who, towering half a head above him, he addressed as his little son. Yet when these words had passed he withdrew into his cloak of silence and sat for hours on his saddle cloth without turning hand to his lute or lifting his voice in song. And that night the heat of the plains was tempered just a bit by a long breeze from the north.

Robert sniffed it as he lay outstretched on his cloak, studying the canopy of stars, and though he thought surely it must be fancy, the breeze seemed to bear with it the tang of the salt sea and wet rocks.

They made a long stretch the next day, and Bunsley complained that the Moslems hemmed him in as if he were part of the treasure of loot they were guarding. Other caravans made way for Inalzig's standard, and all through the day they drew nearer to a line of peaks that had lifted from the skyline two sunrises before.

The wind whipped and buffeted them as they ate their rice and dates and mutton that evening in the very shadow of bare slopes that flung back the red glory of the sunset. Robert had studied the line of mountains carefully, to pick out the pass that might let them through; he had seen cavalcades of hurrying riders sweep up to one point in the foot-hills and immediately pass from view.

When the last shaft of red light vanished from the tallest of the peaks—the one streaked with tiny spots of something that gave back the glitter of the sun—darkness settled like a cloak upon the serais where the caravans had baited for the night. The smoke of the dung fires was not to be seen, and the glow of the flames spread upon bearded faces and lines of picketed beasts.

This was the signal for Inalzig to order his men to saddle again, and four of them came and grinned at the two Franks before ranging themselves on either side. They went forward at a trot until a line of camels, grunting protest at the night march, slowed them to a hand pace.

So strong was the illusion of darkness that Robert felt that they were entering the breast of the hills. High rock walls closed in on them presently. By the echo of the hoofs on stones he judged that the cliffs were sheer and immense. When torches appeared ahead of him, he found that he could not begin to see the top of the cañon walls.

At places great boulders encroached on the narrow pass, leaving no more than a bridle way. The muffled voices and the uproar of the camels ahead sent the echoes leaping from side to side, to diminish to whispers drowned by the gusts of wind.

“Master Robert,” quoth Will, “did the minstrel say that we would fall in with a company of dead lords, and ride with King Cæsar and roguish Alexander—ha, St. Dunstan aid us!”

The echoes caught up his words and shouted them to the sky—

“Alexander—Alexander—aid us—aid!”

“Methinks this is the place.”

Will lowered his voice to a whisper. And—

“Methinks this is—the place—the place!”

The wind-borne whisper passed overhead. Will fell to pattering what prayers he could muster on the moment, mixed with lusty curses on the paynims who had led him into such a stronghold of demons. The cliffs repeated back his mutterings. and garbled the curses with the prayers so that presently he fell into a gloomy silence. The way twisted interminably, and they had to edge past the camels, which had been halted at one side while their riders, apparently, went forward. The ponies shied at the smell of the gaunt beasts, and presently the word came back to dismount.

As he pressed after the torches that flared and smoked in the gusts of air, Robert noticed that he was splashing through cold water. Reaching down one hand, he discovered that a cut on his forefinger smarted keenly; and, tasting the water, he found it salt.

Will merely shook his head when this was called to his attention.

“Aye, tall brother,” he pointed out, “where water is salt, there a sea must be. What sea lies within the desert—save the Styx? Nay, we will sup wi' Satan and bed down wi' the ghosts this night. Seest thou yonder writing? How reads it?”

Glancing where the yeoman's finger pointed, Robert noticed first the portion of a ruined wall stretching athwart the pass, then a row of characters carved in the side of the cliff some distance over his head. The words were not Latin or Arabic, and he could make nothing of them, but a stalwart Kankali at his heels noticed his interest and enlightened him.

“'Tis but one word, O Cairene and that is—

“'Victory.'”

“How old is the word?”

“Am I a prophet, that I should know? Some say it was carved so by the men of the hero Iskander in the elder days, when news came to him of the death of his foe the lord of Parthia.^[2] But now leave your horse and climb, for these are the Gates.”

Robert looked ahead and found that Will was already scrambling up what seemed to be a solid wall of rock, in reality a mass of boulders, up which the Kankalis were swarming. Whether the rocks had been piled there or had fallen from above, Robert cared little. So steep was the ascent that he was forced to use hands and knees, and water trickled down on his shoulders as he pulled himself up to where a line of men were standing with torches.

This proved to be the crest of the natural rampart, and the knight saw that a score of bowmen placed here could hold back an army. The wind smote him full force and staggered him. A spearman reached out an arm and steadied him, thrusting him beside Will, facing the leader of the guards.

On the other side the boulders fell away to the dark surface of water, and Robert suspected that the stream flowing down the gorge had been penned back by the wall of rocks, forming a pool on the upper side. He was surprized to observe a number of women ranged beside the defenders of the pass—veiled women, variously garbed, but all slender and long-haired, unmistakably youthful. He noticed, too, that the Kankalis had passed on save for Inalzig, who stood beside the captain of the warders.

Abdullah was not to be seen, although Will stared about hopefully.

“Would I had a good yew staff at hand!” the archer sighed. “Aye, to make the sign of the cross, and so— Ha, look below!”

Near the surface of the water they saw a white face surrounded by a mesh of dark hair, and—in the glow of the torches—the silk clad limbs of a woman moving gently with the currents of the pool. A moment more and she sank out of sight, but Will stared wide-eyed at the spot.

“You are from Egypt?” a courteous voice questioned the knight. “And alone—yet sent by the lords of Cairo? Verily, riders are coming from the far ends of the earth to the Throne of Gold. A strange sword!”

The speaker was a handsome Moslem, who made a respectful salaam and studied Robert with unwilling admiration.

“I had it from an unbeliever—who died,” responded the knight quietly.

“And from the lords who sent you, O ameer—have you a token or a written word?”

“The word is—victory. The swords of the faithful have scattered the host of the Franks, and the day of the unbeliever in Jerusalem is at an end.”

“Mashallah! So, too, will the Protector of the Faith, the King of the Age, of Time and the Tide, smite the other infidels who dared to mount for war upon the northern border. And your token, O captain of men?”

Robert drew the chain of rubies from his girdle, and the chief of the guards glanced at Inalzig curiously. Others craned their heads to look at the miniature roses threaded on gold.

“Where had you that?” demanded the Kankali, frowning.

“From one who brooks no questioning of his messengers, and who has a whip for a churlish slave,” hazarded the knight, aware that this was a reasonably good characterisation of any Moslem noble.

“Upon whom be peace,” assented the officer. “Well do I know the ruby chain that is a token given by the King of kings, the Shah of shahs, the favored of Allah, the sword arm of the faithful, Alai ud-deen Mohammad, master of Khar. Aye, this token he gives to the anis-al-jalis, the favorites, the cup companions of his hours of pleasure.

He bowed profoundly.

“And the ruby chain admits whoever bears it to the Gates, but no more than one. Yet it is passing strange, O favored of the Shah, that you, who have not passed this way going from Bokhara, should have the chain when you enter the inner country of Khar.”

Robert glanced at the chain with some interest and returned it to his girdle. Then he turned suddenly on the Moslem.

“O brother to a parrot, O pack-saddle of an ass——”

He had learned a fair flood of forcible insults during his captivity, and he called upon his memory for a full minute while the spearmen gaped, and the officer began to look doubtful.

“Another question,” he ended, “and I will open thy breast to see if water or blood be in thy veins.”

So indeed might a noble of Cairo have spoken to one who stood in his way, and it was clear to the warders that the Ameer Arslan would like nothing better than to make good his words with sword-strokes. Inalzig's eyes blazed, and unseen by Robert he made a sign to men who stood back by the cliff.

“If the Caliphs themselves rode out of Bagdad to join the Shah,” he snarled, “the keeper of the Gate would cast them into the pool if they gave not a good account of themselves as Moslems. Look yonder!”

Robert did not turn, but Will Bunsley yelped like a hound viewing its quarry.

“Now praise be to all the saints and martyrs! Here be the demoiselle of Ibelin and Father Evagrius!”

Running to the ledge of rock that served as a pathway back from the buttress on which they stood, he tried to cast himself on his knees and seize the edge of the girl's robe to kiss. A spear-butt planted in his ribs by an alert guard sent him sprawling.

Ellen d'Ibelin stood between two warriors with drawn swords. Her torn hood and bedraggled smock had been replaced with rich silks and white cotton, bound about her waist by a velvet vest. A circlet of silver held in her black locks above the ears, and a transparent veil covered her face below the eyes. But eyes and hair and the poise of her young head were unmistakable.

Her glance showed that she knew Robert, but she did not break silence to make an appeal for help. Evidently she and the priest had been among the riders of the camels, and she must have seen all that passed on the edge of the pool.

“Aid, tall brother, for the maid!” cried Will hoarsely. “Draw and smite—bows and bills! See, the dogs would cast her into the water.”

Then Robert realized that Ellen's arms were chained and her ankles bound together with a girdle. With the priest and the two Moslems she stood on the brink of the ledge, swaying in the wind. The other women who had screened the captives until then had been herded ahead along the narrow path. This path, no more than two paces wide, ran between the wall of the cliff and the dark space of the abyss.

As he watched, Inalzig made another sign, and one of the guards seized the girl's long tresses, twisting them tight in his grasp. Her eyes widened in horror as the warrior, grinning, forced her to the very edge of the rock.

“Yonder maid,” observed the keeper of the Gate reflectively, “was taken from among the Franks. We have other women, from Armenia and the Bedawan villages, and they are kept for the pleasure of the Shah. Such is the custom of the forays beyond the border—yet, O ameer, the redbeard may have touched her, and the touch of a dog of an unbeliever is defilement. So—thrust her over,” he ordered the warrior who held her fast.

And Inalzig's white teeth flashed under his thin mustache.

“Ha! Would a Cairene act thus?”

Robert had leaped the space between the dam and the ledge. The warrior who stood over the girl released his prey and lifted shield and simitar as he strode to meet the knight.

“Ah no, my lord!” Ellen cried, raising her chained arms eagerly. “Keep to your guise and your own purpose. No man's aid will serve to abate our misfortune, and you would be lost!”

She covered her eyes.

“The sweet Mother in Heaven give strength!”

The Moslem who opposed Robert took time for a swift glance at the two chiefs, who shouted an order at him, and the knight drew his sword. The guard's lips lifted in a snarl as he braced his legs for a leap forward. Then he flung up his shield.

In a gleaming arc the heavy blade of the crusader flashed, and the Moslem's simitar was knocked down. His shield of hide and wood crumpled, and the blade hewed through his left arm, deep into his side. The man was swept over the ledge, and Robert freed his blade with a jerk as the body dropped out of sight.

“Well struck, O Nazarene!” applauded Inalzig. “Said I not you would be put to a test at the Gates? Ha, no guise will veil your heart hereafter. Like your follower, I had a devil from the first day, and the devil was doubt.”

The second guard rushed low at Robert, to be met with the point of the sword and slain in his tracks. Will Bunsley scrambled to his feet, wrenching the simitar from the hand of the falling slave.

“Let us show them our heels, brother,” he muttered excitedly. “Do thou take up the maid and run along the path.”

Robert, however, knew that this was just what the Moslems must desire him to do. Moreover the blind priest could not run, and there was no time to release the girl's bonds. He had been tricked and well tricked.

And fierce exultation warmed his heart. No need, now, of racking his brain for the words of deceit. He had jumped to aid the maid instinctively, and even now he might have explained his cutting down of the guards—if Inalzig and the captain of the warders would listen. But he had no desire to try them and for their part they prepared readily to make an end of him. There was the gleam of steel, red in the torchlight, before him and the feel of his sword-haft in his fists.

“Stand clear,” he growled at the archer, and stepped to meet the first two spearmen who crossed from the dam to the pathway.

Ellen had slipped to her knees, and was moving toward Father Evagrius, who was trying to draw her back to the cliff, his face upturned in the patient questioning of those who can not see what goes on about them.

As Will pushed forward stubbornly beside him Robert swept him back with his left arm and slashed at the nearest spear-head. The steel point flew humming through the air, and the crusader dodged the thrust of the second. The Moslems crouched and reached for their long knives. They had not yet learned that the round targets of bull's hide were no protection against the long weapon of their foe. Robert cut through one shield and the skull of the man behind it.

The other warrior shouted and leaped, and Robert missed catching his dagger arm as it came down. But he stepped forward, and the man's knife snapped on the chain mail of his back.

Robert caught hold with his free hand on the man's shoulder blade and—sensing Will's presence behind—jerked him back, to be dealt with by the yeoman's sword. A snarling grunt that changed to a scream sounded from the path, and presently a splash in the water below.

“Sa-ha!” chanted Will. “Another knave a-swim in the Styx. Guard thee, tall brother—so! Pretty work—yeomanly struck.”

A third Moslem had followed close upon the other two and raised his simitar. Robert, caught with his blade down, jammed the heavy hilt into the man's beard and took the simitar stroke on his helmet. The blow sent flames flying before his eyes, and the light steel cap spun from his head. But the Moslem was down, choking, and the knight took another pace forward, leaving Will to dispose of the injured warrior.

A spear splintered against the mail on his chest, and he reeled, coughing, for the point had lodged in his breast-bone. The man who had flung it shouted and whirled up his simitar. The knight parried one cut that would have hacked a knee in half and staggered again, when another spear tore into his left shoulder. The guard—a big-boned Turk—pressed forward too hastily and was dashed down when his legs were cut out from under him by a slash of the long blade.

“By the ninety and nine holy names!” swore Inalzig, who had followed the fighting with glittering eyes. “Here is one who should be brought alive to Bokhara, for he is not as common men. See, he strides forward again.”

“Then do you take him alive, O khan,” snarled the captain.

Will was feverish with exultation. Only three men beside the two chiefs stood on the dam, and these held the torches. Behind them the Kankalis had vanished from sight and hearing. If the strength of the knight could crush these five as well as the six who had died, they would be free, for the moment, in the gorge. But he did not mark how the two wounds had bitten into the thews of his companion.

Inalzig Khan rushed as a falcon stoops—warily, quick of eye, and with his long cloak sweeping about him. His simitar glittered above his shield. Some one behind him hurled a torch at the knight.

Bending low, Robert moved to meet the Moslem, and the two swords grated. The simitar bent nearly double and whipped clear—whipped down on the crusader's sword-arm, cutting to the bone. Robert stumbled forward, threw himself against Inalzig and felt for the Moslem's knife-hilt, while Inalzig felt for his throat and found it.

Jerking the curved dagger free, Robert thrust with failing strength at his foe's thighs under the mail. Inalzig's eyes glared into his, blood-seared and protruding. The knife-blade slipped upward on the Moslem's thigh-bone, and the curved point caught within his ribs.

His grip on Robert's throat fell away, and the knight gasped for air and felt himself drop through space. Instantly the torch-light faded, and he crashed into water, still locked with his adversary. Blackness grew denser, and then red flames shot up before his eyes and his nostrils stung. Blood flooded his throat.

He coughed—found that he could gulp in air—and moved his limbs feebly to keep afloat. For what seemed an interminable time he swam in a gigantic chasm, conscious of lights above him and—once—of Abdullah, the minstrel, looking down at him calmly. Then water splashed over his face, and the blackness was complete.

CHAPTER VII

OSMAN THE WAZIR

MANY things appeared to Robert to take place very rapidly. He felt delightfully at ease, although aware that his body was being jolted, the creaking of leather and the jolting made him think he was riding again, though how he could ride lying down he knew not. Then the sun smote full into his eyes, and somebody shaded them. Robert peered out between two curtains and saw the green expanse of a wide sea with a sail drifting along the horizon. A salty wind caused him to shiver violently, and, still shivering, he dropped back into the inertia.

Again he found himself studying the stars, looking for the Great Bear and recalling that Abdullah had called it jitti karatchi, the Seven Robbers. He could not make out the robbers, and told himself that this was a strange sky as well as a strange sea.

Once he lay on his elbow, looking down at the earth. It was whitish gray. Taking up some in his fingers, he put his tongue to it and found it to be salt. A strange earth. He was bathed in sweat, and a woman came and wiped his face and hands with a cool, moist cloth.

He began talking to the woman, telling her about the changed earth and the remarkable sea that was so cold and so hot. By and by he noticed that the woman was weeping and that she was the Demoiselle d'Ibelin. Henceforth events happened less swiftly and Robert grew irritable with pain, but more often he felt the girl's touch and drank things from her hand.

“Where is that rogue, Abdullah?” he asked, his voice ringing clear.

“He is not here, my lord. Nay, I have not see him since the night in the mountains when he talked with the infidels, and— But, hush, please you, Sir Robert.”

“Damoiselle,” he remarked with dignity. “I am not Sir Robert of Antioch. I am Robert the Wayfarer; and as every man's hand is against me, so is mine against every man. Where is the lout, Will?”

“The archer is chained—nay, do not miscall him, for he jumped into the gorge and saved you your life many days ago.”

“Now that is verily a lie,” Robert responded angrily, “for this is but the morrow of that night.”

With that he slept, to awaken master of his senses again.

They were in a boat—he and the maid and the priest, and a score of strange warriors. He lay upon a cloak stretched on rushes, with a woven screen over his head.

His first thought was for his sword. It was gone, and he reflected that his horse, also, was lost to him. Then he fumbled about for the chain of rubies and found it not. The mail shirt had been removed, and he was clad in loose cotton, with a light khalat wrapped over him.

When he moved, one shoulder irked him with its stiffness. Further investigation revealed a stubby beard and mustache and a growth of hair on his skull that had been shaven. After considering this he asked Father Evagrius, who sat quietly beside his couch, how long he had lain ill, and how he came to be brought alive through the Gates.

“For ten days the fever was heavy upon you, my son. The maid prayed that you would regain your wit and strength, and her prayers were heard. I could not see what befel in the mountain pass, yet meseems Abdullah did persuade the guards to send you living to the lord of this land.”

“Did we pass the border of a sea?”

“Aye, Sir Robert. A week agone I heard the wash of the waves for the last time. Since then we have been placed on camels, and yesterday within this long skiff.”

Robert thought this over. They must then have left the Caspian behind them, and by now should be near to the main cities of Khar. So Abdullah had outlined the journey to him. He asked Father Evagrius to call for Ellen, and the priest shook his head, saying that the maid was kept within the after part of the boat, guarded by Ethiopians. The Kankalis, the priest explained, had permitted her to nurse him during the height of his fever, while he was being carried in a horse litter; but now the Moslems took care to keep her apart. Of Will Bunsley he knew little, save that the archer had survived the gorge of the Sialak and his voice had been heard at times thereafter, complaining bitterly of his chains and a diet of rice and sour wine.

Unable to sit or stand, Robert was fain to be content with this. He could not see over the side wall of the boat, nor could Evagrius see anything at all, and neither of them might speak with Ellen.

So for days the knight was constrained to lie gazing at the roofed-in after-deck where the slender form of the maid of Ibelin sometimes appeared, heavily veiled. At such moments her eyes would seek him out, and she stood where he was visible until one of the guards signed for her to enter the hangings that separated her from the men.

Father Evagrius spent his time in contemplation, eating slowly when food was brought and fingering the cross that hung from a cord about his lean throat. Robert, waxing more irritable with the confinement and the odors of the boat, marveled at the grave quietude of the priest who was preparing himself to meet death at the hands of the Moslem tormentors.

There came an evening when he could stand and look out from the boat, as the Moslems were at the evening prayer.

The river proved to be broad, and thronged with other craft. Gardens, divided off by lines of flowering trees, lined the bank, and Robert observed at once two marble pillars down-stream. These rose from the dark mass of a wall, and until they drifted through the water gate he would not believe that he had judged truly the height of the wall.

Within it he saw the glimmer of lighted pavilions close to the water, and black spires rearing against sunset over domes that gleamed purple and crimson. Straight down upon their boat rowed a barge, draped in black silk and driven by a score of slaves.

On the raised platform behind the rowers a half-dozen men, turbaned and robed in many-colored silks, leaned on brocade cushions and stared down at the smaller craft and its crew.

“Ho, Moslems!” A tall man in the bow of the barge challenged them. “Who enters the water gate after nightfall?”

Robert could not understand the reply of his captors, but presently a command issued from the barge and the sailing-skiff was brought alongside, the rowers lifting their oars. The same speaker, who seemed to be overseer of the slaves, ordered the warriors to send up their prisoners and the woman of the Franks. When Robert's guards argued a mellow voice called out from the stern in liquid Arabic.

“Surety? Am I not Osman the hadji, Wazir of the Throne and master of Bokhara? I will be surety to the Shah, and that will suffice thee. Jackals—sons of jackals and sires of dissension! Yield up the Franks and seek thy pay in the appointed day and place! Am I a hireling to be affronted by slaves in the hour that Allah decreed for pleasuring?”

To a man the soldiers in the boat cast themselves on their knees and beat their foreheads against the planks. Yet Robert heard one murmur to another that the wazir had kept in his own purse the pay that had been promised them. The negroes ushered Ellen forward, through the waist of the boat, and in the deep shadow under the side of the barge she stumbled.

“Abdullah's word to you, my lord!” she whispered quickly. “Hide it!”

He heard the rustle of paper sliding over the reeds of the deck, and leaned forward.

“And what of you, demoiselle?”

“Father Evagrius hath prayed. Tend him—let no injury be done to him.”

One of the negroes thrust Robert back, and steel gleamed in the shadow. The girl was lifted to the barge, and he took advantage of the respite to search for and find a narrow roll of parchment that lay near his feet. Putting this in his girdle, he helped the patriarch out of the boat and followed, rendered dizzy by the sudden movement but finding his limbs steadier than he had thought.

“So this is the champion of the Franks,” observed one of the Moslems about Osman, “who named himself the Lion and clawed Inalzig, the bahator, to death with a score of warriors at the Gates. Shall we match the lion with a man-eating tiger?”

“Nay, 'twould take an elephant to crush his bones,” responded another lightly. “He is greater in bulk than the tallest of the Ethiopians.”

“You are both wrong, my cup companions,” put in a third. “The Frank, like the maid, is to be kept alive against the coming of the Shah.”

Osman, who had been staring at the girl, frowned at this, and a slender boy with insolent eyes ceased tuning a lute long enough to murmur:

“Allah la yebarak fili! May Allah not prosper his coming!”

“What words are these words, O Hassan?” reproved the wazir. “Am I not the slave of Muhammad, and was not he——”

“A slave himself, O most generous of lords,” quoth Hassan, bending ear to lute again, “when he was my age and caught the eye of a woman.”

Somebody mouthed a gibe about the eyes of women, and the assemblage laughed. Osman struck upon a silver gong that hung by his side; and the overseer of the slaves bellowed to the rowers, who brought the barge about and headed down the river into the heart of the lighted city.

Robert, utterly unnoticed, studied Osman curiously. It was the first time he had seen a Kharesmian of the higher classes, and it was difficult to believe that this was not the Shah himself. Osman had pallid, weak muscled cheeks, surrounded by a narrow beard, and his jeweled turban would have bought a castle in Palestine. His dark lips curved like a girl's, and his fine brown eyes had the blank stare of a dreamer or a user of drugs. From the instant that the demoiselle of Ibelin was seated at his side he did not cease to pay her attention.

“Let my counsel be as earrings in thy pretty ears, O damsel. Incline to me, and I will robe thee in samite and cloth of gold, and scent thy eyebrows with attar of rose—so that the Shah himself shall fall bewildered by thy beauty.”

He seemed loath to believe that the captive did not understand his praise, but when it was clear that she knew no Arabic the courtiers launched remarks that made the knight turn away so that they could not observe his eyes. It was wiser that they should not be aware that he could follow what was said.

“To the seller of perfume,” smiled the boy with the lute, “what remains save the dust of the rose petal? How long, O treasurer, wilt thou labor to keep safe the treasure of the slave who claims to be thy master?”

Osman glanced at him warningly, yet seemed to find food for thought in the idle words. He lifted a drinking-cup of pure jade, and from the waist of the barge cymbals and drums resounded as he drank.

“Nay, Osman,” called out a stout man in purple silk who was being fanned by a Nubian slave girl. “Am I not crowned king of the hour of pleasure? What royal honors are accorded me when I lift my cup?”

“The dogs bay.”

Hassan displayed white teeth.

“And spent hags pluck thy purse away——”

“Out upon thee! Pfagh—you are rank of the dunghill that bred thee. Who but I bore to our master, this excellent fellow Osman, the news of the taking of Otrar by the barbarians?”

“The tidings that sent Muhammad to the northern border,” nodded one who had something of the warrior about him. “It was three moons ago that the Manslayer took Otrar into his maw and sent the head of its governor to the Shah. Allah, he was angered!”

“And I made a song about it,” quoth Hassan.

“The imams and kadis wagged their beards and fouled the carpet of counsel with the spittle of quarrels,” nodded the wine-bibber unsteadily.

“And I made a song about that, too.”

“Yet the news was good for us because it gave the reins of Government in Bokhara to our lord, Osman.”

“O sharp-of-wit, canst thou truly see an ant-hill when the ants bite thy toes?”

“The chief of the Kankalis who was leader of the garrison could not,” put in the warrior, signing for a slave to fill his cup again. “At least he drank too much opium by mistake——”

“Thy tongue wags!” whispered one of the courtiers.

“Nay, he was a fine sight in his shroud. By Allah, it came to my ears that his favorite singing-girl slew herself with a dagger——”

“And that was not so fine a sight,” broke in Hassan, “because a shroud was an ill garment for so fair a wench.”

He glanced from under kohl-darkened lashes at the Nazarene maid and swept delicate fingers over the strings of his lute, singing under his breath:

“Wilt to Bokhara? Oh, fool for thy pains! To come from the desert to Bokhara's chains!”

The river became narrower and darker where high walls of palaces and mosques lined the banks, but Osman's barge kept to mid-current, and Robert noticed that the other craft got out of its way hastily and other pleasure-seekers knelt as the wazir passed. But Osman had eyes only for the Nazarene maid, and Hassan, perceiving the mood of his master, sang of love and the beauties of women in a voice that was softer than a silver flute. A brazier, burning in the prow, cast a scent of aloes and musk incense into the air, and at command of the leader of the revels, different powders were put into the wine-cups by slaves—hashish, opium and bhang. Robert, feigning exhausted sleep, heard other references to the Manslayer, to Otrar and the treasure of Muhammad Shah, as the tongues of the drinkers were loosened.

He made out that Osman was the keeper of the Shah's treasure, which was kept in Bokhara, where no Moslem band dare venture theft. And that Muhammad knew to a dinar's worth the value of the treasure. Otrar, he suspected, was the northernmost fortress of Khar, and its capture by the new foe from the mountains to the north had impelled Muhammad to collect his army and march thither some months ago.

The chief of the barbarian tribes who had entered Khar was spoken of as the Manslayer.

ON A landing-stair of carved marble a throng of Nubian slaves awaited Osman's party with sedan chairs. Link-bearers attended them, and the girl was put into a closed palanquin, Osman riding in a chair close behind. Robert, taking the arm of the blind priest, walked in the center of the company.

From the shadows of the alley ragged shapes emerged like lame crows hopping to a meal. They croaked for alms, and the slaves thrust them back with their long wands, shouting against the outcry of the beggars for a way to be opened for the wazir.

One of the ragged men stumbled against Hassan's chair, and a flood of obscenity welled from the lips of the singer. The beggar crouched, whining, and Robert saw that his cheeks were blotched, the flesh eaten away to the bone.

“A bow!” Hassan commanded one of his followers and snatched the weapon, ready strung.

The leper lifted swollen hands, and Hassan, smiling, ordered two of the slaves to hold him. Shivering, the Nubians sprang to obey. The bow twanged and the arrow shaft plunged into the creature's stomach.

The knight, who had seen many men die, was sickened, and fought down rising nausea.

“Have we come to the prison, my son?” the gentle voice of Evagrius asked.

“Nay, we are within the streets of a great city.”

“The sound of it is evil,” nodded the priest. “And the smell is foul, both of dirt and incense. So must Babylon have been ere it was cast down.”

In spite of the fact that Osman seemed anxious to take dark and unfrequented ways to his destination, Robert was amazed by the size of the walled-in dwellings, the stone towers and marble pools that were glimpsed as they passed. Loitering crowds sighted them and stared at the two Franks, spitting and clenching their hands on perceiving the dark robe of the priest. Robert thought that surely Babylon could not have been a greater place than this.

At a bronze gateway Osman's escort halted, and the master of revelry hastened to his side. The man had sobered perceptibly.

“Lord and hadji," he muttered earnestly, “do not stumble with the foot of recklessness upon the pit of misfortune. The maid was to be sent to the palace of the Shah with the other women captives. Will you dare take her within your dwelling?”

“O small-of-wit,” responded the wazir slowly, “if harm came to the Nazarene, who would face the blame?”

“You.”

“Most true. And so shall I keep her safe, under my eye, until Muhammad returns. Who else is to be trusted with a pearl such as this, beyond price?”

“It would be better,” objected the courtier, “to take under your hand the throne treasure, for safekeeping. That would buy allegiance of a host of chiefs, whereas a fair woman will——”

“Please the eye of Muhammad more than countless swords.”

Osman signed for the palanquin bearing the captive girl to be taken to one of the buildings about the central garden, and gave over the knight and the priest to some guards, who led them to a postern door and up a winding stair for so great a distance that Robert knew they must be ascending a tower.

Upon a landing of the stair a narrow door was unbarred, and they were pushed into darkness. Robert bade the priest stand still while he investigated, and discovered that they were in a small, semicircular chamber furnished only with a rug and mattresses to sleep upon. An oval window, barely large enough to admit his head through, enabled him to look out over the garden, and he heard a voice like a nightingale's where lights glowed under the trees beneath the tower—

“Wilt to Bokhara? O fool for thy pains!”

Osman's tower proved to be the highest of the many minarets and cupolas of Bokhara—higher even than the emperor's palace, as Robert observed the next morning. Moreover in the open square and market-places near the tower were the tents of several thousand Kankalis—easily distinguished by their black cloaks and trappings.

Beyond the mosques and academies were the tents and picket-lines of a host of mounted warriors. Where the caravan roads led into the gates of Bokhara's wall other pavilions were pitched. Although the distance was too great for the knight to be sure of the numbers, he estimated forty thousand men under arms within his range of vision and guessed at as many more elsewhere.

Hourly long lines of camels threaded through the gates and pushed into the already crowded market-places. Passing along the alleys beneath him, he made out throngs of mullahs, followed by their disciples, jostled by swaggering Turkomans and pushed aside by the riders that were continually entering and leaving Osman's palace.

And four times a day there floated out over the humming confusion of alley and bazaar the musical call of the summoner-to-prayer.

“Allah akbar! God is great. … There is no God but God. … Pray ye! Prayer is good, and the hour of prayer is at hand!”

The gigantic concourse, the uproar of voices, the smells—that rose even to the tower—wrought upon the senses of the watcher even as Osman's music and incense had failed to do and brought home to him the power of the stronghold of Islam. It was during the first dawn-prayer, when the light was strong enough to read by, that he took out Abdullah's scroll and scanned it in the window niche where the guards in the outer corridor could not see him through the aperture in the door that served to pass in food and enable them to spy upon the prisoners. The letter began abruptly.

Salaam, yah ahmak-greeting, O fool! I have brought you to Bokhara, in spite of your folly which nearly made the Gate the end of the road.

Have you never learned that one rider can pass where four may not go abreast? Why then strive to befriend three others, and two of them weaklings? But what is done is done, and what will be, will be. I have claimed on your behalf that you are the greatest of all the Franks, and it is well that the name of Longsword has penetrated even to the borders of Khar. The Shah will desire to see you, and until his arrival you are safe, for I swore on the Koran that your disguise was needed to take you through the desert tribes.

I also swore that you had been cast out by your peers of Palestine and sought the service of Muhammad, for that also was necessary to keep you from being put into a shroud by the followers of Inalzig.

Your sword is more eloquent than your tongue; keep silence and listen, for Bokhara breeds more gossip than a dunghill vermin. Take these matters to heart, chiefly:

Osman is only lip-loyal to the Shah. The treasurer is the companion of Muhammad's mother, Turkhan khatun, who holds the allegiance of the Kankalis, who in turn are the backbone of the Kharesmian host. Osman secretly poisoned the ameer who commanded the garrison of Bokhara, and would do away with the council of the imams, who are the Moslem elders. The Shah fears him, the imams hate him. If he could lay hand on the throne treasure he would be master of Khar.

Ponder these matters and gather your strength again, for you will have need of wit and daring when I seek you. Bahator, a new path will be opened up by the next moon, and we will ride again.

Three times Robert pored through the delicate Arabic scroll writing and then thrust it into a crack between the bricks outside the window, wondering more than a little what manner of man might be Abdullah, who seemed to go freely wherever he willed and to judge any situation with a clear mind. The crusader was beholden to him for his life, and yet could not be sure Abdullah was his friend.

For days he paced the chamber, or slept heavily as they sleep who are casting off the inertia of sickness. And though he often pondered Abdullah's message, he could make little of it. He had come among men who learned to plot before they were weaned, who built mosques that outrivaled the temple of Solomon, who could fashion weapons that made the clumsy arms of the crusaders look like flails and scythes. Without a weapon in his hand and a horse between his knees, he was restless; and often he found himself thinking of the girl who had come with the pilgrims to seek the Holy Sepulcher and had been led to Bokhara. Father Evagrius talked of her after his fashion, blaming no one for her fate.

“When all is told,” the knight observed thoughtfully, “is not her state better here than on the roads of Palestine?”

“Is yours?”

“Nay, my case is different.”

“You, my lord, have achieved much against the paynims. Will you swear to me that you will strive to speak again with Ellen d'Ibelin and ransom her from this infidel king?”

Robert frowned, chin on hand.

“Nay, that will I not. What ransom would suffice him who sits on the Throne of Gold? What have I?”

“My son, in this life we serve not ourselves. Not long ago the good yeoman leaped into the pool of the gorge and saved you from drowning, and thereafter the maiden tended you when the fever ran in your veins. What will you do for them?”

Glancing from the embrasure, Robert shook his head.

“Could you see the vast city and its wall, twice the height of Jerusalem's—aye, and the array of Moslems passing in and out upon the roads, you would not talk of hope. We have been brought hither like beasts for the eyes of the emperor to scan. Nay, Evagrius, 'twere folly to deceive ourselves. If the maid and the yeoman were free, and I, and we had horses—could we ride over these walls? And, even so, could we achieve a passage through five hundred leagues of Moslem lands?”

He laughed without merriment.

“Nay, Abdullah spoke truth to Montserrat. Whosoever enters Khar returns not.”

The priest smiled.

“My blind eyes have seen more than that. The Red Sea dividing its waters, so that the Christian host passed through. Aye, and water issuing from a rock in the desert.”

Evagrius nodded gently and sank into one of his long musing spells. Robert leaned back against the door, where he could listen to the talk of the guards in the corridor, and presently both were aware of a change in the sounds that drifted up from the alleys and gardens below.

The hum of talk had died away, although it was past the hour of evening prayer for the Moslems. In the water garden of the palace the companions of the wazir were sitting about their cups, and Hassan's clear voice rose in mockery above their laughter. Somewhere a woman began wailing, and slippered feet pattered along a corridor. A horse galloped furiously along the palace wall, and presently the' hum of talk arose again in the alleys.

“What do the warriors, our warders, argue?” asked Evagrius, for the voices were louder than usual outside the door.

“They are disputing about the war. Otrar, one of the cities of Khar, fifty leagues from here, has fallen into the hands of the barbarians. There has been a battle between the host of the Shah and the barbarian chief who is called the Manslayer.”

Robert listened with rising interest.

“They say that Otrar was taken in a week, and ten thousand Moslems slain. A short siege, forsooth. Before that there was a battle in the northern mountains. One man claims that the Shah overthrew his foes; another that he lost half his warriors—a hundred thousand.”

“Who is this foe?”

“They name him now the Great Khan, which is to say Genghis Khan, and his tribe are called Mongols.”

CHAPTER VIII

Not by the robe of honor on his shoulders, not by the sword on his hip, not by the words on his lips is a man to be judged.

When a friend calls for aid—then is the warrior weighed in the balance. And by his deeds, not by his promises, is the bahator judged.

THE next morning the talk of the warders was that Muhammad was approaching Bokhara with his army and there was rejoicing in the bazaars. Carpets were hung out on the balconies overlooking the wide street that led from the Otrar gate through the righistan—the central square on which the great Jumma mosque was situated—past the two palaces of the Shah and Osman, over the bridge that spanned the canal, to the western gate.

All this Robert observed, for his embrasure faced the east and north; but he saw too that while the Bokharians prepared a triumphal entry for the Shah, many caravans came out of the east and passed by the city while none went the other way. He reflected that if the Shah had overthrown his foes merchants would not be bearing away their goods.

While he was watching visitors came to his door, and he beheld bearded faces topped by huge turbans peering in at him. A low-voiced argument between the owners of the turbans and Osman's guards followed, until the door was flung open for the first time since his entry and a stout man with worried, sunken eyes walked in.

“This is the mullah,” announced one of the spearmen, “who has in his keeping the Jumma mosque, and Allah alone knows why he is bearing you hence for a day, O dog of an unbeliever,” he grumbled.

The mullah drew up the skirts of his silk robe as he passed Father Evagrius, and stared for a full moment at Robert.

“Are you verily the infidel bahator who withstood Nasr-ud-deen at Antioch and broached the wall of Damietta?” he asked in scholarly Arabic.

Robert bent his head to conceal his surprize, but the Bokharian guessed his thought.

“We of Khar are conversant with the events of the borderland of Islam, for this is the heart of Islam. The heart would not beat as high if a vein in one finger were opened. Speak, O caphar, for Abdullah sang your praises and made known to us that you are acquainted with our speech.”

“True, O hadji.”

For the mullah wore the green turban cloth that showed he had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca.

With another scornful glance at the impassive blind man the mullah signed for Robert to follow and led the way down the tower stair. In the street they were joined by a half-dozen dignitaries of the town, imams and kadis—hawk-faced Turkomans and stalwart Uzbeks, all looking more than a little troubled and all armed. They took the shortest way—as Robert knew from his study of the streets—to the canal and the wall beyond the bridge.

Once he set foot on the walk that ran on the summit of the wall, Robert strode to the crenellated parapet and stared down. The nobles watched him silently as men might eye a horse that was going through its paces.

“Abdullah,” observed. one presently, “who is a cup-companion of the Shah—upon whom be peace-said in our hearing that the Saracens of Syria set the price of a king's ransom on your head because you were master of the art of siege.”

Robert kept silence, inwardly cheered by the knowledge that the various Moslem races were more often, than not tearing at each other's throats and that the Kharesmians apparently were not allied to the Saracens whom he had fought. So he waited for the speaker to explain himself.

“In the mulberry grove below,” the man went on, “is the mazar of a venerable sheikh who dared to prophesy. Aye, he foretold to Muhammad that a day would come when the walls of Bokhara would be one with the plain, and cattle would graze where its mosques had been.”

The mullah pushed forward to add his word.

“By command of Muhammad, the shadow of God upon earth, this man was cast into the pit of vermin, having first been blinded. Thus his death was slow, yet because of his sanctity the mazar was erected. Muhammad did not act wisely.”

Seeing that they sought something from him, Robert continued to gaze indifferently down at the grove and its shrine.

“How long, O caphar,” demanded the mullah at last impatiently, “could Bokhara withstand a siege?”

“With how many men for garrison?”

“You have seen them, and you have seen the wall.”

Robert shook his head, smiling.

“Will one claw show the size of a tiger—or its teeth?”

After consulting together they led him a league or so around the summit of the wall until they were winded, and the knight waxed exultant with his first hour out in the sun. The guards at each tower and stair looked at him until he was out of sight. The sentries that squatted by each ballista to cast arrow sheaves and each mangonel for the casting of naphtha jars forgot to scratch themselves and salaam to the mullah.

Robert, standing half a head taller than the Bokharians, with his tawny beard uncombed and his yellow hair falling on his square shoulders, strode in the lead, for his interest was aroused; and his gray eyes gleamed as he studied the engines of defense, which differed little from those in Palestine. The murmurs of the warriors gathered around stew-pot and dicing reached his ears, but he gave them little heed—though the kadis were more attentive.

The men were saying to one another that here was another Iskander from the land of the Franks. The mullah knew better, but one of the kadis twitched his sleeve and held up a row of coins that served to ornament his sword-belt. They were old coins, dug out of the cellars of the city, and one bore the head of Alexander.

“Nay, he is no Iskander,” they decided. “But the poise of the head, and the brow and the hair—aye, and the chin are the same. He must be of the race of Macedon.”

They seemed to take comfort from this, although the knight could have told them otherwise. In the memory of the councilors, old men had told stories of the rule of the Bactrian-Greek generals who governed Bokhara until a Chinese horde came out of the east—to be driven away in turn by the Arabs, who were succeeded by the Khar dynasty, the emperors before Muhammad.

“How long could the wall be held?” they asked all together when the mullah halted at the Otrar gate, which, being the chief gate of the city, was used as site for exposing the heads of men slain by order of the Shah—being ornamented by wizened shapes of skin, and hovering birds.

“Forever,” answered Robert briefly. “If two things happen not.”

He was amazed at the labor that had gone into the fortification. The blocks of sun-dried brick were hard as stone, and the wall was solid, a full eight spears' lengths in height and three in width. Moreover, except where the river flowed, the country outside was a wind-whipped, sandy waste. A besieging army would need to drag timber for engines and food from a distance. There was plenty of water within the city and ample forces to man the wall. No ordinary stone-casters could make a breach wide enough to do harm.

“What two things?” demanded the Moslems in unison.

“Treachery, or poor leadership.”

The councilors stared at him with hard, covetous eyes and fingered their beards.

“Inshallah! That is a truth. Can not the wall be made stronger?”

Robert nodded.

“Dig a ditch at its foot—a wide ditch. Or the foe would start tunnels to run under and collapse the towers.”

“And what else?”

“Nay,” the knight smiled, “am I also a prophet to tell of what is to be? What I know, I know, and words are easily twisted. I have answered your question.”

They drew apart to talk again; and when they began to argue, he suspected that the Bokharians had no one who could put the city in a condition for defense. The leader of the garrison being dead, and Osman occupied with his own affairs, the forces in the city lacked a head.

“You have told us no more than we understood before!” exclaimed a kadi with a narrow skull and a wisp of a beard. “Surely you have greater knowledge than that, and we have means to make you speak. The vermin-pit is an ill dwelling-place.”

“Lies are easily had,” assented the knight, “and in Bokhara I have heard much lying and little truth.”

“We will make a bargain with you, O Nazarene. If you will advise our captains how to prepare the city for defense we will speak a word on your behalf to the Shah.”

“And if I tell them what to do, who is to see it done?”

After much argument the Moslems offered to let the crusader come to the wall each day, to watch the progress of the work, and to give advice to the various chiefs who would command the slaves who would do the work. Muhammad was expected in three days. Robert stipulated that the mullah and the judges were to give him a signed promise that no harm would come to Father Evagrius during this time.

AT SUNRISE, the next three days, he was on the wall, attended by guards of Osman's household, and the nobles, who at first listened contemptuously to the plans of an infidel, began to stroke their beards and to ask for fresh suggestions. A multitude of slaves were turned loose outside the wall to dig the ditch.

Across the canal at both entrances a chain was stretched, and a bridge of barges set in place inside the chain. Wooden parapets were erected on the barges and detachments of archers told off to practise shooting in triple ranks; the engines were greased with sheep's fat, and new timbers shaped by craftsmen where the old were decayed.

The chiefs of the Kankalis and Turkomans were better skilled in leading their men on forays than in preparing for a siege, and the headmen of the city saw the worth of what Robert advised. The knight himself, glad of something to do at last, went among the soldiers showing them by example what he wanted done. Meanwhile the councilors did not neglect to seize the cattle of the countryside and to fill up the granaries of the city.

By the third evening the slaves had been joined by throngs of merchants and idlers, for it was known at last that the Moslem host under Muhammad had suffered at the hands of the barbarians, and that the Shah was actually in flight before the Mongols. He had with him a formidable army, and with Bokhara prepared for siege and the Shah to lead the defense the Moslems of the city had no fear of the outcome.

That night Robert found a scroll from Abdullah awaiting him on the silver platter that bore his evening meal, in the tower room. The missive ran:

O little son you have done well, and I have not been idle. Gold, in Bokhara, is the key to all gates save that of the treasure, which is hidden. Your warders have pouched gold from my hand. On the morrow demand to be taken to the street, to stand in the crowd when Muhammad passes. Speak boldly when the time comes, for the devil had his paw on a timid man.

With the first streak of sunrise the knight confided to Father Evagrius that Abdullah had appointed a meeting-place, for what purpose he did not know. He had been content to follow the hints given out by the minstrel, who seemed to wish to make known the worth of the man he had brought to Khar.

He found that the three men who were on guard in the corridor were quite prepared to take him down to the street. They wanted to watch the spectacle themselves, and Robert had been allowed to go out before this. But the knight suspected they had been bribed.

From the window he saw that the flat house-tops were lined with throngs of watchers and that carpets had been laid in the street through which Muhammad must pass to go to his palace; and before the guard had been changed, he perceived dust rising in a long line out on the plain.

When the first horsemen entered the Otrar gate under the sightless eyes of the heads exposed there by order of the Shah, Robert was taken down to the garden and thence to the street where Osman's followers were jammed against the wall. His guards, anxious for a better view, elbowed their way forward with the knight, claiming that the wazir had ordered Robert to be displayed as his prisoner.

Room was made for him in the outer line, and for hours he watched the passing of bodies of horsemen. These were strange to his sight—dark-skinned warriors, well mounted, who cursed the crowd when the way was obstructed. The ponies were sweat-streaked, and many of the riders bore wounds. Robert noticed that they had no spare mounts and no baggage. They looked like men who had been in the saddle throughout the night.

The tumult in the street was echoed from the housetops when it was seen that the van of the cavalry did not halt at the river. Instead they crossed the bridge and passed out of the southern gate. The Bokharians mocked them for cowards who did not dare make a stand in the city, and the Shah's men answered in kind.

Other riders followed—Persian mailed archers, with high lambskin hats and bronze shields. One of the guards at Robert's elbow shouted a question, which was answered by a blow from a scabbard. But rumors were buzzing in the crowd.

“To Samarkand—the army goes to Samarkand! Nay, to Herat, for I heard—Allah, they lost their tents, and all but— To the mountains, I say—they draw their reins to Khorassan.”

Behind Robert the press grew greater. A gaunt Turkoman beg, smelling of sheepskins, bared yellow teeth and roared in his ear:

“Pillage! The door is open to plunder! Death to the Franks!”

They were thrust forward into the dust-cloud as the slaves of Osman issued from the palace gate and beat a path for their master, who sat in a palanquin. Catching sight of Robert, he signed for the guards to bring the captive after him and ordered his bearers to run toward the righistan.

“Where is Muhammad Shah?” bellowed the Turkoman, running with them. “Where are the ameers?”

Osman lay back on his pillows, closing the curtains against the dust. They passed an array of spearmen mounted on camels and—thanks to the wands of the Nubians—emerged into the great square at the same moment that some score of elephants came swaying up the street on the other side. Before and behind the elephants galloped horsemen, white with dust, drawn simitars in hand. Abreast the pillars of the Jumma mosque the leading elephant—a towering beast painted green and red, with steel blades lashed to its tusks—slowed its ambling gait and threw up its trunk. The lines of Bokharians near Robert cast themselves on their knees, pressing their foreheads to earth. So he was able to see the mullah of the mosque standing on the steps of the edifice.

And, when the elephant came to a halt, the man who sat alone in the glittering howdah stared first at Osman and then at Robert, who remained standing.

“Hail to Muhammad Shah, the mighty, the victorious!” roared the crowd.

Robert saw a face under a turban that glittered with jewels—a puffy face with restless eyes. Osman climbed from his litter and salaamed.

“O monarch of the world, make thine elephant kneel. Thy palace is in readiness.”

He spoke boldly, and under the words was a shadow of mockery. The Shah leaned forward.

“Upon thee the peace, O hadji!” he greeted the mullah first. “Necessity has changed my plans. I ride to Herat, there to gather together the new forces from the south.”

The dark eyes of the wazir glittered, although he did not seem surprized.

“And what of Bokhara? What is thy command?”

“To defend it against the Mongols,” replied the man in the howdah slowly. “In council the ameers of the kingdom have given decision to retire to the walled cities. Against these the foe will spend his strength, while a fresh army gathers under my standard.”

“And is this thy decision also, O king?” asked Osman loudly.

“It is my command.”

The minister bent his head.

“To hear is to obey. Give to thy servants the boon of the Presence, if it be only for one night, that our hearts may be strengthened.”

Muhammad hesitated, and Robert thought then that this man was not of a race of leaders, if he knew not his own mind. Instead of answering he signed for Osman and the mullah to approach closer, and they talked for several moments in low voices. Then deliberately the wazir made a response loud enough for Robert and the nearest horsemen to hear.

“Lord of the age, companion of the warriors of Islam, mirror of the glory of Allah—give to thy poorest servant, Osman, the wazir, thy signet ring and the command of Bokhara's garrison, that his back may be straightened and his courage heightened and thine enemies confounded.”

Again Muhammad hesitated while Osman waited at ease. It occurred to Robert that if Osman was powerful enough to speak insolently to the emperor, a successful defense of the city would strengthen the wazir's hand. Osman already had under his influence an army as great as the Shah's; a considerable victory would win him new followers.

“Nay,” said the man in the howdah, firmly this time, “the care of the treasure is thine—and the mullah's. Is not that enough care?”

Other officials now approached the elephant, and there was a brief conference. Osman dissembled his disappointment and listened attentively. Presently Robert recognized Abdullah's voice and saw the minstrel close to the howdah, laughing as at some excellent jest.

Muhammad glanced at the mullah.

“Is it true, O hadji, that the imams have asked for a new leader?”

“Protector of the Faith, it is true.”

“Then I name the ameer of the Franks, the conqueror of the Saracens, commander of the garrison of Bokhara.”

A murmur went up at this, and men pushed closer to study the face of Muhammad. Until the Shah signed to him Robert did not realize that he was the man in question. Osman for once looked utterly astonished, but the mullah seemed satisfied. When he stood under the elephant Robert saw that the lines of fatigue and worry were strongly marked in Muhammad's broad face, and that he was too restless to keep still for long.

“Will you swear, O Nazarene,” the mullah asked, “to serve the Shah in this thing and to give your utmost to the defense of the city?”

The knight looked up silently at the man in the howdah, who turned impatiently on the officers below.

“What is this? We have escorted this warrior from Syria, and you have failed to give him sword or armor or horse. A robe of honor for his shoulders, and do you choose a horse from the best.”

Several of the imams hurried off to obey, and Robert saw Abdullah smile. Osman was chewing at a strand of his mustache, his brow unruffled but his eyes dark with anger that heightened when Muhammad loosened the signet ring on his finger and tossed it down to one of the mounted ameers, who pressed it to his forehead and extended it to the knight.

“Do you swear allegiance, Nazarene?” cried the mullah again.

“Tell me first,” Robert answered slowly, “what authority goes with the ring?”

The keeper of the mosque opened wide his eyes; and Muhammad, listening, started as if he had set his hand on a scorpion.

“Power of life and death! Bokhara is in the hands of its garrison, and you are the leader of the garrison. My favor is accorded you.”

The knight faced Muhammad, and perhaps he was the calmest man of them all because he was skeptical.

“O king, I have heard. What then of Osman? Can there be two moons in the same night? Is my word to be obeyed over his?”

“Boldly have you spoken, O ameer.”

Muhammad did not seem displeased this time, and he gave the knight the Moslem title.

“Yah khawand, the men of the garrison will obey your commands; a firman, a decree, shall be written for their leaders to see. The good wazir has authority in matters of the treasury.”

He glanced restlessly at the tall crusader.

“It has been dinned into my ears by my councilors that you are the one man who can defend the wall of Bokhara. Give me your pledge that you will do so!”

“Speak, fool,” whispered Abdullah, reining his horse nearer Robert.

“First,” observed the knight, “do you pledge me safety from harm for three persons.”

“Allah, what are they?”

“The Nazarene damsel carried from Palestine by Inalzig Khan and her companion the archer, and—” Robert turned to the mullah—“the priest Evagrius.”

“They are yours.”

Robert bent his head.

“O king, there be many witnesses to that promise. And to mine. I swear that I will do my utmost to hold Bokhara for you against your foes.”

“You have my leave to withdraw.”

The man in the howdah turned to speak to the mullah, when a rider passed forward from the rear and rose in his stirrups to exchange a quick word with Muhammad—a word of warning, Robert thought. The Shah uttered a sharp command, the mahout tugged at the elephant's neck with his hook and the great beast swayed into a walk, then broke into a long shamble, followed by the others.

The Bokharians were forced to scramble aside, out of the way, and a disorderly horde of infantry flooded the square, pushing after the elephants. The throng on the housetops and about the mosque knew by now—for tidings travel swiftly in a Moslem crowd—that the Shah was minded to leave the city with the troops that attended his person, and that he had appointed a captive, an infidel, to take command of the garrison. Even now the crowd, fatalists without the power of acting on their own initiative, made no protest at the departure of their Shah. As the glittering elephant swept by, the throngs prostrated themselves; and something like silence settled on the square, where a dozen officers stood about Robert, who was staring at the ring in his palm.

Osman was the first to move forward.

“Salaam, yah khawand. We have heard the word of the lord of Khar, and there is naught but obedience in our hearts. Command, and my men obey.”

The mullah came next, followed by the nobles, who bore a shirt of silvered chain mail, a crested helmet and a cloak of black silk. They took off Robert's old khalat and fitted on the mail, slipping the cloak over it and winding his waist with a girdle of cloth of gold. A simitar of blue steel with a hilt set with glittering gems was offered to the knight, and he took it. Still doubtful of the reality of the honor, he gathered up the reins of a white Arab pony with the mane and head of a king's charger. When he swung into the saddle he flushed with sheer pleasure.

“Salaam, bahator,” his companions saluted him.

Robert raised his sword and took up his rein. Abdullah came to his side.

“A slave's greetings to Iskander,” he cried. “May the road of your namesake be open before you.”

CHAPTER IX

WILL FINDS A BOW

WITH some ten thousand staring at him, the new Ameer of Bokhara issued his first commands and watched without seeming to do so to see if each were acknowledged—Abdullah finding great amusement thereby.

Robert appointed a conference for the chiefs of the various tribes in the courtyard of the Shah's palace two hours hence. He called the several atabegs within view to him, and sent one to take immediate charge at every gate of the city. The imams he requested to draw up lists of the amount of food in the granaries and the total of the weapons stored in the armories.

From the crowd he picked out the Turkoman beg who had talked about killing him, and the man knelt with quivering cheeks, evidently expecting that he would be given over to torture. Instead he was bade to select a hundred riders and set out to the east to establish an advanced post beyond sight of the city. Other detachments were ordered off, to patrol the river and caravan tracks beyond the walls.

His commands were received with the deepest respect and executed at once. Robert, aware of the mullah at his elbow, turned in his saddle.

“O hadji, is it fitting that the leader of your warriors should stretch his cloak in an alley and have the sky for a roof?”

The keeper of the temple started, eyed the knight keenly a moment and nodded gravely.

“True. A house shall be made ready in the garden quarter by the river, and slaves——”

“To this house,” Robert suggested to Osman, “the blind priest and the archer can be sent before the hour is ended.”

The wazir bowed in silence.

“And the Nazarene maid.”

Their eyes met, and the minister of the Shah twisted his fingers in the pearls that hung from his throat.

“Yah khawand! What words are these? In this place? To name a woman before listeners is to shame a follower of the Prophet!”

“Yet, O wazir, I am a Nazarene and a man of my word. If the maid is not placed in this dwelling, unharmed, before the sands have run from the hour-glass I shall open your gate with a thousand spears.”

Osman exchanged glances with the mullah and extended both hands open before him.

“Who am I but the slave of him who has honored you? It shall be as you have said.”

Robert watched him out of sight, well aware that he had made at least one bitter enemy. Turning the long ring on his finger, he studied the massive sapphire, cut in the form of a seal, in the gold setting. Then he raised his head and smiled.

“Here is a riddle, and I would know the answer in true words.”

“Command me,” suggested Abdullah promptly, but Robert shook his head.

“Hadji,” he asked of the mullah, “have you in your house a hamman, a bath where the bathmen are discreet? Then may I be your guest for one-half of the hour?”

Surprized, the mullah signed for him to ride to the rear of the mosque, and Abdullah stared after the two thoughtfully. The boy Hassan approached his horse and peered up mockingly.

“Lick thy palm, O teller of tales. The cup-companion is the favorite of a day and then—the dust of the rose petal remains to the seller of perfume.”

Having launched this shaft the boy darted away and overtook Osman's palanquin at the gate of the wazir's palace, harkening with interest to the low-voiced exclamations of his patron.

“O dog of a mongrel pack! O eater of filth! To claim with a loud tongue what was mine! Son of dishonor and father of foulness! To speak of the maid that would have been mine—aye, before a multitude! O fool and madman—Nazarene, prince of unbelievers—thy grave will be dug by jackals, and dogs will tear it loose again. May the bones of thy mother and thy father's father suffer a like fate.”

Perceiving Hassan awaiting him, Osman mastered his rage somewhat and ordered the singer to run to the dwelling that was being prepared for the Frank, and stint not gold among the slaves selected by the imams for his service. Having confidently expected this command, Hassan made off blithely, for here was a matter dear to his heart, and a quarrel out of which a song might be made to quiet his master in another, more fortunate hour.

ROBERT understood the Turkish character well enough to be quite sure that the Shah's ring and the imperial decree would not serve to keep him his command if he failed to enforce his authority by his personality. He did not wish to appear before the chiefs in council until he had learned something about them and the situation in general. To talk with Abdullah would be a mistake, because the Bokharians would conclude that he relied greatly on the minstrel.

Nur-Anim, the mullah, was a man wise beyond his years and a shrewd schemer, with the fire of fanaticism behind his close-set eyes. Robert had reasoned that he was the second most influential leader of the Bokharians; and he wished to question the mullah before Osman could talk with him, knowing well that he would be answered with half-truths and lies, out of which he might put together some guess as to why the sword and the ring had been bestowed upon him.

“Little time have we, Nur-Anim,” he observed, refusing the offer of sweetmeats and fruit and a seat on the mullah's carpet, “to sit on the carpet of counsel. Is it not true that Muhammad was overthrown in the battle at the Takh-i-suleiman and lost half his men? And that his foes the Mongols are pursuing him apace? Nay, they are not fifty leagues behind.”

He had reasoned this out in the bath, judging that no one not harassed by pursuit would appoint a commander in the great city of Bokhara in such haste. Nur-Anim inclined his head.

“The Mongols are horsemen and ride swiftly,” went on Robert, who had remembered what his guards gossiped, but chose to let Nur-Anim think he was well informed. “And they number full as many as the warriors within Bokhara.”

“Nay, the sum of their strength—may Allah not prosper it—is somewhat greater than one hundred thousand.”

The mullah considered.

“We have twenty thousand more under your orders, and the slaves besides.”

“Who are the most experienced atabegs?”

“Kutchluk Khan, the Uzbek.”

The mullah pronounced the name with distaste.

“Leader of the horsemen of Turan—a one-eyed wolf who can scent plunder farther than a vulture can see a dead horse. And next to him Jahan Khan, chief of the Kankalis, who can cut a sheep in halves with a simitar stroke. Sixty thousand follow them, and their pay takes the revenues of one-tenth Bokhara's trade.”

There were others—the captain of the Persian mailed archers, and only one a noble of Khar. Robert began to see light. These leaders of the tribes were hired retainers. Gold was the tie that bound them—for the most part—to Muhammad, who had much gold. Their homes were elsewhere, and they lost little chance to quarrel and plot against each other.

If Muhammad had chosen one of them for ameer the jealousy of the others would have flared up, and the leader would have had his hands full with the pack. Whereas, led by a stranger, they might fight well; at least until the fighting around Bokhara was at an end, and Robert was glad to learn that he had such men among the garrison.

When he asked about the Mongols and the Manslayer, Nur-Anim could say only that the foes of Khar were wild tribesmen, infidels, who had emerged from the Himalayas, coming down from the Roof of the World like a black storm. Ignorant of the strength of Bokhara, and lacking siege engines, they would be crippled under the wall and cut up by Muhammad when the Shah raised a fresh army in the south.

“Where does Osman keep the treasure of the throne?” Robert asked suddenly.

He knew that the treasure was in the city, and that the Shah had not taken it away.

Nur-Anim started and suppressed a smile.

“Would Muhammad entrust the treasure of Khar to a wazir whose palace was surrounded by wolves like Kutchluk Khan?”

“Yet Osman knows the place of its hiding—as you do!”

“Am I a servant of the Shah—that I should keep the keys? Nay, I serve the mosque.”

He glanced contemptuously at the Nazarene who could be foolish enough to ask such questions.

“What if the Mongols take the city? The wealth of Khar would fall into their hands.”

“They would not find it. Not if they tore down the dungeons and let the water out of the tanks.”

This explained somewhat the readiness with which Muhammad left his personal hoard of riches behind. And Robert fancied that if he had tried to bear off the treasure the atabegs and the garrison would have made trouble. Pretending disbelief, he asked if a guard should not be set about the place where the treasure was kept.

Nur-Anim turned aside to take up some sugared fruit.

“There be watchers that stand over the Throne of Gold. For a hundred moons they have watched, and not Osman himself would dare draw sword against them.”

“With Allah are the keys of—the unseen.”

Robert took his leave and went out, the mullah staring after him a long time and wondering whether the new ameer was really as simple as he seemed, for Nur-Anim was shrewder than others. The knight circled the precincts of the mosque, within which he was forbidden to set foot. He found an escort of a score of Kankalis and as many lean Turkomans awaiting him.

“Yah khawand,” greeted a Kankali beg in a sleeved cloak of red satin, “by order of Jahan Khan do we, thy slaves, attend thee.”

“O ameer!” growled a bearded Turani. “We also be here! Command us!”

They held his stirrup, then raced to their horses, and Robert rode off musing upon the power of an emperor that could raise an unknown warrior to such dignity. From his talk with the mullah he suspected that Nur-Anim was well acquainted with the hiding-place of the treasure—if he was not actually its keeper.

If Muhammad remained away from Bokhara and the city should be besieged for a long time, the possession of the treasure would mean power to the holder. Robert did not intend to let Osman put his hand on it. One thing puzzled him; if Osman knew where it was hidden, what had kept the wazir from seizing the treasure? And who was the Manslayer, that men who had never set eyes upon him should fear him?

This question was answered for him sooner than he expected.

It was sunset before he left the atabegs after issuing his orders and finding out that they knew less than he did about the Mongols. In the courtyard a familiar voice hailed him.

“Now by the shank-bone of the blessed St. Dunstan, here be Master Robert!”

Will Bunsley sprang forward and grasped the knight's hand in both fists, grinning hugely. His hood and hose were somewhat the worse for wear, but he looked fat and hale; in fact a strong odor of wine of Shiraz hung about him.

“Praise be to St. Bacchus—who was a fair trencherman if he lacked of sainthood—that I ha' found thee. Abdullah brought me hither with tidings——”

“How left you Ellen and the blind priest?”

“Safe as an arrow in quiver, and chattering like magpies, God wot! Has Gabriel sounded his trump, lordling, or is the day of miracles at hand again?”

“Yah khawand,” spoke up Abdullah impatiently, “the Mongols are within the gate.”

“How?” The knight's eyes narrowed. “Where?”

“Ah envoy came to the Otrar gate to have speech with the ruler of the city.”

“Ha—and no word from our outposts?”

The minstrel snapped his fingers significantly and pointed to where in the gathering darkness red glows were visible in the distance—the reflection of fire upon rising columns of smoke. Bunsley followed his gesture with an appraising eye and explained cheerily.

“Abdullah doth fret because the light horsemen sent out from this citadel be somewhat heavy this night. Methinks they are, in a manner of speaking, dead, my lord, and divers paynim villages aflare on the horizon; by which token are we beset, and the goodly walls of this town invested, and I lack a bow, Master Robert. A fair long bow, seest thou, is a goodly thing when a siege is toward, and I pray thee——”

But the knight waited not to hear how Bunsley had managed to gather his tidings. Putting his horse to a gallop, followed by his escort and the minstrel and archer, he made for the eastern gate. Riding with loose rein, he glanced about him and saw that in the bazaar the merchants were hurrying to gather the goods from their stalls and that men ran about shouting aimlessly. As when the Shah passed through, crowds of slaves and women lined the housetops to stare at the fires on the skyline. Torches were lighted by the Otrar gate, and here a body of Kankalis stood beyond spear-throw of three men.

At first sight of the three Robert thought that Abullah and Will had jested.

They were mounted on shaggy ponies not much larger than donkeys. They were clad in coarse wool and leather, loosened over their bare chests for coolness in the windless evening. Only one, the most powerful of the three, wore mail of sorts—a haburgeon of iron plates knotted together with leather thongs.

The face of this rider was dark as burnished bronze and clean-cut as iron. His bare right arm was heavy with corded sinews, and the sword at his thigh was broad as an English battle-ax. He spoke in explosive gutturals, barely moving his lips, and one of the Moslems interpreted.

“The Mongol says he is Chatagai, a commander of a hundred. He says Genghis Khan offers the people of the city their lives.”

The envoy glanced once at the crusader and his horse and spoke again.

“You are to bring the people from the walls to the plain,” explained the Kankali, “with food and forage for a hundred thousand men and double that number of horses. He has gifts—a bow and an arrow. Look upon them; such bows are strong, such arrows shoot far.”

Robert took the weapons in his hand and found the bow to be massive indeed, as heavy as a spear and as long as the English bows. The arrow was of cloth-yard length, its solid silver head pierced with holes.

“He says you can not cope with such weapons. If the gates are opened to Genghis Khan he will slay no man; if the gates are shut no man will live.”

Curiously Robert studied the Mongol, the first of that race he had seen. The warrior was strongly built, and horse and man remained as tranquil as if the rider had never known any other seat than the saddle. Chatagai stared for a long time at a dried and wrinkled head stuck upon a spear by the gate, seeming to take especial interest in this one grim remnant among the many skulls about the gate.

“Can you bend this bow?” Robert asked the archer.

“That can I,” assented Will, who had been circling around the weapon like a dog that had sighted a side of venison.

He dismounted, examined the double stringing of twisted gut, and, exerting his strength in knee and arm, strung it swiftly.

“The bow is an honest longbow, but the arrow hath a lewd hammer head. Natheless if yonder churl can loose it, loose it I will——”

Planting his feet he gripped the feathered tip between fore and middle finger upon the string and drew it to his ear. The arrow flashed up into the night with a shrill, tuneful whistling that dwindled and passed beyond hearing. Chatagai grunted in approval.

“Now that is a pretty conceit!” observed the archer in surprize. “The holes i' the silver made a fair flute—sa ha! Master Robert, grant me the bow for mine own, an it please thee.”

The knight nodded, wishing that he could find a weapon to fit his own hand as easily, and turned to the Mongol.

“Tell him we can handle his weapons. Bid him say to his king that I hold Bokhara for Muhammad Shah, and the gates are closed to him.”

Chatagai pointed at the head on the spear and spoke vehemently.

“Yah khawand,” explained the Kankali, “this barbarian reminds you that the man whose head stands there was an envoy sent by Genghis Khan to Otrar. He dares to utter the warning that the person of an envoy was sacred before the time of Muhammad the Slave; he says God alone knows what will be the issue of this. Ai-a, shall we cut him down?”

“He goes free!” growled Robert.

The Mongol glanced briefly at the tall crusader and at Abdullah. Then, lifting his hand to his forehead and lips, he jerked the pony about in its tracks and swept through the gate with his men after him. In an instant they had vanished into the dust and the night.

“That was ill done, my Frank,” quoth the minstrel. “Until now you have walked forward through peril with a sure step, but now you have stumbled. Would you know the reason? Then dismiss your men beyond earshot, and we will talk—you and I alone—of the fate of an empire and the souls of a million men."

CHAPTER X

In the temples sit the priests, seeing all things, for they are slaves of the gods. Aye, the wisdom of the gods is one with Fate. Yet the lips of the priests are locked.

In the palace are the rose-faced women. Their hair is fragrant as a garden at dusk, and their fingers are like silver, for they are the slaves of a king. They have covered their lips with perfume and their hearts with secrecy.

One key only will unlock the hearts of the slaves, and that is Fear.—Persian proverb.

ROBERT ordered his followers to remain where they were and reined his horse through the gate after Abdullah until they were a stone's throw beyond the wall but still within the glow of the torches. The minstrel bore himself like a new man. Lute and pack were gone, and the good-nature had faded from his broad face; he sat restlessly in the high-peaked saddle, peering into the maw of the dark plain as if watching the retreating Mongols and eager to be after them.

“My quest is ended, O companion of the road. I have found you and brought you hither with honor enough for us both.”

The crusader nodded and laughed.

“Verily you are something of a wizard, Abdullah. You led me hither to serve—as you said—the master of all men. And I serve Muhammad in a high place.”

“My master—” Abdullah glanced on all sides—“is not Muhammad, who is a slave, served by slaves. I follow the Manslayer.”

“Genghis Khan?”

“Aye.”

Robert's eyes narrowed. Here was a riddle, and he waited for the minstrel to explain it. And after perceiving that his friend would not speak, Abdullah went on.

“Hear then, lord companion, one last tale from the teller of tales. Before your mother bore you, there lived a tribal chief in the Gobi Desert, which is beyond the Roof of the World. This man came to be called Genghis Khan later, but at that time he herded sheep and cattle and fought with the other tribes. One day there came to him a youth who could sing the hero-songs of the tribes, whose tongue was quick to boast, yet who drew back from no man's sword. This was Chepe Noyon, and they called him the Tiger.

“Again there came one who had the strength of a buffalo, who quaffed a cask of wine before setting it down, and Genghis Khan named him Subotai, or the Buffalo. When the other chiefs of the Mongols were in tatters and saw their herds thinned and their women carried off by their foes they hung their heads and rode away to another place; then Genghis Khan said to these two, the Tiger and the Buffalo, that they should be his chief men, and they kept at his side to spy out the way in front of him and to guard his back against arrows. Sometimes when they were stiff with wounds they fled to the mountains; they tasted the dregs of treachery, which was worse than the buran—the black wind-storm that sweeps the high desert and freezes men in the saddle.”

The minstrel folded his arms and thought for a moment.

“When the dust rose from the plain or the mist descended from the sky these three did not lose the path they followed. In time came reward. The other tribes were trampled down. So they joined the Mongol standard, and Genghis Khan became leader of the Horde—the riders of the Gobi. They counted their herds by the hundred, and friends came to them from the white world of the north^[1] and from the west and the south.

“When Cathay sent its bannermen against them they rode over the Great Wall, which was stronger than this.”

The minstrel nodded at the wall of the city.

“So in time they humbled Cathay and rode their horses into the palaces of Yenking, which is as great as three Bokharas. The wise men of Cathay served them, and they sat at table with Prester John of Asia. But Genghis Khan always kept the Tiger and the Buffalo near him and gave them honor. They were three brothers who would give up their horses, one to the other, in a battle.

“Then the Gur-Khan, who was lord of the Roof of the World, ^[2] mustered his warriors, and Genghis Khan mounted his horse and went up against him. The Horde did not sit again upon the carpets of ease until they took the tents of the Gur-Khan.

“I am Chepe Noyon, the orkhon, leader of the right wing of the Horde, and brother-in-arms to Genghis Khan.”

The minstrel drawled his name, and his eyes twinkled.

“From the Uighurs, who are Turks and scholars, I learned Arabic and heard of Khar; and the desire came upon me to ride down and look upon this Shah who was himself a slave.

“And I came because at the table of Prester John my master had heard of a race of Franks who had landed on the Moslem shores and made havoc with their swords. Hearing of their deeds, Genghis Khan laid a command on me. And the command was to fetch to him one of the Christian Franks who had a strong arm and a stout heart. This was because Genghis Khan wished to see for himself one of these warriors who had come over the seas, to overthrow all of the Moslems as he had struck the Cathayans. And I went, for a command is a command, even from a brother.

“Aye, the orkhon became a minstrel, and good sport was his. Muhammad, the Shah, after seeing him ride and shoot an arrow and empty a flagon of wine without setting it down, took him into favor—not knowing his name or race. Abdullah became the cup-companion of an emperor's revels—and bethought him of his mission. So he asked the way to the strongholds of the Franks, and Muhammad gave him a chain of jewels.”

The Mongol—Robert still thought of him as Abdullah—laughed heartily at the jest, probably aware of what kind of a chain Muhammad would have set upon him if his true name had been known.

“Why,” asked Robert, frowning, “did you bring me with you? There were greater knights in Syria.”

“Of the very few who could have made the journey and lived, none except you had the heart to set forth. Oh, I have watched you and tested you, and my choice was good.”

Chepe Noyon nodded reflectively and continued:

“When we drew our reins to the Sialak I first heard of the war between Muhammad and Genghis Khan, and many lies were told me. But while you were a captive here I rode to Otrar and there learned the truth, and this is it:

“The Moslems, being traders and traffickers by nature, sent caravans to the Mongol empire to sell their wares. And so Genghis Khan sent an embassy to Muhammad to greet him. The Governor of Otrar was a fool, and he mistook the envoys for common men.”

Robert thought of his first impression of Chatagai, and judged that this might easily happen.

“First the Governor of Otrar cut off their beards and then their heads,” went on Chepe Noyon carelessly, “and kept their goods, to win Muhammad's favor. The head that hangs by this gate—” he pointed to the wall behind them—“was the brother of Chatagai. Genghis Khan will let no man of the Horde suffer injury unavenged. Aye, in our land a young woman might carry a sack of gold in her hand from Bishbalik to Kambalu, and she and the gold would be untouched. Nay, can there be two suns in the sky? War between the Shah and the Khan was certain, and now it has come to pass. Muhammad thought he was dealing with a nomad—a herdsman. So he was. But he thinks otherwise.”

Throwing back his head, he laughed, white teeth flashing through his beard.

“By the white horse Kotwan, by the sky dancers, that was a ride we made, from your gate to this gate! These men of Khar be liars! Aye, the men of Khar have tasted fear, and the day is at hand when they will eat shame! Bokhara's wall will be level with the plain and herds will graze where the palaces stood.”

Thinking of the prophecy of the dead sheikh, Robert held his peace.

“In Bokhara,” resumed Chepe Noyon with relish, “I sang your praises, so that the Shah would hear, and demand to see you; then Osman would not dare put you to the torture as he planned. Hai—it happens oftentimes that a pit is dug for a tiger and an ox is trapped. Behold what happened. The imams and the mullah besought Muhammad to make you ameer of the city, to lead its defense. And now you may surrender to Genghis Khan, winning honor thereby. If Bokhara resists it will fare no better than Otrar.”

Robert held up his hand.

“Is a promise made at sunrise to be broken at sundown?”

“Not the promise of a true man.”

“Then I will defend Bokhara. My word is passed, and I will not unsay it.”

FOR a full moment Chepe Noyon gazed up at the vault of the sky and sniffed into his nostrils the odor of the warm sand.

“Tell me this, O companion of the road. Can one man cast himself into the water and so stem the rush of a river in flood?”

The crusader was silent, having no answer, and Chepe Noyon did not seem ill pleased.

“The men of Khar are foxes, apt at stealing and flying to cover. I have lived among foxes on the steppe. You know not the depth of treachery in these Moslems as I do, who have sung my songs in diwan and riwan—in council and feast. Each one lusts for the treasure of Khar.”

“Is the throne of gold in Bokhara?”

“Aye, well hidden. It lies below ground—so much a drunken priest babbled. The wazir knows the way to it, but the priests stand guard over it, and Osman can not hew them down because his foes would cry sacrilege and muster enough Moslems to cut him and his men to pieces.”

He laughed again shortly.

“O fool—to think they gave you honor in good faith! I overheard the talk between Muhammad and his advisors in the righistan where his elephant took stand. He would have waited to bear off the treasure, but Osman's men declared that he must leave the gold as surety that Bokhara would be relieved by him. He fears Osman and his own mother.”

The Mongol looked long at Robert.

“Your eyes would be opened in time, but then it would be too late,” he added. “The Shah left you behind as a figurehead, to deprive Osman of honor. The mullah took your part because he has a dread of the Kankalis—without some one to hold them in check. Osman is shrewd; you can not deal with him. Bokhara is doomed. We are clear of the gate. Ride then with me. I go to Genghis Khan and the fellowship of true men.”

“Go!” said Robert briefly. “I will keep to my place.”

“By the eyes of——!” cried the Mongol. “Bold words, but what deeds will follow? Summon your men—or they will question you about me. Hai—I will lead them a chase.”

He gathered up his reins, and the horse, sensing the purpose of its rider, reared impatiently.

“Nay, there is peace between us, for you saved my life.”

“The debt is even, since you shielded me in Palestine. Now the sword is between us.”

He lifted his muscular hand to his forehead and lips.

“Ahatou koke Mongku-hai!”

Although Robert did not know it, Chepe Noyon had given him the salute of the royal Mongols.

He listened a while to the drumming of hoofs on the baked clay of the road and then turned back to the gate reflectively. Abdullah, or Chepe Noyon, had been a wayward kind of friend, but Robert found that he missed the minstrel now that the Mongol was gone for good.

THE next day the men on the walls of Bokhara watched columns of Mongols move up from the east and spread out over the plain. All day the dust hung in clouds over masses of riders and herds of horses. The sun gleamed on the horns of cattle and the spears of the guards that shepherded thousands of captives from Otrar.

Robert, studying the array, saw that the Mongol warriors were all mounted, and all looked the same. He could not pick out the leaders. All wore the dust-stained leather and skins, and crude, rusted armor was on a few; here and there above the masses of the Horde moved immense standards—the horns of a stag or buffalo, trimmed with streaming tails, on long poles.

When the dust settled, lines of gray tents, built over a wooden framework, stood in place; back of these the captives and the cattle were herded on the open plain, with the heavy carts of the Horde forming fences around them. Robert bade Will try to count the warriors, and the yeoman estimated a trifle over a hundred thousand, the knight somewhat less.

“By the foul fiend, his cloven hoof!” muttered the archer. “Here is woundy work, i' faith. Our foes be quartered already, and the day is not yet done. A true besieger now in Christendom would set about the work in seemly wise. Aye, he would first fashion him out of beams from his baggage-train a fair array of battering-engines—mangonels and trebuchets. Aye, stone-casters and rams—chats and foxes and eke towers of assault. Then in another week he would cut and fit together storming-ladders, and we would harry him with a-many cloth-yard shafts and cast back his ladders on his poll——”

“The Mongols lack siege-engines to my thinking, Master Will.”

“Then do they lack sense, Master Robert. Rede me this riddle: How may men ride horses up a wall? Or tear down the wall with their hands? 'Tis a thing impossible.”

He rubbed his long chin and scowled.

“This paynim wizarder hath the right o' the matter. My lord, as he says, we should sally out and fall upon the foe, pikes and bills—sa ha!”

Osman had suggested a sortie of the garrison, arguing that the Bokharians outnumbered the Mongols. But Robert would not give assent to the plan. The Horde puzzled him, and he wished to see what they were about before trusting the Moslem soldiery against them on open ground.

Meanwhile the besiegers established mounted patrols that cut off all communication with the world outside, and this pleased the knight. The Shah had given him authority within Bokhara, and now no message could reach the city gainsaying this authority, and he meant to hold the command until the Mongols were beaten off. Beyond that he had made no plans.

By noon of the second day he noticed work in progress within the Mongol lines. Ox-sleds dragged up loads of earth, which was dumped along a front of a hundred yards, facing a portion of the wall where no towers stood. The captives labored at this spot, thousands of them, and the earth mound grew in height as it neared the wall.

“A causeway,” he explained to Will. “And a great one. They will push it nearer until it reaches the rampart of our wall.”

Whereupon he set to work to place on platforms built behind the menaced point, machines for casting sheaves of arrows and stones.

Throughout the night the Mongols kept at their labor, and the creaking of the carts sounded nearer. The defenders kindled cressets on the rampart and contented themselves with shouted insults and laughter, while Robert slept in a tent under the wall and the archer dozed at the tent entrance. An hour before dawn the knight roused and went to the battlement.

The causeway had crept forward and mounted higher. Now it reared against the stars about a hundred feet back from the edge of the ditch. Robert sent a warrior for Jahan Khan, the leader of the Kankalis, and the atabeg came, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and cursing under his breath. He was a slender man, glittering from knee to throat in gilded mail. Pearls were sewn into his turban, and a heron's plume marked him apart from his men. The right sleeve of his khalat was turned back on a supple shoulder and held by a diamond chain—this marking him for a notable swordsman—yet his eyes were heavy with the after-sleep of opium as he made his salaam.

“Take twice a hundred of your bowmen to the rampart,” ordered Robert without salutation, “and scatter the workers upon the mole.”

“Mashallah!”

The atabeg smiled.

“Am I a captain of bowmen? Bid me sally forth from the gates, and I will bring you the head of the Mongol chief on a spear.”

“You are a bahator, chief of thirty thousand. Can you check the advance of the causeway?”

Robert permitted the torchlight to flash on the signet ring he wore, and after a moment it was clear to the Kankali that the Nazarene meant to be obeyed. Robert dismissed him and ordered food to be brought to the tent. He broke his fast with keen relish, after instructing Will to mount to the wall and mark the progress made by the defenders.

The archer came back indignant. The Mongols had brought up to the head of the mound wooden frames upon which raw hides had been stretched. These frames were triangular in shape at the front and while they covered the besiegers, permitted earth and stones to be dumped down into the angle and the causeway moved forward as steadily as before. The Moslem archers with their short weapons were doing no damage at all.

“Bid the khan,” Robert ordered one of his followers, “set the engines to work.”

Response came back promptly that Jahan Khan declared the handling of stone-casters was not in the order given him.

“Then say to the khan that he is to come to my tent for a new order.”

The knight was finishing the last of his rice and fruit and washing his hands when Jahan Khan approached and made as if to sit beside him.

“Stand,” said Robert quietly, and while a hundred pairs of eyes watched intently he commanded two bowmen who came with the chief to chain Jahan Khan's arms and lead him away to his tent, there to guard him until relieved.

“What shame is this?” yelled the startled khan. “Am I dirt—I, Jahan Khan, the bahator?”

He gripped his simitar hilt convulsively, and a great sigh went up from the crowd that had gathered about them.

It was the first real test Robert had made of the power given him, and he sat on his carpet without stirring or looking up at the raging chief. If he had started to explain his action Jahan Khan might have pushed the quarrel to blows; if the crusader put hand to weapon the man would strike first and claim afterward that he had done so in defense of his life. In the shadows at his back he heard Will Bunsley slip an arrow from quiver.

After a while he motioned toward one of the younger begs, the tallest of the officers present. This sign among Moslems was as if Robert had beckoned, and after a second's hesitation the warrior strode forward, the crusader waiting until he saw fit to make a salaam.

“Ho, Moslems,” snarled Jahan Khan, “this Nazarene takes upon his shoulders the mantle of the Shah, and that is a shame upon us all.”

It was just too late to appeal to the religious zeal of the Kankalis, because now they had grown curious as to what Robert wanted of the younger beg. They pressed closer to stare, and after a little reflection Jahan Khan took his hand from his weapon, choosing to make the conflict one of words.

“Do you,” Robert remarked to the attentive younger warrior, “take the leadership of the Kankalis, and fight as a man should. And you—” he turned to the doubtful bowmen—“confine this atabeg until he has slept off the opium in his tent. You have leave to go!”

With that he turned his back and no more words were spoken. Jahan Khan was too surprized to argue, and one or two laughed as he went off. Robert had made good his authority against the most troublesome adherent of the wazir, and he knew that the account of the quarrel would be in every quarter of the city by dawn. It was well worth the risk he had taken.

To help the new leader, he sent Will Bunsley to the wall to show the Moslem archers how to loose their arrows in a high arc, to fall behind the protecting shield. The tumult above grew louder, and the grind and thud of catapult and mangonel sounded above the whistling of the arrows as the sun rose. Although the Mongols suffered from the fire, they pressed the work. The remnants of the captives were sent to the rear, and lines of armed men bore sacks of earth and stones up the cause way. The shields were wrecked, and for a time the bodies of men fell over the head of the causeway as thickly as the sacks.

Then arrows began to fly from the Mongol lines and sweep the battlement.

“Ha, lord,” muttered Will, “mark how yonder shafts cleave the paynim shields! They be stoutly sped, with a true eye. Would I had fourscore Lincolnshire lads here upon the rampart!”

He sighed and presently uttered an exclamation of astonishment.

Under cover of the arrow-flights the Mongols began a new building-up of the causeway, which had ceased to move forward. The ox-carts were driven out of the camp by hundreds and steered up the incline.

Men with torches herded the bellowing animals up the causeway, and once the mass started forward, the oxen kept on, goaded by spears and the smoking torches. The first carts reached the brink of the embankment and rolled over and the rest came after in a steady stream of frantic beasts and splintering wagons. The arrows of the Moslems fell fruitlessly among them, and Robert saw that the carts were loaded with sand and stone. Men, caught in the rush of surging animals, stood up and shouted defiance at the wall. One powerful warrior in a tigerskin hurled his torch at the Kankalis and leaped out from the cart, to fall into the ditch and be crushed by the carts that came after him.

When the causeway stood upon the edge of the ditch, as high as the wall and some twenty feet from it, the Mongols withdrew and quiet settled down. Robert left the Kankalis in charge opposite the causeway and rode to seek out Kutchluk Khan, who was camped across the city with his Turkomans.

The one-eyed chief came forward on foot, and the crusader did not dismount, for he was entitled to speak to the old warrior from the saddle.

“Take half your men—ten thousand of the best armed—and clear away the stalls and sheds of the suk. Quarter yourselves in the market-place which is in the center of the city. When a wide space is cleared, assemble your men and report to me. Can you reach any point in the wall, riding four abreast from the suk?”

“Allah pity any who stand in my way,” boasted the Turkoman, grinning. “Are we to sally forth by the river? The Mongols have no more than a few riders on watch on the banks of the Syr.”

“Who spoke first to you of a sally, O atabeg?”

Kutchluk Khan thought for a moment.

“'Twas Osman, or one of the cup-companions.”

“You have seen many battles.”

“By the ninety and nine holy names, I have seen rivers run with blood and the dust of the fighting hide the sun, O ameer.”

“Have you ever given your men an order to ride whither your foes wished them to go?”

“Nay! Am I a smooth-faced boy, to listen to false talk?”

“Then why incline your heart to a sally? The Mongols fight best in the saddle, and on the open plain they would be at home.”

The Turkoman grunted and fingered his beard, not too well pleased at the rebuke.

“Likewise,” went on Robert bluntly, “tell me if Osman holds me in honor or not?”

“By the sword-hand of —— he doth not. Yah khawand,” Kutchluk laughed, baring yellow teeth, “he would be content to pour molten lead in your ears and make of your skull a drinking-cup. He has sworn he will.”

“Sworn to whom?”

“To me and others, having gone among us with whispered talk. Slay him while the hour is propitious; it is all one to me, and my men would stand aside. I know not why the Shah chose you to be over me, but Osman is an adder that strikes from a hole in the wall.”

Kutchluk became good-humored again as he watched the crusader ride away. To his men he observed that the dog of a Nazarene was good steel shining from a dunghill.

“He knows well the worth of a mounted reserve of warriors such as we be. He hath given command for us to clear the bazaars—aye, and a way through every quarter of the city, so that we can mount and ride to his aid when he summons us. Allah send the wazir slay him not, for a feud comes to a head between them.”

“Inshallah—then the door of looting is opened!”

The Turkomans, who had become quarrelsome from long idleness, waxed supremely content and prepared to go and plunder the stalls of the merchants. And by the time they were in saddle the words of the new ameer had been repeated so often that to a man they were ready to swear they had been ordered to loot.

CHAPTER XI

TWO MEN AND A PLAN

THE sun was a brazen ball hanging in a shroud of dust; and even the dogs of Bokhara had got up, panting, and left the alleys when Robert sought the dwelling where Ellen d'Ibelin and the blind priest were quartered. He found the narrow street filled with men who squatted where there was shade, and sweating horses. Pushing through, heedless of the scowls and imprecations that followed, he led his horse into the door of the garden that, behind a high clay wall, separated the house from the street.

It was a rose garden, bordered with jasmine and thyme. A fountain splashed where the shade was coolest, and about the fountain sat Osman and Hassan and several other followers of the wazir. Robert glanced toward the entrance of the house and saw Will Bunsley seated on the threshold with half a dozen weapons—the archer had a way of acquiring whatever dagger or sword struck his fancy without bothering to pay the owner—spread out on the stones beside him. Father Evagrius and the girl were not to be seen.

Osman had entered and brought in his men unknown to the knight, and Robert waited for an explanation of his presence. The wazir rose leisurely and called the crusader by a dozen complimentary names—lord of the planets, perfection of chivalry, a second Iskander.

“I bear thee tidings, O ameer—good tidings. Because the heat in the alley without was a curse upon us, we made bold to enter thy garden.”

His eye quested over the barred embrasures of the dwelling for a glimpse of the girl.

“And Hassan of the ready tongue hath made a song for thy mistress.”

Robert gave his charger to Will to lead back to the stable and walked over to the Kharesmian.

“This house belongs to the damsel,” he said slowly, “and I have not come here save to ask of her welfare. Send your buffoons from the garden and say your say in few words.”

Osman hid his anger behind a smile, and Hassan laughed. When the cup-companions had departed the wazir motioned Robert to the carpet and sat beside him.

“You are not wise to tarnish the mirror of friendship—with me, O Nazarene. Our paths in Bokhara lie together, and we seek the same end of the road——”

“Your tidings?”

“Are that the Mongols have food and fodder for their horses sufficient for only three days. At the end of the three days they must enter Bokhara or strike their tents and go elsewhere.”

“How had you this?”

“From my spies, who traffic with the barbarians under guise of shepherds and wood-carriers.”

“No men have come into the city in two days.”

“True. My followers send messages over the wall. They took from Bokhara pigeons that fly back when they are loosed, and the messages are written and bound to the claws of the pigeons.”

He looked amused at the ignorance of the knight who had never heard of carrier pigeons or water clocks or naphtha.

“Lo,” went on Osman agreeably, “the seal of fate is on the foreheads of the accursed Mongols. They can not complete their causeway, and their horses can not leap the wall elsewhere. Your skill will save Bokhara, for the three days will soon be at an end. And then—” he hesitated—“what reward will be yours?”

Robert merely glanced at him inquiringly, carelessly at first, then attentively. Osman's hand shook and the pupils of his eyes were dark; a muscle twitched in his sallow cheek. In Cairo the crusader had seen Moslems who had taken an overdose of bhang or hashish, and they had looked like this.

“I will take,” he observed suddenly, “two thousand pieces of gold.”

“Two thousand! Thy palm would scarce be covered. Ask for more and it shall be thine! But not from the hand of Muhammad.”

“How then?”

“I can show thee the treasure of Khar.”

“Ha!”

Osman chuckled with secretive satisfaction.

“Aye, the throne of gold that an elephant scarce may bear on its back! Miskals of gold piled in caskets and the caskets as many as the stones of this garden. Jade scattered upon the floor, and an ivory table——”

“Nay, it is hidden.”

“Beneath a mosque. A hundred men might search every mosque in Bokhara for a twelvemonth and find naught. They could dig until they wearied their loins. Only one way leads to it.”

Osman's thin arms clutched his stomach in uncontrollable excitement.

“Ai-a, there are blue sapphires and chains of rose pearls! Diamonds that could put to shame the light of the sun lie there in darkness—for how long?”

“Have you seen it?”

Robert's lean face was attentive.

“May Allah grant me joy for the pain! Aye, I have seen each thing that was sent down, under the eyes of the priests. And Muhammad the Slave, fears to bring his riches to the light. Were I the Shah I would keep it within my hand.”

His thick lips drew back in a sneer. Taking Robert's silence for a reflection of his own greed, the wazir explained how tribute had been levied on the caliphs of Bagdad to get some of the finest of the jewels, and how Herat and Balkh had been searched to add to the treasure of Khar.

“And now you have a plan,” nodded Robert.

Remembering the heat of the day and the quivering nerves of the man beside him, he wondered how much the drug had affected Osman. Certainly the man was telling the truth.

Osman's plan was a bold one. The wazir dared not draw upon himself the rage of the Moslems by violating a mosque. He offered to tell Robert how to reach the entrance to the treasure vault. With some of the lawless Turkomans the crusader could beat off the priests and hold the mosque above the vault long enough to make away with the jewels and the bulk of the gold. Meanwhile Osman would assemble the Kankalis and would protect the Nazarene and his men from pursuit. Robert could take a part of the gold, leaving the rest with the wazir in his palace.

They would not make the attempt until the Mongols had been driven from the city. Robert could escape to the gates with has portion of the gold; his escort of hillmen would be sufficient to force a way through the pass. The Turkomans would like nothing better than such a venture; Khar was torn by strife, and Osman, with the treasure in hand and the city held by his men, would be able to raise his standard against Muhammad. The victory over the Mongols would heighten his influence——

“And if the Turkomans turn against me?”

“That is thy affair and risk. Thou art winning honor among them, O ameer, and they love a bold leader.”

Robert remembered that Osman had said nothing of the maid of Ibelin. Probably the wazir would prove treacherous. Yet—with some of the treasure in his grasp and a horse under him and the road from the city clear—with a few of the wild tribesmen to follow him!

“If thou canst win a victory over the foe, Muhammad will soon put thee in thy shroud,” whispered the Kharesmian. “That is ever his way.”

This was probable. Osman's plan offered a desperate chance, but it stirred Robert's pulse. Nothing could have been said more to his liking. To ride through paynimry into Palestine with an emperor's ransom—to hew out a way of escape at the sword's point for Master Will, and the priest and the maid Ellen!

He looked at Osman. The man was dreaming, his cheeks flushed, his eyes dull. Surely the wazir would lose nothing by making the attempt, and—by a stroke of fortune Robert might find himself at the head of an army, lord of Bokhara in truth. Weighed in the balance, Osman would be found wanting if the ownership of the treasure stirred up fighting.

“Seek me out when the Mongols have been scattered,” Osman whispered. “Our paths lie together—and the end of the road is in sight.”

Robert nodded and rose as a warrior entered the garden.

“Yah khawand,” the newcomer salaamed, “there is brawling between the men of Kutchluk Khan and the merchants of the suk. The Turkomans are riding down the stalls and snatching plunder.”

Osman rolled over on an elbow, secretly pleased at the trouble in store for the crusader, when he should attempt to interfere in the dispute.

“Are the riders clearing the market-place?” Robert asked the messenger.

“Allah—as kites clear bones.”

“Good!” Robert nodded to the surprized wazir. “Go you and adjust the troubles of the merchants. They are in your charge.”

Left alone, he stood by the fountain, his lips set in a harsh line. In his journey from Egypt to Bokhara he had met nothing but treachery and plotting. Even Abdullah had proved to be otherwise than he seemed—and Robert found that he missed Abdullah. Were there no men who kept faith? And why should a man keep faith?

CHAPTER XI

CONCERNING A MAID AND A SURCOAT

“NAY, Messire Long-Face, you may not shun our company this time as heretofore. For I have made ready a pudding of dates against your coming, and Master Will hath fetched some rare wine and, what is more, hath saved some of it.”

So saying, Ellen took Robert's sword-belt and shield and pushed a chair forward to the table where supper was spread.

“Aye,” growled the archer. “Wash, wipe, sit, eat, drink, wipe and depart. ——'s blood, tall brother, dost never loosen thy belt and stretch thy legs under table like a Christian?”

He noticed that the girl's fingers trembled when she placed food and wine before the knight and saw the ominous breaks made in the steel rings where arrows had struck his haburgeon. Ellen had sent away the slaves who had been placed in the house, for she wished none but herself to tend Father Evagrius. And the priest lay on a mattress in another room. The heat of the day had wearied him, and he had declined to join them.

Robert watched her trip back and forth to clear the table and minister to the priest, and the lines of weariness fell away from his eyes. In truth had he longed for this sight of the maid of Ibelin, and several times had turned aside from his riding in Bokhara to pass through the street and listen for sound of her voice lifted in song.

And now he racked his brain for words, wishful that he had been raised in the court where apt speeches were to be learned. He looked expectantly at Will Bunsley, but the glib tongue of the yeoman was still, for a marvel. Meanwhile Ellen settled down on a cushion under a great candle and began to embroider a pattern on a fair sheet of linen stretched upon a small frame.

Her dark head was bent over her task. In this way had she whiled away the long hours of loneliness. Not once did she raise her eyes to the knight.

“Damoiselle!”

Robert flushed and lowered his voice, for he had spoken as if addressing a squadron of men-at-arms.

“Prithee—my thanks for—the supper.”

The long locks hid Ellen's face as she made answer quickly.

“Messire, my thanks for—saving my life.”

“How? In sooth——”

“Indeed Master Will hath told me how you won us from the hands of the wazir.”

“Nay——”

“And Father Evagrius did relate how you took his part in the tower dungeon.”

“And sent the wizarder a-packing from the courtyard before vespers,” observed the archer with a nod.

“And so,” went on the girl, “my lord, you have repaid me in most courteous wise for—the despite I put upon you. Once, my lord, I struck you. They tell me you are ever minded to pay a debt and to hold good your word. So do we render you—thanks!”

Suddenly Robert smiled, and when he smiled the tight, downcurving lips grew merry.

“I cry quittance, damoiselle. 'Twas a fair good buffet you dealt me at our meeting, and a just one. Nay, child, hast forgotten our second meeting, beyond the Gates, by the desert sea? Your hand was gentle then—to a churl.”

Ellen bent over her embroidery, and her fingers tangled in the thread. For when Robert had lain ill with fever she had often taken his head upon her knee and stroked his forehead until he slept. She wondered how much he remembered, and, observing with a swift, sidelong glance that he still smiled, she waxed haughty.

“My lord, I am no child. Next Martinmas I will be seventeen.”

“My lady,” Robert laughed, “I am no lord. Nay, you have spoiled the pattern. What is it?”

She untangled the thread and went to work anew, and he saw that she was embroidering a crimson cross upon a white background.

“Father Evagrius did ask it of me.”

“A surcoat? Then the patriarch grows stronger?”

“He doth not mend.”

She glanced anxiously toward the door of the other room.

“It was his wish that I make it for you.”

Robert thought there was slight chance of his donning the garments of a knight again—or of leaving Bokhara alive. And what chance had the girl?

“See—'tis nearly finished.”

She tilted the frame and surveyed it critically.

“The one you wore was sadly stained.”

“'Tis a fair gift,” he said, surprized that the girl should remember details of this meeting six months ago.

And he listened while she talked lightly of the strange slaves of Bokhara, the pretty garden and the music that she heard upon the river near at hand. Will, she said, had seldom been absent from the house; servants of the priests had brought her all she could wish of fruits and sweetmeats.

“And Will must not leave this place to seek the wall again,” responded Robert gravely. “I give you in his charge.”

“Nay, tall brother,” put in the archer, “'twas she that sent me hence, saying—

“'Hie thee to my lord, and stand at his back; for he hath many foes, and if harm came to him——'”

“Why, our case would e'en be a hard one,” interrupted Ellen swiftly.

Will shook his head doggedly.

“By all the saints, thy words were otherwise. I mind——”

“Be still!”

The girl's eyes flashed, and the work on the embroidery ceased altogether.

“I sent you for tidings of the siege. Will the wall withstand assault, Sir Robert?”

“We will hold it. And the foe must withdraw in three days.”

Will Bunsley scratched his head.

“Now verily, and by thy leave, lord brother, thou didst hold forth contrariwise upon the rampart. Thou didst swear in good broad words that the Sooltan's men were overconfident, and the Mungals—or howsomever they be called—were brewing trickery for our quaffing——”

Robert reached out his foot under the table and, finding the yeoman's understanding too dense to heed a kick, frowned warningly.

“You have quaffed too many cups of Bokharian brewing to remember aught aright, Master Will.”

“Nay, by St. Dunstan——”

“Curb thy tongue, rogue, and cool thy head in the garden for a while.”

The archer went out, muttering under his breath, and Ellen laughed merrily.

“You would make light of our peril, Sir Robert. But you can not silence your eyes, and they were troubled.”

She looked at him frankly.

“Will hath described the barbarians, and it would seem they fight best upon their horses. If I were leader of the besiegers I would take your wall upon the flank. I have seen a point where horsemen could enter a score abreast without dismounting or unbarring a gate.”

Robert did not smile.

“If so—but where?”

“Where you and I entered Bokhara—” she paused to stitch the last thread in the cross—“the foe could swim their horses upon the river through the water gate.”

“A chain hath been stretched across and a barrier made against boats, yet the thought is a good one. How came you to hit upon it?”'

“When I was a child, messire, my father held command in the stronghold of Carcassonne for the queen, and I remember a siege and seeing the foemen swim their chargers across the moat.”

She glanced at his hand where the great sapphire of the Shah's ring gleamed.

“Is that the talisman bestowed by the paynim king?”

“Lightly given.”

Robert turned it on his finger, and lifted his head with sudden purpose.

“We have shared peril, you and I, and you have a heart for true words. Our chance of winning free from Bokhara with our lives is slight.”

The brown eyes searched his without a trace of fear.

“Ah, let the archer attend you, messire. If—if harm befall you he should seek me out, for I would then have need of one arrow from his bow.”

“You would have need of it.”

Robert forced himself to speak coldly. Beholding her pride and her trust in him, he clenched his hands and strode the length of the chamber, to pause beside her.

“Nay, I am a wildling and worthless—as the peers of Palestine did maintain,” he went on. “Hither came I to loot gold and gear and raise myself to a high place, and this day I plotted how to profit by the treachery of the wazir to his master. When I cast aside my spurs I put aside my vows and I have mocked the prayers of good Evagrius—thinking to drown memory of the past in a sea of blood. And this thing is true.”

She began to loosen the long surcoat from the embroidery frame so that he could not see her face, and she made answer softly.

“Among the peers of Palestine—aye and France—who hath done the deeds of the Longsword? Is life, forsooth, such a little thing that we must spend our years in kitchen and hall, making love to some and quarreling with others?”

Robert frowned down at her, wondering, for this was a maid of many surprizes.

“In my father's castle, messire, were many who painted their shields brightly and made a song of each slight dent won in the pleasant jousts. Faith, they tested their skill at romaunts and gestes in the banquet-hall, and they were bold in the hunt—and the war of words.”

She smiled wistfully.

“My father was otherwise, and many a time did he tell me of the brave days of Richard of England. When he died I took the cross, being heavy with grief, and now am I in a paynim hold, long leagues from Jerusalem.”

She stood up, tossing back her dark hair.

“I would not have it otherwise. For now, messire, perchance, I share the last hours of a brave knight and true.”

“O maid,” Robert replied gruffly, being stirred by her bold words, “this is no fit place for a child of d'Ibelin to end her days.”

“Then forsooth and verily,” she cried, her mood changing lightly, “let us adventure forth and win us honor. Nay, the troubadours shall yet make a tale of us, and we will yet see Jerusalem. Master Will hath planned a plan for me whereby I may go forth when the time comes. 'Tis but a makeshift of a plan, and yet——”

Ellen turned and disappeared into her sleeping-chamber and emerged with her arms full of garments.

“—and yet 'twill make a man of a maid.”

Her dark tresses were hidden by a light helmet of silvered steel, and a cotton drop that fell to her boyish shoulders.

“Well for me,” she said gravely, “the Moslems of this quarter are slender men, for Will hath looted shamefully.”

She held out a finely wrought haburgeon of delicate chain mail with a silk girdle, and wide damask pantaloons with embroidered slippers, and—smiling merrily—a long khalat of the richest purple.

“Ha, Master Robert,” quoth the bowman, who had come in when he heard his name called, “she hath the bearing of a likely esquire-at-arms and a temper to boot. I have found for her a small shield and a bow suitable for her hand——”

“Yah khawand,” interrupted Ellen blithely, “wilt take me for a companion upon your road—your road of peril?”

“Aye, verily,” smiled the knight. “Yet no khawand am I, for that is 'lord and master.'”

“Lord and master,” she whispered; and there was no mockery in her eager eyes.

“Harken,” said Robert suddenly.

A sound as of a multitude of bees came through the open embrasures. The two men glanced at each other. To their trained ears the distant hum resolved itself into the mutter of kettle-drums and the clashing of cymbals mingled with the uproar of human voices. Robert picked up his sword-belt and helm.

“That would be a bruit upon the wall.”

Swiftly he girdled on the long simitar he had chosen for lack of a better weapon of the size and weight to which he was accustomed. Ellen dropped her belongings and caught up the white surcoat.

“Wear this, my lord, for the sake of—of Evagrius, who hath blessed it.”

Skilfully she slipped off the khalat that covered his mail and thrust the mantle over his shoulders, fastening his belt upon the outside. As he strode toward the garden he gripped her hand, and she skipped beside him to the outer gate.

“Fare you well—the good angels fight at your side!”

“Brave heart!” cried the knight. “Keep hidden until I return.”

The alley door flew open, and a bearded Kankali peered within and saluted Robert as Will ran up with the saddled charger.

“Will the lord grant his servant permission——”

“Speak!”

“The barbarians have bridged the gap between the wall and the causeway. Aye, they have launched a storm, and Allah hath caused a battle to be.”

Heedless of Robert's last advice, Ellen watched him ride away from the gate and waved farewell as he reached the turn in the alley.

“A fine mark hath thy mantle made of him,” grumbled the archer, who was disappointed at being left behind. “Ah, for the shafts of the foe— Why, lass—why, as St. Dunstan hears me, thou art weeping!”

CHAPTER XIII

THE STORM

AS THEY trotted out of the alley Robert signed to the messenger to come up with him, and sent the man to command Kutchluk Khan to saddle his ponies and hold his men ready to ride. He pressed forward alone, seeking the shortest way to the wall. Here the alleys, odorous with fish and wool and stagnant water, twisted and turned, and his horse was forced to pick a way among heaps of refuse. White walls loomed out of the darkness and voices flung hearty curses after him in many languages.

He turned aside into a quarter where the wooden barrier was let down, and lights gleamed from lattices and the scent of incense and aloes was in the air. In gateways under great lanterns the tinted faces of women peered at him, and from a roof nearly over his head came the high-pitched song of a Circassian girl with the monotonous accompaniment of a lute. In the labyrinth of the alleys the dwellers of Bokhara had come forth after the heat of the day, and Robert wondered whether in truth there could be fighting on the wall——

A woman's form, veiled and sinuous, moved toward him in the swaying walk of the Bokharian slave. Her henna-tinted hands drew back the veil, and he looked down into a face thin yet beautiful, and saw in the half-light of the stars eyes, darkened with kohl, wise with the unhallowed wisdom of Egypt.

Anklets tinkled as other girls fled with ripples of laughter from his horse. In his path a handsome boy caressed a lute, singing with a full throat, his head thrown back to the stars.

“Time passes and no man may stay it. This hour alone is thine. Turn not from the rose and its fairness, for thorns lie thick on the pathway!”

Robert reined in his horse and gripped the singer's shoulder.

“Where lies the wall?”

“I am Hassan,” the boy responded with the gravity of the intoxicated. “Lo, the wall is not here, for this is the street of delightful hours.”

He laughed at the set face of the crusader, and Robert loosed him, setting spurs to the charger. The spring of the horse sent the boy rolling in the dust that eddied up from the plunging hoofs.

Hassan sat up, muttering, and a veiled woman ran to his side from the deep shadow of a wall.

“The moon hath come down from the sky,” cried the boy. “Ah——”

A thin length of steel darted into his side and was withdrawn. The woman's hand felt for his purse, which had jingled when he fell, and slipped it from his girdle. Then she merged again into the shadow.

Rising to his knees, Hassan felt about in the dust as if for something he had lost. Suddenly he screamed, and the song of the Circassian on the roof above ceased for a moment.

ROBERT rode over the bridge that spanned the river, and glanced to either side. Although the tumult on the wall was nearer, pleasure barges drifted along the banks, and Bokharian nobles made wagers as to the length of the fighting. Passing through the gardens at a gallop, he began to hear the ululation of the Kankalis and the clashing of weapons. Dismounting among the tents behind the wall, he climbed a stairway to a tower and found the beg he had left in charge.

“Yah khawand,” the man greeted him, “you are in good time. Watch.”

The causeway was crowded with packed masses of Mongols, and more were moving up on foot from the lines of the camp where the drums and nakars kept up their clamor. At the head of the earth-mound beams had been thrust across the gap by the besiegers and hastily covered with spears, planks and hides. Over this bridge warriors were rushing the rampart, climbing upon the bodies of the slain.

They were half-naked, and those who had shields hurled them at the Moslems. Then they ran forward, stooping and smiting with axes and heavy, curved swords. Most of them fell under the arrows of the Kankalis, who shot from the wall and the nearest towers. The survivors were hurled back by spears and maces in the hands of the mailed defenders.

“Twice have we hewn down their bridge!” exclaimed the captain. “See where our stone-casters thin the numbers in the rear! Allah send victory!'

“But do you send for reenforcements from the palace,” retorted Robert, watching two human tides beat against each other and a sprinkling of dark bodies, outflung from the press, drop into the beds of jasmine and roses underneath.

After a while he picked up his shield and ran down the stairs toward the wall. Greater weight of metal and steadiness of foot was needed here.

Thrusting through the struggling Moslems, he whipped out his sword, hewing his way well in among the Mongols without waiting to see if any of his own men followed. A mace crashed against his helmet, blurring his sight; a spear clanged on his shield. All around him there was a tearing, sobbing sound of tired men striving to rend each other, a snapping of wood and the moaning of the wounded underfoot, Moslems for the most part. The short, grim men who surged at him fought in silence.

Robert thrust the hilt of his sword into a snarling face, swept clear the space before him with his blade and felt himself caught about the legs. Stumbling, he dropped his sword, and his mailed mitten grasped a short battle-ax on the stone surface of the wall. With this he smashed free of those who grappled him and gained his feet—a thing that few did who went down.

Now as he stood his ground he felt that shafts flew past him. A giant who rushed at him with open hands was transfixed by a long arrow and fell upon his feet. Another was pierced through the throat, so that the blow he aimed at Robert fell feebly against the steel casque. He could see, through the eyeslits of his visor, the black mantles of the Kankalis on either hand, and the flash of their simitars. So in time he rested against the broken rampart and the bodies that lay upon it, panting, while the Mongol tide receded down the mole.

Still, however, was heard the summons of the drum and cymbal from the Mongol camp.

“Yah kkawand!” the voice of the beg spoke at his side. “Evil tidings have come. The Mongols have struck in another place along the river. They stole up and smashed the chain with sledges and swam their horses between the towers of the river gate. They are slaying the men in the barges——”

“Send to Kutchluk Khan. Bid him ride with all his men to the river. Half his division should cross the bridge to this side. Then order five thousand Persian archers to the house-tops along the river to support the Turkomans! Haste!”

While he waited anxiously for news of the fight at the river he saw torches assembling in the Mongol camp. Fresh warriors walked to the lower end of the causeway and began to mount silently.

Under the flaming cressets of the wall he could make out that these were powerful men with the horns of beasts upon their fur caps. Those in front carried beams; behind these came ranks of swordsmen in rude iron armor, followed by masses of archers.

Robert realized that the Mongols had launched their main attack at the river under cover of the assault on the causeway. The fresh effort might mean that they had been checked by Kutchluk, or that they had Keen victorious behind him and meant to press home the attack. As yet he heard no fighting on the river near by, and he breathed a prayer that the one-eyed Turkoman had driven home his charge.

Again the Mongols thrust forward their beams and swarmed to the assault. An arrow struck the Kankali beg in the throat, and his body fell under the feet of his men.

“Are ye dogs?” Robert cried at the Moslems. “Come with me!”

He climbed the rampart, followed by all on the wall. The Mongols stood their ground, shouting and working havoc with their heavy weapons. With his long ax Robert cleared a space around him and planted his feet, dizzy with the blows that smashed in the steel of his helmet. Warm blood trickled down his ribs, and hot air seared his lungs.

Until his arms were wearied he stood his ground until the ax broke in his hands, when he fell to rallying the Moslems, who gave back on either side. The weariness crept into his brain, and he fancied he was standing at the head of a great stair up which writhed grimacing dwarfs with hands outstretched to drag him down into darkness.

A moment's pause enabled him to wipe the sweat from his eyes, and he saw Chepe Noyon clearly. The Mongol chief was halfway down the causeway beside a thick-set warrior. This man leaned on a spear, staring up at the fight without expression. His massive arms were bound at the biceps with gold rings, and he wore the long horns of a buffalo on his helmet.

When his glance fell on the knight the powerful Mongol tossed down his spear and strode up the causeway, thrusting friends and foes from his path as a man might push aside corn-stalks.

“Subotai—Subotai!” the nearest Mongols howled exultantly.

Robert fought for breath and looked about vainly for a weapon suited to his strength. Measuring the man with the buffalo horns and his own weariness, he felt that he would not be upon his feet for long.

“Yield thyself,” Chepe Noyon's voice reached him through the uproar, “to the palladin, Subotai, and no shame is thine!”

“I yield to no man!” Robert cried and stepped forward.

A fresh onrush of Moslems from the wall swept between them as reenforcements came up at last from the Perisan camp at the palace. Subotai crushed in the head of a warrior with his sword and leaped to one side, knocking two others from their feet. Then other Mongols sprang to the aid of their leader, who was drawn back, snarling angrily, as the besiegers were thrust back by weight of numbers, and the incline cleared.

Robert watched until the fight on the causeway was over. For the first time he noticed that a broad streak of light ran along the horizon. The struggle had lasted through the night.

“O captain of thousands and companion of heroes,” a glittering Persian addressed him respectfully, “the barbarians have been scattered at the river gate. They have left the waters thick with their dead, and Kutchluk Khan hath passed to the mercy of God with more than the half of his men.”

WHEN the sun rose the sound of the drums ceased. The crusader sought his horse and climbed stiffly into the saddle, while throngs of Bokharians clustered about him and cried praises on the infidel ameer. Men fought for the privilege of taking the reins of his horse and leading him into the thick of the shouting mob, while women tossed roses from the house tops.

“The barbarians are withdrawing their tents from the river!” A warrior stood up in his stirrups to call out. “Hai—they are scattered! The favor of Allah is with the faithful! The triumph is with Bokhara!”

Robert was aware that this rejoicing was ill-timed. Yet was he too weary with his hurts to think of the future. He had held the wall and had made good his word to Muhammad. So might Alexander in other days have ridden through the streets of the ancient city and received the salutes of his warriors.

The tumult died down when he reached the square where some Persian mounted archers were drawn up by the mosque. At their head was Jahan Khan, relieved of his chains, sitting his horse beside the litter of Osman. On the steps of the mosque stood the mullah, Nur-Anim, with a paper in his hand and an array of priests behind him. The Moslem who had been leading his horse withdrew, and the crusader halted before the steps of the Jumma.

“Greeting, O prince of warriors and paladin of swordsmen,” Nur Anim said in his high voice. “Upon thee—the Salute! And now hear the word of Muhammad, Shah of shahs. This firman, this decree, he left with me to be read when victory had fallen to our arms.”

Robert glanced at Jahan Khan, who had been released without his order, and saw that the Kankali was staring at him curiously. A thousand eyes were on him as he sat his charger without helm or sword, with armor and surcoat hacked and stained.

“It is the will of Muhammad Shah that Osman the wazir shall watch closely the deeds of the infidel leader of the garrison. If the Frank presumes to set foot in a mosque or to contrive aught against the treasure of Khar or raise his hand against a true believer he is to be put in chains and held captive until my return. If he resists this command he must be slain with a sword. The Peace upon my servants.”

Robert's lips drew into a hard line, and he lifted his head angrily. Yet, thinking of the three who looked for his coming in the house of the fountain, he waited until he could speak calmly.

“Have I kept my word to Muhammad?”

“Aye,” assented Nur-Anim, rolling up the decree. “It was written that victory should be, and you have served fate.”

“Then will the Shah make good his word to me?”

The mullah glanced at Osman, who raised himself on his elbow to speak; but the knight was before him.

“O Moslems, it is also written that he who breaks an oath is without honor. I have been guilty of none of these things. Who is to be my judge?”

“The wazir and I.”

Robert rallied his wits and tried to shake off his weariness. His head pained him, and loss of blood made it hard to sit erect in the saddle. His eyes went from one face to an other and read in them only exultant mockery—save for two or three of the officers who had served him on the wall.

“And who speaks against me?”

“I!” cried Osman loudly. “Give heed, O Moslems, to the ill deeds of this Frank. He schemed in his garden to steal the treasure of Khar from the mosque. I made a test of him, and witnesses without the wall heard.”

A murmur of astonishment and anger came from the lips of those who listened.

“He cast dirt upon the beard of Jahan Khan,” went on the wazir. “And the boy Hassan he slew in the night for no cause. Women saw it done and will testify.”

Seeing clearly that Osman had determined to get rid of him, Robert held up his hand silently, and after a while—such was the prestige of the man who had defended the city against the Mongols—the murmurs quieted down.

"These be words, and lying words!” he cried. “Do ye believe, ye who have beheld my deeds?”

Some of the warriors looked about restlessly, and all eyes sought Nur-Anim. The mullah could have cast his influence for either man, and he chose to favor the wazir.

“Ye have heard the word of the Shah!”

He lifted the rolled parchment.

“I obey the word.”

Robert tightened his rein and urged his horse slowly along the line of the Bokharians, glancing into each face. And now he beheld only sullen fanaticism and hatred. He had been tricked and cast aside when they believed his work was done. The anger that he held in check swept over him.

“O fools! I could have let the Mongols into the city. Who will lead you when I am gone?”

He ripped the signet ring from his finger and hurled it at Nur-Anim.

“Greet Muhammed with this, and do you find honor in it if you can.”

“Take the dog of a Nazarene!”

Robert wheeled his horse and headed for the Persians who closed in on him. One man he threw from the saddle, and his charger shouldered another out of the way. Vainly he sought to win through the press to reach the three who awaited him in the house of the fountain. A warrior struck him on the head with a mace, and he fell under his rearing horse. A red mist gathered before his eyes, and powerful hands forced him to his feet. His wrists were bound behind him, and a cord was slipped over his head. The cord tightened, and he stumbled forward.

When his sight cleared he saw that he was being led out of the righistan beside Osman's litter, and the wazir was leaning on his elbow the better to feast his eyes on his prisoner.

“Is thy memory so short, O Nazarene? Not three days ago you put yourself before me. You took from me the treasure, the diamond sheen, the houri out of paradise. Didst thou believe I had forgotten? Nay, I will take again the treasure that is more than gold—my eyes will take delight in the face that is fairer than diamonds. Ha, you will live to see that—dog of an unbeliever.”

At the gate of his palace he paused to stare a moment longer at his captive.

“Put upon him the chain that may not be loosened and the weight that may not be set down.”

In the courtyard Robert was seized by slaves who riveted upon his wrists fetters to which chains where attached. These chains in turn supported a round ball of iron half as heavy as a man—a spiked ball, stained with dried blood.

“This is the morning star, Nazarene,” Osman smiled, “for when you awake from sleep it lies near you, and when you would go forth it stirs not. Many who have looked upon it long have cursed the sun and prayed for death.”

The slaves urged him toward a postern door of the tower. To obey, he was forced to pick up the weight and carry it, for the chains were too short to allow him to stand upright. He went forward, and the door closed on him, leaving him in darkness. But for a moment before the door was shut he heard the distant mutter of great drums and the clash of the Mongol cymbals.

CHAPTER XIV

For those who watch the highway and for those who sit by the carpet of sickness, the sands run slowly from the hour-glass, and the water lingers in the wheel of the water clock.

THAT day the muezzin did not call from the minarets at the noon hour. Will Bunsley and Ellen had grown accustomed to hearing the cry to prayer when the sun was at its highest point, and they looked up at the white spires without seeing turbaned figures in the tiny platforms that stood against the blue of the sky.

It was a cloudless day, and no wind stirred the spray of the fountain in the garden. Ellen hung about the path, making pretense of gathering flowers, but really listening with all her ears to the sounds in the street beyond the wall, to be ready to unbar the door the moment she heard Robert's ringing—

“Gate ho!”

She noticed that the noises of the street had changed. There was a steady mutter of voices and a shuffling of feet. The cries of children and the quarreling of loiterers were lacking. And no word came of Robert.

“Lady,” quoth Will Bunsley, arranging his collection of arrows in sundry quivers, “the foe doth make a bruit with drum and horn, so methinks Sir Robert is yet upon the wall.”

“But there is no fighting now.”

Will scratched his head and looked up at the sky dubiously.

“Fighting? Nay, I think so. Armed bands do pass anigh us; so perchance Sir Robert hath driven the foe out upon the plain.”

“Master Will! You know as well as that my lord would permit of no sally!”

Squinting down an arrow, the archer paused to cut back the feathering a trifle. Every day of their stay in the garden he had come in with news of Robert's deeds and his health, and he was well aware that the maid loved the knight with an enduring love.

“Hum. Why then, being weary, my lord doth sleep. For, look ye, a night of sword-strokes doth weary a wight somewhat. Even I——”

Ellen smiled at him.

“You are a brave liar and a hardy rogue, Will Bunsley. Think you Sir Robert would sleep when the clarions were sounding? Oh, for one word——”

She broke off to listen to the murmur outside the gate, her brown eyes dark with anxiety, for Ellen herself had not slept while the clarions were heard upon the wall.

“Why, lass, he will be here anon,” nodded the archer confidently. “Aye, he sought you out i' the mountain pass and in the wizarder's palace. So go thou within and change to thy warrior dress to greet him.”

The girl knew that Will was hiding his misgivings and wished her to be clad as a man because he thought danger was at hand. So she went to her chamber and donned the light mail and steel cap, thrusting her hair beneath the cotton drop. Casting the silk khalat over her shoulders, she hurried forth to the garden. For a moment her glance quested in search of Will, who had disappeared. Then she heard his voice, loud with amazement.

“Lass—lass! The good father sees—he sees! A miracle hath come to pass!”

Ellen caught her breath, and, realizing better than the yeoman what his words portended, ran swiftly to the room of Father Evagrius. The patriarch was sitting up, one hand clasping his thin chest, the other outstretched in the air; his emaciated face was flushed, and his lips quivered. Will Bunsley stood agape in a far corner.

“Monseigneur!” cried the girl.

The eyes of the priest held a new light; no longer did they wander or lift viewlessly to the sky. They were fixed on the white wall, where the sunlight struck through a latticed embrasure.

“The mercy of God!”

Evagrius framed the words with difficulty, and then his voice grew clearer.

“I see the light of the sun! O blessed and fortunate! Nay, this is no abode of payrams!”

He glanced into the shadows, and Ellen sank on her knees beside him, supporting his shoulders with her arm. The hand of the patriarch felt her mailed throat and the steel head-piece.

“Who attends me? I can not see you, but surely you must be one of the warriors of the Sepulcher. Behold—” his finger darted at the wall—“the tomb! Aye, the sun is bright on the Via Dolorosa and the walls of the blessed city. I can see the ensign of the cross—there.”

His eyes closed, and Ellen felt under her hand the heat of the fever that had made him delirious. Yet his lips twitched in a ceaseless smile.

“Happy are those who have taken up the cross!” he cried again, stretching out his thin arms. “They are at home in Jerusalem, and the weary lie here at rest. O warrior, will you come with me to the tomb—yonder, a little way?”

“Aye, father,” said Ellen, bowing her head.

“And bring the good knight Robert. For the Lord hath called to him the mighty men, and they come from the far places.”

“Aye, father.”

She eased the patriarch back to his couch and looked steadily into his face. After a moment she bent forward to close the blind man's eyes and to cross his hands on his breast.

“Evagrius hath died,” she said to the archer, who had drawn nearer uncertainly.

“Nay,” objected Will. “A moment agone he could see. 'Here is a miracle,' said I, and a miracle it was.”

“Perchance it was, Master Will,” assented the girl. “Now do you leave me, for a prayer must be said and candles placed fittingly. And then—what can we do?”

Will sought the garden and halted in his tracks. A dull crashing resounded from the alley, and the outer door quivered back against its bars. The wood splintered, and the head of an ax showed through. Catching up his bow, the archer strung it swiftly. Kneeling in the threshold of the house, he emptied a quiver at his foot and stuck the heads of a score of arrows in the earth in front of him.

“So-ho!” he muttered. “No friend knocks in that fashion.”

The door fell into fragments, and the bars were cast aside by a tall Kankali who strode into the garden with drawn simitar. The light of the afternoon sun was full in the man's eyes, and he saw nothing of the archer until Will's bow snapped and a shaft struck the warrior's throat, knocking him down.

Two others leaped over the dying man and started across the garden. Will sent a shaft fairly between the eyes of the first. The other reached the fountain, where an arrow clanged into the mail above his girdle, and he plunged into the water. An angry shout from the alley showed that the fall of the three had been observed, and the door remained vacant for a moment. Will heard Ellen's step behind him and called over his shoulder.

“We are beset by the paynims. Go thou to the roof with thy bow, but keep below the parapet. Watch lest they climb the wall in the rear.”

“Who are they?”

“What matter—ha!”

The yeoman drew a shaft to his ear and paused alertly. Two shields had been thrust across the opening on the alley side, and behind this protection two warriors knelt hastily, bow in hand. They could not see Will, and he waited until they had sped their shafts hurriedly and without harm to him.

The attempt was repeated, more boldly this time, and an arrow thudded into the empty quiver at his foot. Evidently the assailants hoped that they had wounded the archer, because a Kankali ran into the garden, keeping his head down prudently so that the steel helmet protected his face. His round shield he held in front of his body.

Will rose to his feet and loosed an arrow that ripped through the tough hide target and pierced deep into the warrior's chest. The man stumbled and lay where he fell.

“They will eke be wiser now,” he muttered, fearful that the Moslems would scatter around the wall and climb it out of his range of vision. “What tidings, my lady?” he called cheerily.

“I can see naught beyond the wall. What happened in the garden?”

“A fat man hath gone to pare the ——'s hoofs! His comrades hang back. Nay, I think they are brewing mischief.”

He heard feet running in the alley, and a loud outcry. Then a couple of Kankalis swept past as if the fiend Will had invoked were after them. Ellen appeared at his side, fearful that he had been hurt, and they ventured a few steps into the garden.

Horses trotted up from somewhere and halted outside the wall. Through the door stepped a man who was not a Kankali—a warrior whose long beard swept his bare chest, whose iron helm bore the upper portion of a tiger's head by way of a crest and whose wide shoulders were wrapped in the tigerskin. Will fingered his bow, planting himself before the girl. But Ellen caught his arm with a cry of amazement.

“'Tis Abdullah, the minstrel!”

Abdullah, or Chepe Noyon, the Tiger Lord, glanced at them and laughed. Then, while a dozen squat Mongols crowded after him, he began to turn over the bodies in the garden to look into the faces, evidently seeking to identify one of them.

When he reached the last of the Kankalis, who had been smitten through the shield, he bent over and uttered an exclamation of satisfaction. The dead man was Osman, the wazir.

Chepe Noyon signed to one of his followers, who promptly struck off the head of the Moslem minister. Then the Mongols crowded around the two Christians to stare and finger Will's tattered garments. The archer faced them defiantly, while Chepe Noyon studied Ellen curiously. Resistance was useless, and the girl was the first to throw down her weapons.

CHAPTER XV

THE THRONE OF GOLD

ROBERT had been without sleep for a day and a night and the part of another day, so he had not been an hour in his dungeon before his head sank to the rushes and he fell into a dreamless stupor.

The opening of the door brought him back to consciousness, but his wounds ached and his limbs were stiff. He heard guttural voices that dwindled and left him to sit up and to wonder first why he was in the dungeon and then—as the events of the last morning flashed back into his mind—why the door had been opened. The men who had come to his cell had merely glanced in and passed on.

He tried to get up and cursed the massive weight that cramped his arms. Picking up the spiked ball with an effort, he went to the door and thrust it wide.

The sun was setting, and the minarets of Bokhara were touched with the last crimson of the western sky. For a while he gazed at the courtyard and listened, suspecting some new trick of the wazir's making. Every detail of the place was familiar to him, and yet everything was different. It was the hour of evening prayer, but no call of the muezzin was to be heard; no lights hung in the palace gardens, and no men moved about the courtyard. The gate stood open.

Robert picked up the morning star and walked out into the street, and his eyes puckered thoughtfully. The street was deserted. Opposite him was a potter's bench with a half-formed jar on the stone wheel and water in the bowl beside it. A dog trotted across the alley and entered the door of a shop. Bokhara was wrapped in silence. Although he listened Robert could not hear even the whine of a beggar or the grunting of a camel. He surveyed the alley reflectively, wondering if his senses had not failed him. Then he set out to walk painfully toward the house where he had left Ellen and Will.

At the first crossing, near the righistan, he heard horses approach, and blinked at the glare of torches. Three riders came up and reined in when they saw him—slant-eyed, squat warriors with spears slung at their backs. They wore wolfskin cloaks and rode small, long-haired ponies, and Robert saw that they were Mongols. They exchanged a few words, and one started to draw his sword, when another uttered an exclamation and pointed to the knight's surcoat on which the red cross was still to be made out. Robert caught the word “noyon”—chief—and guessed that the warrior had recognized him as the leader of the garrison.

They stared indifferently at his chains and the iron ball, and motioned him to accompany them, slowing their ponies to a walk to keep about him.

Entering the righistan, they joined other mounted patrols and headed for the Jumma mosque. At the steps two of the warriors took Robert by the arms and rode their ponies up the stair into the pillared transept. Here they dismounted and led him within the mosque itself, where torches glittered on white marble and gold and the great tiles of the flooring. Gathered near the entrance he found groups of the chief imams and khadis. They were holding the bridles of several Mongol ponies. Beside the noblemen were ranged scores of the Shah's singing-girls, guarded by armed Mongols. Robert asked the nearest Moslem what had taken place in the city. The man only seized his beard in both hands and bowed his head.

“Hush!” whispered another. “The wrath of God stands near us.”

“Where are the people of Bokhara?”

“Where is the snow of last year? Wo! Wo! All were ordered out on the plain save the grandees, and we—we must tend the conqueror's horses, aye, feed them with hay from the Koran boxes. Ai-a—a-i-a!”

“How did the Mongols enter the city?”

The khadi glanced fearfully toward the rear of the mosque and tore at his beard. His plump cheeks glistened with sweat.

“How? Allah be compassionate to his servants! They rode in through the gates before sunset, for the keys of Bokhara were rendered up to them.”

“Why?”

Now the man looked at Robert and knew him.

“It happened thus, O captain of many. Osman and Jahan Khan decided on a sortie of the garrison, for the Mongols seemed to be withdrawing in confusion. Nay, it was a trick. When the warriors of Islam rode forth they were cut to pieces as a hare is torn by dogs. The plain is covered with the bodies of the Kankalis and Persians, and Jahan Khan fled toward Herat like a leaf before the wind. Then we within the city gave up the keys on promise of our lives.”

Robert started and gripped the man's shoulder.

“What of the other Franks?”

The khadi moaned.

“What of one bird in a storm? Ask of him if you dare!”

A solitary rider sat in the saddle of a white horse under the colored dome of the mosque, apart from the captives. He wore no armor or insignia of rank. In the shadows at the rear of the edifice he might have been a statue cast out of iron. Even the white horse was motionless on the black marble flooring.

“Who is he?” Robert asked.

“He is the scourge that has come out of the desert. Aye, the Great Khan, Genghis Khan.”

The crusader glanced with quick interest at the conqueror, measuring the spread of the high shoulders and the sinews of wrist and forearm. Only the keen black eyes of the Mongol moved, and Robert fancied they glinted with amusement when they lingered on the grandees holding the horses.

A touch of his arm made him turn, and he saw Chepe Noyon standing beside him; but a Chepe Noyon that no longer resembled Abdullah, the teller of tales. The chieftain had cast back upon his shoulders the tiger muzzle, and Robert noticed that the hair on his head had been shaved except for a long scalp-lock that fell from his skull to the tigerskin.

“Where are the Nazarene maid and the archer?” Robert asked him.

Chepe Noyon chewed his lip reflectively, glancing from Genghis Khan to the imams who were tending the ponies. Throughout the mosque there was only to be heard the snapping of the torches and the munching of the horses that were feeding from the Koran boxes.

“From that high place Nur-Anim was accustomed to read the book of the Moslems.”

Chepe Noyon nodded at a miniature tower, some dozen feet in height, that rose behind Genghis Khan. It was shaped like a minaret with a platform and cupola in which rested on a sandalwood stand a massive Koran.

“There is the book that no one but Nur-Anim might touch.”

He looked at Robert reflectively.

“Your archer slew Osman, which was a good deed. I have him and the maid in man's attire, in my tent. I came upon them when I followed the wazir. But Nur-Anim I have not yet unearthed. In all Bokhara there is no trace of his passing, yet he must have fled from the city.”

He snarled in sudden anger.

“What avails the capture of the city without Nur-Anim?”

“The mullah? Nay, he is harmless——”

“As the fangs of an adder! You were slow to see the evil in these servants of the Shah. Osman was no more than a cup-shot fool, and he died like one, striving to put his hand on a woman. Nur-Anim used him for a moment, no more. The mullah was the true master of Bokhara, for he had the treasure in his hands.”

Chepe Noyon laughed grimly.

“The mullah persuaded the Shah to leave the treasure in the hands of their god, Allah. I have spoken with one or two of his priests with a dagger in my hand, and I know that Nur-Anim wanted you to be ameer because he feared Kutchluk Khan, who was a wolf. Then he overthrew you and whispered to Osman and Jahan Khan to lead forth the army, and they knew no better.”

He made a gesture as of gathering up sand in his fist and casting it into the air.

“A little trick served to break their formation, and then the Horde rode them down.”

“But why did Nur-Anim——”

“O little son, you held the wall like a man and a noyon. But you know not the ways of snakes. Muhammad is already shaken, and his power grows less; Bokhara will be razed to the plain, yet the treasure is hidden beneath it, and Nur-Anim knows the hiding-place. When we have passed on he will come out and dig it up again. A hundred thousand have died that he might do this thing.”

A warrior spoke to the chief, who took Robert's arm.

“Genghis Khan summons you.”

Robert took up his shackles and stepped forward at once, Chepe Noyon walking at his side.

“I can not aid you now. Speak boldly!”

A sigh of relief went up from the Moslems as Robert was singled out to face the man on the white horse, but he himself was too weary to feel either excitement or fear. For several moments he waited by the muzzle of the Khan's pony, while the eyes of Genghis rested on him. Chepe Noyon, after making his salutation, stood to one side to act as interpreter.

“The Khan asks,” he said briefly, “if you are one of the heroes of the Franks who came over the sea?”

“I am a Frank.”

“Are you he who held the wall against our assault?”

“Aye.”

The gray eyes of the knight sought the broad, lined face that looked down at him, utterly without expression.

“And if treachery had not put these chains upon me I would have kept the wall.”

Chepe Noyon interpreted, and the old conqueror glanced at the iron weight that hung from Robert's wrists. He spoke slowly in his deep gutturals and raised his hand.

“He says—” the Tiger Lord drew Robert aside—“that no man has stood so long before the rush of the Horde. The chains are to be taken off, and you are to eat and sleep. On the morrow you will be matched against a man as great in strength as you. The Khan will watch. If you slay the other, you are free to go where you will.”

AS ROBERT turned to go back to his guards Chepe Noyon signed for him to remain. The white horse of Genghis Khan had grown restive and was pawing the marble flooring. As if the mood of the horse had aroused the chieftain, Genghis turned in the saddle and pointed at the Moslem grandees, his dark eyes snap ping with anger.

“O ye imams and khadis,” cried Chepe Noyon, translating the words, “the Khan bids you to reveal the riches that are hidden in the ground. What is above-ground his men will care for. Who among you knows the hiding-place of the treasure of Khar?”

The nobles answered with many voices that they knew nothing of the hiding-place. Some cast themselves on their knees, and the echoes of their cries were flung back by the dome in the roof.

“We have fire and steel that will wring the truth from you,” pointed out Chepe Noyon dispassionately.

Several began to relate how their personal hoards might be discovered, but all insisted that Nur-Anim alone could lead the Mongols to the treasure of Muhammad. Chepe Noyon turned to Robert.

“The throne of gold and the jewels must be near to a mosque,” he observed. “Have you come upon the way to Nur-Anim's secret?”

“I think it lies beneath the grounds of this mosque. Osman disclosed as much.”

Robert, in fact, cared little what became of the hoard. It had passed out of his reach, and his only wish was that Muhammad and the Moslems would not regain it, possibly to use it against the crusaders in later years.

Chepe Noyon spoke briefly with Genghis Khan.

“The floor at this place rings strangely when the horse stamps. Is there a space beneath?”

Echoes sprang to life as some of the priests of the mosque made answer that there was no chamber beneath.

“I would believe them more readily if some had said they did not know,” muttered the Tiger Lord, frowning. “Why do you think it is near to us, O little son?”

“Because Nur-Anim must have kept it where he could watch, and his own dwelling is small and scanty. The garden of the mosque would not be safe. Besides, Muhammad came hither when he entered Bokhara.”

He paused to watch Genghis Khan who, without touching the reins, was kneeing his pony back and forth over the square of black marble. And it did seem to Robert that the tread of the horse echoed differently when it passed under the reader's stand. Genghis Khan dismounted and moved to the tower, as clumsy on foot as he was graceful in the saddle.

He climbed the tiled steps to the cupola, while Chepe Noyon issued a command to the Mongol warriors about the door. A score of them went out, to return quickly with heavy blacksmith sledges.

Meanwhile Genghis Khan had caught up the great Koran, which must have weighed as much as Robert's shackles and ball, and poised it over his head. Then he flung it out, over the edge of the stand, and it crashed down on the marble beneath.

“He said,” muttered Chepe Noyon to the knight, “that if the Kharesmians had spent their gold for walls along the river and if they had fed the army of the beggars and the sick in the city they would not be captives now.”

Once more the echoes of the vast interior started up as the Mongols began to smash at the marble—some kneeling upon the flooring, from which the white horse drew back at once, others standing about the walls, pounding down the gold plaques with the Arabic inscriptions.

The Moslems, who had quivered and crouched as the great Koran was flung down, fell on their faces beating with their fists against the tiles. The women huddled together in a corner, and the night wind whisking in through the wide-flung portals moaned an under-note to the hideous clamor of the echoes; but no thunderbolt came down from the sky to crush the man who had thrown under the legs of his horse the sacred Koran of the Jumma.

Robert thought of the Gates in the Mountains, that had barred the way to Khar for a thousand years. Now the bars were falling. Whole segments of mosaic crumpled up and rained down from the walls, and the gold plates toppled out and down.

In spite of his weariness and his hunger Robert drew closer to the men with the hammers. He was seeing the empire of Islam cracked asunder—something that the crusaders had striven in vain to bring to pass for a hundred years; and his pulse leaped. The thin marble blocks were split into fragments on the floor and tossed aside, revealing an under surface of brick. Once more the hammers went to work, and more torches were brought.

Two of the sledges smashed through the brick at the same time, and the Mongols leaped back. The square that they had uncovered sagged and disappeared in a cloud of dust, leaving a hole wider than a man could leap.

Chepe Noyon flung back his head and roared with laughter. Robert peered down, dazzled by the reflection of the torches on a hundred glittering surfaces. As the dust eddied and settled, he beheld a chamber of considerable size below the floor of the mosque. Near the opening stood a long ivory table, covered with silver, bronze and jade caskets.

He was looking at the riches of Islam, the spoil of Bagdad and Nineveh—the plunder of Balkh and India. It shone from the hilts of weapons hung upon the walls of the vault—it sparkled from the piles of jars and incense holders, of necklaces and anklets upon the floor. And almost under the opening gleamed the throne of gold.

Who had fashioned it and how long ago, the knight could not know. Assuredly it was older than the wall of Bokhara, for in the massy metal of it were inscribed arrows and darts and emblems of another age. Perhaps Alexander and perhaps Darius had sat upon it. But just then—and Chepe Noyon had been the first to perceive him—Nur-Anim crouched against it, staring up with writhing lips, a dagger gripped in his hand.

“Ho, the snake is in its hole!” cried the Tiger Lord.

Some food and a water-sack and several candles showed that the mullah had planned to lie hidden for some time. Robert noticed steps running up into a corridor near the priest, and judged that they led to a door concealed somewhere in the reader's stand.

Chepe Noyon drew his sword at a sign from Genghis Khan. Turning to Robert, he explained swiftly that the knight was to go to a tent in the Mongol camp with the warriors who had brought him to the mosque.

“What of the maid? I must see her,” Robert demanded.

“You will see her on the morrow.”

With that the chieftain leaped bodily into the chamber below, and Robert saw Nur-Anim spring into the dark corridor. He heard Chepe Noyon laugh again, and as he moved away to join his guards the Moslem grandees moaned and gripped their beards. From the opening in the floor arose a scream that swelled and dwindled to a hoarse babble.

CHAPTER XVI

THE ROAD AND ITS END

IT WAS late when Robert was led into a small woolen tent pitched near the horse lines of the Mongol camp, and the rivets of his fetters were struck off by a smith. But he did not go to sleep at once.

The warriors had sought out one who knew a smattering of Arabic, and of him the knight requested water and rice and mutton, and ate until the Mongols smiled approval, believing it a sign of a strong heart that a man should eat mightily before going forth to fight for his life. They asked what weapon he would select, and brought him a varied collection of Moslem mail and swords.

From these the knight selected a strong haburgeon, and tossed away his own, that had many broken links. He refused all the simitars, and the Mongols inquired if he wanted one of their shorter swords.

Robert, however, had determined to fashion a weapon which would not break in the combat on the morrow—as his simitar and ax had broken on the wall—and which would decide the issue swiftly. Hope had forsaken him, and he longed only for two things—the strength to stand against the champion selected by the Mongols, and a sight of Ellen.

He called for a stout staff of hard, seasoned wood as thick as his wrist, and the smith brought him one reenforced with iron—the broken handle of a great mace. Then Robert took up the spiked knob and the chains from which his wrists had been freed and set to work grimly to fit the fetters at the ends of the chains upon the staff.

The Mongols watched the making of this unwonted weapon with attentive interest. They had orders to deny the champion of the Franks no request, and the smith helped find bolts that would fit the holes in the shackles.

When the work was finished, Robert had the mace-handle attached to the two chains, each about a foot long. From these chains swung the spiked knob of iron that had been his gift from Osman. The warriors took turns trying to swing it around their heads, and only a few could do so, with an effort.

“What is this thing?” they asked of the interpreter.

Robert smiled.

“It is the morning star.”

“How is that?”

He thrust the handle in the water-cask so that the wood would swell and grip tighter the iron bands.

“When it falls a man dies.”

The guards squatted down to watch while he slept on a pile of skins. And in whispers, not to disturb him, the Mongols discussed his stature and mighty muscles, the lines in his dark face that were deep even in slumber. They pointed to the tawny mane of yellow hair and shook their heads, for they had never seen a man like this. With equal interest they watched the morning star soaking in the water cask, certain that this was some kind of magic.

WHEN the sun scattered the mists on the sandy plain, throngs of Mongol warriors moved toward the standard of Genghis Khan. They squatted down, keeping clear a space some hundred yards square in front of the pole that bore the horns and the yak-tails. A little later the chieftains of the Horde walked over from their tents, and all raised their arms as the Khan appeared in the entrance of his pavilion and mounted a pony.

It was ever his custom, bred of a life of constant warfare, to be in the saddle; and he was never known to walk when a horse was at hand.

After he had taken his place at the edge of the cleared ground and received the greetings of the palladins, Chepe Noyon rode up and dismounted. Two warriors with drawn swords forced a way through the ranks of watchers at one end of the square and halted. Robert, clad in mail from knee to throat, walked between them, bearing the new mace in his hand, and a thousand pairs of eyes fastened on it curiously.

The knight swept a quick glance at the lines of silent warriors, who sat or stood where they willed, each with a spear or sword at hand—at the savage standard and the deserted wall of the city that loomed above the round tents of the Horde, and the pall of smoke that rose behind the walls and overspread the sky. He stood erect, smiling a little.

For here was no fair fist, fashioned for jousting, with heralds and poursuivants to tend the combatants and enforce the rules of the tournament—no minstrels to make memorable the names of the men who bore themselves well. He rested the spiked knob on the earth and turned to where a commotion at the other end of the square announced the coming of the antagonist whom he was ordered to overthrow if he would live longer.

He saw a tall figure, glistening in the finest of Damascus mail, and a crested helm. The man left his guards and moved toward the knight, who noticed that he carried only a battle-ax, a heavy blade with a long haft.

“Will Bunsley!” cried Robert, taking a pace forward.

It was the archer, and he was pale to the lips as he moved closer. Within easy speaking distance he paused to wipe his forehead and to lean on his ax.

“Aye, Sir Robert, 'tis Will Bunsley, who will ne'er pull a bow or buss a lass again. Harkee, time lacks for parley, and so do thou listen while I gabble—as is my way.

“The Demoiselle d'Ibelin rests within Abdullah's tent. Some words the minstrel did contrive to make clear to her, as follows: Item, thou and I, my lord, must e'en stand and smite each other till one is done to death; item, the maid doth pray for us both, but her heart aches for thee; item, these Mokals be dour fighters—as witness yonder fair city taken in despite of sword and bow and wall—and they will be an-angered if thou dost quibble or draw back.”

He glanced with widening eyes at Robert's new-made mace, and with a muttered, “Saint Dunstan abet me!” went on.

“Item four, and last, Sir Robert, by no means might I prevail against thee in combat, so do thou hew me down—would thou hadst chosen another weapon—and fail not. To make sport for these our captors I will rap thy ribs a time or two and e'en deal thee a buffet on the sconce.”

Drawing a deep breath, he tightened his grasp on his ax.

“And so—fare thee well, my lord.”

It was a changed Will Bunsley that faced Robert, the merriment vanished from his blue eyes, his jaw set stubbornly. Whether Genghis Khan or Chepe Noyon had selected the archer to oppose him, Robert did not know. Probably they had singled out the two Franks for the duel, aware that Robert was more than a match for any man of Khar. And Robert, knowing that Will Bunsley was no match for him, took a step forward.

“A true man are you,” he said, smiling, for he saw his way clear before him now.

Will heaved up his ax hurriedly.

“Nay, Master Robert, get thee to the work. One of us must fall upon the ling, and—what would it avail me to strive with thee? Come, lad, a few good blows——”

“Aye,” cried Robert and, striding foward, thrust aside the other's weapon and gripped his shoulder hard. “We will show them how two Englishmen can bear arms. Shoulder to shoulder, bowman——”

“What would ye, master? Ah, the good Christ aid us!”

For Robert had turned and was walking toward the nearest Mongols, swinging his mace in widening circles.

“'Tis madness for both to die. Bethink ye of the maid Ellen——”

“—who would hold me a caitiff and recreant, to strike you down!”

Robert sprang into the Mongols, who rose to meet him, growling and catching up their weapons. Steel ground against steel, and the great morning star swept clear a space about the knight.

Will Bunsley thrust a quivering hand across his eyes, then leaped after his comrade. His ax smashed down on the iron armor of the scattering Mongols and rose red, to flash down again until he gained Robert's side.

The warriors, who had started back in astonishment as the captives turned on them, closed in swiftly, making a circle about them. But Robert kept moving onward, and ever the iron flail kept clear a space before him, crunching into the heads and breasts of the men who leaped at him.

The knight was making his last stand, and all the power of his long arms went into every sweep of the mace. The ring shifted and changed to a black knot that writhed and twisted and finally came to a halt near the standard, where Will went down voicelessly and disappeared under the stamping feet. A man's spine snapped like a bent branch, and some one cried out:

“Subotai! Way for the Buffalo!”

The knot about Robert fell away as the warriors drew back, glaring and snarling at their victim—as dogs might leave the side of a stag half-pulled to earth. On his pony Genghis Khan had not stirred, although the beast snorted and stamped, a spear's length from the struggle. Only the eyes of the old Mongol followed every move of the men below him.

Robert reeled and steadied himself on his feet against Subotai's rush. His breath was whistling from his lungs; both hands were slashed to the bone, and blood streamed from his forehead into his open mouth. Recognizing the warrior of the buffalo horns as the one who had sought him on the causeway, he swung up the morning star as the giant leaped forward.

Instead of plunging on, Subotai halted, digging his heels into the earth. But Robert did not strike as he had expected, thus leaving himself open to a slash of the massive curved sword of the Mongol. The other warriors stood back to watch the two champions.

This time Subotai rushed in earnest, head up and shield down, his lips snarling and his sword-arm swinging at his side. Both struck at once. The knight's mace smashed the Mongol's iron shield, and the sword swept the helm from Robert's head, sending him back, staggering.

“Hai!" Subotai grunted and leaped in, slashing low.

Robert could not parry the blow; instead of trying to do so he stepped forward, into the sweep of the sword. It bit into the mail on his side and thigh, snapping the steel links, and glanced down to the earth.

The spiked knob smashed down on the Mongol's chest, ripping off the iron plates and drawing blood in streams. Before Subotai could leap clear Robert dropped the mace and gripped him about the knees. Gasping with the effort, he put forth all the strength of sinews and back muscles, raising the struggling body of the chieftain to his shoulder, shifting his grasp in a second to throat and belt of his foe, holding Subotai at the full reach of stiffened arms.

No one among the watchers moved to intercept him, and, filling his laboring lungs, he hurled Subotai to the ground. The warrior, striking on head and shoulder, rolled over and was still.

Robert stood looking down at him, swaying the while on his feet from utter weariness. He heard Chepe Noyon call out, and the deep voice of the Khan bark a command, and he tried to step toward the place where his mace had fallen, but had no longer strength to move foot or arm. He saw Chepe Noyon running toward him, felt the iron embrace of the Mongol's arms about his bruised ribs and looked up as a shout roared forth from ten thousand throats—

“Ahatou koke Mongku, ho!”

“O little son,” cried the Tiger Lord, “you overthrew the Buffalo! You lifted him in your hands and tossed him down! Hai—I chose well—by the white horse of Kaidu, by the eyes of all the gods—I picked a man!”

He drew back to look into Robert's scarred features.

“Did you hear the salute of the Horde? No man hath overthrown Subotai before. Nay, you know not the words of the Horde. 'Ho, brother, warrior of the Mongols, ho!'”

Genghis Khan spoke again, first to Chepe Noyon, then to a group of swordsmen who ran to the fallen Subotai and stood over him. The Buffalo had opened his eyes; now he shook his head savagely and sprang up. Instantly a score of powerful hands gripped him and held him, while the red glare faded from his eyes and he looked at Robert curiously.

“The command was given,” explained Chepe Noyon to the knight, “to stay the Buffalo until his anger passed. You and he must pour water on your swords. The Khan is not minded to lose either of you.”

Robert lifted his head with a wry smile.

“What mockery is this? I fought against you and slew many. Make an end!”

“Then will I tell you the judgment of the Khan. He said—

“'The two Nazarenes kept faith with each other, and so will they keep faith with all men.'

“If you will ride with us, you will sit in a high place at the feasts and ride the best of the horses and have a great tent. Little son, this battle was a test, even as my offer to you to surrender Bokhara was a test, and in each thing you have stood your ground and held to your faith. We have honor for such a hero, as you will see.”

The knight was silent, finding this hard to believe. Yet the warriors he had wounded came to look at him closely and examine the morning star, utterly indifferent to their hurts. Subotai after a while walked over and took up the mace, whirling it about his head like a sling.

He grunted something, and Chepe Noyon interpreted:

“He says that you are to make him such a weapon and he will go against you or any other three warriors.”

Now Robert laughed a little unsteadily.

“Well for me he did not have the mace a while ago. Nay, spare me another such test.”

He remembered Will Bunsley and sought him out, to learn from Chepe Noyon that the Mongols had refrained from slaying the archer and had had him borne away to a tent to mend his wounds. As they talked Genghis Khan wheeled his horse and made off, a lane opening for him through the Mongol ranks. Robert saw that smoke was rising in dense plumes over the wall of Bokhara, and flames, fanned by a stiffening wind, were leaping through the smoke over the mosques.

“'Tis the end of Bokhara,” nodded Chepe Noyon, following his glance. “But the treasure is safe. Come, I have put aside a tent for you, and your share of the treasure awaits you.”

AS THE wind-storm lashed the plain and the horse-herds of the camp tinned their backs to the eddies of dust the flames raged in Bokhara, and the plumes of smoke grew into great clouds that hid the sun and swirled down on the quivering tents. Robert and Chepe Noyon wrapped their mantles over their arms, and the knight shielded his torn face as best he could from the smarting dust. Coming to the closed flap of a round woolen tent, the Mongol raised it and signed for the crusader to enter.

Still holding his mace, Robert stooped under the pole that served as a lintel, and the next instant he was fighting for his life.

A simitar smote his chest, and he warded a blow at his head with the handle of the mace. In the semi-darkness of the heavy tent he could make out the figure of a Moslem in armor—a flying cloak and a curved sword that sought vainly for his head.

The figure leaped at him fiercely, and he brushed aside the steel blade with surprizing ease and caught his antagonist fast within both arms. As he felt for the Moslem's sword-wrist his right hand closed on the warrior's throat, and he was aware of a pulse that throbbed frantically under his fingers. The helm of his adversary fell off, and Robert released his grip.

But only to tighten his arm about the dark tresses that fell about the slender shoulders of Ellen, who stared bewildered into his eyes.

“By the cross, demoiselle,” he laughed out of a full heart, “hast still a mind to war?”

Her hands caught his cheeks and held him with rigid strength, while her warm breath beat against his throat. And he saw that she was pale as the white silk khalat.

“Ellen!” he cried. “Dost not know me—Robert?”

At this her eyes glowed, and she pressed her lips against his, running trembling fingers through his clotted hair, her throat quivering with sounds that made no words. Robert kissed her closed eyes and felt the weariness pass from him. Both flaps of the tent were ripped back, and Chepe Noyon strode in, hand on his sword hilt, looking greatly surprized.

“What—ha! No need to lead thee to the treasure, O Nazarene.”

Ellen looked up as the light flooded in and brushed a hand across her eyes.

“My lord—I thought you slain when you came—I deemed you a Mongol, and I did not want to be—parted, again. Oh, what have I done?”

Her eyes widened, and she swayed back against his arm.

“What?” Robert smiled.

“Your face—and your armor hacked!”

Tears started to the girl's eyes.

“And see, your hand is slashed. Nay, I sought only to die, and now I have hurt you sore.”

Robert stared for a moment in astonishment and then rocked with laughter.

“Little warrior, these few wounds were dealt me by the men of the Horde. Nay, Ellen, methinks you make a better maid than man-at-arms.”

For many an hour they sat upon the rugs of the tent and talked, hand in hand, recounting all that had befallen them; and Chepe Noyon, leaning against the pole of the pavilion, took up a lute—for he was well content—and sang again for them the song with which he first greeted Robert. Until Ellen fell silent, her glance ever on the man who sat, chin on hand, looking through the entrance at the swirling sand and the riders that came and went.

“In another day, brave heart,” he said, “Bokhara will be no more, and the road will be before us again. Chepe Noyon hath made clear to me the Mongol plans. I told him we would ride with them nowither save to Palestine. For there is my place—and you did promise the good Father Evagrius to seek Jerusalem.”

“Then will we go together, and you shall take Jerusalem,” she nodded decidedly.

“Am I an emperor with a host?”

“Aye, so.”

“Nay, I think not. Fair heart, our king lies at the island of Cyprus, and there we will seek him if we reach the end of the road. Yet none before us hath returned alive from Khar. These barbarians set out upon a way of peril, for they seek out Muhammad to overthrow his power and will follow him even beyond the Gates, to Bagdad or to Byzantium. They would have me strive to aid them at siege and assault upon the great cities. Will you come with me?”

“Aye, so.”

She bent her head.

“If you will have me.”

“Then is your promise given."

He sprang up, and Chepe Noyon rose.

“And I will hold it binding. Aye.”

He looked at the Mongol, who held up his hand for silence.

From the center of the camp came the mutter of drums and the brazen note of a great gong. Chepe Noyon spoke, and the knight nodded understanding.

“The summons to saddle hath been given,” Robert said, and his eyes gleamed with swift joy. “Never a queen shall have her coming heralded as yours, and never a maid shall put such a song upon the lips of the troubadors of Christendom.”

AFTER-WORD

SIX months passed; and John of Brienne, thirteenth King of Jerusalem, and his court rested at Tyre, upon the seacoast, where the barons of the northern provinces had gathered in general council to discuss means of holding their ground against fresh inroads of the Saracens.

The Moslem power had grown during the long truce, and the Croises knew themselves to be unable to stand in battle against the armies of the caliphs and the Sultan of Damascus if these hosts should be launched toward the seacoast.

At this council were gathered the lords of Ascalon and Acre, and the Marquis of Antioch, with their peers, and the leaders of the Genoese and Venetians. And the council came to naught because the young king lacked the personality to hold men united in a cause and each baron thought for the most part of his own fief. Yet one curious and notable happening marked the assembly of the peers. A caravan entered the east gate of Tyre and passed through the wall coming from the valley of the Orontes.

The leader of this caravan was a strange figure. Garbed in the finest of Persian silks and the brightest of nankeen and cloth-of-gold, he rode a horse with trappings of silvered cloth. He was attended by a score of savage men armed with spears and bows, whose like had never been beheld in Palestine.

He bore with him a certain store of gold which he guarded carefully and was at pains to despatch by agents of the chief Venetian merchants to Egypt, there to be paid to the Moslem masters of Damietta. This gold amounted to two thousand broad pieces, and the bearer explained that it was the ransom of a knight, one Robert Longsword, so called, who had been thought slain on the border.

As to the messenger himself, when his mission was done he called for the best wine of the taverns and the most skilful of the musicians and held revelry from the Tower of the Sea to the Sign of the Broken Sword, in the French quarter. When he drank his tongue was loosened, and it was learned that he, who had been esteemed a wealthy lord, was merely Will Bunsley, a wandering yeoman.

And when his gold and silver was spent he took service among the archers of the king and in time went from Tyre on a galley to Rhodes and thence to France. Those who had listened at first, drawn by the gold he had in his purse, began to laugh at his tale and call him a lying knave. Some, however, remembered the strange riders who had escorted him to the gate of Tyre.

But these had turned back at once, and few men believed the story of Will Bunsley, of Khar and its treasure, and an emperor of Islam who fled before an unknown conqueror.

Yet in time his narrative returned to the minds of the barons who had been at the council, and chiefly one Hugo of Montserrat, who had held his peace when mention was made of Khar.

This was when tidings came over the border of defeats suffered by the Moslems. Of Herat stormed by a new race of conquerors called the Mongols, and Balkh lost to Islam, and finally Bagdad itself fallen. So it happened that the power of the Saracens was not turned against the crusaders.

And when the fear of invasion had passed, the court of the king waxed merry. The minstrels and troubadors had a new song, made from the talk of the caravans that came over the border, and they sang of a crusader who adventured into paynimry itself and waged war upon the great cities. This they called the Romaunt of the Longsword, and many a time in hall and woman's garden they related it for the pleasuring of the people of the castle who had ever an ear for something new.

This romaunt came to be known even in the courts of Europe, and some of the minstrels sang of a maid who rode in armor beside the knight.

It is the song of a man of high honor, though no more than a youth in years, who kept faith in all things. And now this tale, from which the song came to be, has been told.

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