"That's the hell of it," Holgar said under his breath.
"If they do not throw straight, and he is caught by the belly, it be the will of Allah. Now speak what I have spoken to Omar known as Sittash, who, it comes to me, may be of the same clan as Holgar, for truly their names have something the same sound, and he may tell the condemned one, for the comfort of his soul."
When it was repeated to me, Kerry blue-lipped and gasping, I still could not speak. Then Holgar spoke.
"Ask if they'll let you do it. Big Yank."
"What?"
"The stroke of grace. I gave it to Little Yank. Those bully boys of Sidi's are edgy and will bitch it sure. They'd take my legs and arms and heave, but you can do it with a good grip on my ankles. You're strong as a Hon—and you ought to see one jump over a six-foot boma with a man in his jaws. Your chains are longer than mine and will give you room enough. Great God, if you only could "
Sidi spoke imperiously. "Bid the mutineer He flat on his back."
"Both of you heard that," Kerry said. "You know what it means."
Holgar started to lie down. I had started to say to him, "If they'll let me, I will." Then, in one instant of recognition of my bond with him, I turned and touched my forehead and spoke to the Sidi the Arabic sentence that every prisoner knew.
"Your slave obeys your command."
As Holgar lay belly down, his head raised up and his gaze met mine, and I had never seen such human need in a brave man's eyes, or in any face such prayer that a cup might pass. I seized him by the shackles on his ankles, and as he stiffened to help me, heaved him off the ground. Whirling, I raised him higher and swoing him faster, and now the Sidi was shouting orders that I need not hear because there was thunder in my ears to drown them out, and now lightning flashed before my eyes. Some of his followers sprang forward, but stopped outside the orbit of the human wheel, lest it strike them and break their bones, or a flying chain smash their skulls.
All these and the master, too, fell silent. Faster it sped until, at its fourth revolving, my arms and Holgar's body made one rigid projection level with the ground. By now I saw how high his chest must rise above my head in order to strike true; and with a great wrenching sweep, I swung him upward and backward.
My chains were long enough. The strength of my shoulders and loins stood the inhuman strain of stopping him in mid-air. My back bent, my arms lowered with great power, and hammerlike over my right shoulder, Holgar swept forward and down. Suddenly there was no more weight in my hands, and there was still no sound.
I raised my eyes. The point of the hook had passed cleanly through Holgar's deep chest, and he dangled limply as a sparrow impaled on a thorn by a murderous shrike. His head bowed like a sleeper's, but his wide-open eyes were dark.
Sidi gazed and stroked his beard and was the first to speak.
"Behold a wonder!" he cried to his followers. "This dog of a Christian died with only a pinprick's flow of blood and without one wail."
"He was a stout dog, O Sidi, fit to unleash on the Day of Jahad, had it been his kismet," Ibrim replied. "So it comes to me that Allah showed him mercy."
"What of this Yanki wolfhound? He, too, is no lamb in strength. It is my belief he played a fox's trick, knowing well I would not order him to hang the meat alone."
"But truly he hung it well!"
"It comes to me that the two dogs were in close bond, out of the same pack if not the same litter, and if so, he has been punished more than by fifty blows of the kurbash. The rest I will leave to Allah, who alone gives meat and what is meet to men and dogs."
Between dusk and dark, when he would not be seen or himself missed from any head count, 'Giny Jim climbed the acacia tree above the oasis and tore down the abandoned rook's nest, a landmark old when our earliest comer went down to the Sepulcher.
As our files tramped at daybreak past the place, the scantily leafed tree stood naked and empty against the paling eastern sky. No man raised his shackled hand or his voice above a mutter, but in a few seconds the void was known to all. Many breathed hard. They believed they had seen a sign of ominous import. The guards cracked their whips.
"How could it fall?" my leader murmured in Arabic. "No gale blew last night."
"It rotted out at last, as we will," Kerry replied.
Kerry said nothing more until we were on the bed, then spoke in an evasive manner I was awake to long ago.
"Bloody queer, after all, that rook's nest falling down."
"So?"
"They're made of sticks and earth. If used long enough, the earth turns into a kind of plaster from the droppings, and you've got to break 'em up and pull 'em down. Well, I think that one was pulled down."
"What for?"
"A signal. There couldn't be any other reason. But if a great horse-breeding sheik could get you out—not free, of course—abandon hope ye who enter here—and at last you were free to go." Kerry stopped, his face gray.
"Go on, Kerry," I said.
"If you couldn't take Sparrow, you certainly can't take Jim—or me."
I knew I must not let him build in vain.
"No, I can't, but if such a thing would happen, it would be a long time off."
"Time as it passes in the Sepulcher—one day as long as a year—a year like one day."
We did not mention the matter again for about four months. I did not invite it into my mind, for the uncertainty was more harrowing than the hope was comforting; indeed, I tried to keep it out, since it caused my thoughts to move in the same futile orbit they had completed a hundred times. I had been warned that any circular path worn deeply in the mind led to madness. Almost all of us had to fight madness or drift into it; those that went too mad to work were beaten with the kurbash until they recovered their sanity or died. I had counted the chances in my favor-confronted those opposed—and could only wait.
At the end of four months, one of Suliman's caravans came out of the north, the second since his visit here, rested a day in the oasis, and departed into the blue. I had seen a robed figure beside the road close to the acacia tree as we trudged to the quarry at daybreak, but he did not give me a sign or, as far as I knew, a glance. Kerry mentioned the caravan, his eyes sunk in his head, then the subject was dropped for half a year more.
Then, on May 19, 1809—with eight years of slavery almost through —a wheel of fortune set turning in a sea-bound cave in Malta came full circle.
As we marched in iron the quarry, thornwood fires glimmered on the camp ground, and we heard the ugly bubbling cries of many camels and the shouts of their drivers. We had hardly gained the stockade when Ibrim summoned me from the rank, and Kerry rattled his chain—the slaves' way of wishing good luck—as I was led away. With hardly a word he took me to the house of the quarry master set among date palms which none of the quarry gangs had ever come nigh. Its walls were marble, of quality not quite fine enough to be worth exporting, yet beautiful, and so were the pillars and floor of its portico. It was not meet that I should enter the master's gulphor or that any guest of his should descend to the courtyard to talk to me. So Ibrim brought me into the kiffer, an entrance hall.
In only a moment Suliman came through a screened archway. I saw no change in his countenance, unless its pale brown skin was slightly more taut over its fine bone; but he had dressed more richly than before, in robes of Kashmir and a large turban with a brocaded sash and a diamond plume. In his broad belt the hilts of three daggers sparkled with red and green jewels. Behind him stood the master, his Moorish dress as gaudy as that Murad Reis had worn on the day I first wore chains.
Suliman touched hand to heart and forehead. I did the same, my chains jangling harshly. Suliman's eyes filled with tears, but there was no danger of my weeping. I had lost the power to do so—for tears are often a sign of manly power—just as I had forgotten how to laugh.