Solomon's Stone

Chapter IX.

Arslan Bey's immediate reaction was to curse himself purple in English, French, Osmanli, and Persian."Perfidious infidel swine!" he screamed."We keep strict neutrality; we even lend the dogs money—but hold, this is not forwarding our defense. Come with me, de Nêche!"

For the next half-hour Nash clumped about the palace in the wake of the bellowing sultan. The sound of gunfire beat in on them, now strong, now faint. Once Nash heard women's voices and knew they were passing an entrance to the harem. But, fearing that in his present fury the sultan would as lief take off his guest's head as not, Nash kept his eyes averted.

At length they came out on the top of a tower, cluttered with a bronze armillary sphere, an astrolabe, an equatorial, and a six-foot telescope. The domes and spikes of the palace rose around them, and skirting these was the wall, now fully manned and spitting bullets through the embrasures. Answering shots came from neighboring houses and vacant lots. The wall hid those of the enemy who were close to it, but in the streets that stretched away into the darkness Nash caught glimpses of moving soldiery.

On another tower an oil-burning searchlight sputtered into flame. Its crew swept the beam across the neighboring houses, and halted as it caught a group of figures on a roof. There were a couple of furry Aryans in horned casques, and several men in kilts and legionary cuirasses and helmets, incongruously hefting rifles; a man in an ornate gilded breastplate; a man in a spiked helmet, dark-blue frock coat, Hessian boots, and an enormous cavalry saber. Nash could just make out his great handlebar mustache. Arslan, eye to the telescope, muttered: "Gaio Germanico Ricci, and Roon Bismarck von Schmidt! They must mean business." He raised his voice to a shout: "Over there! Pick them off!"

The group scattered and disappeared. The searchlight moved no more, either its crew or its mechanism having been put out of action. A bullet clanged against one of the astronomical instruments and screeched away; Nash ducked, and Arslan laughed.

"You're as bad as the Romans!" he said."Who would have thought they would have dragged themselves away from their baths long enough to help their so-called allies? There has been bad feeling since—OUCH!"

The sultan jumped, staggered, and cursed. When Nash offered to see what was wrong, Arslan waved him away."A mere bullet burn. We'll burn those blasphemous bischos!" He shook a fist."It is all the fault of those cowardly west-side assembly districts, thinking they could avoid the war by milk-toast declarations of neutrality. Any fool could see... yes, Kerbogha? How goes it?"

"By your leave, not well, my lord," said the wazir, who had just dragged himself up the spiral staircase."We have lost four guardsmen, and the enemy are piling fardels into the moat at three points."

"Well, shoot them down, fool!"

"We do, master, but they keep coming. I doubt we can hold the wall till morn."

Arslan pulled his little beard agitatedly."We could escape by way of Minetta Brook," he growled, "but without our treasure we should be but the leader of a band of poor freebooters. And we could not fight a rear guard action encumbered by our harem and chattels—"

"Hey," said Nash, "is Minetta Brook that underground river that wanders around lower Manhattan?"

"Yes. Do not pester us with questions at a time—"

"Well, suppose I try to convoy your stuff on ahead?"

"The very thing! We do not know why we trust you, monsieur; it must be that curious feeling we have of having known you elsewhere— But come, there is no time to be lost!"

Down they went, down dank stone steps to the landing stage. The astral Minetta Brook was bigger than its mundane counterpart; almost a real river, sliding out of darkness into torchlight and back into darkness under a rough rock roof. Slaves were hauling up to the dock three of six boats tied to its downstream end: low beamy decked barges built for canal-crawling rather than for fast or open-water sailing. Each had oars and poles piled on its deck.

Slaves carried a score of chests onto one barge and stowed them below, until it seemed to Nash's apprehensive eyes that water was being kept from flowing over the gunwhales by surface tension only. Then came three hundred and sixty-five dark figures bundled up to the eyes in enough shawls and veils to stock a dry goods store: the harem. The two remaining boats did not look as if they could possibly hold such a crowd, but aboard they went, and one by one squeezed into the little deckhouses and proceeded below.

Nash protested: "The poor things'll be terribly crowded, sultan. Couldn't you let 'em stay on deck?"

"And have some pirate or Aryan craft sight them? Or have them get some silly female notion of escaping? Ha!"

"Hey!" cried Nash, as Smiley the saber-tooth padded down the steps towing his keeper, and after him a huge red-pelted ape, like a gorilla but taller and straighter."Are they going, too?"

"Certainly, Three guards are all we can spare you; the rest must remain to hold the walls till we make our bolt."

"I'd just as lief not have any guards. Those two animals ought to scare off—"

"Do not be a fool, de Nêche! You would not get a mile with that cargo unguarded. Head straight across the river to the Jersey shore, where we will join you."

"What if—" But Arslan was already bounding up the steps followed by a swirl of soldiery. Nash was left with his barges, menagerie, three guards, and eight miscellaneous slaves.

He shrugged and stepped aboard the first barge and cast off. The three boats, tied nose to tail like circus elephants, picked up way as the current took hold of them. Nash secured a barge pole from the deck and stood in the bow of the lead boat.

"Keep 'em straight!" he called back over his shoulder.

The landing stage and the stone stair shrank away aft, and then there was nothing but black water and rough tunnel, feebly lit by the one torch on each boat, and sometimes so low that they had to flatten themselves to the decks.

They ran into trouble on the first real bend: Nash did not push off from the jagged sides soon enough. His barge came to a scraping halt against the rock, and the other crowded up behind it, bumping its stern. The train folded up and got wedged in the turn.

"Damn it!" yelled Nash."Push off there, you!" The slave began pushing on the wrong wall."The other!" screamed Nash, and at length made the slave understand. The latter then got down and began bumping his forehead on the deck boards.

"Pardon, effendi! I did not understand—"

"Get up! Get up! Get to work!"

The ape grunted and the saber-tooth whined with alarm; a female chirping from the holds of the middle and after boats made itself heard under the echoing shouts of the men. With more shouting and shoving they got the boats around.

Nash faced aft."Look here, you guys! The next one we come to, I want a pair of men on the stern of each barge to plant their poles against the sides of the tunnel, to ease the boat around—"

By repeating everything three times he apparently made the soulless ones understand. His scheme worked fairly well on the next turn, though one of the guards nearly ruined it by urging his barge forward instead of holding back with ~ -his pole. They got around the third quirk with no trouble. After that Nash could relax, for the tunnel was wider and the current slower thenceforth.

Forming slowly in his mind was a plan to take his convoy, not straight across the North River, but south to Staten Island. Then those of Arslan's wives who did not like the harem could go. Alicia Dido Woodson, veiled and squeezed into the hold of one of the following boats, would grab the opportunity. At least he hoped she would; you never could be sure what strange traits an astral body would turn out to have.

Then Nash could look up Merlin Apollonius Stark. Then the Shamir and home!

What about Arslan's gang? They would hardly be so stupid as not to know New Jersey from Staten Island, soulless though they might be. If they got wind—

In a way he disliked double-crossing the sultan, who had trusted him. But, he told himself, Arslan had undoubtedly accumulated his treasure and harem by force and fraud, and did not deserve much consideration.

That still left the guards and slaves. He did not worry much about the latter, who were unarmed. For the former—he really ought to kill them. Their swords were sheathed; if he drew and rushed them suddenly in the semidarkness—

But no, he just could not do it. The mere idea of deliberate assassination almost made him ill. If one of them attacked him, he could give a stout and reasonably brave ■ account of himself. The chevalier could no doubt murder all three without a second thought, but he was not the chevalier except in body. No, he wouldn't feel inferior; he was as good a man in his way as Jean-Prospère was in his.

But damn the inhibitions inculcated by a peaceful, law-abiding accountant's life! Too bad the draft hadn't taken him after all; he could have used a soldierly indifference to homicide now.

The lapping of water grew louder, and the roof of the tunnel slid back. Nash looked up for stars, but instead got a sprinkle of water in the face. A speckle of damp spots appeared on the deck, growing rapidly denser.

"Effendi!" called one of the guards."It rains!"

"I know it." Smiley moaned dismally on the second barge, and on the third Kulu the ape wrapped his forearms over his head to shed the water.

"But what shall we do?" persisted the guard.

"Take the oars and put them in the oarlocks. One man -to each oar—"

"Do you mean we shall stay out in the wet?"

"Of course. You won't dissolve."

"Without stars, how shall we find our way?"

"Leave that to me," ordered Nash. There was nothing like having a few tough-looking armed men asking for instructions to put confidence in one!

Each barge had four rowlocks. The oars were great sweeps designed to be worked standing up. Since there were just as many men as oarlocks, Nash perforce took an oar instead of standing in the bow, inscrutably wrapped in his cloak. He made them douse the torches, and could then make out a few feeble yellow gleams from the Jersey shore through the drizzle.

Behind him the soulless ones bumped oars and cursed each other, caught crabs, and one missed the water altogether and fell on his face. He would never, thought Nash, win the Poughkeepsie regatta with this crew!

He called to them to keep time with him, whereat they protested that they could not see him. Very well, then, they should each watch the man in front of him! That did not work so well either, and Nash was forced to count aloud to keep them in some sort of unison.

When they were fairly well away from the Manhattan shore, Nash, who had the foremost starboard oar, covertly increased the length and force of his stroke. Slowly, slowly, the train of barges swung around until the lights of Jersey were on the starboard beam. Nash's heart was in his mouth as he waited for one of the men to comment on this state of affairs; he wondered what excuse to give them.

But no objections came; the men, grunting at the squeaking oars, were too busy watching their footing on the wet decks. Nash's confidence rose again. Perhaps they knew so little local geography that he could land them at Staten Island without their being any the wiser!

Nash guessed that they had been pulling a good hour, and noted that the lights did not seem to have moved at all. An adverse tide, probably; that would change to favorable in due course. The distance was something like five or six miles; at an average rate of a mile an hour they should arrive within an hour or two of dawn, either before or after.

Long before that, Nash had almost fallen asleep standing up and walked overboard. The others must be getting tired, too, for their strokes were getting ragged again. Nash decided on a system of reliefs. He ordered the crew of the tail boat forward to take the oars of the lead boat while the relieved quartet took a nap, leaving the tail boat to be towed. The least stupid-acting of the guards was appointed pilot; he was told to keep one of the Jersey lights on the starboard beam, and to wake Nash and the other three nappers after five hundred oar strokes. At an estimated ten strokes a minute that should give them a rest of a little under an hour.

When the wet sky paled to dirty pearl, Bay Ridge lay to port, the long spit of Bayonne to starboard, and the low hills of New Brighton a half mile ahead. A small boat appeared here and there in the upper bay, plowing along on its own business. A choppy little swell had begun to smack against the blunt nose of the leading barge, throwing haphazard drops of spray on the rowers; but they were all too soaked to mind. Nash peered toward the site of St. George; sure enough there were docks there as on the mundane plane.

A subtle change in the music of the oars caused him to turn his head. The rowers of the second barge had quit; the slaves leaned listlessly on their sweeps, and in the center of the deck the three guards had their heads together.

"Hey, you!" called Nash.

The guards looked up; then began to advance forward in line abreast, with careful, catlike tread. Nash walked boldly toward them until he and they were separated only by the yard of water between the first and second barges.

"Well?"

The center guard touched his forehead with thin humility."Perhaps we are stupid, effendi, but it don't look to us as if you had gone directly across the river to New Jersey."

"That's all right."

"Humble apologies, but it is not all right. We heard our lord tell you to cross the river directly."

"Don't worry, I know what I'm doing."

"That may be. But how shall our lord find his dough and his molls if you do n

"Oh, he knows where I'm going. I told him just before we left."

"No," said the guard, "I was watching."

Another guard put in: "It looks to us, effendi, as if you sought to give our Protector of the Poor the old double cross!"

"Listen," snapped Nash, "I'm running this show, and as long as—"

"Not any more!" cried the third guard."Give the perfidious infidel the works!"

"Allah!" shouted the others."Smite the unbelieving goon!"

"Slay the highjacking traitor!"

All three backed up, drew their scimitars, and made a running broad jump from their boat to Nash's.

Nash grabbed for his sword, and realized that he had taken it off because it hampered him in rowing, and leaned it against the lee side of the deckhouse. He sprinted forward and grabbed the hilt, letting the scabbard clatter to the deck, the three guards after him whirling their thin steel crescents.

As soon as he could turn he started to uncork a lunge at this nearest, but had to interrupt it to parry a slash from another. For the next ten seconds he fought as he never had exerted himself in his mundane life. Maybe a movie hero could fight three foes at once, but only if the foes merely diddled around with their weapons instead of boring in like these guys. No time for fancy fencing; nothing but a crude right-left slashing to knock the curved blades aside as they swung.

He felt the stem post of the barge behind him. They had backed him into the bow; he knew definitely that no matter how hard he tried, they would have him in a matter of seconds.