Swords From the Desert (48 page)

"An hour ago," the old hadji said, "our lord came down from his hiding place by the snow-fed lake. Like a panther he leaped upon the back of Sultan Hussayn. Aye, when he mounted to ride away, half a moon ago, he said to the Tatar Arslan that he smelled treachery-when Hussayn sent such gifts as a slave girl who could write, and had messenger pigeons for pets-and he would watch, unseen, from the height. He said he would wait to see if Hussayn paid him a visit."

"And ye said naught to me!" Sakhri cried.

The old hadji spread out his hands, and a smile wrinkled his beard. "A secret is no longer a secret if it reaches a woman's ear. As it is, thou didst discover the carrier pigeons."

But Sakhri had left him to hasten down to the window over the gate. For Uzbek Khan was riding back into the castle with loot piled on the saddles of his men, and the mighty Hussayn, Lion of the Hills, walking captive at his horse's-tail. No eagle's mate ever screamed a shriller greeting than the Circassian girl, while the war drum roared and the echoes clamored back.

That evening when the shadow of the height fell over Al Arak and the dust settled down in the courtyard-after the old hadji had wailed the summons to prayer-Sakhri sat happily in the summit of the women's tower. Her arms rested over the knee of Uzbek Khan, and her flaming head, pressed against his side, felt the beating of his heart. With adoration she looked up into the cold gray eyes. Like an eagle's they seemed to gaze far off, without expression.

Since the old khan said nothing, Sakhri contemplated Zuleika's possessions contentedly -they were hers now. Zuleika and Vali had been sent to the cell wherein Sultan Hussayn would wait until his ransom should arrive from Irivan.

"Wilt thou give orders to cut off her nose, 0 my lord?" she ventured at last.

"For what reason?" Uzbek Khan passed a sinewy hand through the tangle of the girl's hair. "By Allah, she was faithful to her lord, even as thou hast been to me. Besides," he sighed reminiscently, "she is beautiful as a young white horse."

Sakhri wriggled jealously. "If I had not been, if I had betrayed thee, what then?"

Removing his hand from her head, he swept it out over the gorge where the crimson of the afterglow was fading to gray on the far rock wall. "I would have cast thee into that."

Down into the blue shadow of the depths Sakhri looked, and glowed with satisfaction. Uzbek Khan loved her, then. He would not even harm that unspeakable woman, that one full of guile. But he would have slain her, if she had looked away from him. She pressed closer to him, stroking his hand. A last doubt troubled her.

"God knows," she whispered, "I am not beautiful, as she is."

A gleam crept into the gray eyes of the khan. After all, the gentle devotion of the girl pleased him.

"Thou art," he responded guilefully, "the illumination of my soul."

"And what else?"

"And the solace of my liver."

Sakhri sighed with utter content. The cup of her joy was full.

Adventure magazine, where many of the tales in this volume first appeared, maintained a letter column titled "The Camp-Fire." As a descriptor, "letter column" does not quite do this regular feature justice. Adventure was published two and sometimes three times a month, and as a result of this frequency and the interchange of ideas it fostered, "The Camp-Fire" was really more like an Internet bulletin board than a letter column found in today's quarterly or even monthly magazines. It featured letters from readers, editorial notes, and essays from writers. If a reader had a question or even a quibble with a story, he could write in and the odds were that the letter would not only be printed but that the story's author would draft a response.

Harold Lamb and other contributors frequently wrote lengthy letters that further explained some of the historical details that appeared in their stories. The relevant letters for this volume follow. Also enclosed are a number of essays concerning the Crusades. Adventure editor Arthur Sullivan Hoffman published excerpts from Lamb's books about the Crusades as Lamb was drafting them and sometimes printed explanatory letters about these excerpts in "The Camp-Fire." While the text of these book excerpts was similar, if not completely identical, to the text in Lamb's Crusades volumes, the text of Lamb's related "Camp-Fire" letters is not, and they are reprinted here for the first time. They provide insight into how Lamb perceived the time and people he was writing about in both his histories and his fiction.

All of editor Arthur Sullivan Hoffman's introductory editorial comments and segues are included in the letters that follow.

The appendix concludes with two anecdotes about Lamb from the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, making brief reference to Lamb's contemporary stories, not contained in this series.

August 8, 1926: "The Shield"

Something from Harold Lamb in connection with his complete novelette in this issue. I don't read enough history these days for my opinion on histories to be worth anything, but I have a strong hunch, not coming altogether from thin air, that Mr. Lamb is right in what he says about modern historians in the bulk.

Berkeley, California.

It is the story of an Arab, in Constantinople, in 1204 when the crusaders took the city from the Greek emperor.

It introduces a new character, Khalil, the Beduin. That is, an Arab of the Ibna or elder chieftains, of al-Yamen, or the desert country. I've become quite interested in these chaps. Every place we followa Venetian or Genoese or French or English pathfinder, an Arab seems to have been there before with his horses or his ship. They were in China four centuries or so before Marco Polo-the first authentic account of the Chinese is that of Abu Zeid al Hassan, about 900 AD. They rambled through Central Asia with their caravans, and their ships penetrated to India before Spain and Portugal emerged from the dark ages. They were born fighters, of course, and lovers of horses. Also they were chivalrous fighters. A crusader's code of ethics was much less formidable than that of a clean-strain Arab, and there were no indulgences issued in Yamen. Two different codes of course, and there were rogues as well as splendid men on both sides-crusader and paynim.

But the Arab, and the saracin-folk, were more intelligent than our Croises, more courteous, and usually more daring. They had a sense of humor. Remember that the Baghdad of Haroun al-Raschid, the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, the observatories, academies and the gardens of all Near-Asia were their heritage. Read side by side, the Moslem chronicles of Ibn Athir, Raschid, or Ibn Battuta are much more human, expressive, and likable than the monkish annals of the crusaders-Matthew of Edessa, Matthew Paris, Archbishop William of Tyre. And, strangely enough, these Arab and Persian historians bring out values that have been unknown to us, at least in our histories of the Crusades. They are very fair-more so than our chroniclers-in giving an enemy credit for gallantry. Figures like Alexander the Great (Iskander) and Richard of England (Ricard Malik) were talked about in Asia for centuries, and became heroes of the first magnitude.

Our existing stock of histories of the Crusades is unfortunate. The early stock was taken from the main Church chronicles, and consisted of a lot of silence and a great deal of fanfare, exaggerating the deeds of the Croises. Then appeared the cynical history, making much hay of the fact that the crusaders usually fought a losing fight, and were sometimes the very opposite of saints. Lastly the ultramodern history has cropped up, making inuch of the superstition and ignorance of the crusaders, and tracing out with great pains the advantages" of the Crusades in establishing contact between the East and West, introducing Asia's inventions into Europe, etc.

In decrying the exaltation of the crusaders, and in hunting out the mercantile gains from their efforts and deaths, we have somehow rather lost sight of the intimate personal story of the crusaders-which a reading of the Arabic chronicles serves to bring back to us.

So MUCH of our history and biography and fiction, too, has been written out of prejudice, or a preconceived bias. "Catherine the Great was one of the most gifted women of all time" vs. "Catherine the Great was one of the greatest--of all time." "Alexander of Macedonia was a superman" vs. "Alexander was mad." You knowhowthose things shape up.

Nowadays one cannot enter a book shop without seeing on all sides "The Truth About This" or "Outlines of That." The desire of readers to learn is real enough. The fault is with the writers, who lack both scholarship and inclination to devote months or years to finding out the truth as nearly as possible. The result is that the very modern histories are usually "outlines" right enough.

Scholarship seems to have died in the last century. Anyway, I'll wager you can't name a better story of the Crusades than Scott's "Talisman." Sir Walter admitted that he wrote from meager information-there was little to be had in his day-but he was a scholar and a conscientious student of his epoch.

History, our dictionaries say, is "a narrative devoted to the exposition of the unfolding of events."

Discarding this husk of Latin phrasing, the dictionary says that history is the story of what actually happened. By the way, it's interesting to notice that the dictionary ranks fiction equally with chronicle. And "unfolding" is just the word. What is history but the uncovering or the unfolding of the past? The story of what certain men did-their adventures, because it's more interesting to read about what they did than what they were. And easier to get at the truth, that way.

It's so absurd to sit down and start in to whitewash some individual or people and call it history. And equally absurd to assemble a few facts and draw personal conclusions from them, without taking the trouble to get at all the facts.

This is beginning to wander. But it's so tiresome to look for history in many modern publications and find only personal opinions, deductions, vilification, or deification, and references to faulty authorities. And so many modern "historical" novels, written by hasty Americans, are enough to make Sienkiewicz or Tolstoy walk the earth again.

Getting back to our Arab-it's been awfully refreshing to read about the crusaders from Arabic sources. But "The Shield" is not a story of the Crusades -the Croises figure only in the taking of Constantinople. I've tried to reconstruct the city as it was then, with its afterglow of Creek and Roman splendor.

The garden of the Patriarch was there, and the Place of Horses, as in the story. I've told the story as Khalil might have told it-many of the incidents befell Ibn Battuta in real life. The storming of the city follows the actual event, except that the siege actually lasted longer. Regarding the disparity in numbers between the crusaders and the Greeks, Mills relates that the crusaders numbered twenty thousand while there were four hundred thousand men capable of bearing arms within the city. Villehardin confirms this, and DuCange. And it is borne out by others.

Khalil rather appeals to me. Also an Arab story to the effect that the sword of Roland-Durandal-taken by the Saracins, after the death of the hero, and hidden away in Asia Minor.

So I'm thinking of a second tale, dealing with the search for the sword by a crusader.

August 15, 1927: "The Guest of Karadak"

Harold Lamb tells about tradition among the Arabs, in connection with his long novelette in this issue.

A word about Arab tradition. It is like no other tradition because the spoken word was handed down from generation to generation rather than the written. Until the ninth or tenth centuries very fewArabs could write, and it was customary when two riders met on the trail to stop and exchange anecdotes. "So-and-so says, on the authority of Such-a-one-"

Naturally when the first annals came to be written they were merely a collection of hadith-tradition. So we find the early Arab histories to be brief and matter-of-fact, almost invariably truthful. They deal with men and deeds, weapons, and the amount of spoil taken in the razzias-with covenants and herds and the position of wells. And especially with the manner in which the great warriors of the books met their deaths.

These fragmentary histories were jotted down on "date leaves, bits of leather, shoulder blades, stony tablets, or the hearts of men." But, put into words by men born and bred to war who spent most of their lives in the saddle, the written hadith have a real ring to them. Here we find no lengthy memoirs, no monastery-compiled chronicles, or histories written long after events. We have the word-ofmouth narrative of men who were on the scene.

That is, perhaps, why the medieval histories of Al Tabari and Ibn Khaldun are better reading than anything that came out of Europe in those days. The Arab then had a fine sense of chivalry, a keen wit, any amount of pride in himself and his deeds, and a full appre ciation of what was due him, and others-in the way of money, but more particularly, of honor.

As an example, take an incident in a famous battle-Cadesiya, when the small host of invading Arabs was confronted by the great mass of Persians under Rustam, in the year 635- as related byBalad- huri and Mas'udi.