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THE WINDS OF THE WORLD

By TALBOT MUNDY




THE WINDS OF THE WORLD


  Ever the Winds of the World fare forth
    (Oh, listen ye! Ah, listen ye!),
  East and West, and South and North,
  Shuttles weaving back and forth
    Amid the warp! (Oh, listen ye!)
  Can sightless touch--can vision keen
  Hunt where the Winds of the World have been
  And searching, learn what rumors mean?
    (Nay, ye who are wise! Nay, listen ye!)
  When tracks are crossed and scent is stale,
  'Tis fools who shout--the fast who fail!
    But wise men harken-Listen ye!

YASMINI'S SONG.




CHAPTER I


A watery July sun was hurrying toward a Punjab sky-line, as if weary of
squandering his strength on men who did not mind, and resentful of the
unexplainable--a rainy-weather field-day. The cold steel and khaki of
native Indian cavalry at attention gleamed motionless between British
infantry and two batteries of horse artillery. The only noticeable
sound was the voice of a general officer, that rose and fell explaining
and asserting pride in his command, but saying nothing as to the why of
exercises in the mud. Nor did he mention why the censorship was in full
force. He did not say a word of Germany, or Belgium.

In front of the third squadron from the right, Risaldar-Major Ranjoor
Singh sat his charger like a big bronze statue. He would have stooped
to see his right spur better, that shone in spite of mud, for though he
has been a man these five-and-twenty years, Ranjoor Singh has neither
lost his boyhood love of such things, nor intends to; he has been
accused of wearing solid silver spurs in bed. But it hurt him to bend
much, after a day's hard exercise on a horse such as he rode.

Once--in a rock-strewn gully where the whistling Himalayan wind was
Acting Antiseptic-of-the-Day--a young surgeon had taken hurried
stitches over Ranjoor Singh's ribs without probing deep enough for an
Afghan bullet; that bullet burned after a long day in the saddle. And
Bagh was--as the big brute's name implied--a tiger of a horse,
unweakened even by monsoon weather, and his habit was to spring with
terrific suddenness when his rider moved on him.

So Ranjoor Singh sat still. He was willing to eat agony at any time for
the squadron's sake--for a squadron of Outram's Own is a unity to
marvel at, or envy; and its leader a man to be forgiven spurs a
half-inch longer than the regulation. As a soldier, however, he was
careful of himself when occasion offered.

Sikh-soldier-wise, he preferred Bagh to all other horses in the world,
because it had needed persuasion, much stroking of a black beard--to
hide anxiety--and many a secret night-ride--to sweat the brute's
savagery--before the colonel-sahib could be made to see his virtues as
a charger and accept him into the regiment. Sikh-wise, he loved all
things that expressed in any way his own unconquerable fire. Most of
all, however, he loved the squadron; there was no woman, nor anything
between him and D Squadron; but Bagh came next.

Spurs were not needed when the general ceased speaking, and the British
colonel of Outram's Own shouted an order. Bagh, brute energy beneath
hand-polished hair and plastered dirt, sprang like a loosed
Hell-tantrum, and his rider's lips drew tight over clenched teeth as he
mastered self, agony and horse in one man's effort. Fight how he would,
heel, tooth and eye all flashing, Bagh was forced to hold his rightful
place in front of the squadron, precisely the right distance behind the
last supernumerary of the squadron next in front.

Line after rippling line, all Sikhs of the true Sikh baptism except for
the eight of their officers who were European, Outram's Own swept down
a living avenue of British troops; and neither gunners nor infantry
could see one flaw in them, although picking flaws in native regiments
is almost part of the British army officer's religion.

To the blare of military music, through a bog of their own mixing, the
Sikhs trotted for a mile, then drew into a walk, to bring the horses
into barracks cool enough for watering.

They reached stables as the sun dipped under the near-by acacia trees,
and while the black-bearded troopers scraped and rubbed the mud from
weary horses, Banjoor Singh went through a task whose form at least was
part of his very life. He could imagine nothing less than death or
active service that could keep him from inspecting every horse in the
squadron before he ate or drank, or as much as washed himself.

But, although the day had been a hard one and the strain on the horses
more than ordinary, his examination now was so perfunctory that the
squadron gaped; the troopers signaled with their eyes as he passed,
little more than glancing at each horse. Almost before his back had
vanished at the stable entrance, wonderment burst into words.

"For the third time he does thus!"

"See! My beast overreached, and he passed without detecting it! Does
the sun set the same way still?"

"I have noticed that he does thus each time after a field-day. What is
the connection? A field-day in the rains--a general officer talking to
us afterward about the Salt, as if a Sikh does not understand the Salt
better than a British general knows English--and our risaldar-major
neglecting the horses--is there a connection?"

"Aye. What is all this? We worked no harder in the war against the
Chitralis. There is something in my bones that speaks of war, when I
listen for a while!"

"War! Hear him, brothers! Talk is talk, but there will be no war until
India grows too fat to breathe--unless the past be remembered and we
make one for ourselves!"

       *       *       *       *       *

There was silence for a while, if a change of sounds is silence. The
Delhi mud sticks as tight as any, and the kneading of it from out of
horsehair taxes most of a trooper's energy and full attention. Then,
the East being the East in all things, a solitary trooper picked up
the scent and gave tongue, as a true hound guides the pack.

"Who is _she_?" he wondered, loud enough for fifty men to hear.

From out of a cloud of horse-dust, where a stable helper on probation
combed a tangled tail, came one word of swift enlightenment.

"Yasmini!"

"Ah-h-h-h!" In a second the whole squadron was by the ears, and the
stable-helper was the center of an interest he had not bargained for.

"Nay, sahibs, I but followed him, and how should I know? Nay, then I
did not follow him! It so happened. I took that road, and he stepped
out of a _tikka-gharri_ at her door. Am I blind? Do I not know her
door? Does not everybody know it? Who am I that I should know why he
goes again? But--does a moth fly only once to the lamp-flame? Does a
drunkard drink but once? By the Guru, nay! May my tongue parch in my
throat if I said he is a drunkard! I said--I meant to say--seeing she
is Yasmini, and he having been to see her once--and being again in a
great hurry--whither goes he?"

So the squadron chose a sub-committee of inquiry, seven strong, that
being a lucky number the wide world over, and the movements of the
risaldar-major were reported one by one to the squadron with the
infinite exactness of small detail that seems so useless to all save
Easterns.

Fifteen minutes after he had left his quarters, no longer in khaki
uniform, but dressed as a Sikh gentleman, the whole squadron knew the
color of his undershirt, also that he had hired a _tikka-gharri_, and
that his only weapon was the ornamental dagger that a true Sikh wears
twisted in his hair. One after one, five other men reported him nearly
all the way through Delhi, through the Chandni Chowk--where the last
man but one nearly lost him in the evening crowd--to the narrow place
where, with a bend in the street to either hand, is Yasmini's.

The last man watched him through Yasmini's outer door and up the lower
stairs before hurrying back to the squadron. And a little later on,
being almost as inquisitive as they were careful for their major, the
squadron delegated other men, in mufti, to watch for him at the foot of
Yasmini's stairs, or as near to the foot as might be, and see him
safely home again if they had to fight all Asia on the way.

These men had some money with them, and weapons hidden underneath their
clothes; for, having betted largely on the quail-fight at Abdul's
stables, the squadron was in funds.

"In case of trouble one can bribe the police," counseled Nanak Singh,
and he surely ought to know, for he was the oldest trooper, and trouble
everlasting had preserved him from promotion. "But weapons are good,
when policemen are not looking," he added, and the squadron agreed with
him.

It was Tej Singh, not given to talking as is rule, who voiced the
general opinion.

"Now we are on the track of things. Now, perhaps, we shall know the
meaning of field exercises during the monsoon, with our horses up to
the belly in blue mud! The winds of all the world blow into Yasmini's
and out again. Our risaldar-major knows nothing at all of women--and
that is the danger. But he can listen to the wind; and, what he hears,
sooner or later we shall know, too. I smell happenings!"

Those three words comprised the whole of it. The squadron spent most of
the night whispering, dissecting, analyzing, subdividing, weighing,
guessing at that smell of happenings, while its risaldar-major,
thinking his secret all his own, investigated nearer to its source.


  Have you heard the dry earth shrug herself
  For a storm that tore the trees?

  Have you watched loot-hungry Faithful
  Praising Allah on their knees?

  Have you felt the short hairs rising
  When the moon slipped out of sight,

  And the chink of steel on rock explained
  That footfall in the night?

  Have you seen a gray boar sniff up-wind
  In the mauve of waking day?

  Have you heard a mad crowd pause and think?
  Have you seen all Hell to pay?




CHAPTER II


Yasmini bears a reputation that includes her gift for dancing and her
skill in song, but is not bounded thereby, Her stairs illustrated
it--the two flights of steep winding stairs that lead to her
bewildering reception-floor; they seem to have been designed to take
men's breath away, and to deliver them at the top defenseless.

But Risaldar-Major Ranjoor Singh mounted them with scarcely an effort,
as a man who could master Bagh well might, and at the top his
middle-aged back was straight and his eye clear. The cunning, curtained
lights did not distract him; so he did not make the usual mistake of
thinking that the Loveliness who met him was Yasmini.

Yasmini likes to make her first impression of the evening on a man just
as he comes from making an idiot of himself; so the maid who curtsies
in the stair-head maze of mirrored lights has been trained to imitate
her. But Ranjoor Singh flipped the girl a coin, and it jingled at her
feet.

The maid ceased bowing, too insulted to retort. The piece of
silver--she would have stooped for gold, just as surely as she would
have recognized its ring--lay where it fell. Ranjoor Singh stepped
forward toward a glass-bead curtain through which a soft light shone,
and an unexpected low laugh greeted him. It was merry, mocking,
musical--and something more. There was wisdom hidden in
it--masquerading as frivolity; somewhere, too, there was
villainy-villainy that she who laughed knew all about and found more
interesting than a play.

Then suddenly the curtain parted, and Yasmini blocked the way, standing
with arms spread wide to either door-post, smiling at him; and Ranjoor
Singh had to stop and stare whether it suited him or not.

Yasmini is not old, nor nearly old, for all that India is full of tales
about her, from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. In a land where twelve
is a marriageable age, a woman need not live to thirty to be talked
about; and if she can dance as Yasmini does--though only the Russian
ballet can do that--she has the secret of perpetual youth to help her
defy the years. No doubt the soft light favored her, but she might have
been Ranjoor Singh's granddaughter as she barred his way and looked him
up and down impudently through languorous brown eyes.

"Salaam, O plowman!" she mocked. She was not actually still an instant,
for the light played incessantly on her gauzy silken trousers and