Flora Annie Webster Steel

Oh clear the cushioned thrones from those who sleep
Preach thou the Truth, let the Untruth be dumb
Till gladsome voices once more fill both worlds
Freshen the universe--Be thou our soul
We are dead bodies. Bring us back to life
Thou art our guard, the caravan is lone.
Thou art our army, let thy standard wave.
Lo! the day steed is weary; the dim night
To all around us; bid thy seraphim
Herald the coming dawn, and wake us, Lord,
As helpless babes we sleep and sleep and sleep
Upon the threshhold of another world.

--Nizami.--A. D. 1140.

Birbal had been wakeful. The discovery of the second false gem had thrown him back on himself. At dawn all his energies must be turned toward making it impossible that the King's rash, almost incredibly rash challenge, should bring disaster on the policy of years; so ere that dawn came endless plans for the recovery of the missing jewel must be set in train. Then, if possible, he must find the juggler with men's senses, the man whose marvellous art had helped him before. There was a chance that King BayazÎd might know his whereabouts; so an hour or so ere daylight, all other things having been started, Birbal's swift-trotting bullocks drew up at the garden gate of the River Palace. All was dreamful as before. Here no lamps of the Dead shone in the wide arcades, only on the roof the light which burnt ever in Rupmati's shrine, showed the gaunt length of her lover asleep on cushions beneath it.

"The Sufi from IsphahÂn?" he said drowsily. "He who called himself the Wayfarer, pretended to be PayandÂr, and was musician! Yea! he left a message for thee--that his work was accomplished. He whom he watched was dead, the danger was overpast; therefore he went, whither I know not. Neither do I care. He sang me a ghazal ere he left--it hath a good lilt to it."

And Birbal as he ran down the stairs again, heard that same lilt of it ringing after him.

A broken glass that held the red-wine of Strife,
The corpse of a man, besprinkled with essence of rose,
A child asleep on the threshold of larger life,
Such is thy dawn-wake, lover who seeks repose.
Lend, for the Love-of-God, to my thirsty heart thy bowl,
So with the dawn-waked winds He shall refresh thy soul.

He muttered a curse on Sufi nonsense, and flinging himself into the rÂth again, bade the servant return cityward. So, after a while he dozed, seizing on time for sleep when naught else could be done. He was aroused by a sharp jolt, a sudden drawing to one side on the part of the driver.

"What is't, fool?" he queried, sharply.

"Protector of the Poor" replied the man "It is the King!"

He was on his feet in an instant, rubbing his eyes in the gray dawn-light in time to see a rider whirl past alone.

The King undoubtedly; but his escort? Was this all? An old man bent with service, dropping farther and farther behind, not so much from any fault in his mount, but simply from lack of riding.

That anyhow could be remedied.

"Your horse!" he cried, and the old servitor, a tall, bony Mahommedan, recognising Birbal instantly, recognising also the advantage of the slim Hindu in a stern chase, obeyed.

"What is it? Where goes he?" asked Birbal briefly, hands busy shortening stirrups.

"ShakÎngarh--to the burning. The Most-Auspicious slept when the madwoman--she who calls herself ChÂran came up in the Preacher's dhooli. Two horses are aye kept saddled in the yard below. The King was on Bijli in a twinkle, and I--there was none else--scrambled on Chytue shouting for some one to follow."

But Birbal had gathered up the reins and was off. Chytue lightened by the change of riders, sweeping on at a thundering gallop, lessening the distance at every stride between him and his stable companion.

Akbar looked round to frown; then to smile. "A race!" he cried gleefully. "How now Bijli?" The mare answering to the call shot forward like an arrow from a bow.

A race indeed! thought Birbal. A lost one, too, most likely, for the gray of the false dawn was passing into primrose.

How had they managed it--they must have killed the old man; and he would be burnt at sunrise, and then Akbar's promise to the little coward of a RÂni--oh! curse all women!--

Fifteen miles good, though in the far distance behind him the low, jagged ridge of Sikri loomed like a cloud. One by one the mud mounds which tell of village sites, rose out of the treeless western horizon, showed silent, lightless, smokeless in the half-light, then sank, dwindled, to join that shadow of the ridge. How many more of them must be passed before dawn ... before dawn ...

So thought the rider behind, cursing himself as he rode, for having forgotten this easy-broken promise of his King.

But Akbar, riding ahead, had forgotten anxiety in determination, and as, at a deviating curve in the track, he struck boldly across country, his every vein thrilled with joyful excitement.

The dawn was coming! Under his horse's flying hoofs the interminable sequence of sandy by-paths through the sun-baked fallows chequered with fields of young millet and maize, seemed to slip past. As the light grew, the purple eyes of the feathery vetches seemed to look at him tear-drenched with dew, the goldy-green balls of the colocynth apples as they cracked under the thundering feet gave out a bitter, bracing, wholesome smell.

Down in an old backwater of the river which held a few acres of damper ground, a flight of cranes rose, to wing a wedge-shaped way to the west.

"Oh! for the wings of a dove."

That was what PÂdrÉ Rudolfo sang.

Was that a spiral trail of smoke on the horizon? Aye; but from a village rubbish heap. After all, a funeral pyre was nothing more; a mere rubbish heap of accessories in which a soul had played its part.

The words of the Bhagavad-Gita recurred to his mind, bringing with them as they do to every human mind that knows them, a sudden sense of companionship, of hand clasping in the wilderness of life.

The pale primrose of the dawn was reddening fast. A few more minutes and the sun's edge would for half a second sparkle like a star on the rim of the world; and then, with the coming of sunlight, the King's Shadow, swifter than the King himself would speed ahead, lengthening out, reaching, touching all things before he, the flesh and blood, could touch them!

Ah! The Shadow was the real man! He glanced backward. He had come fast. No one was in sight. Following the whimsey of his thought he told himself it was always so. Behind, out of sight, almost out of mind, rode the world, in front the Shadow--the Will, the Ideal, the Unattainable.

Faint and far on the horizon a square speck of light showed the tower of ShakÎngarh, the Falcon's Nest. There was little time to spare then, for the sun shone on its battlements.

Little indeed! for as the gleam of the village clustering about the feet of the fortress rose to view, a sound of shawms and trumpets arose also. But there was no spiral of smoke as yet to tell of fire.

Bijli, responding to the spur, swept on over the more cultivated country. An old canal, dug hundreds of years before by some dead dynasty sent sinuous channels through the fields; high cactus hedges, shutting out the view, formed impenetrable barriers. With irritation at the delay, Akbar had to follow a winding cart track, deep-rutted beyond words--an old way--the old way that made reform so difficult!

The sun at last! Akbar's shadow sped before him, climbing the thorn enclosures, which at a sharp corner barred the way.

If he himself could but so override difficulties.

Ye Gods! Smoke!

Bijli, at racing speed, was round the corner in a second. Before her lay a mud wall, beyond that an open space, a dense crowd encircling a huge pile of wood.

As she rose like a bird to the leap, Akbar saw nothing but a smoking flaming torch in a man's hand.

"Hold!" he shouted "Akbar the King forbids it."

Bijli, over the wall, was treating the crowd, as she was given to treating a squash at chaugan with kicks and bites, and an instant after, Akbar slipping to the ground, stood stern beside the pile.

There was a murmur of sheer surprise; but Akbar had no eyes for anything but the dulled, drugged, acquiescence of a girl's face as, dressed in bridal finery, she sate on the funeral pyre with an old man's head upon her lap.

"Unloose her! let her go!" came the order, bringing consternation; yet also relief. For half ShakÎngarh knew the greed of land and gold which led to this enforced suttee. Briefly, the young wife had powerful friends who would claim her full widow's share; therefore she must die.

But a buxom woman, deep-breasted, arrogant, had seized the arrested torch from her husband and was brandishing it fiercely; for being wife to the old profligate's eldest son she had everything to gain by this getting rid of a rival.

"King?" she echoed, "By thine own word only! And even so King of men only! We women claim our right! She shall not be defrauded of it! Our father shall not go to the realms of Yama unattended."

"Then go thyself, woman," retorted Akbar peremptorily. "Thy part is done. Thy breasts have given suck to grown sons. Hers await an infant's lips! At thy peril, fool, or on thine own head be----."

He started forward to seize the torch she was in the act of thrusting into one of the firing places that were ready filled with resins, oil, and cotton wool.

To escape him she leaped nimbly to the pyre and with outstretched arm sought another feeder of the flames. As she did so, something that had lain like a withered branch moved and shot arrow-like at her bare ankle.

"Snake! Snake!"

Her yell of ultimate fear rang out and was caught up by the crowd. The torch dropped recklessly, she was down on her knees rocking herself backward and forward.

"A judgment! A judgment! Let her burn!" The cry of the crowd merged instantly into condemnation; but Akbar had leaped after her, dispatched the cobra--which hidden in some hollow log had doubtless crept out for warmth when the first sun rays had touched the pyre--and crushing out the torch flame with his heel, had his mouth on the woman's ankle.

To no purpose. Even in that brief second the poison had reached the heart, and after a few moans of agonised fear, merciful drowsiness invaded heart and brain, she breathed slowly and yet more slowly.

Akbar stood up and looked about him dazedly. This instant response of Providence in his favour filled him with exulting awe. The almost fanatical enthusiasm for himself, for his ideals, which so often possessed him, seized on him; and Birbal, riding up in weary haste, found him the centre of an enthusiastic crowd who, granting him supernatural power, were busy substituting a dead woman for a living girl, while the latter sate stupidly in the sunlight watching the flames blaze up round another victim with that burden of an old man's head upon her lap.

Anyhow, the promise was unbroken; but Birbal, as he rode back behind Majesty, told himself there was trouble ahead. Such incidents were not wholesome, especially when every effort must be made to keep the King down to practical politics. So little might make him break away.

"So, Shaikie, hath lost one chance of Love," said Akbar, suddenly, when after a long and silent ride, the towers of Fatehpur Sikri showed clear again.

"And Empire hath gained many chances of stability," replied Birbal drily. "With grandsons of RÂjpÛt descent, Majesty may hand on the crown, when God's time comes, in security."

"Of what?" asked Akbar swiftly. "That my dream will be fulfilled--the dream of a King." And then suddenly he almost drew rein. "The woman must be rewarded, Birbal--she who came, God knows how, to warn me. I would not have her escape reward."

"As Majesty has bidden her act ChÂran at the Festival to-day," replied Birbal, still more drily, "there seems small chance of her escaping notice."

The King's face broke suddenly into charming, whimsical smiles. "Of a truth, friend! I must be a thorn in the flesh even to thee; and to those others. God knows how they bear with me."

"Or how they will bear with her," acquiesced Birbal, grimly. For all his liberal culture, his boasted freedom from prejudices, he was conventionality itself in somethings, and it irked him to think of a woman masquerading as a ChÂran.

And yet Âtma Devi looked her best when a few hours afterward she knelt on the floor below the short flight of steps on the second of which the Emperor sate on the royal yellow satin cushions, while the throne, a marvel of gold and gems, occupied the highest step. Her long black hair, unbound, encircled by a steel fillet, fell like a veil over her shoulders, but left her bosom half-hidden by a man's steel corselet bare. A cuirass of steel chains hanging below the corselet covered the muslins of her woman's drapery, and her shapely arms, strenuous under the weight of the huge straight sword, held hilt downward, balanced it straight as a die, steady as a rock, point skyward.

In truth, the whole scene was magnificent beyond compare. The ordinary reception was over, but there was to follow one of the great episodes of the gorgeous yearly round of splendid yet curiously imaginative festivals, which marked Akbar's court. That is to say, the Emperor having challenged his court to play chess with him, was to play the game with the living chessmen who stood duly ranged on the huge chequered board of black and white marble which still exists at Fatehpur Sikri, just beyond the flight of steps which leads downward from the Hall of Audience.

So Akbar alone, the empty throne above him, occupied those empty steps at the foot of which his challenger crouched. Opposite, on the other side of the marble board the court, a blaze of colour and gems--save for a knot or two of Ulemas in their dark robes--stood ranged; while between them, immovable as statues, waited the living chessmen. The very horses of the knights, black and white, scarce moved a muscle, and the unwieldy masses of the elephants, which in the Indian game do the bishop's duty looked carved of stone. Black and silver, white and gold, each and all ablaze with black and white diamonds. The pawns (peons, footmen) cased in gold or silver armour each carried a pennant in black or white velvet embroidered in gold or silver; and the great castles or forts--also of gold or silver--were worn as corselets by huge giants of men, who each held aloft a royal standard of the RÂjpÛt sun or the crescent moon of Mahommed.

Overhead the hard, blue Indian sky; as a background rose-red palace or grass-green trees; and through it all insistent, never ceasing, like the shiver of cicalas on a summer's night a low tremor of muted strings, and deadened drums.

"Challenge for the King, O ChÂran!" came Akbar's voice and on it, almost clipping the last sound, followed a blaring clang, as the great steel sword sweeping forward hit the marble floor. The sound echoed and re-echoed through the arches, almost confusing the wild chant borne upon it.

A faint shiver ran through the crowding courtiers, and Birbal standing in a group composed of the King's greatest friends and allies, looked round anxiously. As a rule these contests were foregone conclusions. To begin with, the King was undoubtedly the best chess-player in his dominions; then as a rule the games were generally of the most jejeune description--mere spectacles of games. But to-day some new interest seemed to make the spectators' faces sharp, and though he could scarcely see how even defeat could be construed into such failure as Akbar had meant in his challenge, he felt vaguely uneasy.

"Thinkst thou they mean mischief?" he said to Abulfazl.

The latter smiled. "Mischief? not they! Mirza IbrahÎm hath as ever, forwarded the schedule and the King hath seen it"--he laughed,--"'Tis an irregular opening, but the onslaught is trivial--an elephant's charge----."

He paused, interrupted by the herald on the other side who took up the challenge on behalf of the Emperor's court.

Birbal looked over to his master. He could scarce tell why, but he was not satisfied. To begin with, that master's eyes were too dreamy. Had he perchance heard that Prince SalÎm, seeking consolation from Love, had been found drunk in Satanstown that morning? As like as not; some of those sour-faced holy ones of set purpose had told him.

Ah! if the next few days were but over. If this RÂjpÛt betrothal had but gone so far that there was no drawing back!

How many hours yet were there before this gnawing anxiety lest he should be overreached, and the King overpersuaded, should be past?

Akbar, nevertheless, showed intent enough upon his game. He was leaning forward his head on his hand, rapidly and in a low voice, calling out each move to the figure beneath him. And, ever, almost ere the tone ended, came that clash of steel on stone, that high strident cry "OhÍ! The King! peon to rukh's fourth" and so on.

Yet in truth Birbal was right. Akbar was preoccupied. The morning's ride, with its hint of omnipotence, had, naturally enough, roused his physical and mental vitality to the highest pitch, and so dissociated him still further from his surroundings, and brought back the old question, "Why should he cling longer to the ancient pathways?" Being a King, accredited by God, seeing the truth clearly, why should he not cast aside old shackles, cease to attempt immortality through his unworthy sons, and achieve it for himself, by himself alone?

And something had happened that very morning which had almost driven from him all hope of one son at any rate. Not the escapade in Satanstown of which he had, of course, been informed. That was bad enough, bringing with it, as it did, scorn of a love which could so solace itself. No! it was not that! It was this: He had seen, being carried to a hospital almost lifeless, the body of a slave brutally beaten by SalÎm's orders, before SalÎm's eyes, and the sight had forced from Akbar's lips the bitter question as to how the son of a man who could not see God's littlest creature suffer without pity, could be so barbarous?

Would it not be better to give up the struggle?

All this was in Akbar's mind, as half-mechanically, working as good chess-players can with a portion of their intellect only, so that they can carry on many games at one and the same time, he marshalled his forces swiftly in these opening moves.

And now the board was clearer. Behind it on either side stood a long row of prisoners. The final onslaught was at hand.

"It is an elephant's attack" murmured Abulfazl and then checked himself--"they have changed it!" he exclaimed louder as the court herald cried.

"Ghorah (knight) to badshad's (king's) seventh."

"Wherefore not?" sneered one of the Mahommedan faction who stood hard by. "There be many alternatives in a game of chess."

Birbal looked hurriedly round him. There was evident eagerness on the very faces where he expected to find it; aye! and there was anticipation in many more. Then he glanced at the board, seeing in an instant that this move altered the whole defence: but even as he recognised this, and recognised that an answering change would make it strong as ever, the ChÂran's cry rang out.

"Badshah's rukh takes wazir" (Queen).

Akbar had let the move slip--had evidently been in a dream, was still in one! Yet it would need skill now to extricate himself for by God! he, himself, had not seen that before! It would be checkmate in two moves if the rukh were moved. The only defence--what was the defence?

"Wazir's rukh takes peon."

Inexorably the Court-herald's voice echoed through the arches and out into the garden. It was followed by a little tense murmur from the crowd.

Ye Gods! what was the defence? Ghorah to---- No! that was fatal. The king of course! The king one step backward and the game was won!

Would Akbar see it?

His attention had anyhow been aroused. He had leant forward, his elbow on his knee, his brows bent. The question was--how much of his mind had been withdrawn from dreams.

"He is not here!" murmured Abulfazl hurriedly, "but surely they cannot----"

"They can and dare all," interrupted Birbal "Oh! devils in hell."

For clear from the King's lips came the words, "Ghorah to----"

This time, however, that clang of steel on stone blurred the closing tones of the King's lips and the ChÂran's rose on it clear.

"Badshah to his eighth."

Birbal gasped, the King started, the courtiers stirred swiftly. But Birbal's quick wit was the first to recover from surprise.

"Repeat the move, O ChÂran of JalÂl-ud-din Mahomed Akbar, Emperor of India! It hath not been fully heard!"

Instantly the clang repeated itself, and the words followed high, strident, unmistakable.

"By the order of the King, badshah to his eighth."

"But we protest," cried the MakhdÛm-ul'-Mulk, finding voice, and Akbar rising, looked angrily downward and prepared to speak.

"Great sire!" interrupted Birbal advancing on the very board itself--"we protest also against disorder. A ChÂran's voice duly challenged, is the voice of the King. Naught can alter it, save treachery. Where is the treachery here? He speaks that which he hears. Question the woman. Ask her what she heard?"

A great wave of sudden curiosity swept over the King's mind. What would this woman say? So far Birbal was right. She could be punished for treachery--but----

"Speak, Âtma Devi, ChÂran of Kings. What didst thou hear?" His voice was strangely soft, but so clear that it could be heard by all.

There was not a quiver in the straight-held sword of steel, no tremor in the firm mouth that gave the answer.

"I heard what I spoke!"

There was an instant's pause; she sate motionless, her face impassive, the half-shut eyes gleaming coldly out at all the world. Then Birbal laughed, a quick cackling laugh.

"The move is played, messieurs! Answer, it if ye can!"

And then he looked admiringly across at Âtma Devi; in truth she was man indeed, in woman's--nay! by the Gods! she was man altogether--a man amongst men; for that was checkmate--checkmate to the King's enemies.