Page:Weird Tales Volume 13 Number 1 (1929-01).djvu/71

assault, trampling over the heaps of slain to ram the city gates.

The rear was formed of a noisy, straggling mob—camels and baggage-carts and the riffraff of an army; soothsayers and astrologers, mendicants and dancers—a looting rabble.

On Moti, the huge war-elephant, rode Aparajita the Princess. Against her lover, minded to leave her in safety, she had turned rebellious. Facing him, splendid in chain-mail blazoned with the sun-emblem, she had cried mockingly:

"Nay, but I come with thee! Am I the first woman of the Rajputs to follow her lord to battle?"

So she had prevailed, and climbed to the rocking howdah, where Banna the Dwarf might shelter her with his leathern buckler.

At noonday battle was joined upon the sun-parched plain before Kamber. Great was the slaughter, but from the first the fortune of the day was with Jai Singh. Word had gone forth of who had been his father, and Raja Nal Singh's troops had little stomach for the fight.

For a time the battle swayed; swords clashed, and man ripped man with the dreaded "tiger's-claw," while twanging war-bows clouded the sky with arrows. Then a rumor flew through the ranks that Raja Nal Singh, desperate of victory, lay dead within his citadel, slain by his own hand. Outflanked and driven in upon the fortifications, the enemy turned and fled, pursued by shouting horsemen.

The trumpets blared the call for the final onset. Jai Singh, sheathing his dripping blade, climbed to his lady's side. Moti, the elephant, wallowed across the moat to a patch of firm, dry land before the fortress gate.

There arose, then, imminent danger to the princess. Arrows were raining from the battlements, rattling on leathern bucklers, bristling in the howdah-front like quills upon a porcupine. Ahead was the massive, heavy-timbered gate, studded with iron spikes which Moti dared not face. In vain his driver strove to urge him forward, prodding behind the ear his steel-shod goad. Swinging his trunk, Moti searched this way and that, but nowhere could he find even a truss of grass to serve for a forehead-pad against those threatening barbs.

From the battlements the arrows still rained down.

"Banna!" the princess called; "is there no way to force for us the gate?"

For a moment longer Bauna stayed perplexed. Then, with the laugh of a brave man facing death, he gave her answer.

"There is a way, oh my Princess!" he said.

They watched him leap from the howdah, shout to Moti an order; too late they understood his sacrifice! The slate-gray trunk shot out, coiled round that valiant body, heaved it aloft for a brow-pad, obtained a purchase! The soul of Bauna the Dwarf joined the souls of the warrior-heroes in Surya-loka—and the gate crashed open!

The sun was setting when Sattya-murti reached the bluff above the sacred river. It was the hour for his evening meditation.

And whilst he stood there, scanning the distant hills, there slunk from the darkened mango-grove behind him one of the fleeing soldiery, a lowering giant, his garments stained with blood. He halted, and with opium-reddened eyeballs glared at the saint.

"A curse on thee!" he snarled, "thou meddlesome old crow! But for thine interference, Jai Singh, the upstart, had been dead ere now, and I not masterless!" His hand whipped to his sword-hilt.

Sattyamurti turned to him, his arms flung wide.