The Shaving of Shagpat - George Meredith (bookreader TXT) 📗

if thou art speedy in winning success.” The Queen was housed on an elephant, harnessed with gold, and with silken purple trappings; from the rose-hued curtains of her palanquin she looked on a mighty march of warriors, filling the extent of the plains; all day she fed her sight on them. Surely the story of her beauty became noised among the guards of her person that rode and ran beneath the royal elephant, till the soldiers of Mashalleed spake but of the beauty of the Queen, and Bhanavar was as a moon shining over that sea of men.

Now, they had passed the cultivated fields, and were halting by the ford of a river bordering the Desert, when lo! a warrior on the yonside, riding in a cloud of dust, and his shout was, “The King Mashalleed is defeated, and flying.” Then the Captains of the host witnessed to the greatness of Allah, and were troubled with a dread, fearing to advance; but Bhanavar commanded a horse to be saddled for her, and mounted it, and plunged through the ford singly; so they followed her, and all day she rode forward on horseback, touching neither food nor drink. By night she was a league beyond the foremost of them, and fell upon the King encamped in the Desert, with the loose remnant of his forces. Mashalleed, when he had looked on her, forgot his affliction, and stood up to embrace her, but Bhanavar spurned him, crying, “A time for this in the time of disgrace?” Then she said, “How came it?”

He answered, “There was a Chief among the enemy, an Arab, before the terror of whom my people fled.”

Cried she, “Conquer him on the morrow, and till then I eat not, drink not, sleep not.”

On the morrow Mashalleed again encountered the rebels, and Bhanavar, seated on her elephant, from a sand-hillock under a palm, beheld the prowess of the Arab Chief and the tempest of battle that he was. She thought, “I have seen but one mighty in combat like that one, Ruark, the Chief of the Beni-Asser.” Thereupon she coursed toward the King, even where the arrows gloomed like locusts, thick and dark in the air aloof, and said, “The victory is with yonder Chief! Hurl on him three of thy sons of valour.”

The three were selected, and made onslaught on this Chief, and perished under his arm.

Bhanavar saw them fall, and exclaimed, “Another attack on him, and with thrice three!”

Her will was the mandate of Mashalleed, and these likewise were ordered forth, and closed on the Chief, but he darted from their toils and wheeled about them, spearing them one by one till the nine were in the dust. Bhanavar compressed her dry lips and muttered to the King, “Head thou a body against him.”

Mashalleed gathered round his standard the chosen of his warriors, and smoothed his beard, and headed them. Then the Chief struck his lance behind him, and stretched rapidly a half-circle across the sand, and halted on a knoll. When they neared him he retreated in a further half-circle, and continued this wise, wasting the fury of Mashalleed, till he stood among his followers. There, as the King hesitated and prepared to retreat, he and the others of the tribe levelled their lances and hung upon his rear, fretting them, slaughtering captains of the troop. When Mashalleed turned to face his pursuer, the Chief was alone, immovable on his mare, fronting the ranks. Then Bhanavar taunted the King, and he essayed the capture of that Chief a second time and a third, and it was each time as the first. Bhanavar looked about her with rapid eyes, murmuring, “Oh, what a Chief is he! Oh that a cloud would fall, a smoke arise, to blind these hosts, that I might sling my serpents on him unseen, for I will not be vanquished, though it be by Ruark!” So she drew to the King, and the altercation between them was fierce in the fury of the battle, he saying, “ ’Tis a feint of the Chief, this challenge; and I must succour the left of my army by the well, that he is overmatching with numbers”; and she, “If thou head them not, then will I, and thou shalt behold a woman do what thou durst not, and lose her love and win her scorn.” While they spake the Arabs they looked on seemed to flutter and waver, and the Chief was backing to them, calling to them as ’twere words of shame to rally them. Seeing this, Mashalleed charged against the Chief once more, and lo! the Arabs opened to receive him, closing on his band of warriors like waters whitened by the storm on a fleet of swift-scudding vessels: and there was a dust and a tumult visible, such as is seen in the darkness when a vessel struck by the lightning-bolt is sinking⁠—flashes of steel, lifting of hands, rolling of horsemen and horses. Then Bhanavar groaned aloud, “They are lost! Shame to us! only one hope is left-that ’tis Ruark, this Chief!” Now, the view of the plain cleared, and with it she beheld the army of Mashalleed broken, the King borne down by a dust of Arabs; so she unveiled her face and rode on the host with the horsemen that guarded her, glorious with a crown of gold and the glowing Jewel on her brow. When she was a javelin’s flight from them the Arabs shouted and paused in terror, for the light of her head was as the sun setting between clouds of thunder; but that Chief dashed forward like a flame beaten level by the wind, crying, “Bhanavar; Bhanavar!” and she knew the features of Ruark; so she said, “Even I!” And he cried again, “Bhanavar! Bhanavar!” and was as one stricken by a shaft. Then Bhanavar threw on him certain of the horsemen with her, and he suffered them without a sign to surround him and grasp his mare by