An infantryman staggered down the lane bent under a brass-bound coffer. Ortho kicked out his foot; man and box went headlong. The man sprang up and flew snarling at Ortho, who beat him in the eyes with his torch and followed that up with menaces of his sword. The man fled and Ortho examined the box which the fall had burst open. It contained a brass tiara, some odds and ends of tarnished Fez silk, a bride’s belt and slippers; that was all. Value a few blanquils—faugh!
He left the stuff where it lay in the filth of the kennel, strolled aimlessly up the street, came opposite a splintered door and looked in.
The house was more substantial than those he had visited, of two stories, with a travesty of a fountain bubbling in the court. The infantry had been there before him. Three women and an old man were lying dead beside the fountain and in a patch of moonlight an imperturbable baby sat playing with a kitten.
An open stairway led aloft. Ortho went up, impelled by a sort of idle curiosity. There was a room at the top of the stair. He peered in. Ransacked. The sole furniture the room possessed—a bed—had been stripped of its coverings and overturned. He walked round the walls, prodding with his sword at suspicious spots in the plaster in the hopes of finding treasure. Nothing.
At the far end of the gallery was another room. Mechanically he strolled towards it, thinking of other things, of his debts in Mequinez, of how to feed his starved horses on the morrow—these people must at least have some grain stored, in sealed pits probably. He entered the second room. It was the same as the first, but it had not been ransacked; it was not worth the trouble. A palmetto basket and an old jellab hung on one wall, a bed was pushed against the far wall—and there was a dead man. Ortho examined him by the flare of his torch. A low type of chiaus foot soldier, fifty, diseased, and dressed in an incredible assortment of tatters. Both his hands were over his heart, clenching fistfuls of bloody rags, and on his face was an expression of extreme surprise. It was as though death were the last person he had expected to meet. Ortho thought it comical.
“What else did you expect to find, jackal—at this gay trade?” he sneered, swept his torch round the room—and prickled.
In the shadow between the bed end and the wall he had seen something, somebody, move.
He stepped cautiously towards the bed end, sword point forwards, on guard. “Who’s there?”
No answer. He lowered his torch. It was a woman, crouched double, swathed in a soiled haik, nothing but her eyes showing. Ortho grunted. Another horse-faced mountain drudge, work-scarred, weather-coarsened!
“Stand up!” he ordered. She did not move. “Do you hear?” he snapped and made a prick at her with his sword.