Zarah the Cruel

by Joan Conquest

She had never failed to kill.

He looked down at Lulah’s hoof-prints and called to the stallion as he caressed the glossy neck. The mare’s hoof-prints showed deeper and deeper, and in two places where she had crossed her feet under the strain of a great fatigue. For speed she was renowned throughout the Peninsula, but in endurance the lowest hireling from the bazaar could beat her.

And behind her ran the greyhound which had never been known to fail in a kill.

He felt the stallion’s pace increase as he stroked the glossy neck; then, clutching the silvery mane, he swung, head down, listening to a sound which had come to him along the sand even above the pounding of the stallion’s hoofs. He swung himself erect and turned and looked along the path marked out by those who fled and those who pursued.

Led by the Patriarch, the men of the Sanctuary, stretched out in a line across the horizon, raced towards him. They rode with the lance at rest, and shouted as they rode, until the heavens were filled with the sound of their voices and the thunder of their horses’ hoofs.

There was no help to be sought of them.

They rode in the joy of the hunt, in the hope of a kill, just as they had ridden to the attack upon the white man’s camp, led by the woman who had revolted them at last with her tyranny, and who, in the secret places of their inconstant hearts, they hoped would die rather than the white man and the white woman who fled before her.

Then Fate jerked the strings which hobbled them all to their destiny.

Al-Asad, riding with his eyes upon the greyhound, looked up and ahead when Yussuf’s challenging cry came to him on the wind. Breathlessly he watched for an instant of time, then sat back and raised his spear as the mare stumbled and flung Zarah to the ground. In an unconscious effort to catch the mare he pulled the stallion to the left, then pressed the beast hard with his right knee, bringing it back to the path, and touched its neck with the tip of the needle-pointed spear, so that it leaped forward under the unexpected goad and hurled itself on the track of the greyhound, which tore like the wind to where the girl stood.

The half-caste just glanced at Yussuf and “His Eyes” as their dromedary suddenly left the path and sped away across the desert. He knew the dromedary was being driven along a circuitous route by which it would ultimately join up with the white people; he knew that Yussuf felt sure of his revenge and had left the end to the will of Allah; he felt no hatred in his heart as he looked after them, fleeing to the safety which was their birthright; he felt no anger as he raised his spear above his head, so that it glittered in the risen sun, and shouted the battle-cry as he drove the stallion to the rescue of the girl who stood alone, so far away, facing him and the greyhound who had never failed to kill.