“The hakim speaks truth!” she laughed.
King turned about instantly to face her, but he salaamed so low that she could not have seen his expression had she tried.
“If Ye wish it, I will order him tossed into Earth's Drink after those other three.”
Muhammed Anim rose stroking his beard and rocking where he stood.
“It is the law!” he growled, and King shuddered.
“It is the law,” Yasmini answered in a voice that rang with pride and insolence, “that none interrupt me while I speak! For such ill-mannered ones Earth's Drink hungers! Will you test my authority, Muhammad Anim?”
The mullah sat down, and hundreds of men laughed at him, but not all of the men by any means.
“It is the law that none goes out of Khinjan Cave alive who breaks the law of the Caves. But he broke no very big law. And he spoke truth. Think Ye! If that head had only fallen into Muhammad Anim's lap, the mullah might have smuggled in another man with it!”
A roar of laughter greeted that thrust. Many men who had not laughed at the mullah's first discomfiture, joined in now. Muhammad Anim sat and fidgeted, meeting nobody's eye and answering nothing.
“So it seems to me good,” Yasmini said, in a voice that did not echo any more but rang very clear and true (she seemed to know the trick of the roof, and to use the echo or not as she chose), “to let this hakim live! He shall meditate in his cave a while, and perhaps he shall be beaten, lest he dare offend again. He can no more escape from Khinjan Caves than the women who are prisoners here. He may therefore live!”