Complete El Borak (Pulp Heroes and Villains) by Robert E. Howard Read Free Book Online Page A

no more scintillant than her eyes.
     
    Instant recognition blazed in those eyes, despite his native garments. She caught him in a fierce grasp. Her slender arms were strong as pliant steel.
     
    “El Borak! I knew you would come!”
     
    Gordon stepped into the chamber and closed the door behind him. A quick glance showed him there was no one there but themselves. Its thick Persian rugs, silk divans, velvet hangings, and gold-chased lamps struck a vivid contrast with the grim plainness of the rest of the temple. Then he turned his full attention again to the woman who stood before him, her white hands clenched in a sort of passionate triumph.
     
    “How did you know I would come, Yasmeena?” he asked.
     
    “You never failed a friend in need,” she answered.
     
    “Who is in need?”
     
    “I!”
     
    “But you are a goddess!”
     
    “I explained it all in my letter!” she exclaimed bewilderedly.
     
    Gordon shook his head. “I have received no letter.”
     
    “Then why are you here?” she demanded in evident puzzlement.
     
    “It’s a long story,” he answered. “Tell me first why Yasmeena, who had the world at her feet and threw it away for weariness to become a goddess in a strange land, should speak of herself as one in need.”
     
    “In desperate need, El Borak.” She raked back her dark locks with a nervously quick hand. Her eyes were shadowed with weariness and something more, something which Gordon had never seen there before--the shadow of fear.
     
    “Here is food you need more than I,” she said as she sank down on a divan and with a dainty foot pushed toward him a small gold table on which were chupaties, curried rice, and broiled mutton, all in gold vessels, and a gold jug of kumiss.
     
    He sat down without comment and began to eat with unfeigned gusto. In his drab camel’s-hair caftan, with the wide sleeves drawn back from his corded brown arms, he looked out of place in that exotic chamber.
     
    Yasmeena watched him broodingly, her chin resting on her hand, her somber eyes enigmatic.
     
    “I did not have the world at my feet, El Borak,” she said presently. “But I had enough of it to sicken me. It became a wine which had lost its savor. Flattery became like an insult; the adulation of men became an empty repetition without meaning. I grew maddeningly weary of the flat fool faces that smirked eternally up at me, all wearing the same sheep expressions and animated by the same sheep thoughts. All except a few men like you, El Borak, and you were wolves in the flock. I might have loved you, El Borak, but there is something too fierce about you; your soul is a whetted blade on which I feared I might cut myself.”
     
    He made no reply, but tilted the golden jug and gulped down enough stinging kumiss to have made an ordinary man’s head swim at once. He had lived the life of the nomads so long that their tastes had become his.
     
    “So I became a princess, wife of a prince of Kashmir,” she went on, her eyes smoldering with a marvelous shifting of clouds and colors. “I thought I knew the depths of men’s swinishness. I found I had much to learn. He was a beast. I fled from him into India, and the British protected me when his ruffians would have dragged me back to him. He still offers many thousand rupees to anyone who will bring me alive to him, so that he may soothe his vanity by having me tortured to death.”
     
    “I have heard a rumor to that effect,” answered Gordon.
     
    A recurrent thought caused his face to darken. He did not frown, but the effect was subtly sinister.
     
    “That experience completed my distaste for the life I knew,” she said, her dark eyes vividly introspective. “I remembered that my father was a priest of Yolgan who fled away for love of a stranger woman. I had emptied the cup and the bowl was dry. I remembered Yolgan through the tales my father told me when I was a babe, and a great yearning rose in me to lose the world and find my soul. All