Golden Blood Read Free

five with me were brave men, and I came back alone, though not altogether empty-handed. The evidence I spoke of.”
    Moving with a certain cat-like ease, despite his gross bulk, Jacob Garth opened a locker and brought Price a roll of parchment—a long, narrow strip of cured skin, dry, cracked, the writing upon it fading with the centuries.
    “A bit faint, but legible,” said Garth. “Do you read Spanish?”
    “After a fashion. Modern Spanish.”
    “This is fair Castilian.”
    Price took it with eager fingers, unrolled it carefully, and scanned the ancient characters.
    “Mayo del Año 1519,” it was dated [May, of the year 1519].
    The manuscript was a brief autobiography of one Fernando Jesus de Quadra y Vargas. Born in Seville about 1480, he was forced to flee to Portugal at the age of twenty-two, as a result of circumstances that he did not detail.
    Entering the maritime service of King Manoel, he was a member of the Portuguese expedition under Alfonso de Albuquerque, which seized the east coast of Arabia in 1508. There, becoming for the second time involved in difficulties that he did not describe, he deserted Albuquerque, only to be immediately captured and enslaved by the Arabs.
    After some years, having escaped his captors, and not daring to return to the Portuguese settlements, he had set out, upon a stolen camel, to cross Arabia, in the direction of his native Spain.
    “Great hardships attended me,” he related, “for want of water, in a heathen land where the true God is not known, nor even the prophet of the infidel. For many weeks I drank naught save the milk of my she -camel, which fed upon the thorns of the cruel desert.
    “Then I came into a region of hot sand, where the camel died for want of water and fodder. I pushed onward on foot, and by the blessing of the Virgin Mary did come into the golden land.
    “I found refreshment at a city beside groves of palms. In most hellish idolatry did I find these people, who call themselves the Beni Anz. They worship beings of living gold, which haunt a mountain near the city, and dwell in a house of gold on that mountain.
    “These beings, the golden folk, took me captive to the mountain, where I saw the idols, which are a tiger and a great snake that live and move, though they are of yellow gold. A man of gold, who is the priest of the snake, did question me, and then tear out my tongue, and make me a slave.
    “For three years did I labor in the mountain, and by the mercy of God I slew my guard with his own sword of gold, which I have with me. Once more with a camel provided by the goodness of the Virgin, I went toward the sea, along a road that is marked with the skulls of men.
    “Again thirst has pursued me, and the evil power of the golden gods. The camel is dead, and I am a cripple; so I can never leave these mountains, in which I have found a spring. In this cave I shall die, and I pray that the vengeance of God shall fall soon upon the golden land, to purge it of idolatry and evil.”
     
    Price sat staring at the dry and brittle parchment, trying to fill out in his imagination the epic of desperate adventure that its faded letters outlined. The old Spaniard must have been made of stern stuff, to do what he had done, and to dress the camel’s hide and make ink and write his memoirs—driven by some obscure impulse of egotism—even after he had resigned himself to death.
    Garth’s deep voice broke the spell: “What do you think of it?”
    “Interesting. Very much so. But it might be a forgery, of course. Plenty of old parchment to work on.”
    “I found that,” said Garth, “near a human skeleton, in a cave in the Jebel Harb.”
    “That doesn’t answer my objection.”
    Garth smiled, grimly. “Perhaps this will. It would not be easily forged.”
    He went back to the locker, and drew out the yellow blade. Wondrously it scintillated in the dim cabin; the ruby blazed hot in the serpent’s mouth. A gem-set, golden yataghan!
    “Look at this!”