Lord Byron's Novel Read Free Page A

dagger or short sword beside. He never had occasion to discharge this piece, having no powder given him along with it—and this was likely to have been a lucky thing, as in that country such old weapons—though finely worked upon the stock in silver—were often neglected in their barrels, and locks—and commonly burst—or burned the hand that used them.
    Thus armed in manly wise, and having a firm compact with his Iman, he went to the han to seek out the old shepherd, who was in his eyes the rule and wisdom of his world, and finding him among the men around the common fire, told him that it was his intention to have the girl for his wife.
    ‘That you cannot,’ said the old one, responding as gravely as he had been demanded of. ‘For she is your sister.’
    ‘How is it she can be my sister?’ Ali responded. ‘My father is unknown, and who my mother was, that matters not.’ Indeed it mattered much—to him —who that lady might have been—and in his throat there came a catch when he made this bold dismissal—he must rest his hand upon his weapon, and set his feet apart, and lift his chin, so it would not be noticed; but in the legal sense he was correct, and the old man acknowledged it with a nodding of his head: no inheritance comes through the mother alone.
    ‘And yet she is your own clan and kin,’ said he to Ali. ‘She is your sister still.’ For among those clans of Albania’s mountains, brother and sister can name any blood relation in the same generation, and a connexion in the tenth or even the twelfth degree is forbidden. And now round the fire those who sat on the men’s side—and those on the other side spinning their distaves—had taken notice of Ali’s suit, and he heard laughter.
    ‘I will have no other, I say, and so says she,’ he said in a big voice, at which the laughers laughed the more, and nodded and puffed their pipes, as though delighted that one so young should kick against the pricks,—or because they thought it a great jest that such a claim should be asserted, which never could be made good. Ali thereupon—knowing himself for the first time mocked because he knew not the world’s ways—which were not his own —looked upon them all in anger, and—lest he weep—turned on his heel, and went out, pursued by further and louder cackles of glee; and for a time he would speak to no one, and answer naught when spoken to: even if it were Iman herself.
    A little later he received a mark of distinction different in kind from those he bore already. On a certain night he was taken among the women, and the eldest beldame laid bare the boy’s arm, and with her best and sharpest needle—the old shepherd guiding her hand with his words—she punctured repeatedly the skin of Ali’s right arm. The blood welled darkly at each small wound, and yet the boy grit his teeth—and would not cry out—and at length was formed there a rayed circle, and within it a serpentine mark that might be seen to be a sigma —tho’ for sure not by those unlettered folk. The old woman, humming and clacking with her tongue to soothe the boy, daubed the place now and again with a clout of lamb’s-wool, and studied her work as any craftsman might, and here deepened and there enlarged—till Ali nearly fainted—though no complaint had yet escaped his lips. Then finally his tormentor took a pinch of gunpowder, and rubbed it in the pin-holes she made—let whoso has had gunpowder by any chance touch an open sore bethink him what Ali felt then, as the beldame’s thumb pressed the stuff in, and rubbed it well, and mingled it so with flesh and blood as to color it forever. Then—as we see on the limbs of the sailors of all nations, not excepting our own most civilised one—there was impressed upon Ali’s right arm a mark that (supposing the arm remained attached to the body, a thing not to be regarded as certain in that land, or among those people) could never be erased. A common thing it is indeed in those