Nash finally got the castle for one month, two hundred and fifty dollars. He paid, and Franchetti dug out a pair of bronze keys big enough to choke a horse.
"Fina," said Franchetti, wringing Nash's hand."And now excusa me, please. This gentleman is await' for me to keel him." He bowed Nash out, and behind him Prosper could hear the clang of blades resume where it had left off.
Back at the dock Nash found quite a crowd, still keeping a respectful distance from the barges. He called the harem up on deck and marshaled them."We'll march three abreast. Line 'em up, Alicia. You and I and Hamid will lead; he'll tow the cat and toot the horn when the crowd gets in the way. Put your veils back on, girls. Yes, you'll need 'em all right, all right. Ready? Let's go!"
Hamid, the slave who was Smiley's keeper, blew a blat on the horn. Nash drew his sword and started."Out of the way, please! One side there, everybody!"
The crowd of loafers hastily made room for the padding saber-tooth, behind whom came the triple file of Arslan's wives. The column was broken in six places; in each break a slave trundled a wheelbarrow flanked by a pair of Alicia's Amazons. The ape and its keeper brought up the rear.
The singular procession crawled up the narrow streets of St. George toward the New Brighton hills, about a mile off. The natives dropped whatever they were doing to watch. There were no hostile moves; a blast from Hamid's horn or a sniff from Smiley's nostrils was enough to open a lane.
But there were plenty of comments."Sucha beautiful soldiers! Are they men or wom'?"
"I wonder whatta they got in dosa box? Bricksa?"
"Haha, looka da monk' at da end! Hey, monk', you wanta some mon'? OH!"
The last was from a sword-girt gentleman in trunk hose and a round, flat-crowned hat. Kulu shot out a long rust-colored arm and snatched the hat, which he calmly took apart with his teeth.
"Signor," said an insinuating voice at Nash's elbow, "Coulda you spare me one littla dima? I am so poor and you are so richa—"
The vagrant, a handsome, humorous-eyed fellow, looked far from starving. But Nash, who was a sucker for such appeals, handed over the requested alms. In one minute flat, there were twenty beggars trotting alongside, all shouting at once.
Nash stood it as long as he could, then in his best attempt at a burr cried: "Get oot, all o' ye, before I whup ye wi' ma claymore!"
The mendicants looked at one another, shrugged, and went their ways.
Chapter XI.
"It looks," remarked Alicia, "as though it ought to be haunted."
Nash agreed. The place he had rented was not a real castle, but a square two-story brick mansion with small windows, towers at the corners, and crumbling battlements to give it a period look. Nash started to get out the keys Franchetti had given him, then observed that the front door sagged half off its hinges.
"I wonder who that is?" asked Alicia.
Nash looked."Probably the haunt." The person in question was an ominous-looking figure in a robe and hood, who stood at a little distance silently watching them.
A nearby bell went bongggg, bongggg, and the cowled figure turned and walked swiftly toward a group of low gray buildings.
"I remember now," said Nash."Franchetti mentioned a monastery, and I guess that's it. Hamid, help me with this door."
Nash wondered who among mundane persons would imagine a monastic astral body for himself. The astral bodies he had met so far seemed to run to the proud, the fierce, the rapacious, and the uninhibited: hardly the sort of people who would make good monks.
Franchetti, he decided, had robbed him, after he observed the warped floor boards, the sagging stairways, the shattered windows, and the scanty and broken furniture. Not that an extra fifty or hundred out of the sultan's hoard would make much difference: it was the principle of the thing.
Still, the place had a huge stove and an equally impressive icebox, and a broom closet holding half a dozen brooms in various stages of decrepitude. Alicia Woodson whooped when she saw these, and pressed them into the unenthusiastic hands of six of her co-wives."Get to work!" she shouted.
"Now," said Nash, "what do we need to live here for a week or two?"
Suggestions were poured over him by all the harem talking at once. He rounded up the slaves, doled out money, and sent them off, one to buy food, another firewood, another ice, another some hardware beginning with a hammer and nails, and so on. Before the first slave returned, Smiley began to roar loudly with hunger, and when a slave did appear he was immediately sent off to buy six quarts of blood.
Nash frantically tried to keep track of everything in his notebook, and the continuous gabble of three hundred and some women nearly drove him crazy. Then he was forced out of the house altogether by the choking clouds of dust raised by the brooms. Alicia rushed about like a cross between Brunhilda and Simon Legree, finding jobs for all the women and pouring loud contumely on those who flagged.
By late afternoon Nash had repaired the door and pasted paper over the broken window panes and nailed down the loose floor boards and glued legs on chairs and caulked the well bucket. Alicia found him sprawled supine among the weeds of what passed for the lawn.
"Prosper," she said, "I... are you tired?"
"No. I'm dead."
"All right, corpse, before you fade out I've got a job for you."
"Go 'way."
"No, really. There's no bedding in the place to speak of. Louise said that the monastery took a lot of paying guests and would have some. So I sent Cleo over to borrow mattresses and blankets, but do you know, when she knocked on the door a monk opened it and took one look at her and slammed it in her face! I'll bet they aren't real monks at all, but a gang of Satanists or something."
"More likely he feared for his immortal soul," groaned Nash, rising."O. K., I'll go."
A monk with his hood thrown back answered Nash's knock; looked carefully at Nash, and said: "You are he who is installing his... uh... seraglio at our very doorstep! What have we to do with such a one?"
"Not -at all!" cried Nash."They're perfectly good girls whom I rescued from a paynim's captivity." He added details.
"Oh," said the monk in a changed tone, "that is different. Come in, my son, and I'll see what we can do. I am Brother Benedict."
When Nash got a better view of Brother Benedict's face, he was sure he had seen it somewhere else—perhaps in a newspaper. He knew that if he dug deep enough through his mental files he'd be able to— Sure enough!
"Brother Benedict," he asked, "is your last name Wilcox?"
"It was."
Nash chuckled. Brother Benedict's mundane counterpart was Harry Van Rensselaer Wilcox, an ornament of cafe society who had been divorced six times, sued for breach of promise four, and thrown out of half the night clubs in New York.
Half an hour later he had his bedding. It would go round—almost, if the girls tripled up. At that Nash feared that the loan would leave some of the monks sleeping on cold stone. But once he had enlisted their sympathy, they would not take "no" for an answer.
Back in the castle Nash found smoke bringing a stench of burning food from the kitchen.
"One of the girls got careless with her beans," explained Alicia."I told off thirty of them to cook."
"Can they?"
"Some can't. But if I started asking, they'd all say they couldn't."
After dinner Alicia said: "You look pretty cheerful for a man who was half dead a couple of hours ago. What's your plan?"
"Gosh, I'm too tired to work this evening. I'm going to have fun."
"Oh, good! What?"
"See that ledger I had the boys get? Well, I'm going to count our money, and open a complete set of books for the estate of Arslan Bey, with every nickel's worth of expenditures and receipts in the right account!"