Swords From the East (42 page)

In the shreds of mist Nadesha seemed like a floating wraith slipping over the snow. Just within the gate Billings sighted a large sleigh and recognized, by its gilded ornaments and pompons, that it was the one used by Kichinskoi himself.

Beside it the young Polish lieutenant sat his horse restlessly. Into the sleigh was climbing the plump woman who was Kichinskoi's mistress. Her maid, lugging bandboxes and shawls was trying to get in beside her. Not ten feet away stood the stocks, and from the frozen body of the imprisoned Cossack, two blind eyes stared at the tumult around the sleigh. The man had died in the night.

In response to Nadesha's call, three horsemen emerged from the dense shadows of the wall. They wore ragged sheepskin svitzas and nondescript black felt hats.

Billings, however, perceived that they were no peasants. He recognized the harsh features and immense shoulders of Norbo, Master of the Herds. Another was a youth of about Nadesha's age. The three evidently knew exactly what was expected of them.

Norbo spurred up to the Pole, who drew a pistol from a saddle holster, but not quickly enough to avoid a sweep of the club in Norbo's hand. The pistol was knocked into the snow, the Pole himself caught up, whirled from his mount, and flung to earth.

Meanwhile the other two had frightened off the two grooms with a flourish of bared sabers. Nadesha, as usual, had not been idle. Seizing the maid by the shoulders, the girl pulled her back, screaming like a wounded parrot. The bandboxes flew about, and the horses attached to the sleigh began to rear.

The German woman had risen, and the forward jerk of the sleigh tumbled her back. Nadesha wormed into the vehicle and fell to rolling the frightened fugitive out of it. Norbo rode up impatiently and put an end to this by leaning over and pulling the woman bodily out of rugs and sleigh. Nadesha screamed something up at the Tatar, who turned and looked at Billings.

The captain had come to a halt. One of the Tatars, the young boy, spurred toward him. Billings drew his sword.

"Alashan!" cried Nadesha, her voice shrill with fear.

Men were running toward them. The Pole, having rolled out from under the horses' feet, was shouting for aid.

The boy who had been called Alashan did not stop. He swung his saber slowly as he galloped. From the direction of the barracks came a ruddy flash and the roar of a musket.

Then Billings heard boots thudding in the snow behind him. He could not turn, for Alashan was almost on him. Something struck against the base of his neck, and a great crackling filled his ears. A red sea formed in front of his eyes. He felt a hand catch his arm; then all was darkness.

Above the roaring in his head persisted the shrill squawking of the fat woman who had been thrown in the snow.

Chapter III

Fight at Ukim Pass

Only for a moment can you say, "I am the slayer, he the slain." The shrill joy-cries of the women at your wedding change to lamentation at your death bed.

-Native proverb

In the year of the Tiger, by the Mongol calendar, Alashan was seventeen years of age. This was one year older than Nadesha. But the girl of Norbo, born of a Persian mother, grew swiftly to womanhood.

Alashan was still a boy, intent on sports and leader of a gang of Torgut rascals who tended the horse herds, racing the best of the beasts almost into the ground in their pastimes.

These other boys of the Torgut nobles were brawnier than Alashan. True, he could ride with a fiery eagerness that won him races; yet in the goat tamasha he could not hold his own, although he rode until his lungs labored and his heart rose in his throat. The goat tamasha, in which each rider tries to capture and keep from the others a live goat, is a furious test of an hour or more during which clubs and cracked heads are often the lot of the contenders.

"You are worse than a hair on the eyeball," Nadesha had assured him spitefully after one defeat. "How do you ever expect to be a man and kill an enemy when you can't even keep a goat in your hand?"

Life, for the Tatar youths in the age when the great clans were still intact, was an ordeal. In the stag-hunts they had to follow the grown men, often from sunrise to sunrise, without eating and without pause except to rest the horses. The wild-swine hunts by torch and moonlight, where thickets coated the valleys, were less arduous but more hurtful. Many an overbold stripling had the calves of his leg ripped apart by angry tuskers, and some were hamstrung.

Alashan's body was more delicate, his eyes deeper than usual. He was much given to hanging around the councils of the older men, even listening for hours to the whisperings of the lama-the priest from Tibet-who was very willing to inculcate superstition and fear into the mind of the future Khan.

So it was from a two-fold fear that Ubaka, his father, had sent Nadesha in his place, disguised as a boy, to Astrakan. He was afraid the Russians might influence the "queer" mind of his son against him.

"Nadesha is more of a man than Alashan," he had said bitterly to Norbo, who, being too blunt to lie, said nothing.

The Khan was a broad man, less muscular than Norbo, more ponderous, with the strength of a bull. He was not clever, and care sat upon him heavily.

"Listen, Alashan," he had said to the boy, "to the words spoken by the All-Conquering, the mighty monarch, Genghis, who when he christened our clan, spoke in this fashion: 'You shall be called the Giants;*
from birth your sons will have a sword in their hands, and they will die so; there will be no peace for you that is not won by blood and suffering. In the stars it is written you will be free men, until the hour of your passing; you are the Giants."

It was the longest speech Alashan had ever heard his silent father make. It lingered in his mind like the after-note of a bell.

"When you have proved yourself a man in the face of your enemies," the Khan added, "then you shall ride on my left side. Not now."

Often while he sat by the hearth in the wooden palace of his father on the steppe near Zaritzan, Alashan thought upon these words. So far, he reasoned, the words of Genghis Khan had proved true. The Torguts had migrated westward from China to keep their freedom. For a hundred and fifty years they had fought the battles of the Russians so that they might hold the steppe upon which their herds grazed.

For a hundred and fifty years the sword had been in their hands. What now? Alashan, while Ubaka was absent on the last campaign against the Turks and Nadesha away in Astrakan, listened to the talk of the women on the other side of the fireplace.

He heard that the levies of cattle and money paid by the Torguts to the Empress were to be increased. He himself had seen the forts going up around the territory of the Torguts.

When Ubaka rode home at the head of his men, Alashan waited in vain for a word of praise or reward from the Russians, and his anger grew. Ubaka became more silent.

One day Ubaka told Norbo to send for Nadesha, and called the Torgut council together. After long talk that the boy did not hear, a rumor sprang up on the steppe.

"We are going to the home of our fathers," the elder Torguts said.

Loosang Lama, the priest from Tibet, was consulted, and approved the plan for reasons of his own. The omens were taken from burned sheep's bones and found to be favorable for the undertaking.

Alashan was glad and hopeful. Although the weeks of preparation made the labor of the boys heavy, he looked forward to the setting out as a Moslem boy might await his first travel to Mecca. He mingled again with his cronies. They stole horses, on a dark night, from the hostile Baskirs-no easy feat, that. They dipped kumiss by stealth out of the big jars by the fire of their various tents and were blindly drunk for a while.

Then, to ease their spirits, they attacked a Cossack sotnik one moonlit night on the Volga. Nadesha put this idea into Alashan's head.

The girl had returned from Astrakan on a fine pony and with a brace of pistols that roused Alashan's immediate envy. She did not show the weapons to anyone else, confiding in the boy that they were "borrowed." So was the horse, Nadesha admitted, but she let Alashan ride it on his foray. She said there was something valuable on the sledge, and she dared him to take it.

To the Tatar boys the chance of seizing a sledge bearing plunder was a fine thing. To tackle Cossacks was a big order; but on the following day they would be riding away from the Volga, and without doubt they would all earn for themselves the name of warrior.

Despite Alashan's craft, they were seen by the Cossack guard and fired upon before they could approach. Keeping to the shadows along the riverbank, they managed to remain out of sight until one of their number was drilled through the head by a chance bullet.

That let loose the devil in the boys, who until then had planned merely to try to run off with the sledge when the Cossacks halted to make camp. They rode their ponies out on the ice and sent arrows swiftly into the soldiers grouped by the sledge.

A musket is not so easily aimed as a bow in the moonlight. Two more boys were knocked from their horses and died soon after, but the three Cossacks lay writhing out their lives on the ice.

Without a shout of triumph, and without plundering the victims, the Tatar youths made off with the sledge and were seen climbing the riverbank by fishermen roused by the shots.

"You are no better than a child," the Khan said to his son when Alashan was brought before him the next day. "Kai, it is so. When I would keep secret our march, you rouse the Cossacks to fury, and our foes the Baskirs you would bring upon our heels. Go!"

Alashan would not confess that Nadesha had sent him upon the Cossacks. When he sought out the girl in the bustle of their village, he found her preparing to go to Zaritzan with her father, in his stead.

"But I am not afraid," he cried.

"That is not enough."

She made a face at him, and to add to this insult took his best kaftan, carefully slitting the inner lining to make a place for the two pistols.

"I am more of a man than you; the Khan said it."

Nothing could have made Alashan more utterly miserable. He sat by the cold hearth of the great log building that did duty as a palace. Nadesha was fairly safe, for even Kichinskoi, Alashan thought, would not lay hand on the son of the Khan.

Then came Norbo with tidings of Nadesha's seizure. Taking pity on the boy's anxiety, the Master of the Herds allowed him to share in the attempt to rescue the girl the next morning. Nadesha had found time to whisper to her father that she would manage to be near one of the gates just before sunrise, and they had counted on the alarm caused by the conflagration to aid their escape.

For Ubaka, as soon as he heard the decision of Kichinskoi to take the Torgut sons, had given the order to burn all the Torgut villages.

"Raise the tugh," he gave command after seeing that his abode was fired. "We will go to our homeland."

Smoke was already rising on every quarter of the steppe; the animals were restless. But when the yak-tailed standard was lifted and the trumpets sounded, the young boys yelped with joy. They were the first to move, driving off the cattle: then came the women, on horse, with other beasts dragging the heavy wagons on which stood the skin tents.

Children raced about in the snow. Dogs barked. The jigits outriding shouted to other bands that appeared beside them on the white sea of the steppe. Axles creaked and horses neighed. It all merged in one vast, joyous murmur.

"The Ili!" women cried to each other and nodded as they whipped up the cattle drawing the wagons.

Ubaka Khan, grandson of Ayuka, sat with the armed men on their horses, waiting to bring up the rear. With steady eyes he was looking into a sunrise that, seen through the smoke, was the hue of blood. This ruddy glow tinged the brown faces that passed the Khan; it dyed red the tossing horns of the cattle. Two hundred thousand humans had burned their homes and were mustering for a march in the dead of winter over one of the most barren regions of the earth.

Even the trampled snow was a crimson sea. Smoke hung above the moving shapes like a shroud-a pall that disgorged black cinders and ashes. Ubaka Khan had never seen such a sunrise.

Behind him there was the sound of a soft, chuckling laugh. He turned in his saddle to see the immense, emaciated form of Loosang Lama at his elbow. The man's countenance was hidden behind a lacquer mask, halfanimal, half-human. A loose robe of the most vivid yellow hung slackly from a bare left shoulder, exposing the half of a wasted body, marked by knives and disease.

"It was your word, my Khan," whispered the priest, "that sent them forth. Do not forget."

Captain Minard Billings had been struck by the butt of a musket at the base of his skull, so that he lay long unconscious, heedless of his surroundings. When he opened his eyes-it hurt him to move them-nightmares were still racing through the back of his brain.

"Ferried across the Styx, by Jove! Lying in a cave with the shade of Hephaestus. Looking out on the procession of the lost and damned, at last."

He rolled his eyes to encompass the other side of the cavern-like abode.

"And that wench Circe sitting yonder with her court of beasts, poor gallants like me, egad! More of the beasts, horned and hoofed, laboring in front of the cave-brimstone in the very air."

At this muttering the figure of the woman rose and placed a cold, wet cloth behind his head and another over his eyes. Her hands were quick and tender, and smelled somewhat of cows. Billings subsided.

When he woke from a long sleep, he was shivering. It was colder than Hades had any right to be. When she rose from her corner to lay another sheepskin over him, Billings recognized that Circe was Nadesha, wrapped in a white kaftan made of the soft bellies of foxes. He saw too that Hephaestus was merely the grim and grotesque man who had led the rescue of Nadesha-Norbo, as he learned later.

The Master of the Herds was pounding at a steaming sword blade, on a small anvil. On a stone hearth between him and Billings a fire roared, filling the tent with smoke. Huddled as far as possible from the fire were a half-dozen odorous sheep. The tent, made of deer- and oxskins, was stretched over alder poles, the whole being mounted on a crude wagon drawn by ten brace of oxen.