Swords From the East (43 page)

Billings groaned and shut his eyes. This was no nightmare. He was stiff and weak, and shooting pains ran up into his skull, but his brain was cool. Nadesha surveyed him with all the insolence of ownership and made him drink some mixture in a bowl-mare's milk and wine, seasoned with sugar and pepper. He coughed and swore under his breath.

"So," she exclaimed angrily, "you let a milk-guzzling boy and a Russian yak stretch you full length in the dirt. Pah, I am ashamed that I took such pains with you, my fine captain."

"I did not expect an attack from the castle. Who knocked me down?"

"As I said, a Russian soldier. He ran out from Kichinskoi's door. When Alashan and Norbo had hauled you into the sledge beside me-and what a mess you made of Alashan's blue! -I heard the pristof himself call out for his men to take you prisoner. Alashan cut down the man who hit you, and we got away with only a little fighting because the mist was still heavy on the river, and the patrols thought it was Kichinskoi's fat woman in the sledge.

"Kai, you stupid milord, Kichinskoi would have made of you fine bait to drag across his trail. True, he hired you to make him a map, I have heard it said. But now his own bones will be summoned to the Empress's rack, and he would have said that you conspired with us and he caught you, and perhaps they would have pulled your joints apart instead."

It was significant that Nadesha thought of the Russian government in terms of the knout and the strappado and the rack.

"Was that why you carried me off, Nadesha?"

"Partly. I want you to do something for me, too. You must do it."

"Hum. Seems to me I'm always doing something for you, Nadesha. Where's my pony that you promised me? Confound it, you've got my sword now!"

He had just seen it, hanging, with the brace of pistols, on the tent wall over Nadesha's corner.

"You are my anda, Captain Beel-ing. I keep the weapons or they would be stolen. Here is your pony."

She pulled back a segment of the skin wall, a kind of adjustable window, and Billings saw his horse in a small herd driven beside the yurt by a Tatar rider.

"Here are your treasures."

Like a magpie with a cache to be exhibited but not touched, Nadesha flitted over to where she had made a temporary couch-Billings was occupying her own bed. Throwing aside the skins, she disclosed a number of bags that Billings recognized as those containing his personal kit, his spare stock of paper, powder, and tobacco. Also the sandalwood box in which he kept an astrolabe, spirit level, compass, globe, dividers, and rule-all his paraphernalia for observation and drafting. Nadesha had been using it as a pillow. Billings grunted with joy and then winced with pain because he had moved.

"What do you want me to do?" he muttered.

"You are a prisoner," she assured him. "This morning thirty Russians blundered into our line of march and were slain because the Cossacks are following and our men were frightened. Where we are going we can take no Christians. You would be left for the wolves if I did not take your part. Do you understand?"

Billings understood very well, but said nothing.

"I want you to make a map," declared the girl.

He waited.

"Is it true, my anda, what men said in Astrakan, that you can look at the sun and the stars and take your instruments in your hands as a lama takes his bones and prayer roll, and tell on what spot of the earth you stand? Eh?"

"It is true."

"Then you know tenni-kazyk, the polar star, and jitti karaktchi, the great bear, and all the others. You can tell what lies ahead and on each hand, just by looking at the sun and the stars."

"True."

"Kai-that is wonderful. Then you must draw a map of the road that we take. It was for that I brought you here."

"Where are you going?"

"To the lake that is Balkash, from which the river Ili flows."

Billings looked up in surprise. This, then, was the route that Kichinskoi had planned for him. The map was the one he was commissioned to make.

"Then make the map, and watch always if we are journeying truly toward Balkash. If our march turns aside, tell me of it. But do not speak to anyone else, or Ubaka Khan himself could not save your life."

Now the Armenian merchant of Astrakan had described to Billings the location of Balkash, which was known to the caravans, as the lake was large, a sort of landmark of Central Asia. The caravan routes from China to Russia passed along it, and, turning south, those to India and Tibet.

"I shall need accurate information brought in daily by riders who have been out to the north and south," he hazarded.

Nadesha clapped her hands.

"Verily, our line of march is wide, very wide, so that the horses can all graze under the snow, and fodder for the cattle can be had. The Torgut clans stretch to the north and south ten miles, and outriders go twenty more on each flank. Some hunters, questing for game, go much farther. Aye, they shall bring in reports to the Master of the Herds. I shall arrange it."

"And what is your part of the bargain-my anda?" he forced himself to ask.

"First promise you will make the map, and tell me if we turn away from the road to Balkash."

"So long as I am with your tribe, I will do it."

"Good. Then I can promise that when we reach Balkash you will be set free with horse, weapons, and goods and followers to take you where you wish." Seeing the man's face set stubbornly, she added: "Captain Beel-ing, you are in the heart of the Tatar Horde. If you escaped from this clan-the Wolf clan of Norbo-you would have to pass through a score of others on the steppe. Then you would fall into the hands of the Cossacks and be taken before Kichinskoi, who sent a soldier to strike you down before his gate."

Billings said nothing. He knew as well as Nadesha that the frightened pristof would leave no stone unturned to avert from himself the deadly anger of the Russian Court at the loss of the Torguts. A good case, as it happened, could be made out against him. Billings had no friends to use influence on his behalf. Mitrassof might speak a word for him-but Mitrassof was, if Nadesha's information proved correct, now in the field against the Torguts.

In common with Kichinskoi, Billings did not believe that the great tribe could escape beyond the reach of the Russian armies. By the time they were headed off and turned back to the Volga, Billings might be able to communicate with Mitrassof, if he stayed with the Torguts. He glanced around the dark tent odorous with smoke and sheep, and set his teeth, resolving at the first opportunity to seek word with the ataman rather than endure months of this prison on wheels. Meanwhile, he would work at his chart. It would give him something to occupy his mind.

"What makes you think," he asked, for this puzzled him, "that your Khan and his riders may turn aside from the road to Balkash?"

Nadesha glanced out of the opening at the entrance of the yurt. No one was at the front of the wagon. She had fancied she heard a slight movement nearby. Leaning her dark head close to the prone man, she whispered: "From here to the river Yaik, and from there across the steppe to the great river Torgai, we know well the way. Beyond there we have only the tales of our fathers and the wisdom of Loosang, who knows all things, who came from the temple of the lamas in the mountains to the south of our road. I have heard old riders of the steppe say that devils are in those mountains-devils with faces of beasts who fall upon the caravans and carry off women such as I."

A shadow crossed the girl's face.

"Tchu-I fear to go among the long, cold mountains. I want to go to the river Ili where the sun smiles on the hot grass."

Billings laughed at this child-like confidence, but Nadesha looked up with a start. She had heard the flap of the tent that served as window drop into place. The strip of skin was still moving. Darting to the entrance, she crawled out to spring to the ground and look about. She saw only the herd of horses and its driver.

On the other side of the yurt, his teeth set and his eyes savage, Alashan spurred away, plying his whip as if one of the thousand devils had climbed up behind him. Nadesha and the son of the Khan had been betrothed in childhood. The bride-payment had already been added to the herds of Norbo.

Unless one of the two fathers should declare Alashan unworthy of the bargain, the beautiful girl would belong to him. Now he had seen her black head pressed against the yellow mane of the giaour, the outlander. He had heard talk in the yurts that Nadesha had made the stranger her anda. He had come to ask the girl whether or not this were true. What he had seen would lead Alashan inevitably to fight Billings and if possible to kill him.

Now, when the chains of winter tightened upon the steppe, all life, human and animal, crept out of sight. The cold was intense, although the sky was clear and the sun's touch fell full on the deep blanket of snow that it could not soften.

In the fir belts, animal life kept together instinctively-elk, and the following wolf packs that ranged from forest to river. Even the rivers were motionless, ice coating their surfaces. Yet across this frozen world moved a black river. It was a stream of fur-clad humans, and as village after village was met with and the smoke of them left behind, the column grew to an army, the army to a horde.

The sound of it became a never-ending mutter, compounded of the groaning of hard-driven beasts, laboring wagons, and toiling men. And this muttering horde of men, going as no people had gone before, was unwonted. It broke, as one might say, the chains set about the steppe; it challenged the wilderness. Before it, as if in mute evidence of this, the elk herds, the wild swine, even the panthers fled out of its course.

But behind it the wolf packs began to gather, tearing to pieces the cattle and horses and sheep that fell by the way.

"A whole people has gone mad," men who had come to look at the moving columns from a distance said. "They will go to their graves like beds."

Others, Cossacks examining the trail of the Horde, pointed out the forbidding signs of hoof marks mingled with the tread of human feet and the black embers of fire in the isolated hamlets the clans had passed over.

These Cossacks of Mitrassof, as well as the Polish regiment, were closing in on the Torguts. The head of a viper, cut off from the body, still retains its poisonous fangs: Kichinskoi, in the last agonies of mortified conceit and dread, had ordered Mitrassof to take up the pursuit of the Horde and to cut to pieces any clan that refused to return with him to its residence on the Volga.

Shortly thereafter the doors of a prison cell closed on Kichinskoi, and before the end of that winter he died. But Mitrassof had his orders, and he carried them out. General Traubenberg also was moving across the Volga with a heavy force of infantry and artillery; but unlike the Cossack he took his time prudently, and when he did come up, it was upon the scene of the disaster at the Ukim.

Although the Horde made the distance from the Volga to the Yaik, three hundred and fifty-odd miles, in ten days, Mitrassof caught up with the rear guard of two clans on the near side of the Yaik.

Carrying out his instructions, he attacked the Yeka Zukor clan when it refused to surrender to him, and his veteran cavalry swept over the Tatars of that tribe. Disheartened, the other clan gave up and returned to the Volga.

This defeat caused the Horde, which had counted on a week at the Yaik to rest the beasts, to move forward again in spite of the loss of nearly half of their cattle from overdriving. Ubaka Khan had no means of knowing how near the main Russian army was to Mitrassof.

The Cossack colonel was a born leader of cavalry, and he saw his chance to deal a second blow. Ubaka was heading for the Torgai, more than a week's march. To gain the river he must cross the Mugojar Mountains, and for the space of some two hundred miles north and south there was only one suitable pass for a multitude. This was the Ukim Pass.

Mounting picked Polish cuirassiers-the armored ladies, of Tatar description-on camels and sending with them his own advance guard, Mitrassof gave orders to press ahead with all available speed, to gain the Ukim, where a few hundred men could hold the gorge against as many thousands. Drawing reinforcements from a Cossack post on the Yaik and patching up his wounded as he went, Mitrassof came after his advance, circling the Horde.

And then the steppe called a halt. Snow set in, and a storm kept Cossack and Tatar alike in their tents.

The storm had driven the Torguts into shelter, and Billings was working at the outline of his map, sketching from a week's observation. He had stretched a square of scraped leather over a wooden frame and was laboring under a single candle, when Nadesha slipped in, shaking back the drift from her hood.

The yawning man-servant who stood guard over the weapons of Norbo and Nadesha blinked as the girl moved into the light and studied the parchment over Billings's shoulder.

"They are coming to slay you," she observed. "They say they will rip the skin from your body and put it upon a tugh."

She turned and gave a quick command to the Tatar, who stumbled out of the yurt, wide awake for once. Billings laid aside the dividers in his hand and looked from Nadesha to the sword and the brace of pistols hanging over her corner.

"Do not think of that, my anda," she smiled, following his eye. "The long pistols will go off twice-pang pang-and then you might draw your sword, the one that you cherish. They would pull down the tent and drag you out by your feet and trample you."

"Who are coming?"

"A crowd of fools who are beside themselves because they have been swallowing smoke and listening to the talk of Loosang. My father is away at the sarga-the council called by the Khan. The mob has had no toil today, so they have guzzled kumiss and their ears are open to evil. They want blood for the blood the Cossacks have shed, and Loosang has told them you are a spy. The lama has seen you making calculations with the needle that points always toward tenni-kazyk, the polar star."

Billings wiped dry the goose quill he was using as a pen. Then he covered up his map. Since the fighting on the other side of the Yaik, he had noticed that the Tatars no longer treated him with indifference. They had grown morose, and those who observed him walking among Norbo's henchmen spat and muttered to each other. Norbo himself was moodier than usual. Men and beasts were hard-pressed. The Tatar boys had lashed the cattle and goaded the oxen to make them keep up, and each day thinned the herds. Occasionally he had seen bodies, twisted and frozen in the snow. The dogs no longer ran barking beside the wagons. They gathered in packs and fell upon the cattle that could not keep their legs.