Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  Smith shrugged slightly and turned away. “O.K.,” he said. “Volya vasha—you’re the boss.”

  A half-grown boy bolted headlong down the village street, feet ringing on the frost-hard ground. “Razbóiniki!” he shrieked. “Razbo-o-oinify!”

  At the feared cry—“Robbers!”—the inhabitants poured out of their dwellings like bees from a threatened hive, some snatching up axes, hoes, even sticks of firewood. No guns—one of Bogomazov’s first acts after he had restored the Soviet authority in Novoselye had been to round up all the firearms, a motley collection of Russian and other makes, and store them safely in a stout shed under the protection of the village’s only working padlock.

  The villagers began to huddle together, hugging the shelter of their houses and staring anxiously eastward, at the farther banks of the frozen river. The boy who had given the alarm ran among them, pointing. Everyone saw the little black figures, men and horses, moving yonder, pacing up and down the snow-covered shore; and a concerted groan went up as one mounted man ventured testingly out onto the ice and, evidently, found it strong enough.

  To make things worse, the penned cattle, upset by the tumult, began bawling. That sound would carry clearly across the river, and would whet the appetites of the razbóiniki. The Novoselyane shivered, remembering all the tales of villages overrun and burned, the inhabitants driven off or slaughtered, remembering too their own collisions with such troops of marauders—remnants of revolted army units, of mobs that had escaped the cities’ ruin, of dispersed Asian tribes—armed riffraff swept randomly together from Heaven knew where, iz-zá grańitsy, from beyond the frontiers even. . . .

  These razbóiniki were plainly numerous, and plainly, too, they were coming. Perhaps a hundred men, half of them mounted, were in sight, and on the skyline beyond the river the sharper-sighted glimpsed wagons, probably ox-drawn. The enemy were well organized, not merely casual looters. The Novoselyane gripped their improvised weapons—vaguely, frightenedly determined to show fight, but withal no more than sheep for the slaughter. A hulking young ex-factory worker mourned aloud, “Bozhemoi, if we only still had the machine guns . . .”

  Then Bogomazov came striding down the street, flinging commands right and left as he went, commands that sent the villagers scurrying into an approximation of a defense line. He swore bitterly, wrestling with the frozen padlock on the shed where the guns had been stored; he got it open, and, together with Ivanov, began to run up and down the line passing out rifles and strict orders not to use them until word was given.

  The mounted razbóiniki were approaching at a walk, in an uneven skirmish line across the ice.

  Smith stood watching, hands tucked for warmth—he owned no mittens—into the pockets of the tattered flight jacket he still clung to. As Bogomazov hurried past, cradling a sniper’s rifle equipped with telescopic sights, Smith remarked, “I used to be a pretty fair shot—”

  “Keep out of the way!” snapped the Communist. He dropped to all fours, crept out onto the open slope beyond the row of houses, and lay sighting carefully. Behind the line Ivanov scurried from point to point, repeating the orders: “Hold your fire, and when you do shoot, aim for the horses in front. They have fewer horses than men; and if an enemy can once be persuaded that the front line is too dangerous, he will shortly have no front line. . . .”

  The hollow sound of the hooves came nearer, clear in the hush. Then Bogomazov’s rifle cracked, and the lead horse reared, throwing its rider; the ice gave way beneath its hind feet, and it floundered. Guns began going off all along the line of houses as Bogomazov came wriggling back. The horsemen on the ice scattered, trotting and crouching low in the saddles, returning the fire. Bullets ricocheted screaming through the village, ripping splinters from walls and roofs.

  Some of the razbóiniki were busied dragging their wounded or foundered comrades and their mounts back toward the farther shore, but off to the right a handful of horsemen broke into a reckless gallop across the groaning ice, making determinedly for the low bank above the village. Bogomazov, rifle slung, started in that direction, beckoning some of the defenders from the firing line and bellowing to the others: “Fire only at the ones still coming! Save your cartridges!”

  The razbóiniki made the shore and bore down on Novoselye’s flank, whooping, urging their unkempt ponies to a dead run. They were heading for the corral, hoping to smash the stockade around it and drive the cattle off; but when they were almost upon their objective bullets started snapping among them. One man spun from his saddle and went rolling along the frozen ground, and a horse sprawled headlong, pinning its rider. The others’ nerve broke, and they wheeled and fled.

  Bogomazov walked out, pistol ready, to inspect the casualties. The man who had been hit was already dead. Bogomazov fired twice with cool precision, finishing first the gasping, lung-shot horse and then the rider who lay stunned beneath it.

  He told his men, “They may attack repeatedly. We will establish watches.”

  But the razbóiniki had had enough. After an anxious hour of watching the movements on the far side of the river, the villagers became aware that the enemy, horse, foot, and wagons, had reassembled in marching order and was streaming away southward. The Novoselyane laughed, wept with relief, and embraced one another; someone did an impromptu clog-dance in the street.

  Bogomazov entered the sooty one-room dwelling which, because of his occupancy, was known as the nach ál ’naya izbá, the “primary hut.” He breathed the warm close air gratefully, beginning to shed his mittens and padded coat. Then he stopped short as he saw Smith warming his hands by the stove, a rifle slung over his shoulder. “Where did you get that?”

  The American grinned. “One of the proletariat developed combat fatigue about ten seconds after the shooting started, so I filled in.”

  Bogomazov hesitated imperceptibly, then thrust his hand out. “Give it to me.”

  Slowly Smith unslung the weapon and handed it over. Bogomazov unloaded it, stuffed the cartridges into his pocket, opened the door of the izbá and called to a passing boy. “Here. You are responsible for delivering this rifle to Comrade Ivanov.”

  The youth hugged the rifle to him, looking adoringly at Bogomazov. “Yes, sir, Comrade General!”

  Bogomazov started to speak, checked himself, and closed the door.

  “So you’re putting the guns under lock and key again.”

  “Naturally. Ivanov is attending to that now.”

  The American raised an eyebrow quizzically. “In my country’s Constitution there is, or used to be, a provision safeguarding the people’s right to keep and bear arms.”

  “The Soviet Constitution contains no such provision.”

  “Today, though, we might have been overrun and massacred if the enemy had approached less openly, and hadn’t been seen in time for you to break out the guns.”

  Bogomazov sank wearily onto a bench by the fire and began unwinding the rags that served him as leggings. He said heavily, “Mister Smeet, you are neither a Russian nor a Communist, and you do not understand these people as I do. You had better leave administration to me, and devote yourself to those matters which you are expert in. . . . How is your work with the radio?”

  Smith shook his head impatiently. “Nothing there—I can’t raise any signals, maybe because there aren’t any. . . . But the question of the guns is a secondary one. The main thing is—what are we going to do now?” The Russian eyed him wonderingly. “What do you mean?”

  “I came here to speak to you because the attack today confirmed a suspicion that’s been growing on me for some time, ever since the first bandits raided through here in November. . . . Did you notice the organization these razbóiniki seemed to have? They were fairly well disciplined; they attacked from and fell back on a mobile camp, with wagons no doubt carrying their women and children, and with driven cattle. The population of their whole camp must be two or three times that of Novoselye.”

  “So? We beat them off. You saw that they proceeded south
; the winter is too much for them, whereas we will sit it out snugly in our houses, so long as order is maintained and rations are conserved.”

  “But they’ll be back in the spring.”

  “Perhaps. If so, we will be stronger by then.”

  “How stronger? We’ve very little rifle ammunition left, and before the spring crop comes in there’s going to be trouble with malnutrition.”

  “The marauders are subject to the same troubles. In Lipy, only fifty kilometers from here, there is a man who knows how to make gunpowder.”

  “I could make gunpowder, for that matter—but damned if I know where to find any sulfur. . . . You miss the point. The signs of organization we saw indicate that these people, wherever they came from originally, have succeeded in taking to a nomadic way of life—a permanently roving existence. They’ll be on us again next spring, without ‘perhaps.’ ” Bogomazov shrugged impatiently. “So, there are dangers. I am not losing sight of them. You had better concentrate on trying to establish radio communication.”

  The American said hotly, “You’re still blind to what this development means! You . . . Well, before this war some of our Western ‘bourgeois’ historians—naturally you wouldn’t have read their writings—saw human history as a long struggle between two basically different ways of life, the two main streams of social evolution: Civilization and Nomadism. Civilization is a way of life based on agriculture—principally cereal crops—on fixed places of habitation, on comparatively stable social patterns whose highest form is the state. Nomadism, on the other hand, has as its economic foundation not fields, but herds; geographically, it rests not on settlements, villages, towns, cities, but on perpetual migration from pasture to pasture; socially, its typical higher form of organization is not the state, but the horde.

  “Since written history began the boundary between Civilization and Nomadism has swayed back and forth as one or the other gained local advantage; but in general, during the historic period—really a very small part of the whole past of humanity—Civilization has been on the offensive. The last great onslaught from the nomad world was in the Twelfth Century—the Mongol conquests, which swept through this very region and brought about the period that your historians call the Tartar Yoke. By the Eighteenth Century the counterattack of Civilization had been so successful that the historian Gibbon—another bourgeois you probably haven’t read—could rejoice that ‘cannon and fortifications had made Europe forever secure against any more such invasions. It looked as if Nomadism was through, due to disappear altogether. . . . But Civilization went on to invent the means of destroying itself: weapons indefinitely effective against the fixed installations that civilized life depends on, but of little consequence to the rootless nomad.

  “And now—where are your cannon, your fortifications, your coal mines and steel mills, your nitrogen-fixing and sulfuric-acid plants? When you discount these raiders as nuisances, you’re still living in a world that’s just died a violent death. We no longer have the whole of Civilization backing us up; we’re on our own!”

  Bogomazov had listened with half-shut eyes, soaking up the fire’s warmth. “Then you think Civilization is finished?”

  “No! But I think that what’s left of it will have to fall back and regroup. You and we, the Americans and Russians—we fought our war for the control of Civilization, and very nearly wrecked it in the process; but on both sides we were and are on the side of Civilization. That’s what counts now. . . . What’s our situation here? According to the scanty liaison we’ve achieved, there are a number of other settlements like this up and down the river, scattered seeds trying to take root again. From the east, toward the Caspian, there’s no news at all, and westward, in the Ukraine, reports tell of nothing but wandering bands—the blights the planes spread interdicted agriculture throughout that region for some years to come.

  “In spring the razbóiniki will be on us again—and perhaps in the meantime their fragmentary groups will have coalesced into bigger and more formidable hordes. With their rediscovered technique of nomadic life, they’ll be expanding into the vacuum created by the internal collapse of the civilized world, as the Huns and their kindred did when the Roman Empire fell. . . . I think we have no choice but to migrate west as soon as the spring crop is in. This country here can no longer be held for Civilization; for one thing it’s too badly devastated, and for another it’s all one huge plain, natural nomad country. The Eurasian plain extends through Northern Europe, clear across Germany and France; we should move south to look for a more favorable geography. It might be possible to make a stand in the Crimea, but it’s said the radioactivity is very bad there; either the Balkans or Italy, with their mountains, should probably be our ultimate objective.”

  Bogomazov sat up straight, looking hard at Smith. He frowned. “You are suggesting—that Russia be abandoned to the razbóiniki.”

  “Exactly. That will be the result in any case: I’m suggesting that we save ourselves while we’ve got time.”

  The Communist’s eyes narrowed, with a peculiar glitter; he was motionless and silent for a moment, then he barked with humorless laughter. “You want to lecture a Marxist on history! I know history. Do you know that this is the very region where took place the events told in the Tale of Igor’s Host; the same region where Prince Dmitri Donskoi overthrew the Golden Horde? And you tell me to retreat from a handful of bandits! Do you know—”

  “I don’t see what the bygone glories of Holy Russia have to do either with Marxism or with preserving Civilization,” Smith interrupted drily.

  The other rose to his feet, rocking on them like an undersized but infuriated bear, and glared hotly at the American’s lanky figure. He shouted, “Will you be quiet, before I—”

  The door slammed open, letting in a cold blast, and in it stood Ivanov breathing hard. He gasped, “Comrade Bogomazov! There are two rifles missing!”

  In a flash Bogomazov was himself again, reaching for his coat. “Two? I’ll investigate, and whoever is trying to hide—”

  “Beg pardon, Comrade Bogomazov, but it’s worse than that. Vasya and Mishka-the-Frog—that is, Citizens Rudin and Bagryanov—are gone with the rifles.”

  “The young fools . . .” Bogomazov plunged through the doorway, still struggling into his coat. Smith followed more slowly; when he caught up, the Communist was in the center of a knot of villagers, furiously interrogating a shawl-wrapped old woman who was bitterly weeping.

  “Where did they go? Which way?” demanded Bogomazov.

  The old woman, mother of one of the missing youths, only sniffled repeatedly: “Ushlí a razbóiniki . . . they went to the robbers. . .

  The Communist wheeled from her in disgust, fists clenching uselessly at his sides. Smith said conversationally, “You’ll never catch them now. There you see the effect of another weapon in Nomadism’s arsenal.”

  “What in the devil’s name are you talking about?”

  “Psychological warfare. Those young fellows, finding guns in their hands and adventure in their hearts, deserted Civilization and its dreary chores for a more romantic-looking life.”

  Bogomazov grunted angrily, “Ideological nonsense! Russians have always run off to join the robbers. It’s in their nature.”

  “Exactly. As boys in my country used to head West in hopes of becoming cowboys. I wonder what’s happening in the American West now. . . . Men have always tended to rebel against civilized restraints and hanker after the nomad’s free, picturesque existence; and when the restraints are loosened, they may bolt.”

  “We can do without that pair. And you—” Bogomazov eyed the American stonily and spoke with deliberate emphasis. “You’ll not repeat these notions of yours to anyone else—understood?” Without awaiting any response, he turned on his heel and stalked away toward the nach ál ’naya izbá.

  Smith gazed somberly after him, knowing that further argument would be useless. The decision was made—to stand and fight it out here.

  Spring came with the
thunderous breakup of the river ice, with the sluicing of thawed water that made the prairie a trackless wilderness of mud for a time, with the pushing of new green everywhere on the vast rolling plains and, less densely, in the fields that last fall had been so painfully broken and seeded.

  Spring came with foreboding, that somehow waxed apace with the hope that returning green life wakens in all living. Smith had kept his ideas to himself; but the Novoselyane whispered among themselves. Those who had been city-dwellers had nothing but a formless and unfocused fear of the great windy spaces, the silences, the night noises of birds and water-creatures along the marshy river brim; but the peasants had their immemorial stories, raised up from the depths of a tradition as deep as race-memory, given new and frightening meanings. Over their heads had come and gone serfdom, emancipation, serfdom again under the name of collectivization, and finally the apocalyptic swallowing-up of the world of cities that they had never quite understood or trusted . . . and they remembered other things.

  They knew that in the old days the greening swells beyond the river had been the edge of the world, the Tartar steppe, out of which the khans had ridden to see the Russian princes grovel and bring tribute before the horsetail standards. The grandiose half-finished works of the Fifth Five-Year Plan were strewn wreckage there now, and it came to their mind that perhaps it was the Tartar steppe again. They remembered the ancient sorrows of the Slavs, the woes that are told in the Russian Primary Chronicle. They spoke darkly of the Horde of Mamai, which in Russian speech has passed into proverbs; and of the obry, whose name now means “ogres,” but who historically were the nomad Avars, that took to herding human cattle even into the heart of Europe. . . .

  When the Communists were not watching them, they studied signs in the flight of migrating birds and the cries of night fowl. Somehow all the portents were evil.

  There were more tangible reasons for alarm. News filtered in of settlements downriver raided and laid waste by wandering bands, whose numbers and ferocity no doubt grew mightily in the telling. Bogomazov succeeded in suppressing or minimizing most of these reports, but not all, nor could trailing smoke-smudges in the southern sky one bright afternoon be concealed. . . .