by Harold Lamb
She was saying something to him, but Nial did not understand a word. And Ivan Aglau was past heeding a girl, as he lurched away with an oath.
“Nial Sahib,” said the dry voice of Afzel Bahadur, “they are breaking up the rifle cases to get more wood. Shall I order them to cease?”
“Why?”
“The rifles will be destroyed.”
Nial got to his feet and walked out toward the fire.
He felt Alai Bai, tugging at his arm again. Anxiously, her face peered up at him. Of them all, he thought, she had the best chance to live. He sat down by her, to wait.
“Ailak," she said, “ailak." Pointing around her, and to herself.
Nial’s sleep-drugged mind caught at a word he knew. Ailak, a summer pasture. He had heard that before.
So he nodded and smiled at her, and she seemed content. Once she touched his hand, and drew away shyly. While the light lasted, she kept stealing glances up at him. And he wondered why her eyes were so clear, her face flushed—almost pretty. And he wondered again why she had come after his detachment.
The hand of the senior N. C. 0. touched his shoulder. “Nial Sahib—”
“Yes, Afzel Bahadur, it is time. Can’t wait any more, can we?”
It was time, he knew, for that last futile gesture.
Nial forced himself to make the gesture fittingly. With the Pathan, he kicked the sleepers back to consciousness. And he instructed the Turks how to make a horse-litter for Vogel out of canvas and poles.
“Sorry we haven’t any more brandy, Major,” he apologized.
But Vogel was muttering to himself in German, as they laid him in the litter, covering him with blankets and canvas.
Only at the last, Nial remembered the gold and searched for it. The five yak-hide chests had vanished. Nor was anything to be seen of Ivan Aglau.
Nial stationed Afzel Bahadur at the rear of the close-packed column, with the most fit of the Pathans. When he took the lead and moved off, with his back to the wind, he could see nothing but the horse beneath him, and the vague mass following.
Until a rider passed him and took the lead. Nial reined forward, and found it to be Alai Bai. He motioned her back, but after he started again, she edged ahead of his horse.
This time he let her go. After all, she had a right to choose her own way.
“Luck to you, Alai Bai,” he muttered, as he reined in, flashing on the electric torch to look at his pocket compass. He had to hold it close to his eyes, for the snow swirled up, like smoke, in the glow of the torch.
When his eyes became accustomed to the murk again, the blur of Alai Bai and her pony was still just beyond the nose of his horse. At intervals she turned her head to look back at him—until the wailing shout of Afzel Bahadur came down the wind, calling for a halt.
“She is riding her own horse,” said the Pathan, when he had come up and found the girl there. “By Allah, that pony may find its way back to its own place.”
“Not over mountain passes,” Nial muttered. “Not in a storm. . . .”
"THE spirits spared him,” explained Alai Bai, kneeling at the feet of her father, Toghrul Khan, by the fire of his yurt. “Ay, the white men fought on our summer pasture of last year. But the curtain of snow came between them, and they could not make thunder with the guns. Very angry were the spirits, because of the guns. They brought sickness to the white man who was a magician, and sleep to him”
“Allah,” observed Toghrul Khan, “is great and merciful.”
“Ay, my father. Only a few of them died on the way down. I led them by the way of the beasts, through the upper valley. And by the Pass of the Last Sheep, over the frozen river, where they found brush for a fire. Over the Thieves Pass, into the forest where they ate and slept the second day.”
“Yes,” nodded Toghrul Khan, “that is where our herds grazed. That is the way we came down from the ailak.”
“Then, because the spirits were satisfied, the storm ceased. But the Cossack went away alone, with three horseloads of gold, toward the ice ravine, where only a fool would go.”
Toghrul Khan grunted. He was pleased. After the spring thaw he would find those loads of gold.
“All white men are fools,” Toghrul Khan decided. “These two, who are alive and at peace, could rest and grow fat here for a whole winter—”
“Yes,” Alai Bai breathed.
“But they will go back to their war as soon as they can mount a horse.” . . .
When the fever left Major Vogel, Nial ordered his men, on the first clear day, to take to the southern trail. When they were mounted, he said farewell to Toghrul Khan, and he went on foot with Vogel to the round yurt of Alai Bai. They stopped at the entrance, looking in.
The girl did not wear her Chinese robe of festivity; she had not put on the sable furs of the snow road. She lay stretched on the earth, weeping.
For the white Khan had come to the Taghdumbash, and he was going away without asking for her. He had not spoken her name to Toghrul Khan. Yet he had said once that she pleased him.
“Confound it,” Nial said, “I can’t thank her properly,”
Hearing his yoice, Alai Bai turned away her head, so he would not see her grief.
The German smiled, buttoning up his overcoat. “She’s taken a fancy to you, Herr Captain. Kiss her, and give her something.”
He went up to Alai Bai, took her damp hand and kissed it ceremoniously. She was looking at Nial, who put his arm about her. She felt his lips touch hers and she closed her eyes.
“I haven’t anything, Major—”
“All women are alike,” said Vogel, “everywhere. Give her some money.”
“Right,” said Nial.
Taking the wallet from his breast pocket, he pulled from it all the paper notes it held. But Alai Bai drew back, looking into Nial’s eyes.
“Doesn’t know what they are,” said Vogel. “Doesn’t understand how many dresses they’ll buy her.”
“Alai Bai,” said Nial. “Altyn—gold!”
He pressed the notes upon her. She looked at the crisp, engraved paper and her face brightened. Timidly, she took them.
“You see,” Vogel laughed, “women are the same—everywhere.”
WHEN the white men had disappeared down the trail, Alai Bai went back to the treasure she had hidden in her jade box.
She dressed her hair carefully, and put on the peacock gown, kneeling by the fire. Taking out the first banknote she looked admiringly at the writing, that was finer than the written prayer of the lama.
Putting it on the glowing embers, she prayed that the ghosts would always safeguard the life of the white Khan. And a gray wisp, floating up through the smoke, indicated that the ghosts had heard.
The Wizard's Eye
I WAS shooting ducks over the lake when I saw Kam the first time. Ill swear he wasn’t there when I started down from the road. By the time I’d missed three flights of wild ducks, he was sitting within a pebble’s toss, looking at me. Just looking.
This was in the pre-war days, when I explored the western edge of the Gobi Desert for traces of the ancient civilization now buried under its encroaching sands. Mine was a one-man expedition, attempting to ferret out one of the secrets old Asia has locked away underground. I had only fair luck that time. Found a mixture of broken pottery, and a few bits of stone carvings.
These things happened as I tell them here. I do not pretend to explain them. But this I do know: In the elder world there was a power and a magic far greater than anything modem science can produce—and Kam was of that world
So I was hauling out my stuff, in a two-wheeled cart, over the Imperial Chinese highway—this being a line of ruts that would bring you out, if you were lucky, to Hami and thence to Peking, as they called it then.
We’d stopped by Sairam Nor, a long brackish lake lying high in the mountain ridges, to take a shot at the ducks. I had Afzal with me, a bright young half-caste, who served as driver and interpreter. He’d left
the cart, and come down into the high grass to watch me shoot. Firearms always fascinated him.
When I blazed away for the third time, he shouted and pointed at a flat rock that had been empty a moment before.
“Hi, Meester—look out!”
Kam was sitting on the rock. And I left the ducks in peace to go over and inspect him, because I’d never seen anything like him before. He sat motionless, cross-legged. He wore some kind of long deerskin coat, hung all over with tiny iron dolls. A snakeskin tail, spotted black and white, curled out behind him. He had a collar of owl’s feathers, and his head was covered with an iron cap, with two small deer’s horns sticking out.
“Don’t touch him,” Afzal begged excitedly.
I wondered why the boy, who had nerve enough, should be afraid of this old native. Kam had the broad, high-boned face of a Buriat-Mongol. His skin was withered and lined, and he wore two squirrel tails for eyebrows. Under them, his small dark eyes glittered up at me.
“He is shaman," Afzal explained, backing away. “Bad. Ve-ry bad.”
A shaman, I knew, was a native conjuror and seer. A kind of sleight-of-hand expert. Chased devils out of the natives’ tents, and out of the natives themselves. Of course these aborigines believed that any sickness was caused by devils getting into them. I’d heard that these shamans collected fat fees and lived high. They were ancient and powerful and tricky.
That was what I’d heard. And some of it was right. You can judge for yourself.
“He is one hundled and ten year old, Meester Elli-son,” Afzal chanted, backing away, “and he undlestan you talk, me talk, evely one talk. He is bad like Number One devil. He is kam.” He paused, helpless. “How you say it?”
“Magician,” I suggested, “wizard.”
“Bogha kam!”
“A great wizard.”
“Gr-reat wizard, yes.” Afzal had learned his English in a mission school, and seasoned it with scraps from the bazaars. But he made it very clear that he was afraid of Kam. “Hai, yes, he belong deer people.”
I stared at the wizard of the deer tribes, who, it seemed, understood all languages. Although his face was etched with lines, his eyes were clear and he didn’t seem to be half one hundred years old. Afzal could lie fluently.
“You try him,” the boy cried from a distance.
“WHAT'S your name?” I asked the shaman.
The black eyes gleamed under the squirrel tails, as if he were amused. “Kam,” his deep voice said.
I asked the same thing in Persian. “Esm-i shuma, chist?”
This time he smiled, as if he understood me perfectly. Although it was hardly probable that a shaman who lived among the human and four-footed cattle in these hills would be acquainted with Persian and English, both. He looked jolly enough to smoke a pipe.
While I pondered, I ejected the shell from my shotgun.
Then Kam made a remark of his own. It was great harm, he said, what I did with that fire staff. His words were measured, slow.
“All I want,” I replied, “is a duck for dinner. And so far I haven’t got one.”
More than that, he said. More than you think. The harm will be in the breaking of your gods. And after that, people making war upon people. . . .
It struck me as strange. But I didn’t think much about it then because I had just noticed the horn on his knee.
The horn was a single piece of bone, about as long as his arm. But it wasn’t ordinary bone. An elephant’s thigh-bone wouldn’t have made half of it—I’d seen enough of skeletons to know that much. This was a monster bone, of the elder world.
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
HE HAD a curious voice. Vibrating. Almost like an echo, but pitched very low. Sometimes it seemed to come out of his coat, and sometimes out of the air. His eyes were fixed on mine intently, as he explained.
His words, also, were peculiar. They told me how he had found that bone deep in the earth when the sky fires were dancing—he must have meant the northern lights—how he had summoned it out of the ground, and first a gigantic tusk appeared, then the black bulk of a monster coming up out of the ground, into the air. ... A mammoth, I thought.
You know the carcasses of these mammoths are often found preserved by the cold, in the ground of the far northern tundras. Still, it was quite a picture Kam drew for me, of that mammoth rising out of the ground, while the sky was aflame.
“Will you sell it?” I asked.
Kam looked amused, and turned his back on me. I supposed the horn was his pet prop, and he didn’t want to part with it. So I said goodby and left him. It was too late to bother about ducks any more, and Afzal was waiting in the cart, eager to be off.
I looked back once. Kam was still on his rock, facing the water of the lake in which the far snow peaks were mirrored. Then we turned a corner, around an ancient deserted Chinese watchtower, and the lake disappeared.
And I knew what was bothering me. Kam had told me quite a bit, but in what language? I couldn’t remember. It had not been English. What then?
One thing was sure. I had little knowledge of any vernacular of Central Asia. So Kam must have spoken some European language pretty fluently. Somehow, I couldn’t remember what it was. Then I bethought me of Afzal, who was more cheerful, now that we had put the tower between us and the wizard.
“Did you understand him?” I asked.
“Him? He did not talk.”
“Oh, yes, he did. About my gun—and he told me the story of the mammoth’s bone.”
Afzal looked at me queerly, and shook his head. “No, he did not talk a blooming word.”
The more I thought the less sure I was of any word the old shaman had spoken. There was one explanation. He had read my thoughts, and had impressed his own upon my mind without words. Some Orientals are able to do this.
Then, of course, Afzal might have lied. He was capable of doing it just to annoy me. When we finally parted company, he stole a box of my shotgun shells and a pair of good boots.
That was in 1913.
"TWELVE years passed before I visited the hinterland of the Gobi again. And in that twelve years I’d pretty well forgotten Kam. For one thing, whenever I tried to tell about meeting him, people looked at me as if I were ribbing them. Oh, yes, they knew that telepathy had been proved by scientists to exist. They knew all about the tricks of mediums in a dark room, and some of them had seen mind readers working on the stage. But an old native shaman talking to me without words—that didn’t fit any of these cases . . . they asked me hopefully if I’d seen a Hindu conjuror do the disappearing-boy trick. So I gave up trying to account for Kam.
Then the war kept us busy quite a while. I did think of Kam, when I heard the guns opening for Saint Mihiel—what he’d mentioned about the harm our fire staffs would do when our gods were broken, and people made war upon people. . . .
After a dozen years there was peace in France, but Asia was feeling the consequences of our Western war. Slow, but exceedingly sure.
My oversize Chinese passport with its red seal stamps was initialed by a Manchurian war lord. I carried a .45 in the left-hand pocket of the car, close to the steering wheel. I had my money—in American silver dollars and British banknotes—packed in a belt. And in the back of the car I had two young refugees picked up in Kashgar.
Helen, of course, wasn’t really a refugee. The war had uprooted her in Poland—her last name being Sieroszewski, with various titles attached to it aforetime—and had jettisoned her into the university at Upsala, where she had applied herself to learning old Turki and kindred languages. And she had wangled her way out for field work with an ethnological survey, at practically no pay. A slender girl, intent on her work, repressed except when she broke out in play like a child.
She had a friendly, husky voice, and dark eyes that were strangely blank except when she looked at Marak.
He sat beside her, in the back seat, with all his worldly goods in a blanket under his
feet. A Hungarian who loved music, a medical student serving in the Austrian medical corps, captured by one of Kaledine’s cavalry units on the Galician front in 1916. Nine years before. He had made his way out through the Terek pass in midwinter, and for more than a year he had been convalescing in Kashgar, in the sanctuary of the British consulate, where Helen found him.
You couldn’t mistake her love for him. And to Marak, emerging from eight years of earthly hell, she was as vital as his own life. They depended so on each other. They had seen so many gods broken that you could feel their dread that something might take the other away.
Instead, I was taking them away from danger—bouncing over the ruts of the former Imperial Chinese highway, as we climbed the ridge toward Sairam Lake.
“Think,” Marak laughed, “in a week, in Peiping, we will see a hotel.”
“And a newspaper,” Helen echoed. Out of politeness to me they tried to speak English, although that was not the language of their love.
We were passing by Sairam Lake, coming to the place where I’d tried to bag some ducks. Now, in midsummer, the grass was lush green.
"I wonder," said Marak, “how it will be like.”
The ruined brick watchtower hadn’t changed. Its enclosing wall straggled across the road. I followed the ruts through the broken arch, and started around the tower. Then I jammed on the brakes, and dust billowed around us.
A cart was drawn across the road. Beside it lounged some soldiers who picked up their rifles and came over to me.
“Go on!” cried Marak.
When I backed the car, two men jumped on the running board. They jerked the door open and motioned me out. These men weren’t Chinese; they looked like assorted tribesmen, and they wore odds and ends of uniforms. Most of them—about a dozen showed up—had Russian Trokh-linie rifles in bad repair.
I got out of the car and produced my passports, American and Chinese. An officer came out of a wattle hut and when he looked at the passports he laughed. That was a bad sign.