by Harold Lamb
“I am glad to see you,” he said.
He looked pleased enough. He wore an Austrian officer’s gray shako with the tarnished initials F. J. I. still visible. Franz Josef Imperator, you know. He carried a swagger stick and he had a revolver belted behind his hip.
“Meester Elli-son,” he added.
THEN I recognized him. My barefoot servant boy of a dozen years before transformed into a booted commandant with a scrubby black mustache and fat greasy cheeks. That was a bit of luck!
“Afzal!” I cried.
“Khoda Afzal, please,” he said, looking past me at the car. His eyes changed and he went over to it.
“What kind of an outpost is this—” I started to ask. Afzal was bending over the door, peering at the Polish girl. Then Marak, who was watching him, made a grab for the side pocket under the steering wheel. He pulled out my .45, but before he could raise it a soldier swung a rifle butt into his head. Another one jabbed a butt into his chest, knocking him down.
Marak let go of the revolver, and lay there, badly hurt. One of Afzal’s companions, rigged out like an officer, picked up the gun and pocketed it quickly. He looked like a European, a Slovak.
I ran over to Marak, and pushed aside the soldier who was swinging up his rifle again. Then someone caught and locked my arms from behind.
“You blasted fool!” I snarled, trying to get loose.
Afzal turned his attention to me. “Not now,” he said. “No, fool.” Reaching into my coat pocket, he fumbled for my wallet and drew it out. Then he noticed the leather money belt, and jerked it off. The Slovak came over to peer at it, and their eyes lighted when they examined one of my banknotes. “Inglis,” said Afzal. The other nodded. Then they trussed us all up severely and went out.
Helen and Marak understood our fix better than I did. Marak’s head hurt him, and he had a broken collarbone, but he pretended to be worse than he was, while he whispered to Helen.
She told me what he thought—that my man Afzal wasn’t connected with any of the regular armies moving through southern Siberia. He had his own band, armed. He could dodge the Chinese detachments by slipping across the border beyond the lake. As for the British in Kashgar, they’d never know what happened to us. Marak didn’t think either he or I would be able to do any talking by the next morning. We wouldn’t be alive.
THE men who had taken us were a mixed band, Kunjatis, and Mongols, and escaped prisoners of one kind or another. A bad lot. Evidently they had quartered themselves on the road at the guard post, to pick up what came their way. After that they’d withdraw to the hills beyond the lake.
“How about ransom?” I asked.
Marak thought it would be too difficult and hazardous for Afzal to try for. They’d simply bury us in the lake, and take Helen off to the hills.
“Only one shot in the locker,” he whispered. If we three could reach the car, and get it started around that accursed cart, we’d have a chance, depending on the marksmanship of Afzal’s men. He couldn’t drive, and Helen didn’t know how, so it would be up to me, if they could get me loose.
Just then Afzal was sitting in the driver’s seat, showing off. I could see he didn’t know how to start the motor, but he could work the horn, and this seemed to impress his men. I suppose most of them had never seen an auto before.
Anyway, it put him in a better frame of mind, and he grinned at me.
“You come have tiffin,” he called. "Miss-sahib come. Top-hole, very jolly.”
When we went off with his Slovak chum toward one of the huts, his men drifted away from the car. I was beginning to measure distances and weigh chances, when I saw the first sheep come around the bend in the road. In a few minutes hundreds of the herd were eddying around the cart and the car.
They were in charge of some tribesmen, mounted on shaggy ponies—bronzed, good-natured chaps, probably Buriats changing grazing ground. Afzal’s men paid no attention to them, except to herd some of the sheep into the enclosure for themselves. The riders protested loudly enough. But they were armed only with clubs, and short, antiquated swords, while Afzal’s men had rifles. Between them all, they blocked the road as effectively as a traffic jam.
It struck me that the tribesmen didn’t seem to be afraid of the soldiers. They just waited, while the sheep spread over the landscape, until a tent came rumbling around the turn.
Even Marak stared at it. A dozen reindeer drew it along, and the tent itself looked like a gray dome mounted on a crude wooden platform, with solid wood wheels. A Tartar yurt.
I just had time to notice that the deerskin yurt covering was ornamented with some strange devices, when it stopped. And Kam came out of the entrance flap, in his robe and antler chapeau.
He didn’t seem to have changed any in the dozen years since I’d seen him. As soon as he appeared, the Buriat tribesmen began to complain about the sheep.
“A Tartar shaman,” Helen exclaimed, “with reindeer.”
The tribesmen seemed to expect Kam to restore their sheep to them. Apparently he acted as king and magistrate, when he wasn’t doing his stuff.
Anyway, he shouted loud enough at the soldiers in that deep voice of his.
“He’s telling them to let the sheep go, to let his people pass,” Helen said. “He’s saying that they have souls like snakes, and if they anger him he will make all of them with fire sticks run away like beetles—”
THEN I heard Afzal’s voice bark behind me. Just a word or two. The soldiers picked up their rifles, leveled them in the general direction of Kam and his circus and began to shoot. The explosions stampeded the sheep, and dust billowed over the whole place.
When the shooting ceased all the loose sheep had scattered over the countryside. The Buriats were galloping out of range. But in front of Kam’s cart, all his reindeer were dying. A couple plunged helplessly in the traces, then sank down on their forelegs.
Afzal had ordered them shot, as an answer to Kam.
“The coward!” Helen whispered.
There’s something childlike about a wounded deer, and reindeer are about the most inoffensive things on four feet. These lay piled up, tangled in the harness, panting until their lungs ceased to work, while Afzal strolled over to inspect them. Kam didn’t say anything more. He just looked at the dead animals, and then turned and went back slowly into his wagon tent. It was a wonder he hadn’t been hit.
Helen was still grieving over the reindeer. She said that Kam and his people believed that the keles, the spirits of their ancestors, lived in reindeer. Anyone who injured a reindeer was liable to be put to death.
It was an old belief, this of the spirits of the reindeer. I remembered reading once that they thought even Erlik Khan, the Lord of Hell, had a special variety of reindeer to pull his throne—mammoths. Quite a chariot it must have been, drawn by mammoths, rising from the underworld, up through the frozen tundras, to the surface of the earth while red fires danced in the sky. . . .
But Afzal seemed pleased at the butchery.
He grinned down at me. “You see? Now we have tiffin, all ve-ry jolly.”
And I had the flash of an idea. “Afzal,” I said, “you’re afraid of Kam."
“Not no more,” he responded.
“You’re afraid of him, because he is bogha kam—great wizard.”
He shook his head. He knew better now, he said. Kam was a little old man who played tricks. But he, Khoda Afzal, was a commandant, knowing how to work magic. And he patted the revolver on his hip.
“You don’t dare eat lunch in Kam’s yurt!” I challenged.
At once Afzal accepted the dare. In fact, the idea pleased him, and he began to shout orders to have things carried into the shaman's moving tent. I'd hoped that we’d be able to make a break for the car, which was between us and the yurt. But Afzal’s men didn’t give us a chance. One of them escorted me up to the wagon, while another herded Marak up with his bayonet. And we were worse off than before. I remember t
he sun stood almost overhead when we were pushed through the entrance flap.
From somewhere Afzal produced a phonograph of wartime vintage, and one of his followers kept it going through the meal, with a single record—a fox-trot that wailed something about my girlie, my babe.
Out of the corner of his eye Afzal watched Kam, to see what effect the voice out of a box would produce on the shaman. Either Kam had heard a phonograph before, or he took pains to show no surprise. He kept quiet in the background, fussing over the little fire back of the center pole, putting tufts of dry steppe grass and bundles of reeds on it. Although he seemed to ignore us, I thought that he watched us.
I COULDN’T think of anything but Helen. Afzal made her wait on the table. She had to break up the tea brick, and make tea in a crude brass samovar, and serve it to Afzal and his chum in china cups.
“Just like a lady,” Afzal informed us.
He stared into Marak’s face, then he wiped his greasy hands on the front of Helen’s dress. Then he jerked her down to her knees and pulled the hairpins out of her dark coiled hair. He shook it loose over her shoulders, and released her.
“Pretty, eh? Like that?”
I couldn’t do anything. My arms were growing numb, and the smoke of the grass fire and the smell of hot grease made me dizzy. The chap beside me had his rifle muzzle within a foot of my ribs. And my plight was nothing compared to Marak’s. The veins stood out along his neck, and the corners of his lips quivered. That was why the girl talked to him, softly, steadily, in the language of their love. How she kept smiling, and keeping up the game of serving tea, I don’t know. Because she realized what was in store for her and for us.
“Ve-ry pretty, what?” Afzal grinned.
Then for the first time I heard Kam’s horn. A low note that grew louder, without changing its key. Probably he had been sounding it for some time, unheeded in the phonograph’s racket. When the phonograph quieted, the horn gave out a deep, vibrating call.
Kam was kneeling behind his fire, holding the mammoth bone in both hands. The fire blazed up, and the shaman’s face stood out, gaunt, with the eyes closed.
“Hai,” shouted Afzal, “look at the old man.”
Kam got to his feet. He moved slowly about the center pole, and as he moved, the small iron dolls jangled on him. Jangled in time, as his feet stamped softly.
“All right,” Afzal yelled, “I know his tricks—the son of a dog.”
I wondered why Afzal yelled so loud. Then I heard the bells, in the smoky murk. They chimed with the stamping of Kam’s booted feet. He was flitting about the fire now, while the reverberation of the horn deepened.
AFZAL leaned over and drank from the cognac bottle, and I heard Marak breathe heavily at my side. My head felt hot and dizzy.
“I’m not afraid of you!” Afzal screamed. But I thought he must be afraid.
The roaring filled my ears. The cognac bottle toppled over, and the reek of alcohol caught at my nostrils. And then came utter silence.
After that tumult of sound, the silence came as a shock. The floor of the yurt seemed to be moving, sinking. I tried to move and found that the numbness of my arms had spread through all my body. My head whirled. I could hear men breathing heavily, like dying reindeer. And something in a robe or skirt moving past me toward the two on the horse skin. I couldn’t see anything but the red glow of the fire, with smoke eddying above it.
“Bird of Heaven, with claw of brass, with beak of ice . . . flying across the moon, hiding the sun—” it was a voice chanting, surely a woman’s voice—“open thou the earth, beneath us . . . summon to us thy Mate . . ."
I felt drowsy. All my muscles relaxed. I thought someone had pulled away the yurt, and I was looking up into the night sky lighted by a red glow.
And the earth quivered, as if at a giant tread. Black shapes rose against the glow in the sky, higher and higher. White tusks gleamed through the smoke. Black heads, shaggy with hair, lifted above me. Mammoths. Their tread shook my flesh.
And behind and above them, something was taking form. A shadow against fire, remote and vast.
Then I saw Afzal's face, near me, staring up. His lips curled back from his teeth. His eyes bulged from his sweating forehead. His right arm groped at his hip, tense with effort. And his hand came up, slowly, clutching his revolver.
In front of him, two paces away, Kam was standing. Motionless as a statue.
I heard Afzal cursing as he strained to lift the revolver. He got it out in front of him, and clasped his wrist with the other hand. Kam’s gaunt face showed equal strain. It was a duel between the will of the shaman and the strength of the armed man.
They looked like dwarfs, against the gigantic shadows moving toward them. Afzal snarled deep in his throat, as a beast snarls before springing. His head lowered between his shoulders. Slowly the revolver came up. It covered Kam’s throat, then his eyes—
A flash and an explosion close to my head half stunned me. And Afzal went down as if flailed by a mammoth’s tusk. He lay at Kam’s feet.
The fumes of the shot made me cough. Beside me Marak laughed, and then choked. With an effort I sat up.
The yurt was back again, above me. The shadow shapes had vanished, and the only light was from the fire where Kam stood gazing down at Afzal’s body. One of Afzal’s hands was in the fire, but it did not move.
“Helen!” Marak choked.
Men got to their feet all around me, stumbling over me. They grunted like beasts as they pushed toward the entrance flap. They scrambled out of the yurt, jumping to the ground.
Only the Polish girl remained, standing by Marak, her eyes heavy with weariness. In her right hand she held my .45. Marak leaned over and touched the barrel.
“Take it, please,” she said with a deep sigh.
Marak got to his feet, and put his good arm around her, and she pressed her head against his shoulder, shivering. She was more utterly done than any of us.
My head ached when I scrambled out of the yurt. But what I saw outside did me good. All of Afzal’s men were running away from the yurt, up the hillside. Most of them had dropped their rifles. They acted like stampeded sheep. Afzal’s chum, the European, was at the head of the rout.
And the Buriat tribesmen were chasing them, urging on their ponies, whacking at the heads of the fleeing men with their cudgels and rusty sabers.
“Good!” Marak spoke behind me. “Mr. Ellison, we’d better go now.”
With his good hand he loosened the knots of the cord that bound my arms. Helen rubbed my wrists until I could move my fingers again.
“Oh, your money,” she cried.
I had forgotten about it. So I went back into the yurt, coughing in the smoke. Turning Afzal’s body over, I found my wallet and passports, and pulled off my money belt. His revolver was lying beside him, but somehow I didn’t feel like taking that.
I felt like thanking Kam—patting him on the shoulder. Probably I was a bit hysterical just then.
However, Kam didn’t even look at me. He was pottering over that fire of his, putting on some more tufts of grass, and rushes, while he muttered to himself. He looked like a troubled old man, putting his house to rights after his guests had departed.
“He must be grieving,” Helen said, as we climbed into the car, “over his reindeer.”
IT’S strange how a thing like that hits you. I drove around the corner, and the old watchtower hid the yurt with its sheep. Glancing back over my shoulder, I noticed for the first time that the sun was setting behind the hills in the west. And my wrist watch registered a few minutes after seven. Yet I was sure we had gone into the yurt at noon.
“Yes,” Helen said, her voice unsteady, “you were out for four hours, all of you.”
“Out?”
“Hypnotized. Kam gave a beautiful exhibition of mass hypnotism in his yurt. But he couldn’t quite break Afzal’s will power.”
I thought of those two minds struggling for hours, while that gi
rl watched over the man she loved—understanding what was going on, and fearful of breaking the shaman’s spell, until the end.
“Then it was a duel between those two,” I said stupidly.
“And a woman,” Marak added quietly.
I didn’t say anything more, because Helen began to sob like a schoolgirl.
What would have happened, if she hadn’t shot Afzal when she did? I’ve often wondered about that, myself.
Money Changer
I HADN’T been in Istanbul an hour before I met Osman. I was stiff with long sitting in the Paris-Orient express, so I left my baggage where it would be safe—piled under the eye of an American petty officer in the vestibule of the embassy, and I went forth to wander in the city until such time as the embassy would be open for official business. And I found Osman, as it were, lying in wait for me.
He was sitting in that vine-covered lane leading into the Street of the Booksellers, which in turn disappears into the maw of the great bazaar of Istanbul—Constantinople, you know. Sitting behind a glass cage.
The cage was piled with coins, and several Turkish pound notes were stuck inside the glass, showing that Osman was a sharaf or money changer. A dozen other sharafs looked up as I passed, and all of them knew me for an American, and began to tap on the glass. But Osman didn’t. He just looked at me expectantly. He had mild brown eyes, his grizzled beard was cut off square at the chin, he wore a sheepskin coat, and he didn’t have so many banknotes in his cage as the other sharafs. He seemed to be a Turk of the older generation—a pre-war Anatolian Turk.
I thought he might be honest. So I stopped and disgorged the handful of silver and paper I’d brought off the train. Osman muttered in his beard as he sorted it out, pushing back regretfully some phony coins. Then he counted out the exchange in Turkish pounds and piasters. It looked about right to me.