by Harold Lamb
Why, Donovan thought, this man was going to shoot again. Mr. Nicolai shoved the cylinder back and a fist hit the side of Donovan’s head. The flash made everything red.
He couldn’t see, and he coughed out the fumes in his throat. He heard a jangling of metal and pounding of hoofs. Then he could see Mr. Nicolai dodging, and a gleam of steel coming down. He wiped his eyes and looked again.
Mr. Nicolai was lying on the ground, and David was reining in his horse above him. David had a sword in his hand; he hadn’t argued with Mr. Nicolai. When Mr. Nicolai shot at Donovan, he had ridden him down, and killed him. And now David, paying no attention to Shotha, was dismounting, going into the house.
When Donovan stopped coughing, he picked up both the revolvers by the body, and looked at them. One had five loaded cartridges in it.
Shotha was whining, and women were screaming in the house. A few men came out to look at Nicolai’s body, and at Donovan. Then David appeared again.
He carried Maga in his arms, and he paid no attention to anyone. Going to his horse, he set the girl gently back of the saddle, and mounted. She held tight to him, crying. Donovan noticed that her boots were muddy.
He watched them ride off.
After he lighted a cigarette, he tried to think things over. “Where’s that car of mine?” he asked. “And that Russian driver.”
“Sir,” Shotha said, "he was afraid—he went back to Tiflis. He will return.”
“I see.” Donovan contemplated the ring of faces around him. They were like animals, afraid, and waiting for him to speak his will. Donovan didn’t argue any more.
“Shotha, you all want to live, don’t you?” he observed briskly. “And you know what will happen to you for risking the life of an American tourist?” Shotha cringed, his mouth open.
“And kidnaping that man David’s wife?”
“But, sir, I swear she came here herself. just—”
“Do you think anyone in Tiflis will believe that? Not if I testify to what you tried to do to me.” Donovan nodded. “Now the best thing you can do is to bury Mr. Nicolai and forget all about David and Maga. I’ll forget about—everything. So no one will be arrested. Do you understand?”
Quite fully, Shotha understood. He threw himself down in front of the American, and pressed his forehead against Donovan’s shoe. And all the others acted, when Shotha talked to them, as if a death sentence had been revoked. It was a crazy way out, Donovan thought, but it would work. Only those girls in Mr. Nicolai’s house weren’t satisfied. They kept on wailing as if their world had come to an end.
AND the Intourist manager, who drove up later that morning with Donovan’s worried driver and three soldiers with bayonets fixed on their rifles in the car, had a lingering doubt.
“But, Mr. Donovan,” he complained, when they were all on their way back to the hotel in Tiflis, “the chauffeur said you had been kidnaped by a Georgian bandit. Believe me, sir, I was on my way to arrest that man before any harm came to you. What happened?”
“We only went tiger hunting. I had a grand time, and that Georgian fellow gave me a swell dinner. They gave me a grand time.”
The Intourist manager looked immensely relieved, but still puzzled. “You say you went tiger hunting—what, sir, do you mean by that?”
Donovan explained what a tiger was, and the Intourist man laughed.
“Oh, that. You call them tigers in America, but we have another name for them in the Caucasus. A ti-gar, like you say, is a head of the works here. A—a big shot like Mr. Nicolai, who died last week, they say, when he was kicked in the head by a horse.”
Donovan said nothing. He was thinking.
“I hope,” the Intourist man made a joke, “you did not go hunting such an important person in our mountains?”
“Well,” said Donovan, “not exactly.”
The Empress' Yankee
I WAS asleep when the order came to me to go to the war. But before the cocks started crowing I was in the saddle of my Kabarda horse, A Cossack of the Terek does not stop when he hears of fighting.
Instead of joining the squadron I went around to my girl’s cottage. Leaving the horse, I scratched on the shutter farthest from where the old people slept. When Babitka looked out, rubbing her hair back, I whispered to her what had happened.
“What war?” she asked.
“How do I know? When an order comes, a Cossack rides, he does not ask questions. It is for the empress!”
Babitka would not let me kiss her. “It is always for that woman, the empress,” she whispered. Then she hugged me. “Wait.”
So I tied up my horse and went to wait at the haystack. I thought Babitka was a fine girl, and so quick. Strong, too—only stubborn at times. And, of course, I would be away at the war a long time.
She kept me waiting until the trees showed against the sky, and she came pulling a pony behind her. Instead of sitting down on the hay, she cracked the whip in her hand, and I saw she had put on men’s broad trousers and boots.
“Ivak,” she said, “listen. This time I am going with you.”
I laughed, thinking of Babitka, who milked the cows and brought in the cherries and baked barley cake, riding off with Ivak, who had smelled the smoke of powder often, who was a sotnik of the squadron.
“Why do you fight this time?” She came close to see my eyes.
How could I say? “For honor, little pigeon, for glory.” And when this did not satisfy her: “Nay, I will bring you a shawl and pearls for your necklace from Tsargrad—for that is how we call Constantinople. The brothers say we will take Tsargrad this time for our empress.”
She pushed me away, so I almost fell down. “Tfu—I could spit when you speak of her. I am coming with you to the war.”
Now if the devil himself, who knows how to talk to girls, said no to Babitka, she would say yes to him. She is strong as two devils, when she feels stubborn. And in her long coat, with her hair tucked up into her woolly cap, she looked almost like a boy. The thought came to me, why not? My blood felt warm because she was so near me.
“You need someone, Ivak, to be wise for you.”
I heard the horses snort together. “A good omen,” I told her.
THAT is how I suffered Babitka to ride with me to the Charnomar, that you call the Black Sea. And when we saw the dark sea, the omens were not so good. For pale white lights gleamed along the edge of the stagnant water. I have heard officers say that this light is the phosphorescent salt in the water, but we Cossacks know it is the souls of the dead running along the edge of the sea seeking a resting place. Babitka looked long at the sea that was not a sea but a huge estuary into which the great rivers ran, making sand bars and currents.
“Those lights,” she said, “are not good. Perhaps they are a sign to us.”
“Look farther, girl,” I told her.
Other lights shone in the channel where Father Dnieper pours himself into the salt estuary. They were on the masts of ships, large and small, all waiting together like a herd of cattle.
When I tried to find my squadron at the encampment, I learned the meaning of the ships. My brothers had been sent on them, and before long these ships were to make a march out into the sea. The war, it seemed, would be on the water, not on the land. What matter? A Cossack is at home anywhere under the sky. But Babitka could not go on a ship of war, stuffed with men. Impossible.
When I told her, she still wanted to go. “Take me on the ship, please, Ivak,” she begged. “And as God lives I will ask for nothing more.”
BECAUSE she was weeping and men began to stare and edge over to us, I took her behind the woodpile and whacked her shoulders with my whip. At once she stopped crying and took the reins of the two horses and marched off, holding her chin down on her chest. And I felt empty inside. Better if she had thrown her knife at me.
I went down quickly to the water, before she could be stubborn again. I went to a man under a lanthorn who shouted in bad Russian. Under his cocked hat his
scalp lock was tied behind with a ribbon, and it was stiff with white flour paste. When I poked my finger into it, he swung up his cane as if to strike me. But he thought better of that. And it was well for him he did so. He looked like a weasel, and the weasel is no fool.
“Get your carcass into that boat, brainless,” he yelped.
Then I knew he was not a Russian. The German Prussians call us dumb because we do not speak German. I wondered why he gave commands on the fleet of the empress.
“Tie up your riband, darling,” I told him, and walked away feeling his eyes on my shoulders.
And on the boat I found much more to wonder at. It was the biggest of the ships, with the masts stretching up like trees. And it smelled of sheep and hot tar and dirt, what with the rivermen on her deck—and snuff-stinking Tatars, and pale gaolbirds trying to sleep around the guns. Already this Vladimir, as they called the big ship, felt the pull of the current and the floors moved under our feet. Ekh-ma, I went up on the roof to breathe freely, and there I found some of my brothers from the squadron, and other Cossacks, all knowing little of why we had been set on this castle of the sea. They said the officers walking about wore the caftans of hussars.
Now it was bad to be quartered among the scourings of the river. It was more than bad to be commanded by hussars. Every Cossack who has served his time knows that a hussar is good only to parade and kill flies.
I felt truly empty, and I thought of Babitka, the sweet one, sleeping in the hay with the horses on good dry earth. I sat on the poles where the motion of the sea was not so great, and borrowed a light for my pipe from a man of Irivan who wore sheepskins.
“Eh, kunak,” I said, “what passes?”
“Much.”
Now being an Armenian, Kushel by name, he knew everything that went on. He had been selling rugs before they put him on the Vladimir.
“Will we march forward into the sea tonight?”
Kushel spat. “No.”
“Tomorrow then?”
“Not tomorrow, or next month. Impossible.”
“How impossible?”
Kushel pointed down the bay, to where a point of light showed, far, far. Down there were the enemy ships, where the water of the bay ran out into the true sea. They were waiting in the mouth of the bay.
“Those dogs will bite,” he said. “Those Turks and Corsairs and such.” Now it seemed to me if the sultan’s ships waited there, our ships would go and drive them away. But Kushel thought otherwise. “Then there would be calamity.”
“How calamity?”
The man from Irivan touched the pole we sat on. “Green wood.” He pointed his pipe at the men snoring among their bundles. “Green sap.”
He explained how the ships had been made in haste, out of wood that was still green, so it rotted in the water, and when all these guns went off together—bourra-oum—they might break through the rotting wood and let in the water. Besides, he said the ships were too big to run down among the sand bars. They would sit in the sand. And the crews were not accustomed.
“So will be calamity.”
Shaking his fists, Kushel swore. All these frigates, as he called them, and gunboats had been made for a whim. They had been made in such haste to please the empress when she visited the Black Sea, a year or so before, so she could see a fleet sailing and go on it herself. “Think of that!” He tore at his beard. “For a parade!”
Truly Kushel was a wise man, to know all that.
“And now,” he groaned, “comes Pavel.”
“What is he?” I asked, wondering at this fleet made for a parade.
“A pirate. Worse, an American.”
No American, Kushel explained, had ventured into our Russian land before. They grew tobacco, far over the sea, to chew. And they built ships to fight on the sea. Pavel’s name was really Paul. John Paul Jones.
HE CAME during a feast that our commanders made for ladies. These ladies smelled of honey, for they were visitors from the court of the Empress Catherine at Petersburg. One of them had her hair piled up, as if bees had hived in it. Eh, she was a beauty, the Lady Anna. She drank wine out of little glasses and she brought her maid to carry her fan.
That maid was Babitka. The little devilkin tripped about the ship where I had told her not to set foot. Ay, she had tied a Persian shawl around her head and put red on her cheeks, and she rolled her eyes at the younger officers when they winked at her. But not a glance for me.
“Babitka!” I called from behind the fence across the deck.
She smoothed down her new shawl. “Eh, animal,” she said, “do not bother a maid in waiting. Be off to your stables.” She waited, smiling at me. But some of the officers laughed, trying to get their arms around her, and I said nothing. It is not good to be laughed at.
So I hardly saw Pavel, the American, when he came over the side of the ship with an escort, and walked up the rump. A small, straight figure of a man, without flour in his hair, or ornaments on his sword. He was gay in his blue coat, as if glad to be among us.
Champing over the notions of that fool girl, Babitka, I paid no heed to him then. Only Kushel saw what happened in the after cabin—although how Kushel came to be in the admiral’s cabin then, I do not know.
All our high commanders bowed to Pavel—to Jones—and praised him, because he brought a letter from the empress herself. There was the Brigadier Alexiano, who commanded the Vladimir, and also the prince of Nassau Siegen, from Prussia, who wore splendid gray and gold, and commanded all the fleet. And between them was the Lady Anna who was Nassau Siegen’s dushenka, his girl. She sparkled upon Jones, giving him wine in a little glass.
NOW to have this Jones come to share the command with Nassau Siegen was not a good thing. One man can drive two horses, but two men cannot drive one horse without calamity. No, never.
Besides, this Jones could speak only one word of Russian, as I came to know. Being dumb like that, he had to have a man to speak for him. Then, too, he had little money, having spent all his life on ships instead of at court, like Nassau Siegen. Ay, Jones had come with all these other foreign officers as bees swarm around the queen bee, to serve our little mother the empress for gold, titles, honor and glory and the like.
“We must give you a voice, my chevalier,” Nassau Siegen told him. “Rely upon me to explain your directions to these ignorant Russians.”
Jones laughed and said he wished he had Lady Anna's voice always at his side, to make music for him. And she gave him her hand to kiss. Nassau Siegen did not seem angry. He already wore decorations, and he spoke as a man sure of himself—a handsome man who made many friends, and used them. Lady Anna looked inside of Jones, and it was clear she thought much of him.
When the women left us, Jones turned to the brigadier. “Captain,” he said, “will you call the men to stations?” Rousing ourselves, we went to stand by the cannon and the ropes as we had been told. Jones walked among us, looking at everything—at our faces and boots, and the wheels of the big cannon, and up at the masts where the sails were tied as they had been all summer. With his hands he turned over ropes and gear. By his manner we knew that he was accustomed. He even went down into the cellar where we kept our wine and goats for fresh meat. He was gone so long that we could smell the kasha pots cooking. When he came up he no longer looked like a man of honey—eh, he had become a man of stone.
Then he stared into the blaze of sunset, at the Turkish ships, tiny in their place at the mouth of the sea. I saw then that he had gray in his hair, and when he did not smile he looked tired.
“Where are the charts?” he asked Nassau Siegen, still making a picture with the eyes of his mind.
Neither Nassau Siegen nor Alexiano knew anything about charts. Then Jones asked for something unwonted—for the bags to put powder in, to carry to the guns.
“The devil, my dear chevalier,” said Nassau Siegen. “Perhaps they will be in the warehouse of the encampment. I will have inquiry made tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow! To
night—now!”
Jones seemed to be gnawed by a fear, while Nassau Siegen felt no fear. A spark was struck between them, because of this.
And the spark grew hotter with every question Jones asked, in his strange fashion. If the bags for the powder were not brought before dark, he said, he would order us of the crew ashore.
“But what if the Turks come?” the prince asked. “We would lose the ships.” Jones was still looking at something with the eye of his mind. “They are top-heavy enough, with their build. We have no right to risk the men—” he stopped, thinking.
“Impossible to run away.” Nassau Siegen held his head high. “I, for one, have the courage to take a risk.”
We who heard this only understood that the spark between them was growing to a fire.
“Only a fool,” said Jones, “would run such a risk as this.”
Nassau Siegen put his hand on his silvered sword hilt; then he shrugged his shoulders and turned away. “I think,” he said loudly to Alexiano, “that our new admiral is afraid. He shows his breeding.”
But he said this in Russian, and Jones did not understand.
After that the American wandered about as if seeking something he could not find. We Cossacks were then gathered at the rail, singing because the brandy had been poured out. When Jones wandered up with the interpreter, we felt sorry for him because like us he was far from his home, and afraid—which we were not. For a while he listened to the singing, looking over the rail at a skiff tied there.
A thought came to him, and the interpreter explained the thought.
“The admiral,” he said, “has a whim. He wants rags tied around the middle of the oars, and a rudder rigged up with a stick in that skiff.”
PERHAPS because I was the biggest of the brothers, or the best singer, the interpreter picked on me to do the work, although he took care himself to disappear after that.