by Harold Lamb
I was working in the skiff—it being then nearly dark—when someone came down the ladder. By his frog’s voice I recognized the Prussian sergeant who had sent me on the ship.
“Eh, Cossack,” he said, “you like rix-dollar for tobacco?”
In his hand silver coins chinked softly. I waited, fastening a pike staff to a board, to serve for the rudder.
“Good soldier,” he said, as if to a horse. “Like me, the drill sergeant, you serve the empress?”
“At command,” I muttered.
“Then, here!” He put five coins into my fist, and they felt like good silver.
Coughing, he told me that I should watch out what Jones did. Because some of the senior officers did not trust Jones. If the admiral tried to send a message to the enemy, I should report him. That was all.
“Fine soldier,” he said again. “You.” The silver being good silver, I kept it.
I began to smell smoke in this, but I could not see any fire. Why should a Prussian sergeant want to turn in the new admiral?
Then I heard Jones coming down the ladder. Eh, he might have heard our words, if he understood. Even in the dark, the Prussian saluted as if made of iron, stepping aside for Jones.
“Stuppai!” said Jones. “Forward!” That word of ours at least he knew. But what did he mean? I could only think of the oars, and I took them up, while he sat in the stern, putting his hand on the new tiller.
The Prussian on the ladder watched us row out into the mist, the two of us alone in the skiff. By the lights of our fleet, I saw that we were heading out toward the Turkish ships. Then the mist hung around us like a veil.
Seaweed pulled at my oars, like the fingers of dead men reaching up, and my heart began to feel cold.
For Jones sat in his shirt sleeves, without his hat but with a pistol and sword in his belt. And he kept throwing into the water a strong cord, knotted along its length, and weighted with a stone. That cord was strong enough to tie a man’s arms. The stone did not go down far on account of the shoals. When he pulled it out, Jones counted the knots.
Because of the rags, the oars did not grate against the thole sticks, and we made no noise. After a time we slipped past an anchored ship, and I heard voices. The skin felt cold inside my belt then—the voices were Turkish. Jones was steering me through the Turkish fleet, tossing out his line as if fishing!
A guard boat rowed past us in the mist. That night, by ill luck, seemed to be full of boats. We were passing a great ship with three rows of cannon when a barge almost bumped into us. Jones put his hand on my knee.
“Ya muslimin ” a Turk in the barge called. “O men, do you carry arak to drink? Our throats are dry.”
Jones never moved or spoke. Glory to the Lord, I could understand and answer: “We have salt. We come from the island.”
Without more words they cursed us and went on. Why should they think that two Christians were rowing a skiff among their ships of war? The sweat was cold on me, but Jones laughed. “Stuppai, Ivak,” he said.
Forward again! We passed the feluccas lined up under the guns of their fort at the bay’s mouth. I rowed until my hands bled, while Jones kept measuring the water of the sea. Truly, his whim was a queer whim. For sometimes he felt of the stone at the end of the line. And sometimes he licked the finger that felt of the stone.
THE next morning the Prussian sergeant drew me aside. “Well, Ivak, what?” he asked. “Did this pirate Pavel speak with the Turks?”
“How could he?” I said. “He cannot speak to me. How could he talk to a Turk?”
He looked at me, and slapped his coat pocket. Silver coins clinked loud in it. He slapped my shoulder. “Ten rix-dollar for you, Ivak,” he said, “if Pavel sends any message to the Turks.” Winking, he put his finger against his nose. “Understand—hein?”
With so much smoke, I began to understand where the fire might be: Nassau Siegen. That prince did not want Jones here to command the fleet.
Every night Jones would call for me and go out in the skiff to measure the water, first turning to this side, then to that. And at times he made marks on a sheet of paper.
In the day he drove all the souls on the Vladimir, as if taking a whip to them. He ordered half of the guns on the upper decks to be hauled ashore in barges. The remaining guns he had us run in and out on their wheels, and load with the heavy balls until we were wet down with our sweat.
Nassau Siegen protested when the cannon were lowered away—saying we would be weak without all the guns. But Jones said the empress had made him admiral of the fleet, and he would pistol any man who refused to carry out an order. After that Nassau Siegen went away, to the gunboats along the shore, where the men drilled little if at all.
Probably he was glad to go, because just then His High Wellbornness arrived at the encampment on the land—the Prince-Marshal Potemkin, the favorite of the empress. Eh, he arrived with coaches and pavilions, and green and red officers of the guard, and two nieces—all to see the new fleet being made ready. And Nassau Siegen was the first to greet him.
I thought of Babitka, with that Persian shawl tied on her, in all this splendor, and my tobacco tasted like dried oak leaves in the pipe. Kushel also felt afraid—more afraid than before.
“Look, Ivak,” he whispered to me, “you can take out the skiff at night. The guards will let us over the side, and tonight you and I can be safe on the shore.” But I could not take the skiff and leave Jones, who might want to measure the water some more. Kushel went away without arguing. And that night he found some way to escape from the Vladimir. He was wiser than we.
He was not on the ship when the calamity came. Mist hid the lower bay in the morning, and we were sitting at the kasha pot when the lookouts began to shout, and feet pounded on deck. When I poked my snout up into the air, I saw Alexiano running, pulling his caftan over his nightshirt and yelling, “They come—they come.”
Through a break in the mist I could see sails of ships moving toward us. Sails upon sails, coming slowly in the light breeze.
On the rump of our ship Alexiano’s officers argued, while we waited for orders. Some of us went to stations, not knowing what else to do. Then I heard a voice of command calling: “Stuppai!”
It was Jones' voice, and he called to us, as he cut the lashings from the wheel. He knew only that one word, forward. Alexiano ran up to him to argue, but Jones motioned us to our stations. Then they dragged out his interpreter, and he could tell us what was in his mind. Tfu—orders for everyone. Up with the anchor, down with the sails. Powder bags from the magazine! He acted like a man who was no longer afraid.
“Quick, lads, or you will be late for the dancing.”
EH, HE made a jest, while we were stumbling around, pulling at ropes.
Bourra-oum sounded over the water, and something splashed close to us. I climbed up the ladder of ropes to the platform on the mast.
And I saw twenty-one Turkish and Levantine ships sailing toward us, their guns flashing and smoking.
We were all afraid—who was not afraid?—when we marched thus out toward the sea.
I watched Jones when the powder smoke cleared away. He stood without moving by the wheel, sometimes putting his hand on the wheel. He turned the ship first this way and then that, passing through the shoals. And I thought of the nights when we had measured the water, so Jones could see the shoals in the eye of his mind.
Behind us the other five frigates followed, struggling with their sails. I saw a bomb fall—kerrumph—into the nearest one, and it turned on its side. It staggered and lay down on the water, like a wounded horse. But the Vladimir did not lie down. She felt her way forward toward the biggest of the Turkish ships, the one. with three rows of cannon.
I HEARD Alexiano shout that we would go aground. He ordered the brothers up in the bow to drop the anchor—Jones understanding nothing of the command. When the anchor pulled at the ship, the mast shook, and the sails cracked. But Jones would not turn the wheel, and the V
ladimir forged on, until the anchor chain ripped away. Jones said something to Alexiano, and after that the brigadier gave no more commands.
So we marched into the mass of the enemy ships, our guns making explosions on each side. Tfu—how things smoked up!
A Cossack came up the ladder of ropes, wiping the blood from his mouth.
“Liven up, lads,” he told us. “Little Father Jones says the dancing is just beginning.”
So we on the platform laughed and began firing off our muskets, as if shooting tigers. Little Father-Jones, that’s what he was!
And the guns barked. We, who were not accustomed, did not even aim. For with the Turks all around us, every ball hit something. Yet they, when they fired at us and missed, hit one another.
I watched the flashes, through the smoke. And I saw a strange thing happen. The Vladimir marched on, toward the sea; but the Turks began to move this way and that. They began to circle away from our guns. When they circled some of them stumbled on the shoals and sat. The biggest of their ships sat thus, leaning over, so its guns pointed up uselessly at the sky.
Then the others tried to go one way and another, heading toward the sea. Something splintered above me, and the smoke grew black. . . .
When I could see again, I felt dried blood on my head. A splinter had slapped me on the scalp lock, and I sat there on the platform looking into the sun. And that sun was setting over the water. The smoke had gone, and we were far from the river, out beyond the bay.
Rubbing some gunpowder and brandy into the split on my scalp, I felt alive again. “Fire away, lads,” I yelled.
The others on the platform looked at me queerly. For hours, they said, I had been blind and snoring, and now the battle was over. Ay, they showed me the sails of the remnant of the Turkish fleet escaping to sea.
“May the dogs bite them,” I said. “But what guns are shooting?”
Because I could hear guns, far off. Nay, it was not well for us that we followed the battle so far to sea. When we turned home, we saw what guns were shooting. Nassau Siegen’s. That officer had not followed Little Father Jones at all into the battle. But he had come up afterward with the flotilla of gunboats and bomb boats, and now he was shooting fire bombs into the Turkish ships sitting on the shoals.
Ay, he was firing into the ships that had surrendered to us, and could not shoot back at him because they sat on the shoals, all six of them. They were burning like haystacks, with men dying inside. Jones, angered by this, hailed Nassau Siegen to stop the destruction, but he would not. What could we do?
When we came back to our anchorage, we found the encampment lighted up as if for a feast, with Prince Potemkin and his ladies and officers watching the fireworks down the bay.
Alexiano, who had all his uniform on now, put his arm around Jones. As for us Cossack brothers, we were glad to be alive—those of us who lived—and to have won the victory. For the Vladimir looked like a floating wreck.
I thought that even Babitka, the devilkin, would admire me now, after the battle. And that night she came again to the Vladimir.
IT WAS after Jones had inspected the wounded. In his shirt sleeves he was sitting in the big after cabin, writing out his report of the action. One wall of the cabin had been shattered into beams. He smiled at me, as I smoked my pipe. “Eh, Ivak,” he said, “we did well.”
He was writing thus, carefully, his report to the empress, when we heard shouting, and in came Alexiano, bowing before the Prince Marshal Potemkin, who wore a cloth of gold cloak, and kissed Jones on both cheeks. The Lady Anna and Nassau Siegen followed after, both sweet as honey to the American. Then my blood felt warm, because of Babitka, the darling, running up to me and catching me in her arms, so I could feel the beating of her heart.
“Ivak—you are on your feet!” She stared up at me. “For the love of good Saint Nikolka, wash your face!”
Such a notion she had—to wash my face! She went away from me, as if I was useless, just because I wasn’t dead. But then I heard the interpreter talking. Potemkin was chewing his beard, thinking. They were telling him, because he asked, what Jones wrote to the empress. Eh, he wrote of the battle, as I had seen it—of the Vladimir and his officers and much of us of the brotherhood.
Still I could see well enough that Nassau Siegen was not pleased. “Chevalier Jones,” he said, “I also saw the action.”
He had been in the camp, miles away. But no one mentioned this—not before the prince marshal. Potemkin seemed to be thinking. He no longer smiled. “It is true, Chevalier Jones,” he said then, “that you handled your ship well.”
At this Jones, who had been puzzled by the talk, flashed out angrily. Eh, he was tired, not having slept much in that week, as I knew.
“If the Prince Marshal please,” he said, “I did not come here to be an apprentice.”
The interpreter wriggled when he said this, and Potemkin looked long into the snuff box he was holding. Truly he was used to softer answers.
Bolshaya, Room Three
IT DOESN'T make sense," said the one with the newspaper, "and it can't make sense."
There were five of them, who had got off at the junction, to connect with the Washington train, which would have a diner on it. It was an hour and a half late. They were standing around smoking and mostly listening to the big guy who had been yelping about priorities. He had an afternoon edition of a Cincinnati paper.
"This kind of a communiqué gets my goat," he said. There's a thousand miles of that Russian front, and a couple of million men stacked up on either side of it. All right. And what kind of a communiqué do those guys in Moscow hand us? 'At Stalingrad, two buildings were recaptured and a battalion of the enemy destroyed.' Two buildings! Are they kidding us at Moscow, or are they covering up, with this talk of two buildings, in a global war?"
"They are not kidding us," said the man in the raincoat—He was a heavy, grayish chap, on the tired side and pretty close to fifty. His bag, an old one, had a flock of hotel labels nearly scraped off.
"If they're not," the big man retorted, "how does it make sense? They tell you any reasons over there?" he added sarcastically.
"No. But I saw something."
IT WAS in his room, on the third floor of the Bolshaya Hotel (he told them). His name was Shayne, and he had left this bag along with his papers in his room at the Bolshaya, which was the best hotel in Rostov-on-the-Don, early in the autumn of 1941.
The reason he had left the stuff behind was that he had gone up beyond Pyatigorsk toward the Hot Mountains to examine the mineral springs and salt beds there. He was practically camping out in the mountains, and since he didn't speak Russian he heard little of the war news, one way or the other. It was quiet enough around Pyatigorsk then.
Shayne, a chemist, carrying out a semiofficial inspection of the mineral formations there, north of the Caucasus, was one of the very few Americans left in the land of the Soviets at that time.
When he told the Intourist girl at Stalingrad that he wanted to go back for his stuff at Rostov, she said it would be difficult. She arranged his transportation, and she always said it was difficult.
"Why so, now?" he asked.
"The Germans are there, at Rostov."
Shayne thought that one over. "Boloney," he said. He hadn't heard of any Germans nearer than the Dnieper River, and he figured the girl was trying to get out of doing something for him, as usual. She was mad at him, anyway, because she had been recalled from some nursing unit to interpret for him.
Of course she only understood English the way it was written in grammars and Shayne had to explain what he meant by boloney.
"It is impossible now," she said, in her singsong way, "for you to go to Rostov."
"Impossible!" said Shayne. Nothing was impossible if you tackled it, and maybe took a chance. He'd never found anything impossible, in his life. This took a lot of explaining for Catherine to understand. He called her Catherine the Great for short, because he couldn't pronounce her Russian na
me.
"Impossible," said Catherine the Great thoughtfully. And she brightened up all at once. She had been worried, all the time, although Shayne knew it wasn't about him. Her thin face softened under its thatch of straw hair. She really looked pretty, then.
"You want to proceed?" she asked anxiously.
"I want those papers of mine."
Just then Shayne's letters and notes and personal stuff seemed mighty important to him. This war was something new to him, and he hadn't had to leave any of his own personal stuff behind as yet. He wouldn't have lost those papers, left in a bureau drawer in his room for a million dollars. That was what he told Catherine.
"Papers—you mean documents?"
Shayne let her pick her own word for them. He forgot for a moment that to Catherine a word meant what it said it meant in the dictionary. The upshot of it was that she believed he had left important documents worth one million United States dollars in the bureau of Room Three of the Bolshaya Hotel, Prospekt Engelsa, Rostov-on- the-Don.
Something clicked in the mind of Catherine the Great, and she nodded. "We will go there," she said. Which was her way of saying okay, we'll roll.
MOST guys in America (Shayne commented) are forever wondering about these mysterious Russians. The trouble is, most of us are trying to think of some one brand of Russian, shaven or hairy—some genus Muscovite. We might just as well try to think of the kind of North American represented by a Navajo, a French-Canadian timberjack, an Iowa hog raiser, and a Los Angeles income-tax payer. Only Soviet Russia, having a lot more territory, has a lot more varieties than we have—a hundred and thirty or so. Shayne found the individual Russians easy enough to get on with, in their own locality, except that he couldn't talk to them.
Catherine, for instance, acted like any tough-minded high-school graduate, without stockings, and with only one dress she'd made herself out of a picture of New York fashions. She bummed his cigarettes, she quoted things out of books, and at times she went off into giggles for no reason at all. But she had something on her mind all the time.