The shaven head dropped on the scarred breast. The Cossacks shifted and murmured in their moustaches. They looked expectantly at Ivan Sablianka. He gnawed his moustache reflectively, glanced at the lateen sail drooping in the windless air, and stared at the shoreline. Besides that of their foe, no other sail was visible on the sea, no harbor or town on that wild lonely coast. Low, tree-covered hills rose from the waterline, climbing swiftly to blue mountains in the distance, on whose snow-tipped peaks the sinking sun flamed red. There was a reason why Ivan should know more about seas and ships than his comrades, but he had no exact idea as to where they were. They had crossed the Black Sea; therefore they were now in Moslem territory; these hills were doubtless full of Turks – in his mind he lumped all Muhammadan races under a single contemptuous term.
Under a broad shading hand he stared at the slowly receding craft – a counterpart to that on which he stood. Its crew had been glad enough to break away from the death-grapple. Ivan knew that it was crippled beyond repair, though in better shape than the hulk which was sinking under his feet. The corsair was making for a creek which wound out of the hills between high cliffs. She moved slowly, heeling to port, but Ivan believed she would make it. On the poop he could still make out a figure which caused him to rumble in his throat – a tall figure, on whose mail and helmet the sinking sun sparkled. Ivan remembered the features under that helmet, glimpsed in the chaotic frenzy of battle – hawk-nosed, grey-eyed, black-bearded – stirring in the Cossack an illusive sensation of semi-recollection. That was Osman Pasha, until recently the scourge of the Levant, most renowned of all the Algerian corsairs.
Ivan studied the shoreline. He could not follow to the creek-mouth, but he believed he could run the galley ashore on a sloping headland that ran out from the hills nearer at hand. He went to one of the steering-sweeps.
“Togrukh and Yermak take the other,” he directed; “Demetri and Konstantine quiet the horses. The rest of you dog-brothers tie up your cuts and then go down into the waist and do the best you can at rowing. If any of those Algerian pigs are still alive, knock ’em on the head.”
There were not. Those the cannon balls of their former comrades had spared had been mowed down by the pistols and swords of the Cossacks as they broke their chains and strove to swarm up out of the waist.
Slowly and laboriously they worked the galley inshore. The sun was setting, the long shadows of the cliffs turning from dark blue to velvety purple. A haze like soft blue smoke hovered over the dark water that sunset turned to dusky amethyst. A few stars blinked out in the east. The corsair galley had limped into the mouth of the creek, vanishing between the towering cliffs.
Ivan and his comrades worked stolidly. The starboard rail was almost awash, and the Cossacks abandoned the oars and came up on the poop. The horses were screaming again, mad with fear at the rising water. The Cossacks looked at the shore, teeming, for all they knew, with hostile tribes, but they said nothing. They followed Ivan’s directions as implicitly as if he had been elected ataman by regular conclave in the Sjetsch, that stronghold of free men on the lower reaches of the Dnieper.
It was the only real democracy that ever existed on earth; a democracy where there was no class distinction save that of personal prowess and courage. To the Saporoska Sjetsch came men of all lands and races, leaving their pasts behind, to merge into the new race that was there being evolved. They took new names, entered into new lives. None asked their real names, nor whence they came. They were of many bloods. Togrukh, for example, was the son of a renegade Hungarian colonel and a Tatar slave-woman.
Whence Ivan came, none knew or cared. He had wandered into the Sjetsch five years before, speaking brokenly the speech of the Muscovites. He had aroused some suspicion at the beginning. He affirmed that he believed in God – which was one of the few questions asked an applicant to the Sjetsch – but he was reluctant to cross himself. After argument he compromised by cutting a cross in the air with his sword. He was narrowly watched for some time, but soon proved his honesty in battles against the Turks, and the Tatars of Crimea. Whatever his former life and tongue, he was all Cossack now. He might have been born and raised on the southern steppes.
His sword was one departure from form, among men where curved blades were almost universally the rule. It was straight, four and a half feet in length from point to pommel, broad, double-edged, a blade for thrusting as well as hacking. Not much inferior in weight to the five-foot two-handed swords used by the Wallachian and German men-at-arms, it was meant to be wielded with one hand. From the wide cross-piece to the heavy silver ball that was the pommel, curved a broad hand-guard in flaring lines of gilt-chased iron. Not half a dozen men on the frontier could wield that sword with one hand. It was in Ivan’s fingers now as he leaned on the useless sweep and stared at the headland which loomed nearer and nearer with each heave and roll of the floundering galley.
II
In the fertile valley of Ekrem happenings were coming to pass. The river that wound through the small patches of meadowland and farmland was tinged red, and the mountains that rose on either hand looked down on a scene only less old than they. Horror had come upon the peaceful valley-dwellers, in the shape of lean wolfish riders from the outlands. They did not turn their gaze toward the castle that hung as if poised on the sheer slope high up the mountains; there too lurked oppressors.
The clan of Ilbars Khan, the Turkoman, driven westward out of Persia by tribal feud, was taking toll among the Armenian villages in the valley of Ekrem. It was but a raid among raids, for cattle, slaves and plunder, meant to impress his lordship over the caphar dogs. He was ambitious; his dreams embraced more than the leadership of a wandering tribe. Chiefs had carved kingdoms out of these hills before.
But just now, like his warriors, he was drunk with slaughter. The huts of the Armenians lay in smoking ruins. The barns had been spared, because they contained fodder for horses, as well as the ricks. Up and down the valley the lean riders raced, stabbing and loosing their arrows. Men screamed as the steel drove home; women shrieked as they were jerked naked across the raiders’ saddle-bows.
The horsemen in their sheepskins and high fur kalpaks were swarming in the straggling streets of the largest village – a squalid cluster of huts, half mud, half stone. Routed out of their pitiful hiding-places, the villagers knelt vainly imploring mercy, or as vainly fled, to be ridden down as they ran.
Foremost in this sport was Ilbars Khan, and lost the chance of a kingdom thereby. He spurred between the huts, out into the meadow, chasing a ragged wretch whose heels were winged by the fear of death. Ilbars Khan’s lance-point caught him between the shoulder-blades. The spear-shaft snapped and the drumming hoofs spurned the writhing body as the chief swept past.
“Allah il allah!” Beards were whitened with foam at the blood-mad cry.
The yataghans whistled, ending in the zhukk! of cloven flesh and bone. With a wild cry a fugitive turned as Ilbars Khan swooped down on him, his wide kaftan spreading out in the wind like the wings of a hawk. In that instant the dilated eyes of the Armenian saw, as in a dream, the lean bearded face with its thin down-curving nose; the gold-broidered vest beneath the flowing cloak, crossed by the wide silk girdle from which projected the ivory hilts of half a dozen daggers; the wide sleeve falling away from the lean muscular arm that lifted, ending in a broad curving glitter of steel. In that instant too, the Turkoman saw the lean stooped figure tensed beneath the rags, the wild eyes glaring from under the lank tangle of hair, the long glimmer of light glancing along the barrel of a musket. A wild cry rang from the lips of the hunted, drowned in the bursting roar of the firelock. A swirling cloud of smoke enveloped the figures, in which a flashing ray of steel cut the murk like a flicker of lightning. Out of the cloud raced a riderless steed, reins flowing free. A breath of wind blew the smoke away.
One of the figures on the ground was still writhing; slowly it drew itself up on one elbow. It was the Armenian, life welling fast from a ghastly cut across the neck a
nd shoulder. Gasping, fighting hard for life, he looked down with wildly glaring eyes on the other form. The Turkoman’s kalpak lay yards away, blown there by the close-range shot; most of his brains were in it. Ilbars Khan’s beard jutted upward, as if in ghastly comic surprize. The Armenian’s arm gave way and his face crashed into the dirt, filling his mouth with dust. He spat it out, dyed red. A ghastly laugh slobbered from his frothy lips. It rose to a shout that scared the wheeling vultures. He fell back threshing the sand with his hands, yelling with maniacal mirth. When the horrified Turkomans reached the spot, the Armenian was dead with a ghastly smile frozen on his lips. He had recognized his victim.
The Turkomans squatted about like evil-eyed vultures about a dead sheep, and conversed over the body of their khan. Their speech was evil as their countenances, and when they rose from that buzzards’ conclave, the doom had been sealed of every Armenian in the valley of Ekrem.
Granaries, ricks and stables, spared by Ilbars Khan, went up in flames. All the prisoners taken were slain – infants tossed living into the flames, young girls ripped up and flung into the blood-stained streets. Beside the khan’s corpse grew a heap of severed heads; the riders galloped up, swinging the ghastly relics by the hair, tossing them on the grim pyramid. Every place that might conceivably lend concealment to a shuddering wretch was ripped apart.
It was while engaged in this that one of the tribesmen, prodding into a stack of hay, discerned a movement in the straw. With a wolfish yell he pounced upon it, and dragged his victim to light, giving tongue in lustful exultation as he saw his prisoner. It was a girl, and no stodgy Armenian woman, either. Tearing off the cloak which she sought to huddle about her slender form, he feasted his vulture-eyes on her beauty, scantily covered by the garb of a Persian dancing-girl. Over her filmy yasmaq – her light veil – her dark eyes, shadowed by long kohl-tinted lashes, were eloquent with fear.
She said nothing, struggling fiercely, her lithe limbs writhing in his cruel grip. He dragged her toward his horse – then quick and deadly as a striking cobra, she snatched a curved dagger from his girdle and sank it to the hilt under his heart. With a groan he crumpled, his sheepskins dyed red, and she sprang like a she-panther to his horse, seeming to soar to the high-peaked saddle, so lithe were her motions. The tall steed neighed and reared, and she wrenched it about and raced up the valley. Behind her the pack gave tongue and streamed out in hot pursuit. Arrows whistled about her head and she flinched as they sang venomously by, but urged the steed to more frenzied efforts.
She reined him straight at the mountain wall on the south, where a narrow canyon opened into the valley. Here the going was perilous, and the Turkomans reined to a less headlong pace among the rolling stones and broken boulders. But the girl rode like a leaf blown before a storm, and so it was that she was leading them by several hundred yards when she came upon a cluster of tamarisk-grown boulders that rose island-like above the level of the canyon floor. There was a spring among those boulders, and men were there.
She saw them among the rocks, and they shouted at her to halt. At first she thought them Turkomans; then she saw her mistake. They were tall and strongly built, chain-mail glinting under their cloaks. Their white turban-cloths were wrapped about steel caps that rose to a spire-like peak. Their dark faces were strong and reckless. If the Turkomans were jackals, these were hawks. All this she saw in that moment, her quick perception abnormally whetted by desperation. She saw too the muzzles of matchlocks among the rocks, and caught the flicker of burning fuses. And she made up her mind instantly. Throwing herself from the steed, she ran up the rocks, falling on her knees.
“Aid, in the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!”
A man emerged from a clump of bushes and looked down at her. And as she looked, she cried out again incredulously.
“Osman Pasha!” Then recollecting her urgent need, she clasped his knees, crying, “Yah khawand, protect me! Save me from these wolves who follow!”
“Why should I risk my life for you?” he asked indifferently.
“I knew you of old in the court of the Padishah!” she cried desperately, tearing off her veil. “I danced before you. I am Ayesha – ”
“Many women have danced before me,” he answered. “I have no quarrel with these desert-dogs.”
“Then I will give you a talsmin,” said she in final desperation. “Listen!” And as she whispered a name in his ear, he started as if stung. Quickly he raised his head, staring at her as if to plumb the depths of her inmost mind. For an instant he stood motionless, his grey eyes turned inward, then clambering up a great boulder, he faced the oncoming riders with lifted hand.
“Go your way in peace, in the name of Allah!”
His answer was a whistle of arrows about his ears. He sprang down, waving his hand. Instantly matchlocks began to crash from among the rocks, the smoke billowing about the thicket-clad knoll. A dozen wild riders rolled from their saddles and lay twitching. The rest gave back, yelling in dismay. They wheeled about and cantered swiftly back up the gorge toward the main valley.
Osman Pasha turned to Ayesha, who had modestly resumed her veil. He was a tall man, with grey eyes like ice and steel. There was in his manner a certain ruthless directness rare in an Oriental. His cloak was of crimson silk, his corselet of close-meshed chain mail threaded with gold. His green turban was held in place by a jeweled brooch, and his spired helmet was chased in silver. Ivory butts of gold-mounted pistols jutted from his shagreen girdle, which was resplendent with a great golden buckle, and his boots were of finest Spanish leather. Salt water, powder smoke and blood had stained and tarnished his apparel; yet the richness of his garments and weapons was notable, even in that age of lavish accoutrements.
His men were gathered about him, forty Algerian pirates, as ruthless and courageous a race as ever trod a deck, bristling with firearms and scimitars. In a depression behind the knoll were horses of a rather inferior breed.
“My daughter,” said Osman Pasha in a benignant manner that was belied by his cruel eyes, “I have made enemies in this strange land, and fought a skirmish on your behalf, because of a name whispered in my ear. I believed you – ”
“If I lied may my hide be stripped from me,” she swore.
“It will be,” he promised gently. “I will see to it personally. You spoke the name of Prince Orkhan. What do you know of him?”
“For three years I have shared his exile.”
“Where is he now?”
She pointed up toward the mountains that overhung the distant valley, where the turrets of the castle were just visible among the crags.
“Across the valley, in yonder castle of El Afdal Shirkuh, the Kurd.”
“It would be hard to take,” he mused.
“Send for the rest of your sea-hawks!” she cried. “I know a way to bring you to the very heart of that keep!”
He shook his head.
“These ye see are all my band.”
Then seeing her incredulous glance, he said, “I am not surprized that you wonder at my change of fortune. I will tell you – ”
And with the disconcerting frankness of the man, which his fellow Moslems found so inexplicable, Osman Pasha briefly sketched his fall. He did not tell her of his triumphs; they were too well known to need repeating. Five years before he had appeared suddenly on the stage of the Mediterranean, as a reis of the famed corsair, Seyf ed-din Ghazi. He soon outstripped his master and gathered a fleet of his own, which owned allegiance to no ruler, not even the Barbary beys. At first an ally of the Grand Turk and a welcome guest at the Sublime Porte, he had later enraged the Sultan by his raids on Turkish shipping.
A deadly feud had arisen between them, and at last fate had declared in favor of Murad. Pillaging along the Dardanelles, the corsair had been trapped by an Ottoman fleet and all his ships destroyed except two. But the Sultan had spared his life, giving him a task that practically amounted to a death sentence. He was commanded to sail up the Black Sea to the Dnieper mouth
and there destroy another foe of the Turk’s – Skol Ostap, the Koshevoi Ataman of the Zaporogian Cossacks, whose raids into Turkish dominions had driven the Sultan well-nigh to madness.
The Cossacks at intervals shifted their Sjetsch – their armed camp – from island to island, secretly, to avoid surprize attacks, but Osman’s luck had been with him to a certain extent. A Greek traitor had led him to the Dnieper island then occupied by the free warriors, and at a time when many of them were away on a raid against the Tatars across the river. The flying raid had failed in capturing Skol Ostap, lying helpless of an old wound, because of the ferocious resistance of the Cossacks with him. In the midst of the battle the riders had returned from pounding the Tatars, and Osman fled, leaving one of his ships in their hands. He knew the penalty for failure, and instead of fleeing toward the Turkish fleet which waited down along the coast, he struck straight out across the Black Sea, soon pursued by the Cossacks in his captured ship, using its crew for oarsmen. He did not understand the ferocity of their pursuit, not knowing that a bursting shell from his cannon had slain the wounded Skol Ostap and maddened his kunaks thereby.
When the eastern coast was in sight, the reckless Cossacks had drawn up within cannon-shot, and in the ensuing battle only the rising of the oarsmen on their craft had won the day for the corsair.
Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures Page 54