Riders of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  "You saw my smoke?"

  "I am not blind. We hastened. A goatherd ran up to us with word that many Turks have entered the lower defiles."

  Being headman of the clan, Ibnol Hammamgi would not condescend to question a young woman, but his eye turned appraisingly on the Cossacks.

  "They are Franks from across the sea. Their sword edges are sharper than their wits, or they would not be upon the road to Aleppo. I want you to lead them from this place, to our folk. Can you save the horses?"

  Ibnol Hammamgi hunched himself closer in his shawl and shook his great head gently from side to side.

  "The horses, aye. The men are another matter—"

  "You will profit much."

  "How?"

  The two spoke together, low-voiced, and in the end the Armenian gave his assent, surlily enough. A bridle chain clinked behind them, and they beheld Demid within arms' reach. Lali did not draw back.

  "O ai," she greeted him, "the slave has summoned the boar of the steppe, and, lo, he comes."

  "Are these your people?"

  "Aye, so. Are you ready to bend the head and sheath the sword, to win safety for your—" Lali, glancing at the young warrior, altered her word— "your men?"

  "My men do not bend the head, nor do I."

  Slender hands uprose to her brow in a mock salaam.

  "Great mighty captain of beggars and king of nowhere—have you wit enough to understand this. The low-born lad who led you here did so at my behest. This is a trap, sometimes used by my folk, but a trap for pursuers, not pursued. There is a way out, unknown to the Turks, who will think that demons have made off with you, if you come with us—"

  "Enough," whined the cral, who had been sniffing the air like a dog. "Snow is coming down from the crests, and we must be upon the paths."

  He glanced at the gold and silver trappings of the Cossack's saddle, and at the packs of the warriors, who had managed to carry off more than a little spoil from the Moslem towns.

  "These Franks have chosen good ponies from below. That is well. Will they keep truce with us?"

  Lali shrugged and turned to Demid.

  "Will you share our bread and salt, and sit down with the maid you struck?"

  Demid considered, for he did not pledge his word lightly, and the girl puzzled him.

  "Lead us out of this gorge and we will share bread and salt with you."

  She tossed her head, disappointed perhaps because he showed no anxiety to go with her. Ibnol Hammamgi lifted his voice in a shout and his followers began to scramble down from their vantage points. Signing to Demid to accompany him, he trotted away toward the cliff. Passing along it for some distance, he turned in among a nest of boulders. Here the path bent sharply and led into what seemed to be the black mouth of a cave.

  Entering, the Cossacks dismounted. Torches were kindled and they pressed forward on foot, drawing the horses after them. The tunnel ended in a narrow cleft in the mountain where the gray light hardly penetrated.

  Evidently, the Cossacks noticed, the mountaineers were following the course of a stream, now dry, that had once forced its way into the gorge they had left.

  Gradually the chasm widened into a wooded ravine, up which they climbed to come out on the ice-coated slopes of the mountains above the timberline. The Armenians pushed on with a shambling trot that made the heavier Cossacks pant to keep up. A word of warning was passed down the line as they threaded along a narrow ridge where stags' antlers, stuck into the stones at intervals, marked the trail. In single file they felt their way where snowdrifts on either hand made the road impassable for any who did not know the marks. And, as they mounted again, on firmer ground, snow began to fall.

  They had left the Black Sea and its guardians behind.

  VII

  Lali Makes a Promise

  An idea once planted in Ayub's mind stuck as a burr sticks to lamb's wool. He was sure that the young witch had suffered a change of heart since her talk with him. Had not the Cossacks been well received by the mountain folk, and given shelter in a large hut that was more than half a cave—so steep was the side of the valley on which the hamlet perched?

  Had not these goat-like people brought to them a goodly pot of mutton and rice, and bottles of really excellent red wine? And straw to sleep on? True, the Cossacks had taken much of this to rub down the ponies, and bed the tired beasts beside the fire within the earth hut. They had done this before eating themselves, and refused to give over the horses to the care of the village folk, for Demid had promised a vivid unpleasantness to the warrior who lost a horse.

  Demid himself had gone off at sundown to the cabin of Ibnol Ham-mamgi, leaving the detachment in the hands of Ayub and Michael. They had slept all through the day, having come in the night before on the heels of the storm, and, being rested and fed, Ayub was moved to give tongue to the idea that possessed him.

  "It would be a great miracle, Mikhail, lad, if the singing girl mends her ways and uses her arts to aid true men. Aye, a mighty miracle. Yet she touched me—all the kunaks saw her touch me—and here I am with a whole hide and a full belly."

  Now, being quick of wit and having the gift of tongue, Michael of Rohan understood a little of the simple speech of the Cossacks, especially the military commands.

  "When you sleep at an inn, keep one eye open for the innkeeper," he responded, in his own language.

  "Eh?"

  Ayub bent his head down, for the cavalier's hat came only to his shoulder. He had grown attached to the youngster, who always listened to his remarks at times when Demid, who used few words, was uncommunicative.

  "Why here she comes, the dove!"

  Lali in fact was passing the wide mouth of that hut where they leaned at ease, but it was a changed Lali. Her veil and cloth-of-silver had disappeared and her face was pallid under a high lace headdress. A tight-fitting bodice sewn with silver coins and a voluminous overskirt of black velvet failed to hide the girl's natural grace. She saw the two men and made a quick sign for them to follow her.

  Ayub coughed and glanced covertly at Michael, who was fastening his collar and adjusting his sword-sling at a more becoming angle.

  "It is said among my people," the Cossack ruminated, "that a Syrian can cheat two Jews, and an Armenian can lift the shirt from a Syrian— but still she looks like a dove."

  The two followed Lali through a dog-infested alley, past a donkey pen and up winding steps where the hovels of the tribesmen could be touched by the hand on either side. Up more steps where children ran out to stare at the girl and to run from the warriors. Sivas was a nest of refuge for the harassed Armenians, hidden in the higher gorges near the caravan tracks. Michael wondered how human beings could exist there in such squalor, not knowing that the clay and the earth of the huts and the grime and the grease of the children all served to insure them against the visits of Turkish collectors and janissaries.

  Above and beyond Sivas towered the mighty crests of the Caucasus, bathed in the purple and scarlet of sunset—as forbidding and awe-inspiring that day as when the priests of Armenia had walked openly in the footsteps of the Christian saints, who for a brief generation had been the monarchs of men and the counselors of kings.

  "Now what is this?" Ayub clutched his arm.

  Lali had slowed her steps and turned into a shallow ravine up which ran a broad flight of marble flags, broken and chipped by age and frost.

  Once she cast back at them a glance mocking and searching, then she fell to working at something in her hand, and when she pressed forward again into the shadows she carried a lighted candle.

  They were aware of muffled voices close at hand and a glow from some hidden source. Lali rounded another corner in the rocks, and they halted in their tracks.

  Before them uprose the portico of chapel, but such a one as Michael had never seen before. Columns of blue marble supported it, and within a hundred candles glimmered upon glazed tiles, and images wrought in gold. Lali bowed her head and stepped into the throng of people that stoo
d facing the altar. Everyone held a taper, except the watchers in the portico who stared out into the shadows to give word of the coming of intruders.

  Ayub, however, thrust past the guard and fixed his eyes on the black figure at the altar—an aged man with a white beard, falling down the wide collar that covered his shoulders, who leaned upon the arms of two acolytes as if wearied by the weight of the white stole and black robe.

  The patriarch was intoning a chant, in a high, clear voice, while the people sang responses. Ayub listened with open mouth.

  "Eh-eh," he whispered, "here is a batko, a holy father, like ours who was cut up by the Moslems. I will rouse up our lads; they will want to set eyes on the batko."

  With that he hastened off, leaving Michael in the shadow of a pillar. Unobserved, the cavalier watched Lali. When the prayers were ended the girl pressed forward, and there was a stir among the Armenians, when she knelt before the patriarch. The aged man asked a brief question, and cast the smoke of incense upon her. Out of the white wraiths of vapor the delicate face of the girl appeared, and Michael saw her lips quiver as the priest touched her forehead and shoulder.

  With a sudden motion she pressed to her cheek the edge of his robe and then drew back to her place. The heads of the Armenians nodded over their tapers understandingly.

  When the singing began again, it was reinforced by the deep voices of the Cossacks, who crowded in eagerly from the portico. Michael now caught the words, which were indeed old and familiar—

  "Kyrie elieson."

  It seemed to him that Lali was taking the sacrament, and that in some way she was bidding farewell to the people of Sivas.

  He was puzzled by this, for Lali's nature appeared many sided, and he managed to ask Ayub about it as they made their way back through the snow. A cold wind swept the heights about them, and overhead the stars gleamed like jewels in imperial purple.

  "Why," the big Cossack explained, "the girl was incensed and took a blessing from the patriarch, because she is going to her fate. That is, to

  Aleppo. Aleppo, they say, is-and there the fiend has his court. It was

  well we met with such a fine batko—he is the patriarch of Armenia come up from Antioch, in the Holy Land."

  The Cossacks were indeed in vast good humor and the visit to the church seemed to remove all suspicion of them from the minds of the folk. Michael, too, felt at ease and ready for the next turn of affairs. The splendid edifice struck him as something of a marvel, and he did not know that he had been within a chapel built by a Roman emperor, Theodosius, in bygone days.

  But he felt a stirring of the pulse, an intimacy with ancient and mighty things. He stood on the threshold of an older world and perhaps within his memory was awakened the pageant of ancestors of his line who had stood upon this ground when the hosts of the Crusaders moved about the Holy Land.

  Even Ayub was somewhat reflective. "Well, I did not know that the maiden had changed so much, from a few words of mine. Still, I argued with her amain, and she listened."

  At the entrance to the hut, one of the younger warriors took Michael's hand with a smile—

  "Eh, will you frolic with us this night, Frank?"

  "Why this night?"

  The Cossack stared, and laughed artlessly as a child:

  "Eh, the day after, the ataman, Demid, leads us forth to a long road. It is our custom to frolic before the road."

  So Michael went about with them, and heard the note of fiddles and harps, drank of the red wine, and gazed at the whirling throngs of the young girls who danced before the warriors, encouraged by the shouts of the Cossacks—he shared the bread dipped in wine, and studied the lined faces from which care had fallen away for a few hours.

  But most of all he watched the girl Lali, hearing for the first time her voice freed from all restraint, hearkening to the song that had come from her lips on the galley, beholding the grace of her light figure in the dance.

  And as he watched he frowned a little, repeating under his breath Ayub's words—

  "She goes with us to Aleppo."

  When Demid entered the dwelling of Ibnol Hammamgi he bore with him two heavy sacks that clanked as he set them down near the tiled stove. A dozen pairs of eyes flew instantly to the sacks and lingered desire-fully. They were hard, bleared eyes, those of the headmen of the tribe of Sivas—aye, sharp and penetrating withal. They pierced inside the heavy leather sacks and a dozen minds, shrewd as foxes, probed at the value of the things that clanked.

  Beards wagged upon the breasts of ancient kaftans, shiny with grease, and the eyes, by a common impulse, traveled to the face of the young Cossack.

  It was an open, weather-beaten face, that of Demid. The corded muscles of the bare throat and the slow-moving hands were evidence of lean strength not at first noticeable in that slender figure.

  The headmen were satisfied. With half a glance they could pick out a man whose thoughts did not dwell on money values. It was well, they thought, that the stranger was such, because they meant to have some gain out of the windfall. Ibnol Hammamgi, their cral, had saved the thick necks of the Cossacks, and something was owing to the tribe for that— if not gifts, then some horses stolen, a few weapons pilfered by boys—a purse slit here and there by the young women—

  Methodically Demid emptied out the contents of the sacks. Gold armlets, a silver headband for a horse studded with sapphires, bits of ambergris, poniards from India with ivory hilts, odds and ends of coral. He had gathered together the pickings of the warriors on their ride up from the coast—some hasty plundering, done at his command.

  Now, to give the headmen time to weigh the value that was scattered on the rug by their knees, he paused to light his pipe. This served, too, to stifle the smells of the hut, for overhead on the rafters were drying woolen pantaloons, and salted fish and the stove hinted at goose feathers and bones in the fire—distasteful to the Don Cossack, who had no liking for the odors of a house, especially a dirty one.

  But long before he had replaced the booty in the bags, a dozen agile brains had guessed the value of his takings to a copper drachma in the markets of Trebizond or Sinope.

  "I leave these sacks in your keeping," he said to Ibnol Hammamgi, in the Turkish that the Armenians understood, "until we ride back from our raid. If we are successful all this shall be yours. If we fail we will take them again, having need of them."

  "Whither will the noble lord raid?"

  "To the castle of Sidi Ahmad, in Aleppo."

  "Impossible!"

  The headmen drew back into their fur-lined kaftans like birds ruffling their plumage at a sudden alarm.

  "That is madness!"

  "How, madness?" Demid pushed the sacks away from him. "Is not Rurik, our cral, captive at the Imperial City, with many Cossack knights? Does not the sultan demand ten thousand ducats for his ransom alone? Well then, we must lay our hands on a treasure and surely there is a treasure at Aleppo."

  The elders all began to talk at once, lifting their hands, and raising their voices, one above the other until Ibnol Hammamgi shrieked louder than the rest and shrieked for silence.

  "What do you want of us?" he demanded, and now the headmen were quiet, seeking to weigh Demid as they had his booty. But this they found more difficult.

  "A guide—horses—information."

  "How many horses?"

  "Two tens. But they must be good ones, Kabarda breed, or Kabulis."

  "Not to be thought of! The horses would be lost to us, because you will never come back."

  "Some of us will come back, Ibnol Hammamgi, and you will do well to aid us because one of your blood rides with us."

  "To Aleppo?"

  The bald head of the chief shook with a dry chuckle.

  "We do not visit the stronghold of Sidi Ahmad, the Turk. Once I visited Aleppo, and they took a toll from me—thus." He shut his good eye and opened the red socket of his blind side.

  "Lali, daughter of Macari, goes with us."

  "Ekh! Does a clipped hawk fl
y back to the hunter? The daughter of Macari is not one in heart with the Moslems; in her veins is the blood of her people. Does the noble lord think that now, when she is restored to us, she will be off at once to that demon's place, Aleppo?"

  The noble lord looked at Ibnol Hammamgi thoughtfully. To tell the truth he had not reflected much upon Lali. The singing girl, that evening, had assured him that she would journey with the Cossacks to the castle of Sidi Ahmad, and Demid had found it a fruitless task to try to reason out why a woman—Lali especially—did things.

  "Perhaps the distinguished captain," went on Ibnol Hammamgi, "does not know that Lali el Niksar is the child of a line of kings. Like a wild goose she is not to be tamed; her forefather was Kagig the First, who was monarch of a thousand spears when Greater Armenia was free, when the Frankish crusaders passed under our mountains and our chivalry fought at their side, and the ravines ran blood in rivers. Christos vokros! That was a day of days."

  A gleam came into his sunken eye and his fingers clawed restlessly at his wisp of a beard.

  "Blood will flow again before our horses turn their heads, O cral. Bid the girl stand before you, and you shall hear the promise she made."

  Ibnol Hammamgi muttered over his shoulder and a tousled lad upheaved from a nest of sheepskins, to run out of the hut in quest of Lali.

  Meanwhile the fire had departed the pallid face of the chief and the habitual mask of caution descended upon it. It would not do at all, he reflected, for the Cossacks to make trouble for the tribe of Sivas.

  "It is quite clear to me," he said, "that the noble sir does not know Sidi Ahmad at all. Except only the Sultan Mustapha, himself—may the dogs litter on his grave—the pasha of Aleppo is the greatest of Moslems. He has a heavy hand and a quick wit, and his treasury is full as a squirrel's nest in Autumn."

  Here Ibnol Hammamgi sighed, thinking of the vast wealth of the pasha.

  "He has bled our people white, and he has taken a third from all the caravans that must cross his province; he took prisoner some of the finest emirs of Persia and no one can count the ransom he had of them. Besides that, he is overlord of Jerusalem, and has raised the admission fee to the Holy Sepulcher to four zecchins a pilgrim, not to speak of the entrance toll to the city for a Christian, of another six, and the certificate of visitation. Besides that, he has farmed out to the Arab chiefs the privilege of plundering the Frank pilgrims, at three thousand sultanons a year—"