Riders of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  It was when the crops were being gathered in on the Cossack steppe, and the favorite time for a Moslem invasion was at hand, that fresh tidings came to the siech from the imperial city. A new priest took up his abode in the log church of the siech and gave forth a word that was repeated from the Dnieper to the Don, as far as the forests of the north.

  Rurik, the chief of all the Cossacks, was slain.

  He had been killed by a quarrelsome Moslem guard, in the last Winter, and the sultan had kept the news a secret, believing that he could trick the Cossacks out of the ransom money. But Rurik, the greatest of all koshevois, captain of the falcon-ship and father of the Zaporogian brotherhood, had been cut down with a scimitar before Demid was fairly on his long journey.

  The word passed over the steppe like a grass fire, driven by a high wind. Riders bore it to the far districts of the steppe, and warriors emerged from their villages—veterans of other wars took to horse before sunset and youths came from the horse herds to join them. Bands of black-capped riders began to move south over the steppe, and the balalaikas sounded in the taverns where the men of the lower country were drinking and talking over their wrongs.

  Ten thousand Cossacks, aroused by the death of Rurik, crowded into the siech and called for a council to be held. The drum was beaten and the warriors thronged from the barracks to the central square where their colonels stood with the priest. The rada—the council of the brotherhood— had not assembled by the empty hut of the koshevoi, when a message came from the patrol on the river that a new band of Cossacks were swimming their horses across to the island camp.

  And these newcomers were from the Tatar side of the river.

  "It is that unbridled-, Demid, come home to roost at last," said the

  essaul of the patrol. "Have you food, noble sirs, for the wanderers? Have you garments? If they come from the east they must be lean and tattered."

  "They have passed over a long road," responded one of the colonels. "We will have food, for their eating. Garments we lack."

  In fact the siech was bare of aught but a sprinkling of horses and the weapons each man brought. Nor did he resent the rough words of the essaul, for, until the siech was at war, there was no rank among the brotherhood.

  It was quite a while before the men on the outskirts of the assembly sighted the new arrivals. (It turned out afterward that Ayub had halted the band to dress up a bit.)

  First came the young warrior who had once asked where the sea was. Now he rode in the essaul's position, one hand on hip, his hat tilted at a rakish angle. His old boots had been discarded for a new pair of red morocco, with blue heels. His leather belt was replaced by a green velvet scarf, and in it, carefully displayed, was a long Turkish pistol with gold-inlaid hilt.

  Four out of the Don men, decked out in all the finery they could lay hand on, trotted in line after the young sergeant, showing off the steps of the blooded Kabarda mounts. When the staring Zaporogians pressed too close they thrust out with their stirrups, and bade the onlookers yield place to the Donskoi who had been on a visit to Aleppo.

  "Eh, they are tricked out like pashas, the dogs!" muttered the colonel who had spoken of garments.

  Four more of the riders escorted a bullock cart laden with heavy leather sacks. But ten thousand pairs of eyes passed over the cart to focus with astonished admiration on Ayub.

  The giant ataman had robed himself that morning for the siech. His kalpak was white ermine, bordered with gold braid; a purple cloak of damask embroidered with peacock feathers hung from his broad shoulders; instead of the long Cossack coat he had on a Turkish robe of honor, of the sheerest silvered cloth, studded with pearls. Diamonds gleamed from the armlets that held in place his wide sleeves.

  "His trousers!" cried a stranger to the siech. "Only look at his pantaloons!"

  Ayub stroked his mustache, delighted with the attention given him. Instead of the usual Cossack attire, he wore a pair of silk bag-trousers, as wide as sails, and the purest yellow in hue.

  Behind the cart Demid and Michael rode into the ring of the rada almost unnoticed. Only eleven had come back, of the thirty-four that had set out. The new priest saluted Ayub gravely, taking him for the leader of the band.

  "You have come from a hard road, my son—surely the bandura players and the minstrels will sing of your deeds this night."

  He did not know the man he addressed.

  "Why do you talk to me of minstrels, batko? As the saints are dear to me, I have as good a tongue as theirs, and I do not need any fiddles or lutes to give it tone. Come, brothers, a cup of vodka, now—I tasted the pasha's sherbet in Aleppo, but he had no vodka."

  Someone gave him a cup and he poured it down his throat deftly.

  "Not bad!"

  He rose in his stirrups and lifted his voice.

  "Noble sirs, it is not modest in a man to relate all his deeds, so I will only touch on a few. When you wish to know how to capture the sultan's navy, I can put a word or two in your ears, where at present there are only fleas. And as for capturing such cities as Aleppo with walls as high as the tallest pines—why I and Demid and the little cockerel of a Frank do not bother our heads about such trifles any more."

  The throng pressed nearer and Ayub's old comrades began to grin and nudge each other.

  "I could tell you how it feels to fight night vampires and ghosts in a Turkish burial ground, or to change the heart of a witch—"

  "Enough!" broke in Demid coldly.

  "—or to row in an open skiff across the Black Sea, when the waves were like the slopes of the Caucasus; but you, sir brothers, only want to scratch the backs of your heads that itch from too much lying down."

  "May the dogs bite you!" howled an angry warrior. "How did you get away from the Greeks, off Trebizond?"

  "How did we do that? Easily—it was nothing at all. When dusk fell the little Frank bade us light two score slow matches that we still had with us for the arquebuses. As I live, we had no firelocks any more, but the Greeks counted the burning matches and sheered off, thinking we were in force. After that we landed, and it is the truth that we passed under the mountain where the blessed ark landed when God flooded the world.1 Aye, we climbed mountains—such mountains! The fiend himself could not have flown over them. Then we mauled the Tatars a bit on their steppe and cut down a hundred or so, because we wanted their horses. But as to that, everyone in the world knows except you, dog-brothers, who are swimming in fat because you have eaten in kitchens so long. I will say only that I—and Demid and Ser Mikhail—have here a million sequins as ransom for the koshevoi Rurik."

  "Rurik is no longer koshevoi," observed one of the Cossacks.

  "How, no longer?"

  "Because the Turks have cut his head open and sliced his heart and salted him down, so that he is no longer alive."

  Ayub's brown face became grim and Demid spurred up to the speaker.

  "When did that happen?" he asked.

  "Last Candlemass, ataman."

  "And you stand here, like midwives at a borning!"

  The eyes of the young warrior flashed around the circle of lifted faces, and he raised his clenched hand over his head. Seven months of achievement in spite of nerve-trying obstacles—his whole journey into Islam had been wasted.

  The nearest Cossacks hung their heads, and avoided his gaze.

  "The forehead to you, ataman," spoke up the colonel who had greeted Demid. "We are not cowards that you should use words like a whip, and we lacked powder, cannon and horseflesh. If the Turks had come up at us we would have pounded them, but we had no leader to go against them."

  "Rurik dead!"

  Demid turned to Ayub, who for once was speechless. Then he spoke to Michael, evenly:

  "This treasure, then, is ours. Your share is a large one, and I will put it aside—"

  "Not so," answered the cavalier promptly. "It was a rare voyage—and my share of Sidi Ahmad's loot goes with yours."

  "And you, Michael?"

  "I shall venture with y
ou henceforth."

  "Eh, the wild goose has chosen its flock." Demid's white teeth flashed in a smile. "Good."

  Once more he surveyed the watching brotherhood, who were ill at ease.

  "Now, noble sirs—" he leaned over to jerk a bag from the cart and toss it to the priest—"here is a new church for the batko, aye and new images of gold and silver."

  Pulling out the other sacks he slashed them open with his sword, releasing upon the ground a flood of shining gold, amber and ivory—and a torrent of the finest jewels.

  "It is not fitting for one Cossack to have more than his brothers. So set your hands in this trash and drink it up, or lay it out in garments or horses, just as you will. Guzzle and gorge and then go back to hug your wives and tend your cattle."

  Taking up his reins he turned away, his face dark with disappointment.

  For a while the elders of the council were angry, then they scratched their heads, and began to pull at their mustaches moodily. A buzz of talk drifted in from the groups of the warriors, and yet no man put hand to the wealth that lay on the earth.

  "He spoke well. That's a fact."

  "Aye, he has a horned soul in him. There is no milk in his blood. Did you hear him call the officers old women?"

  "Well, his sword will back up his words, right enough. No getting around that—"

  "He flew down on Aleppo—"

  "But we are not old women. Let us buy powder and bullets and carriage guns and pound the Turk."

  The murmur grew to a shout and the colonels asked what the will of the assembly was.

  "Our will is that Demid should be koshevoi—chief of all the Cossacks!"

  "Aye," roared Ayub, who had lingered to hear what was to follow, "that was well said. He was Rurik's chum."

  The head men put their heads together, and admitted that Demid had shown wisdom; he had outwitted the Turks, and only the —— was cleverer than the Turks.

  "Demid!" howled the throng of warriors. "Give him the baton, you oxtails, or we will pound you!"

  The colonels held up their hands and gave their assent and a voice somewhere took up a song:

  Glorious fame will arise,

  Among the Cossacks,

  Among the heroes,

  Till the end of time.

  And that Winter when the bandura players sat by the fireside in the cottages on the steppe, they had a new song. Bending their aged limbs toward the blaze and nodding their lean heads, they told how Demid the Falcon rallied the strength of the Cossacks along the border and went against the sultan.

  They sang, these bandura players, who were blind minstrels, of the deeds they had not seen, of a slender Frank who was made colonel of a regiment, and of the storm that was brewed by the giant Ayub who rode his horse within sight of the imperial city. They told how the sultan tore his beard, and the streets of Islam ran red until all the world knew how the Cossacks had come to a reckoning with the Turks for the death of Rurik.

  1

  Probably Ayub stretched matters here, but Ararat is visible from a long distance to the north.

  Bogatyr

  When the trail is lost and the stars are hidden, the warrior looks in vain to his right hand and his left. When there is neither meat in the saddlebags, nor grain in the sack—let the horse show the way.

  Tatar proverb

  Ayub, the Zaporogian Cossack, was lost. As far as he could see in every direction the sea of grass stretched, rippling under the gusts of wind, brushing against his shoulders, although he was a big man and the stallion he bestrode was a rangy Kabarda.

  Behind him the sun was setting and the whole steppe was turning swiftly from green to purple. The wind had a cold bite to it, and Ayub, all the three hundred pounds of him, ached with hunger. In the chill air of evening an old wound twitched painfully. He wanted very much to build a fire and lie down under shelter for the night.

  But how the —— was a warrior, even a Zaporogian—a free Cossack from the war encampment on the river Dnieper—to make a fire when there was not wood? And grass and tamarisk bushes would not make a shelter fit for a dog.

  "Ta nitchdgo!" he muttered to the silky ear that the black stallion turned back, "it doesn't matter."

  He pulled the soiled sheepskin over his shoulders and crossed heavily thewed arms on a chest burned as dark as the svitza by the sun's rays. His nankeen trousers, a prized possession, fell in wide baggy folds to the tops of costly red morocco boots with high silver heels. Not in all the steppe that stretched from the Black Sea of the Tatars to Moscow, the city of the Muscovite lords, was there another such pair of trousers. Ayub had found them on a dead Circassian chief.

  The black Kabarda he had taken in a raid on the horse herd of Gerai Khan, the Nogai Tatar, and it was the pride of his heart. Although the horse had come a hundred leagues in four days, it was only sweating under the saddle; a wise and stout stallion of the breed known as wolf hunters. Ayub stood up in the stirrups and looked north and south in the last level gleam of the sunset. And he saw no trace of smoke from a hamlet in some distant gully, no glint of light from the horns of straggling cattle.

  "-take you, steppe!" he said, angrily. "You are fragrant and smooth

  as a Circassian maiden, and I know none fairer. You are full of tricks. You beckon and smile like the maiden, then leave a warrior to sleep in a cold bed."

  Laughing, he sank back in the saddle that creaked under his weight. Although there were gray hairs in the scalp lock curled under his black kalpak, his Cossack hat with the red crown, Ayub never bothered his head about anything. It was easier not to think about things and to follow where others led. For this reason the Zaporogian Cossacks who held the frontier of the steppe had never made him an ataman, though few warriors could stand up to Ayub with the sword, or ride more swiftly or drink more corn brandy.

  Ayub had a way of trusting everything to luck, and so he got into more scrapes than a drunken bear. Somehow he had kept life in his body in an age when men rode with death at their shoulder on this steppe where the vultures circled over the scurrying quail and Cossack and Tatar alike left their white bones to be washed by the rain. But if he had been put in command of a regiment of warriors there would have been nothing left of the regiment.

  In fact, he could not remember how he had left his comrades at the Zaporogian Siech. He had been drunk when he saddled his horse, and he recalled vaguely a tavern a couple of days later where he had thrown coins to the musicians and had led out the prettiest girls to the cleared space between the tables. At his belt hung a heavy pouch of silver, and he did not know how it had come there.

  Reaching over his shoulder he touched the cross on the hilt of his sword and reflected. A sunset like this, the Moslems said, was an omen—Allah had hung the banners of death in the sky. He had seen such sunsets before and always men had yielded up their breath before the night was done. Where was he to find shelter?

  As nearly as Ayub could remember he had ridden east and a little north from the war camp. He was at the edge of the salt barrens where sage begins to appear. Ahead of him somewhere should be a small river, the Donetz. Beyond that should be the auls of the Nogai Tatars, though God alone knew just where those tent villages were, since they moved around like wolfpacks. In fact Ayub suspected that he had come too far into Tatar country, and this put a new thought into his head.

  Not far from the Donetz in this part of the steppe was an abandoned wooden castle, built in forgotten times by the hordes that had followed Tamerlane to the very gates of Moscow. The log castle would provide him with firewood and shelter, and as for the Tatars, they avoided it for superstitious reasons. But where was it?

  "Tchorttielya vosmi dvortzi!" he grunted. "-take you, castles! The

  stallion will find you before I will."

  So he tossed the reins on the Kabarda's neck and settled back in the saddle.

  The stallion was trotting along a lane in the grass with the purposeful gait of a horse that knows very well where it is going to be quartered that n
ight. They were approaching a river because wild ducks rose with a discordant clamor from the reeds far ahead of them. By the time the last streak of orange had faded in the sky behind them, Ayub's keen eyes picked out the glimmer of fire on a knoll near the spot where the ducks had started up. Toward this speck of light the Kabarda headed with a rush, as if to say the day's ride was over.

  But Ayub, who had no desire to stumble into a Tatar ambush, reined in the horse while he studied the light.

  Many ruddy gleams pierced the darkness on the hillock, and a vague glow rose from the earth, as if the summit of the mound had been hollowed out and a fire kindled in its depths. A mutter of voices and a hammering of axes reached the Cossack.

  The steppe around here should be deserted—he had not seen a living man for days.

  "Can't be Tatars," he reflected. "They wouldn't make such a- of

  a racket after dark. Can't be any honest folk out here either—" With a prickling of the scalp, he remembered the evil omen of the blood-red sunset and wondered whether the knoll might not be in possession of hobgoblins and gnomes. Such mounds, common enough on the great steppe, were often burial places of the tribesmen. In other ages the conquering Mongols had interred their dead in mounds, with gold and silver plate and jeweled weapons, and had slain war horses to bear the dead company to the kingdom of Erlik below the earth. Ayub had seen hardy spirits, Muscovite merchants who came from the cities of the north, dig up such bones and buried riches. For his part he did not fear the live Tatars half as much as the dead.

  He was on the point of turning back when he reflected that his horse showed no uneasiness. The stallion always shied when a vampire was about at night. Besides, ghosts did not chop wood to start fires going. Cautiously—for a man who did not know the meaning of caution other-wise—Ayub advanced until he made out a palisade on the hillock and the shapes of wooden towers.

  The ruddy glow came from large fires within the wall and the light he had first seen from the openings that served for windows in the blockhouse. This was the abandoned stronghold of the Tatars for which he had been searching. Reassured, the Cossack went around to the gate and found a man on guard.