Riders of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  Ayub thought that it was an uncommon youth who could take his horse from the stables and ride out of a Tatar raid.

  "Your sword was—broken," he said slowly.

  "This—" Kirdy hesitated a little—"was given me."

  "Hmm. Who was the Tatar?"

  "Gerai Khan, of the Nogais, made the raid. I saw his white horse when the tavern was burning."

  An old foe of the siech was Gerai Khan, and a valiant man. Ayub knew that the Tatar was shrewd as a steppe fox. And he thought that the boy had a wise head on him to see so much when swords were out and flames were roaring.

  "Did the prince beat him off?" he asked.

  Kirdy was silent for the time that water takes to boil. When he spoke, his accent was so marked that the Cossack barely understood him.

  "In'shalum bak Allah. God forbid I should judge where I have little wisdom. I did not see the prince or his men. It may be they were too late, or Ghirei-ka hemmed them in. But the Tatars cut down the villagers who took weapons in their hands. They slew many, taking some for captives—the young lads and maidens for slaves. They drove off all the cattle and sheep."

  Ayub eyed the piebald pony attentively. It was, as the minstrel had said, a good horse.

  "And whither do you ride?"

  The youth looked up quickly.

  "After the maiden, Galka. I will bring her back from the Tatars."

  All this while Ayub had been revolving things in his mind. Kirdy was not like the bandura players he had known—too young for one thing. The boy had come from beyond the frontier; his speech was strange. Stranger still, he had emerged from a Tatar raid with almost a whole skin, with a horse and a sword worth a noble's ransom. Now he proposed to cross the river in the path of the Tatars, which was a good way to die immediately, unless he was known to the raiders.

  Was he a spy? Had he come to Sirog to measure the strength of Prince Vladimir? Yet, if he were a foeman, why should he linger to talk to Ayub?

  "Look here, my lad," said Ayub bluntly. "We shared bread and salt at the tavern, that's a fact. But when you say Prince Vladimir turned his back and picked his nose while a Tatar chambul raided his villagers, I believe you're lying like a dog. The prince may be half a devil, but he's an orthodox Christian like myself, and no coward. So I think you're a spy, and that's the long and short of it."

  Kirdy's dark head went up and he drew a breath between clenched teeth. Both men reached for their swords, the youth more swiftly than the big warrior. Both were on their knees, their movements hampered by the dense growth around them.

  The minstrel did not raise his weapon. No sooner had his hand closed on the hilt than the curved blade sprang from the scabbard. His arm darted forward and to the right, and the scimitar gleamed under Ayub's chin.

  Death's scent was in Ayub's nostrils as he flung himself to the left, crashing full length on his back. The razor edge of the scimitar did no more than touch his kalpak.

  Lying so, he saw Kirdy bending over him, saw the boy's face, pale and twitching, the black eyes burning. In the brush behind him a horse stamped and someone growled a word of reproof. Kirdy, as if struck by an arrow, remained motionless while the big Cossack tried doggedly to free the broad sword upon which he was lying.

  Then, to Ayub's astonishment, the boy thrust the curved sword back in its scabbard and put his foot on the pommel of the Cossack's weapon. He cried out something in a language Ayub did not understand, and added under his breath, "Nay, between us must be peace!"

  "You give me life?" Ayub scowled up at him. "By the five wounds, I'll take naught from the hand of a Moslem."

  The boy's set lips smiled, though the veins still stood out on his forehead.

  "I am no Moslem."

  Sitting up, Ayub beheld his cap lying on the ground, cut in two. "Well, you are no minstrel either. Who taught you that cross-stroke with the blade? What are you, then?"

  The blood flowed back into Kirdy's lean cheeks and he withdrew his foot from Ayub's sword, standing a moment in silence while the anger of the two men cooled.

  "Sir brother, it is true I am no bandura player. I have come from afar through many enemies, and a minstrel may go where a warrior would meet only sword strokes.

  "I was born in the tents of the Golden Horde, in the sands of the Gobi, beyond the mountains that you call the roof of the world. My mother was a princess, of the line of Kublai Khan. She had the right to bear with her wherever she might go the gold yarligh and to sit on the white horse skin. Before I had backed a horse she and my father were slain by tribesmen who raided down from the mountains. A servant hid me in a cart and so I was not carried off a slave.

  "My grandsire was a bogatyr, a hero. Alone among men he entered the tomb of Genghis Khan in the pine forest where the Kerulon flows, in the land of the Five Rivers. He carried hence the yak-tail Standard of the Mongol Horde, and with it in his hand, he made war against the emperors of Cathay. But my grandfather was old, and the Horde was no more than a scabbard from which the blade has been drawn. He took me into his tent and taught me how to handle a sword.

  "He taught me many things, but not by words. When the Cathayans searched for us, we drew our reins toward the passes in the southern mountains,2 and these we crossed in regions where the snow lay and the winds were very strong. A good swordsman, Chauna Singh, of the tribe called

  Rajputs, gave us aid. He had a fine beard and knew a horse when he saw one. He served Jahangir, the Moghul of Ind.

  "So we also took service with the Moghul, and crossed swords more than once with the Moslems. Yet there was one Moslem who was a bogatyr. He was Abdul Dost, and he taught me how to steal horses and lie in wait for a caravan. I was old enough to follow him in battle, but not old enough to have men to my command.

  "Once I think we saved the life of the Moghul of Ind in a war against the Usbeks, and many were slain. But my grandfather tired of the Moghul's court, because there he made many enemies who were always close at hand, and not in a distant camp that could be watched. There were women who plotted against him, smiling at him because he had found favor with the Moghul, but whispering and stirring up the mansabdars of the throne against him.

  "I, and others with me, begged my grandfather to go before Jahangir, the Lord of the World, the Moghul, and justify himself. But he would not go. He said that once a man might justify himself with words, but not a second time. Besides, he was very weary of the court.

  "So we went at night and led out the best of our horses, taking no more than that with us, for we could not. Aye, many fine pieces of armor and hangings of silk and coralwork and weapons we left behind in the palace grounds of Balkh where the Moghul lay.

  "Again we drew our reins toward the mountain passes to the north. We carried grain for our horses in saddlebags, because snow had put an end to grazing. On the other side of the mountains we found a land of rolling, green valleys where the people did not live in tents, but in clay houses, and had a great deal of cattle. The horses, too, were good. When we reached a wide river with ships that bore masts and sails, my grandfather said that he had been in this place before. He called it Khorosan.3 It was not a good place for us, because the people were turbaned folk—Moslems.

  "Though the grazing was good we had to press on, my grandfather pretending that he was blind, and I saying that I was a cup-companion, a teller of tales from the court of the Moghul. We followed the river and it led us to a city on a sea where all the shore was gray with salt. Aye, we crossed a desert of gray salt where we found no grazing at all, and the caravan beasts were camels.

  "In the city my grandfather talked with men who had thin beards and wore dirty caps and seemed always to be afraid. When they heard what my grandfather wanted they feared the more, but they took from us the last of our gold. They were called Jews. When a Jew passed a Turkish grandee in the street, the Moslem would snatch off the Jew's cap and spit in it and put it back on again.

  "My grandfather, the bogatyr, wanted to be placed on a ship with the horses, to go across t
he sea. He had begun to feel his age, and his joints were stiff. At that time he would sit against the wall of a house and talk to me about his home. He had never done this before.

  "So I learned that his people were all knights who cared not about trade, but fought the Turks and the Tatars. My grandfather's people were the Kazaki—Cossacks of your tribe.

  "He said that the brotherhood of Cossacks never left the war camps, but when they had taken gold or fine jewels in plunder, they would give it all to the musicians, to play and the girls to dance, and hold revelry. Now, when he felt death standing near him, he desired above all things to see the Cossack steppe again, and to greet the warriors, his brothers, so that the minstrels would know of his deeds and his name would not be lost to fame, but would be sung from camp to camp in the steppe.

  "And the Jews, greatly fearing, put us on a ship. For a month we sailed across that sea toward the Jitti-karachi, the Great Bear in the sky.4 Then the shores closed in on us, and we passed up a river, where only reeds and the wagon-tents of the Tatars were to be seen.

  "When we set foot on land again the bellies of our horses were drawn up into their ribs. But the eyes of the bogatyr, my grandfather, were bright and he shouted and plied his whip. For days we sped on through the tall grass, avoiding the Tatar auls and swimming the freshets. We swam the Donetz, and my grandfather began to quiver all over, like an eager horse, when he saw the roofs of the village of Sirog and the men going in and out of the castle.

  "But after we had come up to the gate he said to me that these were not Cossacks, because the Cossacks were free men without masters, and he had seen the banner of the prince. So we kept our saddles.

  "We stopped after a while, and my grandfather sat down because he was weary, and because he was grieved at finding strangers where he had looked for the sir brothers, Cossacks. I went back to the tavern for meat and wine, and there I met you, sir brother."

  So spoke the young Mongol prince, and Ayub meditated upon his tale with lowered eyes, finding in it truth and not falsehood. The Cossack warrior remembered the man he had seen outlined against the moon the night before, and remembered too the Cossack voices that he had heard when he was stretched out drunk. And he was deeply ashamed that an elder Cossack, a bogatyr, whose renown had traveled over all the steppe from the Black Sea to Moscow, should have seen him drunk when Tatars were burning and pillaging near at hand.

  "Ekh," he said at length, "you are mistaken, Kirdy. The fame of your grandsire has not been unvoiced, his deeds have not been forgotten. The gray-haired bandura players have sung of him and children have heard his name. It is in my mind that your grandsire is the Koshevoi Ataman of the Zaporogian Cossacks, who was called the Wolf. Khlit of the Curved Saber, so his enemies named him."

  "That is true," assented Kirdy. "And this is his sword. He gave it to me last night when mine was broken. A Tatar or Mongol would have known it at once for the blade of Kaidu, the rider of the white horse."

  Ayub nodded soberly. He had heard of such a sword, but had never set eyes on it before.

  "Take me to the koshevoi, so that I may hold him in my arms. Eh, he was a hero, and there are not such in the siech today."

  Kirdy glanced up at the sun and shook his head. "Nay, he is far away by now. Come, there is much to be done—if you trust me."

  Rising to his full height, Ayub stretched himself until his bones cracked, then shouldered his sword, and flung an arm around Kirdy. "Nay, youngling, when you are older you will know that it is ill work rousing one who has been fighting the bear—drunk."

  Instead of mounting his horse, Kirdy walked beside the older man, his courtesy forebearing to sit in the saddle while Ayub was afoot. As for the Zaporogian, he eyed the youth sidewise, taking account of the dark brows, the clear, quick moving eyes and the stalwart neck.

  "He's a swordsman, no doubt of that," he thought with pleasure.

  "He's tall and plain-spoken, and he led a horse out under the spears of a

  Tatar chambll.--take me if we don't make a good Cossack out of him.

  Only I hope Khlit put this plan in his head—the lad's unfledged yet, for making a plan, and —— knows my head isn't suited for such things."

  IV

  Prince Vladimir had not slept that night. When his sentinels had brought word of the Tatar attack, he had left the massive chests of gold and silver plate where he had been making a tally of his possessions with the aid of a sleepy clerk and had himself given the alarm. For hours his retainers had stood under arms while Vladimir, in a tower of the blockhouse, watched the sacking and burning of the village a musket shot away.

  Not until dawn, when the last of the riders had disappeared toward the river, did the prince give command to open the gate in the palisade and sally forth. His arquebusiers went out, carrying lighted matches, and the boyars went with a strong guard of pikemen, but Vladimir was attended only by Durak, the clerk, and the priest who had come with him from Moscow.

  He merely glanced at the smoldering and charred walls of the tavern, the demolished huts and the broken cattle pens. He did not go out to the fields where horses had trodden down the tender barley and wheat. Instead, he went from one body to another commanding Durak to turn each one over and identify it.

  There were many bodies and few living souls in the hamlet of Sirog. Old women, who had flocked together, dry-eyed and voiceless, kneeled as he went by, mounted on the black Kabarda. Boys, who had run out into the steppe and so had escaped the Tatar lances, took off their caps. To all these Vladimir spoke, asking the names of the slain. He even bade Durak's men-at-arms rake over the debris of the larger buildings to see if any bodies had been buried in the ruins.

  The boyars soon went back to the castle because the penetrating odor of hot ashes and blood was distasteful to them, but Vladimir kept at his task with feverish eagerness, watching to see that the clerk marked down all the names of the dead on a long roll of paper.

  An hour later they came across the forms of the cobbler, and his sons in the trail well on toward the river.

  "Mark down Ivashko, and his sons," Durak growled to the clerk.

  "See, they took cudgels in their hands, and so they were spitted."

  "Deus eos accipe," murmured Vladimir. "God receive their souls." The captain of the men-at-arms glanced up at his lord bleakly, as if wondering why His Illustriousness bothered his head about so many peasants.

  "The tally is complete, Serene Highness," vouchsafed the clerk. "How many?"

  "Fifty-three, please you, my lord."

  Vladimir motioned him to give the list of names to the priest. "Here, father—these names must be prayed for, per diem, in perpetuity. As a whole and by individuals, by Mother Church. At Easter candles must be burned." He considered a moment. "Will five hundred and thirty gold ducats be a sum sufficient?"

  The priest, with downcast eyes, took the list and bowed.

  "Yet there is no altar and, save for the icon at the castle—"

  "Tomorrow we begin the march to Moscow. There the sum will be paid down." Again Vladimir hesitated, fingering his lip. "Nay, I doubt me that it suffices. Ten garments of cloth-of-gold, with pearls sewn therein will I give the holy images in the Kremyl."

  He glanced at the haze of smoke that still hung over Sirog. "It is manifest, is it not, father, that I am now relieved of my oath to abide by and protect the dogs of serfs on the border?"

  Durak, the voiceless, uttered a croaking sound that might have been a laugh.

  "Cattle gone, wenches gone, brats gone—only kolduns, only magicians, could rebuild the village."

  "Aye, my lord prince," acknowledged the priest to whom exile in the steppe was as abhorrent as to Vladimir, "it is manifest. Will you return to bend the knee at court?"

  Vladimir, hands crossed on the saddle pommel, bade the clerk read over the list again, and when he had done, remarked: "Kukubenko's Galka is not set down. What became of her?"

  Durak pointed up the trail.

  "There are twain who can give my lo
rd some word of the lass."

  The two Cossacks had appeared. They were on foot, Kirdy limping to favor his injured side, Ayub flushed and breathing heavily. At sight of him the stallion had neighed and started forward, only to be restrained by a dig of the spurs. The Zaporogian stifled a groan, because he had never used spurs on the horse, and he could see plainly that the Kabarda had not been rubbed down or fed that morning. The silver cross on the chest strap that all Cossack horses wore had been taken off, and now the reins had been ornamented with rows of tiny gold crosses in the Muscovite fashion.

  When the warriors doffed their caps at his stirrup, Vladimir studied them from under bent brows, his head craned forward from his shoulders. Some slight deformity of the back made it impossible for him to hold it upright, and this painful poise of the head may have made its mark on the man's mind, for the young prince had a restless spirit, beset by black moods that were like evil demons tormenting him with the pangs of conscience.

  "Can you lead me back to the Dnieper?" he asked.

  "If God wills," responded Ayub, thinking that the prince must have changed his mind about the river. Even a Muscovite could see now that this was no place for a settlement.

  "Well, take service with me. Only see that you obey orders."

  Prince Vladimir was new to the frontier; he had heard that the Cossacks were vagabonds—masterless men, sprung from fugitives, soldiers, Tatars, Gypsies and whatnot. Since they acknowledged no masters, they were in his eyes no better than the slaves that deserted the estates of the boyars in Muscovy. He did not know that in these plainsmen there ran sometimes the blood of nobles.

  "We serve a Cossack ataman," said Kirdy gravely.

  "I'll pay you for your horse, tall ruffian."

  Ayub shook his head.

  Now Prince Vladimir was not the man to take a refusal from two wanderers. Yet he needed them to guide him into settled country, and it fell in with his mood to humor them a bit. He bade them follow him to the castle, and this they did—Ayub's eye ever on the stallion, Kirdy occupied with thoughts of his own. Near the end of the trail where the ground sloped up sharply the Cossacks halted in surprise.