Riders of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  "Urgench lies a month's ride to the southeast, and when we cross the Jaick we will be in the lands of the desert khans. Their city is in a dead world—the river is dry, the mountains are bare. In other days it was not like this because there was water in the river, and grass on the plains. But the city of Urgench is holy to the dogs of Moslems. No infidels have ridden under its walls. The mosques have old treasures—the khan keeps his riches in the palace. And why is that, sir brothers?

  "That is because they will not forsake the city that is holy since the time of their prophet—may jackals litter on his grave. In the season of greatest heat which begins now, the khan and his horde leave Urgench for a month or so and ride south to Khiva where water is in the river and their horses can graze. So at this time we can ride against the city and take it, but not in another season."

  "I fear no khan!"

  "Arap Muhammad Khan of Khiva has ten thousand riders in his horde. To the east are double that number of Turkomans. Not far to the south are hundreds of thousands of Moslem dogs in the valley of Bokhara and Samarkand. So Khlit, the Wolf, has said."

  Goloto swore and others pulled at their mustaches reflectively. The blunt statement of the power of the Moslems with whom they were to cope served to remind them that this was not an idle march, or a small raid.

  Although Makshim had nothing more to say, Demid turned to him. "You, kuren ataman, spoke of my pledge to the tsar. It was not mine alone. Before giving it all the sir brothers heard the conditions and agreed with one voice. You yourself approved."

  "And my word is not smoke," said Makshim promptly.

  "See to it."

  "By-in Moscow we were in bonds, now we are in the saddle,"

  grunted Ayub. "What else matters?"

  All spoke approvingly and that night there was singing until the fires had died to gray ashes. In the morning the Cossacks took axes from the wagons and combed the river bank for poplars which grew in the east slope of the hills. They carried to the camp also the dead trunks that lay, brittle and dry in the sand. The carpenters set to work binding the logs to the sides of the carts and when this was done the wagons were fastened together by ropes in threes and fours.

  On the second day the strongest horses were hitched to the carts and driven to the water's edge. Several riders plunged in to lead the way and the ponies were whipped until the carts, fastened together like rafts, were afloat, the poplar trunks keeping them buoyant.

  Other riders drove in the oxen and kept the frightened beasts headed across the stream. The weaker of the oxen were lost in this passage, but the Cossacks and their horses went over safely. They attached their saddle horns together with lariats, Tatar fashion, in groups of twenty or more, keeping the line athwart the current.

  When they climbed the steep bank and wound into the clay gullies that twisted before them the Cossacks glanced back and wondered, perhaps, how long it would be before they crossed the Jaick again.

  Kirdy was well pleased when instead of appointing an older Cossack in his place, the ataman named fifty warriors for the advance. Their labors doubled indeed, for now scouts were sent out on either flank to watch for any sign of human beings. It was necessary to escape observation at this distance from Urgench, because even a Turkoman horseboy would have known that the Cossack tabor was not a merchant's caravan.

  Moreover the nature of the land changed, and the Donskoi who had never been in such a desert before looked about curiously. The soil underfoot grew whiter, and the buttes that reared their heads above the gullies were sometimes red sandstone, sometimes white chalk. Kirdy had to ride in great circles to find water for the nightly camps.

  They passed south of the blue crests of distant hills, and plunged still downward, still to the south and east. The only herbage here was a greenish-gray, almost the color of the sandy clay from which it grew and the ponies that ate of it grew weaker at once.

  No longer did the Cossacks sing. They passed through ravines walled in with ridged sandstone that looked as if it had been carved by some gigantic hand in forgotten times; they plowed through lakes of sand, threaded with streams that were crusted with white salt, and the water, too, was unfit to drink.

  No longer could they look for miles over a level steppe; they were walled in by fortresses and domes and castles—all uninhabited, all molded into grotesque shapes by the same unknown hand—soft rock that crumpled underfoot, or baked clay pinnacles or demonic pillars of sand.

  "Aye," said the Cossack who was called Dog-Face, to Ayub, "you have said it. Foul fiends live in this place."

  He jerked up his pony's muzzle from a pool of stagnant water and swore blackly. Dog-Face had stripped himself to the waist and revealed a trunk as splendidly formed as his face was grotesque—lithe muscles curving over bones as erect as pillars. The kalpak was thrust over one ear on the back of his head and stayed there by some unknown trick of adhesion. His sheepskin was bundled up on the crupper and the saddlebags were stuffed with hay he had cut a week ago, having emptied out cups, shirts, wax, and a remarkable lot of trinkets to make room for the hay.

  "It is clearly to be seen," he went on. "The water poison, the grass is death to the beasts; rock slides apart like sand, and sand stands up like rock."

  He spat to one side and wrenched the sweat off his eyes with a finger. "I have seen the shores of Charnomar,2 and the venom-marshes of the

  Pripet; I have seen the Dnieper flood its banks and trees stick up from the water like bristles on a pig, but the like of this I have not seen."

  "Then you are easily frightened, like a nun," retorted Ayub who took the opposite side of the argument at once.

  "How, frightened?"

  "The Wolf, who has wisdom, says that all this spot was once the bottom of a sea. The little Blue Sea was part of it, and the salt lakes and streams. Now the great sea has gone but these mounds were islands once, and these gullies were channels. The salt and the chalk was left by the sea."

  "But where did it go!"

  Ayub thought for a moment and shook his head. "Well, perhaps it dried up like a fish in the sun. How should I know? But once ships were sailing about up there, over our heads."

  Glancing up, Dog-Face pondered this. "I believe that you are lying. It is well known that you are a father of lies."

  Thrusting out his lower lip, Ayub reined in his horse. "Then you are a fool if you don't know false from true."

  By now the Cossack lancer had begun to snort. "I dare go beyond where you would set your foot. But to ride into a place accursed is another matter. I tell you Satan is near us."

  "Then you should be glad," girded Ayub.

  "Death to you!" growled the Cossack, reaching for his saber.

  Not an instant behind him was Ayub, but before they could bare their weapons a brown stallion thrust between them and Demid glared from one to the other.

  "Show steel and you will taste a bullet!"

  Ayub's forehead went dark, and he breathed heavily, until his eyes opened and he folded his arms. "No harm in a quarrel between kunaks."

  "No harm," assented Demid, "but it is against Cossack custom to draw steel on the march. Greeks and Tziganis use knives, and that is not our nature. Pound each other with fists after the halt tonight."

  Kirdy, who overheard the dispute, observed as soon as the horses were tethered that evening Dog-Face sought out Ayub and they fell to blows while a ring of warriors looked on, with shouts of encouragement and advice. Nor was this the only grudge that was settled in this fashion.

  After Ayub had knocked his antagonist senseless, the Zaporogian went off and returned with a goatskin of water which he poured over the prostrate Dog-Face, in spite of the fact that they had very little water.

  The tabor pushed on slowly through the waste lands, as a panther, crouching close to the earth, pulls itself forward one leg at a time, waiting for the moment to launch its strength in a single spring.

  They crossed another river. It was smaller than the Jaick and its current was sluggish, so that t
hey were able to ford it and get the wagons across in one day. Here, too, they filled the water skins and the animals were able to graze.

  Every evening the Cossacks gazed to the south for a sign of the inland sea beyond which Urgench lay, and they asked Kirdy if he had seen any glint of blue water. But the land was the same—the same gray clay and sand and the purple and red pinnacles that lined the way like watchtowers.

  Some of them noticed, however, that they were ascending. The horizon was closer to them and they went up more often than down. A fitful breeze brushed the desert floor. More than once they saw herds of antelope and gazed longingly at the slender beasts that seemed to drift away from them rather than run. Some of the best-mounted Cossacks tried to ride down the antelope and were jeered at by their companions.

  "If game is here," Demid pointed out, "we will soon meet men."

  But Makshim and some others shook their heads, saying that no man could live in such a land.

  "The Blue Sea is near," retorted Ayub, "and surely we will find fisher-folk on its shores. The ataman has spoken truly."

  "And if there is no Blue Sea? What then is in store for us? No one has seen this sea."

  Ayub had gained experience from his passage-at-arms with Dog-Face, and he had spent some time in questioning Khlit.

  "There is a dark spirit in you, Makshim," he observed sagely. "No man from Christian lands has seen the Blue Sea—that is true. But no man of ours has been in this spot before now."

  "Not in all the earth is there a sea in the desert."

  "May the dogs bite you, Makshim! You have read a book and not one but many. And what is written in books is more lie than truth."

  "How?" demanded the kuren ataman, frowning.

  "Because that is how it is. Who writes in books? Priests, schoolmasters and councilors. What do they write? Only what is in their minds. And of what good is the mind of a Latin priest or a schoolmaster?"

  "Better than the legends of the minstrels."

  "Not so. The bandura players sing of what the knightly heroes have accomplished—their tales relate Cossack glory. Everyone knows that once Potuik, the falcon ship, sailed across dry land, and Helen the Fair fought with a wizard."

  "You are a fool, Ayub. How could a ship sail on land?"

  The big Zaporogian frowned because the tales of the minstrels were well liked by the men of the brotherhood. "Do you not know that Piotr the apostle once walked on the water? If a man can walk on water, a ship can pass over dry earth."

  This unusual reasoning silenced Makshim for a moment. "Yet Piotr the apostle did not walk of his own strength on the water. Besides, he was a craven."

  Ayub ransacked his memory for words he had heard spoken by the war-rior-priests of the Cossacks. "Not so. For, when the Roman knights came to take the White Christ and deliver Him to the torture did not Piotr the blessed draw his saber at once? It was so! Truly he delivered a bad cut— only struck an ear off a Roman—but there is much good in a man who will draw his saber in defense of his Faith. And a craven is one who will forsake his brothers in need." And he looked keenly into the half-shut eyes of handsome Makshim.

  "At least," smiled the kuren ataman, "you are no better than a hound that doubles on the trail it is following, Ayub, and runs down a cold scent instead of coming up with the quarry. Because what you now say you had from a book."

  "Nay, I had it from the lips of the little father, and may a thousand fiends tear me, if he had it from a book, because he could read not a jot except the great gold letters that named the saints. Our little father had a fine throat for song and he swallowed more brandy than water. But read he could not. What he said of Piotr and the White Christ is a legend, told him by others, who had it from their fathers. And so it is true and not false and I will stretch out him that says otherwise."

  "All your words, Ayub," put in another squadron commander who had been listening attentively, "do not reveal to us a trail that we can follow out of this accursed wilderness."

  "Where lies this sea?" demanded a tall Cossack who seldom uttered a word. "As well hunt for a wind in the steppe!"

  "Aye," said Makshim boldly, "even the Tatars know that Demid has lost his way. He goes ahead cautiously with the tabor and sends out scouts."

  "It is true," quoth Goloto who had come up when he saw the squadron commanders in talk sitting their horses beside the wagon trail, "that the way is hard. We have lost a third of the oxen and many horses have made the vultures glad. But, listen to me, noble sirs, it is better to go where the ataman leads, quickly and with a good heart as is the Cossack custom."

  "But we have no more fresh meat, except horse flesh at times."

  "My kuren has barley only sufficient to keep the horses alive for ten days."

  "It is clear," Makshim put in quickly, "that the Cossack brotherhood is not agreed. I ask that a council be called."

  Goloto frowned and Ayub swore at this and the others were silent. Since his first speech to them Demid had said nothing of their journey and the hardships had grown upon them until tempers had become frayed.

  "If we were marching upon a foe," vouchsafed the saturnine Cossack at last, "I would say to Goloto 'Sir brother, your words are truth, and the devil himself would not say otherwise.' But here it is different. Who knows whither we are marching, unless the ataman, and he will not speak?"

  "Aye," nodded Makshim, spitting into the hot sand at which his pony was pawing restlessly. "We are no more than the ghosts of men marching no whither."

  The others looked at Goloto, who pondered long, raising his shrewd eyes to the skyline. "If this were our own steppe or the shores of Charnomar or even Roum3—we would need no council. But here we have marched without a blow struck or a pistol fired, and it is evident that this is an abode of devils. So, sir brothers, it is my opinion that we should call a council and ask the ataman whether we are going against devils or men."

  Hearing this Ayub wheeled his black stallion and rode away from the group. He was troubled because, unless in sight of the enemy or marching over hostile territory, three of the five kuren atamans had the right to call a council. Until now Makshim had been alone in his opinion that they were lost, but with Goloto and the other squadron commander on his side the council would be summoned that night and to the troubles of Demid who had all the responsibility of leading men and beasts across the desert would be added the hardship of dispute and dissension.

  If Demid should order Makshim shot down, the Cossacks might divide into two factions and fall to blows; if the young ataman deprived the three squadron leaders of rank, their men would be angered and a sore would be opened that might never heal.

  If on the other hand Demid did not deal with the objectors strongly and at once, the ataman might lose the baton because the Donskoi in their present mood would not have a leader who lacked a firm hand.

  He found Demid at the rear of the wagon train deep in talk with an old Tatar who possessed a fine eagle—now hooded, and chained to a perch built upon the wagon.

  "Tchelom vam, chunk," he grinned. "The forehead to you, brother! You will be in a hot kettle tonight, and I would not be in your skin for a dozen such golden eagles as that one."

  Demid looked at his comrade inquiringly, and Ayub explained what

  had been discussed by the squadron leaders. "That-Makshim is at

  the bottom of it. They all went off to talk to Khlit."

  "What said the Wolf?"

  "He said, 'Who is your ataman?' And they answered 'Demid, the Falcon. '"

  "And then?"

  "Khlit snarled at them. He is old, Demid, and quarrels weary him. But he called me back, and asked one thing of me. 'Who is Demid?' I said, 'He is my kunak!' He looked at me for a long time and then bade me tell you to put Makshim in Kirdy's place when all was done."

  "He said that? Find him and bid him to me. Send a rider after Kirdy at once."

  As if Ayub's message had not surprised him, Demid returned to his talk with the Tatar, and when Ayub reported that Khlit w
as not to be found in the tabor he was silent until Kirdy rode up on a sweating pony and dismounted to come to his leader's stirrup.

  "Have you seen antelope, Kirdy? Near at hand? Good! Men say you have hunted with eagles."

  "Aye, father."

  "Here is one trained to stags. I think he will fasten upon antelope, because the Tatar has kept him underfed. Take him and—what is your name, Tatar?"

  "Shamaki, O my khan."

  "Well, I think you stole the golden eagle, Shamaki, because bringing down stags is not the sport of Muscovite slaves."

  "Yachim—no, my khan."

  "Take the pair of them, Kirdy; direct the tabor to where the antelope can be seen and show us sport. Wait! Take Goloto with you."

  "At command, father."

  Kirdy bade the Tatar follow while he changed to a fresh pony, and Sha-maki hastily sought in the wagon for a scarred horsehide gauntlet that covered his arm to the elbow. When he had pulled this on he unchained the eagle and let it grip his wrist. This done he hurried after the young warrior, panting under the weight of the great bird. Without bidding he flung himself on the back of a pony in the remount herd and Kirdy smiled when he saw that Shamaki had picked out the second best of the nearest horses. He himself had the piebald pony, the best of the lot.

  Goloto was well pleased to accompany them, because he loved hawking almost as much as the Tatar. And envious glances were cast at the three as they galloped off, Kirdy in the lead.

  Meanwhile the tabor had turned aside from its course and headed toward a ridge that afforded a view of the plain on all sides. Before the nearest Cossacks had settled themselves in their saddles to watch, the three riders were a mile away drawing closer to the antelope herd that drifted slowly before them.

  When Kirdy signed to him, the Tatar pulled the hood from the eagle and it darted up, its great wings threshing like wind-whipped banners. The three horsemen drew rein and watched.

  At first the brown bird soared until it seemed to press against the clouds, then it circled over the antelope herd. And as if warned by some sixth sense of the shadow in the sky the herd made off—sweeping over the brown earth in a wide circle that took it clear around the hunters.