by Harold Lamb
All this Subotai learned from questioning the Moslem peasants who served him as captives, and from the wisdom of Kutsai the Cathayan prince, who had been summoned back to the army of Genghis Khan at Samarkand. But Subotai wanted to know everything about this new road and the people who dwelt in the west. Much he had learned from Sir Hugh, and more from a certain Rabban Simeon, a traveler and physician—who was also a spy of the Greek Emperor, Theodore. Rabban Simeon was silent and shrewd, and neither Subotai nor Sir Hugh knew that he served the Emperor.
On the tent pole of his yurt the Eagle had hung the banners captured from the Moslems, and he himself sat on a horseskin by the fire, while a score of his higher officers—broad-faced scarred Mongols, veterans of a dozen campaigns, and hawk-eyed nomad chieftains—sat on either side the entrance in their wadded coats, their hands on their knees, listening in silence to all that was said.
Before the fire knelt Rabban Simeon.
“Our hearts,” observed Subotai, “are hard as yonder mountains, our sword edges are sharp, our horses fleeter than the wind. What, then, will hinder us from riding into the lands of the Far West?”
“True it is,” said the brown Syrian tranquilly, “O Lord of Men, that your horses can find their way over any path, even in the deep snow. Yet here, above you, lies a barrier not of earth but of living men.”
“What men?” demanded the Mongol general.
“The Georgians.”
As Subotai remained silent, Rabban Simeon went on, choosing his words carefully because he had long since discovered that the red-haired Mongol knew more than he chose to reveal. “The Georgians are men of the mountains. Their home is this great Caucasus, and they will defend their home with their lives. They are brave—they fight on foot with axes and straight swords.”
Still Subotai kept silent.
“Long ago, the Persian amirs,” resumed Simeon, “tried to conquer the Caucasus. Then the hosts of Islam tried, after the day of Muhammad their prophet. They also failed. For the Georgians, like the Armenians, are Christians—although barbarians. In their mountain fastness they still worship the Cross that came to them in the day of the Apostles.”
“What matters this—to me?”
“It matters, O Lord of Men, that these Georgians will not submit to a conqueror. They have never submitted. They are shepherds and forest men, ignorant and proud.”
“I seek no war with them. I will lead my Horde over the snow road, before the heat of the spring makes torrents of the water courses and softens the snow.”
Rabban Simeon bowed his head. This did not please him, because he had been sent by the Emperor Theodore to do his utmost to turn the Mongol army away from the frontiers of the Empire. By plotting, by bribery, and if need be by murder, he was to put obstacles in the way of this advance guard of Genghis Khan. Now, he did not think that he could influence Subotai against the western march. If the Horde meant to move into the West, Rabban Simeon planned to stir up enmity and war between them and the Georgian mountaineers. And the Syrian was a master of plots. He blinked his mild brown eyes.
“Eh, the Georgians are brave, but they are fools. They will not believe that the Mongol Horde will pass without doing them harm. They will defend their city, Tiflis.”
Drinking from the wine goblet at his side, Subotai shook his head. “The order of the Khan,” he said, “was to go through the ranges, and discover what lies beyond.”
“The Negropont—the Black Sea lies beyond. The Horde will find no path over the sea.”
Subotai’s green-blue eyes gleamed. He meant to march around the sea. “It has been told me,” he said, “that the lord of this far sea is a great prince, the equal of Muhammad Shah. He has one mighty city Constantinople, and a summer palace like Xanadu on the border of Cathay. Is this true?”
In spite of his quick wit Rabban Simeon hesitated. He shrank from mentioning the wealth of Theodore to the covetous Mongol.
“True,” he admitted. “The summer palace is the Golden Chersonese. It glows like fire upon the sea, for it lies at the end of a tongue of land, with walls like cliffs. It hath gardens and shining alabaster, and the very trees are silver, and the song birds are fashioned of gold and precious stones. Ay, it was built by Mithridates, who once fought with the Roman Cæsars. But how can it be approached, except in ships?”
Again the Mongol drank gravely from his cup. “Kai—we reined our horses through the great wall of China—we tore down the ramparts of Samarkand. And we will find our way into this Golden Chersonese.”
Clutching his beard, Rabban Simeon cried out. “Ai—bethink thee! The Greeks have more thousands than thou hast hundreds. Even now they prepare and watch the Horde. Nay, I have heard—”
“Thy words are foxes that run first one way, then another.” Subotai was either angry or amused.
“Only listen! There was one sent among you to lead the Horde astray. He is this Christian knight called Hugh.”
Subotai’s eyes turned green as he stared at the spy. “I have seen him. When he is angry he growls like thunder; he bites like a camel. He has kept faith, and his word is not smoke.”
“Indeed,” Rabban Simeon recovered his composure, “he is a warrior, but a Christian. Is his heart not with his own people in the West?”
For a moment Subotai pondered. And Rabban Simeon, who had seized upon Sir Hugh to draw the Mongol’s attention from the Empire, held his breath.
“We will try his faith,” said the Khan slowly. “If his word is no more than smoke he will be broken like an old and useless arrow. Now I have talked enough.” And Rabban Simeon, touching his fingers to his forehead and lips, withdrew from the pavilion of the Eagle.
“Tell me one thing truly,” observed Subotai, to the listening officers. “Hath the Swooping Hawk gone among the Christians of these mountains?”
The Khan of Almalyk lifted his head. “I have heard, O my Orkhon, that the Swooping Hawk walks often, alone, toward the hills for the time it takes the sun to pass half across the sky. But what he does yonder is not known to me.”
The Mongols spoke of Hugh as the Swooping Hawk, after the courier Arslan had given him that name. Subotai clapped his hands and gave an order to the captain of the guard. “Send men who will search for the Swooping Hawk, wherever he may be, and bring him swiftly to me.” To his officers he added, “Either Rabban Simeon or the Swooping Hawk is not to be trusted. It is time we made test of the Christian warrior.”
The embers of the yurt fire still glowed, and Subotai slept not when the entrance flap was lifted and the tall crusader stood before the Mongol. His deep-throated salutation roused the chieftains who were slumbering on the benches.
“Ahatou!”
His long sword had been left without the pavilion, as the law of the Horde ordained, but when he lifted his arm the wolfskin fell away and revealed the chain hauberk, and loose coif of a crusader.
Subotai motioned him to approach, and looked full into the gray eyes of the stranger.
“Hugh,” he said, and spoke the name as if it were the whirring of wings, “you were not at my side. You were not in the orda. What then did you seek?”
“A road.”
Subotai nodded and waited. In the last months the knight had learned to understand the speech of the Mongols and to answer in simple words.
“A road leads,” explained the crusader, “from the river Kur to the mountain villages. It was told me that we may go by this road to the summit of the pass.”
“Have you spoken with the men of these hills?”
“Ay, one knew the speech of the Arabs.”
“Good!”
Subotai scanned the lean face of the man called Hugh—the corded throat, the strongly marked jaw and forehead—with appreciation. There was beauty in the dark countenance framed in its mane of tawny hair, and pride in the poise of the head, but the Mongol weighed only the direct glance of the eyes, the strength of mighty arms. He drew from his girdle a tablet a little smaller than his hand, a silver plaque on which was e
tched a falcon and a few words of Chinese writing.
“The paizah” he said bluntly, “the tablet of command for an envoy of the Horde.”
“Ay”
Hugh knew that this falcon tablet would obtain for the bearer fresh horses, guides, and escort, or any amount of food.
“Take it,” went on Subotai. “I have a task for the Swooping Hawk. Go before the Horde as ambassador. Go first to the khan of these mountains. Say to him this: ‘Our horses are swift, our arrows sharp, and our hearts hard as yonder mountains. It is ours to command; his to obey. Let him not molest us when we pass over the roads of his kingdom.’ ”
“I have heard.” The crusader fixed the words in his mind and then spoke boldly, “The men of the Caucasus are not sheep, to be driven; they will stand their ground like watchdogs. Better to offer them conditions of peace than to lose many warriors, many horses.”
Subotai grunted, a little astonished. The Horde was not in the habit of offering terms to foes with weapons in hand. But he realized the necessity of a clear road over the passes.
“Kai—so be it. Say also this, ‘If the khan of the Georgians keeps his sword in its sheath, his arrows in their quivers, we will do likewise.’ ”
Unversed in writing and contemptuous of promises that needed to be traced on paper, the Mongol had made his pledge and would abide by it.
“Go, Hugh, show the tablet of command to the Gurkhati of the Almalyk bowmen; take two hundred warriors for escort, and mounts with filled saddle-bags.”
“O Khan,” said Hugh, “that is too many and too few. Quarrels would come between my men and the Georgians. Better to go with two than two hundred.”
Subotai glanced keenly into the gray eyes of the Christian, and remembered the warning of Rabban Simeon.
“There is peril upon the road,” he growled. “The Georgians may attack thee.”
“It may be so.”
“Return then to me, for I have need of thee,” added Subotai. “Alone among the men of the Horde thou hast the tongue of the Western peoples. Hai, thou wilt be the voice of the Horde, even to the Greek Emperor in his palace of Chersonese.”
The crusader uttered an exclamation, and his hands gripped the belt until the stout leather creaked.
“I have loosed thy chains,” the Mongol said calmly, “and the road is open to thee. Remember only—we have sworn brotherhood.”
“Kai, it is so.”
When the knight had lifted his hand in leave-taking and had passed from the yurta, Subotai summoned a warrior from the shadows behind the fire, a short and stalwart Mongol who walked with a swagger and wore about his forehead the leather band that was the mark of a courier.
“Go, Arslan,” Subotai commanded, “with the envoys. Look and listen with the eyes of a ferret and the ears of a fox. The Swooping Hawk speaks plain words. He is a thunderbolt, and I have need of him. Stay at his back, unless he betrays us or harm threatens him. If so, ride hither without dismounting for food or drink.”
And then with a word or two for the officers who still drank mare’s milk and listened to the drone of a blind minstrel, Subotai Bahadur went to sleep, simply rolling himself up in a corner of the rug, near the fire. Utterly without fear or repentance or uncertainty, he slept quietly—as few commanders of cavalry divisions could have done in hostile country a thousand miles from their support and base of supplies.
Nor would it have troubled him in the least if he had known the Horde would be on the move sooner than he or anyone expected.
There was snuffling and stirring in the black mass of the horse herds, and here and there thin smoke began to rise against the stars from the openings at the tops of the yurtas. A mounted patrol moved wraithlike across the trodden snow with only a creaking of stirrup leathers.
It was the dawn hour.
Sir Hugh of Taranto stepped from his small tent, drawing tight the buckle of his belt, glanced at the stars in the north, and greeted the two riders and the stocky, fur-wrapped courier who held the rein of his gray war horse.
“Ahatou noyon! Hail, chieftains!”
The two mounted Mongols lifted their hands, sparing of speech. Mist of the horses’ breathing was in the air, and the crusader’s charger neighed as he swung into the saddle.
“A good sign, bahadur” cried Arslan, the dispatch rider, running to his own pony.
“Good!” echoed one of the chieftains.
Hugh picked up his reins and glanced a last time at the familiar outlines of the encampment of the conquerors who had come over the earth from Cathay, at the towering poles of standards topped by horns and by drooping horse and yak tails, at the passing patrol, and the black domes visible under the gray streak of the eastern sky.
Hung about his throat by a silver chain, Hugh bore the tablet of command of the Kha Khan. In mute evidence thereof the two chieftains had come first to his tent. His was the leadership of the embassy. He adjusted the heavy sword at his side and clasped steel-mittened hands on his saddle horn.
“Fair Lord Jesus,” he whispered, “Thou knowest I bear a pagan talisman of power, and my word is passed to the lord of these men. The road before me is dark. Guide Thou my arm!”
Then he settled his helm on his head and turned to the three silent figures behind him.
“Forward, ye men of the East!”
The gray charger tossed his muzzle at a touch on the rein and surged ahead, scattering mud and snow with broad hoofs. The three fell in behind, galloping toward the dark rampart of mountains still invisible in the mist.
CHAPTER XVIII - THE ROAD OF THE WARRIORS
EVEN Arslan, who liked to gossip about omens, was silent as they climbed above the mist and crossed the last open ridges. At first a few venturesome beeches and thorn thickets appeared, and then the gaunt sentinels of the higher timber—young oak and hornbeam, followed by the mass of blue fir and towering deodar, interlaced with the dark stems of giant creepers, and broken here and there by the fall of a monster, now buried under a mound of snow.
Squirrels chattered and barked at them, unseen, and somewhere the wind sighed in the forest mesh. A cluster of wild boar broke across the road, grunting and plowing through the drifts.
“Ai!” cried Arslan, “there be no watchers here—only beasts.”
But the Khan of Almalyk, a handsome man, with the thin nose and square chin of an eastern Turk, slapped the curved saber at his hip and pointed to the side of the road.
A rough crosspiece of wood projected from a mound, and beside it other objects peered out of the snow—a miniature shield, a tiny wooden horse. Arslan bent down to look at it.
“A grave. They have given him a shield to bear and a horse to ride in the world of the dead.”
The crusader held up his hand for silence. Sounds carried far in that frosty air, and above the monotone of the wind he had heard the tinkle of a silver bell, or so it seemed. But when he had listened he knew that it was a woman’s song.
The three others—their ears were keen—heard, and looked at him inquiringly. It was Hugh’s task to lead them; theirs to follow. And the crusader had no wish to leave an outpost behind him when he climbed toward Nakha, the first village of the Caucasus.
So he reined his gray stallion past the grave and bent his helmed head under the laden branches of the evergreens. When the wind blew toward him he caught the note of the song more clearly, and with it a whiff of damp wood smoke. The words of the song he could not understand, but it was swift as the rush of a brook under ice.
Arslan muttered something about the tengri, the spirits of high and distant places that rode from peak to peak on the wind. Presently the song ended abruptly, and the crusader reined his charger into a trot. The Mongol horses moved silently as ghosts over the forest bed, but the big gray trampled down hidden branches, and Hugh knew the mountain folk were not to be taken by surprise. He trotted into a grove of giant deodars where smoke curled up through patches of sunlight.
A score of men, springing up around the fire, were running toward
him, drawing knives and axes and poising short javelins.
“Weapons in sheath,” he cautioned the Mongols, who had drawn up beside him, and called out in Arabic:
“Ho—the leader of this pack!”
“Hail” answered the twenty promptly, and a spear whistled past his ear. They seemed to be hunters, stalwart fellows in bearskin burkas and ragged leg-wrapping; but among them gleamed bronze helmets and a shield or two. They came forward snarling like wolves and with no hesitation at all.
Hugh singled out the best armed of the lot, a handsome giant with the straight nose of a Greek and the deep, piercing eyes of the mountain-bred, a man whose close-cropped head bore no helmet, but whose long limbs were clad in full Turkish mail covered with a white linen cloak embroidered with tiny crosses.
“Back,” he cried, “if you would live!”
The tall warrior only growled and made at Hugh, when a cry, a single word, clear-pitched as the note of a silver bell, halted all twenty in their tracks. Hugh looked past them and saw a woman perched on the shaft of an uptilted cart—the woman whose song had been arrested by his coming.
“Hail, pagan Lord!” Her fresh young voice greeted him in liquid Arabic. “Yield thee and thy men! Cast down that great sword!”
“Yah bint—” responded the knight. “O girl—”
The singer stamped a slender booted foot upon the wagon shaft.
“O boy, these men obey me, and if you do not, they will roll your golden hair in the snow.”
To gain a clearer sight of him she stood up on the shaft, swaying, a guitar poised against her hip. Over slim shoulders fell gleaming brown hair, unbound, and her eyes were surely blue.