by Harold Lamb
“Ay, together.” And, stooping, he lifted the girl high upon his shield arm.
They left the chamber of the Emperor with its dead, and passed down the corridor, finding it empty of foes. The crusader listened and heard movement at the foot of the great stair. Turning once to make certain nothing was behind him, he gripped tighter the sword and strode to the head of the marble steps. And there he stopped, his whole body rigid.
The courtyard was full of Mongols.
Torches gleamed on the yellow marble of the walls, and the horses of the nomads were stamping restlessly on the tiled floor. Some were drinking from the fountain. At the foot of the stair preparing to dismount was a group of noyons, Subotai at their head.
A hundred eyes recognized Sir Hugh and took instant note of the beauty of Rusudan. It was too late to draw back now, and he faced the issue squarely. Not a Greek was in sight, and these riders were certainly masters of the palace. Before Subotai or anyone else could ask the girl of him, he spoke.
“Subotai Bahadur! The gates were open, the way to the palace was clear.”
Subotai, resting on one stirrup, loomed in the torchlight like a giant satyr in black lacquer. Sir Hugh did not know how he had arrived in the courtyard; but the Eagle’s eyes were blazing.
He had seen the bodies in the outer court, the dead Greek at the stair. The few others who had remained in the palace after Choaspes forsook it had been crowding around the Emperor’s chamber, and they had fled into cellars and hidden passages in the rock beneath. It seemed to Subotai as if this solitary man in armor who came forth sword in hand, bearing in his arms a beautiful captive, had made himself master of the place.
“Hail” he growled. “You have spoken boldly. Now hear my answer.”
He pointed with satisfaction to the rich tapestries of the corridors above them and the gold plates that gleamed in the walls.
“All this is mine! Men came to me in the darkness bearing the falcon tablet of the Swooping Hawk, saying my enemies were many, their standards lifted for battle.”
The deep voice of the Mongol began to drawl as he related his deeds of the night.
“I listened to the warning. Yet I pressed nearer to see my enemies. I rode my horse into the alleys, and still the alarm was not given. I looked with the eyes of a ferret for a trap. There was no trap. The Greeks were drinking and making outcry along the shore, blinded by many lights.”
There fell a pause, as Subotai’s mind lingered on the aspect of that shore—the multitude of many races speaking many tongues, making outcry for no visible reason; the warriors mingled with the women and the slaves; and here and there dark figures looting while nobles in shining garments cast money to the throngs to earn their cheers. Never had Subotai beheld so fair an opportunity for a charge or such rich booty.
“Of what avail is a multitude when there is no chieftain? We slew from afar with arrows the khan who sat on the white horse. He died like a hare, and we took his horse. His men formed here and there. Some fled to stone yurtas, others to wooden houses upon the water.”
Sir Hugh could picture the affair—the close-packed bands of Mongols loosing arrows as they galloped, the astonished and terrified Greeks, the rush to safety within the villas and warehouses and ships.
“Men will say of this night,” added the Eagle, “Subotai came with swift horses, escorted by naked blades. He scattered the sparks of war and trampled on chieftains; he sent the young to join the old, and he purged the earth of the weak.
“I have crossed the rivers of the Western world; I have seen all things. I have taken much gold and many precious objects, but the pasture lands are poor, the horses weak. The men mistrust one the other and do not hold to their spoken word. It is time for me to go back to tell this to Genghis Khan in Cathay. Besides, the Greeks will swarm out tomorrow, and I mean to be clear of the town.”
He considered Sir Hugh in silence for a moment.
“Why did you send back to me the falcon tablet? Why do you keep for yourself such a fair captive? We have poured water on our swords. Come, then, to Cathay. There will be power, then, in your words, and your children will be spared the death punishment for all generations.”
“Nay, Subotai. It is time for me to go to my homeland.”
The Mongol nodded; he could understand that.
“When you ride to the grazing land of your tribe, O Swooping Hawk, the old minstrels will sit by you, making songs of your deeds, and there will be feasting.”
But Sir Hugh smiled, bethinking him of the lot of a returning crusader—begging his way through hostile lands, shouldered aside by the cavalcades of merchants, railed at by innkeepers who might have hastened forth to bow to his stirrup when he first rode from the cities of Europe with the Cross sewn to his shoulder. He thought of going back among strange faces, to find his property in the hands of others, and himself forgotten—with only the tale of his own suffering to tell—if children and those who had not wearied of the word “Jerusalem” would listen.
“Nay,” he said again. “I shall take the yurta of the sea and return to the Caucasus.”
At the sound of the familiar word Rusudan stirred and would have questioned him, but he was watching Subotai, grim of eye and tense of lip.
“I have found what I sought,” he said.
“She is fairer than other women,” cried Subotai. “She will bear clear-eyed children. Yield her to me.”
Deep in his throat laughed Sir Hugh.
“Before I yield her I shall take life from her, Subotai. And your men—they who live—will tell of the end of the Swooping Hawk.”
With pride, for it is not given to many men to bear a Rusudan in their arms, he advanced down the broad marble steps, his eyes menacing, his sword gripped firm, his shield covering the girl, her dark hair flooding over his shoulder.
Beholding him so, in rent and battered mail, as he moved down toward the waiting throng of riders, Subotai’s green eyes glowed, and he reined back his horse. His lips parted, and he seemed to struggle inwardly with words. Greater than his disappointment was his delight in such daring. Again he backed his horse, speaking over his shoulder to his men, who pulled their ponies aside until a lane was left clear before the crusader.
When he strode among them, a hundred arms were tossed weaponless over wild heads and crests, and from a hundred throats a roar went up:
“A hai—ahatou—hai!”
It was the salute to the khan, only given to men who were honored above all others.
FIN
Harold Lamb
Who better to tell of his life than Harold Lamb himself? Most of the following is taken from the dust jacket of Kirdy: The Road Out of the World, when Lamb was in his forties, although portions date from another autobiographical essay later in his life.
I was born—New York-1892—with damaged eyes, ears, and speech and grew up so. For some twenty years it was an ordeal to meet people, and I am still uncomfortable in cities or crowds, although by now the damages of childhood have nearly righted themselves. “To build him up” I was sent from the gymnasium in winter to the open country at other times; but all my free hours were spent in my grandfather's library.
School was torment and college—Columbia—worse. The hours that really counted were spent in the library of Columbia. There I dug into something gorgeous and new, chronicles of people in Asia. I wrote all the time—set up my stories in the attic at school and printed them on a hand press and then carried on with the Columbian literary magazine.
In 1914 my father broke down and I found a job as a make-up man on a motor trade weekly, then tried to do financial statistics for the New York Times and write stories at the same time. The stories were gleaned from the oriental digging, and Adventure printed them. An understanding editor, Arthur Sullivan Hoffman, allowed me to write anything I wanted.
I wandered more than a bit, turned up at Plattsburg, 1919, and in the Seventh New York, later the 107 Infantry, in May 1917 as a private, but did not see any fighting. In June o
f that year I married Ruth Barbour, and I have wondered since then why men write books about unhappy marriages. We have a son and a daughter. We went out to the Pacific Coast soon after our marriage, accompanied by my father. Two years of that time were spent at Fort Bragg, in the forest along the Northern California coast.
I have had to gather together my own collection to work with—the medieval travelers, Persian and Russian chronicles, histories of elder China. I spend months in going through the scenes of a book in imagination until all details are clear. Then I try to put it all down in words. I shirk revising, which is an ordeal. When study oppresses I go straight to the Northern lumber camps or the decks of a schooner. My relaxations are chess, tennis, and gardening. I am six feet one inch in height, weigh 160 pounds, and have prematurely gray hair.
Life is good, after all, when a man can go where he wants to, and write about what he likes best and know that other men find pleasure in his work.
Lamb built a career with his writing from an early age. He got his start in the pulps, quickly moving to the prestigious Adventure, his primary fiction outlet for nineteen years. In 1927 he wrote a biography of Genghis Khan, and following on its success turned more and more to the writing of non-fiction, penning numerous biographies and histories until his death in 1962.
During the 1930s and 1940s he published many short romantic pieces in Collier's. By the 1950s he was often writing factual pieces on the Middle East for the Saturday Evening Post, though he also authored some short fiction for them. Later in his career he tried his hand at screenwriting, the most notable of the movies in which he had a hand being El Cid, starring Charlton Heston. Many Lamb pieces were made into movies, among them: The Crusades, 1935, The Plainsmen, 1936, The Golden Horde, 1951, and The Buccaneer, 1958. He was also one of the principal screenwriters involved with the cult movie-that-never-was, War Eagles.
Lamb spoke many languages—French, Latin, ancient Persian, some Arabic, a smattering of Turkish, and a bit of Manchu-Tartar and medieval Ukranian. (An additional source lists him as fluent in Chinese without mentioning which dialect.) He traveled throughout Asia, visiting most of the places he wrote about, and during World War II was on covert assignment overseas for the U.S. government. He had numerous friends both at home and abroad, and despite his retiring nature was sometimes seen in the limelight with famous figures of his day. He was particularly well-regarded in the Middle-East, and was said to have been personal friends with the Shah of Iran. He and his wife had two children, Frederick and Cary.
Bibliography
Fiction …
Marching Sands (1920)
The House of the Falcon (1921)
The Grand Cham (1922)
White Falcon (1926)
Durandal (1931)
Nur Mahal (1932)
Kirdy (1933)
Omar Khayyam (1934)
A Garden to the Eastward (1947)
The Curved Saber (1964)
The Mighty Manslayer (1969)
The Three Palladins (1977)
Durandal (1981)
The Sea of the Ravens (1983)
The Skull of Shirzad Mir (2006)
Wolf of the Steppes (2006)
Warriors of the Steppes (2006)
Riders of the Steppes (2007)
Swords of the Steppes (2007)
Swords from the West (2009)
Swords from the Desert (2009)
Swords from the East (2010)
Swords from the Sea (2010)
Non-fiction and historical biographies…
Genghis Khan: The Emperor of All Men (1927)
Tamerlane (1928)
The Flame of Islam (1930)
Iron Men and Saints (1930)
The Crusades (1931)
The March of the Barbarians (1940)
Alexander of Macedon: The Journey to World's End (1946)
The March of Muscovy: Ivan the Terrible and the Growth of the Russian Empire, 1400-1648 (1948)
The City and the Tsar: Peter the Great and the Move to the West, 1648-1762 (1948)
The Earth Shakers (1949)
Suleiman the Magnificent (1951)
Theodora and the Emperor: The Drama of Justinian (1952)
Charlemagne: The Legend and the Man (1954)
Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde (1954)
New Found World: How North America Was Discovered and Explored (1955)
Constantinople: Birth of an Empire (1957)
Hannibal: One Man Against Rome (1958)
Chief of the Cossacks(1959)
Cyrus the Great (1960)
Babur the Tiger: First of the Great Moguls (1962)
Notes
[←1]
The quotation from “The Song of Roland” are from the translation by John O’Hagan in The Harvard Classics Series used by permission of Lathrop, Lee & Shepard Company.
[←2]
Caesar—The Greek Empire was the last fragment of Roman dominion, comprising, in the early thirteenth century, what is now the Balkans, Greece, the eastern islands of the Mediterranean, and Asia Minor, along the coast of the Black Sea, and as far to the south as Palestine. Constantinople was its imperial city.
It had been ruled for centuries by the family of the Comneni. Now the warlike Seljuk Turks had settled themselves in the heart of Asia Minor.
[←3]
Haroun al-Raschid, of Bagdad.
[←4]
Alexander the Great, who conquered that part of Asia sixteen centuries before the crusaders, and whose name was still a thing to conjure with.
[←5]
Europe
[←6]
A simple quadrant, for figuring the sun's shadow, the water serving to keep the plane of its base level.
[←7]
Post
[←8]
The actual wording of the paizah, or tablet of command, given to officers of Genghis Khan.
[←9]
This must have been the pass of Dariel, called by the Romans the Caucasian Gate, or Iberian Gate.
[←10]
Mirages. The Mongols were acquainted with this phenomenon in the Gobi.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I - SIR HUGH IS CHOSEN
CHAPTER II -THE FRANKS
CHAPTER III - A WARRIOR’S BROTHER
CHAPTER IV - THE CUNNING OF DONN DERA
CHAPTER V - THE SWORD OF ROLAND
CHAPTER VI - THE WAY THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN
CHAPTER VII - THE GAUNTLET
CHAPTER VIII - THE STAR GAZER
CHAPTER IX - THE GRAY HORSE
CHAPTER X - SIR HUGH RIDES ALONE
CHAPTER XI - NUREDDIN’S SIGN
CHAPTER XII - BEHIND THE HORDE
CHAPTER XIII - THE EMPTY TENT
CHAPTER XIV - TWO ROADS
CHAPTER XV - BEYOND THE RANGES
CHAPTER XVI - THE END OF THE ROAD
CHAPTER XVII - RABBAN SIMEON
CHAPTER XVIII - THE ROAD OF THE WARRIORS
CHAPTER XIX - SNOW
CHAPTER XX - THE MESSAGE
CHAPTER XXI - THE WIT OF MESSER ANTONIO
CHAPTER XXII - BLOOD IN THE SNOW
CHAPTER XXIII - THE EVE OF BATTLE
CHAPTER XXIV - THE VALLEY OF THE KUR
CHAPTER XXV - CHOASPES MOVES
CHAPTER XXVI - THE TRAIL OF THE HORDE
CHAPTER XXVII - THE WILL OF THE EAGLE
CHAPTER XXVIII - THE MOST MAGNIFICENT
CHAPTER XXIX - DUSK
CHAPTER XXX - THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE
CHAPTER XXXI - THE SALUTE TO THE KHAN
Harold Lamb
Bibliography
Notes
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