“I suspect you are.”
“Just hand the checks over at the airport, when they can’t object. If they insist on tearing them up–”
Gil’s eyes narrowed. “What’s going on, Bill? Why are you doing this for people you barely know?”
“Because I can. Because they need it and I have more than enough. Maybe because they weren’t going to kill any animals on our trip to the Altai Mountains.” I left before he could say anything else.
I dreamed of the riders. It was daylight, but I could see them in the clear blue sky above Ulan Bator’s main square. The stone horse carrying Sukhe Bator reared, and I watched as the steed leaped from its base and bore its rider toward the others. I climbed the base and stood where Sukhe Bator’s horse had been, knowing that I too would be carried into the sky, and desperately wanting to ride there. Sukhe Bator and his horse disappeared among the throng of riders overhead, and I waited for them to sweep toward me, but they were retreating, shrinking as they rushed toward the sun.
I woke and glanced at my clock; it was past nine. After shaving and washing up, I got out my small carry-on bag; Gil might come back and tell us we had to leave immediately. I packed my toilet articles, changes of underwear, a clean shirt and pants, then added some dried fruit, my camera, my Walkman and my few cassettes. My money, credit cards, and passport were in my money belt; the rest I could leave behind if necessary. I moved around my room, feeling as though I had not quite shaken off my dream.
I went to the window. From there, I could see only part of one street, but the traffic seemed heavier today, with more jeeps and tanks moving past the buses. The men in the jeeps were in khaki.
I grabbed my coat and left the room. A few people were waiting by the elevators. We rode to the lobby in silence. A roar flowed toward us as the elevator doors slid open; the lobby was packed with people perched on suitcases or huddled together in groups. I pushed my way past them to the bar.
Surprisingly, the bar was largely empty. The three men who were to wait with me for Gil were already there, sitting in one dark corner. Bayan was behind the bar, wiping a glass; I was reassured to see him.
“No alcohol,” he said as I approached. “Can’t give you alcoholic beverage.”
That explained why the place was so empty. “Why not?”
Bayan gestured at the lobby beyond. “Because they said.” I saw the soldiers then, moving among the crowd.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“People are leaving city.”
“I know they’re trying to leave,” I said, “but–”
“They are leaving. People from Ulan Bator. They leave with trucks, horses, on feet.”
“All of them?” I asked.
Bayan smiled slightly. “Not all. Soldiers still here, and others. Not everybody goes – many are still here. But enough go to cause worry.”
“Why are they going?” I said, afraid I already knew.
“To wait for night. Ministers do not want tourists to follow. That is why the soldiers are here.”
“Why would tourists want to follow them?” Even as I asked the question, I felt something stir inside myself.
“You do not know?” Bayan shook his head.
I bought a soda from him and headed toward the corner where my traveling companions were sitting. Sandy the lawyer had both his bags with him; Allen and bald Harvey hadn’t brought any of their luggage. One deck of cards was on the table, and Sandy was shuffling a second.
“Sit down,” Allen said. “We’re playing some poker while we wait. Or maybe you’d prefer bridge.”
“The bartender says Mongolians are leaving the city,” I said.
“So we heard.” Allen leaned back. “People aren’t going to work, and there wasn’t any breakfast served this morning. Apparently half the hotel staff didn’t show up either.”
“Jesus,” Harvey muttered.
“I was listening to the BBC before I came down,” Allen said. “They still don’t know what those riders are. A few folks in other places are apparently leaving cities and towns, too, going out to wait for God knows what.”
We played some five-card stud; Sandy kept track of the wagers. There didn’t seem much point in talking. By noon, Harvey had won about forty dollars, I had lost ten, and Gil hadn’t shown up. A couple of soldiers were at the bar talking to Bayan; I waited until they had left.
“I’ll get us some drinks,” I said as I got up. “I mean sodas.”
“Nothing for me,” Allen said.
“Me neither,” Harvey added.
I went to the bar. “You sit here long time,” Bayan said.
“We’re waiting for our tour guide. He’s supposed to come back from the airport and meet us here.”
“He won’t come back,” Bayan said.
“Why not?”
“You people can go out from the airport, but cannot come back in. That is what my buddies from army told me. Soon they will make everybody leave the hotel.”
I leaned against the bar. “Just where are we supposed to go?”
“To your embassies and wait. To the airport and train station and wait.”
“For how long?”
Bayan shrugged. “Who can say?”
“I’ll be honest with you, Bayan. I wouldn’t mind staying, even under these conditions – for a while, anyway. I wanted to come here for years, and all I’ve seen is Ulan Bator. And I keep thinking–” I was silent for a while. “What do you think we should do?”
His smile faded. He looked at me for a long time, as if trying to figure me out. I was beginning to feel uneasy when he said, “You are here. You say you wanted to be here. Now you are here when something important is about to happen.” He paused. “I am leaving work soon. A dream came to me last night, of the horsemen. I will go out from city to see what will happen. I think you want to know what will happen there, too.”
The sensible thing to do was to wait in the hotel until the authorities sent us somewhere else. The diplomatic community here would figure out how to get us home. Mongolia wasn’t a hostile country; the most we would suffer was some discomfort before we were finally on our way. My brief adventure here would be over. If the visions continued to appear, and more of these people became convinced that they were a sign from their ancestor Genghis Khan, things could become unstable; it might not be possible for me to come back to this land again.
I thought of going home to another round of dinners, parties, and idle talk with other idle people until I grew depressed enough to plan a new trip with yet another guide to keep me safe. Maybe I would not even have that life for long if the sky riders were a sign that our world would soon change, or even end. There might soon be no safety anywhere.
“Bayan,” I said, “I want to leave here with you. I’ll go wherever you’re going.”
“I thought you would do that. You will have to leave your friends.”
“Maybe they’ll want to go, too.”
“They will not go. They will say you are crazy to go with me.”
Bayan was right about that.
We left in early afternoon with three of the soldiers, whom Bayan said were going off-duty. Gil had still not come back when we left; Allen was the only one who looked sorry to see me go. I had told Bayan that I would pay the soldiers and that he was welcome to my Walkman, but he seemed indifferent to the offer.
The soldiers had a jeep. There was little traffic on the streets except for a few other military vehicles. No one stopped us, and gradually it dawned on me that the soldiers might have left their post under false pretenses. Other soldiers had not questioned them when we left the hotel; their superiors must have thought that they were taking me to an embassy or to the airport. I was with deserters who could easily take me to some isolated spot and rob me of everything, but somehow I knew they would not.
I looked back. A few dilapidated cross-country vehicles were following our jeep, and soon there was a small convoy behind us. I expected to see a roadblock somewhere along the st
reets, or at least on the edge of the city, but apparently the authorities were more interested in keeping order among those staying in Ulan Bator. As we drove through one of the yurt suburbs, people gathered along the roadside, as if we were part of a parade.
Then we came to a sharp bend in the road, and rounded it; I looked out at the rolling land.
During the flight into Mongolia, I had been struck by the emptiness below. There had been almost no signs of human habitation, no roads, towns, buildings, or cultivated fields, nothing but barren hills, tiny white dots that turned out to be grazing sheep, and the occasional mushroom-like yurt seemingly planted in the middle of nowhere. It had seemed that the entire population of Mongolia must live in Ulan Bator, as indeed almost half did, and even the land surrounding the city seemed devoid of settlements.
Now there were yurts dotting the once empty land, as if another suburb of the round tents had sprung up overnight. Hundreds of people on horseback were streaming across the yellow grass, fanning out in all directions, and more were following them, their horses kicking up clouds of dust. I thought of the ancestors who had ridden out to their conquests.
“It is like Naadam,” Bayan murmured.
“What?” I asked.
“Naadam, our National Day. People come here from all over to celebrate, and that is where they put their gers. But this is more important than Naadam. We must be here.”
Something was calling to us; I knew it now, and was powerless to resist its call. My dream of the horsemen that past night had been part of it, and knowing that I had to come here with Bayan was part of it, too.
The jeep lurched forward.
There were no roads outside the city, only trails of ruts made by other vehicles that had crossed the land. The young man driving the jeep seemed to know which ruts he wanted to follow. By the time we had gone only a few miles, I was aching from the violent bumps of the ride.
Yurts were being raised around us. Men held up tent poles while other men and women adjusted the spokes attached to the roof wheel. People were securing the felt walls of their tents and then hurrying to other families to help them. There were horses everywhere, many of them tethered to ropes stretched between poles.
We drove on; I covered my nose and mouth with a handkerchief to keep out the dust. In a while, the air grew clearer again and I saw fewer yurts and people up ahead. My face was raw from the sun and the cold wind that was beginning to rise. The driver seemed to be heading toward a lone yurt on the horizon, barely visible against the late afternoon sky.
That was where we finally came to a stop, next to a battered truck parked near the tent. An old couple greeted us outside the yurt. The old man said a few words before leading us inside; Bayan told me that the two were the grandparents of one of his companions. By then, the sun was setting, huge and red.
“Three is very significant number,” Bayan said to me. We were sitting near the dwelling’s small iron stove, drinking a liquor he called arkhi from bowls encrusted with dirt. “Of course, so is nine.”
This would be the third night we would see the horsemen if they reappeared. Bayan’s numerological reasoning did not impress me, and I suspected that even he was calling upon it only to convince himself that he was being logical, that he had not been compelled to come here by an irrational impulse. For he had been compelled, I was certain, as had his soldier friends and the crowds assembled in their city of tents. The old couple with us seemed barely able to walk, yet they were here. Bayan might lose a job that was surely a lucrative source of hard currency and other loot, and the soldiers could be facing the Mongolian equivalent of a court-martial for going AWOL and stealing a jeep, and still they had come. I risked almost nothing in comparison.
I drank only enough of the arkhi to be polite. The couple had brought no food, perhaps because of the shortages. I opened my carry-on and passed around some dried fruit; the others ate it passively.
Bayan said a few words in Mongolian, and then to me, “We go outside.”
We left the yurt. The warm temperature of the afternoon had dropped precipitously; I pulled my coat closer around me. The stars hung in the sky like lanterns, set against a sky so clear and black and close that it seemed like the inside of a vast velvet-lined bowl a giant might have reached up and touched.
I looked back. A few lights hung near the other yurts on the plain, or swirled in arcs and circles; some people had apparently brought lanterns and flashlights with them, but most of the plain was dark. One light was blinking on and off, as if the person holding it was sending a signal. The city of tents that had sprung up that afternoon seemed far away, nearly as distant from me as the sky.
Someone near me cried out. I looked up and saw the celestial riders coming out from Orion once more. They grew, covering the sky, moving more rapidly than they had before; their arms rose and fell as though they were whipping their steeds into a faster pace. Their transparent garments shone, casting a blue light over the plain.
My neck ached; as I lowered my eyes, a hand clutched at my shoulder. “Ah,” Bayan said, waving an arm. I saw the horses then, standing out on an empty stretch of land to the west. There were at least nine of them, all larger and more massive than the small Mongolian breed, and their white coats had a bluish tinge. Perhaps they had strayed from their owners; they might be wild. I was sure they hadn’t been anywhere near us until now.
Bayan said something I didn’t understand, then began to run toward the horses. “Bayan!” I called after him.
“Come!” he shouted back. I took off after him, thinking that his friends would follow and help me restrain him. Suddenly something swelled inside me; I felt as though the air filling my lungs would carry me aloft and make me soar over the ground. Then I was running easily, feeling like invisible cords were pulling me.
Bayan skidded to a stop near the horses. I was panting by the time I reached him, dizzy with the effort of running.
“Bayan,” I gasped when I had caught my breath. The night was darker. I looked up; to my surprise, the horsemen above had disappeared. A muscle throbbed in my right thigh; I bent from the waist and rubbed at it with one hand.
One of the white horses neighed. A movement at the edges of my vision made me glance up; I tensed in surprise.
I saw a lone horseman. Bayan whispered a few words in Mongolian, and I knew he saw the rider, too.
The horseman was dropping toward us from the sky, and as he fell, he grew smaller and smaller until his horse touched the ground, and hoofbeats filled the silence. He rode toward us over the grass until his steed reared up and halted.
The strange man was roughly our size now. He looked Mongolian, and wore a long woolen tunic and baggy trousers. I was still, unable to move.
The horse whinnied softly; the man shifted in his saddle. I heard the clink of the necklaces hanging from the rider’s neck and smelled the sweat of his horse. Whatever the two had been while crossing the sky with the heavenly giants, they were now flesh and blood that I could reach out and touch.
Bayan raised his arms above his head. I did the same, not daring to call out or to flee back to our Mongolian companions.
“What are you?” I whispered at last, expecting no reply from the apparition.
“A warrior,” he answered. “I am a man, after all.” He held out his hands, palms up. “I come in peace.”
His voice was low but hard, his words spoken with no discernible accent. Impossible for me to understand him, impossible that he should have descended from the sky – yet there he was, and I needed no translator to know what he said. I glanced at Bayan quickly, wondering if he had heard the man speak in English or Mongolian.
The rider might claim that he had come in peace, but he was well-armed. A bow in a leather case hung from his belt, next to his slightly curved sword, and his quiver was filled with arrows. I lowered my arms slowly, careful to keep my hands where he could see them. “Why are you here?” I asked.
“To ride in the places I once knew. It is a need.” He m
ade a fist, then struck his chest. “I still feel it, this longing for my old home.”
His old home? How old could he be? I wondered what he meant. The air was very still, almost too still, as if a barrier had already surrounded us and cut us off from the world. The nine horses near us were as unmoving as stone.
The man dismounted, walked toward us, and pulled two scarves out from under his tunic. “I come in peace,” he said as he handed one scarf to Bayan and the other to me.
Bayan murmured something in his own language. I hung my scarf around my neck. The man squatted, sitting back on his heels; I sat down in front of him as Bayan knelt. The visitor’s face glowed; below his fur hat hung two coiled braids, and his trousers were tucked into thick boots. His cheekbones were sharper and his eyes fiercer than those of the placid Mongolians I had seen.
“You say this is your old home,” I said. “What did you mean by that?”
“It was my home before the world grew small and we rode to Heaven.” His expression seemed to soften a little, but his eyes were watching us keenly. I had the feeling that he saw everything about me – that I was tired and a bit out of shape, uncomfortable in the cold of this summer night – in short, no match for him. He was speaking to me easily, almost contemptuously under the layer of courtesy, because I was not a threat; somehow, I understood that. His eyes narrowed slightly as he peered at Bayan.
“I’m not sure of what you mean by saying this was your home,” I said. The horseman turned back to me. “I would like to hear your story.”
“I would as well,” Bayan said in English, his voice trembling a bit.
The rider’s mouth twisted into what might have been a smile. “In my camp,” he began, “we had not forgotten the tales of our ancestors and their deeds. We remembered the time when nearly all of the world was our pasture, but our world had grown smaller since then. We were a poor people who had wealth only in memory. A man could ride over the steppe for days without seeing another man, and yet we knew how little it was compared to what we once had ruled. We were nothing to the world, only a patch of land lying between the territories of the people we had once conquered. The world was becoming too small for us, and we too small for it.”
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