by Harold Lamb
Michael caught up the long battle-ax that had supported the Janissary in his ill-timed doze. He hefted it in his left hand, found its length unwieldy, and broke the wooden shaft in two under his foot.
Taking up the shortened weapon, he held it close to his side, away from the fire.
“Keep back,” he hissed at the others, “for this is my fight.”
They mumbled and straightway fell to staring in fear as a burly form strode through the entrance of the aul and came around the diminishing blaze of the fire.
“Who called?” growled El-Arjuk, glancing at Michael and the one sentry swiftly.
He was flushed from drinking, although his step was steady. In feasting he had laid aside his armor, but held a small target of bull’s hide and a scimitar. Noticing the absence of the other Janissary and the strange quietude of the one sentry, he started.
“Blood of Sheitan—”
“I summoned you,” said Michael grimly. “To your reckoning. Guard yourself!”
With that he leaped, swinging his haft of the battle-ax. With one motion El-Arjuk flung up his shield and slashed forward under it with his sword.
The blade met nothing but air. Michael’s jump had carried him over the low sweep of the Turk’s scimitar, while the hastily raised target momentarily obstructed the vision of his adversary.
The Breton’s broad chest struck the shield, bearing it down, and his shortened ax fell once, the full weight of his powerful body behind it. El-Arjuk had started to cry for aid when the blade of the ax crashed into his forehead and the cry ended in a quavering groan. Michael fell to the sand with his enemy, but he rose alone, listening intently.
From somewhere outside the aul a question was shouted idly, for the thud of the two bodies and the moan of the master of the slaves had been heard.
“Reply,” snarled Michael at the staring Janissary who was going through the motions of ablution, kneeling in the sand. The Moslem wished to die with this rite performed. “Reply with the words I put into your mouth or we will fill your throat with the unclean flesh of the dead.”
The warrior hesitated, then bowed his head.
“It is naught,” he called back over the stone wall as Michael prompted him, “but the death of a dog, upon whom be the curse of Allah for his sins.”
A satisfied laugh from the listeners without, who believed that a Christian slave had been killed, came to the ears of the captives. Wasting no time, Michael had green tamarisk branches cast on the fire causing smoke to fill the aul entrance.
Behind this makeshift curtain he ordered El-Arjuk stripped of his brilliant yellow coat and insignia and instructed the nervous captives how to rewind the white turban so as to conceal the blotches of blood.
This done, the Portuguese who was like the master of the slaves in build was clad in the garments and given the shield and scimitar. Meanwhile the excited men would have slain the stolid sentry had not Michael intervened.
“I made a pledge,” he said coldly. “You want blood, methinks, and you will find plenty before long.”
So the surprised sentry was bound and wrapped around with the clothing of the Portuguese until be was helpless either to move or cry out. Then, with the two bodies, he was laid in a corner of the enclosure and covered with sheepskin robes.
“Say to Bayezid,” smiled Michael, “that I bid him not farewell—for I shall seek him again.”
When the fire died down presently and passing soldiers glanced idly into the aul, a group of men issued forth without torches. At their head was the familiar uniform of the master of the slaves, and their feet were bound with leather thongs, permitting them to walk only slowly.
It was entirely natural that El-Arjuk should have work for the caphar slaves to do that night, so the revelers paid scant heed to the group. It was whispered, moreover, that one of the infidels had been slain, so it was entirely to be expected that the others would be used to dig a grave.
At the outskirts of the tents where darkness concealed them Michael called a halt. Passing near the fires, the garments of El-Arjuk had been their safeguard; in the dark they would be challenged at once by the mounted riders who patrolled the camp.
So Michael waited, kneeling on the ground in order to raise passing figures on the sky-line. He ordered his comrades to cut off with the weapons they had concealed under their clothes their bonds and to carry the cords until they could be concealed at a distance from the camp. Not until he was satisfied that a patrol of horsemen had passed the ridge in front of him did he give the word to advance.
An hour later they were beyond the outer guards and running due east, under the stars that guided them, toward the Gate of Shadows.
On the second night they took their ease. Michael had gone among the hill villages at twilight. He had worn the dress of El-Arjuk and when he returned to the men waiting in the thicket up the mountain-slope he said:
“The Darband-i-Ghil, the Spirit Gate, lies six hours’ march above us. Come.”
The six had run before now—too swiftly at first for long endurance—by the north shore of Van. Michael had steadied them to a slow trot and had taken pains to pass through such rocky ravines as offered, in order to wipe out traces of their passage. They had seen no pursuers, even after leaving the lake.
“Nay,” growled a Genoese. “Par Dex, our bones ache and our feet bleed. We must sleep.”
“Sleep!” cried Michael. “With Mamelukes riding in our tracks who have orders not to return alive without us. I’m thinking that Bayezid made short work of the Janissary guard whose life we spared. Will his horsemen yearn for a like fate?”
He himself was near the point of exhaustion, for his arm was scarcely knit and fever had weakened him. But the men would not move from the spot where they had been watching the lights of the Kurd village and talking among themselves.
Realizing that they must rest, Michael sat down against a tree for a brief sleep. The half-light of dawn was flooding the thicket and the sky over the black hills to the east was crimson when he woke at the sound of approaching footsteps.
It was his own band and they were coming up from the village. Some of them were reeling, though not from fatigue, and their breath was heavy with olives and wine. They looked back over their shoulders and grinned uneasily when they met his eye.
“We’ve taken the Moors’ food,” boasted one fellow. “It’s their own law, methinks. An eye for an eye. They’ll remember us.”
Michael glared. These were common men, very different from the belted knights who had sometimes visited his mother’s home in Brittany. She had hoped that he would be a knight. Instead, he had led a rough life and had toiled against hardships until—this.
“—, what fools! That was a Kurdish village, and the men have good eyes and horseflesh. Well, I must bide with you, for you have named me leader. Come.”
They ran sturdily through the dawn. Months of trotting beside the nobles of the Osmanli had schooled them to this. By midday they were above the fields in a place of gray rocks and red clay. In front of them a half-dozen bowshots away a great gully between mountain-shoulders showed the blue of the sky.
“The Gate of Shadows,” they cried.
And with the words riders came out of the woods behind them.
Michael measured the distance to the gully, glanced back at the shouting Mamelukes, and shook his head. He pointed to a mound of rocks nearby and led his five men there.
“’Tis the gate of heaven you will see,” he grunted. “No other, and not that, if you can not die like Christians.”
And the five, to give them their due, fought desperately, using the few weapons they had carried from the Turkish camp, and eking these out with stones.
The Mamelukes, reinforced by Kurds from the hill village, tried at first to make them yield themselves prisoners. But the captives knew what manner of death awaited them at Bayezid’s tent and hurled their stones. The big Portuguese went down with an arrow in his throat. The Genoese leaped among the horses, knife in hand,
and struggled weakly even when his skull was split with a mace.
The rearing horses stirred up a cloud of dust that covered the mound. Into this cloud Michael strode, swinging his half-ax. The first rider that met him was dragged from saddle and slain. Michael went down with a Mameluke on top of him and neither rose, for Michael’s left hand had sought and found the other’s dagger in his girdle.
When the last Christian had been shot down with arrows, the Turks dismounted and proceeded to pound the skulls and vital parts of the bodies of their victims with rocks. If any of the men of El-Arjuk had been in the party Michael would have suffered the fate of his comrades.
But the Mamelukes had neglected to give him the coup de grace owing to the body of their warrior that lay upon his. When they lifted up their dead they saw only a prostrate Frank besmeared with blood—not his own—and with a swollen, bruised right arm that looked as if it had been crushed with a stone.
The senses had been battered out of Michael by the mace of the dead Mameluke and it was a fortunate thing for him. Because by the time he crawled to his feet there were no Turks within view.
Instead, black-winged birds casting a foul scent in the air hovered over his head. The vultures had been descending on the bodies of the five men when Michael Bearn stood up.
Now they circled slowly in the air or perched on the rocks nearby patiently. Michael looked at them long, and then at the bodies of his comrades.
The five had not been brave men, but they had died bravely.
Michael walked slowly away from the knoll toward a rivulet issuing between rocks in the mountainside that rose mightily above him. He knelt and drank deeply. Then he dipped his head in the stream, wiping sway the dried blood. The flapping wings of the vultures impelled him to look up.
His glance penetrated straight down the ravine that was called the Gate of Shadows and he studied thoughtfully the vista of brown plain that lay beyond. Once within the pass he knew that he would see no more of the Turks. The evening before he had been told when he visited the Kurd village that the rock plateau in front of the pass had been the scene of a massacre by the Turks.
The skeletons of the dead were in the pass and a superstition had arisen that the souls of the slain had not left the place. The voices of ghils had been heard in the darkness. So the Moslems considered the place not only unclean but accursed.
“’Fore God,” he sighed, “we were at the Gate, the very Gate. Well, here must they wait for me—my five mates that were.”
So saying, he went back to the knoll, driving away the birds, and dug with his battle-ax a broad shallow grave in the loose sand. Dragging the bodies into this with his one useful arm, he covered them up first with sand, then with large rocks that he rolled down with his bare feet from the knoll.
From a wisp-like tamarisk thicket clinging between the boulders of the plateau, he cut two stout staffs with his ax. These he bound roughly together at the middle with a strip of leather cut from his jerkin. The longer staff of the two he imbedded in the sand at the head of the grave.
He had fashioned a cross.
“Rest ye,” he said gravely and extended his left arm over his head. “Vindica eos, Domine.”
Now as he said this he glanced again at the ravine and the plain beyond where he could find food and a tent among the Tatar villages. Then he turned to the northwest where beyond the hills lay the Mormaior, or Black Sea, and beyond there the great cities of Europe.
To the northwest, if he could penetrate thither, were his countrymen, and theirs, he thought, was the power that might some day strike at the Thunderbolt.
It was to the northwest that he began to walk, away from the grave and the Gate of Shadows. Greater than the will to live was the will to seek again the man who had crippled him.
When darkness came and covered his movements he pressed forward more rapidly, swinging his short ax in his left hand. As he went he munched dates and olives that he had plucked from trees near the mountain villages. He found no men to accost him in these orchards, for the fields were scarred by hoofs of many horses and the huts were charred walls of clay.
Bayezid’s riders had been pillaging the villages of Lesser Armenia.
Once, walking barefoot, he came upon a young wild sheep and killed it with his thrown ax. By now the villages had been left behind and below and the moon stared at him steadily from above the pillars of huge pines as he entered the forest-belt.
Another thought came to Michael. He remembered that, in the tower of ill-fitting stones on the sea cliffs of Brittany where the grass was short because of the ceaseless winds, a black-haired women waited, sitting by her weaving. He had vowed that he would come back to sit at his mother’s table and tell of the voyages to the East. And this, she would know, he would do. A lawless boy, with his father’s hot blood in him, he always kept his word.
From time to time he was forced to beat off the attacks of wild dogs with his ax as he worked through the passes of the Caucasian foothills. His bloodshot eyes closed to slits under the lash of the cold wind and he swayed as his heavily thewed limbs carried him down toward the place where he had seen a glimmer of water in the distance.
It was bodily weakness that drew his thoughts home to the tower and the coast where he had played as a child. For a space he forgot Bayezid and the torture. He had been hale and strong as a boy. Was he to go through life a cripple? Was that the will of God of which his mother had spoken, saying—
“The ways of God are beyond our knowing.”
Thirst had been his invisible companion and the water-courses that he crossed were dry. They led him down to a plain of gray rocks and white salt, where the salt particles in the air dried up the moisture in his throat and brought blood to his lips.
The smell of water coming toward him from the wide shore fired him with longing. He went forward in a staggering run and knelt to dash up some of the water in his hand.
It was thick with salt and dull green in color.
“The Sarai Sea,” he reflected, “the sea of salt. Eh, a rare jest to a thirsty man.”
He knew then that he had come out on the border of the sea now called the Caspian and not the Mormaior (Black) Sea. But, rising, he saw some dull-faced Karabagh fishermen staring at him from a skiff in an adjoining inlet and he laughed exultantly, lifting his hand to the sunset in the west.
The skiff would fetch him to a Muscovite trading-galley, and in time Astrakhan, then Constantinople. He had heard at the court of Bayezid that the Franks were mustering a crusade, to assemble at that city. The chivalry of Europe was taking up arms against the Turk.
“There will be a battle,” he whispered to himself, “and I shall have a share in it, God willing.”
CHAPTER II
The River of Death
Another sunset, and a war galleas was feeling its way with a double bank of oars against the sluggish current of a broad river. There was no wind and the heavy red pennon emblazoned with a winged lion hung nearly to the water between the steering-oars of the high stern castle.
The dark figures of men-at-arms pressed close to the rail of the benches that ran along each side of the waist of the vessel, above the moving gray shapes that were the rowers’ backs.
“Give way, to the shore,” called a voice from the stern platform.
As the heavy-timbered galleass drew in, fully manned for action, toward the rushes of the bank, the speaker cupped his left hand to his eyes and stared at the ruddy light of countless fires. His right arm hung stiffly at his side.
A year had not availed to restore the use of his injured arm to the man who had been a Turk’s slave. Now by infinite pains he could manage with his left. Unlike the men-at-arms and the mailed Venetian archers clustered upon the stern, he wore no weapon.
Michael Bearn had reached the Venetian fleet in the Black Sea at an opportune moment. Experienced ship-masters were needed to take command of the new galleys that were to cooperate under the Venetian flag with the Christian army on the mainland.
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br /> The body of the Venetian fleet lay off the mouth of the Danube, waiting to convey the victorious army of the Christian Allies to Asia Minor and Jerusalem.
It was a great array that had come against the Ottoman. Besides the Venetian war-craft, Sigismund of Hungary was up the river and the cohorts of Slavs, Magyars and the Serbs. With these were the pick of the chivalry of France, the forces of the Elector Palatine and the Knights of Saint John.
They had struck down through the mountains of the Serbs and besieged Nicopolis, on the river. Warnings of the approach of the conqueror Bayezid had reached them, and the French knights who had brought shiploads of women and wine down the Danube had laughed, saying that if the sky were to fall, they would hold it up with their spears.
Verily it was a goodly array of Christendom before Nicopolis—an army blessed by the Pope and dispatched against the Ottoman, who had swept over Arabia, Egypt, Asia Minor—far into Greece, now impotent, and the rugged mainland behind Constantinople.
The Moslems held Gallipoli and a khadi held court beside the marble and gold palace of Paleologus. Bayezid the Conqueror, surnamed the Thunderbolt, had never met defeat.
Bayezid had advanced to the relief of the Moslem governor of Nicopolis and Emperor Sigismund and Count Nevers, commander of the French, had given battle.
For days, hearing of the coming struggle, Michael Bearn had chafed upon the narrow after-deck of his galleass. He had urged the Venetian commander to make his way up the river, to assist in the struggle if possible.
Bearn had been told by the proveditore that the fleet of the Signory of Venice had promised to convey the army only to Asia Minor. It was not the policy of the Maritime Council to risk the loss of good ships—but Bearn was allowed to go, to bring news.
It had been a dangerous path up the Danube, for small Turkish craft thronged the shore and bodies of Janissaries were to be seen from time to time in openings in the dense forests.
Now, conning the darkened galleass close to the bank, Michael Bearn strained his ears to read the meaning of the tumult on shore. He could see horsemen riding past the glow of burning huts and the clash of weapons drifted out over the quiet waters.