by Harold Lamb
A last bevy of Tatar riders galloped past—archers without bows, old men, wounded and silent. A man who carried a musket turned and flung his weapon at a group of helmeted, black-coated horsemen.
Hugo saw several Tatars struck down in the doors of the houses they tried to defend.
“The cattle!” he thought. “They are driven like animals. No discipline, no powder for their muskets, no leaders. Pfagh! The Turks at least know what they are about.”
A sharp-featured bey of a Kazak regiment led his men up to the alley, stared long at the quiet Frenchman, lifted his hand in a salute.
“Salamet, effendi!”
He called out to his men, who began to run into the deserted houses, laughing and jesting. Hugo, palpably not of the Tatars remembered that there were Europeans with Galdan Khan, and that the feather in his cap was some kind of a symbol of rank. The bey must have thought him a man of Galdan Khan. Seeking to leave the alleys, he turned back through the arch, into a small square.
Here he reined in sharply with an oath. This was the quarter of the Chinese merchants. In the teakwood doorway of a cedar house sat a fat man in embroidered silk, a knife in his hand. Through the opened door Hugo could see the bodies of several women, some still stirring feebly. There was blood on the knife in the merchant’s hand. His broad, olive face was expressionless. Having killed his women, according to the code of his caste, the Oriental was awaiting his own fate.
Hugo could go no farther in that direction. A group of Kalmuks were harrying a small pagoda. Others were intent on seeking out the unfortunates who still lived in nearby dwellings. Captives were being roped together by the necks. Children were lifted on lances, to guttural shouts.
Almost within reach, Hugo saw a Tatar’s eyes torn out by a soldier’s fingers.
A sound caused him to turn. From a post by the gate of the merchant’s house the Kalmuks had cut a stake. Upon this they had drawn the passive Chinese. While Hugo looked he wriggled convulsively, his eyes standing from his sweating face.
Never before in the wars had Hugo seen the deliberate slaughter of a people. It sickened him, and he was beating his way through the square when a song arrested him.
“O, bright falcon,
My own brother!
Thou soarest high,
Thou seest far——”
It was dusk now in Kob, a dusk thickened by a pall of smoke and reddened by mounting fires. The song had come from the entrance of the pagoda. Aruk was the singer. Hugo could see the little hunter clearly in the glow from a burning house across the square. Beside Aruk were clustered a handful of Tatars, women among them.
With spears and swords they were defending themselves, for they had used up all their arrows. Aruk, half-naked, was fighting desperately, swinging a scimitar too large for his short arms. His broken body was streaked with sweat and shining blood; his teeth bared in a grin of rage.
Suddenly he caught sight of the tall form of the Krit.
“Aid!” called Aruk. “Aid, my falcon.”
For a space the clash of weapons had stopped. The Kalmuks, ringed around the pagoda steps, were waiting the coming of more men.
“Aid, my Krit,” urged the hunter. “Chase these wolves away before others come.”
It simply did not occur to Hugo to draw his sword in a quarrel between peasants and common soldiers. He was already gathering up his reins when his eye caught the anxious face of Yulga. She did not call to him, but her clasped hands were eloquent of appeal.
This made him ill at ease. Yulga had come daily to say her garbled prayer at the grave of his brother. She was a handsome little thing, and her eyes were tragic.
“Peste! What is it to me?” he grumbled.
Then he growled, at the watching Kalmuks:
“Back, dogs! Back, I say. These Tatars are my prisoners.”
The soldiers hesitated at the ring of command in the voice of the tall Krit. They eyed the feather in his cap, the accouterments of his horse, sullenly. Were not the Tatars their legitimate prey? Who was this tall bey they had not seen before?
Aruk, Ostrim and his daughter and the other Tatars gathered about the horse of Hugo, fingering their weapons defiantly.
“These are prisoners, to be questioned by the chiefs,” Hugo asserted, watching the Kalmuks. “Would you taste a stake, that you disobey the command of a bey? Be off, before I am angry. Loot the temple yonder.”
Sight of the deserted doorway of the pagoda decided the Kalmuks. Here was easy spoil. The Tatars could still bite. Let the bey have them if he wished. They made off.
At a sign from Aruk, Hugo urged his horse toward the archway through which he had come. The fires had not yet reached that quarter, and once in the darkness they would be reasonably safe from discovery.
Abreast of the burning house he reined in with a muttered oath. Several riders paced out of the alley to confront him. He saw a stout officer in a fur kaftan and the round, white hat of a Turkish janissary.
In response to the man’s question Hugo answered that he was escorting prisoners to be questioned. But the other stared evilly and shook his head. Prisoners with arms! They should be bound by the necks.
He peered closely into Hugo’s bearded face and drew back with an angry hiss.
“You are a Christian. I have seen you before. What are you doing here?”
Without replying, Hugo edged his horse nearer the other. Suddenly the Turk snatched at a pistol in his belt.
“Caphar—dog!” he screamed. “You have fought against the believers. You were at Zbaraj. I was there—”
Before the long pistol was fairly in his hand his words ended in a groan. Drawing his sword, Hugo had caught the Turk under the chin with the hilt while the point was still in the scabbard. The janissary swayed, choking and clutching his throat.
Putting spurs to his mount, Hugo rode down another rider, his big bay knocking the small Arab off its feet.
“Kill, kill!” cried the other Turks.
Before they could put their weapons in play, the Tatars were dragging them from their horses, slipping under their scimitars. One or two of the Tatars fell in the short struggle, but the rest were now mounted. The feel of horseflesh between their legs put new heart into them, for a Tatar is at sea without his horse.
Under the guidance of Aruk, who knew every alley of Kob, they made their way unmolested to one of the gates. The sack of the city was beginning in earnest, and no guards had been posted as yet by the Kalmuks. A drunken cavalry patrol fired shots after them as they sped away in the darkness.
Some distance out on the quiet plain toward the lake, Aruk dismounted and came to Hugo. He seized the stirrup of the Frank and bent his head.
“Our lives are yours, my lord. Have I not said to these other jackals that you were a falcon and a wolf-chaser? Hai—they will believe me now.”
Out of the darkness came the guttural answer of the other men.
“Our lives are yours. We have seen you strike a good blow against the wolves.”
Hugo moved impatiently, wishing to be gone.
“Because of that blow,” went on Aruk slowly, “you can not go back to your yurt on the mountain. The Turks would skin you alive and set you on an ant-hill. Besides, they have set fire to the yurt where you slept, and plundered your goods. Come then with us, with the men of the Altai.”
“Come,” echoed the others.
CHAPTER IV
The Gate of the Winds
The water of, Kobdo Nor was like a mirror under the stars, a mirror that reflected as well the scattered glow of fires about the shore of the lake. Water-fowl, roused by the presence of men in the unwonted hours of darkness, flew about with a dull screaming.
Cattle lowed from the plain, whence riders came in on sweating horses, from the steppe, from the more distant tribes of Tartary, to learn what had befallen at Kob.
They saw the crimson spot in the sky that showed where the city still burned on the second night of the sack.
On his back near the reeds
where the women and children from Kob had taken refuge, Hugo of Hainault lay, his head on his hands, his eyes closed. He was rather more than hungry. Never having accustomed himself to the kumiss of the Tatars, or the poorly cooked meat they ate, his one meal of the day had been black bread and fruit, washed down by cold water from a spring near the lake.
Above the whistle of the wind in the reeds and the murmur of a woman quieting her child, his quick ear caught a light step. Opening his eyes he saw a slim figure standing over him.
“It is Yulga, my lord, and I scarce could find you. I have some cold lamb’s flesh and a bowl of wine. Aruk said that you have a throat for the wine of China, so I had this from a merchant whose caravan has wandered here.”
“Wine!”
Hugo sat up and brushed his mustache.
“You are a good child.
“The girl has manners of a sort,” he reflected “and it is necessary to remember that here one is not monsieur le comte, but a vagabond of the highways. Even the remnant of my clothing and money is gone with my forest château.”
“My lord,” Yulga’s low voice broke in, “the kurultai—the council of the clans—has been assembled since the setting of the sun. The wise ones among the noyons are trying to discover the road we must follow. They have heard that Galdan Khan has ordered the death of all the souls in Tartary. His main army is on the road leading to the Urkhogaitu Pass. Soon he will arrive with his banners in Tartary, and with him will be five times ten thousand riders.”
Yulga spoke quickly, almost breathlessly.
“My lord, we will not flee, for where would we go? Cheke Noyon yielded his breath in Kob, and others of our bravest are licking their wounds here. More horsemen are coming in from the Torgut and Buriat clans, and before long others will ride hither from the north.
“We have no khan like Galdan,” went on Yulga sadly, “for the kelets—the evil demons of the air—bring him news, and he is invulnerable. Gorun shivers in his tent and says that Galdan Khan has made magic. The priest can make no magic for us.”
She paused and then lifted her head.
“My lord, there is a magic that can help us. I heard of it from the Christian priest who is dead.”
“The one for whom you pray?”
“Aye, my lord. He told us that God opened a path through a sea, so an army of Christians could pass with dry feet.”
Hugo was silent. Once at a banquet at the Palais Royal he had made a jest of this, remarking that if the Israelites of Egypt had been monks and the Red Sea a sea of wine they would not have passed unwet.
“And an evil horde,” pointed out Yulga eagerly, “that pursued the Christian khans was swallowed up in the sea. Is not that the truth?”
Thought of Paul stayed the gibe that rose to Hugo’s lips.
“If the Christian priest said it,” he responded grimly, “it is true. He was my brother.”
Yulga pondered this.
“Then you must be a Christian from God, because he was an envoy, and you are a khan, a leader of men. And you came to help us in our need. If we do not have a miracle we will all die.”
Breathlessly she kneeled beside the wanderer. He could hear her heart beating. So, he thought with a wry smile, a price must be paid for one’s supper even in the wilderness.
“Then you will die,” he said gruffly.
Yulga laughed patiently.
“My lord jests. How else could the priest who was your brother live after death came to him?”
“Live? How?”
“In the yurt where we pray. When we are there we hear again the words he spoke to us. And how did you, my lord, find his yurt if you did not know where it was?”
Emboldened by the silence of the man, she went on swiftly: “Tell us how we can overthrow Galdan Khan. In two days he will be at the pass. He has ten times the numbers of the riders that are here. Soon we will have as many as he perhaps, but then it will be too late. And he has powder and cannon and muskets.”
She pointed at the glow in the sky that was Kob.
“See, yonder the mirzas of Galdan Khan are building new walls. They are putting their cannon on the walls. Our horses can not ride over stone ramparts.
“Do you tell us what we must do, my lord,” she sighed. “And I will bear the counsel to Aruk, who is sitting in the kurultai.”
“My faith!” thought the Frenchman. “I would not care to go myself. They smell too rank of horse and mutton.”
He glanced at the nearby campfires, noting the anxious men who stood weapons in hand beside their sleeping women. Again he heard the plaint of the sick child and the murmur of its mother.
A blind man sat patiently, the nose-rope of a solitary cow in his hand. More distant from the fire, herders slept on their horses; fishers and skin-clad peasants armed only with sticks stood staring numbly at the crimson spot in the sky.
“What an army!” he thought. “What animals, that Paul should waste his life among them! Pfagh!”
Touching Yulga on the shoulder, he said:
“You have wit. How many Kalmuks and Turks are in Kob?”
“Aruk says four times a thousand. There were more, but many died in the battle.”
“Well, tell Aruk this. Say that your horsemen are useless except as horsemen, skirmishers and archers. Still, you can win back Kob. Spread a circle of riders about the place. Cut off all food. If the Kalmuks sally out, draw them off to the hills, or the marshes by the lake. Tire out their horses, then attack them if you will. It does not matter, so food is kept from their hands. They have but little.”
“Aye, my lord. But Galdan Khan will be at Kob in three days.”
With his hand Hugo turned the head of the girl toward the black mass of the Altai mountains.
“There is the barrier that will keep out Galdan Khan. Through one gate only can he come. You have heard the tale of the army that passed through a gate in the sea. Well, it is easier to close a mountain than to open it. Your khans can not spare many men, for a space until others come in from the north. But two hundred can hold the Urkhogaitu Pass, among the rocks. Let them hold it then until your allies are here.”
Yulga sped back with her tidings, and whispered long into the attentive ear of Aruk, while the assembled khans talked and stared into the fire. When the hunter rose to speak he was listened to, for as the keeper of the pass he was well known.
When he had finished repeating the advice of Hugo, the khans gazed at each other grimly.
“Who will hold the pass?” One voiced the thought of all. “There is no man who does not fear Galdan Khan, who fights with the devil at his back.”
“I will try, good sirs,” spoke up Aruk.
“A pygmy to match blows with a hero?” The Buriat spat. “You are bold enough, but the warriors will not take you as leader.”
“What leader,” countered another, “could hold the bare rocks of the Urkhogaitu against fifty thousand with artillery and Galdan Khan?”
They were silent, uneasy, while the khan of the Buriats, who had ridden far that day, traced figures in the sand by the fire with his gnarled finger.
“It is a good plan,” he ruminated, “a wise plan, that of the hunter. For we could cut communication between Galdan Khan and his wolves in Kob.”
“But if the mirzas who hold Kob sallied back to the pass——”
“Fool, they will not do that. They have orders to roost where they are. They will expect Galdan Khan to appear every day. When he does not come, they will be suspicious—likewise hungry. Then will they sally out, not before. Yet then our allies will be here; aye, we will be stronger than they, if Galdan Khan is held at the pass.”
At this, silence fell again. The chiefs who squatted, looking into the fire, were leaders of tribes but not of nations. There was no one to give commands in the place of Cheke Noyon.
They were not afraid. They knew not how to build a fort to oppose Galdan Khan, even if they all went to hold the Urkhogaitu. And if they did that, there would be no one to keep the mirzas h
emmed in Kob.
So each one avoided the glance of the others, and the Buriat who was a famous sword slayer snarled in his throat as he drew lines in the sand.
At length Yulga, who had left the council-ring, reappeared at Aruk’s side and whispered to the hunter.
Aruk looked surprised; but his eyes gleamed, and he rose.
“Good sirs,” he said, “Hu-go, the Krit lord, will hold the Urkhogaitu Pass.”
The khan of the Buriats grunted and smoothed the lines in the sand with his sword.
“He is mad!”
“Not so. For the plan you have just heard, the plan I bespoke, was his. Yulga brought me the word.”
“With what will he hold the pass?”
“Noble khan, with twice a hundred picked men, bold men—he asks that they be from your clan.”
Pleased, the Buriat grunted and looked around.
“He must have likewise,” went on Aruk, “all the powder in our bags, and steel shirts for the warriors, and we must seize him cannon from the broken walls of Kob——”
“This is a wise khan,” barked the Buriat. “He is no madman.”
“But,” pointed out Gorun, who squatted behind the council-ring, “he can not work wonders.”
To this old Ostrim from the outer ranks made rejoinder:
“Once, when the horde of the Krits in another land were being slain in battle by a powerful foe, the prophet of the Krits went to a mountain, and talked to God, holding up his hands the while. So long as his hands were held up, the Krits conquered; and before very long they had cut off the heads of their enemy and taken many horses. Kai! It is true.”
“But why,” asked the khan of the Buriats “will Hugo Khan go against Galdan?”
At this Yulga broke the custom of ages, and a woman spoke in the council.
“To me he said it. My lord Hugo would sleep in comfort in his own yurt. Galdan Khan is like a buzzing fly, that keeps him from sleep. He said that he was tired of the buzzing and would drive away the fly.”
For a space the flippant answer of Monsieur le Comte d’Hainault sorely puzzled the councilors. Then the khan of the Buriats struck the sand before him with the flat of his sword, roaring: