by Harold Lamb
One day Ubaka told Norbo to send for Nadesha, and called the Torgut council together. After long talk that the boy did not hear, a rumor sprang up on the steppe.
“We are going to the home of our fathers,” the elder Torguts said.
Loosang Lama, the priest from Tibet, was consulted, and approved the plan for reasons of his own. The omens were taken from burned sheeps’ bones and found to be favorable for the undertaking.
Alashan was glad and hopeful. Although the weeks of preparation made the labor of the boys heavy, he looked forward to the setting out as a Moslem boy might await his first travel to Mecca. He mingled again with his cronies. They stole horses, on a dark night, from the hostile Baskirs—no easy feat, that. They dipped kumiss by stealth out of the big jars by the fire of their various tents and were blindly drunk for a while.
Then, to ease their spirits, they attacked a Cossack sotnik one moonlight night on the Volga. Nadesha put this idea into Alashan’s head.
The girl had returned from Astrakan on a fine pony and with a brace of pistols that roused Alashan’s immediate envy. She did not show the weapons to any one else, confiding in the boy that they were “borrowed.” So was the horse, Nadesha admitted, but she let Alashan ride it on his foray. She said there was something valuable on the sledge, and she dared him to take it.
To the Tatar boys the chance of seizing a sledge bearing plunder was a fine thing. To tackle Cossacks was a big order; but on the following day they would be riding away from Volga, and without doubt they would all earn for themselves the name of warrior.
Despite Alashan’s craft, they were seen by the Cossack guard and fired upon before they could approach. Keeping to the shadows along the river bank, they managed to remain out of sight until one of their number was drilled through the head by a chance bullet.
That let loose the devil in the boys, who until then had planned merely to try to run off with the sledge when the Cossacks halted to make camp. They rode their ponies out on the ice and sent arrows swiftly into the soldiers grouped by the sledge.
A musket is not so easily aimed as a bow in the moonlight. Two more boys were knocked from their horses and died soon after, but the three Cossacks lay writhing out their lives on the ice.
Without a shout of triumph, and without plundering the victims, the Tatar youths made off with the sledge and were seen climbing the river bank by fishermen roused by the shots.
“You are no better than a child,” the Khan said to his son when Alashan was brought before him the next day. “Kai, it is so. When I would keep secret our march, you rouse the Cossacks to fury, and our foes the Baskirs you would bring upon our heels. Go!”
Alashan would not confess that Nadesha had sent him upon the Cossacks. When he sought out the girl in the bustle of their village, he found her preparing to go to Zaritzan with her father, in his stead.
“But I am not afraid,” he cried.
“That is not enough.”
She made a face at him, and to add to this insult took his best kaftan, carefully slitting the inner lining to make a place for the two pistols.
“I am more of a man than you; the Khan said it.”
Nothing could have made Alashan more utterly miserable. He sat by the cold hearth of the great log building that did duty as a palace. Nadesha was fairly safe, for even Kichinskoi, Alashan thought, would not lay hand on the son of the Khan.
Then came Norbo with tidings of Nadesha’s seizure. Taking pity on the boy’s anxiety, the Master of the Herds allowed him to share in the attempt to rescue the girl the next morning. Nadesha had found time to whisper to her father that she would manage to be near one of the gates just before sunrise, and they had counted on the alarm caused by the conflagration to aid their escape.
For Ubaka, as soon as he heard the decision of Kichinskoi to take the Torgut sons, had given the order to burn all the Torgut villages.
“Raise the tugh,” he gave command after seeing that his abode was fired. “We will go to our homeland.”
Smoke was already rising on every quarter of the steppe; the animals were restless. But when the yak-tailed standard was lifted and the trumpets sounded, the young boys yelped with joy. They were the first to move, driving off the cattle; then came the women, on horse, with other beasts dragging the heavy wagons on which stood the skin tents.
Children raced about in the snow. Dogs barked. The jigits outriding shouted to other bands that appeared beside them on the white sea of the steppe. Axles creaked and horses neighed. It all merged in one vast, joyous murmur.
“The Ili!” women cried to each other and nodded as they whipped up the cattle drawing the wagons.
Ubaka Khan, grandson of Ayuka, sat with the armed men on their horses, waiting to bring up the rear. With steady eyes he was looking into a sunrise that, seen through the smoke, was the hue of blood. This ruddy glow tinged the brown faces that passed the Khan; it dyed red the tossing horns of the cattle. Two hundred thousand humans had burned their homes and were mustering for a march in the dead of Winter over one of the most barren regions of the earth.
Even the trampled snow was a crimson sea. Smoke hung above the moving shapes like a shroud—a pall that disgorged black cinders and ashes. Ubaka Khan had never seen such a sunrise.
Behind him there was the sound of a soft, chuckling laugh. He turned in his saddle to see the immense, emaciated form of Loosang Lama at his elbow. The man’s countenance was hidden behind a lacquer mask, half-animal, half-human. A loose robe of the most vivid yellow hung slackly from a bare left shoulder, exposing the half of a wasted body, marked by knives and disease.
“It was your word, my Khan,” whispered the priest, “that sent them forth. Do not forget.”
* * * *
Captain Minard Billings had been struck by the butt of a musket at the base of his skull, so that he lay long unconscious, heedless of his surroundings. When he opened his eyes—it hurt him to move them—nightmares were still racing through the back of his brain.
“Ferried across the Styx, by Jove! Lying in a cave with the shade of Hephaestus. Looking out on the procession of the lost and damned, at last.”
He rolled his eyes to encompass the other side of the cavern-like abode.
“And that wench Circe sitting yonder with her court of beasts, poor gallants like me, egad! More of the beasts, horned and hoofed, laboring in front of the cave—brimstone in the very air.”
At this muttering the figure of the woman rose and placed a cold, wet cloth behind his head and another over his eyes. Her hands were quick and tender, and smelled somewhat of cows. Billings subsided.
When he woke from a long sleep he was shivering. It was colder than Hades had any right to be. When she rose from her corner to lay another sheepskin over him, Billings recognized that Circe was Nadesha, wrapped in a white kaftan made of the soft bellies, of foxes. He saw too that Hephaestus was merely the grim and grotesque man who had led the rescue of Nadesha—Norbo, as he learned later.
The Master of the Herds was pounding at a steaming sword blade, on a small anvil. On a stone hearth between him and Billings a fire roared, filling the tent with smoke. Huddled as far as possible from the fire were a half-dozen odorous sheep. The tent, made of deer and ox skins, was stretched over alder poles, the whole being mounted on a crude wagon drawn by ten brace of oxen.
Billings groaned and shut his eyes. This was no nightmare. He was stiff and weak, and shooting pains ran up into his skull, but his brain was cool. Nadesha surveyed him with all the insolence of ownership and made him drink some mixture in a bowl—mare’s milk and wine, seasoned with sugar and pepper. He coughed and swore under his breath.
“So,” she exclaimed angrily, “you let a milk-guzzling boy and a Russian yak stretch you full length in the dirt. Pah, I am ashamed that I took such pains with you, my fine captain.”
“I did not expect an attack from the castle. Who knocked me down?”
“As I said, a Russian soldier. He ran out from Kichinskoi’s door.
When Alashan and Norbo had hauled you into the sledge beside me—and what a mess you made of Alashan’s blue!—I heard the pristof himself call out for his men to take you prisoner. Alashan cut down the man who hit you, and we got away with only a little fighting because the mist was still heavy on the river, and the patrols thought it was Kichinskoi’s fat woman in the sledge.
“Kai, you stupid milord, Kichinskoi would have made of you fine bait to drag across his trail. True, he hired you to make him a map, I have heard it said. But now his own bones will be summoned to the Empress’ rack, and he would have said that you conspired with us and he caught you, and perhaps they would have pulled your joints apart instead.”
It was significant that Nadesha thought of the Russian Government in terms of the knout and the strappado and the rack.
“Was that why you carried me off, Nadesha?”
“Partly. I want you to do something for me, too. You must do it.”
“Hum. Seems to me I’m always doing something for you, Nadesha. Where’s my pony that you promised me? Confound it, you’ve got my sword now!”
He had just seen it, hanging, with the brace of pistols, on the tent wall over Nadesha’s corner.
“You are my anda, Captain Beel-ing. I keep the weapons or they would be stolen. Here is your pony.”
She pulled back a segment of the skin wall, a kind of adjustable window, and Billings saw his horse in a small herd driven beside the yurt by a Tatar rider.
“Here are your treasures.”
Like a magpie with a cache to be exhibited but not touched, Nadesha flitted over to where she had made a temporary couch—Billings was occupying her own bed. Throwing aside the skins, she disclosed a number of bags that Billings recognized as those containing his personal kit, his spare stock of paper, powder and tobacco. Also the sandalwood box in which he kept an astrolabe, spirit level, compass, globe, dividers and rule—all his paraphernalia for observation and drafting. Nadesha had been using it as a pillow. Billings grunted with joy and then winced with pain because he had moved.
“What do you want me to do?” he muttered.
“You are a prisoner,” she assured him. “This morning thirty Russians blundered into our line of march and were slain because the Cossacks are following and our men were frightened. Where we are going we can take no Christians. You would be left for the wolves if I did not take your part. Do you understand?”
Billings understood very well, but said nothing.
“I want you to make a map,” declared the girl.
He waited.
“Is it true, my anda, what men said in Astrakan, that you can look at the sun and the stars and take your instruments in your hands as a lama takes his bones and prayer roll, and tell on what spot of the earth you stand? Eh?”
“It is true.”
“Then you know tenni-kazyk, the polar star, and jitti karaktchi, the great bear, and all the others. You can tell what lies ahead and on each hand, just by looking at the sun and the stars.”
“True.”
“Kai—that is wonderful. Then you must draw a map of the road that we take. It was for that I brought you here.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the lake that is Balkash, from which the river Ili flows.”
Billings looked up in surprize. This, then, was the route that Kichinskoi had planned for him. The map was the one he was commissioned to make.
“Then make the map, and watch always if we are journeying truly toward Balkash. If our march turns aside, tell me of it. But do not speak to any one else, or Ubaka Khan himself could not save your life.”
Now the Armenian merchant of Astrakan had described to Billings the location of Balkash, which was known to the caravans, as the lake was large, a sort of landmark of Central Asia. The caravan routes from China to Russia passed along it, and, turning south, those to India and Tibet.
“I shall need accurate information brought in daily by riders who have been out to the north and south,” he hazarded.
Nadesha clapped her hands.
“Verily, our line of march is wide, very wide, so that the horses can all graze under the snow, and fodder for the cattle can be had. The Torgut clans stretch to the north and south ten miles, and outriders go twenty more on each flank. Some hunters, questing for game, go much farther. Aye, they shall bring in reports to the Master of the Herds. I shall arrange it.”
“And what is your part of the bargain—my anda?” he forced himself to ask.
“First promise you will make the map, and tell me if we turn away from the road to Balkash.”
“So long as I am with your tribe, I will do it.”
“Good. Then I can promise that when we reach Balkash you will be set free with horse, weapons and goods and followers to take you where you wish.” Seeing the man’s face set stubbornly, she added: “Captain Beel-ing, you are in the heart of the Tatar Horde. If you escaped from this clan—the Wolf clan of Norbo—you would have to pass through a score of others on the steppe. Then you would fall into the hands of the Cossacks and be taken before Kichinskoi, who sent a soldier to strike you down before his gate.”
Billings said nothing. He knew as well as Nadesha that the frightened pristof would leave no stone unturned to avert from himself the deadly anger of the Russian Court at the loss of the Torguts. A good case, as it happened, could be made out against him. Billings had no friends to use influence on his behalf. Mitrassof might speak a word for him—but Mitrassof was, if Nadesha’s information proved correct, now in the field against the Torguts.
In common with Kichinskoi, Billings did not believe that the great tribe could escape beyond the reach of the Russian armies. By the time they were headed off and turned back to the Volga, Billings might be able to communicate with Mitrassof, if he stayed with the Torguts. He glanced around the dark tent, odorous with smoke and sheep, and set his teeth, resolving at the first opportunity to seek word with the ataman rather than endure months of this prison on wheels. Meanwhile, he would work at his chart. It would give him something to occupy his mind.
“What makes you think,” he asked, for this puzzled him, “that your Khan and his riders may turn aside from the road to Balkash?”
Nadesha glanced out of the opening at the entrance of the yurt. No one was at the front of the wagon. She had fancied she heard a slight movement near by. Leaning her dark head close to the prone man, she whispered: “From here to the river Yaik, and from there across the steppe to the great river Torgai we know well the way. Beyond there we have only the tales of our fathers and the wisdom of Loosang, who knows all things, who came from the temple of the lamas in the mountains to the south of our road. I have heard old riders of the steppe say that devils are in those mountains—devils with faces of beasts who fall upon the caravans and carry off women such as I.”
A shadow crossed the girl’s face.
“Tchu—I fear to go among the long, cold mountains. I want to go to the river Ili where the sun smiles on the hot grass.”
Billings laughed at this child-like confidence, but Nadesha looked up with a start. She had heard the flap of the tent that served as window drop into place. The strip of skin was still moving. Darting to the entrance, she crawled out, to spring to the ground and look about. She saw only the herd of horses and its driver.
On the other side of the yurt, his teeth set and his eyes savage, Alashan spurred away, plying his whip as if one of the thousand devils had climbed up behind him. Nadesha and the son of the Khan had been betrothed in childhood. The bride-payment had already been added to the herds of Norbo.
Unless one of the two fathers should declare Alashan unworthy of the bargain, the beautiful girl would belong to him. Now he had seen her black head pressed against the yellow mane of the giaour, the outlander. He had heard talk in the yurts that Nadesha had made the stranger her anda. He had come to ask the girl whether or not this were true. What he had seen would lead Alashan inevitably to fight Billings and if possible to kill him.
Now, when the chains of Winter were tightened upon the steppe, all life, human and animal, crept out of sight. The cold was intense, although the sky was clear and the sun’s touch fell full on the deep blanket of snow that it could not soften.
In the fir belts, animal life kept together instinctively—elk, and the following wolf packs that ranged from forest to river. Even the rivers were motionless, ice coating their surfaces. Yet across this frozen world moved a black river. It was a stream of fur-clad humans, and as village after village was met with and the smoke of them left behind, the column grew to an army, the army to a horde.
The sound of it became a never ending mutter, compounded of the groaning of hard-driven beasts, laboring wagons and toiling men. And this muttering horde of men, going as no people had gone before, was unwonted. It broke, as one might say, the chains set about the steppe; it challenged the wilderness. Before it, as if in mute evidence of this, the elk herds, the wild swine, even the panthers fled out of its course.
But behind it the wolf packs began to gather, tearing to pieces the cattle and horses and sheep that fell by the way.
“A whole people has gone mad,” men who had come to look at the moving columns from a distance said. “They will go to their graves like beds.”
Others, Cossacks examining the trail of the Horde, pointed out the forbidding signs of hoof marks mingled with the tread of human feet and the black embers of fire in the isolated hamlets the clans had passed over.
These Cossacks of Mitrassof, as well as the Polish regiment, were closing in on the Torguts. The head oi a viper, cut off from the body, still retains its poisonous fangs: Kichinskoi, in the last agonies of mortified conceit and dread, had ordered Mitrassof to take up the pursuit of the Horde and to cut to pieces any clan that refused to return with him to its residence on the Volga.
Shortly thereafter the doors of a prison cell closed on Kichinskoi, and before the end of that Winter he died. But Mitrassof had his orders, and he carried them out. General Traubenberg also was moving across the Volga with a heavy force of infantry and artillery; but unlike the Cossack he took his time prudently and when he did come up, it was upon the scene of the disaster at the Ukim.