Never shall I forget the morning when the five companies of the first contingent led off on the long march to Kiev.
In the Frankish lands we would keep to two groups, but upon entering the wilder country, where towns were farther apart and castles even fewer, we would travel together but with an advance guard of fifty picked horsemen. Two companies would follow, and a short distance behind, the main body. Finally, there would be a rear guard of twenty horsemen.
We often sang as we marched, and there was always the sound of the marching drum, a sound I shall hear all my life, so deeply is it imbedded in the fibers of my being.
The walking drum…a heavy, methodical beat marking the step of each of us. That drum rode on a cart at the rear of our column, and the pace of the march could be made faster or slower by that beat. We lived with that sound, all of us, it beat like a great pulse for the whole company and for those others, too, who had their own drums to keep their pace.
Our armor was not uniform, nor our helmets. Our weapons were of all kinds, although the number of our archers was greater in proportion than any army of the period. We also had a company of slingers whose skill with that weapon was beyond belief. Our horses and draft animals were of the best.
Hardship and storm were daily companions, keeping our bodies conditioned and our minds prepared. We lived with expectation of trouble, a small world that moved under its own power, that could defend itself, and had.
On this trek we had several carts other than that carrying the drum. Some carts carried supplies; some were homes for the women while on the march. These were two-wheeled carts, and ours was driven by Khatib.
Eastward we marched with the turning leaves, the greens changing to brilliant reds and yellows. The green fields turned to brown, and the crops that covered many of them had been reaped, leaving only stubble. Here and there we stopped, holding small fairs of our own, buying or trading for additional supplies and picking up what information we could of the road ahead.
We were attacked the first time near the Meuse, and the second time on the Rhine. Both times we came off well, and the second time we pursued the attackers, overtook them, and captured their horses, stripping the men of armor and weapons but permitting the survivors to go free.
Nightly camps were each a fortress, our columns like an army on the march. We awakened to a trumpet call, marched upon a second, and all our waking days were accompanied by the rhythmic throb of the walking drum.
We heard its muted thunder roll against the distant hills, through sunlight and storm. That drum was our god, our lord and master, and a warning to potential enemies.
The Hansgraf, on one of his several great horses, led off each day. He consulted often with the doyens who commanded their companies and with merchants whose judgment he respected.
Lolyngton, chief of the acrobats and performers, had become my close friend, and occasionally with him, I departed from the convoy to hunt. He was a master archer, and together we killed several boars, stags, and a number of hares to augment our food supplies.
Upon one of these forays we stumbled upon an ambush. We had seen no travelers, no sheep, nor any riders for some time when Lolyngton and I came suddenly upon a wide band of muddy tracks.
Riding away from that track, we rode cautiously up the slope of a long hill and dismounted. Creeping forward, heads low, we peered over the crest. A half mile away to the north lay the track along which our company would come, and hidden in a copse near the road were several hundred armed men, well mounted.
As many of our men were needed to drive cattle or to handle pack animals, we could muster less than half the force that lay waiting. Had such a force struck without warning, they could have done untold damage, perhaps even destroyed us. No way of avoiding them existed, and a sharp conflict would mean casualties and death.
“If we could strike them now,” Lolyngton suggested, “surprise would be on our side.”
The fact that we would not now be surprised was an advantage, but how to make the most of it?
When we came in sight, what would they do? Lolynton said, “Were it me, I would wait until a part of our column passed before attacking.”
This was my own conclusion, and probably theirs. Our column would be divided and in confusion, but suppose there was no confusion?
Riding swiftly back to the column, we reported to the Hansgraf. He listened attentively, first calling around him the doyens as well as Lucca and Johannes. Sarzeau, doyen of the largest company other than our own, was a good man, as was Flandrin.
My idea was explained to them. My suggestion was that, as the attack could not be avoided, the column continue along, but when the attack began, that portion which had gone ahead and those who were still behind would each swing around and take the enemy on the flanks.
Quietly, we rode along while all members were alerted. Sarzeau had several carts covered with bull’s hide, impervious to arrows. In each of these would be three archers.
Forty horsemen were detached to fall back and to circle and take the enemy from the rear, using the route Lolyngton and I had found. Plans were made, and the disposition of the defenders took place while the column continued to march. Command of the forty horsemen was given to me. “You scouted the route, you know the way.” Lolyngton volunteered to come with me, our party then fell back, substituting for the rear guard.
From the crest of the hill we saw them come storming out of the woods. Our convoy broke, swinging around with military precision, and the attackers were met by a flight of arrows. Military archers were as yet few in any army, and among mercenaries turned outlaw, it was the same. Arrows took several men from the saddle, and then with a shout, we charged down the slope.
The attackers had been caught fairly between the two lines of our convoy and were meeting fierce resistance when we charged into their rear.
We struck them hard, sweeping several of their horses off their feet. A gigantic rider swung at me with a sword, but an arrow took him in the throat before he could complete the blow, and I charged by, slashing another rider across the biceps and seeing his arm fall loose, hanging by a thread.
Lolyngton, drawing off to one side, used his bow and arrows with precision and skill, wasting no time, utterly cool, yet bringing down rider after rider.
A sudden blow swept me from the saddle, and I fell, foot caught in the stirrup, but Ayesha stopped abruptly. Kicking my foot loose, I came up just in time to see a lance point coming at my chest.
Deflecting the lance with my blade, I thrust deep into the attacker’s side, blood pouring down my blade and over my hand. Suddenly, the sounds of fighting ceased, and the attack was over.
Victory was ours, but at what cost! The smith, a burly man who was our best ironworker, was dead. A Lombard, one of our best archers, a man whom I had never really known, had also been killed.
Sheathing my bloody sword, I gave myself over to treating the wounded.
Johannes had a spear thrust in the side. It had missed the heart, but he was losing blood. Binding it tightly, I got him stretched out on a blanket, and while Suzanne tended him I extracted an arrow from the corner of a man’s eye. The eye itself was uninjured, and fortunately, for I knew little of eyes. The arrow had struck the bridge of the nose and the eye socket, wedging there, and the man was more shocked than hurt. A fraction of an inch and he would have lost the eye, and perhaps worse.
From one to the other I went, taking what emergency measures I knew, then back to continue the treatment.
The Hansgraf watched while I worked. “There are fourteen dead, and how many wounded?”
“Thirty-seven, and some with scratches of no importance.”
It was very good, considering the numbers involved, but a long trek stretched before us, and we could not wait beyond the night. There might be further attacks.
Our attackers had lost three times our n
umber of dead largely due to the precision of our archers. There were also some of their wounded left on the field.
We collected armor, weapons, and horses from the field. The Hansgraf was worried.
Johannes, his strong right hand, always cool of head, and cautious in advice, was sorely wounded. It might be weeks before he recovered—if he did. Flandrin, one of the doyens, had been injured, and we had scarcely room to carry them in the carts. Suzanne was the first to volunteer hers.
It was a forbidding sundown with red flame in the sky and brown grass taking the color of fire. From our camp came the moans of the wounded.
Then, as darkness came, from out on the hillside I heard a low cry, the desperate, wailing cry of a wounded man. Listening, I heard the cry again.
And I who was considered a physician could not ignore the sound.
37
KIEV WE FOUND a muddy, disagreeable town, but the weather was excellent. We camped in a forest not far from the Dnieper. The weeks of trekking the vast plains, rivers, and mountains had dealt harshly with us.
There had been a short, fierce engagement at the crossing of the Danube, where we lost two men, and eleven were wounded. In Buda one of our men had been killed in a brawl, others injured. By the time we arrived at Kiev we had forty-seven men who must be carried in carts.
A large part of each day was devoted to checking their wounds or prescribing for illnesses. For such a large body the number was not excessive, but as every man had a job, their work fell upon the shoulders of the others.
Our trade in Kiev was all we had hoped for. Woolen cloaks from Flanders commanded prices many times greater than we paid, and within two weeks our merchandise was gone, and our carts and packhorses were heaped high with furs, ermine, marten, fox and wolf skins, elk hides, and much else.
In the ninth century a few bands of Norsemen had swept over this land, defeating the Slavs and establishing themselves in a series of fortified enclosures called gorods for protection against the people they ruled. Novgorod was one such, Kiev another. Kiev was the largest trade center, and its prince was superior to all others.
To the east lay the Moslem world of Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo, and Samarkand. To the south lay Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, formerly the Eastern Roman Empire, called so but rarely now.
Arab, Jew, and Byzantine traders filtered into Kiev and were quick to establish a working relationship with the rulers from the north. The slave trade, providing slaves for the harems, shops, and large homes of Byzantium, was remunerative. The Hansgraf disapproved of serfdom (he was, I believe, born a serf) and would have none of it. He was on good terms with the Scandinavian traders who had settled among the Slavs and were called Russians by the native peoples.
In Córdoba I had read the writings of Constantine Porphyrogenetus who traveled here in the ninth century, and his works were the source of much of the information I had given the Hansgraf.
Each year there gathered at Kiev a great fleet of boats, and after the melting of the ice, this flotilla descended the Dnieper to the Black Sea, sailing to Constantinople with slaves, furs, and products of the northern lands. Boats also went upriver, and from there the caravans traveled across country to the Baltic, following a part of the Amber Road.
By the time we arrived in Kiev much of this trade had ceased to exist. Far to the east there was restlessness among the wild tribes of the steppes. The Petchenegs, sometimes called Cumans, had swept across the trade route to Baghdad, and they had almost cut Kiev off from Constantinople by driving their hordes into the lands north of the Black Sea.
Kiev was, in many ways, a more enlightened city than Paris, for Paris lay under the domination of an autocratic Church that was only beginning to broaden its intellectual base, and Kiev, utterly pagan, but drawing upon both Christian and Moslem cultures, was a town where all ideas were of interest.
There was little agriculture about the city. Nomadic herdsmen, dark-eyed and savage fellows with Mongolian features, stalked the streets in tight, well-armed groups, talking to no one. There were tall, blond Vikings from the north, a fierce, piratical people, many of whom had become excellent traders.
“Sometime,” I told Suzanne, “I shall write about the relationship between piracy and trade. The one always seems to precede the other, and the most successful pirates have become traders, perhaps on the idea that it is easier to defraud a man than kill him.
“Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again.”
“You are cynical,” Suzanne said. “They only sell them what they want.”
“If people were sold only what they wanted, there would be little trade, my lady. The soul of business is to inspire people to buy that which they neither want nor need.
“Take our Lucca, for example. Fur makes his neck break out in a rash; yet at each fair in Flanders he wore fur-trimmed robes with such style, such elegance, that many were prevailed upon by their wives to buy cloaks in which they looked neither stylish nor elegant, and which their own woolens far outclassed in many respects.”
“Mathurin, has the Hansgraf said when we would go south?”
“Soon. He is negotiating with the boatmen to travel with them, but I fear it will come to nothing. They have their own cargo to carry, and we have too many people.”
“But if we go overland we must pass through the country of the Petchenegs!”
“The boatmen probably hope we will be attacked. Our goods will be in competition to theirs, for they will be carrying furs also, and gold.”
Rising, I belted on my sword and donned a cloak, one of our woolens, purchased in Flanders. “The decision will be made today.”
Trade was no longer of interest to me. What I wished for now was Constantinople, a meeting with Safia’s friend, and then to do what could be done to free my father—if he still lived.
We had met many travelers, and each I prodded with questions about Alamut and the Old Man of the Mountains as well as his Valley of the Assassins. Little it was they could tell beyond what I already knew. They all agreed that escape from the Valley was impossible, to enter it equally impossible.
We gathered about our fire in the woods outside Kiev, an oddly assorted group. Sarzeau was there, his wounds mended now, but oddly surly. The Hansgraf was flanked by Lucca and Johannes, the latter pale and thin after his long illness. Flandrin, Grossefeldt, and the others, all were present. The Hansgraf had failed to negotiate a ride downstream, and the disappointment was great. Following the long trek across Europe with its fighting and hardship, they longed for the lazy drift down the river and the sail across the Black Sea.
Sarzeau was grumbling. A good man and a fighter, since his wound he had changed. Lucca, commenting on it, said, “He thinks his luck has run out.”
It was obvious he intended to bicker with the Hansgraf Grossefeldt, a stubborn, hard-headed man but a good leader, was seated beside him.
Yury Olgevichi was present. He was a leader of a new faction in Kiev, and I suspected him of some association with the tribes to the south. There was little on which to base my suspicion, but I believed he had done much to see we were denied passage on the boats. Khatib spied upon the meetings and assured me this was true. One of his wives was a Magyar woman.
What the Hansgraf had in mind, I did not know, but as we entered the meeting, I whispered to him the news Khatib brought.
Yury I had seen before and did not like, nor did I like the way he looked upon Suzanne. It was not only her beauty that interested him but the importance of Saône. To possess such a castle would give him immeasurable prestige, and I suspected Yury of ambitions toward Constantinople itself. Not many years past a prince of Kiev had led an attack on the Byzantine Empire, driving deep into their territory.
With a strong castle to the south, a fleet on the Black Sea, and a strong land force made up in part
of the tribesmen who had moved in south of Kiev, Yury might pose a serious threat to Constantinople.
He was a tall, powerful man with a reputation as a fighter and a statesman as well. If he possessed the Castle Saône, he could prevent supplies or men reaching Constantinople by that route as well as draw upon the manpower available there. He was a somewhat larger man than I, extremely strong, a dangerous antagonist.
The Hansgraf opened with a statement. “We have been refused transportation down the river to the sea. I propose we travel overland, following the Dnieper for easier travel.”
My head came up, and I stared at him, but he ignored me. Follow the Dnieper? It was insane. The river flowed far to the east before taking a great bend to flow back toward the Black Sea. If he went overland, marching south, it was somewhat less than half the distance. To be sure, there was some protection along the river, but not much. To strike due south was the thing, but I did not interrupt.
Maps were almost nonexistent, and the few who knew the country chose to remain silent and await the Hansgraf’s plan.
“We could buy boats,” Sarzeau argued. “It is foolish to go overland. We have looked forward to the river and a rest.”
“We attempted to buy boats”—Lucca wished to avoid discussion if possible—“and none could be found. They can make more by carrying goods than men.”
“We could build our own boats.”
“We might build enough by spring,” Johannes said, “or we can wait a month until the river freezes and use sleds.”
Sarzeau started an angry reply, but Lucca spoke first. “Whatever we do, the decision must be made here, now. The season is already late.”
“What is the distance?” Grossefeldt asked.
“Perhaps six hundred miles. It is safer following the river.”
The Walking Drum (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 29