Swords of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  Now in his heart Kirdy had no blame for any act of the girl; a blind rage was seizing him. Al-Tabir had said that Nada had joined the company of Otrepiev because she knew that, sooner or later, Kirdy would come up with them. Rage whispered that Al-Tabir lied, to curry favor—that Nada loved the false tsar and the glitter of his deeds. Jealousy whispered that Nada was now riding at his side, not because she wished to be with him, but because she sought to lead him astray from his pursuit.

  And in this moment Nada's mood changed, as a leaf blown by the wind whirls and rushes back upon the gust. Her long eyes, intent on the fire, grew troubled, and she put her hand lightly on the Cossack's arm. Under her fingers the man's muscles were like iron, and he did not dare look at her, for the anger in him.

  "Kirdy," she said after a moment, "look!"

  She pointed up, beyond the dark network of the forest, to the wall of darkness that was the bare, rocky heights above the timber line. Out of this black wall rose at intervals the snow peaks, gleaming in the clear starlight. To the girl—as well as to Girai—they resembled watchtowers built upon a wall of sheer immensity.

  "Tevakel Khan is old and wise," she whispered. "Do as he counseled. Go back to the Horde. Your wounds have not closed; there is fever in you."

  Now he looked at her with burning eyes, his lips set upon clenched teeth. And she frowned and tried to shake his arm.

  "Go back, Kirdy. You did not hear the tale of the wife of Tevakel Khan. Only now—"she hesitated, then—"I fear that Gregory Otrepiev will indeed be master of the country beyond, and blood will fall between us— yours or mine."

  Once Kirdy laughed, and at the sound of it she drew back, lips parted.

  "Remember the omen of the yataghan. Your blood was on it when it was given me." But the Cossack rose suddenly to his feet and cupped his hands about his eyes to peer at the heights.

  "Kirdy," Nada went on impulsively, "let Otrepiev meet his fate, wherever he has gone. He will not return. I fear, for us."

  "Nada," he said slowly, "there is no fear in you. Your beauty is such that you command and men obey, like slaves. It burns, this fever."

  His hands clenched, and his arms flung out so that bones and sinews cracked.

  "That is the way of it! Your thoughts are bent on this traitor because he has played the part of a king. What thought have you for the Falcon, the Cossack? He serves to protect you—to groom your horse—to bring wood for your fire. When the wolves howl, the borzoi is caressed by his mistress; when the sun shines, the Cossack is good enough for your jests. The Cossack is bloody—the Cossack is revengeful—and in your dreams you cling to the man who has slain multitudes for a whim—"

  Springing to her feet, Nada faced him with blazing eyes.

  "Stop! I have given my love to no man."

  "Nay, only you can know if Otrepiev be man or fiend."

  "I—"

  Nada caught her breath, and the sound of it was surely a sob. The next instant she had grasped the hilt of the yataghan and drawn the weapon with a thin slither of steel. With all the strength of shoulders and arm she struck at Kirdy, and the twisted blade stopped over her head as if bound by chains.

  The Cossack, laughing wildly, had caught her wrist with one hand, and when she sought to snatch the sword in her left hand he drew her forward and turned her about so that her head pressed back against his shoulder and his left hand grasped her girdle, holding her helpless. Her sheepskin hat fell off, and the loosened tangle of silk-like hair swept against his throat.

  "Look!" he said between his teeth. And Nada ceased futile struggling to stare up at the heights.

  In the maw of blackness between two of the peaks a red eye of light was visible.

  "It is in the pass," Kirdy went on grimly, "far above the tree growth, where no Tartars venture. That is the fire of Otrepiev, and when you beheld it you said to me, 'Turn back!' You would have led me from the trail."

  "As God lives, that is a lie. I did not see the light."

  But Kirdy merely laughed between his teeth and released the girl, turning his back upon her as if the yataghan and her anger, and his, did not exist.

  "Hi, Girai! Make ready the packs. We will go upon the road."

  Nada stood utterly still, one arm pressed against her heart, and presently she sheathed the sword, and came to Kirdy but did not touch him.

  "You are wild with the fever," she said quietly. "Pour water on your head, walk about, and then sleep. Then in the morning go whither you will. I—I have no place to go, except to the Tartars, and would you have me do that?"

  "Nay, you shall not leave my side until the end of the road."

  She waited while Kirdy and the Tartar made up the packs and saddled the ponies with experienced hands in the darkness. Girai, after a glance into the Cossack's face and another at the gleam of light above them, made no objection to entering the forest on horses that had not slept.

  The three mounted and moved off in silence, leaving the glen with its starlight at once. And when they entered the gloom of the forest, they were no longer three. Girai turned aside and made off toward the valley.

  "Eh," he said, a week later, at the encampment of his clan, "I saw the light. It was the eye of Shaitan, looking out from the gate in the rampart."

  Chapter XVIII The Law

  In elder days the wise men foregathered and said: Thus and so shall be the Law. And a woman, fair to see, came and spurned the Law, dancing upon it with light feet.

  And thereupon the youth of the land came and made an oath, saying: Thus and so shall be the Faith between us.

  When they had parted, a girl-child with flowers in her hair laughed at the Faith.

  Yet when the old men and the youths girded on their armor and went with their chariots to a distant battle, the women kept the Law and abode by the Faith. And who shall say why this was done?

  Nada could be surprisingly patient. Her father had taught her that there is an end to everything. She talked, low-voiced, to the big bay charger,

  who pricked up his ears and surged forward gallantly when she noticed him; she crooned at the eagles that flickered past the forest mesh, and she hunted wild turkeys with a bow while she waited for the black rage to leave Kirdy and the ascent of the Earth Girdle to end.

  At evening—for the Cossack pressed on, and cooked only one meal in the day—she plucked a turkey or roasted a deer's quarter and made barley and cheese cakes for them both, while Kirdy attended to the horses. Only once did he speak.

  "This companion of Otrepiev—who is he?"

  Nada, bending over the fire, made answer quietly.

  "One of the tsar's dogs."

  Then Kirdy knew that the man with the false tsar was an executioner— one of the torturers kept by the Muscovite lords. Otrepiev had chosen a motley court to go upon his exile, and now, except for the interpreter of dreams, only this man garbed in black and armed with a two-handed sword—Kirdy had caught a glimpse of him during the fighting in the Turkoman camp—remained at the fugitive's side.

  Nada's quick eyes missed nothing of the ascent. She knew when the birches and alders gave place to blue firs that they were near the end of the forest and near the spot where the fire had been seen. Ahead of them the mountain slopes closed in, and down this gorge a bitter wind howled as if it were a watchdog chained in the cut of the mountain.

  She knew when Kirdy found the scattered ashes of the fire two days old. For an hour he examined the earth in a wide circle about the spot, and though Nada could see nothing at all in the ground, a sudden tensing of his dark brow and flicker of the thin lips told her that he had made certain that Otrepiev had gone up the gorge. She had learned to read his face, if not his thoughts.

  "Sleep, Nada," he ordered her. "We will rest, and the horses will roll and graze."

  By this she was aware that the fever had left him and she did sleep, drawing her sheepskins about her against the chill breath of that wind—the sleep of the young and weary. But at times she heard the Cossack moving about, and the c
rackle of a growing fire, and the neighing of horses led to water. Near at hand a stream tore down the mountain side between black boulders—a stream that foamed, milky white. And Nada, who knew nothing of glacier-fed streams, was astonished because this one had roared past when she lay down in the late afternoon, and did no more than murmur when she roused at sunrise.

  Kirdy, who never seemed to sleep—after that first night in the storm when she had held his head on her knee—led the way into the teeth of the wind.

  That day they left the last stunted trees behind, and the short grass changed to a mossy growth that clung to the rocks, and the sides of the gorge became sheer cliffs that rose higher until the face of the sun was hidden. They saw the bones of a horse from which foul-smelling vultures flapped up lazily.

  Once they circled the pool under a thousand-foot waterfall—the source of the stream that had given them water for the last day. The sun's rays reached the summit of the narrow fall and tinted the spray in an arc of color that made the girl gasp.

  Then, when the roar of the fall had dwindled to a distant reverberation, Kirdy heard her singing against the voice of the wind:

  Tell me, brother Eagle, is it far to my home—

  Far to blessed Mother Volga’s shore?

  I am hungry, brother Eagle, hungry and cold.

  I will ride no more—no more!

  And, though he pushed ahead without a word, he was troubled. This was the song of Cossack captives, who went in chains to distant lands. He wondered why Nada had chosen it, and whether sickness had touched her.

  That night she slept like the dead, and Kirdy tended the fire at her feet—the glimmer of a fire, fed by the wood one pony had packed up from the forest.

  And while he watched, he listened to the twin voices of the Earth Gir-dle—the strident cry of the wind gusts and the moan of the waterfall.

  In spite of the wind's breath, the fire burned badly, unaccountably so, and when he filled the pot with water and tried to boil the Tartar tea brick in it, he could not do so. Kirdy set this down to the working of the evil spirits that must frequent such a place.

  Although he got up, to walk stiffly up and down between the boulders, drowsiness clutched at him and was not to be shaken off. So, when at last he seated himself by the unconscious girl, his head slipped forward on his chest. He had to struggle for breath. Almost at once the two voices of the pass swelled in volume, and strange words came to the Cossack's ears:

  Ai-a—come and see! The night birds await thee!

  Many have come! Come thou!

  That was the cry of the night wind.

  Oho-ho-o! What lies beyond the Gate?

  A grave. She will ride to the end of the road, but if ill befalls thee, what of her?

  Such was the warning roar that came up from the fall.

  She will lead thee astray—wait and see.

  We have seen her before and we know.

  Fool—she trusts thee. Turn back!

  What hope is there for the blind?

  Then the wind's note changed swiftly to the clang of war cymbals and the monotone of the fall to the mutter of drums. The Cossack heard the clashing of shod hoofs on stones, the snapping of standards, the creaking of great wagons drawn by yoked oxen, and the roaring battle shout of riders.

  The pass was filled with moving shadows and sound. Under the space of starlight above him gleamed the weapons of a host. He heard the snarling of laden camels, the snorting of horses, and the clang and clash of shields.

  This, he thought, must be the Golden Horde coming up from its city. And surely he heard a deafening shout:

  Make way—make way!

  He comes, the Khan of all the Hordes!

  Kirdy sprang up, his limbs chilled and stiff. He peered around him and saw that the line of sky between the rock walls was gray. The roar of the fall had dwindled to a whisper and the fitful wind was no more than a mocking whimper. At his side the horses were stamping and snorting, and Nada, roused by his sudden movement, lifted her head and smiled at the dawn drowsily.

  "If such be the watchers," the Cossack thought, "at the gate, what will be the folk of the city?"

  Before now he had slept on the upper slopes of a mountain range, and at such times dreams had troubled him; breathing had been difficult, and the fire had acted strangely. Whether all this were caused by evil spirits— dreaded by the Tartars—or by the wind and the cold of the heights, he neither knew nor cared. The night was past, the day at hand.

  "Did you hear the cymbals and the drums, White Falcon?" the girl asked.

  "Aye."

  "The Tartars say that is the Horde, marching through the gate. When they hear it, down below, they are afraid."

  "Nay, little Nada—it was the wind, and the thunder of the fall."

  "Listen!" She smiled at him in the gloom of the gorge. "Now the voice of the fall is only a little voice, and the wind barely stirs."

  "Then it may be that the city is near, and the guards upon the wall sound cymbal and drum at the dawn hour."

  "Do they drive camels through the pass at that hour? Nay, this is the gate!"

  She pointed at the sheer rock walls, now growing gray, and Kirdy saw that the pass fell away, to the east. They had camped almost at its highest point. The thought struck him that Otrepiev and the Muscovite might have turned back and passed them during the night and the two horses, clattering among the stones, might have made the uproar.

  But this he did not believe. A man like Otrepiev would not have passed a fire without investigating, or a half dozen ponies without trying to seize them. Also, the Cossack was certain that a horse coming up the pass—a living horse with a rider—would have roused him from his stupor.

  If it had been a dream, Nada would not have heard the same sounds, and his ponies would not have been aroused and restless before the first light.

  No, he had listened to the passage of an armed host, an array not of mortal men but of ghosts. And it was this Horde of the dead that the Tartars feared. Whence came it, and whither did it ride? What matter? The dead were the dead.

  "They paid us no heed!" Nada mused. "Ai, Kirdy, it was surely a warning."

  By now the light was strong enough for him to look closely into her eyes, shadowed by weariness and yet bright with a kind of fever. And he groaned, clutching both hands upon his belt. They were at the gate of the Earth Girdle; beyond might be a barren land where food could not be hunted down.

  In his anger, a few nights ago, he had ordered Nada to ride on, with him. Better for her if she had struck him down with the yataghan! Better, perhaps, if she had kept at Otrepiev's side.

  "Go back, then, little Nada," he said gruffly. "Aye, the Cossack is mad— he has hurt you. How can you go on, in such a land as this where the spirits ride as a regiment? Take the horses, and—God keep you!"

  He took her head in his powerful hands, pressing against the tangle of soft tresses; but his head hung upon his chest, and he did not see her eyes open very wide, or the sudden flush that darkened her skin.

  "Whither?" she asked quietly. "Could I, a woman, ride alone with horses through the tribes?" Again he groaned, thinking that Girai the ax-man, who might have been relied upon to protect Nada, had run from them.

  "Aye," he said, touching the icon at her bare throat.

  "The good Saint Ulass will guard you, as among wolves."

  "Foolish Cossack!" she smiled. "Now we are past the gate, and is there less of peril before than behind? Fool, to have crossed the Earth Girdle! Nay, I think we are near the end of the road. Come and see."

  As Nada had prophesied, the sides of the gorge fell away, and the trail dipped sharply. Rounding a turn a little after sunrise they came out on a point of rocks and reined in, Kirdy silently, the girl with a quick cry of wonder.

  Over the rim of distant mountain ranges the sun glared at them, and all the way to this far-off horizon were ridges and the purple shadows of ranges. Here and there in the nearer valleys the golden beds of lakes flared.

&nbs
p; So great was the elevation of the point on which they stood, they could discern no trees or animal life below them. Instead of the gray-green steppes, they stared down at red cliffs and gorges, still mist-shrouded. Red and gray and barren, this land beyond the Earth Girdle might have been shaped by blind and tortured giants.

  Nada shaded her eyes and looked down.

  "See, my White Falcon, here is the city."

  Kirdy nodded; he had seen it at once, and now he leaned on his saddle horn, studying it.

  For more than a thousand yards the mountain fell away steeply beneath him—sheer cliffs, at places. At the foot of this descent a plateau extended. The top of the plateau, or table formation, was fairly level, and he thought that it towered far above the lower valley.

  At the plateau's level, the mountain was limestone. And the city of the Golden Horde was the same red and white stone, with bits of gray granite and other rock that glittered—quartz or porphyry.

  It was a ruin.

  From where the Cossack stood, the twisted streets looked like gul-lies—the dwellings, piles of crumbled stone. He traced out terraces and bastions without being able to decide whether they had been wrought by men's hands or by nature. There were patches of green growth and glints of water.

  But running down in long zigzags from the point of rock was a road, or rather the remnant of a road, covered at spots with rubble and fallen away completely at places. This road was the only way down from the pass.

  Tevakel Khan's nomads would no more have built that ramp down the mountain side than nature itself could have done so. At one time men had hewn it out and built it up.

  And so, at one time, men must have lived on the plateau. By now he could see the lower valley through the mist—the dense mesh of forest growth that seemed no greater than moss—the lighter green of the valley bed where the mist was clearing, and the brilliance of a lake that looked like a jewel.

  The men who had lived upon the rock plateau could have grazed their herds thousands of feet below—or perhaps the plateau was a citadel, a refuge in time of war. Beyond doubt there were water, wood, and game in the valley.

  But he could see no solitary sign of man.