Swords of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  Again he stepped back, and Nada pressed in, her eyes narrowed, her lip gripped between her teeth.

  Once he parried and tried a quick twist of the saber that should have disarmed her, but the yataghan slid clear.

  The brain of Otrepiev fought coolly, telling him that his saber was heavier than the girl's weapon, his strength greater. He only needed to ward off her first rush, and then—

  Again Nada pressed him back, making no effort to parry, but striving to thrust inside his close-drawn guard.

  "The girl is mad!" he thought, and then the evil impulse of desire that always lurked behind his brain seized upon him. The struggle had stirred him—he wanted to drive his blade past Nada's weapon, to strike it deep into her breast. To slay always delighted him, and, after all, if this wild Cossack lass loved the warrior, she might work him harm. Aye, better deal with her as he desired!

  A moment later Otrepiev stepped back, smiling, and lowered his saber, glancing at the darkened tip.

  Nada's yataghan clattered on the stones, and she bent her head, fumbling with a long lock of hair that had fallen over her shoulder. Gathering the golden tresses in her hand, she pressed them against her side, where Otrepiev's saber had pierced under the heart.

  Then she sank to her knees and lay down, as if utterly weary, on the stones. Tall Feodor came and bent over her with professional interest.

  "Not enough," he spoke for the first time, "my prince, your blade did not go deep. To make sure, another thrust is best." Otrepiev stared eagerly at the girl's drawn face, the pallid lips, and the circles under her eyes.

  "Keep back, you dog," he muttered at his follower.

  And after a moment Feodor touched his shoulder.

  "Great Prince, guard yourself!" Startled, Otrepiev heard the impact of boots on the stones, and looked up as Kirdy leaped a fallen column.

  The Cossack must have seen Nada as he leaped, because he came at them without pause or spoken word. He was panting from the long run, and his sword arm quivered.

  He swerved toward Otrepiev, and his heavy blade rang on the Muscovite's saber as the other stepped back to put space between them and Feodor.

  "Slash him down, dog!" he panted at the headsman, who was swinging up his broadsword silently.

  Kirdy heard and swerved away as Feodor struck, the long blade hissing through the air.

  "From two sides!" snarled Otrepiev. "Come at him from the other side!" As he cried out, he parried swiftly, because Kirdy had put him between himself and the headsman.

  For an instant Otrepiev could do no more than ward the whirling blade that sought head and throat as a wolf strikes. Meanwhile Feodor circled warily, swinging up his broadsword. Kirdy did not seem to notice him— certainly did not glide away as before.

  Feodor tensed his arms, and the Cossack leaped high in the air, turning as he did so. His saber hissed down and in, and for an instant Feodor stood poised on massive limbs.

  The man's head fell down on his chest, held only by one of the throat muscles—and the throat had been all but cut through.

  "Ha!" Otrepiev gasped.

  He heard Feodor's sword and then the giant body fall to the stone flags; but his saber was locked fast by the Cossack's blade. For a moment the eyes of the two, beaded with sweat and bloodshot, glared, and then Kirdy wrenched free.

  A wave of hot anger swept over Otrepiev, and fear beat at his heart like a hammering pulse. With a cry he sprang forward, and his right hand, grasping the saber, flew off and slid along the stone slabs. Kirdy struck twice at the bent head of his foe, and, cut through the temples on either side, the body of Otrepiev stumbled and dropped beside his henchman.

  Kirdy wasted no second's thought upon him. Running to Nada, he cut the fastenings of her vest and drew it off, then gently pulled away the hand and the clotted tresses. With quivering fingers he felt the narrow wound.

  Then he turned her on her left side, to check the inward bleeding, and as he did so, her hand touched his arm and felt up it until she could stroke his head.

  "The end—" her lips moved— "of the road."

  The Cossack glanced around wildly. To heal such a wound in a comrade he would have given a draft of powder mixed in vodka. But he had neither powder nor vodka, and he did not know what more to do, except to bring water.

  "O Father and Son, hear me," he cried. "The spirit of little Nada flutters like a pigeon in the storm wind. It goes, her spirit, from my hands. Hearken, O White Christ, and thou, souls of the Cossack heroes who dwell in the regions above—there is faith in this maiden, and knightly honor. Did she not draw her sword bravely? Is it fitting she should die by the sword of a traitor and a dog?"

  When he returned with water, Nada drank a little, and signed for him to bend closer.

  "I love you, White Falcon—even your shadow and the horse you ride. I stayed behind because I feared he was hiding nearby. Truly, then, I thought I might slay him, so they could not fall upon you. But—promise me you will not leave me, White Falcon. Hold me in your arms and take me from this place, down to the valley, my Falcon."

  The rush of words ceased and her lips quivered.

  Kirdy looked up. Already vultures were dropping down on the columns and the throne slab. The wind threshed through the dry growth, and up the Earth Girdle clouds of driven dust hid the pass and the heights.

  "Aye, little Nada," he said, gently, "I promise."

  Here was something he could do. Yet no living man could carry the suffering girl up that wind-whipped ramp to the desolate pass—or make the horses follow. They had made the descent, but they could not go back that way. When he had circled Otrepiev's bait of a camp, and had noticed that the fire was left to die and the horse likewise, he had suspected the trap set for him and had gone back instantly, running like one possessed when he heard the clash of weapons. But before then he had seen what Otrepiev had discovered, a road winding down the east face of the plateau.

  So, only stopping to bind Feodor's great sword and Otrepiev's helmet on the charger's saddle, he tied up Nada's wound with strips of his shirt and lifted her in his arms, keeping the stallion's rein in his fingers. The ponies trailed after, and no sooner had they moved away than the vultures closed in upon the bodies of the false Dmitri and his solitary companion, the torturer.

  "It was a dog's burial," Kirdy thought, "but it is well suited to Gregory Otrepiev, because he has left his bones in the hall of a king. Bold he was, but not a good Cossack. He kept faith with no one, and he handled a sword badly." Weary beyond knowing, Kirdy strode on into darkness and wind. The night had brought the first of the Autumn's storms, and gusts of rain whipped the mesh of the forest over his head. The burden of the unconscious girl had numbed his arms long since, but as long as he could feel Nada's heart pulsing slowly under his fingers he kept on.

  When neither wind, nor the bitter air of the heights that hinted at snow penetrated to him, he halted and laid Nada down in the darkness, upon ferns and pine needles. When he was able to raise his arms again, he took down the broadsword from the stallion's saddle, and groped for branches and fallen wood.

  A fire kindled and fed to roaring flames, he shook the stupor of sleep from his brain and hacked down young firs, working incessantly until he put together the framework of a low hut and covered three sides with branches. Then he took the saddle from the stallion and the packs from the two ponies that had followed patiently, to be unloaded. He watched them go down at once toward the muttering rush of a stream.

  Then he hurried back to listen to the girl's even breathing. And the glare of exhaustion and anger left his dark eyes.

  "She sleeps, the little Nada," he smiled. "Eh, there is faith in her, in all things. When the Muscovites would have taken her captive, she met them with the sword. With the dawn she will open her eyes." He glanced up at the whirling sparks. The hut was in a grove of gigantic deodars, whose branches rose beyond the firelight, whose tips threshed under the wind gusts that could not move the massive trunks.

  A light flurry of
snow came down on the Cossack—snow that powdered the hut without melting. He looked out at it thoughtfully.

  "Aye, the pass through the Earth Girdle is closed. And here there is no road of any kind."

  He was in a new world, where the sun rises. And Nada had given him her love. What matter the way, if they could ride forth together with no shadow of doubt between them and all the unknown ahead?

  It was the next Summer that Girai the ax-man came to the yurta of old Tevakel Khan and squatted down at the edge of the white horse skin, announcing that he came as a bearer of tidings.

  "Upon thee, O Khan of the Altyn-juz, Lord of the Lesser Horde, master of the plain, mirror of the faith, tree of the fruit of understanding— the salute!

  "The words of caravan men from Cathay have reached my ears, and this is the tale:

  "Where the forest meets the desert, far—far—these men beheld a pair of the tengri that come down at seasons from the heights and are visible to mortal eyes, as is well known. The tale was that one of these spirits was a man, wearing a silver helmet and bearing a sword as long as a spear. The other was a woman with hair like gold, glittering in the sun. Their faces were dark, yet in their voices was no sorrow. They asked, 'What land is this?' And the men of the caravan, being fearful, kneeled at a distance.

  "Because, O Khan, this twain spoke in pride and had the bearing of

  kings. So the caravan men went away swiftly, leaving gifts, thinking that they had seen the tengri that come down from the high places.

  "And my thought is this—that the two are they I led up to the Earth Girdle in the month of the Ox. They followed thine enemy the fanga nialma, and surely they have overcome him, since they carry his sword and helmet. They have set at naught his magic. And now, being spirits, they wander without fear. That is my word, O Khan, my master."

  With the tranquility of the very old, Tevakel Khan considered this, looking into the fire.

  "It is evident," he said at length, "that this youth and maiden have crossed the Earth Girdle and passed through the city of the dead. It is known to me that in former days this city was built by our ancestors. And treachery arose in it as a viper lifts its head. The Khan of all the Hordes was slain, and his warriors, and brother fought with brother, until no more than a few families lived to flee. So, it is accursed and the unburied dead ride about it at night."

  "And the youth and the maiden?" Girai demanded, for his curiosity was very great.

  Tevakel Khan smiled.

  "Surely they are living mortals, or the caravan men would have seen them at night, not during the hours of the day." He meditated upon this for a moment and came to a conclusion.

  "In this twain there was great faith and little fear. Kai, the wolves harmed them not, and the dead passed them by. To such as they, God hath given the keys of the unseen!"

  The Outrider

  Chapter I A Cossack of the Don

  Ayub was in Winter quarters. That is, he had built himself a hut in one of the balkas of the river Dnieper. The balkas, being gullies under the flood level, were filled with brush and willow growth and were likewise sheltered from the Winter winds that swept the surface of the steppe.

  A Cossack—and Ayub was a Cossack of the Don—was able to get shelter and rations for himself even on the shore of an ice-bound river. Ayub had built his hut of wattle and clay, but it kept out the wind; his fireplace was part oven and he slept on top of it. He had made himself a sturgeon spear and had haggled out of the village Tartars a hunting bow with double-headed arrows. When he needed silver he worked at the town of Ku-dak, a league down the frontier road, at the smithy when the smith was drunk.

  But Ayub preferred his hut under the black willows, and the silence of the balka, to the bustle and argument of the town. He was lonely, not for the peasants and tradespeople of Kudak, but for his brother Cossacks.

  He was two score and ten years old, and most of his life had been passed in the war encampments of the Cossacks. He had had many brothers-in-arms. Khlit, called the Wolf, and Kirdy, who had wandered in out of the East. But Khlit had vanished again, going off somewhere alone after Kirdy was lost in the steppe. And Demid, the sword slayer, had laid his bones in the deserts by the inland seas. Ayub was left solitary.

  True, he could have gone to the camp of the Zaporogians—where the picked men of the Cossacks reveled and gathered together to ride to the wars. But the pain of rheumatism was in his bones; at times his sight grew misty. He was an old Cossack, a man who had served his time, a gray-beard who liked a seat at the fires where others would listen to his tales and see that his cup did not lack vodka.

  Moreover, the Cossacks who spread their blankets in the barracks now did not know him. Men who had gone with him on that ride with the witch of Aleppo—who had raided Arap Muhammad Khan—they were gone elsewhere, if they still lived. Among the Zaporogians, Ayub would appear as a stranger. And he did not relish that.

  Most important of all, at the moment he lacked both a horse and a sword. He had drunk up his last horse at Kudak, and his saber had been stolen that night when he was stretched out in the straw of the tavern stables. Perhaps Gypsies had taken it to sell to the Jews. Gone also was everything worthwhile in his garments—his silk neckcloth and the Persian shawl that had served him for a girdle.

  "To the devil with them all," he had thought. "I'll find others."

  But finding others was not so easy as in former years, not so easy in a trading post like Kudak on the frontier. Once Ayub would have gone on the bend and turned out the whole garrison of such a town and come out of it with an officer's sword in each hand, singing the march of the Don Cossacks. He did not lie when he told how he had stolen a racing horse from the sultan's string near Stamboul.

  No, he could not wander off to the Zaporogians in a shabby gray coat, unadorned, and a black sheepskin kalpak, without a horse between his knees or a saber on his hip. So he had gone, alone, into Winter quarters to see what God might give, there on the ice-bound Dnieper, that year in the mid-seventeenth century.

  It was a dull twilight, that one. The snow seemed to give off more light than the sky. The dry rushes crackled under his heavy boots when he plodded into the gully, towing behind him a long bundle of brush looped in his lariat. It was not cheerful work, gathering firewood for himself, alone, but he knew how cold it would be before morning. The cold was the breath of the steppe itself—that almost treeless plain stretching from river to river, hundreds of leagues to the east. Ayub knew it well—a glory of lush grass and wildflowers in the early Spring; a parched plain, wind-tortured in the Summer heat. And now under heavy snow, almost untracked. The saiga antelope had vanished elsewhere, the cattle of the frontier posts were penned, and only the wolfpacks ranged the white expanse with the herds of wild horses.

  No king was master of the steppe. It stretched, partially desolate and forbidding, to the warmer shores of Charnomar, the southern salt sea. The river was its western border, and to this bank of the Dnieper the great landlords of Poland laid claim; but beyond the river was only what men called the wilderness.

  And no Cossack could remember when the steppe had been different in any way. Over its surface moved at times fighting men, but not disciplined armies. They were bands of Tartars on the raid, Cossack patrols looking for spoil or vengeance, moving villages of slant-eyed Kalmuks. Along the rivers outlaws hid and banded together to fall like vultures upon the boats that passed up to the rapids when the ice left the waters. Into the steppe men fled from pursuit, and out of it at times were driven captives to be sold in Warsaw or Stamboul, as the case might be.

  "Hai," Ayub grunted, all thought of the wilderness and other years leaving his mind. He dropped the rope and squinted through the shadows of the gully.

  A pony stood before the entrance of his hut, and the pony was saddled. Unless it had strayed from the road, he had a visitor.

  "Who are you?" he shouted.

  And a soft voice answered from the hut—

  "Ai kunak—O brother—it is no
one, only a message."

  Ayub went nearer without haste and looked at the horse, a shaggy little beast with only a sheepskin for a saddle.

  "Eh, show yourself. Don't hide like a dog."

  A spark flickered in the darkness of the hut entrance, and in a moment a boy's smooth face appeared, outlined in a red glow. The stranger was blowing upon tinder held in the hollow of his hand. When he came out a lighted horn lantern swung in his hand, and Ayub saw that he was a Gypsy lad, wrapped in fox and marmot skins. Without saying anything, the Cossack took the lantern and inspected the one room of the hut.

  "The saddle is there, kunak," the Gypsy whispered.

  This saddle was the one valuable thing Ayub owned—a fine bit of Persian leather work, of gilt shagreen with silver inlaid horn. The night the Cossack's sword had been stolen, he had been sleeping with his head on the green saddle.

  "What was the message?" he asked.

  The Gypsy's eyes lingered on the saddle and lifted sidewise to Ayub's lined face.

  "A good horse is to be shod," he said, and repeated emphatically the words, 'a good horse.' "I have seen him, a piebald Kabardian racer, of the breed of wolf chasers. Swift-paced and enduring and wise I know him to be."

  Ayub shook his head.

  "What lie is this, O thief of the pastures? No such horse is in Ku-dak."

  "Only listen, Cossack. I have seen him in the tavern stables. Zut! Strangers are in Kudak, barons, nobles, and they are outlanders. Omelnik the smith lies drunk in the alley of the tavern." The Gypsy felt in his girdle and showed the Cossack a silver coin. "This was given me, to find a smith. We must go, now, or the Pole will be angry."

  "What Pole?"

  "He who gave me the half-thaler—the owner of the Kabardian."

  "But what are Poles doing out here in the steppe?"

  "Do I know?"

  The Gypsy moved his shoulders idly and smiled. No love had ever been lost between the Cossacks of the steppe and the soldiers and landlords of great Poland.

  "Listen, O my brother. The horse is, as I have said, a good horse. To-morrow—soon—the Poles will mount and go on. They are many, with splendid sleds and enough baggage for a king. Go with them for awhile and surely it will happen that thou wilt find the Kabardian unguarded and then—where would they find thee?"