Swords of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  "From what sea, effendi?"

  In this fashion I addressed him because it seemed to me that he was a man of rank, possibly a chief in some tribe of Frankistan. And in this I was right.

  "That one." He pointed over his shoulder toward the east where we had been wandering, and he thought of a question himself. "What in the name of all the-is it called and where is it?"

  I became more curious than ever. Here was the stranger making his way out of the sea into the snow, and asking me in the oaths of a Turkish slave galley where he had come from. Eh, I have been in many tight places. I have been in the salt desert and the Mountains of the Eagles, but it has never happened that I did not know the place and the way in and the way out as well.

  "Mour Mazanderan," I responded. "The Sea of Mazanderan. The Franks call it the Caspian."

  It is, of course, an inland sea. Men say it is like no other in the earth because it lies down in the earth itself as if a great pit had been dug in other days and filled with salt and water. You cannot go from it to any other sea; only up the great river Volga into our steppe. No tall ships journey on it—only our barks and sailing skiffs and the oar galleys of the Moslems. And in other days it had been a sea of the Moslems, until a man came who took it from them.

  "The-" he said. A very little I explained to him. The Caspian was

  like a bear sitting up on its haunches. And it sat on Persia with its tiny hills and garden valleys. To the east, where the forelegs of the bear might be, were the waste lands—the gray sand deserts and the nomad tribes. To the north was the steppe, around the head of the bear and the river Volga, with the great town of Astrakhan which was held by the Muscovites, where the river runs into the sea. And my cabin was on the west where the steppe runs into the peaks of the Caucasus, about two weeks' ride from Astrakhan.

  And all about the Volga on the breast of the steppe is the country of the Cossacks, of the Jaick and the Don, who once were free men, but are now under the rule of the Muscovite.

  While I explained this to the stranger I filled and lighted my water-pipe, giving him the stem.

  "Tell me your name," I bade him, "and your tribe."

  I could see that the sea and the country I described to him, all of the world I knew, had been unknown to him, and my curiosity grew the more.

  He thought for a moment, and then said—

  "Mark."

  "Is that all the name?"

  "It is enough."

  "And where are your people?"

  He tried to tell me in his slave galley Turkish, but I could not understand. Ships he mentioned and a long, long journey over the sea and then islands.

  I asked then how many days it had taken him to come from his country, and he told me as many days as were in one Winter and one Summer, and this seemed to be a lie. Who could journey for a year without going over the edge of the world?

  Nevertheless, he told the truth. He had come from beyond the edge of the world, and the name of the place sounded like Marak. He was telling the truth, but I could not understand.

  Very patiently he sat on the stove, the stem of the hubble-bubble pipe in his hand, like a bear—a big bear in the prime of life, stripped of its fell. And before long I noticed what I should have seen long ago—that his eyes were sunk and his belly drawn in with hunger. He had not eaten for a day and a night and the part of another day.

  I was ashamed because I had not given him food, and I set about making barley gruel and roasting the quarter of a wild boar that had been hanging outside under the rafters. It was a hard Winter on the steppe, that one; but my cabin had a good stock of meat.

  "Chlieb sol," I bowed to him when the boar's meat and the gruel was ready. "I bid you to my bread and salt, Mark."

  As for him, he got up and put on his shirt; then he bowed, not as we Cossacks do, bending the head to the girdle, but with a downward thrust of the shoulders and a slight outward sweep of the right hand. Then he began to eat very slowly for all his hunger, and when he had done, the shank bone of the boar was picked bare, the bowl emptied of gruel. For a while we drank brandy until the last devilkin of frost had left our fingers and our hearts were thumping soundly. Mark went to sleep where he sat, on the stove, and I put sheepskins, over him, kindling up the fire good and plenty.

  When a man has come over the edge of the world, and has been cast into the waters of an angry sea, and has been upon the steppe when the wind is like the archfiend, he has need of sleep and a fire under him. A good fire.

  The storm lasted for three days and, when it ended, the snow had covered everything except the tips of the sage bushes. Even the deer were snowed in the barkas, the little gullies of the foothills. A man could not walk in that snow until its crust had hardened.

  Mark went to the door and looked at the white hills and the cloudless blue sky and the pinnacles of the great mountains to the south, and I could not tell whether he was pleased or grieved. But it was clear that he had not seen such a land until now. He liked to sleep on the stove, but he always left my place clear for me. The rents in his coat he sewed up very neatly, and he greased his boots with bear's fat. Nor would he help himself to brandy unless I was drinking.

  Our next bout with the spirits was a long one. Mark kept pace with me, cup for cup. In time I became both sad and gay, and sang a song of the Cossack people:

  Glorious fame will arise,

  Among the brothers, among the Cossacks,

  Till the end of time.

  Mark liked the song. He kept time, beating with his hand. And when I had done, he sang. His voice was deep and throaty, but it rang out finely in the cabin. And the song had a beat to it that I liked. When he had repeated the first words of the chorus I joined in—though the words were unknown to me—thus:

  Blow high; blow low—what care we,

  On the coast of the high Barbaree.

  That night it was Mark who put me to bed. Eh, he had a hard head on him.

  In time I went into the valleys again to hunt and to discover where my ponies were, and brought back many Ufa marten skins and some skins of the little black mountain bear, so we did not lack for meat—or barley or honey, for that matter.

  One day I came back to the cabin about sunset, and on the trail I saw the tracks of four ponies that looked like mine. The door was shut and I could not see through the horn windows, so I circled the choutar and found that the four horses had gone away again. Then I discovered a great deal of blood sunk in the snow before the door and many footprints. Some were the horsehide riding boots of Tatars and some were Mark's broad prints. I thought that there had been trouble, and it was a bad thing.

  If Tatars had come, they would have slain Mark and taken away everything I had in the hut. Usually the Nogais did not trouble me because I did them no harm; but the Winter was a hard one and many of their ponies had died. So they had come for the food and the weapons and the garments in my place, doubtless having watched me go out that morning, unaware that Mark was in the cabin.

  Most of all I was sorry for Mark. He had worn no weapon, and had never shown any inclination to use one of mine. I had taken the matchlock with me and the four Nogais must have had arrows. From the amount of blood, it appeared that he had killed or hurt one of them, and that would have been his end.

  So I thought. But Mark was sitting on the stove, the stem of the hubble-bubble in his hand just the same as ever, except that his eyes were like bits of light in his dark face. I looked around at the weapons in the cabin.

  There were the nine Circassian daggers hanging in place, and the rusted yataghan that a dying Turkoman had let me have. But the heavy scimitar was on the stove beside Mark. I took the blade from the sheath; it was not bloodied, but had been cleaned painstakingly with sand and oil, so that the blood was all gone from the channels.

  This had been the weapon Mark used, and I wondered what had happened in my cabin.

  "Eh, Mark, how was it?"

  The four Nogais had all entered the hut on foot. They were surprised to find M
ark sitting on the stove. At first they moved around without touching anything. Then one of them caught up the cask of brandy and another threatened Mark with a knife. He took down the scimitar from the wall before they realized what he was doing, and when they ran at him he put two on their backs. One was cut between the shoulder and throat and one in the groin.

  When this had been done the two others carried their wounded brothers to the horses without being molested by Mark, who stayed in the cabin when he saw their bows. It was well for him he did that. They did not try to enter the door again because they were afraid of his sword. Afterwards he went out and watched them ride to the south.

  "Shabash!" I cried. "Well done!"

  If the food and the weapons and the pelts had been taken from the cabin, we would have been no better off than hamstrung rabbits. On the other hand, Mark had wounded two of the Nogais, and their brothers would certainly come from the camp to make an end of us twain. The Nogais are great thieves, but they do not take up the sword unless they have a blood feud. They had one now.

  That evening when I had thought it all over, I told Mark we must go from the cabin.

  "Nay," he said at once. "I will go, if it's my hide they want. Why should you leave your cabin?"

  "Where, kunak moi, would you go?"

  Aye, I called him my brother-friend. It is not every man who will stand up to four armed Tatars in a hut for the sake of the belongings of another man. The Tatars would not have hurt him if he had sat still.

  After he thought about it, he said he would go to Astrakhan where I had told him there was a Muscovite governor and many officers from Frankistan. Then I said I would go to Astrakhan with him. Why not? For three years I had not talked with my brother Cossacks, or heard tidings of what was going on in the world.

  Already the ice was breaking up in the rivers and the sun was eating through the crust of snow. We would be able to make our way along the trails, and when we reached the northern plain the snow would be gone. It was not pleasant to walk on our feet but it was better to do that than to be buried in the snow.

  The next morning I made a bundle of the pelts. It was very heavy, but Mark carried it easily on his shoulders. Before setting out, I gave him the scimitar, saying that a man who went unarmed in this country would not live very long. He thrust it through his belt and smiled, the first time I had seen him smile since he came out of the storm.

  The nine daggers I put in my shawl girdle and took the harquebus on my arm, with a pack made up of the barley, salt, a cook pan, tallow and flint and steel, also powder and bullets in a separate leather sack.

  "Now for the road!" I said.

  So we closed the door of the choutar and set forth for Astrakhan, neither of us minded to turn out for any one. We had finished the brandy the night before, and it was indeed the will of God that kept us on the trail, because a dozen suns were floating in the sky over me. Hornets were buzzing in my ears and flies crawling up and down my back.

  And that morning I knew who Mark was. We had come to understand each other well enough in Turkish and as we went forward he talked.

  This place called Marak had nothing to do with his name. It was America.

  A strange place, by all the-! It lay beyond the great sea, beyond

  Frankistan where the Christian tribes of Europe have their camps. Mark had been born in a frontier stanitza, called Virginia, where tabak2 was grown as at Astrakhan, and the white men fought against nomad tribes that were very much like our Tatars.

  When he was old enough to own a gun, Mark went to an island off this coast of America on the other side of the world with his father, who was a governor of the island.

  There they were raided by other Franks, who were Spaniards and came in ships. The Spaniards must have been like the Turks of Constantinople, because their sultan was an emperor who claimed dominion over all this new world and had multitudes of slaves. His ships were full of gold and silver, like the galleons of the sultan.

  Mark was not made a slave because he escaped from the Spaniards and found his way to another island where was a city named Tortuga.

  Here were gathered a brotherhood of men who had come to band themselves together in this way. They had voyaged to the islands to hunt wild cattle, which were plentiful. The meat of the steers they smoked and dried and sent away in ships. Before long they found that they could take plunder easily by going out in their sailing skiffs and lying in wait for the treasure ships of the Spaniards. Then they began to build and to capture tall ships of their own and to go against the fleets of the Spaniards.

  The men of this brotherhood were called the buccaneers of America, although the Spaniards called them pirates and the hornets of Tortuga.

  They grew in number and power until the other kings of Frankistan began to encourage them with gifts of powder and weapons and money to make war on the Spaniards, because these kings were not strong enough to stand against the Spaniards in the new world.

  "Eh," I explained to Mark, "your brotherhood is like the fellowship of the Cossacks. When the Muscovite nobles and the Poles wish us to fight the Turks, they make gifts to us. When we do any plundering on our own account, they call us pirates and cry death to us."

  "That is so," he assented.

  I had spoken in jest, but it was indeed as he said. Did not the buccaneers choose their own ataman, or chief, to lead them? Did they not take new names when they joined the brotherhood of that coast, as we do? They had no wives in the camp at Tortuga, and when they had made a successful raid they scattered their plunder in a fine debauch, as the Cossacks do. Why not? What does it avail a man to store honey and mead in cellars and gold in chests?

  When we have such things we go into the streets, and all who pass by may drink or eat at our will.

  "Eh," I thought, "my kunak does not always sit on the stove. There is cold blood in him, but fire as well. He will kindle things up in Astrakhan."

  And, in truth, he did so. Though not as I had thought. I had seen much of his spirit, but not all. It would have been better for us if we had stayed in the choutar in the Caucasus in spite of a feud and Tatars.

  "How did you come, kunak," I asked, "from this nest of pirates in the sea beyond the edge of the world?"

  "I did not come. I was brought, Uncle Kosta. Among the Spaniards was an emir of the sea who had slain my father and my mother. I sought his ship for a long time among the islands of the Americas. In the end I found it—in company with three others."

  He looked out over the glittering snow with narrowed eyes, as in that day he might have gazed over the shining sea at the four ships of his enemies.

  "I cut him down in his own cabin, but before night I and the men who survived were prisoners of the Dons. They brought us to Algiers to be sold as slaves to the people of the Barbary pashas. I was taken by a Persian mirza who was far from his own country. He went in a galleon to Constantinople and from there into another sea. Then we crossed beneath high mountains into a land of many cities—Mazanderan, I think. Persia was not far away when the mirza was taken sick and died. I have known worse men than he."

  Mark thought for a while, and shifted the burden on his back.

  "I never saw Persia, Uncle Kosta. They put me into an oar galley that was being fitted out in that lake you call the Caspian. There was talk of a war on the lake. Some pirates had come down from the north, and the Mohammedans were sending galleys against them. When we did go out of the harbor, a storm came up, and the galley, besides being ill-built, was not the craft for a storm. It broke up on a sandbar and I swam ashore."

  "You have a horned soul in you, Mark. You are not easily killed."

  In fact, luck was with us for a while. At the Kuma River we traded our pelts with a wandering band of Kalmuks, for horses.

  It is true that the nags were not roundbellied Kiptchak stallions. They were all bones and sores and evil temper, and our saddles were strips of felt. But all cattle were lean at that time, and hunger was like a curse on the steppe.

 
The tribesmen were in a black mood. Before long they would be able to glean milk out of the mares and make themselves drunk—aye, even the babes at the women's breasts—from the fermented milk. Then they could take honey from the wild hives and fish from the streams. But not yet. I was glad to get across the Kuma with a whole skin.

  We gave the ponies some barley, and before long the steppe showed green in patches, and they were able to graze after a fashion. Because here on the Caspian the steppe is not like our Cossack land. The al-kali grass is poisonous to horses, good only to be burned so that soap can be made from the ashes. And when we looked to find wells in rocky pits, we found only layers of shining salt.

  Almost in a day the snow ended and the steppe became brown. Waves of sand appeared at the sea's edge, where we followed one of the Kozaki khoda, the Cossack paths to the north. Aye, sand and crumbled shells and, in the air—gnats. And the ceaseless croaking of frogs.

  But one evening we saw a thing that astonished me. The sea was a Moslem sea, and it had been so for the ages of ages. We were watching the round moon come up over the dry lakes of shining salt when Mark pointed out to the gray line of the sea where his quick eye had picked out a sail.

  It was not a skiff, but a bark, and it was going north. We could hear the men in it singing with a light heart.

  "That sounds like your song, Barbakosta," Mark said after he had listened.

  It was so. A puff of wind brought it clearly to my ears.

  Glorious fame will arise,

  Among the Cossacks, among the brothers,

  ’Till the end of time.

  I shouted at the bark and, though they must have seen our fire, they paid no attention. The wind was blowing away from them and they did not hear. If they had heard, we might have been spared many things and less blood would have been on the path that lay before us.

  But who can escape what lies before him? It was our kismet that we should go to Astrakhan, on the white island in the river Volga.

  When we saw the gray breast of the Volga and the masts of the ships and, behind them, the wall of the town with its domes and clock towers, Mark was glad.