Swords of the Steppes

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by Harold Lamb


  We could see the house of the governor within its wooden wall and the stone fortress that is the Muscovite citadel with its churches. But all the rest was Asia. The domed gray tents of Tatars, the huts of Armenians, the mud caravansary of the Hindu traders—all these clustered like hornets' nests outside the Muscovite wall, filling the north end of the island on which the city stood. Mark was glad, and yet one thing grieved him. While we waited for the ferry barge to cross the river we saw a fleet of more than twenty sailing craft depart up the river. And every vessel was crowded with Muscovite soldiery in their black and white greatcoats. They were armed with harquebuses and the ships were armed with brass cannon. Flags snapped on staffs at the prows, and when they drew abreast the governor's house there was a great hullabaloo of trumpets, and a gun went off—bang.

  Mark watched them for as long as he could, and I think he was sorry that we had not come in time for him to go on one of those boats on the expedition.

  "Where are they bound for, Uncle Kosta?" he asked me.

  "They go where they go, kunak moi."

  And I could tell him no more than that, because all around Astrakhan the steppe is like a desert—a red and gray desert.

  And when we reached the serai of the Armenians, I thought no more of the fleet of boats going up the river. Mark wanted a new pair of trousers and a hat and such things before presenting himself at the governor's house and, after looking at him very shrewdly, the Armenians gave him all he wanted. They were very excited about something or other, but would say nothing at all to me. And as for understanding their talk among themselves, the devil himself cannot understand Armenians when they wag their beards and toss their hands and shriek at each other.

  There were some Circassians around the big fire in the courtyard of the serai where the horses were quartered, playing their interminable fiddles and singing under their breath. They went off without a word when I began to question them, and they were not the sort to give up the fire to anyone else.

  So we went to sleep in the gallery above the horses, no wiser than when we came. All night the hubbub of voices went on, quarreling all over the place, even the camels squealing and grunting, and Jewesses screeching at their men who were trying to keep out of the way of the Circassians and their knives.

  I was glad when morning came and the town gates opened. Mark started off through one of the gates toward the citadel and I went to the Tatar tent village to look for old friends. It had been agreed between us that he was to seek some post of employment in the garrison because we could not live in the town for long without money, and we had not a kopek between us—only the two nags.

  In the steppe we got along splendidly without silver or copper, but here in Astrakhan, among our kind, we had to give money. Eh, that is how things are!

  I had not expected to find so many Nogai Tatars still at Astrakhan, because the ice had gone out of the river and the steppe was in flower to the north, the cattle fattening up splendidly. You see the Nogais come to Astrakhan with the first snow for shelter and to escape the Kalmuks,3 who hunt them down like ferrets. During the Winter the governor of the town gives the Nogais arms, firelocks and such, to protect themselves against the raids of the Kalmuks, who come across when the river is frozen.

  With the last of the snow the governor takes the weapons away from the Nogais so that they will not be tempted to use them against Muscovites on the steppe. But these Nogais still had firelocks, and they had sent their women and children from their yurtas.

  Their chief, Koum Agha, was known to me and I sat down in his tent on the carpet with several other old men who were all drinking mare's milk, flavored with bitter herbs. When Koum Agha offered me a bowl of the milk, I knew that he remembered me. He was a thin warrior who shaved his head and carried it a little on one side because of a sword cut that had injured the neck muscles.

  When I had listened to the talk for a while, I understood that the Nogais were making ready for war.

  "Eh, Koum," I asked, "what is upon the river?"

  "Kazaki!"

  "How, Cossacks?"

  "They are upon the river, Barbakosta, and upon the steppe like the fire that springs up with the night."

  It was nothing particularly new for the Nogais to have a quarrel with my people, and I asked what leader they were going against, thinking that horses had been stolen on one side or the other.

  "Khaghan Kazaki, Stenka Razin."

  The chief of the Cossacks, Stenka Razin! Three years ago I had been in the bazaar of Astrakhan and I had seen Razin, the little father, the nour-isher. Ekh, a tall man with dark eyes, his face pitted with smallpox scars, his svitza pure white ermine, strings of pearls wound around his kalpak, his sword hilt gleaming with diamonds. Wherever he went a crowd gathered, and at times he tossed handfuls of gold coins to the children.

  He had despoiled a Persian city, and he cast away his riches so that every one could be jolly. He was a pirate, and he had the gift of holding the love of men. They brought him their woes and he laughed, saying—

  "Come with me!"

  But I did not see what quarrel the Tatars could have with Stenka Ra-zin who lived on the Volga and the sea.

  "He comes," Koum explained, "the great leader. He comes against Astrakhan with a horde. Tomorrow or the next day or the next he will be beating at the walls. Already he has taken Kamushink and the other kibit-kas of the Muscovites. The steppe is afire, as I said."

  "Your words are smoke, Koum Agha," I told him. "Stenka Razin has made a truce with the Muscovites."

  "Unless, by God's will, a goat does not breed." He meant that all things happened only by God's will. "A truce is easily broken, Barbakosta. Ai-iy! This thing is true."

  By then I had remembered the bark that we had seen manned by armed Cossacks and sailing toward Astrakhan, and the boats going up the river with the Muscovite soldiers. I remembered the tumult in the serai of the Armenians. Indeed, as the old agha said, this thing was true.

  Long ago a Muscovite general had put to death Stenka Razin's brother, who was serving under his command, for slight cause. And Razin had sworn that until the day of his death he would be an enemy of the Muscovites. Men came to him then as now, and he ranged the Volga, escaping pursuit, boarding the barks of the merchants, laughing when flames soared up.

  They sent armed regiments and barks with cannon from Moscow to take him and he slipped away to the Caspian to a refuge in the islands where they besieged him in vain. Eh, he was a wolf, the leader of a pack!

  He descended on the Moslem shores, and the women of Kinderly and Kietu had cause to weep. With his six thousand he took the city of a sultan. But there was splendid wine in that city and, when his men were drunk, the Moslems came back and slew all but six hundred. The Muscovites did not know this and they had had their fill of his sword. They offered him peace and swore that he would not be molested and his men would be pardoned.

  He accepted the truce and came to Astrakhan, laughing, as I have said, with his handful of followers, clad like princes. Ekh moi. They gave a pearl for a glass of brandy and the Jews waxed wealthy overnight. Even the Frankish merchants crowded around the Cossacks to buy a silk carpet for a few kopeks or a gold chain for a cask of mead.

  When they found out that his band was no more than these few, they began to think. When they thought that he was stripped of his power at last, they became imperious, saying that he must command all his followers to enter Astrakhan and not leave it. And this thing he did, though not as they had desired.

  "If you so love fire and the sword," he said to their envoys, "I will make you glad."

  With that he went away into the steppe, and men rode from far places to join him until he had an army again. Astrakhan was cut off from the northern world and, as Koum Agha said, the steppe was his. In this way he fetched all his followers to Astrakhan as the governor had commanded!

  "And you, Koum Agha," I asked. "What will you do?"

  "Tchoulbim padishah," he responded. "We are servants of the em
peror."

  "You did not go in the boats."

  "Fire is for the hearth, water for the bowl."

  By this he meant that the Nogais were not accustomed to fighting in boats as the Cossacks were, and I asked if he had heard how the flotilla had fared against Stenka Razin. The Tatars have a way of finding out what is happening on the steppe before anyone else knows, and that was why I had come to his tent.

  "God is one!" he said with conviction, and I waited until afternoon when riders came to the tents and there was swift talk among the Tatars. It was then the hour of sunset.

  Finally Koum took me aside and clicked his teeth, shaking his head to show that he was troubled.

  "Go away from the tents, Barbakosta. The town is not a good place for you. The boats of the Muscovites have all been eaten by your Kazak Khaghan."

  So Stenka Razin had got the better of the fleet!

  "Was it a great fight?" I asked.

  "Yok! Nay, a very little fight. Only the Muscovite officers were slain, and by their own men who went over to your chieftain." Again he shook his head moodily. "Ai-iy! I see wolves, full fed. I see vultures gathering in the sky, and the earth red with blood. Go now, Barbakosta."

  But I did not want to go without Mark, and he was somewhere within the Muscovite city. I hurried, because the ten gates of Astrakhan are always closed when it is dark.

  A strong body of horsemen were coming out of the Motsagolski gate near the Tatar tents, and these were Circassians, riding fine Kipchak and Kabarda ponies, clashing cymbals and kettledrums as they came to make their rounds of the island. They ride well, the Circassians, and these were pleased with themselves. But I knew they were not the fellows to stand a charge or to drive one home-.

  It was not pleasant in the narrow streets, with women hanging out of the upper windows and the smells of many kinds of greasy cooking arising from the doors and the dogs snarling among the piles of refuse. Only overhead where the glow was leaving the sky, the stars began to shine down, bright and warm. So it was in the quarter of the Circassian women—courtesans if ever women were—only the smells were of musk and mastic and fruit. Here and there one of the beauties opened a screen casement to look at me, but they mocked my sheepskins when they saw I was not an officer.

  They had big, dark eyes and white skins and small mouths. They needed no paint to make them shine—those tall, supple women with hair like ripe straw. I saw more than one Muscovite underofficer going in their doors to eat dinner, but I did not see Mark. Nor was he in the wide central place called the bazaar street, where a mob of people moved around in groups and lanterns bobbed in and out like glow flies on the steppe. Aye, here were Hindu turbans and the small velvet caps of Kitayans4 among the merchants closing up their stalls.

  When the dark angel, Gabriel, blows his horn, some men will be found bartering goods, and when the dead of all the ages come out of their graves, a Jew or an Armenian will still be sitting on a carpet, testing a dinar with his teeth to see if it is a sound coin.

  Then I remembered that Mark had gone to the governor's house, and thither I went, too, through rows of barracks where many soldiers were gathered around fires, through a palisade gate, into a grove of tall poplars and so to a square wooden building with a double-headed eagle painted over the door and two halberdiers standing guard. I went where the shadows were deepest because those who saw me shouted evilly, and I knew that a Cossack with a gun was not a welcome sight within government grounds.

  At the edge of the trees I hid behind bushes and watched for a long time all that went on within the house. It shone with candles, and many people were eating dinner at a long table, waited on by serfs with iron collars about their necks. By and by some ladies came out of the door wearing enormous puffed-out skirts and Turkish shawls, and the officers bowed them to the sedan chairs that were in waiting under the poplars.

  I looked chiefly at the officers, and they seemed to have come from different parts of Frankistan, and were all very gay. Muscovite lords, too, appeared at the windows, and I heard later that many of these had fled from their estates up the river to the protection of the governor at Astrakhan.

  More candles were brought, and they began to play at cards and chess, and I grew more and more impatient because the night was wearing on and Mark was not to be seen.

  Then he came out with a gray-haired colonel who wore a breastplate and a wide sash and long boots. This, Mark explained to me afterward, was a Roundhead. By this he meant an English kwajahbahadur or praying soldier who had rebelled against his king and had to fly from the country. Ironsides was another name for him.

  They headed through the grove and I joined them, bowing so that the colonel should think I was a servant and whispering to Mark what I had heard from Koum Agha.

  "Eh, Uncle Kosta—" he shook his head—"his Excellency, the governor has had no news from the flotilla."

  By this I knew that Mark had been told about the war with the Cossacks and the coming of Stenka Razin.

  "The Armenian are flying down the river in boats," I pointed out. "The Nogais are of two minds what to do. It is true."

  Not by words can you tell when a thing is true. Ekh moi, if birds fly up in fright from a thicket, is not an animal stirring in the brush?

  Mark looked at me.

  "How could such a well-equipped fleet be wiped out by pirates, Uncle Kosta? Why did you not bring the word to the governor at once?"

  "Because by dawn we must mount and ride from this place. If I had gone braying to the Muscovite princes, they would have asked questions and shut me up in a room."

  Then Mark spoke to the colonel, and the praying Englishman swore under his breath unhappily.

  "We are not leaving Astrakhan, Uncle Kosta," my kunak then said to me. "I have volunteered to serve in the defense of the town."

  That was like a saber cut on the head! I could think of nothing to say until we reached Mark's new quarters—the colonel going back at once to bear the report to the governor—in a clay house near the barracks. Again I urged him to come with me to the steppe, and he said that I was free to go, but he had given his word to stay with the Muscovites.

  It is true that I was not a follower of Stenka Razin, but I was not at ease in Astrakhan. Koum Agha had given me good advice. But how could I leave Mark, my kunak? He had talked with his countrymen and had eaten bread and wine with them, and his heart was uplifted. He smiled and said he would appoint me a sergeant of artillery, since he had now a hundred men and many guns under his orders.

  "Good!" I said at last. "We will remain in this place. It was written. But I would rather pare the devil's hoofs than be one of the Muscovite soldiery. Let me be your servant. Otherwise they will hang me later because I am a Cossack."

  So I stayed in the hut the next morning, sweeping it out and tending the fire in the stove like a serf. Again I prayed Mark to go away with me, but he would not, going off instead to drill his men at the guns. He gave me some silver to take to the Armenians to make payment for his new clothes, and I went with a heavy heart.

  Not an Armenian remained in the serai except some that had been knifed during the night by Moslems.

  Eh, it was truly as if a steppe fire had been sweeping down on us, fanned by a whirlwind! Such a fire as drives all the steppe dwellers into flight before it—the little red foxes, the marmots out of their holes, the wolfpack and antelope taking no heed of each other, and even the bougay, the great, gray, long-horned steer, master of the wild herd, lord of the plains.

  The foreign merchants, many of them, and all Circassians who were not penned within the garrison, were crowding into boats. They were lugging along bales and women, and the women were lugging brats and pitchers and bundles on their heads. Every other minute a bark would hoist sail and begin to move down the river toward the sea. And some of the skiffs were so crowded that the sailors were dipping water out in pails when the waves splashed over the sides.

  If they had known what was awaiting them on the sea down below, they would h
ave stayed with us.

  But they had heard that morning of the rebellion of the soldiers that had been sent against Stenka Razin in the fleet, and they were mad with fear. I saw a Jew, watering at the mouth, running down to the shore, clad only in his long cap and half a sheepskin and carrying his own weight

  in rolls of silk, snatched up from-knows where. A Muscovite guard

  shouted at him and pricked him with a spear, and he dropped the silk and began to weep because he could not carry it away with him. Then he feared that he would be left on the shore, and waded into the water. He could not swim, and an oar hit him on the head, so that he was not to be seen any more.

  Then the same Muscovite pikeman came up to me with some soldiers and said I was a spy because I had been standing on the shore watching what went on.

  "Bind the dog of a Cossack," he ordered.

  I gave him the silver that had been meant for the Armenians, and they let me off because they wanted to go to a tavern and drink brandy. Eh, they had not been paid for a year, and had nothing but beer and watery vodka to drink.

  "Don't hang around here, Uncle," they said. "You will be flayed. Go across the river to your mates."

  Instead of that, I doubled back through the gate of St. Nicholas, intending to find my hut and stay in it like a bear in his snow shelter when Winter is on the steppe.

  Nay, the narrow streets were full of eyes, and men who, the day before, had passed me with a friendly word, now took occasion to cry after me to show their zeal for the Muscovite cause. A patrol of riders, blackfaced Kalmuks with spears slung across their shoulders, heard the cries and closed around me, taking me to the poplar grove where others of their tribe had brought one of Razin's boys, a prisoner.

  He was a young Zaporogian, as I knew by the long scalp lock and the wide Turkish trousers. He had been tortured a little in the hands and arms, and was hot with fever.

  "Brother, Cossack," he cried, "give me brandy! By ——, the Kalmuks, the sons of dogs, are going to cut the skin off me."

 

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