Swords of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  Because such deeds were good hearing, Stenka Razin held Mark in favor, and the next days were pleasant ones. We went about clad in cloth of silver and in silks from Kitai,1 with belts full of weapons, with wine casks open in all the streets and more meat than we could eat at night. For a bottle of spirits we gave a gold chain to a merchant, and the minstrels made a song about Stenka Razin. Even the shepherds and boatmen of the place had full bellies and wallets and no one mourned the dead Muscovite lords.

  The sun smiled on us and we lived like princes in the fine boats of the Cossacks until the day a Terek Cossack rode a foundered horse into the gate of the Tatar city and flung himself, white with dust, from the saddle before Razin.

  "Father," he cried, "the shah of the Persians has sent his fleet to sea to make war on you."

  Then Stenka Razin laughed. The townspeople of Astrakhan feared that he would hoist the sails on his chayaks, his river skiffs, and go away up the Volga into the steppe where the archfiend himself could not find him, and they would be left without a defender.

  On their knees they begged him to stay and hold the city wall against the Moslems who would carry off all the inhabitants and sell them into slavery in Shamaki and Tiflis and Bokhara. Sitting in his chair under the poplars, with a tankard of mead on his knee, Razin heard them through, and laughed.

  "We are dogs," he growled, "to bite the Muscovite boyars. We are not a garrison."

  For his captains he had other words.

  "Come with me, my children. We will frolic!"

  It was in the minds of all who heard that he meant to leave Astrakhan to its fate and move up the river. But he had another plan. And at this moment it happened that his eye fell upon Mark, who was sitting with him, and he remembered the warning of my comrade.

  "Eh, Mark," Razin said, "are you a prophet as well as a kunak? You said the Moslem jackals were getting together a fleet to come against me."

  "That is true, ataman, as you see."

  "Well, I will not await them here in Astrakhan. I will move down among the islands, and their women will wait in vain for the warriors of the shah."

  Hearing this, the captains exchanged glances and Chvedor made bold to speak. The Persian fleet had been seen coasting to the north within a few days of the Volga mouth. In the fleet were a hundred vessels, large and small, manned by perhaps twenty thousand warriors and slaves. The Cossacks, he pointed out, numbered seven thousand, not counting what was left of the Muscovite garrison, and the soldiers might do well enough behind walls supported by heavy cannon, but were little used to river warfare.

  "By the black mass!" cried Razin. "I do not want the Muscovites. They would overcrowd our boats."

  To other arguments he would not listen, and the townspeople thought him mad. They were pleased that the Cossacks were going against the Persians, because there were not ships enough left to them to bear away the inhabitants up the river, and they were thinking of their houses and goods and children.

  As for the Cossacks, they were ready to follow Razin anywhere. Was he not their father? Had he not a charm that protected him against bullets, steel or poison? Did he not find plunder and sport for them wherever he turned? They would have gone with him against all Asia!

  And so, in fact, the pirate boats were manned on the second day, sixty of them. Filka the Devil and two thousand men were left with the Muscovites who had joined Razin in the city, and the fleet moved off down the Volga after sending picket boats ahead to find the Persians. And with the others went the little bark that had been given to Mark.

  Razin wished the buccaneer to come, and Mark was not the man to refuse. Nor would the Frankish girl leave him. Although two brass cannon had been put in the pretty cabin in place of the divan and a crew of a dozen outlaws were in the waist of the vessel, she sat on the rail of the cabin beside Mark, and in vain he urged her that she would be better in Astrakhan.

  Eh, the same thought was in my mind. In a battle on the steppe if things go wrong you can turn your horse and go away, but you cannot run away on a ship. And if God wills that the ship should cease floating and should sink down in the water, that's the end of everything. I thought of what Koum Agha had said:

  "Fire for the hearth, water for the cup."

  A ship and a battle on the sea was not to my liking.

  Mistress Bailly only smiled at Mark and waved her hand to the children, gathered on the shore near the city wall under conduct of some priest or other. They were delighted at the sight of so many little boats moving down the river and began to sing in their high, sweet voices:

  From the White Island On the Mother Volga Stenka Razin's brothers Sail with a merry song.

  Our Cossacks all looked at the children and waved their hats, and took it as a good omen. At first they had grumbled because there was a woman on the boat. They were surprised that evening when a skiff came from the big bark of the chieftain with a command that Mark should attend the council of the captains. They had not known that Stenka Razin trusted Mark greatly, and now they treated me in friendly wise and asked me to share their kasha and hubble-bubble pipes. They were lean men from the uplands of the Don and Terek, river-men and hunters like myself—men of good faith, although given to quarrelling. They had been kissing the cup a-plenty in the town, but now that we were setting forth to pound the Moslems, they would not touch even mild red wine.

  So we sailed down the Volga, five thousand going against twenty thousand, and we knew not what else.

  Nor did we know where the Persians were or what channel they would enter. And this, the Cossacks told me, was no light trouble. Because Mother Volga has not one mouth but eighty, all reaching into the sea. How were we to find the Moslems?

  What worried our leaders were the eighty mouths of the great river. These mouths spread over the steppe, running around innumerable islands, and some were not channels, but shallow streams down which barks could not sail. Others, nearly all, had sandbars and rocks that barred the way.

  So, for as far as a man could ride on a good horse in a day, there was a wilderness in front of us—a wilderness of sluggish streams and marshes, of islands hidden by immense rushes and inhabited only by hawks and gnats and the evil spirits of the waste. Roving Tatars sometimes pitched their tents on one of the islands by a main channel and waited until a bark ran ashore, which often happened, and gave them a chance to plunder the goods of merchants and carry off the merchants to sell as slaves. In all this waste of rushes and rocks and yellow sand a man might lose himself and starve to death.

  The Muscovites came there, it is true, to set their nets for sturgeon and strelet; but they had no love for the Volga mouths.

  And here it was that Stenka Razin had decided to give battle to the Moslem fleet; beside an island that he knew well. This was an eminence of rocks on the summit of which he had built a wooden castle when the Muscovites besieged him in former years. It was called Shatiri Bogar, the Mountain of the Prince, and it lay beside one of the navigable channels.

  Stenka Razin was shrewd enough to know that in the open sea his small Cossack craft would fare badly against the big sailing barks and sandals and oar galleys of the Moslems.

  He had brought a score of heavy iron cannon from Astrakhan and barrels of powder and round shot and grape. And he planned to set a trap for the Persians.

  "Eh," he said, "we will catch them in nets, like fish."

  And that night, when the full moon came up over the Volga mouths, we saw what he meant. We came to the nets.

  They stretched from the shore of one long island to another save for a space of the length of three spears that had been left for the boats of the merchants to pass. Piles made from the trunks of trees, sharpened at one end, had been driven down into the bottom of the channel in a ragged line, and between the piles nets of strong hemp were stretched.

  There were three lines of these nets, a stone's cast apart—the two upstream having openings in them so that the fish might swim through and be held against the lowest trap. Then the Muscovit
es would row up in their boats and sink hooks behind the heads of the sturgeon and slay them. Since there had been no Muscovites at the nets for many days, the traps were nearly filled with the long, twisting bodies.

  And since the sturgeon were great and powerful, the nets were heavy, too heavy for any boat to break through.

  Behind this triple line of nets Razin planned to place the bulk of his boats, manned with Cossacks who had muskets. So, in a way, they would be behind an entrenchment—a palisade in the river itself. And since there was no time to lose, he set a hundred men to work pulling up the piles and the hemp meshes from the upstream line, enough of them to close the gap that had been left for boats to go through.

  But before this was done, twenty skiffs and barks and barges floated down through the gap, down the river for the distance of two musket shots, along the side of a great island in the center of which rose a rocky height. This was Shatiri Bogar, and its shore was hidden by a mass of rushes—the highest I had ever seen—like a forest growing out of the water.

  In seventeen of these craft were the heavy cannon he had fetched from Astrakhan. And these boats were sent through the tall rushes in single file so that they made but one track which was afterward closed by a screen of rushes. They were beached and the cannon, the shot and the powder, landed. A command was given, and the Cossacks from the seventeen boats began to dig an entrenchment in the sand of the shore.

  They worked swiftly, for this was labor they liked well, and the trick they thought to play on the Moslems made them merry. They arranged places for the cannon behind the earthwork so that a little after sunup, they had twenty guns on the shore of Shatiri Bogar, hidden behind the towering rushes.

  And these twenty guns pointed at the channel. A Polish officer of ar-tillery—Heaven knows whence he came or why he fled to the outlaws— commanded the guns and the thousand men who were in the redoubt. And the stout priest Chvedor, sitting atop a powder keg, commanded the Pole, in order that everything should be as Razin wished. I wondered why the Cossacks did not man the wooden fort on the summit of the rock; but not so much as a lookout was posted there. The buildings looked empty because they were in truth deserted except by crows.

  Aye, all these things I saw because our bark was one of the three that had drifted below the nets and had not been run ashore on Shatiri Bo-gar. I saw, too, how the trap was being made. First the cannon, then the nets would hinder the Moslem boats from going up the channel. But why should the Persians choose this of the half dozen main channels? And why could they not turn around and go away to another one when they discovered the lair of the Cossacks?

  Razin, however, had thought of all things. At the council he said:

  "Hai, my brothers, the trap must be baited. Who ever heard of a wolf putting his head into a snare unless there was bait? We will anchor three boats out the mouth of the Shatiri Bogar channel and when the Persians come up along the coast they will sight our boats and come this way."

  To this the captains agreed—all except Mark, who had set such traps himself in that sea of the Spaniards at the edge of the world.

  "Nay, ataman," he said thoughtfully. "I have seen the Persians and their leaders. They are fathers of treachery, and they are ever distrustful. If they behold three Cossack boats waiting for them they may take it into their heads to go elsewhere, thinking that these are scouts."

  "Well, they may. They will ask their astrologers and, if the omens are favorable, they will press ahead. In that way they are fools. "

  "True," assented Mark. "But who knows what the soothsayers will advise?"

  The Cossacks exchanged glances and Razin gnawed his nails. He was bold. He had gone with five thousand against a great fleet. He was shrewd— he had blocked the channel, as I have said. But beyond that he cared not, trusting in his luck.

  "Eh, what?" he asked.

  "Send the three barks out into the sea athwart the course of the Moslems. When they sight the Persians, let them veer and sail confusedly as if the pilots were terrified or as if they had no pilots. Drawing back into this channel they will surely bring some of the Moslem craft in pursuit. And where some of them go, all will go."

  "You have spoken well, Mark. You have planned wisely. Do you wish to be part of the bait?"

  "Aye," said Mark when the eyes of the Cossack leaders turned on him.

  Stenka Razin had asked the question idly, pondering whom he would send as captain of the three ships, which would be the same as a death warrant. When Mark accepted at once, he stroked his mustache and said no more. He would have gone himself, but the Cossacks would not have permitted it.

  "Eh, be it so." Suddenly he remembered the woman on the bark. "What will you do with your wife? We will guard her on Shatiri Bogar."

  Mark pondered and shook his head.

  "Unless we bound her, she would not leave the bark. She will go with me."

  And so in truth she did. All that morning I had been asleep in the nose of the boat where Mark would not see me and take it into his head to summon me to row with the Cossacks who were laboring at the oars—since the wind was the warm, south wind, and the boat would not go against it without the oars. When the sun was overhead and the thumping of the oars stopped, I woke up and found that a new Cossack was on the boat.

  A slender youth with a white lambskin hat and white wool cherkeska, bound with a broad red sash. The boots of the newcomer were red morocco, embroidered with gold, and a pistol and a light yataghan were thrust through the red sash. Eh, that was Mistress Bailly and a handsome boy she made, standing on the rump of the boat beside Mark, looking intently to the south.

  "A-yar!" said a Terek warrior who was sitting smoking beside me. "She is better so, the princess! Look!"

  With his pipe he pointed to the south. Here the gray water was covered by a black mass moving along the shore toward us. Never have I seen such a number of vessels—high sandals, swift shallops, darting like spiders over the waves, squat merchants' barks and galleys—all with sails of every color, both square and triangular and all moving toward us while we sat on the water, rolling from side to side and making no effort to escape.

  Even before I saw the green crescents on the white sails of the sandals, I knew this was the fleet of the Persians. Among the ships were many that had fled from Astrakhan and had been captured.

  We were not far from the coast, but when I looked to the north whence we had come I saw only a gray line, shrouded in mist. We had followed the west coast but we had come many leagues from the river's mouth. On the rump of the ship I found Mark leaning against the pole by which he steered.

  "Surely, Mark," I said, "it is time to hoist the sail and tighten the reins of the ship so that we will not fall into the hands of yonder dogs."

  "Your place, Barbakosta," he responded, "is there in the bow."

  Mistress Bailly smiled at me, and her eyes were bright. Mark, too, appeared taller, and his words had a bite to them. He was studying the clouds and the birds that wheeled over the masts of the Moslems—rooks and hawks that had come from God knows where.

  Ekh-ma! The men from the Terek and the Don mocked me when I went back and sat down, not at all proudly, because the sons of jackals had heard the words of the Frank. One said—

  "Messenger to the chieftain!"

  Another put in—

  "Ambassador Barbakosta!"

  "Hi, brothers, to the oars! Barbakosta does not want to fall into the hands of the Moslems."

  "Nay, he went to woo the ataman's wife, the old dog! His fleas woke him up."

  I had not thought before then that a Cossack on a boat was not expected to speak to the officer or to go up on the roof where the tiller was. Just then Mark gave an order and the men ran to the mast and began to hoist the long beam to which the sail hangs. The wind turned the boat and we ploughed through the waves instead of rolling around in one place.

  But it was not part of Mark's plan to run away quickly. He turned the tiller and our bark bumped against the side of another so that so
me of the ropes were broken and the sail began to flap like a limed pigeon.

  Soon I heard the "Hourra-ha-a!" of the Moslems who were closest to us in several long shallops. Our Cossacks mended the ropes that were broken and we sped away again, leaning over on one side because the wind was pushing very strongly.

  The islands of the Volga mouths began to draw nearer, and I picked out the high rock of Shatiri Bogar before midafternoon. By then we could see the peaked turbans and the mailed corselets of the Persians in the shallops, and it was clear that the whole fleet was coming after us.

  Slowly opened out the mouth of the river toward which we were headed. White surf fringed the rocks and the tall rushes wavered and bent like a forest under a tempest. Our boat leaned over more and more until the men beside me lay down on the floor with their feet braced against the lower railing, paying no heed to the spray that came over us. They watched the sail and said that Mark at last was trying to make the boat show its best speed.

  The cannon in the Persian boats began to go off, and every time the man from the Terek would lift his head to see where the balls had struck.

  "The birds are flying high," he said, and I asked why we did not return their fire.

  He pointed down to the floor of the bark and shook his head, meaning that it was impossible to fire unless the deck were level; but our pursuers began to loose more cannon at us. Their great sandals had come up closer, and they seemed to have no reluctance to burn powder. This was because they did not wish us to escape and bear the tidings, as they fancied, of their arrival to Astrakhan. So said the man from the Terek, pointing to the shore that seemed to fly toward us. Thin, veil-like mist was gathering between us and the rock of Shatiri Bogar. Yet I could see the wooden house of Stenka Razin on the summit with the rooks settled about it.

  Surely the Persians would fear nothing from that, because birds would not act like that if men were about.