Swords of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  Then the gray horse checked and whirled, rearing. Its hoofs lashed out at the onrushing Cossack. But Demid's horse had played this trick—the dreaded lava that the Cossacks taught their chargers—himself. He swerved from the descending hoofs, almost throwing Demid from the saddle.

  With an angry cry the rider of the gray horse drew a sword, slashing out at the half-unseated Cossack. Demid had no time to draw his own sword—he threw himself bodily from the saddle, straining every muscle to fall on his feet. As the white rider reined forward to strike again, the Cossack leaped up, catching him about the waist.

  So swiftly had he moved, the other was not able to brace himself against the impact and they both came down, rolling in the soft snow. Demid gripped his adversary beneath him, catching the wrist that held the sword and forcing it back into the snow. His right hand grasped the other's throat. And then he loosed his grip with an exclamation.

  For the throat beneath his fingers was soft and round, and long dark tresses lay about the small head from which the papakh had fallen. A woman's gray eyes looked up into his.

  "The devil!" he muttered.

  When he drew the sword from her hand she made no resistance. She lay quiet, looking at him steadily. He got to his feet slowly, the blood pounding in his head. Reaching down, he lifted her in his arms. Without doubt she was a woman, light and warm and sweet-smelling. A vampire would have been cold to the touch. Yet her eyes as they searched his face were the eyes of a wild thing.

  "Eh, speak!" he whispered.

  Well, she was a beauty, with soft, dark lips—her small head as pale as one of the wax figures in church. Demid bent his bead, kissed her lips lightly. "Do you greet all strangers with a sword, little lass?" he asked. "Can't you speak? Are you hurt?"

  Suddenly the blood flooded her cheeks, and her eyes closed. Demid waited. He did not want to put her down. But she started in his arms, her head turned and her eyes dilated as she stared past him into the wood.

  "Yok! Tzee—tzee, yok!" she cried shrilly, and the Cossack set her down on her feet.

  Behind him in the brush at which she had been looking a brown wrinkled face was drawing back out of sight—a thing malevolent as a demon, wrapped in a wolf skin, with a great bow held fast in its hand.

  Demid knew then that he was in peril of his life, and he crouched in the snow, his muscles tense. The thicket ceased quivering, and there was no further sign of the Tartar bowman who had been peering out at him. He heard sounds behind him, and turned his head in time to see the girl going off on the gray horse.

  This time Demid made no move to follow. He knew that eyes as keen as wolves' were spying upon him, and he knew that an arrow from a Tartar bow could kill at a hundred paces. "No—oh, no!" the girl had cried at the face in the brush.

  So she had guardians, in this wood of hers. She, the wild thing, had warned them not to strike down the Cossack, although he had handled her, unwittingly, as roughly as a bear. She had cried out in the Tartar tongue, which Demid understood. Thoughtfully he went to his horse, and when he was in the saddle again he turned back to the highroad that led to Gorod. He was thinking of a splendid dark head lying in the snow beneath him, and nothing else would come into his mind.

  That evening be was admitted with Ostap to the hall of the starosta, who dismissed the other servants in the room before speaking to him.

  "Well, have you news?"

  "Yes," said Demid slowly. "This maiden of Khor is no vampire but a woman like any other."

  "I did not ask for your thoughts," retorted Mikhail. "Tell me what you saw—what happened?"

  The Cossack told about sighting the Lady Ivga—as Ostap called her— and his pursuit of her. Ostap listened to every word, breathing heavily.

  "The truth is," commented Mikhail, "that the life was nearly cut out of you, my lad. You should have followed her, tied her up, and brought her in for examination by the boyars and by myself."

  Demid shook his head. "If that was the Lady Ivga, we were on her land. Why shouldn't she slash at a man? She's lovely as a deer." He remembered how her eyes had closed when she flushed, and he was silent so long that the two men moved uneasily.

  "Look here," Demid went on. "I know how Togrul was slain—with an arrow. It leaves a small cut; still it will drain the blood out of a man."

  "We found no arrow," Ostap muttered.

  "And I think otherwise," pondered the starosta. "What if she had appeared before him in woman's dress—what if she came up to him and put him under the spell of her eyes and then struck him down with a small knife?"

  "Ay," put in Ostap heavily, "she's a witch and she has cast a spell on this Cossack."

  "If she's a witch, I'm a monk!"

  "Now, now, young wildfire. Doesn't she haunt graves, and change her shape? She does, because she rides about in man's dress. Hasn't she long, tangled hair and baneful eyes. You say she has. Did you hear her speak honest Christian words, like 'Get out, you son of a dog?' You did not.

  Well, then, she's young and fair, but she's a witch all the same and no good will come of her."

  The starosta lifted his hand. "I want proof, not words. Go you to the highway of Khor at night, Cossack, and watch what she does in the hours of darkness. There is a moon and you know your way about now. Eh?"

  "I'll do that," Demid nodded, "tomorrow night."

  "Not for forty good silver ducats of Kiev," said Ostap when they were alone again, "would I do the like of that. Better to follow the hangman's torch than the moon over Khor. Don't you know, her brother and grand-sire and other men of Khor are in those graves?" He sighed and rubbed his head. "Akh, you should have thrust your sword in the ground and said what I told you; then you would be at peace now, instead of rushing about like a wild horse at the end of a rope."

  There was no peace in the mind of the Cossack. On the morrow's night when he took the snow road to Khor he galloped as if he were racing the wind. Over his head the cloud wrack passed across the face of the round moon. The bare branches of the wood threshed together as if they were bony fingers of the dead doing a dance in the wind.

  A bad night. A bad night to go alone, seeking a witch in that wood. But the Cossack saw gray eyes half closing; he felt the weight of a slender body upon his arm. His blood pounded in his head, and he rode straight as the eagle flies, up the hill to Khor tower. With his stirrup he knocked on the closed wooden gate of the yard.

  Round and dark, the tower of Khor rose against the flecked sky. When he beat on the gate an owl swooped away. Steep roof peaks of the log buildings stood against the tower.

  "What seek ye?" a man's voice cried.

  "The Lady of Khor. Say to her that the Cossack Demid comes as a guest."

  "Nay, the khanim will see no man from Gorod."

  "I am no man of Gorod. No one follows me."

  Silence at the gate. Dark figures moving in the shadows of the log wall. A spear point brightening in the moon's light. The black horse snorted, turning restlessly. The gate opened slowly, and Demid rode in, dismounted by the well-sweep, to give his rein to the Tartar who opened the door of the tower. Candlelight flooded the trodden snow, and Demid strode in.

  No one was in the round room. A fire blazed in the wide hearth. Bright Turkish rugs covered the floor, and the scent of herbs was in the air. Demid, his papakh on his arm, flung himself into a great chair by the hearth.

  He did not hear Ivga come in, so quietly did she move over the carpets behind him. She wore no man's garments this time—she was clad in a short shirt and embroidered slippers, in a sleeveless khalat that left her arms bare. Her long hair was brushed back and held over her ears by a silver band that was like a diadem. Demid sprang up and bowed to her, and she went close to the fire.

  "Chlieb sol," she said quietly. "My bread and salt is yours, O guest. It is many a moon since a guest has come to Khor."

  Again Demid bowed his head. He could not say anything, because blood was throbbing in his head. The Lady Ivga had changed her shape indeed, and he could not take
his eyes from her dark head. When she clapped her hands a Tartar servant entered with a silver goblet. She took this in both hands and held it out to the Cossack. "A greeting to the guest."

  "Health to you my lady," he said hoarsely. His hands quivered as he took it from her and drank the corn brandy that was warm and fragrant with spices.

  "Are you not afraid, Cossack," she asked, "that the brandy is drugged, and that I am tempting you from your duty?"

  "What is that?"

  She looked at him, and smiled slowly. "To ride down women in the wood of Khor."

  When she smiled the skin of his head tingled, and the breath caught in his throat. "Why did you go in man's dress, with a sword?"

  "Because a little while ago when I rode in my own dress, one of the Gorod riders stalked me like a panther. When he tried to put his hands on me, Ghirei, one of my hunters, slew him with an arrow."

  "What became of the arrow? It was not found."

  "We took it away. After all, that Torgrul was dead. Ghirei caught his horse wandering with a loose rein and rode back to the spot and drew out the arrow without dismounting. If the starosta's men had found the Tartar arrow in that dead rogue, the starosta would have taken half the fields of Khor in payment for a life."

  Then Demid understood why the only tracks found by the body of Togrul had been those of his own horse. "Why do you tell me this?" he asked.

  "I do not know." Ivga did not smile; her gray eyes sought the fire as if to read the answer in the flames. "Perhaps because you come as a guest, after this long time. Perhaps because you are a Cossack, like my grandfather. I don't want you to die," she added impulsively, "as Togrul did."

  Forty silver ducats for proof of a slaying, and now he had that proof from her. The price of two years' service in the wars. Yet here, beside Ivga, he thought nothing of that. Togrul, the dog, had been well slain.

  "Why did you come to the tower?" she asked suddenly. "You should not have come."

  Demid shook his head. How could be have stayed away, after he had held her in his arms? He was frightened, because the wild girl of the snow road had changed into a proud girl of the manor, as remote from his touch as an image in the church. "In Gorod they are saying that you are a witch," he explained, "and your servants rob wayfarers."

  "My Tartars!" Her eyes blazed at him. "O fool! My Tartars were born here—aye, their grandsires served Khor, in the day of my grandfather, when the lands of Khor stretched as far as Gorod, which was no more than a village then. We counted our cattle by the hundred on the ranges. Then guests filled the house and there was feasting in this tower. My grandfather was a Cossack, so he had nothing but war in his head. He spent lives and gold and horses with an open hand, and he himself died by the sword. His grave is in the wood." Chin on hand, she gazed into the fire. "Six graves there are that I tend. And the newest is Ivan's. Ivan, my brother, who grew up with me. Ivan was like a Cossack, tall and heedless of everything but his sword and his hunting. He went to serve the tsar in Moscow, taking the strongest of the peasants with him. Whenever he wrote to me he begged for more gold for his debts, his horses—all the things he needed. He used to call me his Devilkin. I sold the cattle and the upper pastureland to send money to him. I was a child, then, and I did not know how to manage such things—"

  Ivga looked into the fire. "Then they brought his coffin back to Khor with a letter that said he was a hero. But to me, his Devilkin, he had always been a hero . . . well, that's past. Ivan lived joyfully, but we are poor now. The land that is left is good for wheat, but the rest of the peasants went off to town with their carts. That is because the new starosta is building houses there. Now he takes a horn-tax, a head-tax and a fire-tax from us. I went to Gorod to tell him that we had never paid a tax to Gorod, because the land is our freehold. I cannot work the land with Tartars."

  Demid nodded assent—he had grown up on the southern cattle range.

  "The starosta Mikhail said," Ivga went on slowly, "that Khor was an ill place for a woman. He said he would take this land and castle, and give me in exchange a house in town. It had barred windows and the sun did not shine in it. How would I live there, without land and horses? I said I would pay his taxes . . . The Tartars have not left me. They fish the river and they hunt. We sold skins and grapes in the town, to pay the last taxes. Now the starosta buys skins only from the traders. The man who was killed on the highroad in our wood was a fur trader on his way from Gorod. My men knew nothing—did not see him. But there were masterless men in the tavern, who knew that the trader had silver on him.

  The Cossack also was looking into the fire. He saw how the starosta meant to get Khor into his hands. But Demid had no skill to deal with merchants' work—

  "This year," added Ivga proudly, "we will be able to sell horses for the money."

  "And after that, what?"

  After that? There were Turkish yataghans hanging on the walls, gold inlaid; there were holy pictures on the icon stand, with silver frames— Ivga only knew with a deep certainty that this gray tower and its roofs and the graves by the silent chapel were part of her and she could not separate herself from them.

  And then the fever that had been rising in the Cossack found a voice. He knelt beside her, pressing his hot head against her knee, and the voice in him begged her to ride with him to the southland where the blue sea water gleamed in the sun. There, he was an ataman, a leader of warriors. He would go out on that sea in long boats and take spoil from the Turks. He would bring back silk garments and slaves for her. And his brown hand quivered when it touched the cotton skirt upon her knee.

  "Nay," she whispered, stroking his head, "nay, Brother Eagle, where is your home?"

  "In the steppe," cried Demid.

  "It is far off, where the wind blows and the cries are of war. Do I not know, after Ivan went away?" Her eyes, now that he could not see, had pain and longing in them. "You should not have come to my tower, because, after all, I am a Devilkin."

  "I cannot go away."

  Then he rose to his feet, his hand on his sword hilt. Silently, moving over the rugs in deerskin boots, a Tartar appeared beside him—holding a bow unstrung, his broad face expressionless.

  Demid recognized the face that had looked at him from the thicket.

  "Khanim," the man said to Ivga, "two riders are upon the road, in the wood."

  "What riders?"

  "Khanim, I do not know. They are calling in a loud voice—Ai-ai!"

  Demid considered. They might be men who had come after him from Gorod, or belated wayfarers. Here was something that he could see to--there must be no more bloodshed on Ivga's land. "I will go down. Only, do not let these bowmen of yours loose."

  "Don't go to the wood," she said quickly. "Stay here. I—I am afraid." She did not know why. A breath of wind from an open door set the candle flames flickering. She touched the Cossack's arm. "Please, do not go away."

  But he smiled. "Eh, little Ivga—then I will come back."

  He went to his horse and mounted, though she came out into the moonlight and touched his rein, as if to hold him there with her. And she did not go back until he had passed through the palisade gate.

  High over the bare trees the moon gleamed on the white snow, outlining the black shadows. As he cantered down a trail toward the chapel and the road, Demid heard a shout. Coming out the highway he saw two riders moving at a foot pace toward Gorod. They were heavy men in sheepskins with saddlebags at their knees. Demid did not know them, but he looked closely at their horses—he had a memory for horses.

  "Hi, lad," the foremost hailed him, "where lies Gorod tavern? Is that it yonder i' the wood? Faith, we're weary of this accursed road."

  "Ride on for half an hour, and you will see the light of the tavern."

  "May the dogs bite me!" grumbled the nearer of the two. "A half hour he says. Well, here's something for us all." Lifting the flap of a saddlebag, he drew out a stone jug, and then a glass. Seeing it, the other man came over to them, beating his arms against his shou
lders to warm his blood. From the three horses rose thin clouds of steam.

  The man with the jug poured out a glassful. He lifted it and grinned at the Cossack. "Here's health to you!"

  Behind Demid saddle-leather creaked and steel flicked through the moonlight. But the Cossack had not been watching the jug. He threw his body away from the dagger that whipped past his ear, and as he did so he jerked out his saber with his free hand.

  Without turning to look or to set himself, he slashed up and back, wrenching his shoulder around with the force of the blow. His saber's edge caught and cut deep under a man's jaw, and the man fell back without a cry.

  The other dropped jug and glass and drew a sword from beneath his coat. He slashed at Demid, who caught the blade with his own, and laughed. This was work for a Cossack. The two weapons parted and clashed. Demid kneed his horse forward until he was shoulder to shoulder with the stranger. Once he slashed the man down the cheek and once over the ribs.

  Groaning, the stranger cut wide at the Cossack's head. Demid locked hilts, wrenched the other's saber, sending it flying among the trees.

  "Don't strike again!" the man screamed. "For Christ's mercy!"

  "Who sent you?" Demid demanded, holding back his arm.

  The man was silent. He stared at the wood behind the Cossack. "Hush," he whispered, "or he will hear you."

  "He'll hear me," Demid said. Reining back, he glanced at the body of the man who had struck at him first. Beside it lay a strange weapon—a blade as long as a hand, yet no thicker than a straw. An Italian dagger, a stiletto that could slay and leave a mark no larger than a tooth.

  Swinging down from the saddle Demid picked it up, thrust it into his belt. "Wait here, dog," he cried at the wounded man. Then he spurred along the road, his eyes questing into the shadows of the forest. When he saw a third horseman motionless there, he plunged in among the trees, the blood-stained saber swinging in his hand.

  But this third rider did not run or lift weapon. It was Mikhail the sta-rosta with his jutting black beard. Now his hands trembled against his coat and his mouth hung open—for he was shaken by fear, as some men are at the sight of blood.