Swords of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  As he scrambled back, he heard the words: "When the bread is hot from the oven, dear girl you will burn your fingers. Wait!"

  Within the screen of grass, Jan was emptying the cup. "When the kiss is hot, on your, lips, dear girl . . . you must never wait. Hurry!"

  Beside him Be-ty sat silent.

  "Shut up, and listen, Jan," the Cossack exclaimed. "In the river a city is coming up, with men climbing out."

  "In a pig's eye!"

  Jan laughed and poured himself more cognac from a bottle that Yarak judged to be more than half empty already.

  "Ghosts on the water," Jan said. "Cossack, I used to sit like this on the stone steps, while Marya made tea. At her house you know—or you don't know. To the devil with tea! She had hair like gold, and she looked into my eye's—not afraid. I'd kiss her hand. Like two kids."

  "Stop licking the drink. It's the girl's."

  "Not this girl's. She's alive, isn't she?" Jan filled his cup carefully. "When I was out of Czersk, I got down to the Tatras to look for her at the old place. The farm people told me about Marya. She'd had typhus, and before she was well, she had been sent with the family out of their house, north to the swamps. For the water sports, the Nazis said. You know, cutting timber in the bogs, poling rafts. I didn't find her. It was like chasing a ghost over the swamps—"

  The girl Be-ty had been watching his face in the starlight, and she took the cup away from him. Jan stopped talking.

  "There's a gun on the river now, Jan," Yarak insisted.

  He took Jan's arm, leading him down to the sand bar. For a long time Jan stared at the shape on the water. "Undersea boat," he said. Leaning close to the water, he listened. "It's not Russian they're speaking over there."

  "Four men rowed ashore. Without a boat." Yarak pointed to the far bank, hidden in the murk.

  "They're Germans, all right. Probably going to communicate with Chovno."

  The thing out of the sea was an enemy warship, Jan insisted.

  "Impossible," Yarak grunted. He knew that ships sailed on top of the water; they did not emerge from the depths like a sturgeon coming up to feed.

  Jan peered at him curiously. "You believe in a city of dead people coming up out of the water, but you balk at a submarine."

  "Oh, crickey!"

  Quietly the girl Be-ty had come up behind them. And she knew more than Jan about the black shape moored in the river. She said it would have a searchlight and machine gun on the little house that she called a conning tower, and a small boat made of rubber, blown up so it would float. In this berth at the river mouth it could lie hidden for the night, and it would be off by daybreak. It showed no lights, to prevent observation from the air.

  "Tfu!" Yarak shook his head. A machine such as that to swim around in the water like a fish. It could not be.

  Jan, squatting down close to the water, did not move. He was like a man bound tight with wire cords. "There are only four of the water sporters on deck," he whispered, "and, I think, two on shore over there."

  Then Yarak heard a sound that sent him crawling back hastily through the grass. Heavy feet were moving in the dry growth about the camp site, and his sharp ears caught the clink of a glass bottle. As he suspected, he found the Siberian guerrillas there, nosing about. They had found the cognac and the girl's bag.

  "Hi, kunaks," Yarak hailed softly, "those are the foreign lady's bottles. Look here—there's a German machine lying like a fish in the shallows of the river."

  Invitingly he pointed down at the bank. A short, stocky figure stepped up to him. "We aren't blind, Uncle. Sure it's there. Only we haven't any kriga—net traps big enough to catch that fish."

  Those Siberians had the bottles, and Yarak counted eight men with four long, old-fashioned rifles among them. He did not argue with the stocky man, the section leader called Kem by the others. Then Jan appeared with the girl, and Jan picked up the stick bomb from the ground. He spoke with the ring of command in his voice:

  "Army men, can you find your way through to your lines?"

  "Yes," said Kem, "when we're ready to go."

  "Well, it's time you took off, with this lady. She's a nurse and she'll end up by getting killed here. See that she's put on a train to the Kavkaz, to Tiflis. There'll be other English people in Tiflis. You won't want to stick around here."

  "Why not?" demanded Kem. "And what makes you think you can give the orders?"

  "It will be too hot around here for you, after an hour. I'm through giving orders. I'm going over to the other bank to give them this cocktail."

  Jan's voice was flat, as he showed Kem the stick bomb. The Siberians crowded around, muttering. No use throwing one bomb, the Germans had sentries on shore, and a party coming back from Chovno. And their searchlight could show up all the bank there.

  Kem hesitated, and put down the cognac. "We have some dynamite, from Chovno, but we couldn't find any detonators. We're keeping it for the roads."

  "Well, you can't worry a submarine by exploding dynamite in the open air—if you could explode it."

  "I know that." The Siberian seemed angered. "Didn't I graduate at the Ural Kuznetsk chemico-metallurgical combination?" He laughed. "For cultural upliftment."

  "May the dogs bite your cultural upliftment!" Yarak pushed up to them, snorting. It had taken a long time to convince him; but if the soldiers also believed the leviathan from the deep to be a warship, it must be so. Although it seemed to him something of a miracle that such a ship could be. "You didn't learn much on the Amur. You've got a raft, haven't you, Kem? Then hand over the dynamite and I'll take it down alongside that machine."

  "The forehead to you, Yarak! So you'll cripple the submarine by yourself."

  "Tfu! I was doing things like that when you were still wet behind the ears." Yarak felt provoked. First the officer Jan had slighted the Savage Division of the real war, and now this man from the Amur made a jest of him. Yarak felt hot under his skull. "I've taken a log down a river at night with Tatars watching. And they don't need searchlights to see at night."

  He explained how it was done. Not by splashing around like the men from the Amur, but by drifting with the current. Not by lying on the logs but by swimming behind them.

  "Only one thing is needed," he added. "A diversion. If you Siberian fly killers can get up on the bank over there, throw in a stone for the boat boys to look at."

  "What did you say?" Kem asked.

  "A diversion. To make them look the other way."

  For a moment the officer and Kem stared at the gaunt Cossack. They seemed to find much to think about in what he said. Jan shifted the bomb in his hand, and Kem breathed hard through his teeth. "Uncle," he said, "will you try your luck like that?"

  "Stop talking, and fetch the dynamite."

  They were starting up the river, when Jan put out his hand. The girl was waiting there, not knowing what they meant to do. Yarak saw the officer go up to her and talk, strained. It was as if Jan had been pulled toward her.

  "She wants to come with us," he explained quickly. "She says she wants to share our luck."

  His voice was glad, and he took the girl's hand, bending over to kiss it. Be-ty moved unexpectedly. She brushed back the tangle of her hair and she smiled at Jan, putting her arms around him. Tight she held to him, whispering.

  When he lifted his head, Jan's face was not hard as before. He looked like a boy, troubled and determined. His fingers held to the girl's hand.

  Yarak thought that Jan was no longer afraid of a ghost. This girl had somehow driven the black devil out of him. Well, that was how it happened, with a girl.

  The Pole held his body straight in the torn tunic. Taking the lead, he walked fast, motioning Kem to keep up with him. Yarak could hear them talking, low-voiced, up at the guerrillas' hideout.

  And there they lost no time rooting heavy boxes out of the brush. Lugging the boxes down to the shore, they worked over them, while Yarak inspected the log raft. Not satisfied, he searched out a dead branch and puffed up rushes
by the roots. Kem came over to watch him curiously, while the others laid a half dozen dynamite boxes close together on the two logs of the raft.

  Over these boxes, Yarak wedged the branch, and stuck rushes in between the logs. He noticed that the wooden boxes bore numbers and marking.

  The others were wading across the river from shoal to shoal, Jan carrying the girl. Some of the Siberians seemed to be carrying packs.

  "Wait for as long as it takes to milk a cow," Kem explained. "Then shove off." He calculated a moment. "That gives us time to get around to the bank."

  "Don't forget to make the diversion," Yarak warned. Then he thought of something. "How will the dynamite go off?"

  He did not know much about the explosive qualities of dynamite, but Kem, understood such chemicals, "Don't worry, Uncle. It will go off, at the submarine." He hesitated, watching Yarak. "Only you'd better get away from the raft before then. Understand? Well, that's all you need to know."

  And he ran after the file, now lost in the gloom of the opposite bank.

  Stripped from his shaven forehead to his toes, Yarak shoved his driftwood raft out into mid-current. When he felt the tug of the current, he spat three times and crossed himself, to ward off bad luck. After a while he let himself into the water, holding on to the end of a log, guiding it. With his head screened by the branch he watched the outline of the high bank, and peered ahead for the little house on top of the boat. He only moved his legs to guide his floating bomb.

  When he lifted his head he sighted the leviathan of the deep closer than he had expected. From the water it loomed up, high. He caught a faint humming and a clank of metal as men moved about the house.

  The current, he calculated, was taking his float near the outer side of the monster, and he did not dare, now, to change its course. Lowering himself down, he waited for the splash of a stone, or some diversion from the bank. Surely, he thought, the kunaks up on the bank, twenty paces away, could spot him by now.

  But no diversion came. Yarak could make out the rubber boat tied to the shore ahead of him, and hear men moving there. No other sound broke the quiet of the river. And he was bearing down steadily upon the giant from under the sea.

  "The brothers of a dog!" he thought bitterly, trying to swing the logs closer to the submarine.

  Suddenly a flashlight blinked at the water. Then a glow of light dazzled Yarak. The Germans had turned their searchlight on the driftwood, now only a stone's throw away.

  Yarak kept his head still, swearing silently. He heard the crack of a single shot. Water sprayed beside him. A second shot from the conning tower ripped through one of the boxes. Yarak wondered again what made dynamite explode. And, hastily, he released the logs, letting himself sink into the water. Then he turned to swim against the current.

  The glow faded from the water around him, and he came up to breathe.

  Twenty feet away, the searchlight held on the logs, now almost at the submarine's bow. Its glow showed a man in a jersey out on the runway aiming a rifle at the suspicious floating mass. An officer climbed out of the tower, and shouted as if angry. The rifleman held his fire, while the others clustered around him, peering at the boxes which they could see plainly now.

  Then the quiet of the river was shattered. Four shots flashed from the bank above the submarine, and Yarak recognized the roar of the heavy Russian Trokhlini rifles. Another volley cracked down, bullets whining off the steel decks, and some of the crew tumbling down where they stood.

  The survivors jumped away from the light, and again the officer shouted. The searchlight swung around and up, across the face of the bank. Nothing showed there except brush.

  From aft the conning tower, a machine gun rattled and spat at the bank, following the finger of light. The Germans, Yarak thought, were quick as devils to shoot. And by now his dynamite would be drifting harmlessly out to sea—

  He caught the splash of paddles coming out from the bank before he saw, in the glow under the lightbeam, the rubber boat drawing near the submarine. Four men were hunched over in the strange craft, racing toward the iron ladder under the conning tower. Yarak wondered if the officers had returned from shore. Then he stared, fascinated.

  The men in the boat were not Germans. When they grasped the ladder two of them went up with knives in their hands. The machine gun stopped, and the sailor with the rifle jumped for the ladder. At the same instant Kem jumped for the rifleman, and the two of them splashed into the water.

  The two guerrillas following swung heavy packs over their heads. The packs dropped down the hatch. Another sailed in after them.

  At the rail of the conning tower, the German officer stepped into the light, firing a revolver. Beneath him Jan held to the ladder with one hand. The other hand swung the stick bomb up. It dropped after the bundles into the steel hatch. And Jan let go his hold, to drop back into the water.

  "Ekh ma!" Yarak breathed. The machine gun cut loose again. And with it the water shook around Yarak, and a blast shot up from the conning tower

  The submarine swayed; and vapor boiled around it coming out of the hatch and the seams of the deck. The searchlight dimmed out and smoke spread over the water.

  Yarak found himself clawing toward the shore across from him, shaking his head, to clear it. Looking back, he caught the splash of paddles, where the rubber boat was again in motion toward the high bank. Some of the boarding party, then, had got away.

  The smoke closed down on him, and the reek of oil made him cough. Shivering with the chill of the river, the Cossack climbed out on the shoal. At once, his bare legs laboring through the grass, he made for his camp site.

  There lay the two cognac bottles where they had been left. Yarak shook the one that felt half empty. He took a long swallow, to drive the chill out of his body. "Eh," he muttered "I was the diversion."

  Immediately he felt warmed inside, but not outside so he took another long swallow. "Eh, the firing from the boat was the diversion for the boat."

  He felt comfortable, now that he understood everything. The dog brothers, he thought—they bit hard. They left him the boxes and took the dynamite with them.

  Upstream, when he sat down to put on his clothes, he saw the guerrillas making back across the ford. He counted nine, with the Polish officer and the wondering girl among them. He heard Kem telling the survivors to get their rolls together and start east to the next post. "Brothers, soldiers," Yarak called after them, "that was done like Cossacks."

  Overhead the finger of a searchlight probed the sky to the west; a patrol hurried down the far bank. Yarak felt a glow of contentment, and, crawling back into the rocks, he wrapped himself in his coat. Putting the remaining bottle in a convenient pocket of the coat, he dozed happily.

  The Two Swords of Genghis Khan

  There are several motor routes from the U.S.S.R. into China, none of them good. They cross the mountain ranges of mid-Asia and what is known as the Gobi Desert. The Kurdai-Luntai route, hitherto unmapped, was discovered by the army of the United States. It was discovered accidentally. It might never have been found and mapped if the tribe of Dungans had not cherished a superstitious fear of the ghost of Genghis Khan, or if Uncle Yarak had been able to find any war in the settlement of Kurdai.

  On that particular day, the soul of Yarak the Cossack was sick. Sitting moodily on a gasoline tin, he polished his sword with the tail of his shirt, wholly heedless of the scenic beauty of the bare heights around him. There was nothing else for him to do in this place.

  "Tfu," muttered Yarak. "The devil has flown away with this war."

  It had been in the west, where the sun set—no doubt of that. But he had heard there was also war in the place of the sun's rising. Whereupon he had contrived to get himself as far to the east as possible, to Kurdai, and had found himself in the shacks of a construction camp where a battalion of soldiers labored at laying the roadbed of a railroad.

  Yarak had no desire to work upon a railroad. In other and better days now long vanished, he had played hi
s part in these barrens of central Asia as a Cossack should, with a kuniaki—a little horse—between his knees and a real saber at his side. Then he had stalked and killed his enemies and possessed himself of their weapons. He had kissed the Dungan girls, at night, after washing down his meat with corn brandy as clear as crystal.

  When Yarak thought of that brandy, he got to his feet. If he could not fight, he would drink. Only he had no coin to buy brandy, nor did he own anything fit to sell for money—except this sword.

  It wasn't much of a sword, being an ancient yataghan with some writing on its steel that he had picked up unseen at a market. Moodily, he considered it, and brightened. It wasn't worth ten kopecks but he could think up a legend about it. Yarak knew plenty of legends—more than these ignorant Russians.

  To think, with Yarak, was to act. In a minute he had drawn the officer of the battalion aside and exhibited the yataghan. He had found it in a kurgan, a tomb mound, very ancient. This was a lie.

  "Look at the writing on it," he urged. "It's old, that's what." He lowered his voice: "It's the sword of Genghis Khan."

  Without haste the captain inspected the yataghan. He knew Yarak. "The sword of Genghis Khan?" He laughed. "With Arabic writing on it? Pin your shirt tail with it. It's not worth ten kopecks."

  "May the dogs bite you, Brother Captain Ilytch," growled Yarak.

  The engineer captain considered. "Tell you a what, Uncle. Sell it to the Amrikans."

  "The which?"

  "The Amrikans. They don't know anything, Yarak. Look at them over there—reading a book to find out where they are. They're dumb but they have coin."

  So it happened that Yarak sallied forth across the roadbed to try his luck with the Amrikans.

  Five of them were clustered about a sixth, reading a book, on the running board of a motor truck. The seventh was a woman, also reading from a book leaning against a new command car. Yarak noticed that their uniforms differed from the Russian gray and their cars shone like new.

  The woman wore boots of a kind and trim khaki. She had a clean, lovely face and her gray eyes looked full at Yarak with surprise as he strode toward her.