Swords of the Steppes

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Swords of the Steppes Page 68

by Harold Lamb


  The strange Beg rolled his good eye up at the empty hillside and back at Yarak. "A dog barks at the wind," he rasped. "And who art thou?" He hissed the words as if they were strange to his tongue.

  "One man," replied Yarak modestly, pleased with his stratagem. "Yet a mighty manslayer. The sword I carry is a sword of power."

  Behind him, the tribesmen breathed audibly and strained closer to hear. Yarak turned on them, touched the ivory hilt of his yataghan and shouted, "Tell me, jackals, what spirit rides in the night over these mountains when the sand dunes sound with the beat of drums?"

  "The spirit of Genghis Khan!" voices clamored.

  "True. And this is the sword of Genghis Khan, taken from the tomb of Genghis Khan!"

  His words brought instant silence. The tribesmen gaped at him, their hands on their mouths. Yarak put his hands on his hips proudly.

  "Thou?" yelled one. "That is a lie and a poor one."

  Gripping their rifles, they surged around him, staring at the ancient yataghan. "Our leader has the sword of Genghis Khan!" they chanted, and they pointed at the chieftain, who did not sit like a tribesman of the Gobi. "The power is in him. In the night, his eyes see. No bullet can harm him. Ai-a, all who follow him shall slay and be victorious over the Christians."

  The leader of the Dungans had indeed a sword different from any Yarak: had seen—long, in a black lacquer sheath, with a shining hilt.

  "From the place of the sun's rising, from Jih pen kuo, he has come," the Dungans cried. "These rifles he gave us, to slay the western Christians."

  Laughter shook the crowd. Yarak noticed that the rifles were serviceable, with a bolt action. He spat vigorously.

  "Bow down, Cossack," rasped the chieftain. "For I set my foot where the spirit horde stands guard. When the white spirit horse came, in the seventh moon, I took this sword from the grave of Genghis Khan. No enemy can stand before me. Bow down."

  Silently the seated man drew a blade of polished steel. Yarak felt a chill of fear. But he had no mind to bend his head, to have it cut off by that sword. He slid a glance toward the two Amrikans. They were empty-handed, their arms tied, and on the height behind them, there was no sign of soldiers or truck.

  "Then prove it!" he shouted. "A dog can bark, a lama can lie. I have the true sword. It is your head that will fall."

  He began to feel uneasy. The Dungans patted their hands on their hips, overjoyed by the challenge to their swordsman. The chieftain lifted the long shining blade of the sword gently and stepped forward arrogantly. The Dungans surged back. So did Yarak.

  Rather he jumped back, and swung himself into the saddle of the Kabarda pony. "Het," he shouted, "to the saddle, thou. Are we to fight like women, in the dirt?"

  So quickly had he moved that the Dungans had not been able to stop him mounting. Moreover, they appeared supremely confident in the prowess of their swordsman. That person hesitated, then swung himself not too easily into the saddle of his fine white horse.

  Instantly, Yarak rode at him, swinging the yataghan. As he suspected, the strange Japanese was a poorer rider than swordsman. Circling him, Yarak cut savagely, whirled the Kabarda and slashed again.

  Each blow fell against the rigid blade of the long, tapering sword. A chill of misgiving went through the Cossack. The stranger used the sword as if it were part of him. The razor point flashed at Yarak's belt, and the Cossack almost lost his seat. That sword had a power in it.

  Yarak felt afraid. He was tired and panting. The stranger pressed him inexorably. Yarak whirled the Kabarda, kicking the little horse. He would have to use his pony more than his sword.

  As he streaked away toward the hills, with the swordsman two lengths behind him, the greater part of the Dungans scrambled into their saddles and whipped after the fighters, yelping with excitement.

  Watching back as he rode, Yarak gripped the Kabarda with his knees. The little horse was strange to him, but nimble on its feet—racing with its head tossing up, alert. Yarak crossed himself with his sword hand and decided to risk a trick.

  Savagely he jerked the rein around and up. The startled horse missed stride and spun on its heels. With all the strength of his arm, Yarak pulled up its head.

  He pulled the rearing Kabarda around and full into the racing white horse that had no time to swerve. The Kabarda's hoofs struck into the head of the white horse. Yarak slashed down with the yataghan.

  This was the lava, an old saber trick of the Cossacks. The white horse fell heavily. The Japanese shot out of the saddle with his head half off. The blade of the yataghan had caught his neck. Hurriedly Yarak dismounted and caught up the strange sword.

  Waving the two weapons, he yelled at the oncoming Dungans, "Which sword has power? Which, now, is the sword of Genghis Khan?"

  Bending down from the saddle, the tribesmen glared at the body of their leader, with the blood running out of it. The power of magic had not protected him, who had given them rifles to slay these Westerners.

  Cra-ash! Something exploded sharply at the edge of the surging crowd. It was followed by the crack of high-powered rifles.

  Yarak jumped, then looked over his shoulder. Momentarily he had forgotten the other Amrikans. He saw them now.

  Over the ridge, two hundred yards away, one driver steered the truck. Beside him two riflemen advanced on foot. Two others were reloading the trench mortar hastily. Sergeant Lanihan's detail had all the appearance of the advance point of a strong force.

  "Het!" Yarak yelped.

  The second burst came full among the Dungans. This firepower stunned and awed them. As one man, they headed off into the sand dunes, lashing their horses. After that, it seemed only natural to Kitty that Captain Whittaker should sight a plane when it was no more than a speck on the vaulting skyline. It seemed only natural that he should plot its course, and that finally they should arrive at an American emergency landing field—a cluster of brown tents ranged along a clear stretch of clay, all ferried in by transport.

  Not until they had eaten canned soup and prunes and slept the clock around on real cots, not until Whittaker completed his sketch survey of the way they had come and showed it to the major commanding the field, not till then did Kitty realize that the captain had accomplished a small miracle.

  The major stared. "You came through the mountains?" he exclaimed incredulously. "From Kurdai to Luntai? By my map, it's impossible."

  "We had an excellent guide," Whittaker said. "He knew an old caravan route."

  "Great Scott!" The major beamed. "This means we can supply the field overland—by truck."

  Kitty heard the wind beating at the sand dunes with a roar like that of drums and she went out into the night to wait for Noble Whittaker. When he had finished with the major, he found her and she pointed out how bright the stars were.

  He peered up at them intently. "That's Orion," he said, "just south of here."

  Kitty stared at him for a moment and then smiled. For all he was a man of courage, he was also a man of maps. One day perhaps she might draw him a map, a different sort of map than any he was accustomed to reading, but he would follow it.

  She took his arm and said, "Let's find Yarak. We haven't thanked him."

  "Nor paid him," said Whittaker.

  It was not hard to find Yarak. Something like a free-for-all was taking place at the campfire, where most of the enlisted personnel of the field gathered around the gaunt Cossack who had taken his stand on a gasoline drum. Voices cracked out and fists were thrust up at him.

  On the drum beside him rested a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and another of gin, now empty, Whittaker observed. Above the tumult, Yarak waved the long curiously shaped sword of ancient workmanship. In the upraised fists of the American soldiers, Kitty sighted bank notes and Chinese silver.

  "He's auctioning off the sword," she laughed, "of that Japanese officer."

  The Phantom Caravan

  No war had come to the land where Usbekistan borders Afghanistan. No plane traversed the hard blue sky over the r
uins of Samarkand and no machines raised the red dust along roads where pack horses plodded. Fighting machines and petrol had been sucked away beyond the Volga and men of fighting age had followed them, leaving only obsolete machines in the vicinity. A rusted Italian machine gun or a Lebel single-shot rifle with cartridges fetched their weight in silver here, for they gave their owners power.

  While Soviet troops policed the railroad, the borderland of the hills served at night as a pathway for horse thieves and armed men of ill will. The Black Sheep Turkomans took to raiding again. And the name of Zara-fak, the Gold Finder, became a powerful one.

  Yarak the Cossack, journeying homeward to the west by horseback, had encountered the strength of Zarafak and was now considering its consequences ruefully. He sat on a park bench under silvery poplars over which shown the splendor of the blue-tiled dome and chewed meditatively on the stem of his cherry wood pipe. "When the Devil is afraid," he muttered disconsolately, "he sends a woman."

  It was unquestionably true. Regardless of the first mother, Eva, had not Kleopatra beguiled the good soldier Marka Antonius to his ruin so that he killed himself with his own saber? No doubt. And he, Yarak, formerly of the Savage Division in the old war and participant in his good sablianka upon the battle fronts of this new war had been beguiled likewise by the words of a yellow-haired girl who chewed sunflower seeds. Such woman as she and Kleopatra seduced men to sit on doorsteps of a home and think of cattle and mattress beds and children. That was how they tempted an otherwise right-thinking man.

  Yarak spat three times carefully, and went over in his mind the steps leading to his downfall.

  First his coming into Samarkand at moonrise, leading his horse, looking for vodka and companionship. He found no lighted shops or barracks or soldiers. Only, in this silent city, the shining blue dome arising from the poplar grove and having all the appearance of a palace. It struck Yarak as strange.

  Then he sighted this girl sitting on the doorstep of the small house, with her yellow hair unbound, weeping quietly.

  "Eh, say, girl," he demanded, "what has happened here? Is this a place of the dead?"

  It was the old city, she explained, wiping her face with her sleeve. The ruined city of Tamerlane, the Lame. Tamerlane, a limping Turkish conqueror, had built himself a palace with the loot of the world five centuries and a half ago. When he tired of war, he passed his time among the pleasure gardens.

  Yarak pondered the words of the girl, Praska, who sat here alone because her man was serving in the west. So the thought came to him. Why should he, Yarak, endure another Winter of war? He had wealth in his saddle roll. Like Tamerlane, he could settle down in an izba of his own, with smoked fish hanging to the rafters, a keg of vodka by the head of his bed, and a hawk on its perch by the door. He could pass his days so in luxury, perhaps hiring a bandura player to sing the old songs of the Cossack brotherhood.

  After all, he was old. Certain parts of his six-foot body ached when the Winter frost set in. Was it not better to sit like a nabob smoking his pipe on the sunny side of his house, than to live in the saddle like this, following after battles like a dog after a caravan? Certainly it was better.

  That was how the girl Praska put a thought into his head as if she had been a koldun, a magician.

  To think with Yarak was to act. At once he wanted to turn his property into money.

  "Eh, say," he asked, "where is a trader, a money changer?"

  "Over in this new city, by the station."

  Yarak peered at her curiously. "What makes you cry, girl?"

  Praska looked up at him with wet eyes. "Nothing," she said. "I'm not crying. Don't hang around here, grandfather."

  Full of his new thought, Yarak climbed into the saddle and put his horse to a trot. Passing the twin towers of a giant ruined mosque, he looked for the road out. And off in the moonlight he saw lanterns move.

  Heading toward it, he found, instead of a road, the wide crumbling gateway of a serai. Beyond the gateway moved man and animals. There were plenty of such deserted caravansary along the old roads here, but seldom with people in them. Entering, Yarak found a score of horses being loaded by men in black sheepskin hats—Turkomans, who were evidently preparing to take the road.

  He stopped because he had no desire to interfere with tribesmen who chose to be on the move at night. But the lantern moved over to him, and the man who held at it—whose massive fat was bound up in a shining blue khalat—demanded, "Well, what, Cossack?"

  "Nothing, brother," Yarak explained. "I am looking for a trader."

  "Dismount, then. For here is a buyer of goods."

  He pointed and Yarak saw, up on the balcony of the serai, a well-dressed European sorting papers into a box.

  Yarak presented himself before the master of the caravan with his pack. Out of the saddle roll he shook his wealth—bits of jade and carved ivory, American paper money, a blue enamel triptych from some forgotten church, a fine Afghan yataghan and other stuff he had acquired during his wandering in ways that he chose not to explain. In the wake of the war's devastation it was not hard to pick up wealth like this.

  "How much for the lot, in gold?" he asked.

  The trader looked at the jade and the triptych carefully, close to the light. He had a pale face like a moon.

  "Pay him twenty pounds, Yussuf" he said, his long fingers putting in the jade away in a box.

  "Gold," insisted Yarak, who knew how worthless most paper currencies were.

  The big man in the khalat showed his broken teeth in a grin. "Ai, Cossack—gold, for stolen articles?"

  The trader closed the box carefully, and spoke without expression. "Possession of gold is illegal, Cossack. It would mean the taste of a Soviet prison. You will be paid in good foreign currency. Look."

  The man called Yussuf counted out a sheaf of soiled bank notes, pinkish blue in color and ornamented with a woman's head. Yarak spat.

  "That dog won't bite," he snarled.

  Moon-face closed his box and locked it. "A bargain is a bargain," he said.

  Yussuf, grinning, picked up the lantern. Behind him, Yarak heard a familiar clack. Turning his head, he observed a Turkoman closing the breach of a sawed-off rifle. Quickly he went down to his horse. He did not want to lose the animal, which was a good one.

  The next morning he showed his beautiful engraved bank notes to an officer at the railroad station and discover that he had been paid in Syrian paper pounds which could not be used in Soviet territory and were worth little in any case. The officer wanted to know where Yarak got such money, and Yarak explained that he had found it in a deserted caravansary. The caravansary was, in truth, deserted that sunrise.

  So, thinking it over, Yarak blamed the girl Praska for his loss. Morosely he rode back to the little house by the tiled dome. He strode in through the door and stopped, surprised at what he saw. The main room, instead of a bed and furnishing, had only a row of empty glass cases and a chest with traces of gilt upon it, likewise empty. Wondering what sort of house this might be, he passed into the rear room, where he discovered Praska heating water for tea in a samovar. Beside the stove stood her cot, neatly made up. Evidently she lived in this kitchen.

  "What kind of nest is this?" he demanded.

  Not a nest, Praska informed him—a museum, closed since the war. She was, she explained, in charge of the valuable exhibits in the showcases, the bits of gold work and turquoise jewelry and several fine Korans, all belonging to the time of Tamerlane. But these exhibits had been stolen while she had been away yesterday evening at the railway station watching the train coming in.

  Yarak pondered this. "Eh," he ventured, "did you see the Turkoman horse caravan yesterday?"

  Praska shook her head. She had seen only Yarak. As for tribesmen, they would not have known about the exhibits. Whoever would have broken into the house for the old Korans and jewels from the tomb?

  "What tomb?" demanded Yarak.

  "This one." Praska nodded toward that tiled edifice under the towered d
ome. "The Gur Amur where Tamerlane is buried in his tomb."

  "But you said it was a palace."

  It was true, she explained, that Tamerlane started to build the mosques and palaces of Samarkand, now in ruins; but he died of a sickness before the city was finished, and he'd been buried there in the place now known as his tomb.

  "Eh, that's the truth of it," Yarak muttered. "When he turned his horse from the path of war and settled down he became sick and died."

  The kettle dropped from Praska's hand as she looked past Yarak, and the blood drained from her face as if the hand of a ghost had touched her.

  Yarak peered over his shoulder and beheld a stocky man coming up the path to the kitchen door. Coming slowly, dragging one leg, with a blanket roll on his shoulder. He wore infantry boots.

  "Michael!" gasped the girl.

  Past Yarak she flew, to be grasped in Michael's arms, her golden hair pressing against his shoulder. "Michael—you did not come on the train. I thought for months you did not come, and I thought—"

  "I came by road, riding trucks."

  Praska's eyes gleamed under the tangle of her hair and she flew around the kitchen, getting a bench for the limping man, pouring out hot tea for him fresh from the samovar. And when he explained that he had come on indefinite leave with the injury to his leg, it was as if new life coursed through her.

  "Glory to God," she cried. "Listen to the man! And I was thinking that he was off dancing with the Polish girls."

  The lines of the soldier's face shifted as he smiled. "Devilkin," he said. He rubbed his red thatch as he told how he had been injured while investigating the working of a new Niemtsev mine. In his pack he had some detonating mechanisms from captured mines brought back to show Praska, with some fringed Italian silk for a shawl for her. He had been two years at the war, seeing much of the world, Praska knew. And she knew that he would never walk far again with that leg.

  Michael limped with him along the path when Yarak went to mount his horse, and Praska brought along bread for the Cossack to take with him. When he undid his saddle pack to put in the two small Korans and a silver-guilt bracelet fell out. Yarak stared at them, puzzled, but the girl examined them and cried out. "Akh—from the museum!"

 

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