The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four

by Louis L'Amour

  She accepted some tea, drinking from a bowl that had come to Tibet from India in the dower of a princess, more than a thousand years before. In those years, Tibet had controlled most of western China, as well as part of India and Kashmir.

  Abruptly, without waiting for the others to assemble, Norba declared himself. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we will move to Tosun Nor to pasture upon the old lands.”

  There was silence as he looked around the yurt. That silence held for a slow minute, and then Kulan said one word.

  “No.”

  The word was definite, the tone clear, the challenge accepted.

  Norba’s face flushed with anger, but Kulan spoke before Norba could frame a word.

  “There is drought at Tosun Nor. The grass lies yellow and dead, the air is filled with dust. The beds of streams are cracked earth. We must go to the mountains, to the Yur-tse.”

  Again Norba prepared to speak, but Kulan interrupted. “My father is dead, but I am my father’s son. We rode upon the high grass together and he taught me what I must do.”

  For the first time, he looked at Norba. “You are deba of two hundred tents. You may ride with us or go to Tosun Nor. I would advise you to come with us.”

  Norba looked around at his followers. “We are men, and not to be led by a boy. It is I who shall lead the Khang-sar. When you are of an age to lead,” he added slyly, “you may lead.”

  Tsan-Po spoke. “The boy is his father’s son. Leadership falls upon him.”

  Norba got to his feet. “Enough! I say that I shall lead. I say it, and my men say it.”

  Kulan arose, and Shambe and Anna arose with him. Anna held her gun in her hand. “The Ku-ts’a stand without,” Shambe said, “and they follow Kulan…Unless all the chieftains say otherwise.”

  Norba’s lips flattened against his big teeth, and for an instant Anna thought he would strike Kulan despite the fact that the bodyguards surrounded the tent. The Ku-ts’a numbered fifty-eight chosen men, the hereditary guard of the jyabo. Norba had not expected the Ku-ts’a. With the jyabo dead, he had believed they would accept the situation.

  He slammed his sword back into its scabbard. “We will go to Tosun Nor,” he said. “You are fools.”

  “Go, if you will,” Kulan replied, “and those who survive are welcome to return. Our herds will be fat upon the long grass of the limestone mountains.”

  With a pang, Anna realized that Kulan was no longer a boy. The discipline had been strict and the training harsh, but he was every inch a king. Yet she was impatient, for their time was short, and if the plane were discovered, the fliers would be killed and they would be condemned to more fruitless, wasted years.

  Alone at last, she said to him, “What was all that about the drought at Tosun Nor?”

  “It had been rumored, so while you talked to the old man of your people, I asked the other. He spoke of dense clouds of dust high in the heavens, and of sheep and horses lying dead from starvation and thirst.”

  He paused. “It is well that Norba goes, for when he returns, if he returns, his power will be broken.”

  He glanced at her slyly, his face warming with a smile. “My mother taught me to listen, to question when in doubt, and to keep my thoughts until the time for speaking.”

  After Kulan was asleep, she went outside the yurt and stood alone under the stars. There was moonlight upon the snows of the God Mountain, reflected moonlight that seemed born from some inner glory within the mountain itself.

  She thought of home, of the quiet college town and the autumn leaves falling. It had been almost twenty years, but tomorrow they would fly over the mountains to India. To a fine hotel, a room of her own, a hot bath, and a real bed…it was impossible to imagine such things still existed.

  For fifteen years she had been virtually a prisoner. True, Lok-sha had treated her well, and she had been respected among the Go-log, but their ways were strange, and her nights had been given up to dreaming of home.

  The thought of Norba returned. If Kulan was gone, he would be in control, and would probably lead the Khang-sar Go-log to disaster. Lok-sha had always said he was a stubborn fool.

  No matter. It was now or never. It was impossible that another opportunity would occur, for travel was restricted. No Europeans or Americans would be flying over this country. It was her last chance.

  She looked around at the sleeping encampment. She would miss it. Lok-sha, despite their differences of background, had been a superior man. If he had been slow to appreciate her feelings, there had been no cruelty in him.

  The icy peak was austere in its bath of moonlight; it was taller than Everest, some said, yet it gave an impression of bulk rather than height. It was no wonder the Go-log called it the God Mountain.

  Tsan-Po was walking toward her. “Do you go tomorrow?”

  She had ceased to be startled by his awareness of things. “Yes.”

  “You have been long away…does someone await you there?”

  “No.”

  “We will miss you, and we will miss Kulan.”

  “He goes to a great land. He will do well, I think.”

  “Here he is a king. Ours is a small king, but even a small king is still a king.”

  She felt the reproof of his tone, and together they watched the moonlight on Amne Machin. “He will make a strong man,” the lama said, “a stronger man and a better leader than Lok-sha.”

  She was surprised. “Do you really believe that?”

  “You have taught him much, and he has character. We Go-log face a trying time, for as the world changes, even we must change.

  “Kulan has a sense of the world. You taught him of your land and of Europe, and I have told him of India, where I worked as a young man. He is schooled in the arts of war and statecraft, and I believe it is in him to be a great leader.”

  He was silent, then added, “Your country could use a friend here.”

  “Do you believe I am wrong to take him away?”

  “We need him,” Tsan-Po replied simply, “and he needs you. For several years yet, he will need you.”

  The lama turned away. “It is late.” He took a step, then paused. “Beware of Norba. You have not finished with him.”

  When morning dawned, they rode swiftly to the hidden trucks. What Lok-sha planned to do with the trucks, she did not know, but presumably he intended to use them as a trap for Chinese soldiers.

  She started the truck with difficulty for the motor was cold. There was no road, but the turf was solid, and she had driven on the prairie during her childhood in Montana. The old Army six-by-six was no problem.

  Kulan followed, holding off to one side and leading her horse.

  Keeping to low ground and circling to avoid gullies or patches of rock, she needed all of an hour to reach the plane.

  The pilot and Dr. Schwarzkopf rushed to the tailgate and started to unload the cans. As soon as the truck was empty, Anna drove back for a second truck, and by the time she had returned, the cans of the first had been emptied into the tanks of the plane.

  Yet they had scarcely begun on the second load when Shambe came down off the ridge where he had been on watch. Kulan, also watching from a quarter of a mile away, wheeled his mount and raced back at a dead run, drawing his rifle from its scabbard.

  “Norba comes,” Shambe said, “with many men.”

  Schwarzkopf dropped his jerry can and started for his rifle, but Anna’s gesture stopped him. “Finish refueling,” she said, and when he hesitated, “Doctor, put that gun down and get busy!”

  Kulan swung his pony alongside her as she mounted, and Shambe drew upon the other side. They sat together, awaiting the oncoming riders.

  Norba’s horse reared as he drew up, a hard pleasure in his eyes. “So…you are traitors. I shall kill you.”

  Anna Doone’s heart pounded heavily, yet she kept all emotion from her face. Her son’s life, as well as her own, was at stake.

  “These men are our friends. We help them on their way,” she said.


  “And I shall decide who is and is not a traitor,” Kulan added.

  From behind them the pilot said, “One more can does it.”

  Anna’s heart lifted. Behind her was the plane that could take her home, the rescue of which she had dreamed for fifteen years. The time was here, the time was now.

  The sky beckoned, and beyond the mountains lay India, the threshold to home.

  “Go with them, Mother.” Kulan’s eyes did not turn from Norba. “I cannot, for these are my people.”

  Her protest found no words. How often had she taught him that kingship was an obligation rather than a glory?

  Her eyes swung around the semicircle of savage faces, and then for one brief instant the dream remained, shimmering before her eyes: a warm quiet house, a hot bath, meals prepared from food from a market, life without fear of disease or crippling disfigurement, life without war.

  “Dr. Schwarzkopf,” she said, “you will leave your rifles and ammunition, they are in short supply here.”

  “If you are going,” Kulan said, “you must go now.”

  “If these are your people, Kulan, then they are my people also.”

  The winding caravan of Norba’s people appeared, heading north toward Tosun Nor. She should have remembered they would come this way.

  Dr. Schwarzkopf brought the weapons and the ammunition. “You will not come with us, then?”

  “I can’t. This is my son.”

  “You will die,” Norba said. His eyes flickered over the three he hated—the wife of Lok-sha, the leader of the Ku-ts’a, and the boy who stood between him and the kingship.

  Norba’s rifle started to lift, and Shambe’s started up with it, but Kulan put out a hand to stop the movement, then stepped his horse toward Norba and looked into his eyes.

  “I am jyabo,” he said. “I am your king.”

  For an instant Norba’s rifle held still, then slowly it lowered. With an oath, Norba whirled his horse and dashed away, followed by his men.

  Behind them the motors broke into a roar, and throwing up a vast cloud of dust, the plane rolled off, gathered speed, then soared up and away, toward India, toward home.

  “You should have let me kill him,” Shambe said.

  “No, Shambe,” Kulan replied, “many go to die, but those who remain will remember that I spoke truth.”

  Three abreast, they rode to the crest of the ridge and halted. The caravan of Norba’s followers moved north toward the great lake known as Tosun Nor, moved toward drought and death.

  Anna Doone, born in Montana, looked beyond them to a bright fleck that hung in the sky. Sunlight gleamed for an instant on a wingtip…then it winked out and was gone, leaving only a distant mutter of engines that echoed against the mountains.

  May There Be a Road

  Tohkta looked at the bridge suspended across the gorge of the Yurung-kash. After four years, the bridge hung again, and now, at last, he could go to his betrothed, to Kushla.

  At this point the gorge was scarcely a hundred feet wide, but black cliffs towered into the clouds above it, even as they fell sheer away hundreds of yards below. Down those cliffs came the trails that approached the bridge on either side. From where the bridge came into view from above, it seemed the merest thread…a thin line for which the eye must seek and seek again.

  Scarcely four feet wide, the bridge was built of their handmade rope, of slats cut from pine forests, and of thin planks laid across the slats. With every gust of wind the bridge swayed, but those who had built it hoped that it would be their lifeline to the outside world.

  Tohkta’s people were of the mountains, yet once each year they had descended to the oasis towns at the desert’s edge, taking the furs, the wool and hides, for which they were known. The gold they sometimes took was a secret thing. In the timeless kingdom of their mountain valleys the bridge was their link to the future.

  Only once in all the years their tribal memory encompassed had the bridge not been there, hanging five hundred feet above the tumbling white water. And for too long had Tohkta’s people been isolated by its loss.

  Four…almost five years before there had come a great shaking of the earth when the mountains raised higher, and steam and hot water gushed from newly made cracks. There had been a grinding of rock when the teeth of the earth were gnashed together. In the midst of it, the pinnacle that supported their bridge had toppled from the far side of the Yurung-kash into the gorge below.

  There followed years of struggle against the high rocks and the torrent, years of terrible work to replace their bridge. Fields still had to be tilled and flocks tended, but two men had been dashed to death on the jagged rocks below when they fell from their ropes. Yet now the bridge was done.

  The Kunlun Mountains rim the northern edge of Tibet, hanging above the deserts of Sinkiang, and are among the loneliest of the world’s mountain ranges. Long, long ago when Tohkta’s grandfather was a boy, a rare caravan still ventured along the ancient track that led from Sinkiang across Tibet and through the Himalayas to India itself, passing close to Mount Kailas, sacred to Buddhists.

  For centuries that ancient track had been almost abandoned. Only yak hunters, as wild and strange as the creatures they hunted, used it now, or an occasional herdsman taking his flock to secret pasturage in the high mountain valleys.

  Tohkta sat his horse beside his grandfather, Batai Khan, chieftain of their small tribe of fifty-six tents. This was a proud day, for today Tohkta rode to claim his bride from her father, Yakub, a wealthy Moslem trader. He glanced at his grandfather with pride, for the old man sat his horse like a boy despite his almost one hundred years. Fierce and fiery as always, the Khan was the oldest among a people known for their great age and their great strength.

  Few outsiders ever came to know the mountain Tochari, remnants of a proud, warlike race that had ruled most of eastern Turkestan and much of western China. In ages past they had carried their banners against Mongol and Chinese, against Tungan and Turk, against the Tatar and Hun.

  Slowly the column of twenty riders and their pack animals crossed the swinging bridge, and Batai Khan did not start up the trail until all were safely across.

  “Yol Bolsun!” he called out, waving to the people of the village who lined the switchback trail on the other side of the gorge. It was an old greeting to those who rode the mountain trails: “May There Be a Road!”

  And now, for the first time in four long years, there was a road. The home of the Tochari was an island in mountains, cut off by the deep gorges of the Yurung-kash and the Keriya, and at its ends by impassable slopes. Within there lay more than one hundred square miles of grassy valleys, forest glades, waterfalls, and grass-covered mountain pastures. It was an isolated paradise among the snow-covered peaks, but now it was isolated no longer.

  TOHKTA WAS IMPATIENT. Kushla awaited in the ancient oasis town of Kargalik, and how many were the nights he had remained awake to dream of her? Batai Khan and Yakub had arranged the match, but since their eyes first met, neither Tohkta nor Kushla had thoughts for another.

  Yet four full years had gone by when no word could be received from her, nor sent to her.

  “She will have forgotten me,” Tohkta said gloomily. “It has been forever.”

  “She was a child,” Batai Khan replied, “now she will be a woman, and so much the better. You are not forgotten, believe me.” He glanced around at his handsome grandson. “I, who know women, say it. You have been a dream to her, and who can forget a dream?”

  In the days that followed the finishing of the bridge Tola Beg, an ancient yak hunter, had been the first to cross, and he brought strange news. Chinese soldiers of a new kind had come to Sinkiang and to Tibet. The Dalai Lama had fled to India, and soldiers were in Khotan and Kargalik as well as Lhasa. People had been driven from their farms and their flocks to work upon a new road, harnessed like yak or camels.

  “Do not go, Batai Khan.” Tola Beg peered across the fire from his ancient, rheumy eyes, his skin withered and weathere
d by wind and cold, darkened by wind and sun. “They will imprison you and seize your goods.”

  “It is the time for the marriage of Tohkta.”

  “There is danger. The Chinese seek the ancient track to India but it is not India they want; it is the men of our mountains they would enslave.” Tola Beg gulped his yak-butter tea noisily, as was the custom. “They respect nothing and they have no God. The mosques and lamaseries are closed and the lamas driven to work in the fields. The prayer wheels are stilled and there is a curse on the land.”

  “I can go alone,” Tohkta said. “I will take the gold and go for Kushla.”

  “We are Tochari.” Batai Khan spoke with dignity. “Does a khan of Tochari go like a thief in the night to meet his betrothed?”

  They were Tochari. That was the final word among them. Tohkta knew the history of his people, and much more had been told him by an Englishman. In ages past it was said some of his people had migrated from Central Asia, going westward to become the Greeks and the Celts. Others had gone into northern India, to settle there, driven by the Hiung Nu, known to western nations as the Hun.

  The Englishman had dug in ancient refuse piles along the ruins of the Great Wall, searching for bits of wood or paper on which there was writing. He had told Tohkta these fragments would piece together the history of the area, and of the Tochari. He glanced at Tohkta’s dark red hair and green eyes, a coloring not uncommon among these people of the mountains, and said the Tochari were a people who made history.

  Batai Khan had rebuked him gently. “We know our past, and need not dig in dung piles for it. If you would know it, too, come sit by our fires and our bards will sing for you.”

  And now they rode to claim the bride of Tohkta, for a khan of the Tochari must ride with warriors at his back and gold to consummate the union. Raw and cold was the weather, for the season was late. Soon the high passes would be closed, and the mountain basins would brim full with snow.