P?ts looked at Yevgeny and Mladenov and started to laugh. Mladenov scowled. "I do not see anything funny here, Anton Avgustovich," he growled. "Nothing."
"No?" P?ts said. "Here is the war between us, all at once forgotten because we have a worse problem. From my enemy, the man who gladly would have killed me half an hour ago, you've turned into my ally and my friend. Do you see no joke there?"
"Put so, maybe I do," Mladenov said. "When the choice is between fair land and no land, it makes the choice between fair land and better land seem of small importance, doesn't it?"
So it does, Iosef Trofimovich, so it does. Your leading men and mine need to sit down and talk things over, I think. Those nomads look damnably well armed. If we want to keep this valley for ourselves, we won't hold them off with words alone. We'll need all the guns we can get our hands on. . and we'll need to work together." The words left a bad taste in Pat's mouth, but he knew they were true.
So did Mladenov. "It shall be as you say, Anton Avgustovich." He looked no happier about the prospect than Pits was, but went on nonetheless: "We will need sentries at the mouth of the valley, to warn us if the nomads come. We have a few two-way radio sets, to get word quickly back to town-"
"Do you?" Pits said in surprise. "We tried to get some, but our applications went nowhere. Of course, we are not Russians, either." One more reason to be glad my people are not going to fight these Pamyat bastards, he thought. Walkie-talkies would have given them one more big edge. Fight the Russians. . he looked down at his watch. "I have to go, Iosef Trofimovich, right this minute, or my own people will start the war coming after me."
"Can't have that, not now," Mladenov said. "Shall I come with you, to start working out a rotation for sentries?"
"Come if you care to," P?ts answered. The Russian leader was no coward, not if he was willing to beard a band of armed and angry Estonians in their den. He would have been easier to dislike as a more thoroughgoing villain.
The Estonians were almost out of their den when Pits and Mladenov reached them. They were forming up by the flag in front of Pits' house. Some carried spears improvised from knives and poles, a couple bore hunting bows, while all those who owned firearms had them.
"Wait!" Pits shouted.
"Father of my wife," Konstantin Laidoner said in glad surprise. Then he saw who was with Pits. "Why have you brought the Russian here? We were all getting ready to come and rescue you." He sounded disappointed at missing the chance to fight. He was still a young man.
"I am here, as you see. And all of us, Estonians and Russians alike, have a worse enemy than any who lives in this valley." Pits used Russian so Mladenov could follow what he said. He went on, "I will let Iosef Trofimovich here speak of that."
Seeing the Russian leader as anything but a menace was new and different for the Estonians. Seeing him as someone who had important information, information that could actually help them, was not only different but difficult. But he spoke effectively and to the point-he did not lead his own community by accident. He finished, "You Estonians know I do not love you. I think you have acted unjustly by not sharing out the lands in this valley more fairly. Still, neither have you tried to enslave me or my people. That is what Isa Bektashi will do. If we don't beat back the nomads now, we lose all chance to quarrel among ourselves later."
The Estonians were not a people to show much of what they felt, not among themselves, still less to an outsider. They talked in low voices, using their own tongue. Finally Jaak Vilde switched to Russian: "Iosef Trofimovich, we are with you. As you say, we can always fight among ourselves. This other fight does not look likely to wait."
Mladenov crossed himself. By the gesture, he set himself apart once more from the Estonians, who were mostly Lutheran. Somehow, it did not matter now. P?ts said, "Let's start planning now, to work out how best we can hold what is ours."
Tallinn Valley's opening onto the steppe was several kilometers wide. Till now, that had not mattered; till now, there had not been enough people on the steppe for it to matter. But the gap was too big to fortify in a hurry. If the clan of Aydin attacked, they would have to be met inside the valley. The most sentries could hope to do was give early warning.
Accordingly, none of the young men who went out to stand watch carried guns-they were too vulnerable to being picked off by Tatar raiders, and the folk of the valley did not own enough firearms to risk them thus. The youngsters went forth proudly all the same. The Russians and Estonians who had rifles slung them on their backs as they went about their chores, ready to fight at a moment's notice.
But hour followed hour, and nothing happened. Cat's Eye joined Byers' Star in the sky, making the valley as light and bright as it ever became. Byers' Star slowly sank, leaving Cat's Eye alone in the sky for more than forty hours. Then Byers' Star returned and Cat's Eye sank. Finally, a hundred thirty hours after Byers' Star first rose, both it and Cat's Eye were gone from the sky-full night was back for another twenty-two hours.
That stretch worried Anton Pits-who could guess what deviltry the Tatars might try when no one could see what they were up to? At his urging, Mladenov doubled the number of patroling sentries. The Russian wanted to light watchfires through the darkness, but P?ts talked him out of it: "They'll let Bektashi's men see where we are but they won't do us a bit of good, looking out onto the steppe."
For all the farmers' precautions, Nikita Tukachevsky's relief could not find him when he came out to take his place. The word needed a while to filter back into Tallinn Town, for Tukachevsky had one of the valley's precious radios, which he was supposed to pass on to his relief. The Estonian who was to replace him had to track down the sentry to the west before he could send word to anyone in the valley that something was wrong.
Armed searchers went out at once, but found no sign of the luckless Tukachevsky until Cat's Eye returned to the sky. Pits was part of that search party. He carried his rifle at the ready, his hands tight on it in the nervous grip of a man who knows war only from stories.
"Over here," someone called, and Pits, a couple of hundred meters away, trotted through mixed grass and native Haven shrubbery to here. He heard how much noise he made as he ran, and knew he needed to do better-he sounded like a herd of drunken muskylopes with the mating frenzy upon them.
Tukachevsky lay sprawled and dead. His trousers were around his ankles, and he had been mutilated. P?ts sucked in a sick breath. A word was carved in sinuous Arabic script on the young Russian's forehead. Something bloody had been stuffed into his mouth. P?ts reached down to pull it out. He found he was holding Tukachevsky's severed penis. With a groan, he dropped it by the corpse. His stomach heaved; he fought against being sick.
More searchers, Estonians and Russians both, came up and formed a circle around the sentry's maltreated body. Some looked frightened, some looked fierce. Most seemed both at the same time. Several Russians made the sign of the cross.
Pits said, "This is a warning to us. The Tatars think to make us afraid with it." He remembered the feel of what he had just touched. He was afraid, all right. But he did not let that show in his voice: "The truth is, it warns us what we can expect if we give in to them-and not just we men, but our wives and daughters, too. You and you and you, take this poor lad back to Tallinn Town for burial. The rest of us, well, we will watch and we will wait. The time for revenge will come."
The men nodded, one by one. The fear had gone from most of their faces, and some of the ferocity as well. They just looked grim, as men will do when they face a dangerous job from which they cannot escape. Pits had seen that look on old pictures of veteran soldiers from the days of the Great Patriotic War. He'd thought it obsolete. Now he suspected he wore it himself.
The nomads gave the folk of Tallinn Town another twenty hours or so to mull over the fate of Nikita Tukachevsky. Then horns blared an alarm from the central square of the town. A bonfire was kindled there, its column of smoke a warning the enemy was on the way. Anton P?ts was in his garden a few hundred meters o
ut of town when the alarm went up. He swore in Russian and Estonian, got up from his hands and knees, and looked north.
Bektashi's men did nothing to conceal their presence. On the contrary-fires flared as they threw torches into the fields. Pits swore again, horribly. Even if the nomads were beaten, Tallinn Valley would suffer on account of them.
The forward assembly point for the farmers was a couple of kilometers north of Tallinn Town. Alternating between a jog and a fast walk, P?ts hurried in that direction. By the time he got close, the rifle on his shoulder seemed to have doubled its weight. Other men hurried up with him-everyone who had a gun, and a good many who did not.
"What happened?" P?ts asked.
Sergei Izvekov said, "The radio let out a squawk. One of the sentries-I think it was your Eugen"-he pronounced it Evgen, trying to make it into the Russian Yevgeny-"said 'Help! They're-' and then that channel went dead." And Eugen, a good man with three little children, dead with it, Pits thought.
"Form a firing line," Iosef Mladenov shouted. "Take cover where you can, and make every shot count. Think of your mother, think of your wife-"
"If that doesn't do it, think of your neighbor's wife," somebody broke in. Mladenov tried to glare every which way at once to find out who had interrupted his martial address. He had no luck. The tension-breaking laughter that rose from the amateur warriors said the gibe had done some good.
P?ts found a place behind a boulder too big to have been cleared out of the field. Methodical as always, he checked to make sure his weapon had a round in the chamber and that the safety was off. Then he peered round the rock to see how close the Tatars were.
A kilometer of ground still separated horsemen from defenders. Bektashi's men were not advancing all out; they paused every so often to light more fires or simply to ride this way and that through the fields, trampling down long swathes of grain.
From five meters or so off to Pi?ts' left, Sergei Izvekov called, "You see, Anton Avgustovich, they are no more soldiers than we. Bandits, yes, acting the hooligan for the sport of it, but not really soldiers."
At the far right end of the farmers' line, someone started shooting at the nomads. At that range, he couldn't have hit a farmhouse, let alone a rapidly moving man on horseback. Mladenov's bull roar called down curses on the nervous rifleman's head.
Bektashi's men whooped and came on, spreading out into a skirmish line as they drew close enough for a gunshot to have some chance of striking home. Pits thought there might have been fifty of them, about as many as the men they attacked. The nomads began firing too, some of them blazing away with weapons on full automatic. That meant baa shooting, but it also meant a lot of lead in the air. Through the noise of the gunfire came wounded men's screams and the shouts of the Tatars: "Allah! Allah! Allah!"
Pits peeked out from behind his boulder, fired at the nearest leather-clad horseman. He missed. Two bullets spannged off the stone close by, throwing stinging chips into his face. He lurched backwards, worked the bolt, peeped out again. Now the nomad was terrifyingly close. P?ts snapped off another shot, heard a scream. The steppe pony the nomad rode went down as if it had run headlong into a fence. P?ts shouted in triumph.
But the nomad had been in the saddle since boyhood, and knew how to take a fall. He lost his rifle, but hit rolling and came to his feet only a couple of meters from the boulder. At that point-blank range, P?ts fired-and missed. Before he could work the bolt again, the nomad pulled out a knife and jumped on him.
P?ts went over backwards. His gun flew out of his hands. He screamed as the nomad's knife grated along a rib; had the fellow stabbed two centimeters higher or lower, he would have been silent forevermore. He grabbed the Tartar's knife wrist with his left hand, tried to get his right on his opponent's throat. The nomad bit him, down to the bone. He screamed again.
He jerked up his knee. The Tatar twisted aside before it could slam into his crotch. In the tiny part of his rational mind that was still functioning, Pits realized that, while Bektashi's men might be bandits rather than soldiers, even bandits were apt to know more of hand-to-hand combat than farmers. Rather more to the point, he realized he was probably going to get killed.
A rifle roared, so close to P?ts' ear that for an instant he thought it was the sound of his own death. But it was the nomad who jerked and convulsed, who splashed P?ts with blood and brains and bits of bone, whose bowels let go, adding the manure pile to the battlefield stenches of burnt cordite and burnt meat.
P?ts threw the corpse aside, scrambled up to his hands and knees-he remembered enough of where he was not to stand up. Sergei Izvekov was less cautious, or more foolish. Seeing as he'd just blown out the Tartar's brains, Pits could hardly complain. He did shout, "Get down!" A startled expression crossed Izvekov's face, as if he suddenly realized what he'd just done. He threw himself flat. "Spasebo" P?ts added more quietly: "Thank you."
"Nichevo," Izvekov answered.
P?ts thumped him on the back, reclaimed his own rifle, and looked out to see what was happening in the bigger fight. A lot of horses were down, and a lot of men. A couple of nomads had managed to get around the farmers' right flank. That would have been a lot worse had anything much remained of the rest of the plainsmen's assault. But almost all the riders there were either dead or galloping north as fast as their horses and muskylopes could take them. Well-led soldiers will accept hideous losses for the sake of a decisive victory. Bandits, as a rule, will not.
As P?ts watched, one of the Tatars off to the right slid from his muskylope and crashed to the ground. His rifle bounced away. He made no move to go after it. He would never move again. That was all the other would-be enfilader needed to see. He wheeled his mount and dashed after his comrades. He reeled in the saddle before he got out of rifle range, but kept his seat and kept on riding.
Sergei Izvekov had been watching, too. "Bozhemoi," he said softly. "We won." He sounded astonished.
"So we did," Pits said. He didn't sound anything but amazed himself. His ribs and his fingers started hurting again. He reminded himself to use an antitetanus ampoule for the bite. The nomad had had jaws like a cliff lion's. Pits looked down at his late foe's ruined head. That Tatar wouldn't bite anybody else, nor would his clans mates. They'd broken teeth on something harder than they'd expected.
All along the farmers' firing line, men stood up and exchanged congratulations with their neighbors. No, not all along the line: four or five men were down. Some thrashed on the ground, some lay still. Pits ground his teeth. Only in stories did the heroes win their victories without loss.
Now that the shooting was done, the cries of wounded animals and men dominated the little battlefield. Easily recognizable even from a couple of hundred meters away because of his blocky shape, Iosef Mladenov went out to a nomad who was clutching a shattered leg and shrieking. The Russian's rifle barked once. The nomad was quiet after that.
Mladenov headed for the next injured Tatar. "Wait, Iosef Trofimovich," Pits called as he hurried out toward the Russian.
Mladenov's face clouded over. "Don't bleat to me of mercy, Anton Avgustovich," he growled. "I won't hear a word you say. These damned Tatars don't understand the meaning of the word, and they'd only take it for weakness. And after what they did to poor Nikita, I wouldn't give it to them if they did understand. A bullet's a better mercy than they ought to have."
Pits did not answer, not with words. He raised his own rifle to his shoulder, aimed at the nomad writhing on the ground, shot him through the head. The plainsman jerked and twitched for a few more seconds, then lay still. Mladenov gaped at P?ts, his pale eyes wide and staring. "You shouldn't have to do it all yourself," Pits said.
Taking turns, they finished four more of the attackers. When the nasty job was done, Mladenov said, "As well we did not come to blows ourselves, Estonian. I thought you and your people softer than you prove to be."
"As well we did not come to blows," Pits said, and let it go at that. He knew the bulk of the firepower that had defeated Bektas
hi's clan had belonged to the Russians. As if he had every right to it, he picked up the automatic rifle that lay beside the last dead Tatar. The fellow carried several spare magazines, and cartridges for two or three more on his bandoliers. Pits appropriated the ammunition, too. He felt Mladenov's eyes on him all the while, but the Russian kept his mouth shut.
Sergie Izvekov came up. The young man gulped a couple of times as he looked at the pool of blood under the dead nomad's shattered skull, but he'd caused the same kind of carnage not an hour before, to save Pits' life. In any case, battlefield courage was not the kind he was looking for now. He gulped again, then said, "Anton Avgustovich, may I speak to you about your daughter Ana?"
Pits peered down at the shorter Russian. When that long, measuring stare failed to send Izvekov fleeing, the Estonian let out a long sigh and said, "Speak, Sergei Dmitrovich. I should be poor-spirited indeed to deny you now. If Ana cares to have you, you will be part of my family, and a welcome part."
Mladenov boomed laughter and waggled a sausage-like finger under P?ts' nose. "You see, Anton Avgustovich, one way or another, we Russians shall end up with some of your land."
Pits started to scowl. Then he looked round the battlefield. Estonians and Russians were embracing like brothers, strolling here and there together, gaping at the bodies of Tatars they had slain, trying to run down riderless horses and muskylopes. Had Bektashi's men not come, the only way the two sides in Tallinn Valley would have looked at each other was over open sights. And the plainsmen, though beaten now, were still out there on the steppe. Pits eyes swung north. Bektashi's men or some new clan might swoop down at any time.
"If we cannot live as neighbors, Iosef Trofimovich, we will live as slaves," Pits said. "What's the American proverb? 'We must all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately'? Something like that. So better Sergei gets his land like this than manured with Estonian blood."
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