by Harold Lamb
Even while his mind raced, he was aware of the servant edging out of the door beside him.
"Greet the Mullah Ismail and—and you know the others—for me," he told Paul. "Tell them I am not the spokesman of my government. I have no authority to be here. I am their friend, only that——"
As Paul interpreted, Jacob thought: their faces are blank as Indians', and I am speaking as if to Navahos or Apaches; yet their faces are like mine, and they are children. How can I tell them the truth? And with a sudden impulse he spoke as if to his own kindred. "You have been shut up in these hills of yours. You do not realize that the great war is over, because it has come here into your valleys in another form that is not the war you understand but the working out of schemes."
They were shut off from communication with the outer world, yet within a stone's throw a radio was sending reports of their actions to cities beyond the mountains.
"America knows nothing about you. You have sent no spokesman to us. It will be a long time before the outer world knows the truth of what is happening here, and until that time comes, there is nothing you can do but unite, and keep your arms without using them, and wait."
They had caught the appeal in his voice, and Ismail raised his head. Paul smiled for the first time. "The Mullah says that waiting is bitter for wounded men, but its fruits may be sweet for their children."
Before Jacob could go on, one of the enclosure guards pushed past him and called out something. As one man, the Kurds stirred, and the Ghazi strode out the door with his followers after him.
Ismail, passing Jacob, spoke briefly.
"He asks," Paul interpreted gravely, "why America, which has made planes and guns for all the nations, has sent nothing to the Kurds?"
In his anxiety the Mullah had not waited for a reply. Outside the door, they were staring beyond the camp at the dark line of the eastern trail. A half mile away, on rising ground, a convoy of six trucks had halted. These were the vehicles bringing to Mullah Ismail's army the weapons promised by Soviet agents, and they had arrived on time. Evidently the drivers were cautious about approaching a strange encampment without an invitation.
"If they would only stay out there," Paul muttered, his glance searching the steps to the summit, where four men were descending slowly.
Out of the corner of his eye Jacob saw Major Omelko run into the enclosure gate toward the horse lines.
Two shots cracked and echoed from the rock. Jacob was turning to try to place them, when the knots of men around him sprang into action.
"Stay here!" Paul shouted at him, and ran for the gate, toward the bell tower.
Near the tower door a crowd revolved upon itself, within its center the swirl of fighting. There had been struck the spark that had set off the explosion of fury in the encampment. The teamsters who had taken down the bell had been attacked by Herki riflemen and shots had been fired.
Once aroused, the tribesmen acted with silent speed; they rushed at the Russian guards, snatching away their rifles; at the bell they threw and tied the workmen; at the wire fence they leaped over or swept into the gate, disarming every man with a weapon. Only the veteran Assyrians, alert at the outbreak of fighting, kept together and held off the tribesmen with their bayonets. Daniel had started his detachment toward shelter, making for the empty cinema house.
When they were inside, the Assyrians closed and locked the door and manned the windows, while the Herki riflemen hesitated outside.
The Mullah was mounting a horse, trying to get a clear sight of what was happening beyond the enclosure, while keeping his men from attacking the Assyrian detachment. So far, Jacob realized, very few men had been hurt. It had been a flare-up of tempers on both sides, and the powerful tribesmen had disarmed the more sluggish guards in less than five minutes. Helpless to do anything himself, he started back to find Paul.
Unnoticed because he carried no weapon, Svetlov had hurried over to the light truck, where the radio operator watched from the step.
"The fools," muttered the operator. "What do they want of twenty rifles? They could have had as many heavy machine guns by evening and a battery of anti-tank babies as well. Now they've done themselves out of a nice gift. Unless—" His quick eye caught a movement along the horse line, and he kicked Svetlov. "Ilia, warn that crazy Cossack. He ought to inform the convoy. Orders are, no force unless necessary. And no massed firing. Stir yourself!"
Agitated, Svetlov plowed through the snow with an ominous sense of responsibility. There was the devil to pay, and he had to repeat an order. The order was that Omelko must inform the convoy what to do. When he reached Omelko, the Cossack had saddled a horse and was mounting. Svetlov coughed, and cried hoarsely. "Major—have to warn you. The convoy! There's no force to be——"
"Save your breath, Ilia."
Avoiding the anxious messenger, Omelko swung his horse toward the gate. Unlike Svetlov, he was not agitated, but he was angry. Because the bell had been hauled down, his men had been mauled, and when one had fired a shot, their weapons had been snatched by the devils of tribesmen. Force! There was force enough in the convoy to give the Kurds the lesson they needed. Their Mullahs could argue about it afterward, but he, Omelko, meant to bring in that convoy prepared for retaliatory action. Out there the guards on the trucks were front-line troops who knew how to handle a mob. And the Cossack turned his horse out of the gate at a gallop.
A fine rider, he avoided a knot of tribesmen and threaded through the tents toward the east. Instinctively as he rode he drew his revolver, watching behind him.
A dozen Kurds appeared, mounted, their ponies jumping rocks and making fast time over the snow. A bullet cracked over him. The Cossack swung his right arm back and began to reply to the firing.
From the rise near the shrine Jacob, searching for Paul, heard the faint crack of the weapons. The horsemen pursuing the one rider on the road seemed to move very slowly over the surface of the valley. Except for the distant explosions, it might have been a friendly race. More Kurds were streaming out, mounted, from the encampment to join it.
On the distant ridge, where the trucks waited, more rapid movement took place. Black specks descended, two or three together, and lay down in the snow. With mechanical precision, they formed a line on the crest of the rise. Two trucks also moved up beside the first at the head of the column.
Thereupon the knoll waited, without movement. The single rider ascended toward it, and the moment's silence struck chill into Jacob's body. It was too quiet on the knoll.
Then he heard the faint metallic chattering. The group of pursuers fell apart. The men and horses seemed to roll in the snow. Three of the Kurds turned and started back. Then they also sank down and remained still.
A sigh went through the tribesmen on the knoll by Jacob. "Az Kurmanjam!" one cried, jerking up his rifle. As if drawn by a common longing, of love and hatred, they hastened away, avoiding women who ran out from the tents to hold to them. In the clear spaces men were mounting into saddles eagerly, dreading to be slow in joining the rush that was moving like a flood through the encampment. This flood of riders turned toward the east.
Jacob sighted Ismail for a moment in the dark mass of horsemen. The Mullah tried at first to check the rush of his tribesmen into the plain; when the mass went on, he went with it.
Without a rifle, Badr ran beside the Mullah's stirrup.
In their gay jackets and flying sheepskins the men of the Herki and the Havaband and the Baradust galloped toward the stretch of valley that lay, open and shelterless, between them and the knoll.
"They have seen their kinsmen killed," said Paul. He had climbed to the shrine by Jacob to watch, and when the massed riders moved out from the tents, he sat down, his arms on his knees as if not knowing what to do.
Out in the plain there must have been two thousand riders, Jacob thought. Those from the Azerbaijani camp had followed after the Mullah's small army. Except for a few women and servants the camps of the Kurds had emptied into the plain, where the ho
rsemen were ranging themselves into two long lines. In this rush forward Mullah Ismail and the Ghazi had forgotten their rivalry.
The double line began to move at a slow trot toward the knoll.
On that ridge some forty men lay quietly around the heavy machine guns, adjusting ammunition belts while waiting for the word of command. They looked very much alike, the bones standing out in their faces, their fingers deft in ministering to the steel machines. Since most of them were Siberians from a regiment that had been decorated for remaining under fire across the river at Stalingrad, they wasted no motion in readying their steel machines. They were picked men, selected for this trip to instruct the ignorant tribesmen in the use of these machines.
Seated in the middle truck of the first three vehicles, the senior sergeant, also a Siberian, waited for Omelko to give an order. At the outset the sergeant, when he had observed the officer pursued by a few tribesmen, had instructed the crew of one gun to fire a burst over the heads of the Kurds to stop them. But the tribesmen had kept on, and had been killed by the next burst.
Now the sergeant waited for the major to give the order. Automatically the sergeant estimated, while he waited, that there were two full regiments of horsemen attempting to charge their position on the ridge—more than two thousand men moving at a rapid pace against sixteen guns and forty men. But these Kurds rode knee to knee in regular lines, making an admirable target of themselves.
That target grew within the Cossack's vision. Across just such a stretch of snow he had watched other enemies in gray moving.
"One dose and they'll show their tails," he grunted; then something hard and urgent pressed into his brain. "Give it to them!" he shouted.
Into the sergeant's mind flashed the thought that he himself had tried a warning volley, without result; but when he turned to tell this to the major, from long habit he shouted the order to the waiting gunners instead.
In his excitement he forgot to give the range. The experienced gun crews, however, had estimated that for themselves.
Instead of breaking asunder at the first laceration of the steel that tore into their lines, the Kurds began to fire from their saddles. Well aimed, the bullets from their powerful military Mausers and Enfields searched the crest of the ridge, bursting open the skulls of three of the gunners and shattering the windshields of the trucks. The Kurds rode on, impelled by no command but by an inward rejoicing in rushing forward together knee to knee and hearing the sound of their rifles over the blasting of the guns on the ridge. Not to go forward in this manner was as unthinkable as to become pariahs of the tribes—men without pride and excluded from the love of women.
The stripling son of Mullah Ismail, straining to wield a heavy rifle, shouted with all the power of his lungs. His joy paralyzed him, making him weep while his limbs moved spasmodically.
Ahead of them flame sparked across the snow and unseen steel tore into the bodies of the Kurds and their horses.
As Jacob and Paul watched silently, the aspect of the valley changed. A haze that was no natural mist covered the ridge a half mile away. The slope leading to it had turned dark with tiny figures motionless or crawling. The second line of horsemen had almost climbed to the summit of the knoll. The first had vanished or merged into it.
The thin reverberation of the guns kept on.
Paul said quietly, "The weapons have come alive."
Jacob thought, absurdly, that it did not matter now if those remaining few hundred maddened horsemen reached and rode over the surviving gunners. The valley had changed, and the terror that lay upon the distant ridge like the haze of the explosions would not end when the guns ceased. He heard a complaining voice and realized that Mr. Parabat was asking, "Can nothing be done?"
Paul did not look up. Answering himself rather than the Zoroastrian, Jacob said, "Not now, but the Russians have a radio, and——"
The stupidity of his words silenced him. Then Paul sprang up, striking his hands together. Groups of riders were racing back from the crest of the ridge. They had not reached the guns. As they fled back toward the camp the thin diapason of the guns changed to a stammering tac-toc as the invisible gun crews searched out the changed and moving targets. Entire knots of horsemen collapsed into the snow. The others scattered as wounded horses plunged to the side. But the riders kept on in their slow flight toward the camps they had left.
"The firing is useless now," said Paul, as if arguing. "It must be stopped. Can't you talk to the Russians at the radio?"
Jacob nodded, and they began to hurry through the almost deserted camp. Their ears were strained for the bursts of firing that did not stop.
"The dispensary of the mission," Paul went on in the same flat voice, "has typhus serum and smallpox vaccine, and I think some of your American penicillin. Only that to treat a thousand stretcher cases out there."
Paul was not babbling under the influence of shock. The former corpsman was thinking of the reality of innumerable wounded bodies without means of caring for them. "Listen," he said suddenly.
The bursts of the machine guns dwindled and ceased. There was silence for three or four minutes. This silence was broken by the sharper, authoritative crack of larger, high-velocity guns.
Immediately the air over the tents was shaken by a series of explosions. Fragments of wool flung up in swirls of vapor from the tents.
Out from the vapor Vasstan staggered like a man intoxicated.
At the same time fleeing horsemen swept into the camp. They came singly, many of them still holding their rifles. A rider passed Jacob gripping the mane of his straining horse, blood streaming from the torn flesh where his jaw had been.
Some of the fugitives turned into their tents, and helped out women, lifting them into the saddles. One woman appeared with her arms grasping quilts and cooking utensils. Some of them, coming out of the black tents, became frightened and hurried back seeking shelter again beneath the flimsy woolen cloth.
The surviving men seemed to be staggering after a long intoxication. Their eyes were fixed, their mouths open. The sweat-soaked horses labored over the snow, steaming. Jacob felt a faint surprise when he sighted one horse propped up on its forelegs, its head straining back as if it were trying to raise its shattered body after its head.
He thought: these shells are searching the two Kurdish camps; the Russian enclosure will be safe; but these people must get away from all the tents. When another horseman came up to him, Jacob waved urgently to one side. Without heeding him, the man dismounted at a tent. Even under the shelling, the instincts of the Kurds drove them to find and carry off their children and women and belongings.
Jacob saw no sign of any of the leaders who had listened to him less than an hour before in the cinema house.
Now he heard a high-pitched wailing from the voices of terrified women and the screaming of horses. It kept on between the shells.
Then he retraced his steps toward the shrine and the stairway leading up Araman, which he would have to climb to reach Michal. Mr. Parabat was running ahead of him in this direction. Paul's voice called, "Lie down."
He was close to the shrine when a blast of air pushed him forward, and his arm jerked. The burst of a shell so close deafened him, and he shook his head as he walked on. Mr. Parabat was lying down, as if trying to embrace the snow. Beneath the Zoroastrian blood spread in a dark pool.
Jacob went over to him. Then, seeing that Mr. Parabat was dead, he hurried on, finding it hard to keep his footing. His shoulder had begun to ache, and his arm felt cold.
After a moment he felt blood running from his fingers, and tried to examine his left arm beneath the heavy sleeve of the sheepskin coat. When he slipped off the coat, he could move more easily. His arm, however, felt numb, and he lifted it to check the bleeding.
Then he was surprised to discover that instead of climbing the steps he was still stumbling on the slope leading to the tree of the Kurdish shrine. It was hard to move his legs, and he sat down for a moment to rest himself. The shelling had
stopped and the camp again seemed deserted. Out in the valley a few human beings fled away from the camp. In small groups of families, laden with their belongings, they ran toward the shelter of the forest.
The only person near that he recognized was Vasstan, walking between two Russian guards toward the wire of the enclosure which had not been harmed by the firing.
Vasstan looked old and feeble, stumbling between the guards.
Perhaps of all those in the encampment Sergeant Daniel had observed most clearly what had passed. No shells had exploded near him. This man with a body like iron had the cunning of thirty years of campaigning in him. He had no responsibility except for the lives of the eight Assyrians with him, and he had been able to look out for them up to this point. Moreover, as the Assyrians were now taking the rations and pay of the Soviet mission, he anticipated no further danger from the disorder of battle after the shelling ceased.
But like an old lynx, overlooking the forest after a storm, he felt instinctively that evil would come of all this derangement. For one thing, the Kurdish tribes, from the Herki to the Baradust, would never forget the slaughter of their leaders and young men. For another, somebody in the mixed Russian command had blundered, and Daniel knew that when that happened among these variegated Russians, punishment always followed. When he saw Colonel Vasstan, his former patron, led in under guard, he smelled punishment as a wolf smells the track of its enemy, man. He acted then, sending half his men questing through the shattered camps for information and moving over himself to the radio truck, to try to discover what commands were being issued.
There he found Dr. Anna sobbing and Professor Vorontzev gaping aimlessly at the soldiers. Svetlov looked sick, repeating constantly that he had made no mistake. All this Daniel took in silently, not daring to approach too close, while he listened to the voice of the operator within.