by Harold Lamb
But you are, she thought, and Gopal will not be able to finish your portrait on the wall.
Sensations new to Michal seized on her. When she stopped to catch her breath, she felt the vertigo of space; when she moved on, the darkness pushed against her like an impalpable force. Above her stretched the brightness of the Milky Way—the Path of the Wild Geese, Paul called it. Orion's square became four lanterns hung in space to light her way.
Never before had she felt the edges of stone tearing her bare feet, or the blood running between her fingers when she caught at outcroppings of rock. The cord around her waist rasped her sides when she slipped. It would be very easy to die if that cord itself slipped, and an hour before then she would not have minded; now she had hope, and if you had hope you did not need a light in darkness. Paul's voice, telling her where to put her feet and where to hold with her hands, assured her that he had hope.
With the lanterns of Orion lighting her way across space, she did not hear the echo of the splintering roar of the guns or the thrumming roar of the planes, nor did she think of that other flight down to Argos where she and a man now strange to her had watched the sky for planes. Jacob sailed his ship with her secure in it, watching for the other ship to cross the night sky.
When the last of her strength gave out, she sank down and felt round pebbles against her face. Paul's hands raised her, and he lifted her high, her body against his good shoulder, and presently the leaves of a tree brushed against her hair. She was conscious of being lowered to the ground, and when she reached up to brush her hair back, Jacob's hand took hers.
She was sitting on a blanket, with Jacob's shoulder touching hers. To make certain of that, her fingers felt his cheek. And she said, "I'm a mess, all of me. I'm glad it's dark, Jacob." Then she began to cry.
While the three men talked, low-voiced, Michal said nothing. She drank from the canteen Daniel had brought her, letting the water run out over her lacerated fingers. All three of them agreed that she and Jacob must get away from Araman that night, yet he could not walk, nor could Michal, after her descent of the cliff. So it was not possible.
That did not worry Michal; she could luxuriate in her weariness now that she could hear Jacob's voice. Besides, it was a matter for the men to decide.
Saying that he would see if he might find something, Daniel went away, and Michal slept after Jacob pulled a blanket over her.
The creaking of wagon wheels woke her. A team of horses trudged up to the tree, and the wagon stopped almost within reach of them. Sergeant Daniel got down from it and said it would do for an ambulance because he had found a cot to put in it and some food. It had a good canvas top, he added proudly.
"Can you get a wagon through the passes?" Jacob asked.
"To go out, yes. If we can find others to help on the slopes."
"Can you take us as far as Riyat?"
The old Assyrian considered, running his hands over the harness buckles. "Who knows? Perhaps."
"Jacob," whispered Michal, "the monastery is nearer."
"This thing couldn't descend the gorge. And we have to get to Baghdad."
Michal hardly understood. She knew that she could not think very clearly. "Then perhaps Riyat would be lovely, Jacob," she agreed.
It seemed that they had to hurry. Sergeant Daniel complained that half the night was gone already. The two men helped Jacob in over the back of the wagon, and then turned to lift her in. Drowsily she felt in her pockets to make sure that her treasures were safe, and she pulled out her shoes, thinking that there would have been nothing left of them or of her if she had kept them on during the descent.
When the wagon lurched suddenly, starting, she had to hold to the edges of the cot. After a moment she realized that Paul, who had been standing back of the wagon, had not climbed in. As she called out, Jacob caught her arm in warning and obediently she hushed.
"He will not leave Araman," he whispered, "ever."
Words in this night were finalities. You started to walk down through space; you climbed into a wagon smelling of wet canvas and onions, to drive through solid mountains and arrive somewhere, perhaps.
To reassure herself, because her thoughts whirled around dizzily, Michal reached out to touch Jacob and make certain he was lying quietly as he should. In doing so her hand struck against cold metal, and when her fingers explored it, the thing seemed to be a rather massive bell.
Stifling a laugh, Michal bent over and whispered, "My bell is going with us."
On the driver's seat, Daniel Toghrak guided the team toward the south, along marks left by two pairs of skis that wound toward a break in the surrounding ridges. It was important for him as well as for the two Americans to be out of sight of the camps by daybreak. Beyond that, the matter rested with God. Whether the man with the torn arm could reach Baghdad alive was a problematical matter; whether the young woman who cried when she was happy and laughed because the bell taken down by the Russians was riding with her—whether she would regain her sanity of mind Sergeant Daniel did not know.
About the bell he did not care. Since it was in the wagon it would need to stay there now, because it would be dangerous to leave it lying behind them on the wagon's track. That wheel track in the snow worried him. Squinting ahead into the murk over the gray snow, the Assyrian mountaineer sampled the night and the vista ahead of him. When he saw the horses lift their heads and made out two figures standing close together in his way, he felt no alarm. They stood as if waiting, and when he reached them he stopped, finding them to be two of his own men. "You can come with me," he told them.
Lying at the edge of the cot, her hand on Jacob's bandaged arm, Michal looked out the back of the wagon, to see why they had stopped. Behind them stretched the white valley. Far down it she could make out the shape of Araman. There was no glimmer of a fire on the altar height.
"It's dark, Jacob," she said.
Then, when the wagon creaked on again, and trees closed in shutting out the valley, she had a forlorn feeling as if she were leaving behind something that never could be recovered.
A hand pressing his knee woke Jacob from a troubled sleep. The wagon was motionless, and with daylight flooding the opening he recognized Sergeant Daniel crouching by him pulling gently at his knee. On the cot beside him Michal, wrapped in blankets and the tangle of her hair, breathed steadily, not waking.
Sliding out with the Assyrian's aid, Jacob stood up dizzily, the back of his head aching and his body shaking with the early morning cold.
"You have passport," whispered Sergeant Daniel. "What kind?"
This could not be a frontier post. Overhead the sky was a gray veil, and wisps of clouds threaded through the pine trees that covered the knoll on which they had halted, a little above the shallow ravine they had followed through the night. Jacob's forearm felt stiff from the clotted blood that had hardened into Paul's bandages. Mechanically he fumbled awkwardly with his right hand, to draw out his wallet and extract the battered card that proclaimed him to be Captain Jacob S. Ide, of the Third Battalion, Headquarters Cairo, USAFIME. Carefully the Assyrian read the card and shook his head.
"Your American Army, will it look for you now?" he asked earnestly.
"No."
"Will the British Army look for you?"
At each question the faded blue eyes of the mountaineer searched his face. With an effort Jacob tried to think back over the months. Daoud had said something about British planes searching, but where was Daoud? No, Jacob Ide existed only for the British authorities as the stray American who had gone off in the car of their security officer, Squadron Leader Aurel Leicester, at Kirkuk station, ages before—in spite of their warning.
"No," he said.
With a sigh Daniel handed him a pair of field glasses. They were old-fashioned Zeiss glasses, somehow familiar—the pair that had belonged to Vasstan. "Look," Daniel bade him, pointing back down the shallow ravine. Following the line indicated by his stubby finger, Jacob sighted black figures moving up a clear space bet
ween the trees. Adjusting the glasses with his good hand, he brought the figures into close view.
In advance a horseman uniformed in gray ascended between the faint tracks of the wagon wheels. Two others followed, keeping to the side slopes. All carried rifles across their knees. The vehicle behind them disclosed itself as a jeep, in which a Soviet officer rode beside the driver and a soldier behind him held upraised an ominous-looking tube that would be a heavy machine gun. The fourth man, in a black overcoat, had a familiar appearance. Only Svetlov wore an overcoat like that. A bulky object resting between them might be a walkie-talkie, of the type shipped by the thousands to Russia.
Without a word Jacob lowered the glasses. The pursuing detachment might be a third of a mile away, approaching at a foot pace. The wagon tracks led up from the valley bed for a hundred yards or so to the wagon itself in which the exhausted woman slept. The two horses loosed from the traces were nosing barley spread on a blanket.
Above Jacob rose the shoulder of a hill, studded with pines. Across from him a similar slope ascended into the gray mist. The snow in which he stood was a foot deep. It was, he thought, a very peaceful scene, and it afforded not the slightest hope of escape.
Sheer bad luck must have impelled this armed party to search for the missing wagon. Or had it been luck? The glasses in his hand reminded him of the German, and he thought that Vasstan had got in a word about him, whereupon he had been searched for and found missing, as well as the wagon.
Twenty-four hours before he could have walked down to the officer in the jeep and joked about the wagon over cigarettes. But this officer was not Omelko, and now he, Jacob, was a wounded fugitive after the battle that had changed everything in the valley. He knew beyond any doubt that he and Michal could not force their way up the hillside in the deep snow, nor could the three Assyrians carry even Michal far on the cot. Not without leaving tracks, and tracks would be followed. The situation was very clear.
"All right, Daniel," he assented. "I see how it is. You and the other two scram—get out of here, up the hill. You can; we can't. So long." He held out his hand with the glasses.
The stocky Assyrian made no move to go. "You will not defend this place, Mr. Ide?"
Behind him the other two listened carefully. One was a bandylegged fellow with a shock of gray hair, the other a pinched-faced boy who looked as if he did not know what a square meal was.
"With them?" Jacob asked. "With only three rifles?"
"Yes."
"And with how much of a chance?"
Planting his feet, his scarred hand rubbing the butt of his rifle, Sergeant Daniel searched the screen of pines around them with his eyes. He even sniffed the wind and muttered something about snow. "It is a sporting chance," he announced at last.
"That's what you think?"
"Yes, Mr. Ide. We can hold this hill for a while, then—we may have help." Quickly he conferred with his companions, who nodded assent. Then he thrust into Jacob's hand a half sheet of ruled notepaper. On it were printed in pencil two groups of Christian-sounding names, eleven in all, male and female. Daniel's square forefinger pointed to the first group. "My family and relatives." To the second—"Masha's family. All are living in Keif, which is two hours' ride by automobile from Mosul. If Masha or I are killed, will you provide a little for the families, Mr. Ide?"
Anxiously his blue eyes questioned Jacob, who thought stubbornly, except for the commandeered wagon he and Michal had every right to be where they were, and he had to try to get down to Baghdad to report the story of Araman. Sir Clement would have taken that sporting chance.
"All right, Daniel," he agreed, folding the notepaper and putting it in his wallet. "If I get to Baghdad, that is."
Not until the Assyrians had rushed to the wagon and hauled Michal's cot down to the hollow behind the hillock, and he had seen her pushing at the blankets, did he realize the insanity of it all. For Sergeant Daniel, as soon as he rose from the cot, lifted his rifle and fired a shot into the air. "I want the hills to hear," grunted the Assyrian, and Jacob bent over Michal, saying they were all crazy, and she must keep quiet where she was or spoil everything. Then he hurried back to the wagon and lay down between the Assyrians who had placed themselves a dozen yards apart, the other two to the sides and a little back of Daniel, who laid his rifle between two rocks.
Jacob, resting his chin on his good arm, watched two bugs crawling over the moss on the stone in front of him. If Daniel had not fired that shot, they might have been able to surprise—— But they couldn't open fire on men who had not seen them. It would begin to snow and then everything would be crazy.
The jeep crawled up the trail with the gunner and Svetlov walking on the other side, and the gun in place, pointing toward the wagon. The officer, who wore a new uniform, walked behind all this and made no effort to hail the hillock. Instead, the gun opened fire, cutting through the wagon, which sank crazily on its side in a cloud of flying splinters. The bronze bell clanged mournfully.
About a hundred yards away the jeep stopped, the driver ducking behind it by the gunner. Jacob waited so long for something else to happen that he began to glance at his watch. Then Daniel fired once, and a rifle cracked back from the opposite slope of the ravine. One of the riders, dismounted, must have climbed over there, a little above them. His shots began to crack very close over their heads.
It was as crazy as this, Jacob reflected; you did not see what was happening, you lay dug into the snow until it was over. You only listened. He heard the machine gun fire a burst at Daniel's lair, certain of that because bullets screamed, glancing off rocks. Then he heard the boy on his other side shooting, and guessed that the remaining two soldiers were working toward the hillock from that flank.
When he did not hear the boy's rifle, he rolled over and twisted his head to look. The boy was sitting up, carefully wiping blood from his eyes. Then he lay down, feeling his head, and Jacob squirmed toward him, to take up the rifle.
It was a Mauser, expertly cleaned, a nineteen thirty-nine model with a single word carved in German script upon the stock—Sieg.
Placing this weapon across a flat stone, Jacob searched the slope in front of him with his eyes. These were the hills of Kurdistan and the fine German rifle was inscribed with Victory. But he could see nothing moving on the white slope with its dark patches of laurel under the pines. He felt uneasy because he could see no trace of the two enemies who might be lining up their sights on him at that moment.
Then this vista of silence became wholly insane. Rifles cracked above Jacob and ahead of him, far off and near. They sounded across the ravine.
Out of the corner of his eyes Jacob sighted swift movement above him, as the shapes of men slid downhill from cover to cover. Below him the jeep's engine roared instead of the machine gun.
Directly in front of him two men in gray jumped out of a thicket and ran for the trail. One of them dropped and rolled over until the other locked an arm around him and hauled him on.
Sergeant Daniel crouched beside Jacob and gripped his hand that was on the rifle. "Be careful, Mr. Ide," he said.
Down the slope ran the men who had appeared from the mist above, in dark baggy garments, all firing as they raced down.
"Some Baradust Kurds, some Herki also," explained the Assyrian.
These must have been among the fugitives escaping through the ravine, and they would have heard Daniel's first warning shot. Lifting himself on his elbow, Jacob looked for the jeep and found that it had turned in the trail and was starting back, loaded with men who crouched low, hugging each other. Where it had been Svetlov, the civilian, was left. At once Svetlov began to run, not after the machine but into the brush on the far slope.
Without his rifle, Sergeant Daniel stood up, lifting both arms and sending the wailing call of a mountain shepherd into the ravine.
In an hour a curtain of snow enveloped the hillsides and wind roared through the pine forest. They could not see a stone's throw ahead or behind them. Where the ground was
clear, flurries of icy particles drove up at them, seething around them. Jacob, walking laboriously beside Michal's cot, had no least idea where they could be going.
Ahead of him, Sergeant Daniel was carrying the injured boy over one shoulder, with two rifles slung across the other. Masha and a Kurd who might have been Badr's twin carried the end of the cot. Ahead of them, breaking the force of the wind, other tribesmen led the team from the demolished wagon and the three ponies they had captured along the trail.
Bending down, they forced their way through the storm, along the hillside where no road existed. Jacob did not know by what signs or instinct they guided themselves, but they stopped and tethered the horses in a heavy stand of timber where smoke came from a single low shelter of black wool stretched over tree branches.
Under the cloth women and children were packed around the fire. Without surprise they watched the arrival of the strangers and made way for the cot of the sick woman. In the pot over the embers broth simmered, smelling of meat.
Between the horses and the shelter the men stretched out on blankets, pulling their sheepskins about their heads. So they lay without speaking, occupied with their own thoughts after the disaster of the day before.
Someone handed a blanket to Jacob, who drew it over his head, turning his back to the wind. A hot copper bowl of broth was thrust into his hand, and he began to sip it slowly, feeling comfort in its warmth and savor.
For a while no one spoke to him. On her cot, warmed by the fire, Michal slept quietly. Beside her cot she had placed her two slippers carefully. It cheered Jacob to see these two white slippers waiting there as if in readiness for Michal to get up and put them on. As if she could do that, and be strong again, and walk out into the snow somehow to a place of safety in evening slippers.
From a tent pole over the fire hung slender haunches of gazelles. Out of a jar the silent women poured curdled milk into bowls for the children. Around them drifted the pine smoke, stirred by eddies of the wind.