by Harold Lamb
After a while Anya, who had been putting wood on the fire, began to cry. Dry sobs shook her and twisted her mouth. Without saying anything, she put more hay into the cow’s pen, and began to make up a bundle of Semyon’s things—a sweater and an old pair of shoes.
While she was doing this, Ayub appeared in the open door. And Anya, crying, began to shout at him, her voice rising. Shad caught the sense of what she was telling the ex-soldier—how Semyon had been snatched while he was off rifling or drinking. He caught a few of the names she called Ayub, who shouted back at her and went to the fireplace for the ax. At once the girl quieted.
"He says he will bring back Semyon,” she told Shad.
Half an hour later Shad Donovan was coaxing the jeep over a rough trail where hoof marks showed up in the hazy light of an old moon. Ayub had climbed into the car willingly enough—he seemed to know what a jeep could do. At least, he had switched off the headlights as soon as Shad had turned them on, and he seemed to be able to make out the tracks of the riders in the deceptive moonlight.
The tracks led toward the pine grove and the old castle. At the edge of the trees, Ayub motioned the American to stop. Something that chattered and smelled of grease came out of the shadows and climbed into the hack of the jeep. Out of the corner of his eye Shad discerned only an old man with long hair under a cap of birds’ feathers, wrapped up in a coat with flowing sleeves. Small iron images jangled on his belt when he moved.
"Shamaki," said Ayub, nudging Shad and smiling.
This old man of the mountains was the wizard who was Ayub’s friend. They got their heads together and talked, above the grinding of the jeep. In Shad’s opinion, the presence of this overage local magician didn't help the situation any. The only chance he could see to get Anya’s youngster back was to steal him.
Deep in the shadow of the pines, Ayub pulled at Shad’s arm and whispered! "Nyet,” meaning "No,” so he stopped the jeep and the three of them got out to climb toward the castle.
This, as Shad soon saw, was really a massive tower surmounting a hillock, with an outer wall half fallen in around it.
Before they reached the outer gate, they split up; Shamaki going on along the trail with his hardware clanking, while Ayub led Shad around through the brush, moving silently, to a point where the wall near the tower had fallen into a pile of stones.
As soon as the two of them climbed up on these stones. Shad decided that the chance of stealing back the boy was no chance at all. A half-dozen horses were tethered opposite them, and the live embers of a fire lighted up the weed-grown stone steps leading to the one narrow doorway in the face of the squat tower. The windows were slits between the stones, too small for a man to crawl in. The riders had made their quarters inside the tower, and the boy with them.
Two of them were standing in the entrance, listening to Shamaki. The wizard had come as far as the fire, where he squatted, arguing plaintively, and warming his hands while he chewed shreds of meat he gleaned from the ground.
After a minute, one of the armed men got tired of thin palaver and went in. No light showed inside the tower. The other, who held a rifle, seated himself on a pair of wolfskins on the step nearest the fire, obviously intending to stay where he was. The wolfskins looked fresh.
That, Shad figured, ended any possibility of getting at the boy. The five men in possession of the tower could and would use their weapons—likely, they had taken the child along in place of Anya as a hostage. To try to move in on them with an ax and a knife would be a good way of committing suicide. Or so he thought.
Beside him, Ayub made a sound like a drowsy bird chirping. The sentry didn’t even turn his head, but Shamaki began to act up. The country magician produced several scrolls of paper from his sleeve, chattering about each one. Prayers, Shad thought.
And then he forgot the chill in his body and the ache in his head. Ayub had gone from his side, sliding down and forward over the stones without a sound.
Shamaki burned one of the paper prayers and made a spiel as the ash flew up. The man with the rifle grunted, but watched idly, as if he were having his fortune told. Ayub had cleared the heap of stones and was moving along the base of the tower, crawling on when Shamaki yelped loudest.
Shad began to have trouble keeping his breathing quiet when the magician threw some grease on the embers and burned a prayer in the flame that shot up. The sentry looked uneasy, as if he had had his death told. Shad recognized him as the one who had nearly crushed in his own skull.
Then the maneuver broke down. Hearing something, the rifleman looked around and sighted Ayub crawling up the steps behind him. At once he fired the rifle from his knee, and started to get himself up. Like a cat, Ayub jumped inside the dark doorway.
"Ghar!" the man yelled. He fired a slug after Ayub and plunged up into the entrance.
Out he fell, sliding down the steps, with his skull split over the eyes. Shamiki screamed like an eagle, shook his long sleeves and jumped among the startled horses, pulling loose their halter ropes and driving them off into the moonlight.
The door of the tower stayed dark. But feet rasped on stone and men called out. Shad heard Semyon's familiar wail of fright, shut off quick. Then there was quiet, as if those inside were trying to size up what was happening to them. Quiet, broken by the rapping of an automatic pistol. Then there was a soft rushing, like the twisting of struggling animals. A rifle whanged off, lighting an embrasure. The pistol echoed it, searching for an elusive target. Shad, wiping the sweat from his eyes, remembered how Anya had said that men who lit a fire in the ruined castle would be visited by a devil.
The silence that followed set his nerves on edge. Then he heard feet running. Close together, four men broke from the doorway. Not one of these was hurt, but they acted as if mad with fear. Swerving away from the body by the fire, they ran to where the horses had been tethered, then broke away again, disappearing into the moonlight. Faintly, Shad heard the echo of Shamaki’s laughter.
Ayub came out alone, holding to the wall. On his shoulder he gripped Semyon, who whimpered. When he climbed the stones slowly, Shad heard him breathing like a tired animal. He had to help the big man climb into the jeep.
At the door of Anya’s room there was a good light from the fire. Ayub carried the boy in and then set him down. For the first time Shad saw how the injured man was bleeding from the chest and hip; the flesh of one cheek had been ripped open.
Semyon straddled his legs and hurried to his mother. She picked him up, but she was staring at Ayub, sweating and swaying on his feet. She said, "Chleb sol.” Taking his hand, she drew him over to the bench. Making him sit down, she began to pull off his dirty jacket, staring at him as if afraid.
When she had heated water in the caldron on the fire, she washed the big man’s wounds with clean garments hanging by the fire. As she did so, she pressed her cheek against the good side of his head happily.
"Early tonight,” she cried at Shad, "when I called him bad names, he told me something! At Kiev, Ayub was many days in the house-to-house fighting. Yes, there he found Mi’hail hurt, and carried him out. But Mi’hail died. Now tonight he promised me that he would bring Semyon out of the house, and Semyon would be alive.”
Carefully, she began to pull off Ayub’s boots and help him to lie down in her bed.
"He is bad sick,” she said. Although she spoke to Shad, she didn’t seem to know he was there.
Daybreak came soon, and when it did, Shad Donovan got up from the bench where he had been sitting and put another log on the fire. When he looked at Anya asleep under a sheepskin on the floor by the bed, with her hand touching Ayub’s scarred head, he did not wake her to ask if, after all, she did not want him to take her and the kid down to Tiflis. He knew the answer to that, and he eased himself out to his jeep without waking any of the family.
Lost City
THE day the Irantour plane to India came down in the desert, all the usual things were done about it. In Teheran, the plane’s point of departure, the
personnel of the embassy of the United States urged the local Ministry of the Interior to notify all gendarmery posts along the desert’s edge; we hurried out several cars to the village of Ardistan, where the plane had been sighted last, to comb the western fringe of the desert; the few available planes at the Teheran airport probed the sky over the desert.
Even the British embassy sent out a search car, because some of their junior attaches had danced with Barbara Duncan. She had been the only passenger on that small obsolescent plane. The pilot—an Iranian—hadn’t taken any reserves of water or foodstuffs. I knew that because I had seen Barbara off. I, too, had danced with her the night before. And I had tried to persuade her to take the safer way around by British Airways to Karachi. She had laughed telling me good-by, "The shortest distance, Terry, between two points is right straight across.” Straight she had gone, over Ardistan, but not down to Zahidan on the far edge of the great salt desert, the Kavir. By one o'clock the next day that was all we knew. Nothing more. Because she was Barbara, and because she was lost somewhere in the lifeless Kavir. I sat arguing with Shag McGuire, the first secretary of our embassy, when I should have been concentrating on cabling a background story of Iran home to the New York Chronicle. Because I had covered the somewhat similar backgrounds in Afghanistan and India-Pakistan, I thought I knew something about desert transport. But Shag knew more.
At five minutes after one the young tourist who had been sitting staring at the oversized topographical map on the wall got up from his chair.
"If you have a small map, Mr. McGuire" he said, "I'd like to borrow it . . . only for a week,”
I hadn’t noticed Bill Laing before. He wasn't the kind of man to be noticed, anyway, sitting around and trying to keep out of people’s way—awkward and polite. His clothes had never come from New York; the dark sunburn under his jutting cheekbones showed he’d gone around wearing a hat instead of getting himself a healthy tan.
"What for?” asked Shag, who was tired and hot.
"We went to school together,” Bill Laing said, and hesitated. "I’ve got hold of a car," he explained, as if scared of being turned down.
He looked to be about twenty-five, and he gave me a queer impression—as if he hadn’t slept well or was accustomed to taking beatings. Someone had said he came from Phoenix, Arizona, to see the archaeological excavations in the Old World. I remembered that, and I remembered how, two evenings before, when I had had that dance with Barbara Duncan, this kid had been sitting alone at a table. She had said about ten words to him—not much for two people who had been to school together.
"But, Mr. Laing,” said Shag, "you can’t get into the Kavir with a car. There isn’t any road.”
"I’ve traveled deserts.”
Shag McGuire shook his head, and I knew he meant it. The last thing he wanted just then was for an inexperienced tourist to go tearing off into the Kavir where he’d have to be searched for.
"Look at this one,” he murmured, taking the boy over to the wall map, pointing at the yellow cancer that ran slanting across the east side of Iran. Thirty thousand square miles of it, Shag explained patiently, dry miles, salted up and impassable in this summer heat. Sand and rock, with no source of water. A crisscross of animal tracks where some wandering tribes hunted in winter—tribes that would strip stray foreigners to their undies.
Bill Laing listened carefully. "I’ve worked with Navajos.”
With a shrug, Shag explained, "Our two military attaches got across one corner of the Kavir. They had a command car and a jeep, with five men along. That was in winter, Mr. Laing. Both officers spoke Persian, and after two weeks they had to be helped out by some friendly Kurds, with the jeep towing the command car.”
"I’m only asking for the loan of a map.” Something came into the boy’s eyes. "Do I have to put it in writing?” After a second Shag looked around at me. "Mr. Kettridge has a map. . . . How about it, Terry?”
I knew what he meant, and why. Desiring me to take the boy out of his hair, he also hoped I’d bring this Bill Laing back safe in his hired car to Teheran. There was every reason why I shouldn't volunteer for a wild ride to nowhere. But the memory of Barbara haunted me. And the percentage was that Bill Laing would take off anyway, alone.
"Yes, I have a map,” I told him. "Suppose I come with you?”
After a minute, he nodded. "All right,” he agreed.
It was six o’clock before Bill Laing finished testing the old American coupé he had hired from a garage near the bazaar. To the coupé’s off side he’d lashed some strange equipment—four lengths of heavy fence wire folded triple and beaten into fourteen-inch-wide tracks, with a clumsy iron spade secured in the lashings. Between us we’d piled in some not-so-good spare tire casings, tubes, patches, with a pump and a stock of rusted tins of milk and food—old American Army stuff, as we both recognized—along with the bigger tins of gasoline, oil and water.
When he stopped work, fingering the pockets of his stained shirt, Bill hesitated again, getting a grip on his confidence. "This is one thing, Mr. Kettridge,” he said, "that’s got to break my way.”
Dropping down from the Teheran-plateau level, we sighted the dead white of dry salt lakes on the right before dark closed in and we felt the hot breath of the Kavir.
Bill told me of his notion, to circle the Kavir and search the far eastern edge where no other car had ventured. His notion was that the pilot of the Irantour plane in trouble over the desert would have pushed on regardless to the far side rather than try to land. With what we had to go on, that seemed as good an idea as any. But to get there we had to cross about half of Iran, a country neither of us knew, by the map.
"Why not?” I told him. "It’s a chance.”
Somehow I didn’t want to say how much of a chance it might be to spot the speck of a plane in those thirty thousand square miles where Barbara Duncan almost certainly had died by now.
"She used to bring her history dead ends to me,” he confided, "because I was a senior, two years older. I was good at the book stuff then. Barb kept asking why didn’t I write a history of civilization like Mr. H. G. Wells.”
While he forced the car over the humps and dry washes of the road, he told me things like that, as if I ought to understand why we had to hurry. It seemed that while Bill Laing belonged in Arizona, Barbara had gone to college there to build up her health. Her people were somebodies in manufacturing in a New England city, and Barbara, said Bill, might have married one of the key men in aviation or an ambassador. In the long ago of school days she had been willing to marry him—when she was eighteen.
"She was always for taking chances,” he explained.
After the war that broke them apart, Laing going to the Pacific, and Barbara to Italy and points in Africa, he hadn’t wanted to do anything but drift through the desert country above Phoenix with his books. He wanted to teach, but to make a career of teaching nowadays you had to have an M.A. or, better, a Ph.D., and Bill never got around to trying for that.
I had to pry that out of him, because he seemed to want to talk only about Barbara. He even told me part of a letter she’d written him then: "Don’t tell me archaeology’s your dream. I know it isn’t. It’s only what you like to do. Bill; you’re accustomed to it, and working alone. You’re afraid to compete with other people, and you don’t try to understand them. Try.”
Then I realized that Bill understood just as clearly as I did how little chance there was that she could be found alive. So he had to talk about her, like a man in agony who can't keep quiet.
Twenty-one hours later, we sighted the elusive black streak. It came and went, off in the glare of the flat. I pointed to it, and Bill nodded. "Maybe a mirage,” he said.
It looked like one—an image refracted from miles away, in the furnace heat of the Kavir. Sure enough, it vanished from my tired eyes. I had dozed some, while in the twenty-one hours Bill had nursed the car more than seven hundred miles, changing and patching tires, swinging south at a place called Meshed, down tow
ard Zahidan. We were racing across an endless flat resembling Utah at its worst.
I was dozing again, thinking how the black line had looked like a road into the desert, when the brakes jammed on and the coupé stopped dead in a dust cloud. Bill climbed out, and I found him kneeling at the edge of the road, staring at a dark stretch of what seemed to be paving blocks and felt like asphalt schist to the touch.
"God, if it’s a road,” Bill muttered. It showed only for a dozen yards to the nearest sand drift, and it looked to me like a turnout for the truck convoys that had used this Zahidan-Meshed highway during the war. Bill said it led beyond the sand block straight into the Kavir.
"There isn’t a paved road,” I told him, "within two thousand miles of here.”
"I saw one in the Syrian desert—an ancient Roman road.”
"Well, even Roman roads went from somewhere to somewhere else. Where would this thing go?”
Rubbing his hand over an asphalt block Bill argued, "It’s cut to shape, Mr. Kettridge. Nobody ever built a road that didn’t go somewhere.”
I looked around. That scrawny boy with the patient, tired eyes was the only living thing within the horizon. Behind us reared bare peaks that might be part of Afghanistan or the Turkmen S.S.R. To check on it, I picked out our probable location on the map. As I had suspected, I saw no mark of a road, trail or village in the direction the paving blocks led. Bill, however, pointed out that the plane would have passed about here, if it had got this far.
"It’s the only way in,” he muttered.
My watch told me we had about four hours until dark, and that we’d get nowhere in that time by trying to ride the ruin of a road. Then I found myself looking into the ghost of a face, gay, with a little hat slanting smartly over gray eyes. She had written him at Phoenix that she was going on a world tour with friends, the somebody-Johnsons and Mel Fleming. He hadn’t said how he’d got himself somehow to Iran to cross her route and sit alone at the table watching her dance with us. As soon as she had seen him, she had led me over to that table, to tell him how she was flying the next day to join her friends and Mel Fleming at Agra. He had said, "Sure, Barb,” and she had waited a second before holding out her band, saying, "Good-by, Bill.” Not that she’d be seeing him soon, but good-by. And he had stiffened himself, with a half grin. Then, going away with me, she had been quiet for a while, as if I hadn’t been there. I hadn’t understood then, but I did now. It was that old link between two youngsters, hurting them. Yes, I could see Barbara’s face clearly.