Little Lost Lambs at the Post

by Harold Lamb

  It was the rifles. Up on the earth’s surface, with firearms, the raiders could have wiped us all out in five minutes, and got whatever they wanted out of Hecatompylae. Here the rifles were only a liability, because every flash drew a flock of rocks or the whack of a club. In no time at all, the firing stopped and the raiders surged toward the exits, grunting and helping one another out.

  They were through. They made a fast getaway, because I picked myself up from where a rifle butt or something had dropped me and climbed out after them, to watch them trot off.

  We seemed to be the only casualties. Bill and I. A slug had ripped down his chest, cracking a rib, and he was bleeding a lot into Barbara’s dress and the ground, while she worked with the water in the channel and his shirt to stop it. She was pale and her lips jerked.

  "The situation is restored, Terry,” he laughed. He seemed to have no more inhibitions. This tear, he said, was nothing like the one he'd got at Buna. I hadn’t known he’d been wounded like that.

  Pulling her down to him, he gripped her hard. "You’re still undamaged, Barb.”

  "I’m not."

  Barbara the brittle and poised, the darling of the diplomatic corps, blinked hard and tears ran down the dust of her face. "I’m not. I —— Oh, I’m going back.” As if afraid to let go, she held to his arm. I suppose she still heard the blasting of the shots over her. Words poured out of her in a stream she didn’t try to stop. "You’re going back to Arizona, Bill, to the campus and that desert where I can watch you." She was smiling and crying. "I can brush back my disordered hair-do, Bill, over the washing machine, and see you coming up the cactus garden of our prefabricated 'dobe house surrounded by Navajo freshmen who are your pupils coming to—to dinner without telling me."

  They looked at each other then, in the glimmer of the flashlight, seeing nothing of the wonders of Hecatompylae or any part of a disordered world, but only each other.

  Then Methuselah, who had been trying to attract my attention, pushed his beard into the spotlight. He was trying to explain about the raiders. "They want. You give.” As before, I could make nothing of what they had wanted.

  Finally he gestured as if twisting the air in his fingers, then reached into my pocket and pulled out a ring with two keys triumphantly. The car keys. That meant the raiders had tried to make off with Bill's chartered vehicle, regardless of how many casualties they inflicted on Hecatompylae folk.

  "All they wanted was the car keys!” cried Barbara. And those two youngsters looked at each other again, and just laughed.

  Six days later they were welcomed back in style to Teheran by the United States embassy. Shag McGuire even served cocktails around the pool, to announce that Barbara Duncan had been found alive. Some other embassies sent cards and flowers; two junior secretaries brought over the well-wishes of His Britannic Majesty’s government, and His Excellency Ahmad Etimadi, the Iranian Minister of the Interior, appeared in a cutaway to express his relief and happiness in person.

  The stage was set as if for a big event, and Barbara looked lovely when she told Shag McGuire that William Laing had a message for the Iranian Government. Then, still bandaged, Bill produced my map.

  It had the exact location of the lost city of Hecatompylae carefully marked on it. And Bill was neither awkward nor shy when he told the diplomats of the discovery.

  Then His Excellency nearly burst his buttons with excitement. With the map secured in his breast pocket, he made a marvelous speech of thanks, praising to the skies the genius of the young American archaeologist who had discovered what they had sought in vain for generations.

  That was all, and Barbara knew it. After that moment, Bill wouldn’t figure in the glory of Hecatompylae. It was just a nice curtain for him.

  I meant to give him full credit, of course, in the story I was cabling home. I followed Barbara away from the people and the cocktails. "I can’t make a speech, Barbara,” I said, "but —— "

  "You don’t have to, Terry.”

  Under her smart hat, her gray eyes slanted up at me happily. For a moment, we were alone. Suddenly she pulled back her sleeve. On her arm gleamed gold, brightly polished.

  "I want it,” she whispered defiantly, "for a wedding present, from I don’t know who.”

  It was the Greek armlet, fragile as paper, lovely as youth that is lost but imperishable.

  The Mysterious Knife

  AT first Dr. David Merrick did not realize that no American had come to Kurgan before him. He was aware only of certain oddities in this village that clung to a hill where the smell of hay met the damp breath of the sea. The gypsy who fiddled after dinner attracted his notice, and the old people who sat in boots and embroidered shirts under the elms in the moonlight, watching him.

  That was at the tomb, of course. As Dr. David Merrick, of the department of European history of the University of Chicago, he felt an alert interest at sight of the tomb. This ancient mound, which gave the village its name of Kurgan, had been opened up to disclose in its depths an unmistakable Viking burial. The torches had shown him the burnt ribs of a boat and the bones of a chieftain, still covered by shreds of leather and cloth, beside the blackened blade of a sword.

  His mood perhaps had been shaped by the lilt of the fiddle and the gleam of torches, instead of the usual blinking of flashlights. It was rather the things they brought, him when they heard he was an American that set him wondering.

  First the schoolgirl with the reddish hair fetched him the small book wrapped in a piece of velvet. Opening it, Doctor Merrick found it to be English, dated 1786, entitled The Singular Travels, Campaigns, Voyages and Sporting Adventures of Baron Munchausen; as He Relates Them Over a Bottle When Surrounded by His Friends.

  "What is it?” the girl asked curiously. It had belonged to her family, she explained, for a long time.

  As best he could, Merrick answered in his academic Russian. He was accustomed to meeting with the unexpected in Russia, and he reflected with amusement that the jovial Baron Munchausen had also visited the empire of Catherine the Great. Or so he said.

  Then the girl—they called her Dunya— beckoned to her grandfather. "If you are an American,” she asked Merrick, "are you a Yankee also?”

  "In a way, yes,” he admitted, thinking that Dunya must have been reading other books than Munchausen. "If you are a Russian, Dunya, are you not a Cossack also?”

  Before she could answer, a sharp voice spoke. "Durak! I am a Cossack.” And from within white eyebrows and beard a benevolent giant smiled at Merrick. Dunya’s grandfather wore the old-fashioned svitka; his broad belt gleamed, and in the belt reposed a long, curved knife. This he drew and offered to the visitor. "I, Andriushko, say chelom vam."

  This salutation meant literally, "the forehead to you.” Like a salaam. An old way of speaking, thought Merrick, whose Scottish ancestry made him sympathetic to legendry. "A fine knife, Andriushko,” he murmured.

  "No, a gift. Look, Yankee.”

  Doctor Merrick examined the blade and found an inscription traced on the steel. In English, it ran: FROM PAVEL JONES TO HIS FRIEND COSSACK IVAK. The letters had been scratched carefully, as if with the point of a diamond.

  "The Yankee’s gift,” proclaimed the Cossack Andriushko, pointing to them.

  Now, a volume of Munchausen might have strayed anywhere in these troubled times, and a family of Kurgan might have picked up the word "Yankee.” But it was more than odd that they should have a knife inscribed like that as well. They assured him that no American had been near their village before, and they sat waiting, as if they wanted him to tell them something about the curious book and the odd inscription on the knife. But what?

  David Merrick wasn’t slow on the uptake, yet he had been away for only two months from the other side of the world where you picked up a newspaper or a telephone to find out what you wanted. Vaguely, he realized that these people of the Cossack village depended on talk to get their answers. Offering Grandpa Andriushko his tobacco pouch, he waited until the belted Cossack
had filled his pipe—clay it was, with a stem as long as your arm.

  "Well, now, Andriushko,” he ventured, "tell me how your fine knife was a gift from a Yankee.”

  The giant smiled. "Eh, you tell.”

  "But I don’t know.”

  Lighting his pipe with a stick from the fire, Andriushko asked, "Where did he go? Did he find his own country again?”

  "You mean Pavel Jones?”

  "Batko Jones,” Dunya broke in impatiently. Little Father Jones. "Pavel” would be "Paul.” It sounded exasperatingly familiar. Why of course— John Paul Jones. He had certainly journeyed to Russia, to the court of Catherine the Great, and he had seen service here at the short of the Black Sea. Some kind of service. Although Merrick searched his memory, he could not recall what had happened.

  "Yes,” he murmured, "Pavel Jones was here, at sea.”

  They stared at him as if contemptuous of his ignorance of the Yankee who had given the knife, if not the book.

  "Not at sea.” Andriushko shook his head. "The ships would not march into the sea. And then there was the Lady Anya.”

  "Who was she?” Merrick asked skeptically.

  And, reproachfully, the big Cossack stared at him. "Such a beauty she was . . . like honey in the sun! Haven’t you heard, Yankee?”

  It wasn’t only the fiddle, or the torches, or the quaint make-up of these listeners that worked on David Merrick. It was the words, carefully remembered from old time that drew his mind back in the magic of moonlight to the year 1788.

  The torches had been thrown on the fire, and Andriushko stood there telling him what his grandfather had told him. "Ivak, who was the father of my grandfather, had never set eyes on such a girl. Like fire. Ivak knew the feel of young women; he was a jigit, liking to ride wild horses and to break down locked doors. A sotnik, a squadron commander, at twenty-eight, with the scars and decorations of two campaigns. . . .”

  When the summons to this war came to the steppe (the Cossack Andriushko explained) Ivak, the father of my grandfather, said to himself, Look, you son of a devil, at the smoke before you jump into the fire again. He asked himself, How will it help to join a regiment merely to get another wound? This time Ivak said he would make something out of a war.

  So he mounted his Kabarda gelding and rode off to the River Dnieper where the cannon barked. For this village, Kurgan, was a post on the frontier.

  The first thing he saw was the broad mouth of Father Dnieper filled with ships, barges and rafts. At night they gleamed with lanterns, like fireflies. While he watched them, Ivak beheld other lights flickering in the wash of waves along the shore. Some foreign officers said those were phosphorescent salt, yet Ivak, the sotnik, knew them to be the souls of the dead seeking a resting place. So he turned his horse away, toward the encampment on the shore. For a Cossack the earth is good, the sea is bad.

  Although it was late at night, coaches and riders splashed through the mud. They all pushed toward the new town of Kherson, built, as Ivak heard, by the order of the Prince Marshal, Potemkin. Here they turned into the palace, which shone with candlelight. When Ivak observed ladies as fine as peacocks passing through the guards at the palace door, he thought they would be dancing inside, so he dismounted to go in where he could see better.

  A gaitered sergeant yelped at him in bad Russian, "Out, brainless!”

  "I am ataman of the Kameniecz Hussars,” said Ivak, who had once served with those hussars and did not like them.

  The sergeant had three corners to his hat, and his hair whitened with flour paste, his scalp lock tied behind with a riband in Prussian style. "You are a pig’s bristle! ” he replied, rapping Ivak’s belt buckle with his cane.

  There were four grenadiers behind the sergeant; they had bayonets fixed. Ivak pulled the front corner of the sergeant’s hat down over his eyes, so it stuck fast with the flour paste. "Tie up your riband, sweetheart,” he said, walking away quickly.

  That was how he came to find the Lady Anya. For the rudeness of the sentries at the door made Ivak all the more determined to see the dancing. In the back among the lemon trees he saw no guards. The only windows, in the base of a round tower, rose high over his head, with iron bars that he could not break.

  But the narrow door gave a little at top and bottom, showing that it had been locked with only one bolt. This he worked back with the tip of his knife, and, after listening a space, pushed the door open.

  Inside he saw no one, only a round whitewashed chamber like a monk’s cell, with gold candlesticks on the long table. Ivak picked up the flagon on the table and took a swallow—sweet wine it was, not brandy. Among the papers and snuffboxes, gems and precious stones had been strewn. They gleamed with blue and amber fire, and one as large as his thumb’s end he thought to be a crystal. Then he saw it was a diamond, yellow, but without a flaw.

  At once Ivak thought of two things: in his hand he held the worth of four or five years’ pay; also this was no ordinary room, having a table spread with medals, jewels and maps. When he listened he heard someone breathing quickly. In a mirror he noticed a slim woman with bare shoulders, combing her hair and crying quietly.

  In shadow she sat at a little table behind the screen. Carefully Ivak put back the diamond and moved toward the other door. It did not seem wise to stay in that cell-like room.

  Before he could reach the inner door, it started to open, and voices resounded. Ivak had no time to slip out into the garden, so he stepped to the side of the door, drawing his sword and holding it against his boot as if on duty there. With his long svitka and sheepskin cap, he looked much like a soldier.

  A big man plunged in, slamming the door—a hairy man with bowlegs showing under a loose monk’s robe. "Now I will see you, little pigeon!” he called.

  To Ivak he paid no attention. In a moment the woman came from behind the screen, and Ivak almost laughed. All at once she had ceased whimpering like a hurt puppy; her eyes, blue as cornflowers, sparkled, and her slippered feet danced. Holding out her skirt, she sank almost to the floor and smiled up at the monk man, who stared at her and nodded. "Yes, child, you look well enough.”

  "If your highness is pleased —— ” she prattled.

  "Yes, the court chose you well. I am pleased, but not yet satisfied. Of course, you speak English?”

  "Your nobility knows my father was James Graeme, of the Preobrazhensky Guards—the surgeon.”

  Ivak hardly understood the name at the time; he learned of it later. Since neither the man nor the slim girl in the festival dress—she might have been eighteen years old—seemed to notice him, he stood where he was.

  The big man was whispering orders to her—and such orders. Ivak heard the name "Pavel” repeated. Pavel would arrive very soon, and to Pavel this girl must attach herself, to observe his actions and report them. She would have no trouble pleasing Pavel, who appreciated the charm of fair, sparkling ladies.

  The girl made a face like an imp. "And after?” she asked, her head on one side.

  "After? It may happen that you will need to complain of him and denounce him for trapping your virtuous self in his quarters and outraging your girlish innocence. It may be necessary, Anya.”

  The girl did not smile. "I thank your highness. It is better to know the truth.”

  Stepping to the door to let her out, the owner of the splendid cell faced Ivak squarely for the first time. "What devil possessed you, Anya,” he shouted, "to bring your bodyguard here?”

  Icy cold ran down Ivak’s back. The man stared at him with one motionless eye, while the other eye twitched nervously. Clearly he had not seen the Cossack before because he was blind in one eye.

  "I did not bring him,” the girl said. "I thought you had sent him to watch your playthings.”

  Turning swiftly, the noble glanced at the table. Ivak gripped the hilt of his sword. Such a one-eyed highness as this could be only one man—the Prince Marshal George Alexandrovitch Potemkin, commander of all the armies and fleets of the Russian Empire, and darling of the
Empress Catherine. This Potemkin, the son of a peasant, could clap his hands and order bullets fired into Ivak’s back.

  "Idiot,” he shouted, "have you a name? What is it?”

  Ivak told him truthfully. Swaying on his bowlegs, Potemkin pondered moodily. Closely Ivak watched him.

  Suddenly Potemkin rocked with laughter. "By Satan’s horns, Cossack, I think you have licked at my wine, but you have not pocketed any papers. Well, you can be this poor child’s bodyguard. Escort her everywhere, protect her like your own dushenka. Only do not leave her. Understand me?”

  Bending his head, Ivak rapped out, "At command!" In another moment, he thought, he would be out the garden door, alive. Blinking at him, Potemkin pulled open a drawer in the table and handed him a roll of silver coins. By the clink of the coins as he gripped them in his free hand, Ivak knew them to be silver rix-dollars.

  "For a good drunk, Cossack,” the great man said. "There’ll be more at the end if you serve well.”

  And instead of letting the two of them go from the garden, he swung open the inner door, stroking the shoulder of the girl Anya. "War is a bitter business, little pigeon,” he whispered. "Forgive me, and remember in your prayers that Potemkin will protect you.”

  It seemed to Ivak that he posed for a second in the open door bending over the slender girl. Certainly a hundred eyes saw him doing it—the eyes of commanders and their women, of foreign officers with powdered hair, and ribbons across their chests, of boyarinas and smiling young ensigns, all pacing this anteroom to tinkling music, bowing to one another and stepping daintily.

  Out of the dancers a boyarina swept, holding her fan and the sides of her swelling skirt. "Cristabel Anastasiya Graeme!” she cried. "To think that you have deserted Petersburg for the army! Whoever came with you?”