Little Lost Lambs at the Post

by Harold Lamb

  The vehicle slowed down on the wooden bridge that spanned the narrow ravine beside the castle. Here Miss Susie said, "Look what is happening because of the ghosts.”

  Below the bridge a stream flowed sluggishly between pools. The water, however, was muddied by cattle and sheep pushing down the slope of the ravine in spite of the efforts of women armed with sticks to keep them back. One small urchin was hoisting a lamb through the animals to get at water.

  "This river,” enunciated Miss Susie, "is all the waterworks of Kirik.”

  "Um,” said the admiral.

  According to the girl, the animals had been driven down from the pastures where melting snow gave water enough. There was not enough within the town for animals and humans.

  "You mean, Miss Susie,” suggested McGowan sympathetically with his arm back of her shoulder-length bob, "they were frightened by the ghosts?”

  "Some of them were killed.”

  From this exhibit the girl conducted the Americans politely farther into antiquity, through the doorless entrance of the castle into a lofty chamber cluttered with mirrors, faded photographs and a grand piano. From the shadowed ottoman behind the grand piano rose a straight-backed woman, steadying herself on an ivory staff, holding the corner of a black silk scarf across her mouth. The mother, said Susie, of her grandmother—Madame Hayreddin, who was honored by their coming to her poor home.

  Evidently Madame Hayreddin could notforget that proper ladies had once worn veils. Her husky voice murmured shyly, but the dark eyes above the scarf were more compelling than Anna Held’s. It seemed that she occupied the Byzantine castle because it had pleasant memories and was rent free.

  "Madame finds it fantastic and exciting,” interpreted Susie rapidly, "to call down an American admiral from the sky, to remove the trouble from our village.”

  In wary silence the admiral took note of the gentlemen with fezzes, mustaches and starfish decorations in the photos. An old family, he decided. "Honor’s mine,” he muttered.

  The scarf dropped an inch.

  "She apologizes,” Susie hurried on, "because no officers saluted your excellency at the airport. But our mayor has driven to Erzerum, which is division headquarters, for army first aid, and the captain of police and others have departed up the mountain to defend us against the ghosts.” Madame’s thin finger indicated a photograph. "She called upon you because she is navy also—his excellency, her ’usband, commanded our Black Sea fleet under the last sultan. So madame has no trust in army officers, who are, as you say it, big ’eads ——”

  "Fatheads,” supplied the admiral.

  "Fat’eads ... or the police, who do nothing but shoot rifles. Madame trusts only a sailor to help us.”

  The admiral had a hunch that two gifted women were maneuvering him into position for attack. Madame, it seemed, had been responsible for his coming. "Then will madame,” he demanded, "identify the so-called ghosts and define the situation here?”

  Madame Hayreddin recognized the voice of authority, and responded in kind. Kirik was menaced by raiders from the higher ranges who looked like, and called themselves, tribal Kurds. But for a generation there had been no such tribal Kurds; instead they raised horses and grew tobacco and sent their children to Susie’s school. Madame remembered that, and she did not believe in ghosts. She wanted the American admiral to drive away the raiders. The American sailor before him in the Black Sea had done such wonders.

  To the admiral’s knowledge, he was the first American naval officer to be stationed in these waters, and he said so.

  "No, sir,” Susie informed him triumphantly, "madame says His Excellency John Paul Jones fought here before you, though on the wrong side.”

  Frowning, the admiral tried to recall long-forgotten history, and McGowan caught his eye. "They’re right, sir. Jones was here in ’88. That is, 1788.”

  Madame poked Susie with the cane.

  "She says a hungry man doesn’t give a good answer back. So, while you decide to help us, she wants you to eat a small mouthful here—a snack.”

  When the admiral glanced at his watch, the girl beckoned him hurriedly out through the hole in the wall that did duty as a window, to the castle terrace overlooking the sea. "Please, sir, eat her snack. She is old, and she will be ’urt in the ’eart if you leave without tasting our bread. She does not understand our modem tempo.”

  "I'm not so sure of that,” muttered the admiral.

  As if he had agreed to stay, the girl flitted back into the castle chamber. McGowan grinned. "A museum piece, that madame.”

  "McGowan, did you ever think what it takes to be a piece in a museum? Nowadays they don’t make women like that, in the grand manner ——”

  Irritably he strode over to the parapet to stare down at the bed of the Kirik River, now churned into mud by frantic animals. Across the way, women sat with their children, watching him expectantly. Abruptly he realized that able-bodied men seemed to be strangely absent from the town.

  A dust-laden breeze whipped the terrace, and he was conscious of a faint but familiar "tap . . . tap-tap.” "Now what is that?” he growled.

  "Rifles,” said McGowan. "A couple of miles up the mountains, I’d say.”

  Exasperation needled the ache of hunger and the growing pangs of thirst within the admiral. Mightily he longed for his end-of-the-day half tumbler of brandy. These Turks, he had discovered, drank only water.

  Two shirt-sleeved menservants ran out with a table and a clean cloth. They reappeared with two chairs and empty glasses, and then with a fine big platter of Ming ware containing two small dry balls of crisped dough. The officers, aware of Madame Hayreddin hovering within the window, dutifully ate their snacks.

  Out to them hurried Susie in a fresh organdy dress with a white rose. "You must sit down, please,” she urged breathlessly. "Madame does not think it proper for her or me to eat a supper snack with gentlemen. She wishes you to sit where you can see your ship of war doing nothing with its cannon while the battle is fought.”

  Before the admiral’s jaundiced eye, the neat little gunboat lay at her hook offshore, with all awnings up and wash hung in the breeze. Moodily he dated her from the Spanish war, and the foredeck gun as an obsolete 4.7 rifle.

  "Young lady,” he rasped, "will you tell me in plain English what the situation is? Are your people firing at ghosts or is there a tribal— uh—revolt?”

  "Neither.” Something like fear touched her young face. "Wait.”

  Again the menservants came at the double. But this time they set before the admiring eyes of the Americans two plates of steaming whole lobsters and two bottles of red wine. Presently the Ming platter returned heaped up with snowy white rice. As a side dish, the plates came back bearing kebabs on toast coated with sour cream. To top off, an hour later, the officers had baklava sirup cake. Munching it, the admiral felt he must do something for these helpless, well-brought-up women.

  Silently Susie stepped to his side with a tray bearing a tall, untouched bottle of French brandy. Deftly she avoided McGowan’s experienced arm. McGowan murmured," Beautiful lady,” as she poured the brandy.

  In the admiral’s eyes at that moment she was indeed a beautiful young lady; he hoped, at her age, she was not falling for McGowan’s dark Irish charm. She seemed to be emotional. Then he identified her emotion as fright.

  "There!” Susie chewed at her soft lip. "Now you have had your snack, madame says to tell your excellency ——”

  "Susie.” The admiral sniffed his glass. "My friends call me 'Mickey.'”

  The sympathy, unexpected, in his voice broke down the tension in the girl, and she laughed nervously. "Mickey! We Turks have a saying—in bad trouble, go on laughing. I could not tell you the trouble where so many ears listened. We have a bad neighbor.”

  The admiral nodded. "H’m. Ghosts or raiders? Stick to facts, Susie.”

  "That is the biggest fact, sir . . . Mickey. Second fact, our neighbor sends evil to us across the border. His destroyers take the fishnets from
our fishing boats; he demands to take this shore from us. Third fact, he sends armed men—maybe tribesmen, maybe soldiers—sneaking across the mountain frontier, to drive our herds from pasture and cut down our telefon wire, and otherwise make the worst trouble.” Susie took a quick breath. "Fourth fact, if we shoot at these raiders, our neighbor will say how they are really Kurdish tribesmen. But when did real tribesmen shoot down animals? No matter. Our neighbor will say this shore where we Turkish people have been for five hundred years is not safe any more, and to be safe it should be a Kurdish republic, and not Turkish any more.”

  Out of the mouth of a teenage girl, the admiral thought, there are the facts. "Moses,” he said.

  The lines creasing over his eyes, he squinted seaward at the distant mountains of the Caucasus. There was the neighbor. And this Turkish-Soviet frontier had all the explosive potential of a minefield.

  He thought of what might follow a frontier incident here, reported in the tense debates of the UN at Lake Success. As he thought of what might happen to the career of Rear Admiral Cater if he interfered where he had no shadow of authority to act—"toc-toc-toc-toc” sounded from the hills.

  "A machine gun, sir,” said McGowan, seriously. "Closer, by my reckoning.”

  "Yes,” said Susie. "Our polis do not have that kind of a gun.” Something hard and unyielding touched her face. "We will not be frightened away from Kirik. Mickey, tell us what to do.”

  Like madame, she believed that an American officer, without authority or means to take action, could help them defend their temporarily isolated town.

  "My dear,” he grumbled, "I can’t even do that. I can’t order even an operational readiness test on shipboard, much lesson land. I’m only a technical adviser, a necktie-wearing stooge.”

  Out to the table stepped Lieutenant Nimet, to announce in the flat voice of duty that the T-ll was repaired.

  "Shut up, Turgut,” growled the admiral, pondering. If he could find some excuse to stay on, he might be able to bear a hand. "We’ve hardly finished supper.” He wondered what John Paul Jones would have done. Jones had a way of acting without authorization from the Government. "McGowan,” he demanded suddenly, "what kind of an Irishman are you, not to identify ghosts under your eyes? Proceed up this river and find out how the police force is making out with the ghosts. Go now, fast, and report the exact situation to me.”

  Surprised, McGowan emptied his glass and rose. Nimet eyed him with restrained jealousy and doubt, objecting that horse herders said the police were being driven back and encircled by the raiding tribesmen. No American should go where he could not talk to people. He would go instead.

  The admiral studied the two youngsters and the silent girl. "Both of you,” he grunted. "Borrow madame’s team, and report to me here.”

  Alone with Miss Susie, the admiral propped his feet comfortably on the parapet, drew the brandy bottle closer and noticed how a tear in the organdy over her breast had been covered up by exquisite embroidery, probably by the hand of madame. Salvage.

  Her brown eyes smiled at him, and forty years slipped away from him into the sunset glow reflected in the tideless Black Sea. Into that glow rose the dust of the herds crowding into the streets of Kirik. Tasting his fourth brandy, the admiral reflected that there was nothing fantastic, after all, about Kirik, which was like any ranching town in Montana. The fantastic thing was the implacable evil that threatened it.

  "Then you will help, Mickey,” the girl whispered, as if reading his mind.

  He nodded, although he had no idea how he could do so. "Sure,” he said, forgetting how he had been warned never to make a promise to these Turks he could not carry out. Confidently he patted her knee.

  At once a sharp whisper sounded behind them, and Miss Susie listened. "It is madame who warns me, Mickey. She says to trust no man after sunset, and you are handsome and dangerous.”

  Forty years ago the admiral would not have let a girl like this depart so easily. But when she left him the grand piano began to sound under her fingers in an old waltz. Yes, he thought, these women had taste. If he only held command, like the ghost of madame’s husband, on this Black Sea.

  With the music, something tugged at his mind. An old command, forgotten. Something he had not heard, but seen that day. It had to do with the word "neighbor” . . . and the field where his plane had come to rest . . . with oxen, and donkeys, too . . . and then the menservants who carried in the lobsters.

  It didn’t make sense. The admiral thought he would doze until McGowan showed up with the facts. . . .

  A shaft of light lay across his eyes. The stiffness of a long, relaxing sleep bound him when he moved. The light came from an electric torch in the hand of the senior pilot, who spoke bad English. It revealed also Susie, holding to a small excited boy.

  "Sir, we are sorry to wake you up,” she explained, "but Captain Buyur wants you in the aeroplane, safe, ready to fly before sunrise. The polis are cut off and the danger is great here.”

  "Where’s Nimet? And the American officer?”

  "Finish,” said Captain Buyur, and the boy pointed to the dark bulk of the mountain. Susie began to cry like any overstrained sixteen-year-old, explaining that the lad had seen the two officers cut off by the tribesmen up there.

  Yanking his tie into place, the admiral said, "The hell with authority.” He had at his command one unarmed trainer plane and, possibly, one ancient anchored gunboat. Blinking at the riding lights of the vessel, he told the girl, "Susie, we’re all going for a row. First, tell madame she’s right. It takes the navy to deal with a situation like this.”

  Lt. Turgut Nimet was the first man on the ridge of the mountain to hear the faint drone of the plane. He said, "Listen, the admiral’s going home.”

  Where he lay on hard rocks, Lt. Comdr. Terence McGowan woke up, aching from his bruised head to his twisted ankle. He saw clouds tinted by sunrise drifting through pine trees far above him. When he lifted his head with an effort, he beheld below him a mountain scene as fine as a post card from Switzerland. His bed of rocks formed part of a slide at the foot of a creeper-grown cliff. This slide was populated by crouching figures in the gray uniform of the Turkish national police and in the dark homespun of farmers—all of them clutching old single-shot rifles. Below the slide wound a gushing stream, and beyond it pine-topped ridges rose to a peak coated with gray ice.

  From the trees opposite, a machine gun chattered lazily. Promptly slugs ricocheted, screaming, through the rocks of McGowan’s slide, and memory returned to him vividly.

  It had happened here. He had climbed the mountain, riding with the airman up the riverbank, leaving the horses with a boy at a charcoal burner’s smoking pit, then trying to keep up with Turgut on foot until the police captain ran down to them, dodging, waving them back, then falling when a slug hit him. After dark, McGowan had tried to help drag the police officer back to the slide where the defenders of Kirik held out, nursing their cartridges. McGowan, a citizen of New York and no mountain climber, had fallen into a cleft between the rocks until Turgut extracted him.

  Now, sore, helpless and unarmed, he said, "What about us?”

  Turgut was watching the raiders, whom McGowan could not sight, except for smoke drifting across the way from fires where they seemed to be preparing breakfast from slaughtered sheep. Turgut said they wore black lambskin jackets, like Kurds, but they had packs, which tribesmen did not usually carry. McGowan no longer thought Turgut to be a show-off.

  The drone of the plane came over them. The T-ll passed through the thinning clouds too high to sight anything stirring in the river valley.

  "Wait,” muttered Turgut. "Maybe Buyur is lining up the cliffs.”

  After a while the plane came back. It roared over the trees on the cliff summit behind them.

  "The crazy gink!” yelled McGowan. He sighted a stocky figure crouched in the glass bomber’s bay.

  The reappearance of the T-ll so close activated the marksmen across the river. A dozen rifles cracked up at i
t, and the heavy machine gun fired a burst from the pine grove opposite.

  The tired Turks, who had brightened when the plane showed up, edged themselves closer to watch McGowan expectantly, as if the T-ll might help them someway. But he knew the unarmed trainer was as harmless as a passing beetle. Nor could its occupants, even if they had spotted the setup in the valley, summon up any armed force from Kirik, stripped of its defenders.

  A sergeant slid between two boulders, rifle in hand, and stood up to salute. Turgut listened to him, and told McGowan, "The captain, who is hurt, asks if he should not make some signal to the plane?”

  McGowan shook his head. Not even a Turkish pilot could land here.

  "Yok,” muttered the airman, and the sergeant started to crawl away. A slug cracked the air over him. A faint echo of laughter came from across the river, followed by a high-pitched mountaineer’s yowl. Turgut grunted. "They call to us shabuk gel, which means come out quick, to surrender. What do you say, Terry?”

  Aching with pain and sick with humiliation, McGowan tried to think of some way out of the trap. "Listen,” he said, "they seem to watch the T-Eleven. If it comes over again, you and the guys that can hoof it make a break.”

  The airman shook his head. "Yok. No, thanks. Our neighbors would like it fine, to shoot us running.”

  He stopped at a far-off sound. McGowan stared unbelieving, hearing the whistle of a shell. The burst came at the head of the valley.

  Turgut blinked and said, "Where did that bomb come from? Or did it?”

  High above them, the plane appeared again, circling in the sunlight. Swearing feverishly, McGowan pulled himself along until he could sight Kirik far below between two boulders. There was only one gun capable of shelling this topside of the mountains.