by Yury Nikitin
Chapter 13
Karganlyk straightened up, his eyes blazing. Oleg put his hand on the sword hilt. For a while, they tried to crack each other with their eyes, then Karganlyk turned away and ran down, jumping among the rocks, sprightly. Down in the valley, Hazars stirred, rushing to meet him. Oleg hurried up the slope, widening his distance to the Hazars who were poor archers. No Khazars anymore. Those were splendid riders and marksmen, dangerous enemies. These are just a bestial gang: unable to build anything, and even out of their skill to destroy.
The northern end of the cleft was guarded by the marauders, the southern by the robbers. The helmets of the two knights glittered over the middle of the ridge. Mortal enemies, but they felt more comfortable with each other than with the other men, brigands and deserters. Chachar bustled among the three groups like a messenger among warring hosts. She was the only one welcome anywhere. Her cheeks flushed with happiness. That was her paradise – only men around.
“How’s your trade?” Gorvel cried to Oleg, while Thomas breathed out with relief.
“As usual: no swindle, no sale. He offered for us to leave the cup and get away.”
Roland uttered a loud hem. “We need to agree!” he expressed the common opinion of his comrades and also the robbers. “Even if the cup is golden, our lives are golder!”
Gorvel and Thomas said nothing. Chachar grasped Oleg by the hand, her eyes glittered with tears. “You refused? Why?”
“After he takes the cup, he will take us.”
“What’s the point of him to losing his men?” Gorvel said warily. “We’ll kill much of his, and he’ll gain only what he hopes to get for nothing!”
“He doesn’t need the cup,” Oleg replied. “He needs us. He was told Sir Gorvel carries all the family jewels with him. They cost enough to hire a small army or build a medium-sized fortress. Sir Gorvel, you may find it hard to believe that your masters have set him on you, but it’s in the spirit of progress. Hazars can’t be commanded in the way you were, but these base creatures are easily manipulated by playing on their greed, envy, and malice!”
Gorvel turned pale, his hand darted to his sword hilt. At once, Thomas and Roland, the leader of the marauders, drew their swords and covered the wonderer. “And the cup…” Oleg continued. “Karganlyk will give it to those who pointed out the rich prey, in gratitude of their hint. Who needs that plain cup, Sir Gorvel?”
Gorvel sheathed his sword with a thud, turned away. The marauders and robbers exchanged suspicious, unbelieving glances. Kings, basileuses, and sultans were legendary creatures. Just as gods, demons, and peries. None of those is to be encountered by ordinary men, so forget them and only rely upon your own strength, fortune, and a lucky star!
“What will we do?” Roland inquired. He stepped out of the group of marauders. “Holy father, we see you have definitely met these devils before. And those meetings might have been hard, as you know their military habits. That horned devil was talking to you respectfully, we all saw. And he’s the kind of demon to escape no censure but a hard fist. And he kept glancing, the other men will say if I lie, at your fists, not your charms!”
Oleg fingered absent-mindedly the charms on his breast. “We’ll have to wait. We can’t leave without horses. The mountain must have been surrounded, but they won’t attack at night. I know it.”
“We ran short of water,” Roland reminded them. He licked his dry lips. “And they’ll pour it over themselves in the morning! There’s a spring half a mile from here.”
Oleg shook his head sadly. “We have no other choice. The roads are busy here. The forces of Barons and Saracens often ride through this valley. If any of them come, the wild Hazars will be driven away. They are hated by everyone.”
Roland stepped back but his eyes were doubtful. The marauders took a quiet counsel, and the Black Beard, who had kept silent up to that moment, roared, “If! Your ‘if’ brought death to all of mine! Let the pilgrim have his ways, and we’ll have ours. Once it’s dark, we try to break through. Some of us die, but others live. Or we all die with this fool!”
Thomas blushed, his hand darted to his sword hilt. Gorvel puffed up, stepped closer to him. Oleg flung his fist swiftly. There was the muffled tinkle of a helmet. For a moment, the Black Beard stood with wide eyes, then his knees bent, he collapsed face first. The dumbfounded robbers watched his iron helmet, which had fallen to the ground, a dent in it, then shifted their gazes to the bare fist of the peaceful pilgrim.
“You… killed him?” Gorvel asked.
“It would have pleased the Hazars if I had. He’ll soon come to.”
Gorvel breathed out with relief. “I’m glad that you are our sultan, sheikh, and king! If I were you, I couldn’t help killing that churl!”
Thomas bent his head and said nothing: he’d also have killed the robber with great pleasure. The Black Beard groaned, turned on his back with effort. A marauder who was smirking malevolently from ear to ear kicked the empty helmet to him, it landed in a position for the dent to be well seen.
The Black Beard’s hair on the left side of his head was matted with blood. He moaned and sat up, resting both hands on the ground. “Take your cut-throats,” Oleg told him mildly. “The watch before midnight is yours. Then these brave soldiers of imperial guard will change with you.”
The Black Beard touched his badly hurt head, stood up and left without saying a word. Even robbers could not object to such forcible arguments.
At night, Oleg and Thomas crawled on their bellies on the bare ground, peering at the rocks shimmering in the starlight. The silence was only broken by the rare howl of a jackal. In the valley far below, a red fire could be seen. At times it disappeared as a vigilant sentinel walked past.
Gorvel had a long talk with Roland, glancing back at Thomas and Oleg frequently. They seemed to have reached an agreement at last, as they covered themselves with cloaks and lay down to sleep. Robbers stood the first watch. Chachar sat with them for a while, staring in the dark, resenting Thomas for his paying her too little attention. However, she was almost the first to fall asleep.
Oleg fingered his charms. A wooden figure of a hare was caught frequently. If he understood the meaning of that sign sent by his eternal, all-seeing and all-knowing soul, someone was going to run away, trying to save his skin.
The Black Beard, with his bandaged head, was lying at the other end of the cleft. Next to him, Oleg saw the heads of his survived robbers. One of the marauders, a taciturn beastlike man, sat beside them, exchanging some quiet remarks with them.
Thomas and Oleg looked at each other. Thomas became alerted, pulled his sheathed sword towards himself. “Is there a way out?” he whispered hopefully. “I must get out!”
“I see. The Holy Grail–”
“Krizhina waits for me! If I linger, her brothers will give her in marriage!”
“Oh, that’s serious, I see. But we have to wait. For some host to pass by, for something else to happen… This land is no wild steppe for Hazars to invade without being seen! Someone somewhere is already blowing trumpets, saddling horses…”
“They’ll be late,” Thomas sighed. “We have to set our hopes upon a miracle.”
Oleg heard a heavy sigh in the dark, as if one were carrying the whole valley on his back. He smirked sadly. All the way, at the least occasion, the knight had been telling him with ardor about the miracles made by the first Christians,. And when nothing is left to us but belief in miracles, he lost his heart.
Far below, on the left side of their crevice, stone tapped lightly on stone. As the man saw himself spotted, he dashed across the moonlit area and vanished in the shadow, only his hard soles stamped hastily on the rocks.
Oleg glanced back at the sentinels. The Black Beard was in place, one of his robbers with him, a sullen marauder sitting nearby and grinding his dagger, but another robber had disappeared. The Black Beard shook his fist angrily after the runaway.
Gorvel swore. “I’d rather expect it of their leader! That scum is going to those mountains
. And the Hazars are far. The bastard must have robbed us! And he’s leaving!”
“Will he leave?” Oleg asked with doubt. Thomas shifted his gaze between the wonderer and the red-bearded knight.
“I stake my arms and armor,” Gorvel said sharply, “on his successful leave. He walks light and far from Hazars. See their fire?”
Thomas looked at the distant fire, far even from the foot of the hill. His face darkened.
“I bet my head to your armor, sir,” Oleg told Gorvel sadly. “The Hazars have made fires there deliberately for us to see. In fact, two score of warriors lie in ambush among those rocks, in half a hundred steps from us, and listen, trying to guess what we do, what we are going to do, what we hope on. That’s a common tactic of Hazars! I’m surprised to find you, Sir Gorvel, a man of war, that easy to be dece–”
They heard a scream a hundred steps away in the dark. A heavy body hit against the stone, pebbles clattered down the slope. A scream again: muffled, as if the man was silenced while uttering it. Dead silence fell, broken only by the distant sounds of speedy feet running away.
Thomas turned to Gorvel briskly, with his eyes shining like a lynx’s and a wide smile from ear to ear. “You armor, Sir Gorvel!”
“Not now,” Oleg interfered hurriedly. “He’ll need it to fight.”
Gorvel fidgeted, as he forced himself to speak with great embarrassment and displeasure. “Sir Thomas, I’ve lost my armor. It belongs to sir wonderer. I, a knight, made a mistake. You and your friend know the ways of filthy barbarians better. That’s no surprise for me…”
Oleg saw Thomas’s face darkening in the faint moonlight and put his heavy hand on the knight’s shoulder to keep him from a furious lung. The cleft was dark. They heard marauders speaking in angry, irritated voices. “Keep a vigilant watch,” Oleg told them in a warning tone. “Over the rocks and bushes. Memorize their positions.”
A dark figure turned to him. When the man spoke, Oleg recognized the voice of Roland, the leader of marauders. “I know such tricks. They won’t sneak up.”
“See to no one sleeping on the watch!”
Roland hemmed. His reply sounded a bitter irony. “Everyone’s heard of Hazars. A bit at least. Who can sleep when his hair stands on end?”
Oleg turned away from him. “Let no one try to get out alone!” Thomas added in the peremptory tone of a lordly knight.
Roland laughed. “If anyone nursed such an idea, he has trampled and ground it by now!”
Oleg saw their faces, white in the dark. Woken up by the hushed voices, people looked at him with hope. He adjusted the bow and the quiver on his back, checked his knives. “I’ll go and have a close look at their camp.”
Thomas gasped. “But how will you… get there? You’ve said we are surrounded. They sit behind every stone. A fly couldn’t pass!”
“There are no flies at night,” Oleg replied indifferently. “Only gnats… Sir Thomas, I’m not a steel-thundering knight, nor a robber. Slavs are taught as children to steal up to an animal! A child grasps a wild goose, an adult can jump on the back of the keenest deer… When coming back, I’ll give a whistle, so you won’t shoot me if you hear my steps.” He backed away and vanished into the night. Thomas, Gorvel and all the rest listened tensely, watched the starry sky closely, but no star vanished behind a moving figure, no twig snapped, no pebble clicked.
A scatter of smooth stones looked like a herd of giant turtles frozen in the chill of the night. The sentinels kept counting the largest rocks. The Black Beard shot two arrows in a boulder that seemed suspicious to him and saw it sinking a bit, changing its shape slightly. When the moon came out again from behind a cloud, the boulder was not in place.
Oleg moved in the night, as silent as a bat. At times he stopped, pressed against the ground, smelled unwashed bodies and horse sweat, listened to the creaks of belts and breath of men. Once he made out a full picture, to the smallest detail, he moved on, slipping past Hazars in their hideout. There were not two scores of barbarians around their refuge, as Oleg had supposed, but twice that number, or even more. Karganlyk was so craving to the Holy Grail that he’d sent half his tribe to guard, for no one to slip out, to crawl away, to dig into burrows.
As Oleg lay on the rocks, he listened to jackals roaming around the Hazar camp. A skilled hunter reads the voices of animals as easily as their tracks, so Oleg, still being far from the camp, knew that there were no more than a hundred Hazars and twice that number of horses, three bonfires, six killed rams, and human flesh cooked on spits: Hazars, unlike Khazars, eat not only dead enemies but their own dead too.
He slipped down into the valley, stealing up to the bonfires. He stopped dead at the strange sounds: mumbles and measured trample, as if several men were making a gloomy ritual dance. Oleg sneaked closer and saw, against the starry sky, a massive wooden cross, a white body on it. The poor man was crucified. The robber who tried to escape alone. Oleg recognized the dark stripes on his body at once: they were where Hazars had cut the man’s skin off to make belts from it. The robber’s mouth was gagged tightly. They don’t want his voice to get hoarse before time. They would let him shriek as much as he wished in the morning, for Oleg and his small party to see and hear what awaited them.
Four Hazars were stamping on the soft ground the cross dug into, driving stones and wedges under its base. Dark blood was streaming down the cross. The robber’s feet were set against the ground, otherwise the nails couldn’t have kept his body. The Hazars had not only cut belts from him: they maimed the bottom of his belly, pulled out his male parts.
Noiselessly, Oleg took his bow off, emptied the arrows on the ground. He hesitated for a while and laid down a throwing knife too, though it was hard to shoot an arrow while lying and throwing a knife was even worse.
He loosed the first arrow after a thorough aim-taking. Then he’d snatch the next one by its feather hastily, draw in a flash, shoot and grasp another at once. The first Hazar was shot in the throat, two more in their heads before they could cry, but the fourth one had time to see the glitter of the arrowhead in the dark. He jumped aside, a saber flashed in hand.
Oleg threw the knife with force. The Hazar fell, the hilt stuck out of his left eye socket. Oleg caught the body, flinched at the blood pouring over him, put it noiselessly on the ground.
From the Hazar camp, he heard common sounds of any nomad camp where half of the men are awake, whetting their swords, putting heads on their arrows and spears, while the sentinels mostly watch the bonfires and meat on spits.
He wiped the throwing knife clean, tucked it in place. While he ran around the cross and gathered his arrows, he kept listening to the sounds of the noisy Hazar camp. He approached cautiously, flinching at every chirrup of a grasshopper. There was no suspicious noise, no signs of alarm, and Oleg breathed out with great relief. At the blaze of farther bonfires, he saw many Hazars drinking heavily, the befuddling soma, chewing death caps. Their faces twitched, contorted, froze in awful grimaces.
He was looking out for Karganlyk when someone pushed him the on back. “Why ramble in the dark?” an angry voice said in the spoiled tongue of Eastern Khazars who had turned Hazars. “Carry the wood–”
Oleg wheeled round, pulling out his knife. Two Hazars glared at him, the third one behind them was dragging a dry log with effort. Oleg kicked the first Hazar in the groin. At the same time, the knife vanished from his hand, appearing as a hilt stuck in the throat of the second enemy. Oleg jumped on the third Hazar who dropped the log and widened his eyes in fear. He let out a terrible yell that stopped abruptly with a shrill sob.
Oleg dashed aside, fell, rolled over his head and stopped dead, sprawling on the ground, his ear pressed to it. He heard screams at the camp, a loud clatter of hooves. Someone darted across the fire, scattering hot coals. The sleeping Hazars were jumping up with dreadful yells, in burning clothes. Only those befuddled by soma and death caps did not stir.
Oleg cast anxious glances at the dark sky. The light spot of moon van
ished behind fast running clouds one minute, then shone through them too brightly, threatening to fall out into the clear sky. He would be exposed then!
He ran off a bit, crouched, watching and listening for who was where, how many of them, where they were headed. Karganlyk did not show up, though Oleg heard his stentorian roar twice. He started to sneak his way but soon heard the leader’s voice from another side, as if Karganlyk had felt the danger and was hiding or trying to trick Oleg into ambush.
The turmoil went on. They found the bodies and are combing the valley through! Oleg started a quiet retreat to the mountain. Warned by the trample of hooves or feet beforehand, he fell on the ground each time, merged into its hummocks, pretended to be a boulder. One Hazar was too fast, no time to dodge. Oleg had to punch him in the head to stun him.
Thomas and Gorvel were awake, peering at the far bonfires. Nearby, the Black Beard was scuffing with concentration, as he whetted his curved sword, checked it carefully with his nail, as thick as a hoof, and moved the rough whetstone lovingly on the blade again.
“You friend is a man of great courage,” Gorvel remarked at last. “A civilized man would never take such a risk, but he’s a Pagan, as those wild Hazars are. He’s a match for them.”
“He has enough civilization and enough culture,” Thomas snapped. “He knows the Holy Writ, though he doesn’t appreciate it. Sometimes it seems to me he has met all the great prophets in person, so profound is his knowledge of their words and their ideas!”
“Then his soul belongs to Satan,” Gorvel told him with confidence. “Are you sure he’s not Satan himself? Or one of his servants? Not the least of them! Some things he does… I wonder whether they are possible for any man.”
Thomas pondered over it, then his face lit. “He held the Holy Grail in his hands! And it can’t be touched by one with foul intent. By the way… Can you hold it?”
Gorvel turned away. He stared into the dark for a long time. The reply he gave afterwards sounded steady and confident, as if he felt great powers behind. “I treat the cup of Christ’s blood with too much respect to lay dirty fingers on it. Once I’m back to my castle… either the old or a new one… a priest will absolve me of all my sins, however small. Then I’ll take it.”
“That will be a long confession,” Thomas said. “You’ll get old before you finish it!”
Chachar tossed anxiously in her sleep under Thomas’s cloak, whispered something. Thomas walked aside so as not to wake her, glad at the opportunity to move away from despicable Gorvel: the veiled creature who robbed his guest of the Holy Grail and then tried to kill him treacherously, throwing heavy stones down at him… And this monster doesn’t burn of shame. He speaks to me as if nothing happened! He could keep closer to robbers, men of his own sort, but instead he’s hanging around me, an honest man.
Suddenly, they heard screams from the dark valley below. The closest bonfire blazed up. Thomas saw the tiny figures of men rushing around it, then some riders galloping past like ghosts. Then other bonfires blazed up too. There was a glitter of blades, furious shouts grew louder.
“They captured him!” Gorvel cried with obvious vexation.
“At least he managed to kill some of them!” Thomas replied angrily. “Unlike us. We’ll die without any glory.”
“They wouldn’t make such ado for nothing,” Gorvel agreed.
The Black Beard woke another robber up, cursing furiously. Together with the marauders who had jumped up, they peered with fear and anxiety at the far bonfires and darting figures. Then the Black Beard climbed out of the cleft. “We can get out!” he cried excitedly. “They have the pilgrim, all their attention is on him. I don’t know whose holy relics he worshipped, but I bet he’s killed at least one of theirs! And they forgot us!”
“And the devils that guard us?” another robber asked him.
“They must have run down. And if some remained… you’ve served in the imperial guard, haven’t you?”
The marauders exchanged glances, started to climb out of the cleft. Swords and daggers glittered in their hands. Chachar jumped up, wrapping herself in Thomas’s cloak with cold, and clung to the knight.
Gorvel hesitated, his eyes shifted from the robbers and marauders preparing to leave, to Thomas and the shivering Chachar. “Sir Thomas, we’ll have to join this scum for a while. Even if they all die, two of us, the strongest knights, will break through! And then we settle our dispute in combat. Agreed?”
“No,” Thomas snapped resolutely. “My friend is captured by enemies. I’m bound to save him. Or die trying to save him.”
“Bound!” Gorvel jeered. “What about our duel?”
“My sword will find you, scoundrel,” Thomas told him with loathing. “But first I’ll try to rescue sir wonderer. If I perish, it will be the death of Christian warrior.”
“Your death will be neither Christian nor worthy of a warrior,” Gorvel objected. “You don’t see what’s behind you!”
Thomas wheeled round – and saw empty mountain slope, all dark. He heard Chachar squeal in fright, started turning back to Gorvel but a violent header came down on him. With a flash of white fire before his eyes, he fell silently to the ground, rolled few steps down into the cleft. Gorvel raised his axe to descend and cleave the knight’s head, but the marauders and robbers had vanished from sight; he could only hear their heavy breath, clang of arms, and trample of feet. He swore and ran after them, sent the crying Chachar flying out of his way.
Weeping loudly, Chachar collapsed on the cold iron body. Thomas did not stir, and when she managed to raise his visor a bit, her fingers found something wet, hot, and sticky.
A red stripe emerged on the east, but the knight’s unblinking eyes were fixed on the fading stars.