Nicholas’s arms were so stiff, his hands so numb from the aching captivity that he could barely hold onto his reins. He trusted to the grip of horseman’s thighs, keeping low, face almost buried in his pony’s flying mane. He had the mad thought of holding onto that mane with his teeth. They raced over the plain westwards for the watercourse, Smith riding faster and coming upon the Cossacks carrying the baggage, shouting out for their weapons back. Andriushko was behind them. Nicholas looked back and cried out. Andriushko’s horse had stumbled – one of them was doomed to in this wild galloping flight – forefoot in some burrow or marmot hole, and Andriushko came rolling over its neck to land senseless on the ground.
‘No!’ Stanley pulled his pony up short and drove it round, and Nicholas followed. It might be that the Cossack’s horse wasn’t badly hurt and they could still bring him back … and then they saw the first dark shapes emerging out of their own dustcloud. The Tatars.
‘Jesus have mercy,’ whispered Stanley as they reined in hard. Though the ferocious warriors of the East would be upon them in perhaps two minutes, yet they held their skittish mounts as best they could, the ponies’ flared nostrils smelling the danger, their riders’ fear – and took in a long curving line of horsemen, like some old woodcut of the Mongol horde of the Great Khan. How they had come upon them like this was sheer bad luck, but the Easterners soon realised this was a party of Cossacks, and the hunt was on. How many? A hundred and fifty, two hundred … Riding down their ancient enemy this hot summer day, the old sport of the Asiatic steppe.
Broad faces with high windburned cheekbones, crouched low along their ponies’ backs. Their arms mostly the bow and arrow, here and there the gleam of curved scimitar of the Saracen pattern, and what looked like long bullwhips. The earth thundering, the dust rolling along with their thunderous course, narrowed eyes almost closed against the dust, and even at this distance, Nicholas thought he could see their wolfish grins. And Andriushko lying senseless ahead of them.
The gentle giant of a Cossack was lost to them.
‘Ride!’ shouted Stanley bitterly.
Meanwhile Smith had got their bundle of weapons back and was rolling from his horse still at the trot. Stenka had taken to the rise and was marshalling his men. They could not outrun the Tatars, not with their baggage, and Stenka was damned if he would surrender those precious plates of China. A cross-plains gallop that might endure half an hour would only end in the ponies collapsing to the ground with bloody lungs and burst hearts. No, the hell with it. They would take to the rise and in those two or three precious minutes before the Tatars fell on them, they’d charge their guns and let them have a full volley. They were outnumbered ten to one, of course, so to stand and fight was madness. But by the blood of Christ, let the fight come. God stood with the mad often in this mad world. Stenka had seen it.
With a good volley the Tatars would lose ten men, their ponies would rear and reel in indignant rage, and then they would wheel away, releasing a fatal shower of arrows before coming to rest a safe distance off, foam-flecked, panting. And then they’d come back in again, and again …
The Cossack band tumbled from their winded steeds and let them breathe a moment standing, and then forced them down, whinnying furiously. They crouched behind them, the ponies’ foam-flecked bellies rising and falling like forge bellows. Urgently they primed their guns, powdered the pans of ancient muskets and looted Ottoman arquebuses and the occasional German handgun only a little less weighty and barely more wieldy. Ivan Koltzo raced among them distributing more powder and ball. Others shook
their heads and waited with bow and arrow whose simplicity they trusted far more.
The Tatars were breaking wide into a crescent, the ominous arc of the bull’s horn, widely outflanking them to come up the rise from three sides or even all four – but then Stenka saw with astonishment that the two foreign knights, his late captives, had already dismounted at the edge of the gully below. They pulled down their horses, the beasts whinnying furiously at being thus separated from the rest of the herd at this moment of high terror for animals so highly nerved, and then both dropped down into the gully, a natural trench in the plains, but as much a trap as any animal pit. Stenka clenched his jaw grimly. So that was it. They were traitors after all, had even brought this upon them, and now waited below to join the Tatar band as they rode in …
He strode over to where Hodge and Nicholas lay, drawing his curved dagger ready to cut their throats in two swift movements, at the same time bellowing out, ‘Shoot those two dogs below first!’
‘No!’ cried Nicholas, raising his arm. Stenka grimaced and seized his hair and put his blade to the youth’s throat and glanced up once more and then saw a strange sight.
The two traitors were priming guns too, leaning out of the gully to face the oncoming horde. What were the sunstruck fools doing?
‘Smith!’ cried Nicholas. ‘Stanley! Get back!’
Stenka changed his mind. They were not traitors. But they were damn fools, and fools die. ‘The arrows fly overhead, you fools!’ he called to them. ‘They come down like rain!’
But his words fell on deaf ears. Smith and Stanley were otherwise occupied. Still panting, they held themselves as still as they could and Smith propped his jezail on its wooden tripod through the long grass and sighted down the long gleaming barrel of Indian wootz steel. Stanley stood beside him, head held a little higher. Lookout.
What were they thinking? For all their heroics, Nicholas knew they were never yet suicidal. But two hundred Tatars or more came galloping down on them … He could see their red banners fluttering from long spears, their ponies’ nostrils flared, he could see that they wore padded and quilted coats for protection, very few with armour, and most had narrow moustaches and pointed beards.
They would hammer down upon the two crouching knights, with one good shot between them, in another minute or two.
Smith sighted and waited, his breathing slowing, his grip on the long lethal musket steadier all the time. Stanley’s keen blue eyes roved back and forth across the dust-clouded Tatar line, as if looking for something specific. Then he murmured, ‘Got him.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure. One of the few with some kind of steel helmet, morion shape, gold torc of some kind around his neck. Grey beard and hair. Rider to his right with a fringed red pennant flying from—’
‘Got him,’ said Smith. Squinting, turning the jezail a fraction, levelling, accounting for wind, little account today, and the natural fall of the musket ball. Just half an ounce of lead, so small a thing. If he fired at two hundred yards he’d aim just over the head. At one hundred, he’d aim for the helmet but there was a risk the ball might glance off, leaving the rider with little more than a headache. At fifty to seventy yards though, he could aim for the forehead, just below the helmet’s rim, and the ball should take him clean between the eyes. They only had one chance.
Three hundred yards.
Then Stanley, eyes moderately better than Smith’s though not his marksmanship, looked again at the rider with the red banner.
They were cantering in easy now. Some were raising their short, immensely powerful recurved bows, arrows pointing skywards. Black rain coming.
Two hundred yards.
Stanley saw the Tatar chieftain in his steel helmet turn to his left and seem to speak, and the one with the banner smiled and nodded. He was younger, the chieftain was grey-haired. He saw that they both looked …
A hundred and fifty yards.
‘Take the rider to his left,’ said Stanley.
‘Hunh?’
‘Trust me. To his left, that is our right. Forget the chieftain. Take the one with the red pennant.’
Smith had never mistrusted Stanley’s judgement. He grunted and moved the muzzle of his jezail a fraction and from the Tatar host came a great war cry as they closed in.
A hundred yards.
Smith increased the pressure of his forefinger on the trigger and breathed out and relaxed and – eighty yards – fired. It seemed almost instantaneous. The rider with the red banner slipped and fell from his horse without a noise amid the oncoming din and roar, and the next instant the chieftain gave a great cry and reined in and the host of the Tatars stumbled and slowed to a bewildered trot. Some even came riding round across the front of their own line towards their beloved chieftain.
The older man was down off his horse and tearing his steel helmet from his head and kneeling in the dust beside …
Stanley nodded. ‘It was his son.’
Stenka rose up in disbelief at the sight, then raised his sword arm. ‘Fire!’
And forty Cossacks loosed musket balls and arrows down onto the confused and milling host below them. There were shouts and some fell from their horses, more confusion, angry cries, others already cantering back out of range.
In the watercourse, the moment he had fired, Smith began to reload his jezail, his hands almost a blur. Muttering to himself, ‘Just take him, take him as well, and we could be saved without a fight. Cut off the head of this hydra and it’ll never regrow …’
He lay low, aimed, closed his finger on the trigger and fired. The chieftain moved and stirred and glared back. A fine-looking old fellow, broad cheekbones and eyes of an eagle. Quite an enemy to have there. Hell and damnation, how could he have missed? Then there were at least a dozen Tatar horsemen standing or riding their horses in front of him, surrounding him, shielding him with their own bodies. Smith reloaded in less than a minute. The jezail could take it. Cheaper muskets needed time to cool after almost every shot, like cannon, but another wonder of this steel viper was that he had never known her overheat, no matter how hard he worked her. Even in the inferno of Malta.
But there was no chance of another shot at the chieftain. With that mysterious unspoken unity which made a Tatar war party such a fearsome body of fighting men, they pulled around as one and headed away east, the chieftain with the dead body of his son across his own lap. They left not another dead body behind on the plain, they took all for burial. Only a few corpses of horses remained for the carrion birds.
The dust settled behind the vanishing horsemen of the steppe, and the Cossacks slowly stood to their feet and stared after them, barely able to believe their luck. Nicholas and Hodge stared too, and Smith and Stanley relaxed a little, Smith dropping the hammer of his musket carefully down again. They saw that one or two of the horses were not yet dead but pitifully wounded, lying on their sides, slowly stirring their stiff legs in the air. One trying to stand, whinnying, unable, its left hindleg shattered beneath it. Ivan Koltzo went out to them with his long knife.
And then they saw that the Tatars had left one other thing for them. Thrust into the parched earth before them was the spear of the slain son, its blood-red pennant still hanging from the shaft, stirring gently in the hot wind.
They didn’t linger. They rode hard all that day, northwards, over grass steppe until at last as dusk fell they came to a land of shallow valleys and thin trees, thorn brake and birch, and they took shelter there. Any Tatar would be able to follow their trail virtually blindfold, but it was as far as they could go. The horses were tired and they desperately needed watering. They would rest here the night and hope to sleep as best they could.
Once dismounted, nevertheless the Cossacks crowded around the two knights, clapping them on the back and jabbering praise. Even Stenka gruffly acknowledged they had probably saved their skins – for now – and he eyed Smith’s gleaming jezail with envy.
‘You are men of mystery,’ he said. ‘But for now I suppose we must believe you are not in league with the Tatars.’
‘Are you not going to bind them again?’ said Petlin. ‘This is folly. We still know nothing of them. They have lied to us. Now they have raised the whole Tatar nation against us, and what have we to show for it? A few China plates, which they say are valuable. I say, give me that musket of yours, stranger, and be done with it.’
Smith just smiled, and shook his head very slowly.
Petlin strode forward as if to strike him, and Smith’s huge fist enclosed Petlin’s raised arm, as if to snap it like a twig. He gave a jerk and Petlin reeled to the ground. He let him go. Petlin spat in the dust and cursed foully, and nursing his wrenched arm, strode off into the gathering dark. The rest laughed.
‘You’ll not be bound again,’ said Stenka. ‘You are not our prisoners. But you are not our brother Cossacks either. Yet you may ride with us further, for now.’
‘You are not going east to Kharkov?’
‘We are not.’
‘Then … north?’
Stenka nodded. ‘North.’
They watered the horses, shot some wild duck and a young deer, cooked millet cakes and ate. A little later a shadowy figure reappeared out of the gloom. Petlin, still nursing his arm and his wounded pride. Except – this shape was too big for Petlin. They drew their swords. And into the firelight stepped Andriushko.
There was great rejoicing. ‘Andriushko, you simple bear! You ride a horse like a woman, and fall off like a grainsack! How the devil did you get here?’
Andriushko said he had found a stray and panicked horse out there alone, by some miracle, and called it to him. Being a horse, easily lonesome, it had come to him, and he had mounted and followed their trail.
‘How did the Tatars not find you and string you up for archery practice? How are you still living? Are you a ghost?’
He grinned and rubbed his head. ‘The Tatars galloped right over me. I lost my senses and saved my life. Now I’m a ghost with a terrible ache in his skull. Must have landed badly.’
‘But we must give thanks!’ cried Chvedar the defrocked priest. ‘Let there be a Mass, and let us chant the ancient hymns of the Mother Church to praise our God for returning to us so mysteriously our beloved Brother in Arms, Andriushko, devout Christian, Whoremonger and Drunk.’ He passed around a leather flask of the grain spirit they called vodka. ‘The blood of Christ.’
The four Englishmen sat out this ramshackle blasphemy of a spectacle, watching with half-amused fascination. Chvedar handed out millet cakes, hot from the stone. ‘The body of Christ.’
That at least could not be accounted heretical. ‘But can you use this vodka of theirs instead of wine?’ asked Nicholas.
‘A theological grey area,’ said Stanley.
‘Bloody savages,’ said Hodge. ‘We’d be just as well off among the Tatars.’
Chvedar was already drunk himself. ‘“Eat, drink and be merry,” said our Lord Jesus, “and drown your earthly sorrows in vodka, for the Spirit is with you.” The Gospel of Saint Inebrius.’ He crossed himself. The Cossacks guffawed. Chvedar their crazed priest. He lifted his robe and made another sign of the cross over his bare buttocks. Smith shook his head. ‘The Mother of God protect you this night,’ said Chvedar, ‘as the Tatars stalk us all around, yellow wolf eyes in the darkness, daggers in their hands.’
‘A great comfort, Father Chvedar,’ said Stenka.
‘May She gather up the host of the Tatars in her loving arms and raise them up to heaven – and then drop them all down again into the burning mouth of hell, like so many maggots. For the Wrath of the Lord is kindled against them, and we are the instruments of his vengeance. The Cossacks are the chosen people. Has He not blessed us with guns and horses and vodka? Surely God the Father is our refuge, and He will crush our enemies beneath his feet as grapes are pressed in the winepress.’
‘Like scraps of the Scripture regurgitated by a Bedlam beggar,’ said Smith.
‘Enough piety,’ said Stenka. ‘Pass the flask, Father Chvedar, don’t drain it all down your own gullet.’
Chvedar drained it – maybe a pint of the fiery spirit in one draught, and then stood, blear-eyed, swaying. He belched mightily, looked as if he might be sick, swallowed it down, and then very slowly drew his filthy robe over his head and stood naked for them. His body bony and white but for the red weals of his battle scars, a surprising number for a supposed priest, his manhood long and flaccid, skinny shanks and huge splayed feet. Then he laid his robe by the fireside and lay down upon it and fell asleep with mouth agape.
What madmen had they come among?
They moved on before dawn. Even the last of the moonlight seemed malevolent, the vast and empty plains only emphasising cruelly their pitifully small numbers.
Petlin joined them again, slinking in like a fox as they rode out.
‘The Tatars are trailing us,’ muttered Smith.
‘I know it,’ said Stanley.
‘Do you trust Petlin?’
‘Less far than I can spit. But he would not league with the Tatars.’
‘How many more days to Moscow?’ asked Nicholas. He imagined a mighty fortified city, battlements and towers, monstrous cannon – please God, just over the next rise, the next …
‘Days?’ said Smith. ‘Weeks.’
This country. A great emptiness. Plus some Tatar horsemen intent on killing them in the worst way they could devise.
‘Why have they not attacked?’
‘They want the right time,’ said Stanley.
‘There are so few of us,’ said Nicholas.
‘I don’t know. They like to torment the minds of their enemies. It is our punishment, already begun. Refuse to be punished. Do not fear them.’
‘All very well. But I do fear them. I don’t think they’ll treat us too well if they take us alive.’
Stanley said bluntly, ‘Don’t be. Whatever else happens, Brother Nicholas – don’t be taken alive. We have killed the chief’s son. They will have plans for us.’
‘And these Tatars could teach even the Turks a thing or two about torture,’ said Smith with his usual cheeriness.
Towards mid-morning they came upon an ominous sight. A huge circle of bleached bones. Near the edge of the circle was a dark spillage of fresh blood, and a trail leading away into the tall grass. They reined in and looked on in silence. A grim augury. Ivan Koltzo slipped from his pony and knelt and touched his fingertips to the blood and held them beneath his nose.
‘Taur,’ he said. ‘Wild ox. It has gone away wounded, we might track it.’
‘And these bones?’ said Stenka.
Ivan shrugged. ‘They are old.’ He stood and nudged them with the toe of his boot. ‘Some massacre. This one – this could be a human thigh bone. I do not know for sure.’
Nicholas and Hodge exchanged glances. Nicholas pictured the slaughter. A Russian wagon train, perhaps ten years ago, or even a generation since. A family travelling south, a band of Cossacks, perhaps even a band of hopeful German settlers, with their cattle and their sheep, riding out across the plains to found a homestead beside some peaceful river. And then set upon and slaughtered in this desolate spot by Tatars or bandits of some kind, and not a cross to mark them. Who knew? Yet it could equally well have been a Tatar party slaughtered by Cossacks. Such bones, bleached as these, had no tribe, no nation, barely even distinguishable as animal or human.
He felt almost paralysed with foreboding. They all did. Even now they felt a huge circle of Tatars closing in. There would be no glorious stand, no heroics, no fight. They would be efficiently captured, tortured, flayed, perhaps buried alive beside an anthill with only their heads protruding above the earth, eyelids sliced away by the Tatar women and their delicate knives. What had they done?
Then they started. Very far off, a single shot rang out. Ivan Koltzo was up on his pony instantly and heeling the animal towards the distant sound.
‘A lone hunter,’ said Petlin. ‘Trailing the wounded ox.’
Ivan Koltzo did not look back. ‘Pray it is,’ he said. And he was gone, horse and rider vanishing into the tall grass as utterly as a diver beneath the surface of a lake.
They waited. And waited. Nicholas felt the Tatars closing in around them. Topknots, wide faces, high cheekbones and burned red cheeks, thin moustaches, long quilted robes, and their small ugly ponies with their stocky legs and huge heads and mighty barrel chests … Oh, to have no imagination, to be a stolid block of a man. He felt chilled, even thought he might scream. Yet he could be courageous enough in battle. Always it was like this. If you could but fight, could but see and know the enemy, however numerous, could busy yourself with loading muskets or bulking up walls and gates, or even carting barrels of water around the lines – but this impotent stillness shrivelled your heart away.
Flies buzzed. Sweat trickled. Not a breath of wind.
Some minutes later Andriushko, sitting tall on his horse, saw a movement in the grass and gestured to them fiercely. They laid their hands on the hilts of swords, on guns, though without hope. A horseman appeared: Koltzo. They stayed tense, urgently trying to read the expression on his face. It did not look good.
‘My brothers,’ he said softly. ‘We are done for.’
They subsided in their saddles. Well, thought Nicholas. That is it. Never again will we see—
Koltzo said, ‘There is no escaping our fate. Tomorrow we will awaken with headaches from hell.’
Stenka frowned. ‘Speak plainly, brother. This is no time for riddles.’
‘The gunshot.’ He waved. ‘It was that lunatic Yakublev and his men.’
‘You mean—’
‘I came upon them. Yakublev and his party. There must be four hundred of them. Only two weeks ago they captured a merchant ship on the river and their summer raiding is done. They can carry no more. We dine with them tonight.’
Stenka and Andriushko both fell upon Koltzo simultaneously, belabouring him with a kind of good-natured, desperate relief.
‘You devious rat!’ yelled Andriushko. ‘I almost shat my breeches there! Plucking our nerve strings like that, God damn your eyes!’