by John Masters
Sweat and grease shone on the men’s flat faces. Their heavy felt boots padded on the steps of the eating-house. Each carried a long knife as well as the short, modern carbine. In the entrance they stopped, and their leader called imperiously in a strange tongue. The proprietor, who had come out at the shooting and now stood apprehensively a yard behind Robin’s mat, said, ‘I--I don’t understand.’
They gabbled furiously at him. The merchant leaned towards Robin and muttered, ‘They want kumiz--fermented mare’s milk--lots of it, and meat. Kumiz, in the name of Allah, and we make fine wine and brandy here!’
The proprietor waved his hands helplessly, backing into the room as the others surged forward. Their leader bellowed cheerfully in vilely distorted Turki, ‘Kumiz! Meat! Not care what meat. Horse, sheep, camel! Meat!’ A thick smell of grease, horse, sweat-soaked wool, and old dirt made the air pungent in the room. The merchant whispered, ‘We would be wise to leave now, I think.’
Robin muttered, ‘They’re like savages. Who are they?’
‘Mongols. Allah knows what they are doing here. Are you coming?’
Robin shook his head. ‘I’m waiting for my servant. God be with you.’
The Andijani rose, gracefully made his adieus, and strolled away up the street. Robin sipped his tea and listened to the guttural torrent of chatter over his shoulder. The proprietor scuttled forward with a goatskin full of kumiz, and the Mongols began to drink, passing the skin around, pouring the liquor down their throats and splashing it over their coats and yelling with laughter.
‘More, more!’ the leader shouted. He was shorter, wider, paler, dirtier, greasier, and more slant-eyed than any of his comrades. The street emptied slowly as the Andijanis, without loss of dignity, sauntered farther away. Nearby merchants quietly shuttered their shops, barricaded their doors, and vanished.
The Mongol leader glanced around, met Robin’s eye, and turned again to mutter something to his neighbour. A second later he leaped to his feet, came to Robin, and struck him a tremendous blow with his fist on the broad of the back. ‘You, friend!’ he bellowed. ‘Where from?’
‘Gharghara.’
‘Where that?’
‘Afghanistan.’ Robin waved his hand to the south. ‘A thousand miles.’
‘Good. I---there!’ The Mongol pointed to the north-east. ‘Two thousand miles. Zavashay zdarovay!’
‘Good health!’ It was a common Russian phrase, which Lenya Muralev had often used. The Mongol returned to Turki. ‘Come. Drink.’ He laid a thick hand on Robin’s elbow and pulled. Robin allowed himself to be jerked to his feet.
As he sat in the rough circle among them they handed him the goatskin, and he tilted it and drank. The liquor was strong and musty and left him gasping. By now the Mongols had made up their minds that only horsemeat would do, and keep bawling, ‘Meat, horse, meat, horse!’ The proprietor yelped that he had no horse-meat to-day. The leader jumped to his feet, and a loud argument began among the group. At the end of it they all trooped out into the street, unsaddled one among their horses, slashed its throat, and together attacked the carcass with their knives. In an unbelievably short space of time they returned, carrying huge, bleeding chunks of meat. The disembowelled horse, slashed to ribbons, lay in the middle of the street. In the eating-house they threw the meat on the floor. The proprietor wailed, ‘H-how shall I c-c-cook it?’
The leader shouted, ‘Cook? Not cook! Beat!’ He pounded one of the horse steaks with the butt of his carbine. ‘Beat! Long time!’
They all drank together for another half hour. Upstairs the proprietor and his women and children beat frantically on the meat with clubs. The ceiling rattled, and the room was full of the nervous, quick thudding. When the meat came Robin had to eat his share. The Mongols drank some more and began to sing. The leader sang by himself, then the others joined in with a yell and a shout.
Without warning the whole mob leaped to their feet and ran for their horses, dragging Robin with them. He hung back, protesting that his pony was in the serai, but the leader swept him up with easy strength on to the front of his saddle. Another Mongol took up the fellow whose horse had been eaten. They galloped up the street, yelling, ‘Women! Women!’
Before midnight every man was drunk. Robin was nagged by a hazy sense that he ought to ask the Mongols some question or other. He said, suppressing a spasm of nausea, ‘I never seen your country. You have good horses? I horse-trader.’
‘Horses? Best in world. Go anywhere. Good to eat too.’
The leader embraced him. Robin saw Jagbir’s perplexed face in the entrance of another eating-house across the way, and burst out in a foolish giggle. Jagbir looked so disapproving; he knew that his lord Khussro wasn’t just pretending to be drunk. He was drunk, drunk as a--as a Mongol horseman.
The Mongol leader whispered hoarsely in Robin’s ear, ‘Best horses world. Go anywhere, our horses. Know what? Go to India!’
‘India?’ Robin giggled again. ‘Why go India? Hot. Full of Indians.’
‘A-a-a-ah! Secret. Not go now. Later. What like India women? Big, little?’ The Mongol measured imaginary spaces between his forefinger and thumb.
‘But mountains to India, or deserts,’ Robin said obstinately. ‘You be tired. On way you rest my house, Gharghara, in Hazarajat, in Afghanistan.’
The leader threw back his head and laughed in high and bloodthirsty good humour. ‘The First Horde not rest, ever! Eat, drink, gamble, kill, ride. Come see us. You my friend. No women. Mares all right. Russians not allow, but’--he spat on the floor--’that for Russians! You come our camp. We hide.’
Robin dashed into the street and was sick. An opportunity had come to him because he had come to the right place at the right time. He was just sober enough to realize that. But in the next hour he saw the opportunity fading as his own drunkenness increased and the frenzy of the Mongols steadily mounted. He had to drink, because the leader challenged him to a competition. After that he could do nothing but stumble on foot in the wake of the others as their debauch rose to its finale. When they stripped a pair of whores and chased them down the street, he was not far behind. When they rode down a squad of foot police he arrived in time to see the end of the fray, with all the policemen but one running in flight, and the Mongol leader carving designs on that one’s chest with his knife. After that he lost them. He ran on blindly for several minutes, cannoning from wall to wall of the narrow street. Then the wall on the left swung around and struck him a brick-like blow on the jaw, and he fell down senseless.
He awoke in half-light, inside a room, and recognized Jagbir before the vomit rose in his throat and a stunning pain in his head again cut out the light. There was a lamp near him next time, and it took him longer to be sick, and he managed afterwards to retain his senses. All night he lay on his mat. There was something he had to do. He would nearly catch it, then the walls swung, the lamp lurched horribly, and it was gone. After he had slept again, it was light. Light in the east. Dawn. He sat up. ‘Those Mongols. Where are they? Did you follow them?’
‘They went at this time yesterday. They got on their horses and rode away. The horses weren’t drunk.’
‘Which way?’
‘West.’
With Jagbir’s help he rose, dressed, and washed. The only words he could remember from the debauch were ‘camp’ and ‘First Horde.’ Jagbir said, ‘They were soldiers, then? I noticed their carbines. They must have gone absent without leave from some camp, to get drunk.’
‘We’ve got to find the camp. I wonder if other parties of Mongols have been into Andijan before, making merry. It seems extraordinary that the townspeople haven’t mentioned it.’
‘This is the first time. I asked some questions while you were asleep yesterday. The camp can’t have been in existence long. Those people have no discipline. They’d be breaking out all the time.’
Robin considered as carefully as his shaky head would let him. If the camp lay to the west of Andijan it must be more than two days’ riding
away, because he and Jagbir had gone that far in making their inquiries about horses. It could therefore be somewhere in that area where the Hungry Steppe reached the banks of the Syr Darya, or it could be in the mountains, two hundred miles deep, which separated the Farghana in the south-east from Tashkent in the northwest. There must be several thousand men in a ‘Horde.’ Even in Central Asia such numbers could not live in a camp without word of their presence filtering out.
Robin and Jagbir set off the following morning and rode fast to the west. They asked wandering herdsmen on the edge of the steppe; they asked tradesmen in little towns; they asked villagers in miserable hamlets where the houses were like the shelters of conies, half above and half below ground. Then, when so many shrugs and so many silent shakes of the head had assured them that no secret lay hidden there or in the steppe to the west, they turned north into the mountains.
Here they knew more exactly what they were looking for. It had to be a valley wide enough to graze, say, five thousand horses. It had to have reasonably good access to some town whence supplies could be sent up for the men in the camp. Certainly no supplies for any large number of men had passed northward through any of the Farghana towns. So they must come from the other side of the mountains, from Tashkent. Further, if the camp had been newly set up, it was probably meant to remain in existence through the winter--a broad, grassy valley, therefore, with a good access both summer and winter from Tashkent, and at least fifty thousand gallons a day of waterflow that did not freeze up.
Deep in the mountains, the word of a chance-met shepherd sent them across staggering precipices into the next valley, and thence north and east.
On a late afternoon they saw the camp in the distance. They climbed a hundred feet up the valley wall and looked again. What they saw bore no resemblance to a conventional military camp. Groups of the round black felt tents called yurts clotted the grass about a marsh-fringed lake--there would always be water under the ice. They could not make out men or horses as separate and identifiable objects, but Jagbir said, ‘There are thousands of them, loose, all over the plain. The horses must be hobbled. We must get closer. What will we look for then? What more do we hope to see?’
‘I don’t know. But we must get closer.’
Standing side by side, they searched for a way to approach the camp--Robin still called it that, although, except for the great numbers, it looked more like the temporary meeting-place of a Kirghiz migration. Jagbir saw a way at last. The valley ran north and south, like a corridor, and seemed to be about twenty miles long and five miles wide. From where they stood at the southern end Robin estimated that the lake, under the eastern or right-hand wall of the corridor, was five miles distant. The mountain walls were split in several places on both flanks, where side-streams burst through into the main valley to trickle across the uneven flat into the lake. Jagbir pointed out one such break in the eastern ridge. ‘There, lord--about two miles. If we can get in there we should be able to work farther north behind the wall. When we think we are opposite the camp, we climb up and look straight down on it. We can go now, I think. If there are any outposts short of the lake they’re well hidden. These people have probably blocked only the other end of the valley, the Tashkent end.’
Robin nodded, and they mounted, walked the horses into the plain, and began to move steadily forward, hugging the foot of the eastern mountain wall. As darkness fell they entered the gap Jagbir had seen. At once the going became rough, and it was no use trying to get any farther. They halted where they were and lay down to sleep.
The next morning they worked northward, taking the first stream that entered the gorge from the left, and following it up. As they went on up the steep draw the horses began to scramble for foothold, frequently falling forward and scraping their knees. At last the draw widened, the hills drew back, and near ten o’clock they stood in a valley which was the miniature of the great one to the west. But this held no lake. Tethering the horses securely, they began to climb the ridge.
On the top Robin lay down carefully, got his breath, and stared in disbelief. The sun shimmered on the surface of the lake, the reeds waved in a light wind, the yellow-green grass of the plain rolled forward under the wind--but there were no tents, no men, no horses.
Jagbir touched his elbow. There!’ Straining his eyes across the valley, Robin saw long columns of horses descending the opposite mountain, streaming down like ants into the plain. They watched in silence. Two hours later the black tents were up where they had been before, and thousands of hobbled horses wandered loose about the valley and cropped the grass. The men too must be eating--but no smoke rose from cooking-fires. There were none. Robin realized there was no fuel except perhaps dried horse dung, and hardly enough of that.
‘Manoeuvres over for the day,’ Jagbir said shortly.
Robin thought of what he had seen. He said, ‘To-night we must climb down the face of the ridge and get closer still. I want to see how they carry those tents, what their equipment is, their formations. Do you see that they have no pack train, no commissariat?’
During the afternoon they scanned the hill below them, looking for a way down that would serve in darkness. They found the climb would not be difficult. Though the ridge was steep it was by no means a precipice; with some difficulty even horsemen could ascend or descend it. In the evening they returned to the ponies, watered them, ate, drank, and slept. At two in the morning they reclimbed the ridge, crossed over the crest, and scrambled carefully down towards the floor of the main valley.
When dawn came they saw that they had reached a point a hundred feet above the toe of the ridge. The lake lay less than a mile away, and the nearest black tent was much closer. Already the camp was astir. Men galloped about with shouts, driving the hobbled horses towards other men, as yet on foot, who ran up and caught them. With rising, unwilling excitement Robin saw the men pull down the black tents, ten men to each tent. Each man took a strip of the felt, folded it, and placed it on his horse. Then they dragged out their light saddles and threw them on the ponies’ backs over the felt. Then each man took one of the withy sticks that had made a framework to support the tent, and slung it across his back. Each man stowed away in the pockets of his sheepskin coat some of the leather thongs that had held the tent together. Soon the ponies were ready--carrying felt, saddle, bags of food, carbine in its bucket, and, at last, rider.
They gathered together, first in tens, then the tens into hundreds, the hundreds into thousands. All was performed on the move. No markers stood to indicate the line where the ranks should fall in, no trumpets sounded. The horsemen wheeled and swooped across the plain, and the dust rose at their horses’ heels in the grey sunless air, and out of the changing pattern a troop of ten became a squadron of a hundred, loosely knit, in no known formation, cantering together, wheeling together.
Jagbir sucked in his breath, hissing through his teeth. ‘They do have discipline. They’re dangerous.’
Robin muttered, ‘This is only the First Horde.’
As the sun came up one squadron broke away from the mass and trotted towards their ridge, heading straight for their hiding-place. But at the foot of the slope, not two hundred yards away, the squadron bore half left and began to climb up the ridge, leaving Robin and Jagbir on its right. Another squadron shook out, trotted to the hill, and followed the first. Jagbir whispered, ‘The first lot will be over the top soon. They’ll see our ponies.’
Robin moved his shoulders uncomfortably. ‘Depends which way they turn. Wasn’t there a Russian with them?’
‘Yes. There’s one with each. Look, about half-way down the squadron.’ Peering closely, Robin saw a taller man among the Mongols of the squadron nearest to him. He saw the glitter of a steel sword-scabbard. Otherwise the Russian wore the same dress and carried the same accoutrements as the Mongols.
As a third squadron faced the slope Jagbir said, ‘Someone’s coming up the valley from the south.’
Robin turned his head cautiously and watche
d the dust cloud approaching behind two isolated, racing riders. They galloped between the squadrons and halted among a group of seven or eight horsemen who stood apart by the edge of the lake.
Jagbir said, ‘One of those two was the woman.’
‘The woman only? Not the man?’
‘The woman only.’
It was no use doubting Jagbir’s eyesight. Robin had expected Muralev, but Lenya had come--and she had come from the south, where Andijan lay. Therefore she would know that he and Jagbir had been through the Farghana. Therefore ....
A horseman shot out from the group by the lake and galloped to the next squadron as it circled into position for its climb. While he spoke with the squadron’s Russian officer the squadron continued to circle, like a weight on the end of a string. Minutes later, as though the string had broken, the squadron moved off in a straight line down the valley, to the south. Another squadron followed. A third swung north, and another behind that. The messenger then put his horse at the hill, and the stones flew as it strove with all its strength to catch up the squadron climbing ahead of it.
Jagbir said, ‘They’re after us now. She’s guessed we’ll be somewhere on this hill.’
Robin thought. Two hundred men had gone south; they would find the gap he and Jagbir had used, and would follow it up. They would reach the tethered horses early in the afternoon.
Two hundred men had gone north--no need to worry about them.
Two or three hundred were already up the hill behind them. The messenger was on his way to tell that party to split up, some right, some left, until each met one of the other parties. There were still at least four thousand men in the main valley.
