Warriors of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  These Khlit ordered curtly back, but took the freed prisoners with him, some running at the stirrups of his men. Broken by torture and fatigue, the Afghans ran on, silently, nursing their longing for revenge.

  Within the space of a few moments the Horde had reached the main camp of the Mogul's forces and cleared it of defenders. The fugitives ran to Paluwan Khan, crying that the Mongols were upon them, and their coming added to the general confusion that had ensued upon the heels of the temporary victory of the ameers.

  But Paluwan Khan, cursing mightily, formed his battalions to face the rear and sent a rider speeding to Raja Man Singh with urgent summons to draw back to aid him. The movements of the Tatars had been so swift and their change of mounts so quickly accomplished that the tale of their numbers had grown.

  “Fetch back your cannon!” roared Paluwan Khan at the Thun-der-Thrower. “Where are your pikemen? Send me the leader of the Portuguese infidels! In the name of Allah, form your ranks!” Before this could be done the Horde was among the main array of the ameers. The Tatars hitherto had met but the scourings of the camp, the bazaar hangers-on, servants, slaves and camp followers. Now they gave a great shout at sight of the line of footmen drawn up behind pikes.

  Chagan carried the yak-tail standard into the front of the attack, followed closely by Khlit, and a thousand horsemen— hewing, slashing, and mad with the intoxication of battle—had broken into the ranks of Paluwan Khan.

  Short, broad swords smote the steel heads from pikes; flights of arrows sped over the foremost riders to fall thick among the men of Paluwan Khan. The imperial lines, disconcerted, broken, began to give back.

  A second line of Tatars came forward, driving into the melee just as the elephants, or those that could be brought up from the engagement at the Afghan camp, came plodding forward, their howdahs a-bristle with archers.

  Until now Khlit had made full use of the advantage gained by the tulughma—the encircling movement that was the favorite stratagem of Genghis Khan, who sent his cavalry from the rear of his own lines clear into the rear of the enemy.

  He had reasoned that he would find the forces of the ameers scattered and in part disorganized after the affray with the Afghans. In advancing as he did into the heart of the Mogul's army, he foresaw that he would meet with different detachments separately. Yet now he realized that the strength of the enemy had been barely touched by the reckless assaults of Abdul Dost upon a prepared defense.

  And the huge elephants were veritable citadels of strength.

  “Bid the clans,” he shouted to the nearest warriors, “fight clear of the elephants—all but the beast bearing the standard of Paluwan Khan.”

  He pointed to the howdah of the Northern Lord, glittering with its costly trimmings.

  “Chagan, take a score of followers and slay me that chief.”

  By now the arrows from the howdahs were flying among the Tatar riders, and their own arrows were deflected off the armored coverings of the beasts. Khlit rose to a standing position in his saddle and surveyed the masses of fighting men. He rode swiftly from clan to clan, bidding them draw away from the riverbank. In so doing they passed near the elephant of Paluwan Khan.

  Chagan had driven his horse at the head of the giant beast, clearing a path for himself with his sword. He swung at the black trunk that swayed above him, missed his stroke, and went down as his horse fell with an arrow in its throat.

  “Bid your elephant kneel, cowardly lord,” he bellowed, springing to his feet and avoiding the impact of the great tusks, “and fight as a man should!”

  His companions being for the most part slain, Chagan seized a fresh mount that went by riderless and rode against the elephant's side. Gripping the canopy that overhung the elephant's back, with teeth and clutching fingers he drew himself up, heedless of blows delivered upon his steel headpiece and mailed chest.

  “Ho!” he cried from between set teeth. “I will come to you, Northern Lord!”

  An arrow seared his cheek and a knife in the hand of an archer bit into the muscles of a massive arm. Chagan's free hand seized the mahout and jerked him from behind the ears of the elephant as ripe fruit is plucked from a tree. At this the beast swayed and shivered, and for an instant the occupants of the howdah were flung back upon themselves and Chagan was nearly cast to earth.

  Kneeling, holding on the howdah-edge with a bleeding hand, he smote twice with his heavy sword, smashing the skull of an archer and knocking another to the ground. The remaining native thrust his shield before Paluwan Khan.

  But the Northern Lord, no coward, pushed his servant aside and sprang at Chagan, scimitar in hand.

  The Tatar sword-bearer, kneeling, wounded, was at a disadvantage. Swiftly he let fall his own weapon and closed with Paluwan Khan, taking the latter's stroke upon his shoulder. A clutching hand gripped the throat of the Northern Lord above the mail and Chagan roared in triumph.

  Pulling his foe free of the howdah, the Tatar lifted Paluwan Khan to his shoulder and leaped from the back of the elephant.

  The two mailed bodies struck the earth heavily, Paluwan Khan underneath, and it was a long moment before Chagan rose, reeling. In his bleeding hand he clasped the head of the Northern Lord. And, reeling, he made his way to Khlit, through the watchers who had halted to view the struggle upon the elephant.

  “Kha Khan, look upon your foe!”

  And Chagan tossed the head aside, to run, staggering, at Khlit's stirrup as the Tatars swept athwart the Mogul's line, away from the river.

  Under cover of arrow flights discharged from horseback, the Tatar clans fell in behind their leaders, riding slowly, being reluctant to leave their foe.

  “We have not quelled them, lord,” panted a one-eyed warrior at young Berang Khan. “Aye, more ride up. Why do we not stay them?”

  “Peace!” roared Berang. “Still your clamorous tongues, dogs, and await your time.”

  Grumbling and glancing often back, the Tatars drew clear of the Mogul's main array, drawing ever to the hillocks, away from the riverbank. Khlit, watching shrewdly the movements of the fighting men, had seen that detachments of Rajputs were coming up from the beleaguered Afghans.

  Moreover, the elephants were causing his Tatars sore hurt, and his men were wearied. So he led the Horde, once again assembled in its hive-like entirety, to what had been the left flank of Paluwan Khan, behind the broken, rocky ground, out into the plain. And here he bade his men dress their wounds and wait, under cover of the rising ground.

  As they did so, from the grove and field of grain, from nullah and waterbed came groups of Afghan men and women who had concealed themselves during the battle, and these bore milk and goatskins of water to allay the thirst of the Tatars.

  And more—groups of armed riders galloped up, leaderless, having been separated from the Afghans in the camp of Abdul Dost. Frightened herds of cattle were rushing about the fields behind the Tatars.

  Khlit, standing on the uppermost rocks, the sun behind his back, was now facing the river. After passing through Talikan, the Mogul camp, and charging the rear of the main line of Paluwan Khan, he had turned aside and brought his men to the extreme flank of the enemy.

  “Gather your men into their clans,” he said briefly to the khans. “See that each one has arrows and a sword. Send riders to head those herds—” he pointed at the trampling cattle on the plain—“this way. Make haste.”

  Carefully he studied the forces of the Mogul a pistol-shot away. He saw that they were moving about, forming a new line to face him. Cannon were being brought up on camel back. Some men tried to cut down the stout leather ropes bound to the stakes that now divided their own position—as Khlit was on their flank.

  He saw mounted Rajputs riding through the multitude, and companies of mercenaries marching first here, then there.

  “It is well,” he smiled. “They have no leaders.”

  What had happened was this. Paluwan Khan until his death had commanded Alacha's men as well as his own. With both ameers lost, only
the mansabdars and company leaders remained, with the exception of the Thunder-Thrower, who was swearing in his endeavor to make his pieces bear on the new position of the Tatars.

  Khlit saw that some six thousand fighting men faced his own horsemen, who did not now number two thousand. And the elephants remained.

  Though he longed to do so, he could not ride on to where the Afghans still fought Raja Man Singh, on his left, to the North behind several gullies and groves. For the ground there was broken, and he could not leave six thousand men, and elephants, close in his rear, to ride farther to the North.

  But he smiled, seeing the masses of cattle driven up, and turned to Berang. “If the Mogul's men had advanced upon us here among the rocks the battle would be theirs,” he growled. “Yet, having no leader, they held back. Now will we charge.”

  He cast a last glance to the North, wondering how Abdul Dost fared. Then he seized the standard from Chagan's weakened hand, shouting for the riders to head the cattle forward, toward the enemy and the river.

  “Nay, lord,” groaned the sword—bearer. “That is my task—to hold the standard—”

  “Give back, Chagan,” Khlit urged, “for you are half-slain.”

  But the sword-bearer spurred after him, reeling in the saddle. The Horde followed after the standard, their eyes fastened on the flying yak-tails, a mighty shout rumbling from their throats.

  And before them went the frightened cattle.

  Crash, and again crash came the blast of the zam zan, the cannon of the Lord Thunder-Thrower, and many cattle and some Tatars were blown to earth. Urging on their spent horses, rising high in their stirrups, sending arrows swiftly from their short bows—so that the sun glinted upon them as upon drops of rain— the Tatars charged home, riding in among the cattle, sweeping first to one side, then the other with their strange swords, hacking, wheeling, shouting.

  The Portuguese mercenaries discharged their pieces and caught up their short swords fearfully; the men of the Lord Thunder-Thrower had time for but one blast of their light pieces, for the feringha could not be moved to face the Tatars; the imperial archers found their shafts fruitless against the swift, short bows of the Mongols.

  “Allah turned his face from us,” said a cannoneer of the Thunder-Thrower that night, speaking of the charge, “and the spirits of the air fought against us; since we had slain our foe and they had passed from our sight, yet they came again to be slain, and the cannon balls did not check them. Aye, they were like to the spirits of the dead, like to the Horde of Genghis, the Terrible.”

  He had seen Chagan cut half in two by a sweep of a pike, yet strike down the man who held the pike, and grapple with a matchlock-man who had turned to flee.

  “We cannot slay them!” cried an archer of the household troops, flinging down his bow. “Our shafts pass through them, but they do not fall. Woe—woe!”

  “They be spirits of the air!” shrieked a wounded Punjabi, his turban falling over his bloody face. “The gods fight against us— the many-armed gods!”

  Whereupon a cursing Rajput struck him down and rode forward at the Tatar standard until Berang spurred against him and he too went headlong to death, but valorously.

  “Flee, flee!” cried a small, cloaked figure, running about among the horses' legs.

  It was a shriveled man in a dirty purple cloak, fear blazoned on his black face. Gutchluk had sought safety in the Mogul's ranks, yet found it not.

  “Flee!” bellowed a brawny Turk, flinging down his scimitar and rushing toward the river.

  Now after the Tatar charge came a curious array. Horseless Afghans, wearied and bloody, stumbled on; old men caught up weapons from the trampled fields; stripling youths shrilled their war shout, plying bows and dashing nimbly among the embattled host—Chan the minstrel riding at their head and singing as he rode.

  Khlit and the bodyguard of the Tatars were fighting grimly about the standard when these new, strange friends slipped among the horses to their aid. The Cossack had chosen the moment well. He had not given the enemy time to form into orderly ranks; he had charged with the sun at his back and the river at the rear of the foe. He pressed on, his curved sword red, his eyes alert. And with the standard came the swarm of the Horde.

  That stout Turk, the Thunder-Thrower, had forsaken his cannon in judicious foretaste of what was coming. Halting two slaves with him at his scimitar point, he beat a ponderous retreat and arrived panting at the muddy bank of the river.

  Rushing into the water, he scrambled up, upon the shoulders of his slaves, grasping their hair.

  “Now bear me across the water, jackals, or you die!” he muttered.

  One man slipped and the Lord Thunder-Thrower subsided into the brown current of the Oxus gasping, impregnating the water with a smell of musk. Seeing this the other native, eyes agleam, caught at him, wrenching the pearls from throat and turban.

  “Aid me to swim, in the name of God!” roared the Turk.

  But his follower had gone, swimming away among the other fugitives.

  Then did the stout Thunder-Thrower espy a goatskin filled with air, floating upon the current—such a skin as the common natives used to ferry them from bank to bank—and upon this was a water-soaked, brown man, shriveled of face, his purple robe clinging to shrunken shoulders.

  Gutchluk had fled before the Turk. In a moment the bulky master cannoneer had struck the shaman heavily on the side of the head, and Gutchluk sank back into the brown water, his fingers still clutching at the life-giving skin. The Thunder-Thrower wrenched away the groping hands and spurned Gutchluk with his foot, as the shaman disappeared under the surface.

  The Mogul ranks had been broken. Panic had seized the men of the Mogul. They cast away their arms and ran back to the riverbank. Here some tried to flee north and south in the mud, to be cut down by the Tatar horsemen. Others swam across the river—mainly horsemen.

  Mailed Turks gathered into groups and rode desperately south into Talikan. Only the elephants and scattered Rajputs held the field, for the footmen had been the first to flee.

  Against the elephants Khlit ordered huge fagots, torn from the defenses of the Thunder-Thrower, to be carried, flaming. The Tatar archers shot arrows into the necks of the huge beasts, and soon the elephants were retreating trumpeting, into the river, or running amuck south to Talikan.

  The sun was now setting, and the fight had become a shambles.

  Talikan and the Mogul camp were burning. Khlit sounded the nacars and assembled a remnant of his men, others joining him as he advanced forward again, north along the river toward the Afghan camp. His men reeled in their saddles from weariness; some slept as they rode; no one shouted or sang, save the Afghan boys and men who had aided them.

  “On to Abdul Dost!” they cried.

  In the smoky twilight the array of the Horde drew near the Afghan village, where Raja Man Singh saw them and gathered his Rajputs about him. Some three thousand good men he had, of the Marwar clan, of Oudipur and Sindh. The Rajput code of honor would not permit him to withdraw from the field.

  And then the sun sank, plunging the plain of Badakshan with its hideous carpet of dead, the dark flood of the river Oxus, and the overhanging hills into gloom—save for where flames soared into the sky from the bazaars of Talikan and the tents of the Mogul; and in the light of the fires Afghan children and wounded Tatars plundered the riches of the ameers.

  In the deepening twilight the Afghans issued from their lines— the lines they still held at the village—and joined the Tatars. United, they sought the Rajputs in the dark.

  Here was no orderly charge of mounted ranks, but a hand-to-hand struggle, fierce and silent, except for the clash of steel and the cry of the stricken. Men moved numbly over the plain, and oftentimes foemen stared at each other in the gloom, too wearied to strike. But always the Rajputs were pressed away from the river and the Afghan village, into the plain, fighting until they could fight no more.

  By moonrise the battlefield was cleared, and dark bodies of rid
ers passed far afield into the plain, some fleeing, some pursuing. Raja Man Singh was carried away bodily by two servants, his sword lost and he himself wounded. It was many days before the Rajput clans reformed their ranks, broken by the Tatars.

  “Lord of the World, Monarch of the Universe,” the Lord Thun-der-Thrower made plaint subsequently to the Mogul, “I did assemble some forces beyond the river, but demons pursued us through the night, and Ghils shrieked at us in the moonlight. They followed, nor could we lose them.”

  “The gods walked the earth again that night,” chattered a native soldier.

  “Nay,” said another, “I heard the trumpets of Genghis Khan, and the tramp of his host in the air.”

  Thus was the battle won and lost in Badakshan. And the broken army of the Mogul withdrew from Badakshan, leaving the Afghans free. Some said that forces more than human had fought against the Mogul; others, that intrigue and treachery had planted the fear of the coming of the Horde in the breast of the Mogul's men, and that they heard and saw naught but the image of their own fears in the moonlight. The mullahs of the North declared that the sins of the ameers had worked their undoing.

  For how otherwise, asked the mullahs, could the imperial army be routed by a small band of Tatars who came from nowhere and who went—nowhere?

  Yet no one knew that a master of cavalry tactics had outgeneraled the ameers of the Mogul by a maneuver as old as the campaigns of Genghis, and had outfought six times his numbers with men who had not their match upon horses.

  Khlit had drawn back from the pursuit at moonrise to seek for Abdul Dost in the Afghan camp. He walked a spent horse alone into the rows of fallen tents from fire to fire, holding a broken sword clasped in his hand.

  He did not go far alone. Men and women who had thronged to the camp fell in behind his horse. Chan rode up, singing, followed by a group of Afghan youths chanting their victory.

  “Where is Abdul Dost?” asked Khlit.

  At this the singing was silenced. Torches came, and the gathering throng passed with him to the center of the Afghan lines, where the torches grouped themselves about a figure in armor prone on the ground—the armor slashed and bloodied, and the lean, dark face very harsh in the moonlight. The Afghan khans and their women and children looked on as Khlit dismounted stiffly, for he also was wounded.