Leaning forward a little, I said in a low voice that I tried to fill with good-natured, devil-may-care humor, “Say, boss, ya’ think we’ll make it back alive?”
Slim was the only one who bothered to answer me. In an equally low voice he said, “Hell, Levi, the only reason we come along at all is t’ make sure these dumb cossacks don’t get lost in the dark.”
And though they didn’t help all that much, those were the last words spoken in a long time.
After another hour or so, the huge three-quarter Siberian moon appeared slowly over the horizon, seeming to nearly fill that part of the sky and spilling its bleak, cool light all over the world around us.
A mile or two later, moving at an easy, soundless lope in the soft ground, Shad and Rostov suddenly both pulled up almost as though they were one single rider.
At the exact and same moment the two of them had heard or sensed something that none of the rest of us had. But then, in the absolutely total, almost deafening silence, there was a tiny, dry click of sound far ahead. It must have been a mile away, but it was the unmistakable sound of an unshod pony’s hoof hitting a small rock.
And the way it turned out, that slight sound was a terribly costly mistake.
Shad and Rostov instantly turned to the right, up toward a nearby mile-long line of thick pines, each of them walking their horses as gently as if each hoof was coming down on an eggshell that musn’t be broken. And the other four of us followed as quietly as possible. Buck’s left forehoof struck lightly against a clump of earth with a faint whisper of a thud, and I would have rebuked him with a slight hit between his ears, except that I suddenly realized that even that gentle touch would make more noise than Buck had made in our deathly silent ride up the hill.
It still might be peaceful hunters or trappers ahead of us up there. But I had one nifty thought as we moved into the hidden protection of the pines and sat silently on our horses. We hadn’t made one damn sound louder than hands barely rubbing together might make, so if those bastards were Tartars, and moved like ghosts, they were up against some vastly superior ghosts.
Because we knew about them and they didn’t know about us.
And they were Tartars.
Thirteen of them.
They first appeared as silent black specks moving slowly over a hill in that cold, crystal moonlight more than a mile away. I couldn’t understand why they were moving so slowly, because you could follow that vast, trampled trail of our cows at a full gallop in jet-black hell. And it even occurred to me that you could follow it pretty damn fast if you were blind as a bat just by following the plain old smell of cowshit leading you along your way.
But still they came on slow.
They were so slow that there was plenty of time to watch them.
In utter silence, Rostov took out his telescope and studied them. Then he handed it to Shad, who looked briefly and passed it in turn to Slim. I was the last one to look through it, and by the time it finally got to me, the Tartars were less than a quarter of a mile away.
Still keeping one hand on Buck’s nose, so he wouldn’t snort or come up with a foolish whinny, I raised the glass and stared at the oncoming Tartars. It took a minute to get them in view, but when I did it was as though they were about spitting distance away in the silvery light.
And Christ! Like the ones I’d seen a long time ago, before Khabarovsk, that half-dressed, long-haired bunch gave me that same feeling again of wolves on horseback. What Bruk had told me came strongly back to mind. About them being descendants of a great blue wolf. And about that handful of rice and blood for their daily ration. And about him respecting them.
I sure as hell agreed with the respect he felt, but not having his wisdom, I was feeling that respect out of pure fear. Yet I’d have rather died than show that fear to Shad or Rostov or any of the others. So I just looked, and tried to keep down any slight noise that my hard-pressed gut might start to make.
They were, like the earlier ones I’d seen, armed with every kind of a mean weapon that had ever been invented. Some of them had spears or lances, or whatever makes the difference between them, and all of them had bows and arrows and viciously curved and jagged daggers and swords of one kind or another. And with their strangely painted horses, and the feeling of deadliness and death about them, that was about all I wanted to know. But for just a second longer my eye stayed to see that some had guns, others what I took to be crossbows and wicked-looking wide-bladed hatchets. And with all those images of tools made just for the one purpose of killing, I handed Rostov back his telescope. If there had been one thing I could mention just then, it would have been the fact that a riderless horse was being led down below. I was convinced that that was the horse who’d kicked the rock a while back, and those other Tartars had killed the dumb rider who was on him when he did it.
But everything was still too silent to hardly even breathe easy, let alone say anything.
Taking the scope, Rostov gestured with his hand so that I could figure out what he meant. I was at the far end of our line of horsemen, on Rostov’s right. And a few yards still farther to the right there was an eight-foot-high steep rise of ground. I was supposed to get off Buck and go up on that rise to see what was beyond it, for whatever reason.
So I nodded and got off Buck without using the stirrups. Not wanting to cause a creaking of saddle leather, I pulled my feet out of the stirrups, put my arms around his neck and lowered myself in complete silence to the soft ground.
The moonlight and my eyes were working so well together that I even saw a small leafy branch along the way and stepped well beyond it so there wouldn’t even be the soft murmur of a dry leaf being crushed underfoot.
And with that kind of careful silence, still not knowing what the hell I was supposed to be doing, I at last raised my face over that eight-foot-high rise. The rise was only about two feet across the top before it sloped down again on the other side.
And exactly two feet away from me, raising his face at the same time, was a fourteenth Tartar warrior who’d come up to his side of the rise just as quiet as I had.
I don’t know how ugly he thought I was, but I can triple guarantee how ugly I thought he was. For one thing, the bastard’s astonished lips suddenly drew back and he had no teeth. In one of those dumb things that sometimes flash through your mind, my first thought was that maybe that was why he only ate rice mixed with blood. There was no goddamn way he could eat much else. And on top of that, he was scarred all to hell and was missing one eye. His right eye was just a hollow place with the lids of it sucked back into the hollow and a narrow line of sightless black between them.
But he surely could see good with that other eye. And seeing me, he ducked back down as fast as I did, though our sudden movements even in that soft earth must have made a little noise.
And then, for whatever reasons make scared men the quickest to fight, we both bounded right back up over the two-foot ledge and smack at each other.
When we crashed into each other, he was reaching for a curved knife and I was trying to haul out my Navy Remington. But our head-on collision wasn’t too fair because I must have outweighed him by forty pounds, and he went flying far backward down his side of the rise.
He was littler than me, but quick as a wildcat. Landing on his back about five yards down and away, he flipped around and up onto his feet in one swift motion, a strung bow and an arrow instantly ready to go. He let fly as I dropped to one knee and heard the arrow go whooshing by near my right ear.
Then, as I finally hauled my heavy old .44 out and cocked it, he screamed a warning to the others below. And then the dumb bastard came charging up at me with only his bow in his hands. At the rate he was coming, I guessed it would take him about one and a half seconds to get to me. But a whole lot went in and out of my mind just then. First of all, I’d never ever pulled that old gun in anger, and secondly I’d sure as hell never shot anybody. And at the same instant I couldn’t help but feel sorry for that poor crazy idiot racin
g up toward me. How can you aim your gun and shoot some poor bastard who’s only got one eye, no teeth at all, and is also underweight? Furthermore, what could he do with that dumb bow he was waving fiercely toward my chest and neck? Tickle me to death?
All of those jumbled thoughts of mine couldn’t have taken more than one second of his swift charge. For in the last half second Rostov leaped over the rise and landed in front of me, his revolver drawn. As the Tartar lunged forward, jabbing out toward him with his bow, Rostov’s gun roared and the Tartar went flying down the sloping earth for the last time.
And it was only then I saw that the Tartar’s bow was also fashioned as a deadly spear at one end. And that sharp spear point was sticking through Rostov’s right arm.
The bow was still strung, so the expanding tension of the rawhide was tearing Rostov’s flesh. “Get this thing out of me!” he snarled.
I was too damn slow to shoot before, but I was fast now. As he took his revolver from his nerveless right fingers with his left hand and jabbed it back into its holster I already had a knife out and had cut the bowstring. Then, though it was a tough sonofabitch, I broke the bow itself, snapping it between hands that had never been so strong before. And finally, I grabbed the wickedly flanged spearhead sticking through Rostov’s arm and jerked on it fiercely, pulling it and what was left of the shaft cleanly out.
This had all happened within seconds. And now instead of sitting, or even falling down, as I expected him to, Rostov rushed back to our horses with me following him.
But even in that short run I more or less sized up what was happening. Rostov, being closer to where I was than Shad, had come over to take care of me. The others were already galloping down to attack the Tartars below. And I suddenly realized that all of them had to be killed or they’d spread the word about us being there to every other Tartar warrior in Siberia.
And two other things I knew. One, that toothless, one-eyed killer I’d run into had been scouting far flank to make sure that the men in the valley wouldn’t be trapped. Two, that the men in the valley sure didn’t think they were trapped, with only four men bearing down upon them and only two more of us charging along behind to back them up.
It had to be less than one fast minute between the time that Tartar and I first scared the hell out of each other to the time the general battle was engaged in the valley below.
For whatever reasons, the Tartars were certain they had us whipped. They shied away a bit at first, and then seeing there were only six of us, with one kind of sloping in his saddle, they changed direction and charged back at us, outnumbering us more than two to one.
And that’s when the costly mistake before mentioned really came to pass. Without the click of the hoof before, or without this charge, they might have hung around the edges and killed a few of us and then gotten away in the night, moonlit or not.
As it was, it was a brief, swift massacre. Four of them had single-shots and fired along the way toward us. One man made his shot, and the giant Kirdyaga was knocked half out of his saddle. And then we all cut loose with our repeaters and five of them were down before we were a hundred feet from each other. It’s harder than hell to make a shot from a moving horse, and I don’t know if I hit any of them or not, but just thinking of the damage they’d already done us, I sure as hell was aiming as best I could.
And then we slammed together, still outnumbered, and were in a swirling, close-up fight. My damned Winchester was suddenly out of bullets, and there was no time to try to get that Navy Remington out of its holster, so I reversed the rifle and slammed a Tartar alongside the head as he went by and ripped a hole in my jacket with his lance.
In almost that same instant Kirdyaga galloped up and leaped from his horse taking that Tartar down with him, and there was a cracking sound as they hit the ground that meant the Tartar’s back was gone.
It seemed, all of a sudden, that everybody was out of bullets. And the last Tartar swung his horse at Shad, slashing toward him with a curved sword.
He didn’t make it because Rostov was suddenly there and cut the man damnere in half, his saber held in his still strong left hand.
And that was the end of the fight.
Shad had never learned how to say thanks, and still couldn’t say it, so instead he frowned and started to reload his Colt revolver.
“There’s this difference between a gun and a saber,” Rostov said.
Shad glanced at him. “Yeah?”
“A gun has a limited number of deaths within it. A saber has a thousand, and then still more.”
And having made his point with quiet dignity, Rostov swayed far out of the saddle and, still with that same dignity, fell off of his horse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SHAD AND I both swung down quickly and knelt beside the unconscious Rostov, raising him to a sitting position. His right sleeve was soaked with fresh blood from his wound, and Shad swiftly cut the sleeve to get a look at the arm.
“He was run through with a kind of a spear. I broke it off an’ pulled it on out.” And then I added huskily, “Oughtta’ve been me.”
Shad glanced at me briefly. “That so?”
Slim and Sergeant Nick had dismounted and gotten Kirdyaga off of the dead Tartar beneath him. He was lying on his back as they unbuttoned his vest to see how bad he was hit. They were close enough that I could see Kirdyaga was still breathing, but just barely, each breath shallow and labored.
“How is Captain Rostov?” Nick called over anxiously.
“He’ll be all right,” Shad said, examining the two holes where the blood was almost coagulated now. “Just lost too much blood.—Kirdyaga?”
“We’ll know better in a minute,” Slim muttered.
Shad got a flask of bourbon and a clean red bandanna from his saddlebags, then knelt back down where I was holding Rostov up in a sitting position.
Shad deliberately squeezed the hurt arm hard, making blood start to flow from the two open wounds once more. Then he poured bourbon over them freely.
The pain of Shad’s rough squeeze, plus the added fiery shock of the alcohol, forced Rostov’s eyes open. He looked down at his hurt arm and then said darkly, “Goddamnit, you ruined my shirt.”
Shad held the flask to Rostov’s lips and the captain took a long drink. Then Shad started to bandage his arm with the clean bandanna. “Lucky you’re not one a’ Verushki’s Imperial Cossacks, fallin’ off your horse that way.”
The bourbon was getting to Rostov, and he was feeling a little stronger already. “I did not fall off my horse.” With his free hand he took another drink of the Jack Daniel’s. “That was just an original way of dismounting.”
Shad was nearly finished with the bandage. “Guess it would save time,” he now knotted the ends of the bandanna tightly, “if a fella was in a real hurry t’ git off ’is horse an’ go t’ sleep.”
If the average man had lost as much blood as Rostov, he’d still have been flat on his back. But Rostov, suddenly frowning over toward where the two men were kneeling near Kirdyaga, now shrugged away from my supporting grip and lurched weakly up onto his feet. And though he almost tipped over a couple of times on his way to the giant wounded cossack, we knew better than to try to help him.
Slim and Nick had bared Kirdyaga’s huge chest and stomach, and there was a wicked bluish hole about six inches below and to the right of his belly button. Nick was dabbing at the ugly wound gently with a wet cloth.
Looking up at us grimly, Slim said, “Can’t locate the bullet by touch. Just ain’t no way t’ figure where it’s got to inside ’im or t’ try t’ git it out.”
Rostov, though still weaving very slightly, said with finality, “We will make no attempt to remove it.”
“No?” That shook me up because I’d heard somewhere or other that you always had to take the bullet out of a shot man.
“He’s right,” Shad said flatly.
Rostov now felt he had enough strength to kneel down without falling down, and he did so, resting his we
ight on one knee and gently exploring Kirdyaga’s abdomen with the fingertips of his better hand.
And with Rostov there, Nick now stood slowly up and pulled out the enormous revolver he carried, which somehow managed to look both clumsy and lethal as hell at the same time. He checked to see that it was fully loaded and then walked off in the moonlight. I knew instinctively that he was going to make sure there was no more possible threat to us from any of the Tartars.
I hunched down on my heels near Kirdyaga and finally said helplessly, “Well, will the big sonofabitch live with that goddamned bullet in ’im?”
Rostov glanced at me, seeing how deeply I cared. Then, as he started to bandage Kirdyaga, already beginning to use his hurt arm and that hand a little, he said, “I have one inside me that’s been there about fifteen years.”
“Oh.”
“As to whether he’ll live, that will depend on the location of the bullet, his constitution, and God.”
Rostov now had the damp bandage folded and in place over the wound, but he needed some way to hold it there securely. Shad took off the wide, strong cotton mesh belt he wore and kneeled down, handing it to Rostov. “God’s already done his part. Gave this big bastard the strength of an ox.”
One on each side, Shad and Slim lifted Kirdyaga’s huge torso gently so that Rostov could slip the belt underneath and around him. Then Rostov tightened the belt, which locked automatically in place at any point, until the bandage was held very firmly over the wound.
“Now,” Slim said dryly, still looking at Kirdyaga with grim concern, “how ya’ gonna hold y’r britches up?”
Those worn old Levi’s fit him like a glove, so Shad wasn’t in any trouble. “Hell,” he shrugged, “got another belt back t’ camp.”
About then, Kirdyaga started to come around. His face and neck muscles moved, twitching slightly, and then his eyes blinked open and started to clear. Shad brought his flask of Jack Daniel’s, and Rostov raised the big cossack’s head enough to give him one or two small sips. Kirdyaga gagged briefly, but the bourbon warmed him and brought some color back to his face.
The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 31
