Swords From the Sea

by Harold Lamb

  "Your Highness, we can't go back. So we must go forward. The Boug estuary holds us." With a nod he indicated the scabbard and lifted one fist, placing it on the other. "Clear away Hassan's vessels for ten hours and my Cossacks will be across. Enough said for a soldier who knows nothing of seamanship."

  "But how will Hassan's fleet be disposed of?"

  "That is Jones's affair. Ask him."

  Argument followed, voices were raised, and Potemkin, falling into one of his black rages, struck an officer in the face. Champagne was brought in and then vodka, and more than a few were drunk. Suvarof said nothing more, but listened without going to sleep again.

  Popoff had drawn his rapier, to beat on the table, and began to make passes at the frightened servants who approached the table to pour the wine.

  "A hit-a hit!" he cried triumphantly as he thrust a lackey in the calf.

  Nassau, swaying in his chair, applauded.

  "Go you one better, Colonel-curse me if I won't. Have in a girl to dance on the table."

  "Lay you odds, Popoff," put in another, "you can't pink her in the legs."

  "Done with you, kunak! Ten crowns! "

  De Ligne, his lined face colorless as his powdered wig, rose from his place and stepped behind Potemkin's chair to whisper to the prince. Potemkin, who had been brooding over his glass, nodded and waved the diplomat away.

  Signing to Suvarof to follow, de Ligne went to one of the doors where they could talk without being overheard.

  "Permit me to ask, mon general; is our situation dangerous?"

  Suvarof nodded.

  "Ah. His Highness is pleased to give you full discretion. Act as you see fit but have an understanding with the American at once. He must work with you. Can you reach him tomorrow-"

  "I am going to his ship now."

  The heavy eyes of the diplomat studied the old general with some curiosity. "I make you my congratulation, Prince. Between ourselves, you came with the purpose of gaining a free hand, without disclosing your plan of operations. Pray, did not you desire this conference with the admiral?"

  Suvarof's brown eyes met his stare without surprise or amusement.

  "My dear de Ligne, would it not be better if Jones also had an undivided command?"

  The diplomat raised his brows, and did not reflect until afterward that he had not been answered.

  "How do you mean?"

  "He was promised full authority, but he must act with Nassau and Alexiano, it seems."

  "But you have not known this American a week. How-"

  "I know Nassau and Alexiano," said the general dryly. "And Paul Jones is my friend."

  De Ligne smiled and shook his head.

  "Impossible!" He hesitated a moment. "Nassau is favored in a high quarter-in Tsarkoe-seloe." His lips formed the words, "The empress."

  A shout of laughter from the table interrupted them. A Circassian girl was dancing unveiled on the map spread between the candles, her bare toes touching in turn the goblets of the officers without upsetting them. Popoff's sword glinted as it thrust at her clumsily.

  Suvarof's face was grave when he left Paul Jones that evening and rode without sparing himself or his horse to his quarters on the Boug. But he had time to watch the Cossacks rub down the Arab that had carried him on the last leg of his journey. When he was satisfied that they would not give the mare water too quickly, he turned to confront a tall man who lounged in the stable door, hands thrust in his belt.

  "Ivak, you scoundrel, you are growing fat. I have work to do that will make you lean." From long experience with his men, he was aware that the giant had something to say to him. "What is it?"

  The Don Cossack straightened, towering over the slender general. He wore the long black coat and red sash of a cavalry regiment, both more than a little ragged.

  His saber would have cost a year's pay if he had not plundered it. When he pulled off his sheepskin hat a long scalplock fell over one shoulder.

  "Evil tidings, Little Father," he grumbled. "I was riding with the river patrol and we hit upon a village of our folk, with only vultures in it. It must have been a week since the Turks left it."

  Ivak had braid on his collar-the mark of a sotnik, or captain of a hundred. He was past middle age, and in the widest black eyes and thin, downcurving nose there was a trace of the Eastern blood of the men from the river Don.

  "We are collecting all the skiffs and flatboats along the Boug," he went on moodily, "and others are being built out of the forests as you ordered. The Turks are all on the other side and they keep watch fires going at night."

  "Are the gunboats there?"

  "Aye. Give me twenty men, and I will cut out-"

  "Nay, I have other work for you."

  "But the kunaks, the brothers are uneasy, Little Father. They are restless because the Turks who laid waste the village have not been followed up. Ekh-" he slapped the side of his head-"I was forgetting! The patrol brought in a powder wagon, from the steppe."

  "How, from the steppe?"

  "It was as I say. They heard a man singing in the darkness and at first they thought it was a trick, and then a wandering ghost. But it was a man named Pietr, a fine fellow, really. I took him to my hut."

  "And the wagon?" demanded Suvarof patiently, knowing that the sotnik must tell his tale in his own way.

  "They heard wheels creaking, and they rode down the party, twelve men from a Petersburg regiment and half as many wounded in the wagon. They were all that were left of a battalion and a supply train. Bashkirs attacked the train and the twelve had been fighting off other riders armed with bows slung over their left shoulders-"

  "Tatars from the Kuban?"

  Ivak considered a moment and nodded.

  "Aye, Tatars from the Kuban; bad customers. I saw one of their arrows, fixed in the wagon."

  "Do you think the tribes have mounted for war?"

  "Aye, they have tasted blood. Out on the steppe the wolves are hunting in packs and the vultures are dropping lower. Yesterday I saw a rider from the Krim, down in the rushes of the river, looking at our outposts. I fired at him with my musket, but he was off like a flash-the weasel!"

  The lines in the general's forehead deepened, and he stepped to the horse, picking up each hoof in turn to inspect it. The Arab thrust its lean, veined head against his shoulder, and he rubbed his fingers behind its ears absently. He moved stiffly because the ride had been a hard one, and old wounds irked him.

  "Do you think the tribes are moving from the Krim?" he asked.

  The sotnik shook his head.

  "No, Father. This was a spy."

  Suvarof understood that Ivak meant the Tatars of the Crimea were sending out scouts to find out how matters stood on the Liman. If the Krim Tatars took the field, the Russians would have small chance of fighting their way back along the Dnieper.

  They were cut off. They must cross the estuary of the Boug, smash Hassan's army, take Otchakof. With the river between them and the tribes, who would hang back if Hassan was defeated, they would have breathing space. They could open up the Dnieper again, and bring in grain, meat and powder by sea from Sebastopol.

  "Now," he said, "I will tell you what you must do to help your poor little father, Suvarof."

  Chapter V

  The Black Frigates

  The crackling of a fire awakened Pierre Pillon, and he sniffed at frying fish. Then he groaned, being all one ache from head to heels, and thirsty beyond imagining.

  Instead of arriving upon a smiling coast fringed with villages-villages with taverns, olive groves, and grape vines-he was still in the desert. The very earth on which he slept was sand streaked with gray salt.

  He grunted, yawned, and rose to limp to the water jug. The fire smoldered in a ring of stones under a hole in the roof of the wattle and clay hut. Ivak knelt beside it watching the fish that sizzled in the pan.

  A falcon screamed from his perch, and the Cossack took down a halfplucked crow from a mass of marmot skins and ermine that hung from a Circ
assian dagger driven into a post. He tied the claws of the crow over the perch, and the falcon proceeded to eat breakfast.

  Pierre stared, because in his country hawking was a sport for the nobles. Ivak's hut had other treasures-a pair of soft shagreen boots and a high-peaked Kirghiz saddle covered with silk.

  "Sit," growled the Cossack, indicating the saddle, and hacking the salt fish into equal halves. "God has given us bread and salt to eat."

  He went to a shelf out of the hawk's reach and drew a plate of barley cakes out of a pile of odds and ends of silver, powder horns, spare flints, and finely made fish nets. Whatever the state of the army's commissary, the Cossacks usually managed to fare well.

  When Pierre had satisfied his hunger, he looked up.

  "Bien merci-my thanks to you, Cossack. Now point out the road that leads to the fleet anchored off this coast."

  He had turned over the powder wagon with its burden of wounded to an officer of the advance; he had told his story to Ivak. His battalion was wiped out and he did not know where his regiment was. His one thought was to reach Paul Jones's ship, and join the marine guard.

  Ivak was studying the big Provencal as a man might eye a promising horse he meant to buy. Going to the pile of sheepskins that were his bed-he had given it to Pierre last night-he put them aside and dug with his hands in the yielding sand, unearthing a stone jug tightly corked.

  This he held out to Pierre, who had the cork drawn in a twinkling. The Provencal raised the jug in both hands and let cool red wine run down into his open throat. Ivak watched with interest.

  "Allah, you pour out a man's measure!"

  He took the jug and duplicated Pierre's drink. Then he produced two short clay pipes and filled them from his tobacco sack. Lighting a twist of hemp in the embers, he began to smoke in silence.

  "An empty belly and a dry throat lead to short words," the Cossack remarked. "But now we can talk. You say you served under Paul, the American. Would you aid him, if the chance offered?"

  "Only tell me how."

  They were talking in the lingua franca that both understood, eked out with some Russian. Ivak had more than a little respect for a man who could bring a wagon in safely from the open steppe when the Tatars were raiding. He saw that Pierre did not know that he was an officer; but among the free Cossacks a trooper considered himself as good as his colonel, although discipline was strict.

  Thoughtfully he patted the earth between his knees.

  "Eh, this is my place; I have never served in the floating batteries. But Father Suvarof has sent me on a mission to the water. I need a kunak, a comrade, who understands the trails about a ship. Will you come with me?"

  "To the flagship?"

  "Aye, so."

  Nothing could have suited Pierre better. He cracked his thumbs and grinned in huge delight.

  "Come, allons! Let us go."

  "You may have your skin slit open. Have you ever hunted from a lopazik, Pietr?"

  The Provencal shook his head; only the gentry followed the hounds or coursed hares with dogs in his country; a peasant caught poaching would be glad to escape with the loss of his right hand.

  "A lopazik," Ivak explained, "is a platform built in a tree. You sit in it to watch for game. A calf or goat is staked out beneath the tree at evening and you squat up in the platform until perhaps a tiger comes along in the darkness. Then you keep very quiet and make sure it's really a tiger and not a witch or something evil before letting off your piece. Okh! If you're a real huntsman you've sighted between the eyes and that skin is yours; if not the tiger goes off- f ut!-frightening the wild geese and stirring up all the forest. Geese always cry out at midnight, but they sound different. I know all about it."

  "Once geese saved a big city," nodded Pierre, to be polite, "by their squawking. That would have been Rouen, or Paris. That was before my time and besides I've never hunted."

  Ivak shook his head in astonishment.

  "Well, Pietr, it is hard to understand. Anyway, you are no green lad with a musket. Now you must go and build a lopazik-" he pointed through the door-"out yonder on the fleet. There are men on the Vladimir, Paul Jones's flagship, who would do him a bad turn if they get the chance."

  Pierre pricked up his ears at this.

  "Aye," went on the Cossack slowly, "I rode with Paul Jones from Petersburg, the city of the empress. Eh, he is a jighil, not a moujik,* he thinks only of whipping the Turks, as a man should. The Turks have made the red cock crow in our Cossack villages, they have burned our hamlets and driven off our young women for slaves; they have cut off the hands and feet of our priests. Only God knows what they haven't done.

  "Before the American came to the fleet, Pietr, there were two in command. A Greek named Alexiano, who has a pouch like a Polish landowner, and a Prussian named Nassau-Siegen, who has no belly at all. Once the Greek was a Moslem and men say that he tried his hand with the brethren of the Coast. I do not know. But between them they took many prizes near the Liman, and gained rewards for themselves, beside keeping the plunder. The prizes they took were merchant ships, and of all that loot they gave their crews not a copeck."

  Pierre threw out a hand, palm up.

  "Name of a sacred dog! I have served in three seas and as many wars. But never have I seen the gun-deck hearties go without their share of prize money when a prize was taken. What kind of birds are these officers?"

  "You will see." Ivak spat into the glowing embers. "In their looting they did not find time to sound the Liman, which is full of shoals as a dog of fleas."

  "What kind of a sea is this?"

  "You will see. Paul made soundings with me, in a skiff at night. We were fired on, but he did not give the word to go back."

  "He is a man, that one." With a wave of his pipe Pierre expressed at once his knowledge of Jones's daring and his experience of the risks of navigating hostile waters.

  Ivak fell into one of his sudden silences, wherein he seemed not to think as much as to dream, like the child of the steppe that he was.

  "Ekh, a leader of men is Paul," he muttered at last. "Yet-would you turn your back on a tiger, Pietr? Not if you had seen one or smelled it at night. Paul has eyes only for the enemy in front.

  "When we rode from the north to the Black Sea," he added slowly, "many times we found all the horses gone from the post stations. River bandits jumped into our path and we beat them off with cold steel. Someone would have kept Paul from his command. Perhaps it was Nassau, perhaps Alexiano; perhaps the Turk, or the himself. Who knows? He is cunning as a woman and full of hate as a trodden adder, and he will strike again on the ship.

  "So little Father Suvarof, who knew that I came from Petersburg with Paul, sent for me and bade me seek out the traitor."

  "Good!" The big Provencal struck his chest. "C'est la guerre! I'll smell out the rogue-I'll open up his hide."

  "Nay, if you go about it like that, you will wake up some night with a knife in your liver. The men of the Vladimir, the flagship, are wolves; their fangs are long."

  His eyes hardened.

  "You must play the part of a masterless man; don't let them know you are the American's man. Say that you are a deserter, and don't stop at a brawl."

  "Then," Pierre's face fell, "I am not to speak to the admiral if chance serves?"

  "Not to him. Keep your ears sharp and tell me what you hear down under the deck where the men are camped. Every evening I will walk by the biggest mast. But don't speak to me unless you have learned something. All the ship knows that Paul and I are kunaks."

  Pierre felt a twinge of jealousy, but saw the wisdom in the Cossack's plan. Ivak announced that they would set out at once, and proceeded to break camp by burying the jug and taking the hawk to the hut of a fellow officer. He led Pierre to the stables and ordered his horse and two others, picking out a trooper to ride with them to bring the beasts back.

  He did not hurry, until his own horse, a black Kirghiz stallion, fresh from a long rest, broke away from the Cossack that held it. Ivak
saw it rear and was at its side in a half-dozen swift strides. The stallion tossed its head and wheeled away, but the sotnik had a hand on the saddle horn. Running beside the horse, he leaped into the saddle.

  Finding his stirrups and taking up the reins, he raced the stallion in a wide circle bringing up in front of the stables, reining in so sharply that its hind hoofs scattered gravel and sand over the onlookers. The Cossacks gave the performance no more than a casual glance, but Pierre looked glum.

  "Bon sang! I cannot sit on a beast like that."

  Ivak was utterly astonished when he learned that the Provencal had never ridden a horse. He asked how men got about in France, and learned that the gentry rode in coaches, while the peasants sat on donkeys, if they had them. He thought for a moment and ordered blankets girded to Pierre's mount instead of a saddle.

  "Hold on by the mane," he directed, "and wrap your legs around its barrel so! Give him a hand up, one of you."

  Cossacks strolled over from the barracks to stare at the unusual performance. To them a man who could not ride an artillery cast-off was a marvel.

  "Ekh, here's a fellow who doesn't like stirrups-see his saddle."

  "Nay, it's a new way to carry your bed around."

  "Wrong, you simpletons. He's been to Constantinople and raided the sultan's stables. What are you going to do with him, Uncle Ivak?"

  Pierre gritted his teeth and held fast. He saw that those troopers who swaggered in weather-stained uniforms, who wore weapons as if born to them, were veterans who knew their own worth, quite different from the recruits of Petersburg.

  "Don't cackle before you lay an egg," Ivak remarked at large, not mindful to have his own dignity slighted through his companion. "This kunak of mine laid out more Tatars in the steppe than you would put to grass in a lifetime."

  "Well, luck to him," shouted a trooper. "S'Bogun-go with God."

  Some hours later they passed the last of the pickets and came out on the shore, where Ivak searched for and found a skiff hidden in the rushes. And Pierre had his first glimpse of the Liman.

  They were halfway between the Boug estuary and the upper end of the Liman, where the Russian fleet was anchored in a half circle across the wide mouth of the Dnieper.