Swords of the Steppes

by Harold Lamb

  What a woman like this was doing with the strange Amrikans Yarak did not know. But young as she was and dumb, he liked her looks. He put one arm around her and, with the other, displayed the ancient curved yataghan.

  "Hai, dushenka," he growled invitingly. "Hi, darling, do you want to buy a sword cheap, for brandy money? And such a sword!"

  The darling said something Yarak could not understand, although he knew most of the dialects of central Asia. Then a man's arm with stripes on it was shoved against Yarak's chest. A stocky soldier appeared in front of him, shoving hard.

  "Het!" Yarak yelled.

  He kicked out at the offending soldier's thigh, and the soldier dodged, swinging a heavy fist below Yarak's belt. This heavy Amrikan had gray hair and he breathed like a bull. Pained, Yarak jabbed him in the throat and swung up the yataghan. The soldier reached for an ax. Before either one could land a blow, in between them jumped the girl.

  She seemed to Yarak to be an angry girl.

  "Fold up, you zombie!" said Nurse Branson crisply, keeping her slender person between Yarak and the sergeant.

  In a previous war, Sergeant Lanihan had served in a regiment known, for good cause, as the "Infighting Irish." Now he was ready to go and he protested: "The guy made a pass at you with a knife."

  "Oh—rats!" said she, and she looked at the officer wearily. "Can't you do anything?"

  "I—I'm sorry, Kitty." The officer flushed.

  Now Kitty Branson had been through a good deal, and all of it unexpected. The transport plane bearing her and this Captain Whittaker with other officers had made an emergency landing through the overcast on unknown terrain, shaking up its passengers. True, they had been picked up after due time by cars summoned from the nearest emergency field by radio. Thereupon, this same Sergeant Lanihan had lost his way driving back to the field, in the enveloping mist that Captain Whittaker called clouds.

  There being no roads, apparently, and the leading cars being lost to sight, Sergeant Lanihan had relied mistakenly upon his compass, forgetting that the metal and electric system of a motorcar had more attraction for a magnetized needle than the true north. The truck, containing a 60 mm mortar detail and several rifles, had followed Lanihan's car obediently.

  Now, after a foodless day and a sleepless night, they were lost. All that Captain Whittaker could say for certain was that they were nine thousand one hundred and eighty feet over sea level.

  Feeling their way through the clouds, they had stumbled upon this battalion of Russian engineers. But they could not communicate with the Russians, owing to the barrier of language.

  Surveying Yarak's six foot three of height, his gaunt, pockmarked face and flowing mustache, Kitty Branson longed for the gift of free speech.

  She had a manual of Russian phrases with her and she had been able to ask these Russian engineers for bread. But when she tried to ask for the landing field, they brought her out a cot.

  "Are we going to stay here," Kitty inquired in clear Boston accents, "making signs for the Red army to feed us, until they get that railroad built, and a Trans-Siberian express comes along to take us somewhere?"

  Far overhead, a plane droned past, invisible above the drifting clouds. Bitterly, Kitty reflected that the crew in that plane was probably American, perhaps searching for them at that moment.

  "How about it, Captain?" she asked, with malice.

  The bars upon Noble Whittaker's shoulders were shining and unscarred. He had worn his uniform for no more than three months. Never had he been placed in command of men or set his foot upon the soil of Asia before now. Shy and spectacled, he had one enthusiasm—map making. Upon a drafting board, with the skill of an artist, he had brought to life the delicate contours of elevations, the dark shadings of depressions, the tracery of rivers. He had dreamed of so delineating this misty mid-region of Asia, which of all the areas upon the globe, not excepting the North Polar region, was the least known topographically. And to carry out this dream, the Army had clothed him and sent him forth—but not to give orders to fighting men.

  Technically, Whittaker was not in command of this mixed detail, but he was the only officer present and he felt the weight of full responsibility resting on his slender shoulders. It was up to him to get them all out— somewhere, somehow.

  Then came the flash of inspiration. He remembered that the pilots in the transport plane had talked about another emergency field set up near a place called Luntai.

  "Wait a minute," he said eagerly, and he had Lanihan unlock the rear compartment of the car, so he could get at his map case. When Lanihan obeyed reluctantly a half dozen bottles were revealed among the assorted baggage.

  Yarak, watching the strange actions of the Amrikans, moved up instantly. Some of the bottles held a brownish liquor that might well be brandy; some, square in shape, contained liquor clear as crystal—unmis-takably vodka. His thirst increased.

  Meanwhile the officer was regarding a map very thoughtfully. He had found Luntai. "Ask that Cossack," he demanded, "if he knows the bearing of Luntai. That is—where it is."

  In grim silence, Kitty extracted her Russian phrase book. "Piu na Luntai?" she gave forth presently.

  Yarak pricked up his ears. Two generations of wandering had tuned his ears to the dialects of Asia, and he decided the Amrikan girl was trying to speak Russian, which he knew almost as well as his native Ukrainian. Whereupon the following dialogue ensued:

  Yarak: "That way, darling." He pointed, and Whittaker by use of the compass took a bearing of almost due southeast. It looked about right to him.

  Whittaker: "Does he know the road, there?"

  Kitty: "Road to Luntai?"

  Yarak: "There isn't a road. But I know the way through the mountains like my doorstep. Look, Commander, that way." His eyes quested along the mountain barrier and spotted a ravine through which large birds were flying. Yarak had no notion of the way to Luntai, but he knew that such birds did not enter a ravine unless it led somewhere.

  Whittaker (studying the ravine entrance through his field glasses and observing a track of some sort): "Will he guide us there—for pay, of course?"

  Kitty (having difficulty with this): "Will you go there—leading us— for money?"

  Yarak: "Certainly."

  It was just as Brother Ilytch had said. These Amrikans could not do anything without reading books and looking at maps. Moreover they had money. But Yarak was chiefly interested in the bottles.

  He spat three times and crossed himself. His problem was solved. With these Amrikans, he would go out of railroad building Kurdai, and when they drank the good brandy and vodka, Yarak also would drink.

  If not, he need only wait until there was an accident and then he'd abstract a couple of bottles from the rump of the small car. Knowing these mountains, he did not think these Amrikans would go far on their way.

  As for Luntai, Yarak had no wish to go there, beyond the mountains. In the memory of man, no Christian souls and no wheeled vehicles had gone there. On the contrary, Yarak would wait for the accident to happen.

  Meanwhile the Kurdai-Luntai expedition was being launched in a fashion unforeseen by anyone but Whittaker, who was making something like a speech to the four enlisted men.

  "It's really up to you guys to decide. We can stock up with chow and gas by purchase from the Russians, I hope. Enough to last for five days or a week. Then we can proceed in one of two directions. Lanihan can try to guide us back to his field."

  There was silence at this. "We just as well try to fly," said one of the mortar detail at length, "than follow him around any more."

  "What's the other direction?" demanded Lanihan, and added, "Sir?"

  "China."

  No one said anything. Kitty looked at the captain curiously.

  Whittaker explained about the aaf's emergency field. It meant a hundred miles through the mountains, and then thirty miles or so across the barren Gobi Desert. Perhaps they could get the cars through the mountains, if the gas held out. They'd have to take th
eir luck with water.

  "The printed maps are lousy about detail," he assured his audience. "But I think I can pick up Luntai."

  Whittaker tried to keep enthusiasm out of his voice. He wanted earnestly to explore these unmapped mountains.

  The enlisted personnel looked at him, looked at the sergeant and voted to try for Luntai. They were tired of chasing mist in this no man's land, and China sounded good to them.

  "If you find it," said Lanihan sourly.

  "What about you, Miss Branson?" Whittaker asked.

  "I seem to remember that Marco Polo was the only European who found a road ready for him in this part of the world."

  Whittaker nodded. His shyness had vanished. "Yes. I figured we'd have to make our own."

  Kitty looked at him with respect. Right or wrong, he had guts.

  During the next five days, Sergeant Lanihan decided that the track they followed—Marco Polo or no Marco Polo—had been made by animals, and that those animals had been goats.

  For five days, Yarak found his hopes unfulfilled. These Amrikans did not open up a bottle even when they cooked supper. Moreover, he could not manage to break into the rump of the car with any tool he found handy. The girl, for some reason best known to her, kept the key of the compartment.

  They escaped an accident by a succession of miracles. They climbed steadily into the silence of the heights, where they could look down on the eagles when the cloud rift cleared. Where the slope was too steep, they made the smaller car haul itself up by a wire cable, and then the small machine towed up the big one.

  Where a sandstone outcropping blocked the way, the noncom cleared it by accurate blasts from the small trench mortar. Where a gray glacier-fed torrent had torn out the track, they rushed the cars through. Finally the track failed altogether, but the Amrikans slid the machines down a rubble slope on the cable and followed the dry bed of a stream out upon a plain bare of everything except gray tamarisk and dead reeds. Here the ground unexpectedly gave off heat like a covered oven.

  Yarak decided that, although the devils of the mountain pass had been strong, the devils in the Amrikans were stronger. At every point, the Am-rikan officer had sketched in his compass bearings on a new map, taking observations of the drift of the mountain range and the summits when he could. Under his pencil, the road through the pass took shape.

  Then on the sixth day, the accident happened that Yarak had expected hitherto in vain.

  It began with a stoppage in the thermostat on the truck, due probably to bad water. While Lanihan and his gang were investigating the ther-mostat—and digging for water—Whittaker searched the plain with his glasses and observed no sign of Luntai. He was in the Gobi Desert, but where in the Gobi Desert he did not know.

  To his questioning, via Kitty, Yarak returned only evasive answers. Luntai was a town, he admitted, yet it wasn't. In what direction it lay, he would not say.

  So Whittaker took Kitty and the Cossack in the command car and went forth to investigate the gray plain upon which appeared no sizable tree, or any building built by the hands of men.

  "It looks empty," Kitty observed, "and dead." After those five days she was the worse for wear and she was hot. "Are you sure Luntai is a town?"

  "No," said Whittaker.

  Through his field glasses, he saw what looked like a division of infantry, standing in open order on an endless parade ground. But when he headed the command car toward them, the formation turned out to be a few square miles of desiccated and iron-hard poplar forest. Only the lower trunks of the trees survived, poking upright in billows of sand.

  Steering between sand dunes, drawing away from Lanihan and the truck, Whittaker came upon some strange sights. All around him the roof beams and gates of wooden houses, gnawed by sun and sand, projected from the ground.

  "Luntai!" said Yarak, peering at them.

  A few holes had been dug down into the sand-buried houses. Horse tracks crisscrossed the loose sand but not even a lizard seemed to be alive and crawling in the ruins.

  "This," said Kitty emphatically, "is the grandfather of all the ghost towns. I don't like it."

  Whittaker assured her they must have come upon one of the sand-buried cities of the Gobi. A couple of millenniums ago, the remnant of a salt inland sea had moistened this vast depression. The bed of the sea had dried up into salt crust, and the encroaching sands had buried the houses of Luntai, preserving them in that bone-dry atmosphere. Triumphantly, he pointed out how this was proof that the Kurdai-Luntai road had once been a caravan route across Asia.

  "You're a good guesser," Kitty admitted wearily, wiping the sweat out of her eyes. After the icy-cold of the heights the heat from the ground made her dizzy and she felt like crying. Noble Whittaker didn't seem to think of anything but a line on the map.

  That moment Yarak sighted the Dungans. They came galloping over the mounds of sand, sun-blackened riders in flapping sheepskins, on shaggy ponies, with a tall swordsman leading them.

  "Kubardar bratsui!" Yarak yelled, and slid out of the car.

  Neither Whittaker nor Kitty understood his warning. The tribesmen flowed in like a human tide on their horses, making for the motorcar.

  Whittaker reached for a pistol, then took count of the numbers of the Dungans. He did not know what they were. He looked for the damaged truck, but it was out of sight.

  Yarak perceived that at last an accident was happening to the Amri-kans. Taking up a large rock hastily, he smashed it down on the handle of the luggage compartment. The lid opened to his pull, and he extracted deftly two of the bottles, one brown, one white.

  He had had experience with the tribes of the Gobi region; he proceeded to get himself out of visual range. Jumping into a hollow, he crawled off between the sand dunes. He did not think the Amrikans would get any farther, and he had saved at least two of the bottles.

  Lying prone in the sand, he looked back and saw the wave of horsemen swirl around the car. In their black sheepskins, the Dungans looked like animals.

  Dismounting, they pulled the Amrikans out of the car. They knocked Whittaker down and trampled on him. Then they began snatching at the crates of stores.

  "Tzee-tzee!" their voices chanted around the leader on the white horse.

  Unobserved, Yarak caught the rein of a wandering horse. It was a good, swift-paced Kabarda pony, and before the tribesmen sighted him he was a half mile off, heading back toward the hills.

  Beyond the first rise, Yarak dismounted to watch his back track. All this rapid exertion made him sweat. The ground was hot under his knees. Gratefully, he ripped the fastening off a bottle and drank.

  It was the white liquor and it tasted much like vodka. Smiling, Yarak opened the brown bottle and tried it also. It had the pungent flavor of brandy and Yarok sighed with satisfaction. At leisure, he quaffed from the square white bottle, and then from the brown.

  A sense of increasing comfort pervaded him. The ill luck of the Am-rikans had been his good fortune. Now he had a horse and most of two bottles.

  With this assurance of well-being, however, a vague discomfort assailed his Cossack spirit. The liquor of the Amrikans was good liquor. They had come over the mountain pass in their machines like devils. They had been like kunaks, brothers of the road. And now, by force of an accident, he had to leave them.

  The dumb lady had smiled at him, like a merry girl. When the Dun-gans discovered she was young, they wouldn't leave much of her.

  "Tfu," he muttered. "Impossible to ride off and leave a girl like that." But he couldn't think of anything else to do.

  Then he heard the chugging of a motor, and the truck came surging up to the rise, its injury repaired. "Het!" yelled Yarak, pulling his horse over to it. The truck stopped suddenly.

  Sergeant Lanihan and the half squad surveyed the scene below them in the sand-buried city of Luntai. "Hell's bells!" said the sergeant and let the truck slide back out of view.

  He reflected that he had in the truck only the 60-mm mortar and several rifles. Also,
he knew that the Asiatics swarming around the captain and the lady were at present beyond the mortar's effective range. He wanted time to size up the picture.

  "Are they Japs, Sarge?" someone asked.

  Lanihan did not answer because he did not know.

  Then Yarak came up, jabbering and gesticulating. The eyes of the Cossack gleamed under shaggy brows, and his breath gave out with gin and whisky, although Lanihan could see no bottle on him.

  The sergeant knew no Russian and less Ukrainian, but in days gone by, he had argued with Frogs in similar situations. Bending his ear attentively, he tried to make out what this Cossack was saying but it made no sense.

  When Yarak mounted the Kabarda and went swinging off to the side, back toward Luntai, Lanihan nodded to his henchmen. He had a reputation to maintain, and that reputation had suffered recently.

  He thought he could guess what Yarak was doing.

  "Co-ordinate on this, you guys," he told his excited detail. "Maybe them's Japs, an' maybe they ain't. The Cossack's gone to find out. But never mind him. We got to move quick. We couldn't find our way out of here without that captain."

  With the Kabarda between his knees, Yarak trotted up to the Dungans in the ruined city. His mind was alert with drink, and he was shaping a stratagem. Tribesmen like these could be frightened by something they did not understand—by the supernatural.

  The Dungans, beholding him returning of his own accord and alone on one of their horses, watched him with great and growing curiosity.

  "Chorziaka," he growled at them, "insects out of a dunghill, make way for me."

  He saw the two Amrikans and was relieved that neither the girl nor the officer called out to him. They were not afraid of the Dungans.

  Kicking his way through the armed crowd, he dismounted and strode up to the leader of the riders, who now sat upon a horsehide in the shadow of a gate. A heavy man, with a scar closing one eye, he looked like a hard soul. Silent, he sat on his ankles instead of his heels in a curious fashion.

  "Yah Beg," said Yarak. "Chieftain, I have come where the spoil is gathered. I have come for my share."