Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  Tartars ride fast, and those are good horses, the Cossack thought. Dorzha must have led them a merry chase.

  He mentally added a few notches to the lively respect he’d formed for the easterner.

  This is not a little lost boy who’s come to our steppe, for all he has no beard.

  The Nogai warriors had followed the tracks of Sergey and Dorzha just long enough to make sure that they hadn’t visited the well, then come directly back here; the two chance-met comrades had galloped west three kilometers, then looped north through the ravine and come back well away from their outward trace.

  The Tartars thought their prey was still in headlong flight to the west. They’d plan to water their horses before they took up the chase again, pushing hard to make those they pursued founder their beasts; a thirsty horse died faster. But even if they thought themselves safe, the riders of the Nogai Ordu were experienced fighters. Two of them remained mounted, keeping a careful eye out and their bows ready while the others heaved the massive timbers of the lid out of the way and uncoiled their lariats to lower hide buckets and haul them back up hand-over-hand.

  Sergey had pulled on hiskosovorotka shirt-tunic while he rode and over it a sleeveless leather vest sewn with old-time washers of stainless steel, an heirloom from his grandfather, like the round Red Army helmet that now covered his shaven head. He looked over at Dorzha and tapped his bow, then held up two fingers and flipped his hand back and forth to indicate the Tartar sentries:

  I the one on the north; you the one on the south. Then as many more as we can.

  The Kalmyk nodded grimly, keeping his head well below the four-foot top of the ruined wall. Sergey eased three arrows out of his quiver, selecting hunting shafts with broad triangular heads, since none of the Tartars looked as if they were wearing armor. He set one on his string and the other two carefully point-down in the dirt. Dorzha did likewise. His arrows were black-fletched in nomad fashion; the Cossack preferred to use expensive imported peacock feathers from the Crimea, even if some of his friends teased him about being a dandy.

  As if they’d practiced the motion together for years, they sprang to their feet, drawing and loosing in the same motion.

  “Hourra!” Sergey shouted.

  Dorzha simply shrieked with exultation, a sound like a file on metal. The snap of the strings on the bracers sounded in almost the same instant as the wet thunk of impact; at ten meters, an arrow from a powerful sinew-and-horn horseman’s bow struck quicker than thought. Sergey’s target went backwards over the crupper of his saddle in a double splash of red as the arrow punched through his chest and out the back of his body without slowing. The other sentry took Dorzha’s shaft under one armpit, and it sank to the fletching; he collapsed thrashing and screaming.

  Sergey reached for another arrow. Dorzha shot before he could draw, and a Tartar on foot staggered backwards, staring down incredulously at the shaft in his stomach, then toppled backwards still clutching the bucket he’d been drawing. The long leather rope whipped down the shaft after him, and a scream floated up to be followed by a splash as the man struck headfirst.

  “Four left!” Sergey shouted.

  Then the Nogai were shooting back and leaping into the saddle; Sergey ducked as a whistle of shafts went by overhead. A savage yelping war-shout rose as they reined around toward the wall:

  “Gur! Gur! Gur!”

  And a thunder of hooves. Sergey yelled laughter as the two men turned and ran, vaulting over the lower back wall of the ruined building and turning sharply left between a higher stretch of rubble and a big oak tree.

  “The infidel swine won’t get off their horses even to piss if they can help it!”

  He’d counted on that. With superb horsemanship, the leading Tartar took the wall Sergey and Dorzha had just leapt, and shot from the saddle in midjump. Sergey swerved with a yell as the arrow went vwwwpt! past his left ear and dived for the ground. Dorzha landed beside him and scrabbled in the dirt; the Tartar in the laneway reined back slightly to let his comrades catch up, then came on again with his lance poised.

  “Pull!” Sergey shouted.

  “I pulling am, stupid Cossack ox!” Dorzha wheezed.

  Their joined lariats sprang up out of the dust, secured to the oak tree and with a half-hitch around the jut of eroded brick wall. They both braced their feet and flung themselves backwards, but even with the friction of the hitch, the rope jerked savagely through his callused palms as the first two horses struck it. One went over in a complete somersault and landed on its rider like a woman’s wooden tenderizing hammer coming down on a pork cutlet; the other collapsed and slid, throwing its rider ahead of it. The two behind reared and crow-hopped on their hind legs, screaming louder than their riders as they tried to dodge the tangle of human and equine flesh before them.

  Sergey plucked the hatchet out of his belt, tossed it into a better grip, and threw with a whipping overarm motion. The ashwood of the handle left his hand with that sweet fluid feeling you got when something was thrown properly, and an instant later the steel helve went smack into a Tartar’s face; the man fell and beat at the earth with his hands, screaming in a gobbling, choking grunt.

  Dorzha had his yataghan out. He dodged in cat-quick under the last rider’s hasty slash, turned it with his round leather-covered cane shield and drove the point of the inward-curved sword into the horse’s haunch. It bucked uncontrollably, and the Nogai had no time to spare for swordwork for an instant. That was enough.

  Quick as a cat indeed! Sergey thought, as the sharp Damascus-patterned steel slashed across the man’s thigh, swinging in a beautifully economical curve. It opened the muscle nearly to the bone; Dorzha bounced away again to let him bleed out.

  The Tartar who’d been thrown from his horse had landed with a weasel’s agility, rolling over and over, then bouncing up. His bow was gone, but he had his curved shamshir out almost instantly.

  “Allahu Akbar!” he shouted as he charged, sword whirling over his head. “Gur!”

  “Yob tvoyu mat’,” Sergey replied, grinning and coming up on the balls of his feet; the Tartar probably even understood it—everyone picked up swearwords. “Hourra! Christ is risen!”

  His shapska was longer than the nomad’s weapon, a guardless shallow curve with an eagle’s-head pommel, and while the Tartars were fearsome fighters on horseback, most of them were as awkward on foot as a pig on ice. He flicked the Nogai’s cut aside—Sergey grunted slightly at the impact; the man was strong—with a ting and a shower of sparks. The Tartar smashed at him like a man threshing grain, but Sergey drifted backwards until he saw Dorzha circling in the corner of his eye. Then he pressed the attack, lunging forward—only a fool fought fair with a Tartar when he didn’t have to.

  Seconds later, the Nogai collapsed with a yell of agony as the yataghan cut his hamstring and the Cossack saber slashed his sword-arm. Sergey grunted again in surprise as Dorzha beat up his killing stroke, leaving him staggering for a second.

  “The devil carry you off in a sack!” he said resentfully, examining his sword’s edge—no nick, thank the saints. “Why did you do that?”

  Dorzha ignored him. Instead he planted a foot on the wounded Tartar’s chest and put the point of his yataghan under the man’s chin. The Tartar spat at him, then hissed as the point dimpled the flesh.

  “Where is the princess?” Dorzha asked ... in Tartar, of which Sergey had a fair command.

  “On her way to Astrakhan, where you will never follow, you depravedkufur bi—”

  The point drove home and the curse ended in a gurgle, and the Tartar’s heels drummed briefly on the ground. Dorzha wiped his sword and the edge of his boot free of blood on the nomad’s sheepskin jacket.

  “Princess?” Sergey asked casually as he helped his chance-met comrade make sure of the others.

  “That was a good trick with the axe,” Dorzha said.

  Sergey wrenched it free of the wounded man’s face and slammed the blunt hammer on the back of the blade into the Nogai’s t
emple with a heavy crunching sound. The man jerked once and stopped twitching.

  “Off to hell, black-arse,” he said cheerfully, then flipped the weapon into the air and caught the handle.

  “Grandfather Mikhail wasspetsnaz, he taught us the trick,” Sergey said, and pointed to the axe—not particularly threatening, but not not so either. “The Princess?”

  Dorzha sighed and sat on a stump of wall. “The daughter of my Khan. I was her bodyguard;” he said. “Not in the troops with us, just...personal guard.”

  Well-born nom’klaturnik stripling dancing attendance on this princess, Sergey thought.

  He’d noted the quality of Dorzha’s boots, and the silver inlay on his yataghan and kinjal-dagger, and the tooling on his belt, whose buckle was a blue-enameled wolf’s-head. And his mail-shirt was of fine riveted links, a master-smith’s work.

  Then, grudgingly: Young, and a nobleman, but he can fight.

  “We taking her up the Volga—a wedding with Duke Pyotr of Nikolayevsk. Then these Tartars, river pirates working for the Khan of Chistopol attack.”

  Sergey nodded thoughtfully. “The misbelieving infidel dog wouldn’t want Nikolayevsk strengthened by an alliance.”

  Dorzha pounded a fist against the brick beside his hip. “They supposed to kill her, I think, but instead take to sell. That why I run. They no hurt her—”

  “You could get a good sum for the virgin daughter of a khan,” Sergey said thoughtfully. “In Astrakhan.”

  He turned and freed his lariat, uncoiling it and rigging a casting loop. “Let’s get going,” he said. “There are eighteen of their horses. Can you sleep in the saddle, boy?”

  Dorzha grinned. “Can you, farmer?”

  * * * *

  “Oi, Pri Luzhke!”Sergey sang in a loud, melodious baritone seven days later, reeling in the saddle with his feet kicked free of the stirrups.

  “Carry the water; Gala!

  Come, maiden, and water my horse—”

  “Silence, Cossack pig!” thestreltsy officer at the north gate of Astrakhan said in his rough southeastern dialect of Russian.

  He twitched the long black mustaches that hung past his blue-stubbled chin; behind him his men hefted their crossbows and half-pikes. The two young men had twenty good horses with them, counting the ones they rode, and their gear was of fine quality. They could probably afford a bribe, and they were strangers without friends here. The scalplock of the Don Cossack was unmistakable, and so were the features of the Kalmyk; Erdne Khan wasn’t at war with Astrakhan, but the realms weren’t particularly friendly either.

  “What is your business in the city?”

  “I come to drink all the vodka and screw all the women, of course, fool,” Sergey said, and held his canteen up over his open mouth to shake out the last drops, breathing out with satisfaction and tossing the empty vessel aside. “Ahhhh! Got a drink on you, dog-face? Or will I have to settle for fucking your sister, after I put a bag on her ugly head?”

  The man flushed, and there was a ripple of laughter from the crowd jammed in the gate, ragged peasants from the drained marshes outside the city with little two-wheeled ox-carts of vegetables, peddlers with pack-donkeys, a hook-nosed Armenian merchant in a skullcap and long kaftan with a curved knife stuck through his sash. A camel in the Armenian’s caravan-string threw its head up and made an unearthly burbling sound, as if joining in the mirth. Two Kuban Cossacks in their round black lambskin caps and long wool cherkessa coats laughed loudest of all. Though there wasn’t much love lost between what its members called the All-Great Kuban Host and their northerly cousins from the Don, they still enjoyed seeing one of the Sir Brothers mock a city man.

  The streltsy looked around, obviously trying to see who’d laughed so he could beat someone safer than a Cossack.

  “We come to sell our horses,” Dorzha broke in, scowling himself and fingering the silver-inlaid hilt of his yataghan.

  He hefted the leading-rope; they had all the Nogai horses, minus those who’d broken legs or sprained something in the brief fight. The tall slim-legged animals were snorting and rolling their eyes at the unfamiliar noises and scents of the great city of the Volga delta.

  The militia officer snorted himself. “Where did you get those?” he said. “They’re good horses.”

  “They were a gift,” Sergey said.

  “A gift?”

  “Da. From some dead Tartars,” Sergey said. “Or you could call it an inheritance.”

  That produced more hooted laughter; one of the Kuban men nearly fell off his horse as he wheezed helplessly with mirth. A couple of Tartars shot Sergey looks from under hooded eyes, and there were loud calls from the back of the crowd for the streltsy to stop being officious and clear the way.

  “Now, are you going to let us past so we can go ease our thirst like Christian men, or will you keep us talking all night?” Sergei asked.

  It was only half an hour until the late summer sundown, and nobody wanted to be stuck outside when the gates closed. The officer hefted his long two-handed axe, idly running a thumb down the great curved cutting-edge. He was wearing a steel breastplate and helmet despite the damp heat, and sweat poured off his lean dark face. He spoke to Dorzha next:

  “And what’s a Kalmyk boy doing with this scalplock devil?”

  “I keep him with me to hold me back when I lose my temper!” Dorzha said, flipping a coin toward the city militiaman. “Here!”

  The militiaman snatched it out of the air, bit the silver dihrem and looked at it with respect—it bore the stamp of the Chistopol mint. They both had a fair number of those, courtesy of the dead Nogai. Someone had been paying them well.

  “Pass, then,” he said; his men stirred, expecting their cut. “But remember that the great Czar Boris Bozhenov keeps good order here in his city—thieves are sent to the chain-gangs, and armed robbers are impaled or knouted to death. Drunken rowdies cool their heads in the butuks.”

  He jerked a thumb at a brace of bleary-looking rascals not far away, sitting with their feet and hands locked in the stocks. A few children were amusing themselves by throwing horse-dung and the occasional rock at them.

  “Czar!” Dorzha said with contempt, after they’d passed through the thick rubble-and-concrete wall into the noise and crowds of the street. “Grandfather of Boris called himself Chairman.”

  Sergey shrugged. “All the Princes and Grand Dukes and Khans and Czars used to be called that, back in the old days,” he said. “Or Party Secretaries, my grandfather told us children.”

  Of course, he also told us that he could fly like a bird back then and jump from the sky into battle, Sergey thought. Sober, he was the best liar I’ve ever met. Of course, there are such things as gliders and balloons, but...And he could throw an axe like an angel.

  “Did you have to be so loudness at the gate, like bull that bellows?” Dorzha went on; his Russian had improved, but he still slipped now and then.

  Sergey shrugged again. “Who ever heard of a humble Cossack?” he said. “That would be suspicious. Besides, your idea was good: we want those Tartars to hear of us and come for vengeance. How else can we find them before they sell your Princess to Big-Head Boris, or to some Kazakh slave-trader for the harem of the Emir of Bokhara? There must be thirty or even forty thousand people in this city.”

  “Seventy-five thousands,” Dorzha said absently.

  “Bozehmoi!” Sergey said with awe. “It must be the biggest city in the world, bigger than Moskva the Great in the old days!”

  Dorzha shook his head. “They say Winchester is as big, and richer,” he said; at Sergey’s blank look, he went on: “In Britain, far to the west. And there are much more big...bigger...cities in Hinduraj, and China.”

  Sergey grunted; those places were the edge of the world, where men might have their heads set on backwards or hop around on a single leg. Astrakhan was certainly at least twice as big as Belgorod, which was the largest city in his part of the world.

  Grandfather Mikhail called us snails
, because we hadn’t seen Moskva the Great or Vladivostock, Sergey thought. But now I’ve begun to travel like him!

  They walked their horses through a crush of carts and wagons and rickshaws and the occasional bicycle or pedicab, and past horse-drawn tram-cars traveling on steel rails set into the roadway—another mark of urban sophistication. Most of the folk were the locals, Russians of a sort, but there were Georgians and Armenians, Greeks and Circassians, Tartars of a dozen different tribes, Kurds, men from the oasis-cities far to the east, a swaggering Lah in the gold-laced crimson coat and plumed hat the Poles affected, sailors from the Caspian fleets, porters staggering under high-piled packs . . .

  “Here, it stinks,” Dorzha said, in a resigned tone. Which it did; most of the city was low-lying, and the land around it natural swamp, and there was a thick wet smell of sewage and rot. “Best not to drink the water.”