Little Lost Lambs at the Post

by Harold Lamb

  A round mass shot up in front of him, and Shad clamped on the brakes. The jeep’s steaming nose stopped smack against a haystack, and Shad knew ' for a fact that he had left the road. When he climbed out to look for it, his knees sagged and points of flame shot like tracer bullets across his sight.

  One of the points of fire, however, stayed put, and Shad decided that it was a real fire off somewhere. After shutting his eyes, he looked again. It was still there. So he switched off the lights, pulled out his musette bag and stumbled toward the fire. He blundered into a sapling tree, and then into the smooth side of a tent.

  Behind the tent rose the slope of the mountain, with the glow of a fire within it. Inside a window. Shad's outstretched hand investigated a stone wall around the window and then felt a door. This door had no knob, and it stayed shut, so he pounded on it until it opened, and he limped in, toward the embers of the fire on the hearth in a warm, whitewashed room built into the slope of the hillside. And Shad laughed.

  This room was occupied by a cow in one corner, and a cradle with a child in another, wet linen and dried meat hung from the ceiling, cabbages and cheese lay piled against the wall; the girl who watched him from the open door had long braids of hair, like straw. She looked ready to run out into the storm, until she saw how his hands shook when he tried to unfasten his trench coat.

  Then she shut the door, and cried out, "Chleb sol!”

  "Meaning what?” grunted Shad, dizzy with fever. No house could be like this, inside a mountain.

  "I mean, be welcome,” the girl said. Her gray eyes questioned him, as if amazed; her hand felt his cheek. "Because,” she explained, "you are bad sick.”

  "Not bad.” Shad didn’t believe she was really talking to him in English. She looked slight and worried, but somehow strong, and about eighteen years old.

  "Yes,” she corrected, helping to pull off his coat. "Otherwise, who are you?”

  "Shad,” he said, too tired to explain any more.

  She said she was Anya, while she started to unhitch his heavy hiking boots. "Now you should sleep. Shad. Here in the bed,” Anya told him, "it is warm yet.”

  The one bed was a quilt topped with blankets of raw gray wool on the floor by the hearth. When Anya had got his boots and wind jacket off, she pushed Shad’s remaining hundred and eighty pounds toward this bed.

  "That’s yours,” he objected. "How about that tent for me?”

  He had to explain what a tent was, and when she understood, she shook her head vigorously. "That is Ayub’s yurta. This is more better for you. because you are old and sick.”

  When she had helped him into the blankets, which were still warm, and had bundled him in, Anya heated up cabbage soup in a pot on the embers and fed Shad some. Her strong young body moved easily. With the tracer bullets flickering above him. Shad could only lie in her blankets and watch. The child gave out a cry, and she set the cradle to rocking with a touch of her hand as she passed.

  "My ’usband’s one son,” she explained, her eyes proud.

  Shad wondered why the man of the family seemed to occupy the tent outside. "Ayub’s son?” he asked.

  The effect of the name on the girl Anya was startling. "Never Ayub. It is Mi’hail’s, my ’usband.” And she added, "He was killed dead in the liberation of Kiev.” Again she looked like exploding. "Ayub is a devil of the biggest kind.”

  This girl of the Caucasus did not look sad when she spoke of her soldier husband, but she certainly felt mighty sore about Ayub. Drowsily, Shad Donovan asked her what she did here.

  "Here? We just live.”

  When the chills stopped racking him, Shad dropped off into sleep. Once he felt Anya pushing the blankets in tightly around him, and once he waked to see her doing something to the child. Between whiles she slept under sheepskins on part of the cow’s straw. In the dawn’s gray light, she was holding a spindling lamb close to the hearth. Then she was milking the cow. Apparently, she had a good deal to do, just to go on living.

  For the first time he could remember, Shad Donovan lay flat on his back, helpless, while the fever ran its course. He had no quinine to check it, and the woman would not let him get up. "You are welcome,” she insisted. So Shad had to rest where he was, and watch Anya go on living.

  The next thing, Ayub came in and looked him over. This Ayub appeared to be a tough customer, even to Shad, who had met hard men in plenty. His dark head shaved, a black lambskin cape over his high shoulders, a knife stuck into his wide leather girdle, he moved as softly in his boots as a heavyweight sliding in for a knockout. His forehead was ridged by a scar, and his eyes glowed green when he stood over Shad. He might have been twenty years of age.

  The way he looked at Shad made the American climb out of the blankets and stand up, unsteady as he was. Anya hurried in and came between them, storming at the big man and, as far as Shad could judge, calling him some dirty names. After a moment of this, Ayub went out, not saying anything. Squatting down in the open flap of his tent, he rolled himself a cigarette and began to hone an old ax with a short haft. The blade of that ax, Shad noticed, was stained brown as if blood had dried on it.

  "Never do I welcome Ayub here,” Anya whispered, breathing hard. "Such a durak—a stupid animal, he is. He does not care that you, Shad, be old and foreign and sick. No, he does not like you.”

  All this while she was busy hanging up one of the biggest haunches of meat Shad had ever seen. She said it was part of a bear, thin with spring hunger, that Ayub had killed.

  Now Shad could see everything inside the small army tent occupied by Ayub. He saw a homemade bow that looked pretty useful, with a half-dozen feathered arrows, and he saw the ax. A bow like that would only have annoyed a starving bear, and Shad judged that Ayub must have killed it with the short-handled ax. Or maybe with the ax and knife.

  "The only way he is clever,” Anya elucidated, "is to kill such other animals. He brings hares and deer and sometimes pheasants when he is not drinking kvas down at the Irbil inhabited settlement.”

  Her farm, it seemed, was in a high valley—which Shad had mistaken for a prairie in the storm—where only a few other rock houses like hers were set into the mountainside for warmth. In old times they had belonged to the herders who tended the cattle of the castle which had lain unoccupiod for two centuries or more.

  Tho old people in the valley, Anya explained, believed that a devil had settled down in tho ruined castle, and that anyone who started a fire in it would be carried off by this devil. "Such superstition,” she scoffed.

  Anya herself had grown up in a town house in Tiflis and had won a prize for study of English; she had learned to play the zither, and had wanted to compose music for other instruments. Being educated, she made fun of superstitions. She had met Mi’hail in the rest area of the Caucasus, when he had been recovering from a wound, and he had brought her to his farm—Shad, putting one thing with another, figured she had been fifteen years old then—where Anya stayed on to care for the cow and the small flock of sheep after Mi’hail returned to the fighting fronts. There she had had the child. It was not easy living in the valley, she said. Even the windmills no longer worked. And the worst of it was Ayub, whose name meant the Oak.

  Ayub had Tartar blood in him, being from the Ufa territory in the east, and he had never been to school because for four years he had been at the battle fronts.

  "So he has old-time superstitions like when stars fall at night or wild geese fly up. Stupid. At the end of it he was Mi’hail’s kunak—comrade—like a brother, you say. These Tartar types—it is the greatest thing with them to be like brothers. Before he died in Kiev, Mi’hail told Ayub to find me and take care of me. So the durak said be would care for me. He . . . for me!”

  Anya boiled over like a seething pot. She had refused to welcome Ayub into the house, and he had set up a stolen tent outside her door. When she drove him away, her husband's soldier friend rode off to hunt or to get drunk—if he had anything to sell for drink.

  "When I have the
baby, he rides away also, to bring back another kunak, a greasy old fellow who casts spells like a magician, from tho windmill. Because it is bad luck for them to have a child born under a roof, they carry me out to the tent. While I am having Semyon, who is my fine boy, what are they doing but burning prayers at the hearth here! Then, for good luck, Ayub plants this birch tree, so Semyon shall grow up strong like the birch. He gives his comrade magician all his money to burn prayers for me!”

  When Anya was angry like this. Shad thought she looked pretty enough to eat, with her eyes shining under the tangle of hair she never bothered to comb. It was a strange feud between the troubled young woman and the silent boy who had been born in the eastern steppes. Ayub never lifted a hand to help Anya about the farm; he feathered a double-headed arrow for shooting birds while she plaited together the branches of the elm saplings that she had planted in a square to make a corral for the lambs and ewes, to keep out the wolves. Ayub would sit in the sun smoking his self-made cigarettes, watching her pound the goatskin of sour milk to curdle it. She didn't offer him any of it, and what he found to eat, Shad didn’t know.

  Anya had not too much herself, but Semyon, the year-and-a-half-old boy, did not lack for milk from his mother or the cow. And Semyon kept toddling out to Ayub’s tent as if already preferring a man to Anya. When he bumped against the soldier’s knee. Ayub would shove him away. Falling down hard, Semyon would straddle his legs and got up again without a whine. Once Shad noticed that Anya was crying after she carried the boy back from the tent.

  "He says he in strong, like Mi’hail,” she explained, wiping at her cheeks. "Animal that he is!”

  By now Shad was able to move around the room and to bathe himself within the keg of water Anya heated for him. As soon as he could make it, he walked down to the jeep at the haystack. The machine was just as he had left it, and he dug under the tarpaulin for the small portable phonograph and the half-dozen records he carried around with him. It was an old one that cranked by hand.

  While he rested before starting back with the machine, he noticed Ayub moving around the stone house. Down the length of the valley where new grass showed in the gray stubble of grain there wasn't a mark of civilization except the stranded jeep. Above the valley, snow-covered peaks pierced drifting clouds, and the air Shad breathed was like a swallow of fine brandy. He felt good. And for the first time in years he didn’t care that the days were going by without him getting anywhere. Although he was shaking all over, Shad Donovan was glad just to be alive and breathing.

  When he had lugged the phonograph back to the bench by the hearth, he found a fresh pile of wood there much too heavy for Anya to have carried in. Ayub was not to be seen. Waiting until he sighted Anya carrying Semyon down from the sheep pastures, Shad wound up the creaking old machine and started a record.

  She came in running, panting with the weight of the boy, brushing her hair back to stare around her. "It is Borodin!" she cried excitedly. "The overture before Prince Igor!"

  Probably Anya had not heard any music for two or three years, except her own singing. While she listened, exclaiming, to all the records, Shad searched in his musette bag for a bar of chocolate, and told her to eat it all. Then Anya insisted on brewing tea for him. She had a little saved up in a paper bag. "To have Borodin . . . here! Akh, lirniki!" In her confusion, she spilled the hot water, and laughed, and went dancing around while Semyon paraded solemnly after her.

  "It’s yours,” said Shad gruffly.

  "The machine . . . mine?”

  Incredibly, the creaking phonograph had enriched her house. Anya wiped at her cheeks and came over to touch Shad’s hand shyly.

  Shad had not noticed it was dark until the door opened and Ayub looked in. At once Anya stiffened, as if daring him to come into her room. But for once the Tartar had something to say, and as she listened she smiled mockingly.

  "Durak!" She spat out the word. Ayub’s eyes gleamed in the firelight like a dog’s, and he stepped over to her softly. With his big hands gripping her arms, she sat rigid, staring at him while he spoke again, before he let her go and went out. Anya laughed, deep in her throat. "Like an animal. He has seen a fire lighted in the ruined castle. So he is afraid. Because I do not believe in such superstition, he will put saddle on his horse and ride to his friend, the greasy conjuror, Shamaki.”

  Shad thought, It's not that Ayub is a throwback; he only dates with the windmill and the defunct castle and this sort of feudal farming. It's Anya who is off the beam here; she's hungry to use her mind and do something more than nurse a lot of animals.

  "Look,” he said aloud. "Why don’t you ditch this outfit and take the kid back to the city? You could get a job teaching English or something. Ayub won’t follow you there."

  Her gray eyes opened wide. "How?” she wanted to know.

  After ten days Shad knew how her mind worked, or thought he did. "Only one way, Anya. Pack your stuff and I'll taxi you and Semyon down in the jeep to Tiflis.”

  "You?" The girl rubbed one hand over the other, glancing around at the thin cow and the sick lamb in process of warming by the fire, and at the cradle. Quickly she shook her head.

  "Sure,” said Shad.

  Again Anya shook her head, poking at the fire. And he was as sure as of anything in his experience that Anya would leave this valley, so unsuited to her, the next day.

  She had gone to the upper pastures to attend to the sheep when Shad noticed the wolf. Semyon, left behind by his mother, was playing with the arrows in the empty tent when he also sighted the wolf going through strange antics.

  The beast looked red as well as gray as it staggered over the meadow. The child went closer to stare at it, and suddenly Shad Donovan yelled and came out as fast as he could with the ax. This maddened wraith of a wolf had been ripped out of its skin and turned loose to die. It clawed in the mud, its jaws snapping when Shad killed it with the ax.

  By the time Anya got back, the carcass had been buried, but Shad told her about it, wondering who had had the black cruelty to skin an animal alive.

  "One sheep was killed also,” she said that evening. "I saw the blood, and also the smoke of a fire far away.”

  When it was dark. Shad played a Borodin record, waiting to bear her say she was ready to leave the farm and go back with him to Tiflis. After a while she stopped the record, listening. Semyon gave out a pleased squeal. Horses clumped and stamped near the house.

  The door swung open and two men looked in—Shad taking them at first for friends of Ayub. Carefully they stepped in, wearing portions of dirty uniforms, carrying a pistol and a small Schmeisser gun, something in them relaxing when they had seen everything in the room. Two others came at their backs with rifles. The one holding the pistol had a pair of German binoculars slung around the muffler at his throat.

  "Please be quiet, Shad,” Anya warned him.

  He was sitting on the bench when the strangers opened up his musette bag and took his toilet kit, after examining the things in it.

  "Just a minute,” said Shad.

  No one seemed to understand or to pay any attention to him, once they had made certain that he had no weapon. Talking among themselves in dialects different from ordinary Russian, they pulled down the smoked meat from the rafter and packed it into a sack with Anya’s cabbages and her small tin of flour. One of them wore a stained jacket with a fine sable collar.

  Excited by all this, Semyon coasted around between them. When he blundered into the man with the sack, he was shoved back hard. Without whimpering, the child got on his feet again, and moved forward, smiling. With a rush, his mother caught him up, retreating to the hearth.

  The man with the fur collar stepped after her. Thrusting his head close to her, he caught her shirt at the throat, and ripped it down, pulling away the silver clasp she wore. Then Anya cried out.

  At this, Shad came up, swinging his right at the leader, who stepped back. A rifle butt smashed into Shad’s chest, knocking him back. The rifle barrel caught him on the side
of the head, driving him to his knees against the wall, half blind for a moment. Pain stabbed through the back of his skull as he tried to get to his feet.

  No one paid any attention to him, because the four raiders were watching Anya, who had backed against the fireplace, where she picked up the long iron spit.

  The leader of the band, who had the binoculars, was telling her something, taking his time. He was a good-looking man, evidently accustomed to being obeyed, and by his gestures Shad gathered that he was telling the girl to come with them to cook the food. Gripping the spit tight, Anya shook her head.

  The man did not argue. Suddenly he picked up Semyon and went out. Two of the others followed him with the food sacks, grinning at the girl. The fourth, who had laid Shad out, waited a minute at the door. They moved quickly, as if they had worked together plenty of times. They rode off with a fifth man, who had been holding the horses outside, and Anya went as far as the door to watch them disappear into the haze of moonlight.

  Only with a word or two did she answer Shad’s questions. The raiders were not from the valley; they might be deserters or simply one of the bands that hid out along the Caucasus frontier, armed. They only wanted her, Anya, to cook for them and amuse them awhile. The leader had laughed because he did not want to carry her along like a spitting cat; instead, she would have to walk after them, seven miles, if she wanted to catch up with her boy, Semyon.

  Shad couldn’t believe it at first. Then he tried to figure out what to do. He could try to follow them in the jeep, or—better still—race Anya down to Tiflis, to report the kidnaping. Although she listened, Anya only shook her head.

  "No," she said. "You do not understand, Shad. They have no milk for Semyon. Tomorrow, perhaps, they will go to another place.”

  Shad understood one thing. These five wanderers, snatching at food and a woman, were wraiths of the war, dangerous because they had kept or stolen the tools of war. They were ghosts of yesteryear’s armies, intruding into the quiet valley.