Eight
They caught him at noon the next day, at a ford, because he let them.
He heard them a long way off, the way you hear any Russian cavalry in mountains: the clink of bits and the creak of good leather, and big shod hooves on stones, and a man’s voice saying something sharp and another man laughing. He could have gone up into the trees and let them pass. He sat the grey in the middle of the ford instead, with the water running round her knees and the carbine across the saddle, and waited.
There were six of them, as the old woman had said, on tall Don horses, bays and chestnuts, sweating and blowing from the hill. Five men in long grey coats with the red star on their caps and rifles slung, and in front, on the best horse, a young man with a leather coat and a Mauser pistol in a wooden holster on his hip and a face that had been shaved that morning in cold water by a man who believed in shaving.
He pulled up at the edge of the ford and looked at Bayish, and his hand went to the holster and stayed there.
“Who are you?”
“Bayish Kenje uulu. Chong-Talas stud.”
The young man’s face changed. “The horse-breaker,” he said. “The one who went after them alone.”
“Yes.”
“Get down off that horse.”
His name was Ivanchuk, Lieutenant, of the OGPU, Talas district detachment, and he was twenty-six years old and from a village near Poltava, and he was very angry.
“You went over the Kenkol after an armed counter-revolutionary band,” Ivanchuk said. “Alone. Without orders. Without informing the competent organs.”
“The competent organs were mending a lorry in Kara-Buura.”
“Because your director telephoned Talas and said horse thieves. Horse thieves! It took him a second call to mention a White officer.” He looked down at his boots, scraped grey to the ankle. “I lost a horse on your scree. A good one.”
Bayish stood in the shallows with the water round his boots and let him be angry. A divisional commissar had shouted at him for an hour once, outside Kokand in 1920, and then given him a medal. It passed.
“That weapon,” Ivanchuk said, pointing at the carbine. “Where did you get it?”
“The Fergana. In ’21.”
“Is it registered?”
“No.”
“Then it’s illegal. You’re carrying an illegal weapon in a border zone. Give it to me.”
Bayish did not move.
The five men behind the lieutenant had gone quiet. One of them, a thickset man with a broad Kazakh face and a sergeant’s stripes, sat his horse very still and watched Bayish’s hands.
“Comrade Lieutenant,” Bayish said. “I’ll give you something else first.”
He reached slowly into his coat, slowly enough that the sergeant could see what he was doing, and took out the Party card, and held it out.
Ivanchuk took it. He opened it and read it. He read it twice before he looked up, and something in his face shifted, not much, the way ice shifts on a river in March before anything has really happened.
“Six years,” he said.
“Six years.”
“And before that?”
“The Iradi volunteer horse, in ’19. Then the Turkestan Front, scouts. The Fergana. Kokand. Andijan.” Bayish held out his hand, and Ivanchuk, after a moment, gave the card back. “I know the Black Kurbashi. I’ve fought him. I know Strelnikov. I know his horse. I’ve followed it twice now.” He put the card away. “You can have my carbine, Comrade Lieutenant. When the mares are back at Chong-Talas. Until then I’ll keep it, and you can write me up in your report, and I’ll sign it.”
They had the argument properly that evening, at the camp, after the men had seen to the horses.
Ivanchuk spread an old survey sheet on a flat stone and weighted the corners with cartridges. “We follow them to Kara-Jygach,” he said, and drew a neat line with his pencil. “We confirm the location. Two men ride back to Talas. The organs request a detachment from the Fergana garrison, with a machine-gun section.” The pencil made a ring round Kara-Jygach. “Then we liquidate the bandit formation.”
“How long?” Bayish said.
Ivanchuk calculated. “Two weeks. Perhaps three.”
“In three weeks the mares will be in Kashgar. Or in the Kurbashi’s cooking pots.”
“Then they’ll be in Kashgar. They’re horses.” Ivanchuk looked at him across the fire. “I have six men, comrade. You have one carbine and a hole in your side. They have eighty. What do you want me to do? Charge?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Bayish looked into the fire. He could not have explained it. That was the trouble. He could have explained it to Kalmurat, or to the priest, or to the boy’s mother. He could not explain it to a young man from Poltava with a map and a pencil and a plan.
“There’s a boy with them,” he said instead. “A hostage. Sixteen years old. From the Chatkal. If the Red Army comes up that valley with a machine-gun section, the first thing anybody does is cut his throat.”
“A boy.” Ivanchuk frowned. “What boy? There’s nothing in the report about a boy.”
“There’s nothing in the report about anything.”
Bayish took the strip of grey cloth out of his pocket, the last one he had found, the small one, and put it on the map by the fire, on top of the place marked Kara-Jygach.
“He’s been leaving me these,” he said. “All the way down through the forest. Every mile. With his hands tied and a bullet hole in his arm that I put there. So that I’d know he was alive.” He looked up. “You go back to Talas and write your report, Comrade Lieutenant. I’m going to Kara-Jygach.”
Ivanchuk picked up the strip of cloth and turned it over in his fingers.
“You’ll get them all killed,” he said at last. “The boy. Yourself. The mares. All of them.”
“Then come and stop me.”
The sergeant with the Kazakh face, who had been sitting a little way off pretending to clean his rifle, laughed once, very quietly, and turned it into a cough.
Later, when the men were asleep, Ivanchuk came and sat down by Bayish at the edge of the firelight, where Bayish was sitting with his back against a walnut tree and the carbine across his knees.
For a while he only sat and watched the grey mare, who was standing a little apart from the big Don horses, asleep on her feet, with the white felt pale on her brow in the dark.
“What’s that?” he said at last. “On her head.”
“A woman tied it there.”
“For what?”
“Superstition,” Ivanchuk said, not unkindly. “Up here they’re full of it. In the villages. They tie rags to trees, they pour milk on stones. They think a white horse comes down off the mountains.” He shook his head. “In ten years it’ll all be gone. Electricity. Schools. Tractors. In ten years every child in the Chatkal will read Lenin, and no one will remember any of it.”
“Perhaps.”
“You don’t believe in it.”
“No.”
“Then why don’t you take it off?”
Bayish thought about that. The fire had burned down to embers. Somewhere above them in the walnut trees an owl was calling, two notes, over and over.
“Because a woman tied it there,” he said, “whose husband died on the ice above the Kökjal, and whose son I shot. And I told her I’d bring him back.” He looked at the young man. “If I bring him back, she can take it off herself.”
Ivanchuk said nothing. After a while he got up and went back to his blanket.
But in the morning, when Bayish saddled the grey, the lieutenant came over and stood by him and watched, and when Bayish swung up into the saddle, Ivanchuk said, “The sergeant thinks you know what you’re doing.”
“Does he.”
“Sergeant Zhakupov was at Kokand too. In 1920. He says he remembers a scout who stole a whole herd of remounts out of a basmachi camp in one night, and the basmachi never found out how.” The young man’s face was quite expressionless. “He says the scout rode a bay with a white face.”
Bayish looked over at the sergeant, who was tightening his own girth and did not look up.
“It was a long time ago,” he said.
“Yes,” said Ivanchuk. He swung up onto the big Don bay. “We’ll go together, then. As far as Kara-Jygach. Then we’ll see.” He gathered his reins. “You’ll keep the carbine. For now. I’ll write you up.”
“I’ll sign it.”
They rode south all that day, out of the walnut forest and down into the dry hills above the Fergana, where the trees gave out and the slopes were brown and bare and cut by deep stony ravines, and the light was hard and white and went on for ever.
In the middle of the afternoon Zhakupov brought his big Don horse up level with the grey, on her off side, and rode there for a while without saying anything. Ivanchuk was out in front with two of the privates, studying the land through his field glasses and making marks on his map. The sergeant watched him do it for some time.
“The lieutenant told you,” he said at last, in Kazakh, “that I remember Kokand.”
“He did.”
“He has it wrong.” Zhakupov shifted the rifle across his saddle. “I never saw the scout’s face. What I remember is the horse lines.”
Bayish looked at him.
“I was sixteen,” the sergeant said. “From the lower Chu. My father had a few horses and a few sheep and a debt, like everybody. In the spring of 1920 a kurbashi came through with his men and took the horses, and took me to look after them. That was how it was done then. They took the boys who could ride, and gave them an old rifle and the night watch on the horse lines, and if the horses were stolen, they beat the boy.” He said it without any feeling at all, the way Aimkan had told about the ice. “So I was on the horse lines outside Kokand. With an old Berdan. On the night the remounts went.”
They rode on a little way. The grey’s ears had turned back toward the sergeant’s voice.
“It was very dark,” Zhakupov said. “No moon. About two in the morning. I was sitting on a saddle at the end of the line, half asleep, and I heard a man talking. Low. Not words. Nonsense. The sounds you make to a horse in the morning when you come into the yard, so she knows who it is.” He glanced across. “My grandmother talked like that to the mares at milking. I had not heard it since I was small. So I sat on the saddle and listened, and I thought I was dreaming about my grandmother.”
“And then?”
“And then I saw him. A shape, walking down the line in the dark, with his hand on each horse as he went by. Cutting the picket ropes. One, and then the next, and then the next. Quite slowly. Talking to them the whole time.” The sergeant was silent for a moment. “I had the Berdan on him from the third horse to the last. Forty yards. I could not have missed.”
“Why didn’t you shoot?”
Zhakupov thought about it, as if nobody had ever asked him before, and perhaps nobody had.
“Because the horses were not afraid of him,” he said. “Two hundred horses, in the dark, with a stranger among them, cutting their ropes. And not one of them pulled back or made a sound. They put their heads down to him as he went by, like they were in their own yard.” He shrugged, a small movement of the big shoulders. “I was sixteen. I thought: a man the horses are not afraid of is not a man I want to kill. So I sat on my saddle and watched him take them all away into the dark, and in the morning the kurbashi beat me with a whip until I could not stand. A week later I walked into Kokand and joined the Reds.”
He looked across at Bayish, and for the first time since the ford his broad face showed something that was nearly a smile.
“So you see, comrade,” he said. “I have been following you for five years. You just did not know it.”
Bayish rode for a while without answering. He looked at the grey’s ears, and the brown hills going on and on ahead of them in the hard white light.
“It was a long time ago,” he said.
“Not so long,” said Zhakupov, and touched his heel to the big Don horse, and went forward to see what the lieutenant was writing on his map.
Late in the afternoon, from the top of a long ridge, Bayish pulled up and pointed.
Far off, on the edge of the hills, where they broke down in cliffs and gullies toward the great flat haze of the valley, there was a fold in the land, and in the fold there were trees, poplars and willows, the green of water. And above the trees, going up thin and straight into the evening, smoke. Many fires. More than he could count.
“Kara-Jygach,” said Sergeant Zhakupov, beside him.
Ivanchuk took out his field glasses and swept the fold from end to end.
“Eighty,” he said at last, quietly. “At least.”
Bayish said nothing. He was looking at the gorge.
Between the ridge where they sat and the fold with the smoke in it, there was only one way down. A narrow ravine, deep and steep-sided, with a dry stream bed at the bottom and a path along it. The herd’s trail went down into it and did not come out until the far end, where the poplars began.
It was a very good place for an ambush.
He had seen a great many places like it in the Fergana. He had ridden into some of them. The ones who rode out again were the ones who had looked at the walls of the ravine first and asked themselves where they would put men, if they were the other side.
He sat on the ridge in the last of the light and looked at the walls of the ravine, and asked himself.