Eleven
Zhakupov met them at the head of the meadow an hour before dawn, coming down out of the gorge on his big Don horse with the carbine across his saddle and a face like thunder.
“I heard the shooting,” he said. “You were not back.”
“It hasn’t been two dawns.”
“I can’t count,” said the sergeant. He looked at the boy sitting in front of Bayish on the grey, with his strapped arm and the boot knife still in his good hand. “So. This is the one with the strips of shirt.”
“This is the one.”
Zhakupov took the boy in, from the felt round his head to the boot knife. Then he leaned down from the saddle and held out his hand, and after a moment the boy took it, and they shook, gravely, like two men at a bazaar agreeing a price.
“The lieutenant said to tell you,” said Zhakupov, straightening, “that he has written you up for three separate offences, and will add a fourth if you get killed.”
“Tell him I’ll sign all four.”
The sergeant handed him the carbine, and unbuckled the cartridge belt from his own saddle, Bayish’s belt with the hundred and six rounds, and handed that across too.
“Where’s the Captain?”
“Gone.” Bayish buckled on the belt. His fingers knew how to do it without him. “When the herd broke, he went with it. Up there.” He pointed with his chin at the dark hills to the east, above the meadow, where the herd had gone thundering up into the night. “He’ll catch the stallion. The mares will follow the stallion. He’ll take what he can and go east, toward the high passes. Toward China.”
“On his own?”
“He’s always been on his own.”
They found the herd at first light, scattered across a long bare hillside a mile above the camp, grazing, as if nothing had happened. Mares are like that. A herd that has run itself out in the night will stop where it stops and put its head down and eat, and if you did not know, you would never think they had been mad with fear three hours before.
There were twenty-nine on the hillside. Bayish counted them twice. Three lay dead at the bottom of the meadow, where the herd had gone through the camp and they had gone down among the tents and fires and been trampled by the others. One more had fallen in a ravine in the dark and broken her back, and lay at the bottom of it, still breathing, and Zhakupov climbed down and shot her.
Thirty-five had come out of the camp. Twenty-nine were here.
“Five,” Bayish said.
He walked the edge of the hillside, bent over, reading the ground, while the sergeant and the boy sat their horses and watched. It did not take long. The ground here was bare and soft, and it was all there for anyone who could read it. The herd had come up the slope in the dark and stopped. Then a man on foot had come up after them, walking, one of the camp ponies on a rope behind him. He had gone in among the mares, unhurried, and caught the stallion, which had stood for him, and saddled it. Then he had driven five mares off the edge of the herd, the five nearest, and gone away east along the hillside toward the high ground, on the black horse, with the pony on its rope and the five mares in front.
The black stallion’s prints were big and round and deep, a heavy horse with a tall man on him, going fast.
“He’s riding Kara-Jal,” Bayish said.
“Is that bad?”
Bayish looked east, where the tracks went away along the hillside and up toward a long grey ridge, and beyond it a line of mountains with snow on them, and above the mountains a sky that had gone the colour of slate, low and heavy, with no light in it at all.
“There’s snow coming,” he said. “And he’s on a stallion that’s never been ridden in mountains, driving five mares in foal toward a pass. Yes. It’s bad.”
He sent the boy back with Zhakupov, to bring the twenty-nine down to the gorge and hold them there with the privates. The boy argued. Bayish let him argue for a while, and then said, “Your mother,” and the boy stopped arguing and looked at the ground. He had not stopped holding the knife.
“Keep it,” Bayish said. “You earned it. You sat on it a whole day.”
“Will you come back?”
Bayish looked at him.
“I said I’d bring you back to your mother,” he said. “I didn’t say anything about me.” He turned the grey’s head toward the east. “Go on. Watch the bay mare with the white blaze, the one by the rocks. She’s lame on the near fore. Don’t let them push her.”
The snow began an hour later.
It came out of the east, into his face, the way snow comes in those hills in late October: not falling but driving, flat and hard and fine as sand, on a wind that came down off the high passes and went straight through his coat. In ten minutes the hillside was white. In twenty the tracks he was following were half filled. In an hour he could see perhaps fifty yards in front of him, and then thirty, and then nothing but grey and white and the dark shape of the grey’s head with the snow caking on her mane.
But the tracks were still there. Big round deep prints in the new snow, half filled, softening, still clear enough. The stallion was heavy and the snow was not yet deep. Strelnikov was not hiding his trail any more. He had no time. He was racing the storm to the pass, as Bayish was, and he was losing, as Bayish was.
The ground went up. Rock now, under the snow. A long ridge that narrowed and narrowed, with the land falling away on the left into a white emptiness that Bayish could not see the bottom of and could hear only as a hollow roaring of wind. On the right the mountain went up, a wall of black rock with snow driving across its face.
The path between them was a ledge. A herders’ path, used for a thousand years, a yard wide in places, less in others, going along the face of the mountain above the gorge toward the pass.
The tracks went along it.
Bayish got down. He led the grey onto the ledge on foot, with the reins over his shoulder and the carbine in his right hand, close against the rock wall, and she came behind him carefully in his footprints, as she had come up the scree on the Kenkol in the dark, with her nose almost on his back.
They went along it for perhaps a quarter of an hour.
Then the ledge widened a little, into a place where the rock wall bent back and made a shelf, ten yards long and three wide, before the path narrowed again and went on round a shoulder of the mountain out of sight. And on the shelf, against the rock, standing with their tails to the wind and their heads down and the snow piling on their backs, were five mares and a camp pony.
The stallion was not there.
Bayish stopped at the edge of the shelf. The mares lifted their heads and looked at him, and one of them, a chestnut he knew, called once, low, and dropped her head again. They were finished. They could go no further, and they knew it, the way horses know, and they had stopped.
He looked at the snow on the shelf. A man’s prints, and the stallion’s, going on round the shoulder of the mountain onto the narrow path beyond. Not long ago. The edges were still sharp.
Strelnikov had left the mares. He had seen they could go no further, and he had left them on the shelf in the storm, and gone on alone on the stallion, toward the pass.
Bayish stood there a moment with the snow driving into his face. Then he went on.
The path round the shoulder of the mountain was barely a path at all. A crack along the face of the rock, two feet wide, with the wind coming round the corner like a solid thing, and the gorge on the left, invisible, roaring. He went along it with his back to the rock and the grey behind him, step by step. The grey did not hesitate once. He did not let himself think about what that meant.
Round the shoulder, the path opened out again, a little, into a slope of broken rock and snow that went up toward a notch in the ridge. The pass. It was there, just, a darker grey against the grey of the storm, two hundred yards above him.
And halfway up the slope, a black horse.
Kara-Jal had stopped. He was standing on the slope with his legs braced and his head down and his black mane streaming sideways in the wind, and he would not go on. Strelnikov was on his back, kicking him, hauling at the reins, the arm going up and down with the whip, and the stallion was not moving. He was standing quite still on the slope, a black shape against the white, and looking up at the pass.
Strelnikov turned in the saddle and saw Bayish.
He did not reach for his carbine at once. He sat there on the black horse in the driving snow and looked down the slope, and Bayish thought he could see the long tired face, the grey at the corners of the mouth. Then the Captain laughed. Bayish could not hear it, over the wind, but he saw it, the head going back.
Then he unslung his carbine.
They fired at the same moment.
Strelnikov’s shot went past Bayish’s ear with a snap like a breaking stick, and behind him the grey threw up her head. Bayish’s did not go past anything. He saw it hit. The Captain jerked in the saddle as if someone had caught him by the collar, and his carbine went out of his hands and away down the slope into the snow, and he sat back hard, with both fists dragging on the reins.
The stallion went up.
He went up on his hind legs, high, higher, with his forefeet striking at the air and his black mane flying and the weight of the man pulling his head back and back. For a moment he stood there against the white, black and enormous, upright as a man. Then his hind feet went out from under him on the broken rock and the snow, and he went over sideways off the edge of the slope, into the gorge.
He went without a sound. So did the man.
Bayish stood on the slope for a long time.
He stood until his hands were so cold he could not feel the carbine, and the snow was piling on his hat and his shoulders, and the grey had come up beside him and was standing with her head against his back. At last he went up the slope, slowly, to the place where the stallion had been.
There was nothing there. Only the big round prints of the stallion in the snow, deep and scuffed where he had reared, and then the long raw scrape of his hind feet at the edge, where the rock went down into the roar of the gorge.
And above it, between the edge and the notch of the pass, the snow. Smooth and white, driven into ridges by the wind, unmarked by anything at all.
Then he looked down at his carbine, and at the cartridge belt, and counted. He had fired once. One hundred and five.
He knew where that one had gone. He stood there in the storm and thought about a dry valley above Andijan, and a boy of seventeen who never stopped talking, and he waited to feel what he had thought for four years he would feel. Nothing came. Only the cold, and the wind, and the grey’s breath on the back of his neck.
A black horse, the old men said, belonged to somebody else.
He turned round, and went back down the slope to the grey, and took her rein. They went back along the crack in the rock, and round the shoulder of the mountain, to the shelf where five mares and a camp pony stood with their heads down in the snow, waiting for somebody to tell them what to do.
“Come on,” he said to them. “Come on, girls. We’re going home.”