Five
He rode into Kök-Saz at noon, alone, by the main road, with the carbine in its boot under his leg and his hat on straight, like a man who had business and nothing to hide.
He had left the boy in a ruined sheepfold on the hill above the village, with the two ponies and the empty rifle and strict instructions, and the boy had looked at him with his dark eyes and said yes to all of them, and Bayish had not believed a word of it. But there was nothing to be done about that. You cannot tie a boy of sixteen to a sheepfold.
Kök-Saz lay where Aimkan had said, where the valley opened out and the river went slow and brown among the reed beds that gave the place its name. Forty houses, perhaps fifty, flat-roofed, mud-brick, with poplars round them and the stubble of the harvest on the terraces above. A mill. A shop with a tin sign in Russian and Arabic letters. A small square of beaten earth with a mulberry tree in it and three old men sitting under the tree on a felt, who watched him ride past and did not stop talking.
And at the top of the village, against the hill, a wall.
It was as she had said. Twice the height of a man, mud-brick on a stone footing, whitewashed once and long ago, with the wash coming off in patches like old skin. A big double gate of poplar wood, studded with iron. Over the gate, nailed to the wood, a board with red letters on it in Russian and in the old Arabic letters that Iradi was still written in then, which said that this was the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies of the Kök-Saz Village Council.
The gate was open. Bayish rode through it.
The bai received him on a raised platform under the mulberry tree in the inner yard, on a heap of carpets and cushions, with a samovar going at his elbow and a boy to pour. He was a heavy man of fifty or so, with a grey beard trimmed close and small clever eyes in a soft face, and he wore a quilted silk coat over a Russian shirt with a collar, and a Party badge on the coat. He did not get up.
“A guest,” he said, and smiled. “Sit. Sit. Tea. You have come over the mountain? In this weather? Sit.”
Bayish sat on the edge of the platform. He took the bowl of tea the boy gave him. He looked past the bai, across the yard, to the second gate in the far wall, where the stable yard would be. It was shut. Behind it, quite clearly, came the sound of horses. A lot of horses. And once, high and angry, a stallion calling.
“You have fine horses,” he said.
“Horses?” The bai spread his hands. “A few. I am a poor man. I keep a few horses for my sons.” He sipped his tea. “You are from the Talas, by your voice.”
“From Chong-Talas.”
The bai’s face did not change at all. Bayish gave him that. “Ah,” he said. “The state farm. The Russian’s farm. The horses for the Red Army. A great work. A great work of the Soviet power.” He set his bowl down. “And what brings a man from the state farm so far over the mountain?”
“Forty-one mares,” Bayish said. “And a black stallion. Stolen four nights ago. Their trail comes into your yard.”
There was a silence under the mulberry tree. The boy who poured the tea had stopped pouring.
Then the bai laughed, the comfortable laugh of a fat man at a joke he has heard before.
“Stolen?” he said. “My dear friend. Nobody has stolen anything. I bought them. Last week. In good faith, from a dealer, with a paper.” He clapped his hands, and a man came out of the house, a thin man with spectacles, and the bai said something to him, and the man went back in. “You’ll see. A paper with a stamp. From your own director. The Russian. He sold them because the state has no money to feed them over the winter. Everybody knows the state has no money. You’ll see.”
The thin man came back with a paper. The bai handed it to Bayish with a little bow, as if it were a gift.
Bayish read it. It was in Russian, typed on a good machine, and it said that the Chong-Talas State Stud, by order of its director, had sold to the citizen A. Abdyrakhmanov of Kök-Saz forty-two horses of the riding type, surplus to requirements, for the sum of four thousand roubles in chervontsy, paid in full. It was signed Pavlov. There was a round purple stamp.
It was a very good paper. It was so good that for a moment, holding it, Bayish was not sure.
Then he looked at the signature again, and was sure. Pavlov signed his name with a great sweeping tail on the final letter, like a man signing for a whole railway. This one had no tail. Whoever had forged it had seen Pavlov’s name typed, but never written.
“It’s a fine paper,” he said, and handed it back.
“You see?” said the bai happily. “A misunderstanding. Your director has forgotten. Directors are always forgetting. You will go home and tell him, and he will remember, and he will be very ashamed, and we will all laugh about it.” He leaned forward a little on his cushions, and his small eyes were not laughing at all. “And if he does not remember, well. There is the soviet. There is the law. I am the soviet, here. You understand me? Here, I am the law.”
“He doesn’t understand you, Abdyrakhman,” said a voice behind Bayish, in Russian. “He’s a soldier. Soldiers never understand anything. That’s why they make such good soldiers.”
Bayish turned round.
The man standing in the doorway of the house was tall and thin and perhaps fifty, with a long tired face and a short beard gone grey at the corners of the mouth. He wore a good English coat that had been very good once and was now only good, and riding boots that had been mended by someone who knew boots. He had a glass of tea in his hand, in a silver holder, the Russian way. He looked at Bayish with an expression of mild and courteous interest, like a man meeting someone at a railway station whom he has been told to expect.
“Captain Strelnikov,” the bai said, with a wave of his hand. “My guest. A dealer in horses. A very honest man.”
“Thank you, Abdyrakhman,” said Strelnikov. He came across the yard and sat down on the edge of the platform, a little way from Bayish, and crossed his legs, and drank his tea. “And you,” he said to Bayish, pleasantly, in Iradi now, a good careful Iradi with a Russian edge to it, “are the man who killed Sapar on the Kenkol. And shot a child. The rearguard told me. The one who came back.”
Bayish said nothing. There had been no one who came back. The man was guessing, and guessing well.
“You came up the scree in the dark,” said Strelnikov. “Alone. On a Chongtor mare. And lay down on the ridge in full view of my picket like a cadet on his first exercise.” He shook his head. “I nearly had the camp turned out for you. Then I thought, no. Let him come. A man who comes that far alone is either a fool or a man with a reason. And I wanted to see which.”
“Which am I?”
Strelnikov considered him over the rim of the glass.
“Andijan,” he said. “Wasn’t it? The summer of ’21. The dry valley. You were the scout. You were always out in front. You rode a bay with a white face, and there was a boy with you who never stopped talking.” He set the glass down on the carpet. “I’m sorry about the boy. I was aiming at you.”
Bayish sat very still. The tea bowl was in his hand. He found that he had to think about not crushing it.
Across the yard, behind the shut gate, the stallion called again.
“I’ll make you an offer,” Strelnikov said, and now he was not smiling. “Because I liked the way you came up the scree, and because I’m tired, and because I have shot enough of you people for one lifetime. Twenty gold pieces.” He took a small leather bag out of his coat and set it on the carpet between them. It clinked. “Tsarist. With the eagle. Enough to buy a house in Talas and a wife to put in it. You go home. You tell your Russian the mares were dead on the Kenkol, or sold, or flown away to heaven. Nobody will ever know. In a month I will be in Kashgar, and Abdyrakhman will be a richer man, and your Soviet power will buy forty more mares from somebody else and never miss these.”
“And if I don’t?”
Strelnikov sighed. He stood up, and brushed his coat, and picked up his glass.
“Then sometime in the next few days,” he said, “somebody will shoot you. Probably me. And I’ll be sorry about that, too.” He looked down at Bayish. “Think about it. Abdyrakhman will give you a bed for the night. He’s very hospitable. You’ll be quite safe under his roof. Won’t he, Abdyrakhman?”
“Quite safe,” said the bai. “A guest is sacred.”
Strelnikov nodded, and went back into the house.
Bayish sat a moment longer. He put down his tea bowl, untouched, and left the bag of gold where it lay. He stood up and bowed to the bai, the short bow of a guest leaving, and walked back across the yard to where the grey was tied, and untied her, and mounted.
“You will not stay?” said the bai, surprised.
“I have to see a man about some sheep,” Bayish said, and rode out of the gate.
He went back up the hill to the ruined sheepfold, by a long way round, watching his back trail. The boy was not in the sheepfold. The boy was flat on his belly on a rock above it, where he could see the whole of the village and the bai’s compound, with the empty Gras beside him, exactly where he had been told not to be.
“I said stay in the fold.”
“You’d have done the same,” said Nurdin.
Bayish thought about it. “Yes,” he said, and lay down on the rock beside him.
From up there you could see into the bai’s back yard, over the wall. The mares were there. Bayish counted them, slowly, twice. Thirty-nine. Packed into the stable yard, which was not big enough for half that number, standing nose to tail in the mud, with hay thrown down on them from the stable roof. In one corner, on his own, roped to an iron ring in the wall, the black stallion, who would not stand still, who kept swinging his quarters and throwing his head against the rope and squealing, so that the mares nearest him pressed away.
“Tonight,” Bayish said.
They went in at two in the morning, by the aryk.
The water was colder than Bayish had believed water could be, and came above the knee, and the bottom was soft mud that pulled at his boots. They went along the foot of the wall in the dark, with the water talking softly round their legs and the stars very bright and cold overhead, and came to the place where the channel went under the wall into a low black arch, with the grating across it.
The boy put his good hand on the third bar from the left and pulled, and it came out of its socket in the mud as easily as a tooth from an old man’s jaw.
They went through on their bellies in the water, one after the other, Bayish holding the carbine above his head. On the other side was the stable yard. It stank of horses and wet hay and dung. The mares were dark shapes standing close together, breathing, shifting, and the smell of strangers went through them like wind through grass. Bayish stood in the mud with the water running off him and spoke to them, low, in the voice he used at Chong-Talas in the mornings, the nonsense voice that horses like, and the shifting slowed, and stopped.
The stable gate was in the far wall. It was barred on the inside with a beam. Beyond it was the bai’s main yard, and beyond that the big gate, and the village, and the road. The plan was simple. Lift the beam. Open the stable gate. Open the big gate, which would be barred too, but only with a beam, because who would steal from the soviet? Then drive the mares through and out and up the valley, all of them at once, at a gallop, in the dark, and let the bai’s men try to catch thirty-nine panicked horses in the night.
He had done it before. In 1920, outside Kokand, he had stolen a whole herd of remounts out of a basmachi camp in exactly this way.
He went along the wall with the boy behind him, among the mares, through the warm smell of them, and put his hands on the beam.
Kara-Jal screamed.
It was high and terrible, the sound a stallion makes when he is fighting. The black horse had smelled the strangers and the water and the cold, and he came round on his rope and reared and struck at the wall with his forefeet, and screamed again. The mares broke. They went every way at once in the dark, a great sliding surge of bodies, and Bayish was thrown against the gate and felt the beam go into his ribs, and somewhere a dog began to bark, and then all the dogs.
A light came on in the house.
“The beam!” Bayish shouted to the boy. “Lift it!”
They got it halfway. Then the door of the house opened and a man came out with a lantern, and behind him another with a shotgun, and behind them the bai’s son, in his shirt, shouting. The lantern swung. Bayish saw the boy’s face in it, white, with his mouth open, and saw the man with the shotgun see it too.
Bayish fired once over their heads, high, to make them drop, and they dropped, and the lantern went out.
“Back!” he said to the boy. “The aryk! Go!”
They ran. The boy went first, along the wall, among the mares. Bayish came behind him, and as he came someone fired from the house, a rifle this time, not the shotgun, and something hit him in the side like a thrown stone and spun him half round against the wall.
He did not fall. He was surprised by that, afterwards. He put his hand to his side and it came away wet and warm, and he thought, quite clearly, ribs, and kept going.
At the arch he looked back. The boy was not behind him.
He was in the middle of the yard, among the plunging mares, on his knees in the mud, and two of the bai’s men had him, one on each arm, the bad arm too, and the boy was not screaming, only twisting and kicking like a young horse at its first saddle. The lantern was alight again. In its light, standing on the step of the house in his good English coat with a carbine in his hands, quite calm, was Strelnikov.
He was looking straight at the arch.
Bayish lifted the carbine. He had a clear shot. Forty yards, lantern light, a still man on a step. He had made harder shots.
Then the bai’s man holding the boy’s good arm pulled the boy up and round, in front of himself, and held him there, and looked at the arch too.
Bayish lowered the carbine.
He went down into the water, on his back, under the wall, and out into the dark, with the cold of the aryk closing over his side like a hand, and the dogs still barking behind him, and the stallion still screaming, and over all of it, quite clearly, as he came out on the far side and began to run, the sound of Strelnikov’s voice saying something in Russian that might have been a laugh.