Four
Aimkan’s winter camp was three stone houses and a sheepfold on a shelf of the side valley, with a stream below and a stand of poplars that had dropped their leaves, so that the yellow lay thick on the ground and the bare white trunks stood up out of it like candles. There was smoke from one of the houses. A dog came out to meet them, barking, and then stopped barking and ran back again, and a woman came out of the door with a ladle in her hand.
She stood in the doorway and looked at her son on the pony, with his arm strapped across his chest and his face the colour of whey, and at the stranger on the grey mare beside him, and at the empty rifle. She did not say anything.
Then she put the ladle down on the step, very carefully, the way you put down something you might otherwise throw.
“Get off that horse,” she said to her son.
Nurdin got off. He did it badly, one-handed, and nearly fell, and his mother did not move to help him. He stood in front of her in the yellow leaves with the rifle in his good hand.
She hit him once, open-handed, across the face. Not hard.
Then she took his face in both her hands and held it, and looked at it, and did not let go.
Bayish sat on the grey and looked at the poplars.
Her name was Aimkan, and she was perhaps forty, though the mountains had made her look older. She was tall and straight, with a long face and dark eyes like her son’s, and she wore the white elechek of a married woman, wound high and tight, though her husband had been dead for eight years. She brought Bayish into the house because he was a guest and there was no other way to treat a guest, and she sat him on the felt in the place of honour, and she brought him milk and bread and a bowl of mutton broth, and she did not once look at him while she did it.
When Nurdin told her who had shot him she was silent for a while, holding the teapot.
“You,” she said to Bayish.
“Yes.”
“You could have killed him.”
“Yes.”
She poured his tea. Her hand was quite steady. “Why didn’t you?”
Bayish thought about lying, and did not. “I had a boy beside me once,” he said. “In the Fergana. About his age. A man with a carbine killed him.” He drank some of the tea. It was very strong, with salt and milk in it, the way they make it in the Chatkal. “It’s the same man your son was riding for.”
Aimkan put the teapot down.
She looked at her son, who was sitting by the stove with a bowl of broth he had not touched, and then at Bayish, and then at the window, where the light came in grey through a pane of thin scraped hide.
“My husband,” she said, “was called Tölögön. In the summer of the Great Flight, when the soldiers came up the valley, he took us over the Kenkol and the Suusamyr and the Kökjal passes into China. Me and this one and his sister. On the ice above the Kökjal his sister died, and he carried her two days before he would let me put her down. In China he worked for a Chinese merchant for nothing, for a bowl of rice a day, and in the spring of the next year we came back over the same passes, and on the Kenkol he fell in the snow and did not get up.” She said it quite flatly. “So my son knows the passes. His father showed him every one of them.”
Bayish said nothing. There was nothing to say. Half the families in the Talas and the Chatkal had a story like it.
“And when we came back,” Aimkan said, “there was nothing. The houses were burned. The sheep were gone. The Russians had the bottom land. And Abdyrakhman-bai, who had not gone anywhere, who had sat in his house at Kök-Saz all through the troubles selling bread to the soldiers, he lent us sheep. Forty sheep, to start again.” Her mouth went thin. “That was eight years ago. I have paid him back two hundred.”
“And you still owe him.”
“I still owe him forty. Every year I still owe him forty. That is how a bai lends.” She looked at her son. “So when the Captain came and said there was a rifle and a gold piece for a boy who knew the passes, and the bai’s man Sapar said the bai would forgive the debt if he went, what was a boy of sixteen going to do?”
Nurdin was staring into his bowl. His ears had gone red.
“He was going to do something stupid,” Aimkan said. “Like his father.”
After the meal she sent the boy to lie down in the other room, and he went without arguing, which told Bayish how bad the arm was. Aimkan unwound the bandage herself and looked at the wound and said nothing, and washed it with salt water that made the boy go white and silent, and bound it up again with clean cloth. When she came back she sat down across the stove from Bayish and folded her hands.
“Now,” she said. “What are you?”
“I break horses at Chong-Talas. The state stud.”
“No. What are you?” She pointed with her chin at the carbine, which was leaning against the wall by the door, and then at his coat, where the Party card was, though she could not have known that. “You talk like a soldier. You shoot like a soldier. You go after ten men alone like a fool. Are you the OGPU?”
“No.”
“The militia?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Bayish turned his bowl in his hands. “I’m the man who looks after the horses,” he said. “Somebody took the horses. So I’ve come to get them back.”
Aimkan looked at him. Then she laughed, once, without any pleasure in it.
“You are a fool,” she said. “Listen to me. You don’t know what you’re riding into. Abdyrakhman-bai is not a thief. He is the soviet. He is the law in this valley. When the commissars came in ’23 and said there must be a soviet in Kök-Saz, he called a meeting in his courtyard, and his men stood at the gate, and everybody put up their hands, and now he is the chairman. He has a stamp. He has a paper from Tashkent with a seal on it. If you go into Kök-Saz with that rifle and say he has stolen state horses, he will have you arrested as a bandit by his own soviet, and sent to Tashkent with a letter, and you will never see the Talas again.”
“I’m a Party member.”
“So is he,” said Aimkan.
Bayish put his bowl down.
He had not thought of that. He should have. In 1923 every bai in Turkestan who could read had joined something, the Party or the Koshchi union or the soviet, the way a man puts on a coat when the weather changes. He had seen it in the Fergana. A man who had paid the basmachi in the morning would be at a Party meeting by the afternoon, making speeches about the class enemy.
“And the Captain,” Aimkan said. “The Captain is the bai’s guest. You understand? Under his roof, at his table. If you touch the Captain in the bai’s house, you insult the bai, and every man in the valley who owes him sheep will be on the bai’s side. And every man in the valley owes him sheep.”
They sat in silence for a while. Outside, the wind had got up and was moving in the poplars, and the yellow leaves went past the window in a slant.
“Tell me about his house,” Bayish said.
Aimkan looked at him. “You’re still going.”
“Tell me about his house.”
She told him. She told it well. She had walked past it every week of her life and hated it every time. The bai’s compound stood at the top of the village of Kök-Saz, where the valley widened and the river ran slow among reed beds. A mud-brick wall twice the height of a man, with a wooden gate on the village side, and the bai’s houses inside, and storerooms, and a big yard with a well and a mulberry tree. Behind the houses, against the hill, a second yard, with stables along the back wall. That was where he kept his horses. That was where the mares would be.
“Is there another way in? Besides the gate?”
Aimkan hesitated. Then she said: “The aryk.”
The irrigation channel, she said, came off the river above the village and ran down along the foot of the hill, and the bai, who had paid for it to be dug and who took more of its water than anyone, had had it brought in under the back wall of his compound to water the stable yard and the mulberry and his wife’s flowers. There was a hole in the bottom of the wall where it went in, with a grating of wooden bars across it. Children went in and out under the grating in summer when the water was low, to steal mulberries. In autumn the water was low.
“How low?”
“To the knee. Lower, now.”
“How do you know?”
Aimkan looked at the door of the other room, where her son was lying.
“Because he was one of the children,” she said.
Bayish slept that night on the felt by the stove, with the carbine beside him, and woke before dawn to find Aimkan already up, kneeling by the fire, blowing it into life. Nurdin was standing in the doorway of the other room, fully dressed, with his strapped arm and the empty rifle.
Aimkan did not look round.
“You can’t come,” Bayish said to the boy.
“I know the aryk.”
“Your mother knows the aryk. She’s told me.”
“She doesn’t know where the grating’s loose.” The boy’s chin came up. “I do. And I know which dog is which. And I know the bai’s stableman, Kudaibergen, who drinks. And I know the bai’s son, who is a coward, and which room he sleeps in. You don’t know any of that.”
“No,” Bayish said. “I don’t.”
He looked at Aimkan. She was still blowing on the fire, very carefully, and did not look at either of them.
“If he comes,” she said, without turning round, “and he dies, you owe me kun. A man’s blood-price, for my son. Before the elders. Ninefold.”
“I don’t have it.”
“No,” Aimkan said. “Nobody does.” She sat back on her heels and looked at the fire, which had caught now, the flames going up yellow round the dung cakes. “So you had better not let him die.”
She got up. She went to the chest by the wall and opened it and took out a strip of white felt, a long narrow strip of the kind that is tied to a cradle or a saddle or the branch of a holy tree, and came over to the door, past her son, and out into the grey morning where the horses were. Bayish followed her. She went to the grey mare, who stood quiet and let her, and she tied the strip of white felt to the brow band of the mare’s bridle, between the ears, with a knot that would not come undone.
“So that he knows her,” Aimkan said.
“Who?”
She looked at him as if he were simple, the way her son had looked at him on the mountain.
“The one who comes down off the pass for souls,” she said. “So that if he comes for one of you, he knows which horse to bring back.”
Bayish looked at the white felt on the mare’s brow. He had a Party card in his coat, and a carbine, and a hundred and fifteen rounds.
He did not take the felt off.