Nine
“Nobody rides into that gorge in daylight,” Bayish said.
Ivanchuk looked up from his map. They were sitting below the crest of the ridge, out of sight of the fold and the smoke, in the last grey light, with the horses picketed behind them in a hollow and the men eating cold bread. The lieutenant had marked the gorge on the map with his pencil, a neat little line with an arrow at the end of it.
“It’s the only way in.”
“It’s the only way in for horses. It’s not the only way in for men.” Bayish pointed up at the dark rim of the ravine, where it came out against the sky on either side. “If I were the Kurbashi, I’d have three men up there on each side. Maybe four. Behind the rocks, at the narrow place, halfway down, where the path goes close under the west wall. They let the column into the narrow place, and then they shoot the first horse and the last horse, and then they shoot everything in between.”
“You don’t know there’s anyone up there.”
“No.”
“Then how...”
“Because it’s what I’d do.”
Ivanchuk stared at him. Then he turned to Sergeant Zhakupov, who was sitting on a rock nearby, chewing, and looking at nothing.
“Sergeant?”
Zhakupov swallowed. “It’s what I’d do too, Comrade Lieutenant.”
They argued about it for an hour. In the end it was decided the way most things are decided in the army, which is that the officer decided, and the officer was twenty-six and from Poltava and had his orders, and his orders said nothing about scouts going up cliffs in the dark on their own initiative. They would go down the gorge at first light, in column, with intervals of twenty paces, rifles ready, and if they were fired on, they would return fire and push through to the far end at a gallop.
“And you,” Ivanchuk said to Bayish, “will ride with the column. Where I can see you.”
“No,” said Bayish.
He said it quite gently. Ivanchuk opened his mouth, and then shut it.
“I’m going up the west rim tonight,” Bayish said. “On foot. Before you go in. If there’s nobody there, I’ll come down to the far end and wait for you under the poplars, and you can put me under arrest. If there is somebody there...” He shrugged. “Then you’ll hear.”
He got up, and took the carbine, and went to the grey in the hollow, and stood with her a moment, rubbing her face. She pushed her nose against his chest. He took the white felt off her brow, carefully, unpicking Aimkan’s knot with his fingers, and folded it, and put it in the inside pocket of his coat, with the Party card and the priest’s pinch of bread.
“Sergeant,” he said, without turning round. “Look after my mare.”
“I will,” said Zhakupov.
It took him four hours to get up the west rim of the gorge in the dark. He went a long way round, back along the ridge and then out to the west and down into a side gully that he had marked from the crest in the last of the light, and up its far side, on hands and knees much of the time, with the carbine slung across his back and his side tearing at every handhold. Twice he had to stop and lie flat on the cold stone until the world stopped turning. Once a stone went out from under his foot and went down into the dark, knocking from rock to rock, and he lay with his face against the rock for ten minutes, not breathing, listening, and nothing happened.
By three in the morning he was on the rim. By four he had found them.
There were three. He found them by their smell before anything else: tobacco and sheep-fat and wet felt. They were in a nest of boulders at the narrow place, exactly where he would have put them, lying in their coats and blankets with their rifles beside them, one awake and two asleep. Across the gorge, on the far rim, against the first faint grey of the sky, he thought he could see the shapes of more boulders, and perhaps a man among them, and perhaps not.
He lay forty yards behind the three on the west rim, in a crack between two stones, and waited for the light.
It came slowly, grey and then white, filling the gorge from the top down, like water poured into a bowl. Below him lay the dry stream bed and the path along it, pale among the stones. Then the far rim came clear, and on it, as he had thought, three more men, in a line of rocks a little higher than his own.
The man on watch in front of him woke the other two with his foot. They sat up and rubbed their faces and took up their rifles and lay down behind the boulders facing the gorge, and one of them lit a pipe, and the smoke went up thin and blue in the cold.
Then, far up the gorge, from the north, Bayish heard horses.
The column came down into the ravine at a walk, as Ivanchuk had said. Six big horses, twenty paces apart, the men in their grey coats with their rifles across their saddles, looking up at the walls. The lieutenant rode second, behind a private on a chestnut. Zhakupov rode last, leading the grey mare on a rope. She came quietly behind his big Don horse, with her wall eye rolling up at the cliffs, and Bayish lay in his crack in the rock and watched her come and thought, I should not have let her go down there, and could do nothing about it.
The three men in front of him had seen the column. They were very still. The one with the pipe had put it down on the rock. They were waiting for the first horse to reach the narrow place.
Bayish looked across the gorge at the far rim, and the three men there, and calculated. Forty yards to the ones in front of him. A hundred and fifty across to the others. He could take the three in front. He could take them before they knew he was there. But the moment he fired, the three on the far rim would fire too, at the column, down into the narrow place, and the column would be caught in the open.
Unless he fired first. Before the column was in the narrow place. Before they were ready.
He did not wait any longer.
He shot the man with the pipe first, through the back, and the man pitched forward over his rifle. The second man came up on his knees and turned, and Bayish shot him too. The third one was quicker. He rolled into the boulders and fired once, wild, at the crack in the rocks, and the bullet went off the stone a foot above Bayish’s head and away into the sky. Then he ran. He ran along the rim, crouched over, away toward the south, toward the fold and the smoke, and Bayish fired once after him and missed, and let him go, because by then the far rim was firing.
They fired at the column, as he had known they would. But the column was not in the narrow place yet. It was a hundred yards short of it, in the open, and the first volley came too early and too high, and Bayish heard Ivanchuk’s voice come up out of the gorge, very loud and quite steady: “Dismount! Cover! Return fire!”
The big horses plunged and reared. One went down, a chestnut, with a private still half in the saddle. The rest of the men were off their horses and in among the stones of the stream bed, firing up at the far rim. It was the shooting of men lying on their backs among rocks, firing at a cliff a hundred feet above them.
Bayish was not on his back.
He came out of his crack and ran along the west rim to the nest of boulders where the three men had been, and lay down behind the dead man with the pipe, and laid the carbine on the rock, and looked across the gorge.
A hundred and fifty yards. A little downhill. No wind. Three men behind rocks, with their heads and shoulders showing as they fired down into the gorge, and not one of them looking across at the other rim, where their own people were.
He took them one at a time.
The first he hit in the shoulder, and the man dropped his rifle over the cliff and went down behind his rock. The second he missed, and missed again, and then hit as the man rose to see where the shots were coming from. The third saw him. He swung his rifle round and they fired at the same moment, and something plucked at Bayish’s sleeve, and the man on the far rim sat down very suddenly and did not get up.
Then it was quiet.
Down in the gorge a horse was screaming. Somebody was shouting in Russian, over and over, a name. Sokolov. Sokolov. Bayish lay on the rock with his cheek against the cold stock of the carbine and his side burning like a coal, and counted his cartridges, because it was something to do with his hands. He had fired eight. He had a hundred and six left. It had taken perhaps two minutes.
When he came down into the gorge the sun was up, and it was over.
Two of Ivanchuk’s men were dead. Sokolov, a boy from Tver with fair hair, had been in the saddle of the chestnut when it went down, and the first volley had taken him through the chest. Bekov, a Tatar from Kazan, had been hit in the head as he dismounted, and was lying among the stones of the stream bed with his rifle still in his hands. The chestnut was dead. A second horse was down with a broken leg, and Zhakupov had shot it.
Ivanchuk was sitting against a boulder with his leather coat open and his right trouser leg cut away and a field dressing on his thigh, already soaking through red. He was very white. He watched Bayish come down the last of the slope and pick his way through the stones toward him, and waited until Bayish was standing over him.
“Two,” he said. “Two of mine.”
“Yes.”
“If we’d been in the narrow place...”
“Yes.”
Ivanchuk looked away down the gorge, toward the far end, where the poplars began and the smoke of the Kurbashi’s camp went up into the clear morning. His jaw was working.
“You were right,” he said at last. “Write that in your report. I’ll sign it.”
The grey mare was standing by Zhakupov’s horse at the side of the path, on her rope, untouched. When she saw Bayish she lifted her head and called to him, once, a short low sound, and he went to her and put his hand on her neck and stood there, and the sergeant looked at the two of them and turned away and busied himself with a girth.
They had one prisoner. He was the man Bayish had hit in the shoulder on the far rim. Two of the privates had climbed up after the shooting stopped and dragged him down. He was a thin hill man of thirty or so, with a scrubby beard and terrified eyes, and he sat on a stone with his arm hanging and answered everything Zhakupov asked him, very fast, in the Fergana speech.
Yes, the Kurbashi was at Kara-Jygach. Yes, the horses had come in yesterday evening. The Captain had come with them, and the bai’s men, and they were all in the camp under the poplars by the spring. Eighty men, perhaps more. The Kurbashi and the Captain were to sit together tonight and agree a price. The money was to be paid tomorrow at dawn, in gold, and the bai’s men would go home, and the Captain would go east toward China with his share, and the horses would go to the Kurbashi.
“And the boy?” Bayish said. “The Chatkal boy. With the bad arm.”
The prisoner looked at him. “The Captain keeps him. In his own tent. With a rope on his foot.” He hesitated. “The Captain says he is a guarantee.”
“Of what?”
The man shrugged with his good shoulder. “Of you, I think.”
Ivanchuk could not ride. Zhakupov said it, and Ivanchuk said it himself, after he had tried to stand and fallen back against the boulder with his face grey and sweating. The bullet was still in his thigh. It had missed the bone and the big vessel, or he would be dead already, but it needed a surgeon, and the nearest surgeon was in Namangan, two days down in the valley.
“Then we go back,” Ivanchuk said. “We go back and get the detachment. There’s nothing else. I have three men who can fight. You have one carbine.”
“The Kurbashi heard the shooting,” Bayish said. “He’ll have every man in the camp up by now. By the time your detachment gets here, the mares will be gone, and so will Strelnikov, and the boy will be at the bottom of a cliff.”
“Then what?” The lieutenant’s voice cracked. “What do you want? Tell me what you want.”
Bayish looked down the gorge at the smoke.
“I’m going to walk into his camp,” he said, “tonight. Alone. Without the carbine. As a guest.”
There was a silence in the gorge. Even the privates who were digging in the stony ground for the two dead men stopped digging.
“He’ll kill you,” Ivanchuk said.
“No. He won’t. Not under his own roof.” Bayish turned to the prisoner on his stone. “Tell me. Is the Kurbashi a man of the old law? Does he keep the guest?”
The prisoner’s eyes went to the sergeant, and then back to Bayish, and he nodded, once.
“The Kurbashi keeps the guest,” he said. “Three days. Even an enemy. Even a Russian.” He swallowed. “After three days, he kills them.”
“Three days is plenty,” said Bayish.