Seven
The walnut forest began a day’s ride south of the priest’s yurt, where the Chatkal hills fold down toward the Fergana and the air goes soft and the snow gives out.
Bayish came into it in the late afternoon, out of the high bare country, down a long slope of dead bracken, and the trees closed over him all at once like water. They were old trees, older than anything he had seen on the Talas, with trunks a man could not put his arms round and great grey branches that went out and out over the slope and met the branches of the next tree, so that the light came down green and gold and broken, and the ground was soft and brown with fallen leaves and the husks of walnuts, black and split. It smelled bitter and clean, of leaf-rot and green walnut and woodsmoke from somewhere far off.
The herd’s trail went through it like a river through a reed bed. Thirty-nine mares and the black stallion, eight or nine men, and now the bai’s people too, a dozen riders by the look of it, had come down this slope that morning and torn a wide brown road through the leaves, and broken branches, and left their dung in heaps. A child could have followed it.
That was what worried him.
He rode slowly, with the carbine across the saddle in front of him and his side stiff and burning under the priest’s linen. He had opened two of the stitches getting into the saddle that morning, as the priest had said he would, and felt them go, and said nothing. The bleeding had stopped again. He did not think about it.
The grey went quietly through the leaves with her ears moving. The white felt was still on her brow, a little grey now with dirt. Twice he had thought about taking it off, and twice he had not.
At the bottom of the slope, where a stream came down through the trees in a little ravine, he found the third mare.
She was lying in the stream with her head on the bank, as if she had lain down to drink and not got up. A bay, heavy in foal, near her time. There was no wound on her. She had simply been driven too far too fast, down off the mountain and through the forest, with the foal pulling at her from inside, and somewhere on the slope her heart had given out, and they had left her where she fell.
The foal had moved once inside her as Bayish knelt there. He felt it under his hand. Then it was still.
He did not shoot her. There was no need. He stayed there a while with his hand on her flank, and the stream going past, and the walnut leaves coming down one by one through the green light and settling on the water.
Thirty-eight.
He thought of Pavlov, standing in the empty corral with his rifle he did not know how to hold. He thought of Kalmurat, who had bred some of these mares from foals and knew all their names. He thought: they don’t care. Kalmurat had said it. They’re not selling foals. They’re selling horses.
He got up and went on.
Half a mile further on, the trail split.
It was very well done. Bayish gave Strelnikov that, as he had given the bai his calm. The trail came down the stream valley to a place where the trees opened into a long glade, and there, on a bare patch of stony ground where the leaves had blown away, it divided. One road went on south, down the valley. The other turned east, up a side ravine toward the higher ground. Both were wide. Both were trampled by many hooves. Both had fresh dung on them.
And in the soft earth at the edge of the eastern trail, clear as a signature, the crooked half-moon of the big bay.
Bayish sat the grey at the fork and read it.
The east trail went up. Up toward the high passes, toward the Kökjal country and the long way round to China. A man who wanted to sell his horses on the Fergana side and be gone would not go that way. But a man who knew he was being followed, by someone who knew his horse’s track, might send his horse that way, and go the other.
He got down. He went along the eastern trail on foot, bent over, for fifty yards, reading it. Then he came back and did the same on the southern one.
It took him a quarter of an hour. When he had finished he stood in the glade with the leaves coming down round him, and almost smiled.
The eastern trail was a dozen horses. No more. Chongtor ponies, mostly, ridden, and a few loose ones driven ahead, and something dragged behind them, branches perhaps, to churn the ground and make it look like more. The dung was fresh, but there was not enough of it. And the half-moon track of the big bay was there, sharp and crooked, but too shallow. The bay was being led. Nobody was riding him. A big horse with a man on him sinks deep in soft ground. This one was walking light, like a horse in a paddock.
The southern trail was the herd. Thirty-eight mares in foal, heavy, slow, their tracks deep and close together. Dung in long trails, the loose dung of tired horses. And among the mares, here and there, the prints of the riders’ ponies, and once, in a patch of mud by a spring, the long narrow print of a riding boot. A good boot, mended by someone who knew boots.
Strelnikov had put his horse on the decoy and gone with the herd on something else.
“You clever bastard,” Bayish said aloud, to the glade, and the grey turned her head and looked at him.
He found the boy’s sign a mile down the southern trail.
It was a strip of cloth, tied to a low branch at the height of a rider’s hand. Grey cloth, dirty, torn from a shirt. Bayish knew the shirt. He had cut the sleeve of it on the Kenkol to get at the boy’s arm.
He sat and looked at it, and had to wait a while before he could ride on.
A mile further on there was another. Then, at a stream crossing, a walnut twig broken and laid across a stone, pointing down the valley. Then another strip of cloth, very small this time, as if the boy were running out of shirt. They were not leading him anywhere. He did not need leading. The herd’s trail was a road.
They were a message that the boy was alive, and knew he was being followed, and was not afraid.
Or was afraid, and tying them anyway.
At dusk he came to a walnut-gatherers’ camp.
It was in a clearing among the big trees: two felt tents and a brushwood shelter and a fire, and sacks of walnuts heaped against a log, and children, and a dog that came out barking and then thought better of it. A man got up from the fire with an axe in his hand, and then saw the carbine across Bayish’s saddle, and put the axe down slowly, the way Aimkan had put down her ladle.
They were Fergana people, from the hill villages below. Muslims, by the man’s skullcap and the women’s dress and the way the old woman by the fire said bismillah under her breath when she saw him. They had come up into the forest, as they did every autumn, to gather the walnuts on the family’s plot, and they would be here another two weeks, until the first big snow drove them down.
They had seen the herd. Of course they had seen it. It had come through the edge of their plot at midday, a river of horses, and men with rifles, and the man with the axe had stood in front of his children and not said a word while they went past.
“Russians?” he asked Bayish. “Soldiers?”
“Thieves.”
The man looked at him. Then he said something to his wife, and she brought bread, round and flat and still warm from the ashes, and a bowl of walnuts, and a pot of tea, and set them on a felt by the fire, and the man waved Bayish to it.
Bayish sat. He had not known how hungry he was until he smelled the bread.
The old woman watched him eat. She was very old, older than the priest, with a face like a dried apple and eyes that missed nothing. When he had finished, she leaned forward and pointed at the grey mare, who was standing by the tents with the white felt on her brow, and said something to her son in the Fergana speech, quickly, too quick for Bayish to follow.
The son looked uncomfortable. “My mother says,” he said, “that the mare has been blessed. By the Christians. The ones up in the mountains.”
“Yes,” said Bayish. There was no point in saying otherwise.
The old woman said something else.
“She says,” said the son, “that in the summer of the troubles, when she was a girl, her father went over the mountain to the Chatkal with the soldiers behind him, and the Christian people up there hid him in their houses for a week and fed him and did not tell. She says it doesn’t matter what God put the felt on the mare. She says a blessing is a blessing.” He hesitated. “She says the men who went past today are not blessed by anybody.”
The old woman nodded firmly and sat back.
“Where are they going?” Bayish asked.
The man’s face closed a little. “South. Down to Kara-Jygach. To the Kurbashi’s camp.”
“You know the Kurbashi?”
“Everybody knows the Kurbashi.” The man looked at the sacks of walnuts heaped against the log. “Every autumn his men come up here and take one sack in five. For the cause, they say. Before, it was for Islam. Now it is just for the cause.” He shrugged. “The Soviets came last year and said the Kurbashi was finished. The Kurbashi is not finished. The Kurbashi is in Kara-Jygach with eighty men, and he takes one sack in five.”
“Eighty.”
“Perhaps more. Perhaps fewer. They come and go.”
Bayish looked into the fire.
Eighty men. And the Captain’s eight, and the bai’s dozen. One man with a carbine and a hundred and fourteen rounds, and a hole in his side, and a pinch of bread in a scrap of felt.
The old woman leaned forward again and said something, and this time she said it slowly, looking straight at him, so that he would understand.
“She says,” said her son, “there are soldiers coming. Real ones. Russian ones, from the Talas side. Six of them, on big horses. Her nephew saw them yesterday at the top of the forest, coming down your way. She says you should wait for them.”
Bayish looked at the old woman. She looked back at him with her dried-apple face and did not blink.
“Thank you, mother,” he said.
He did not say whether he would wait.
He woke in the middle of the night and the son was gone from the fire. Bayish lay still under his coat and watched him go, a dark shape moving away down the hill through the walnut trees toward the south, with an empty sack over his shoulder.
One sack in five, the man had said. A family that pays the Kurbashi a fifth of its walnuts pays him in other ways too.
Bayish did not stop him. In the morning the son was back by the fire, blowing on the embers, and would not meet his eye. The old woman gave Bayish bread for the road and said nothing at all.