Six
He did not remember getting to the sheepfold. He remembered the cold of the aryk, and running, and the dogs, and then he was in the ruined fold with his hands on the grey’s neck and his forehead against her shoulder, and she was standing quite still in the dark and letting him lean.
The boy’s pony was there, and Sapar’s pony, tied where they had left them. The boy was not.
Bayish stood there a while, breathing. His side was on fire. He opened his coat and his shirt and felt along the ribs with his fingers, and found the place where the bullet had gone along the bone, in at the front and out at the side, a long torn groove the length of his hand. Not deep. No rib broken, or he would not have been able to breathe like this. Bleeding, though. Bleeding a good deal, and his shirt was soaked and cold and stuck to him.
He tore the tail off the shirt and folded it into a pad and pressed it against the wound, and buttoned the coat over it tight. He untied the ponies and turned them loose. They would go home to the bai’s, or to Aimkan’s, or wherever ponies went. He could not lead them now.
Below in the village the dogs had stopped. There were lights in the bai’s compound, moving. Men with lanterns were coming out of the gate and spreading along the road, and two of them were coming up the hill.
Bayish got his foot into the stirrup on the third try, and pulled himself up into the saddle, and the grey moved off before he had asked her, up the hill and away from the lights, into the dark.
He let her choose the way. He had no choice about that. He could barely see, and he could not think very well, and when he tried to think, the thoughts went sideways and away from him like sheep on a hill. He held the saddle horn with one hand and his side with the other and let the mare go where she would.
She went up. Away from the river and the village and the road, up the long slope behind Kök-Saz, through the stubble terraces and then the thorn scrub and then the open hillside where the grass was burned and the wind came down cold off the tops. Somewhere along the way it began to snow again. He did not notice when. He noticed only that the darkness had gone grey and soft round him, and that there was snow on his knees, and on the mare’s mane, and on the strip of white felt that Aimkan had tied to her brow.
He thought about the boy.
He thought about the boy on his knees in the mud, between the bai’s men, twisting like a colt. He thought about the boy’s mother blowing on the fire, very carefully, and saying, So you had better not let him die. He thought about Ilyas in the dust.
He thought he had a clear shot at Strelnikov, and had not taken it, because of the boy, and that Strelnikov had known he would not take it. That was what the laugh had been: a man proved right about something he had hoped to be wrong about.
After a while he stopped thinking about anything at all.
When he woke, the grey had stopped.
He did not know how long he had been asleep, or if it had been sleep. He was still in the saddle, leaning forward over the horn, and his face was against the mare’s mane, and it was stiff with frost. The snow had stopped. The clouds had gone off somewhere, and there was a moon, almost full, high and white and very small, and in its light the whole hillside lay silver and silent round him, every stone and bush with its little cap of white.
He did not know where he was. Somewhere high. The valley of Kök-Saz was gone. Below him the hillside fell away into a fold of the mountains he did not recognise, a hollow full of shadow.
The grey was standing with her head down, looking at the snow in front of her.
He looked where she was looking.
There was a track in the snow.
One track. A single line of hoofprints, crossing the hillside in front of them from left to right and going on up the slope. The prints of a horse, unshod. Not a Chongtor. Bigger than that, longer in the stride, a tall horse, light on its feet, the prints clean-edged and sharp in the new snow, as if they had been made a minute ago. They came out of nowhere on his left, out of the unbroken snow of the hillside, and went away on his right, up over the shoulder of the hill and out of sight.
There was no rider’s track beside them. No man’s boots. Only the horse.
Bayish sat and looked at it for a long time.
He was a Party man. He was a Red cavalryman. He had read trails for twenty years. He knew that a single horse’s track in fresh snow on a moonlit hillside meant that a single horse had crossed the hillside since the snow stopped, and nothing more. A herder’s horse, strayed. A wild one, perhaps, from the old herds that ran on the high Chatkal. It meant nothing.
The grey lifted her head. She looked up the slope, where the track went, and her ears went forward.
Then she stepped into the track and began to follow it.
He did not stop her. He did not think he could have stopped her. He sat in the saddle with his hand on his side and the moon on the snow and let the mare carry him up the hillside, step by step, in the prints of the other horse, over the shoulder of the hill and down into the next hollow.
At the bottom of the hollow, among birches, there was a yurt. A white one. There was smoke coming out of the crown of it, straight up in the windless air, and the smell of juniper.
The track went across the snow toward the yurt and stopped at the door.
There was no horse there.
The man who came out of the yurt was very old. He was small and bent, with a white beard down to his chest and a long dark robe and a sheepskin over it, and on his chest, on a cord, a bare cross of carved walnut wood with three beads at the end of each arm, rising out of a flower.
He looked at the grey mare, and at the white felt on her brow, and at the man slumped in the saddle with his hand pressed to his side.
“Well,” he said. “Come in, then. Come in. You’re letting the cold in.”
His name was Father Mattai, and he was the priest of the upper Chatkal, and the yurt was his church. Bayish learned this in pieces, over a long time, between bouts of sleep, lying on a felt by the fire with his coat off and his shirt cut away. The old man washed the wound with warm water and salt. He sewed it up with a curved needle and a thread of white horsehair, quickly and neatly, the way a woman sews felt, while Bayish lay with his teeth shut and stared up at the crown of the yurt, where the smoke went out and the stars showed through. Then the old man smeared it with something that smelled of juniper and mutton fat, and bound it with clean linen, and made him drink a bowl of warm milk with honey in it.
“I don’t believe in any of this,” Bayish said, somewhere in the middle of it.
“No,” the old man agreed. “Drink your milk.”
The yurt was hung with felts, white ones, with the cross of the flower worked on them in red. At the far side, opposite the door, in the place where in a herder’s yurt the chest of honour would stand, there was a low table with a white cloth on it, and on the cloth a book with a wooden cover, and a small brass lamp, and a black walnut pot with a lid tied on with a thong.
“What’s in the pot?”
“Bread,” said Father Mattai. “Or the beginning of it. The mother leaven. The malka.” He looked at the pot. “My teacher gave it to me, and his teacher gave it to him. It goes back to the bread of Janyl, they say. I don’t know. I know it has never been let die.”
Bayish lay and looked at the pot. His mother had talked about the malka. In his village on the upper Talas they had not kept it any more, not since his grandmother’s time. His mother had been sorry about that.
“How did you find this place?” the old man asked. “Nobody comes here in the snow. Not even the shepherds.”
Bayish was silent.
“I followed a track,” he said at last.
Father Mattai sat back on his heels. He did not look surprised. He looked, if anything, a little sad.
“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes it’s like that.”
“There was no horse.”
“No,” said the priest. “There usually isn’t.”
He got up slowly, a hand on his knee, and went to the door of the yurt and lifted the felt and looked out at the moonlit snow. Then he let the felt fall and came back to the fire.
“Sometimes he comes for a soul,” he said. “To carry it home over the pass. Not tonight, I think. Your mare knows that.” He nodded toward the door, where the grey was standing outside under the birches. “What’s her name?”
“She doesn’t have one.”
“Everything has a name.”
Bayish thought about it.
“She never needed one,” he said.
The old man laughed, quietly, and for a moment, in the firelight, he looked much younger.
“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose she did.”
Bayish slept until noon. When he woke the priest was sitting by the door of the yurt in the thin sunlight with the wooden book on his knees, reading, moving his lips. The grey was grazing under the birches, pulling at the dry grass where the snow had melted off it. There was no track in the snow anywhere round the yurt except his own and the mare’s, coming down the hillside together.
He looked for a long time. Then he stopped looking.
“They’ll move the herd today,” Father Mattai said, without looking up from the book. “A shepherd came by at dawn. The bai is frightened. He’s sending the horses south with the Captain this afternoon. Over the walnut hills, toward the Fergana. Two days, perhaps three, to Kara-Jygach.” He turned a page. “And the boy goes with them.”
Bayish sat up too fast and the stitches pulled and he sat very still until the world steadied.
“Alive?”
“Alive. The bai’s no fool. He won’t kill a Chatkal boy in his own village, in front of the boy’s own people. He’d have half the valley at his gate.” The priest closed the book. “No. He’ll send him with the herd. As a hostage, in case the man who came under the wall tries again. And when they get to Kara-Jygach, and the Captain has his gold, then perhaps there’s an accident on a mountain path. Boys fall off mountains. Everybody knows that.”
Bayish was already reaching for his shirt.
“You’ll open those stitches,” the priest said, without getting up.
“Then you’ll have to sew them again.”
Father Mattai got up, and went to the low table with the white cloth, and untied the thong on the walnut pot, and took a pinch of something from inside it, a small grey lump of dough, and wrapped it in a scrap of white felt and tied it with a white thread, and came back and put it into Bayish’s hand.
“It’s given,” the priest said. “Never sold. To brides. To new priests. To the head of a family when the herd divides.” He closed Bayish’s fingers over it. “And to men who are going a long way and might not come back. Keep it warm. Feed it if you can. If you can’t, it doesn’t matter. Somebody will find it.”
“I’m a Party man.”
“So you keep telling me,” said Father Mattai. “Go on. Your mare’s waiting.”
[Translator’s note: in the 1964 edition this chapter ends with Bayish waking in “a shepherd’s hut” where “an old man of the village” binds his wound and tells him the herd is moving south. The track in the snow, the yurt chapel, the priest, the cross, the malka and the conversation about the Rider are restored here from the author’s typescript. The censor’s pencil runs down the margin of all eleven pages. At the foot of the last page, in the author’s hand, there is a single line: “Leave him the horse, at least.” The 1964 edition does leave him the horse.]