Ten
He went down the last of the gorge at sunset, on foot, leading the grey, with his hands empty and his coat open so that anyone could see there was no pistol in his belt.
The carbine stayed behind with Zhakupov. So did the hundred and six rounds. Bayish had handed them over without a word, and the sergeant had taken them without a word, and then, when Bayish turned to go, had said in Kazakh, very low, so that the lieutenant would not hear: If you are not back by the second dawn, I will come in after you, and so will these two boys, and we will all die very stupidly together. And Bayish had said, in the same language, Then I’d better be back.
At the far end of the gorge the path came out of the rocks into a long sloping meadow with poplars along the bottom of it, where a spring came out of the hill and spread into a marsh of reeds and willows. The camp was there. Tents and brushwood shelters and horse lines all along the edge of the trees, and fires, many fires, and men round them. More than eighty. A hundred, perhaps.
They saw him a long way off. He had meant them to.
By the time he was halfway down the meadow there were twenty men standing at the edge of the camp, with rifles, watching him come. By the time he reached the first fire there were fifty. Nobody raised a rifle. Nobody spoke. They simply stood, and looked at him, and at the wall-eyed grey mare, and let him walk in among them, and closed up behind him, so that by the time he stopped in the middle of the camp, by the biggest fire, he was standing in a ring of men three deep with his back to nothing at all.
He stood there, and waited.
The Black Kurbashi was not black. Bayish had never seen him close, in 1921. He had imagined something, a big man, a beard, a face like a hawk. The man who came out of the largest tent and stood in the firelight was small and neat and grey-haired, perhaps sixty, with a short white beard and a quilted coat of dark blue silk and a turban wound small and tight, and a face like a schoolmaster’s, mild and tired and very intelligent.
He studied Bayish. Then his eyes went to the grey mare.
“I know you,” he said. He spoke the Fergana Iradi, softly, with the Uzbek in it. “Not your face. Your way of standing. You were the scout. In the summer of ’21. In the valleys above Andijan.” He tilted his head. “My men called you the Shadow. They used to say that if the Shadow was in front of a Red patrol, there was no point in laying an ambush, because he would be sitting on top of it when it went off.”
“Your men exaggerated.”
“Did they?” The Kurbashi smiled very slightly. “I have six men on the rims of Kara-Jygach who would tell you otherwise. Or I would have, if four of them were not dead and the fifth were not in the hands of the OGPU.” He folded his hands inside his sleeves. “And now you walk into my camp. With no rifle. At sunset. Why?”
“I’ve come as a guest,” Bayish said. “To ask the master of the house for the price of forty horses.”
It was the old form of words. The one that a man used on the steppe, long ago, when he came to another man’s camp to talk about a theft, or a debt, or a death, and wanted it known that he had come to talk and not to fight. Bayish had heard his grandfather use it once, when he was a small boy, at a camp on the upper Talas, and had not thought of it since. He was surprised the words were still there when he reached for them.
The Kurbashi’s face did not change. But round the fire, in the ring of men, there was a sound, a kind of low murmur, like wind going over long grass.
“Thirty-eight,” the Kurbashi said. “There are thirty-eight. I counted them myself.” He turned and spoke over his shoulder, to a boy by the tent. “Bring tea. And bring the Captain.”
They sat on a felt by the fire, the three of them, with the tea between them, and the ring of men standing round at a distance, listening. Strelnikov had come out of his tent in his good English coat and looked at Bayish and laughed, as he had laughed at Kök-Saz, softly, without much pleasure, and sat down.
“I told you,” he said in Russian, to the Kurbashi. “Didn’t I tell you? He walks into things. It’s a disease.”
“Speak Iradi,” said the Kurbashi mildly. “My men like to know what is being said.”
Strelnikov shrugged and switched. “He walks into things,” he said again. “He walked into my camp on the Kenkol. He walked into Abdyrakhman’s house at Kök-Saz. Now he walks into yours. One day he will walk into something he can’t walk out of.” He took a glass of tea. “Possibly tonight.”
The Kurbashi ignored him. He looked at Bayish.
“You came to ask a price,” he said. “Ask.”
Bayish put his tea down untouched.
“The mares are from the state stud at Chong-Talas,” he said. “Every one of them is in foal to the black stallion.”
The Kurbashi’s glass stopped on its way to his mouth.
“Every one of them is in a book in Pavlov’s office,” Bayish said. “Her colour, her marks, her name. There’s a copy in Tashkent, at the remount service.” He waited. Somewhere in the ring of men somebody coughed. “There isn’t a dealer between here and Kashgar who won’t know a Chong-Talas mare when he sees one. They’re the best riding horses in Turkestan. That’s why he stole them.” He nodded at Strelnikov. “It’s also why you can’t keep them.”
The Kurbashi set the glass down without drinking. He was looking at Strelnikov now.
“There’s a Red Army garrison at Namangan,” Bayish said. “Two days’ ride. There’s an OGPU lieutenant up in your gorge with a bullet in his leg who is going to be very angry when he gets to a surgeon, and there are two dead men up there who were shot by your pickets. You can kill me tonight. But the lieutenant knows I’m here. If I don’t come back, he goes down to Namangan, and in a week there will be a regiment of Red cavalry in Kara-Jygach, with guns. Not for me. For the mares.” He paused. “And for you. Because you bought them.”
There was a long silence round the fire.
“That’s very good,” said Strelnikov at last, admiringly. “That’s very good indeed. Did you think of all that yourself, or did the lieutenant help?” He turned to the Kurbashi. “He’s bluffing. The lieutenant’s dying in the gorge. Nobody’s going to Namangan. Nobody in Tashkent cares about forty mares. Pay me, and I’ll be gone at dawn, and you can do what you like with this one.”
The Kurbashi did not answer at once. He drank his tea, slowly, looking into the fire. When he spoke, he did not speak to Strelnikov.
“You told me,” he said, “that these were horses from a bai’s herd in the Chatkal. Surplus. With papers. You told me nobody would come looking.” He set his glass down on the felt. “You did not tell me they were from the Red Army’s stud. You did not tell me they were in foal. You did not tell me you had a Red scout following you over the Kenkol, or that you would leave dead OGPU men in my gorge.” He looked up. “You did not tell me a great many things, Captain.”
“I told you what you needed to know.”
“No,” said the Kurbashi. “You told me what you needed me to know.” He turned his head a little, toward the ring of men. “Rahim. Ismail.”
Two men came forward out of the ring.
Strelnikov did not move. He sat quite still on the felt, with his glass in his hand, and looked at the two men, and then at the Kurbashi, and then at Bayish. His long tired face did not change at all.
“Ah,” he said, under his breath. “So that’s how it is.”
Then he threw the glass of hot tea into the Kurbashi’s face, and came up off the felt with a revolver in his hand that Bayish had not seen, and shot the man called Rahim through the body, and was gone into the dark between the tents before anyone else had moved.
After that it was very fast, and very confused, and Bayish remembered it afterwards only in pieces.
He remembered the Kurbashi on his knees by the fire with his hands over his face, and men shouting, and men running, and rifles going off into the dark at nothing. He remembered running himself, not after Strelnikov, but toward the Captain’s tent, which was the big one beside the Kurbashi’s, with a lamp burning inside it. He remembered tearing the door felt aside.
The boy was there. He was sitting on the ground at the back of the tent with a rope tied round his ankle to the tent pole, and his strapped arm against his chest, and his face white and fierce in the lamplight. When he saw Bayish he held up his good hand, and in it there was a knife, a small one, a boot knife, with which he had already cut most of the way through the rope.
“Where did you get that?”
“The Captain dropped it.” The boy’s mouth twitched. “A day ago. I sat on it.”
Bayish took the boot knife out of his hand and cut through the last strands of the rope, and pulled the boy up, and they came out of the tent together into the noise and the dark.
And then the mares began to run.
He never found out who had cut the horse lines. Strelnikov, perhaps, to cover his escape. Or one of the Kurbashi’s men, in the panic. Or no one at all, only the shooting, and the smell of blood, and the screaming of the horse that Rahim had been standing next to when he fell.
But he heard Kara-Jal.
The black stallion’s scream went up over the noise of the camp, high and terrible, the way it had gone up in the bai’s yard at Kök-Saz, and then there was a sound like the Naryn in spring flood, a great rolling thunder of hooves, and the whole herd came through the camp at a gallop in the dark. Thirty-eight mares, heavy in foal, mad with fear, with the black stallion at their head and the night full of fire and shouting, came straight through the tents and the fires and the men. Felts went down, and cooking pots, and men scattered in every direction or did not scatter fast enough, and the herd poured on through and out the far side of the camp and away up the meadow toward the hills.
Bayish had the boy by the arm. He pulled him down behind a heap of saddles and lay on top of him while the herd went by, and the ground shook under them, and a hoof went down six inches from his head.
Then it was past, and gone up the meadow into the dark, and the sound of it went away and away up the hillside toward the high ground.
Bayish got up on his knees. The camp was wreckage, fires scattered and burning in the grass, tents down, men lying where the herd had gone over them, men running. Nobody was looking at him.
“The grey,” he said. “Where’s the grey?”
She was there. She came out of the dark between the burning tents at a trot, with her head high and her wall eye rolling white in the firelight, and stopped in front of him, and stood. She had not run with the herd. She had not run at all.
He put the boy up on her back, and got up behind him, and turned her up the meadow after the herd, into the dark.
At the top of the meadow, where the ground rose toward the hills, he pulled her up for a moment and looked back.
The Kurbashi was standing by his ruined fire in the middle of the camp, with his face wet and red where the tea had scalded it, looking up the meadow after them. He did not raise a rifle. He did not call out. He only stood there, a small neat man in a silk coat in the middle of the wreckage, and looked.
Then he lifted one hand, slowly, and laid it flat on his chest, over his heart, and bowed his head.
It was the gesture a host makes to a guest who is leaving.