Three
The ground was frozen too hard to dig, so they covered the big man with stones.
Bayish did most of it. The boy carried what he could one-handed, small flat stones from the scree, and laid them where Bayish showed him, and did not speak. When it was done there was a low grey mound against the boulders with the man’s boots sticking out of the end of it, because there had not been enough stones, and Bayish took off his own coat and laid it over the boots and then thought better of it and put it back on. A dead man does not need a coat. A live one does, on the Kenkol in October.
“What was he called?”
“Sapar,” the boy said. “He worked for the bai.”
“Which bai?”
The boy looked at him as if he were simple. “Abdyrakhman-bai. At Kök-Saz.”
Bayish nodded slowly. He had heard the name. Everyone south of the Talas Alatau had heard the name, the way everyone had heard of the weather. Abdyrakhman-bai owned flocks on six mountains and shops in three bazaars and the soviet of Kök-Saz, which had been elected in 1923 by a show of hands in the bai’s own courtyard, with the bai’s own men standing at the gate.
“Do you want to say anything?” he asked. “Over him.”
The boy hesitated. Then he took his hat off, which was not a hat but a strip of felt tied round his head, and stood at the head of the mound in the wind and said the short prayer that the Chatkal people say for the dead, the one that asks the White Rider to come down off the mountain for a soul and carry it home over the pass. He said it fast and badly, the way a boy says something he has heard old women say a hundred times and never said himself. At the end he said omin, and put the felt back on.
Bayish had not said that prayer since his mother’s funeral. He did not say it now. But he stood with his hat in his hand until the boy was finished, because it was not his business to stand any other way.
They went down the south side of the pass in the middle of the morning, leading the two ponies, Bayish on the grey. The herd’s trail was a brown road through the snow, easy to follow, and lower down, where the snow gave out, a brown road through the frost-burned grass, with the dung still steaming in places. They were an hour behind, perhaps two. Bayish did not hurry. He wanted to be an hour behind. An hour behind, he could read their trail. Ten minutes behind, they could read him.
The boy rode one of the ponies, holding the reins in his good hand, with the other arm strapped across his chest in what was left of his shirt. He was very pale. Twice he swayed in the saddle and Bayish thought he would fall, and twice he caught himself and sat up straight and looked ahead as if nothing had happened.
At noon they stopped by a stream and Bayish made him drink, and gave him dried curd, and looked at the arm. The bleeding had stopped. The skin round the holes was hot, but not too hot. Bayish had seen men lose arms from smaller wounds, and men keep them after worse. You could not tell, in the first days. You could only keep it clean and hope.
“Why did you do it?” he said.
The boy did not pretend not to understand. “For the rifle.”
“The Gras?”
“He said I could keep it. After.” The boy’s mouth twisted. “He said every man who rode with him got a rifle and a gold piece. Sapar said it was true. Sapar had two gold pieces. He showed me. They had an eagle on them.”
Tsarist coins. Bayish knew them. In 1919 half the Fergana had been paid in them, by one side or another, and the other half had been paid in paper that would not light a fire.
“Who said? Strelnikov?”
“The Captain.” The boy said it in Russian. Kapitan. “Everybody calls him that. The bai calls him that.”
“How long has he been at Kök-Saz?”
“Since the summer. He came over from the Fergana in the summer with six men and some horses. He stayed at the bai’s. He bought horses, and he sold horses, and he paid in gold.” The boy looked at the stream. “Then in the autumn he said there would be a big job. Over the Kenkol. He needed men who could ride and men who knew the passes. I know the passes. My father took the sheep over the Kenkol every year before...” He stopped.
“Before what?”
“Before he died.”
Bayish did not ask how. There were only two ways a man from the Chatkal died, in the years when this boy was small. In 1916 they had gone over the passes into China, the whole valley, with the Russian soldiers behind them, and half of them had died on the ice. And in the years after, the ones who came back had died of what they brought back with them.
“The herd,” he said instead. “Where does it go?”
“To Kök-Saz. To the bai’s. They’ll rest them two days in the bai’s yard, and then they go south.” The boy pointed with his chin, down the valley and beyond it, to the far brown hills in the haze. “Over the hills, to the Fergana side. There’s a man there who will buy them. The Captain says he pays better than anybody.”
“Which man?”
The boy looked at the ground. “I don’t know his name. They call him the Kurbashi. The Black Kurbashi.”
Bayish knew that name too.
He sat by the stream with his elbows on his knees and looked at the water going over the stones, and for a while he was not in the Chatkal at all. He was in a dry valley above Andijan, in the summer of 1921, with the sun so hot that the rocks burned your hands, riding at the head of a patrol of nine men with a boy beside him called Ilyas.
Ilyas had been seventeen. He had lied about it and said nineteen, and nobody had believed him, and nobody had cared. He came from the upper Talas, from a village near Bayish’s own, and he had attached himself to Bayish on the first day the way a foal attaches itself to a horse that is not its mother, and Bayish had let him, because it was easier than not. Ilyas talked. He talked about horses and girls and the city of Tashkent, which he had never seen, and about what he was going to do after the war, which was to breed horses, a whole herd of them, golden ones, on the upper Talas, and sell them to the army for a fortune.
They had been following a band of horse thieves who were selling to the basmachi. The thieves had a White officer with them, everybody said, a Russian, who rode a big bay with a crooked hind foot. They followed the half-moon track for two days up the dry valley. On the third day the man on the bay turned in his saddle at four hundred yards, at a gallop, with the sun behind him, and fired once with a cavalry carbine, and Ilyas went off his horse backwards and lay in the dust with his throat open and his hands moving.
It had taken him a quarter of an hour to die. Bayish had held him the whole time. He had talked to him, though he could not remember afterwards what he had said. He thought it might have been about the golden horses.
The Black Kurbashi had been the basmachi commander in those hills that summer. He had been buying.
“You know him,” the boy said. “The Captain.”
Bayish looked up. The boy was watching him with his pale face and his dark eyes, and Bayish saw that he had been watching for some time.
“I know his horse,” he said.
He stood up and went to the boy’s pony and took the Gras rifle out of the saddle boot where he had put it that morning. He worked the bolt, to show it was empty, and held it out butt first.
The boy stared at it.
“Take it,” Bayish said. “It’s yours. You earned it. You stood your watch and fired your round. That’s more than most of them do.”
The boy took the rifle slowly with his good hand. He held it across his knees.
“There’s no cartridges,” he said.
“No,” Bayish agreed. “There’s no cartridges.”
He pointed west, down the stream, where it went away from the herd’s trail toward a side valley and a long brown slope with sheepfolds on it, small grey squares of stone, and smoke.
“Is that the way to your mother’s?”
The boy said nothing for a moment. Then he nodded.
“Go home,” Bayish said. “Tell her you fell off a horse. Tell her whatever you like. Keep the arm clean. Wash it in salt water, if she has salt. If it goes black, go to the doctor in Talas, not to a bakshy.” He gathered up the grey’s reins. “And stay off the Kenkol.”
He swung up into the saddle. He took the rope of the second pony, the dead man’s, and turned the grey’s head down the valley, onto the herd’s road, and rode away without looking back.
He had gone perhaps a mile when he heard the pony behind him.
He did not turn round. He rode on at the same pace, along the brown trail through the burned grass, with the dead man’s pony on its rope behind him and the river loud on his right. After a while the sound of the second pony came up a little closer, and then stayed there, fifty yards back, matching his pace.
At the next stream crossing he stopped to let the grey drink, and sat in the saddle looking at the water.
The boy stopped too, fifty yards back, and sat on his pony with the empty rifle across his knees and his strapped arm against his chest, and looked at the water as well.
Neither of them said anything for some time.
“Your mother,” Bayish said at last, not loud, so that the boy had to come a little closer to hear, “is going to be very angry with you.”
“Yes,” the boy said.
“And with me.”
The boy thought about that. “Yes,” he said. “Probably more with you.”
Bayish looked away down the valley, where the herd’s trail went on and on into the haze, toward Kök-Saz and the bai and the Captain and the hills beyond, and further than that, the Fergana, and the Black Kurbashi, and a dry valley above Andijan where a boy of seventeen had lain in the dust with his hands moving.
He was not going to have another one. He knew that much. He would send this one home tonight, if he had to tie him to the pony and lead him there himself.
“You know the passes,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You know Kök-Saz. You know the bai’s house. The way in and the way out.”
“Yes.”
Bayish nodded. He picked up the grey’s reins.
“Ride beside me, then,” he said. “Not behind. A man who rides behind me, I shoot.”
The boy brought his pony up level, carefully, on the grey’s off side, and they went on down the valley together, and neither of them said any more about the boy’s mother for the rest of that day.
They camped that night in a stand of birch above the river, without a fire. The boy slept at once, with the rifle in his good arm like a child with a doll. Bayish sat up with his back against a tree and the carbine across his knees and watched the dark.
Toward midnight the boy began to talk in his sleep. Fever talk, quick and low, in the Chatkal dialect with its old church words. Bayish could not follow most of it. Once, quite clearly, the boy said “Ene”, mother, and once he said a name that might have been his father’s.
Bayish got up and found the boy’s forehead with his hand. It was hot, but not burning. He wet his own scarf in the river and laid it across the boy’s face, and sat down again.
Below them in the dark, very far off down the valley, a horse called. One long rising whinny that went on and on and broke at the top, the way a stallion calls when he is penned among strange horses and does not like it.
Kara-Jal, Bayish thought. He was certain of it, though he could not have said why.
He sat and listened until the sound stopped. Then he sat and listened to the silence, and the river, and the boy’s breathing, until the sky in the east began to grey.