Two
He slept two hours with his back against the rock and the carbine across his knees, and woke because the grey had moved.
She was standing over him in the dark with her head low, close enough that her breath was warm on his face. It was snowing. Not much, a thin dry snow that came down out of a sky he could no longer see and lay on the shoulders of his coat like flour on a baker. The fire was out. The juniper smell was gone. Somewhere up the valley a stone let go and went clattering down the scree for a long time, and then there was only the hiss of the snow.
Bayish got up slowly, because his legs were stiff with cold, and put his hand on the mare’s neck.
“All right,” he said. “I’m awake.”
It was perhaps three in the morning. The thieves would have made their camp on the far side of the pass, below the snowline, where there was grass and wood and shelter from the wind. They would not move again until light. A herd of forty mares heavy in foal does not cross a pass in the dark twice. If he went now, on foot, leading the grey, he could be at the notch before dawn and look down on them while they were still lighting their fires.
He did not think about the rider. He had decided that while he slept, without arguing. He had been tired. The light had been strange. There were herders in the Talas Alatau who rode white horses, and there was no law that said one of them could not be sitting on the Kenkol Pass at sunset, minding his own business, and then ride on down the other side.
He tightened the girth, checked the carbine, and started up.
The scree was the worst of it. In daylight it was only steep. In the dark, under an inch of new snow, it was a slope of loose stones that moved when you stepped on them, and every stone that moved took two others with it. The trail the herd had made switched back and forth across it, and he could follow it by feel more than sight, a band of trampled ground a little firmer than the rest, the snow lying differently on it, darker where the dung was.
He climbed with one hand on the grey’s mane and his head down. She came behind him without being asked, placing her feet in the places where his had been, the way a mountain horse will when she trusts the man in front of her, and twice when he slipped she stopped dead and let him catch hold of her and pull himself up.
Halfway up he found the second mare.
She had gone off the trail at a switchback and slid a little way down the scree and stopped against a boulder, and the snow had already begun to cover her. A chestnut, young, with a white sock on the near fore. Her neck was broken. There was a rope halter on her still, and the end of the rope had been cut. Whoever had been leading her had cut her loose when she fell rather than be pulled down after her, and had gone on.
Bayish crouched beside her for a moment in the dark. He brushed the snow off her face with his glove.
Thirty-nine, he thought.
Then he went on up.
The notch was a gap between two shoulders of black rock, wide enough for three horses abreast, with the wind coming through it so hard that the snow went sideways and he had to turn his face away to breathe. He stopped below it, in the lee of the eastern shoulder, and waited until the sky behind him began to turn the colour of ash.
Then he went up into the gap, slowly, with the carbine in his hands.
There was nobody there.
He had known there would be nobody there. He stood in the middle of the notch with the wind pulling at his coat and looked at the snow. It lay smooth and fresh across the whole of the gap, a hand deep, unmarked except by the herd’s trail, which came up out of the north side and went over and down the south. Forty horses and ten men had passed through here in the evening, before the snow, and their road was a wide grey trough with the new snow lying soft in it.
On either side of the trough the snow was perfect. No track of any horse, white or otherwise. Nothing had stood here since the snow began.
He walked the width of the gap twice to make sure. Then he stood still.
It meant nothing. The snow had come after. Whatever had stood here at sunset had stood here before the snow, and its tracks were under the snow with the herd’s, and there was nothing to see. That was all. A man who had read trails all his life knew that new snow lies about everything.
He did not walk the gap a third time.
The grey had come up behind him and was standing in the lee of the rock with her tail to the wind. She was not looking at anything in particular. He found that he had been watching her to see if she would.
The south side of the Kenkol drops away more gently than the north, in long benches of grass and stone, down into the head of a valley that runs south and west toward the Chatkal. The light was coming now, grey and flat, and he could see a long way. He went down a few hundred yards below the notch, to where a ridge of rock gave him cover, and lay on his belly in the snow and looked.
The herd was there. They had made their camp where he had guessed, on the first wide bench below the snowline, where a stream came down out of the rocks and there was a little thin birch for firewood. The mares were a dark patch on the white, close together for warmth, and beyond them were the horse lines and three fires with smoke going up straight in the still air of the valley, below the wind. He counted the fires twice. He counted the men in sight. Seven. Eight. Two more moving among the horses. Ten, perhaps, or nine.
And the big bay. He could pick it out even at that distance, standing apart on the horse lines, taller than the Chongtor ponies by a hand and more, with a blanket on it. Strelnikov had always looked after his horse.
Bayish lay in the snow and thought about it.
Ten men in a camp, with the light coming. One man on the ridge above them with a carbine and a hundred and twenty rounds. He could kill three, perhaps four, before they found cover. Then they would scatter into the rocks and the birches and work up the slope at him from three sides, and he would have no way down but the way he had come, and the scree at his back.
And the mares would run. Thirty-nine mares in foal, panicked by gunfire on a mountainside in snow. He would kill more of them than of the thieves.
He lay there long enough to be sure, and then he began to slide back down off the ridge.
That was when the shot came.
It came from below and to the right, from a tumble of boulders a hundred yards down the slope that he had looked at and dismissed, and it hit the rock six inches from his face and went away singing. Stone chips stung his cheek. He was already rolling, left, away from the ridge, down into a shallow gully that a stream had cut in summer, and the second shot came through the place where he had been.
Two rifles. He had heard them both. One heavy, an old Berdan perhaps, slow to load. The other lighter and quicker.
A rearguard. Of course there was a rearguard. Strelnikov had been a cavalry officer for twenty years before he was a thief. He had left two men in the rocks below the pass to watch the trail, and Bayish had walked up to the edge of the camp and lain down in plain sight of them like a recruit.
He lay in the gully with his face in the snow and cursed himself for a recruit.
The grey. Where was the grey?
He lifted his head an inch. She was still up by the ridge, in the lee of the rock, standing quite still with her ears pricked toward the boulders. She had not run. A shot went over his head, high, aimed at nothing, and she did not move.
Below, in the camp, men were shouting. He did not have long.
He looked at the gully. It ran down the slope at an angle, past the boulders where the riflemen were, perhaps forty yards to the left of them, and then on down toward the stream. It was not deep. A man on his belly would show his back.
He took his hat off, put it on the end of the carbine and pushed it up over the lip of the gully on the right. The heavy rifle fired at once and the hat jumped and spun away down the slope. He heard the man swear, and the clatter of the bolt, and he was already moving down the gully on his elbows and knees as fast as he could go, while the Berdan man reloaded and the other one looked at the place where the hat had been.
He got thirty yards before the second rifle found him. The bullet went into the snow by his knee. He came up on one knee in the bottom of the gully and fired three times at the boulders, fast, not aiming at anything, just to put stone in their faces, and went on.
Then he was below them, and to the side, and the boulders were between him and the camp.
He waited. He breathed. There they were, both of them, crouched in the rocks with their backs half to him, looking up at the ridge. One was a big man in a sheepskin with the old Berdan across his knees, thumbing a cartridge into it. The other was small and thin and had no hat.
“Put them down,” Bayish said.
The big man did not put it down. He came round with the Berdan, fast for a big man, and Bayish shot him through the body, and he sat down against the rock with a surprised look on his face and the rifle sliding off his knees into the snow.
The small one had turned too. He had his rifle half up. Bayish saw his face, and saw that it was a boy’s face, a boy of fifteen or sixteen with no hair on his lip and his mouth open, and he moved the carbine a hand’s width to the right and shot him through the upper arm.
The boy screamed and dropped the rifle and fell back against the boulder holding his arm.
Below in the camp they had stopped shouting. That was worse. There was the noise of horses, a lot of horses, and men calling to each other in low voices, and the scrape of saddles.
He went down into the boulders. The big man was dead, or would be. The boy was sitting in the snow with his back to a rock and his good hand clamped over his arm, blood coming out between his fingers, and he was crying without any sound, his mouth wide open, staring up at Bayish and waiting to be shot.
Bayish picked up both rifles and threw the Berdan down the slope into the snow. The boy’s rifle was an old single-shot Gras, French, from God knew what war. He worked the bolt. It was empty. The boy had fired his one cartridge and had not reloaded.
“Where are your horses?”
The boy pointed with his chin. Down, behind the boulders, two Chongtor ponies tied to a stunted birch.
Bayish looked down at the camp. They were not coming up. They were moving, and he knew why. The fires had been kicked out. Men were mounted and riding among the mares, getting them up, getting them moving, driving them down off the bench into the valley in a long dark stream, with the big bay at the head of it and a man on it in a long coat who turned once in the saddle and looked up at the pass.
He was too far away to see a face. But Bayish knew the set of the shoulders, and the way he sat a horse, as if the horse were a chair he had been born in.
Strelnikov was not going to waste a morning fighting one man on a mountainside. He had a herd to sell. He would leave the rearguard to their luck and be gone down the valley before the sun was high, and anyone who wanted the mares back would have to come down off the mountain after him into country he chose.
Bayish watched the herd go. He counted what he could. Thirty-nine, or near it. Kara-Jal was among them, black against the snow, his head up, fighting the rope. Bayish looked at the stallion longer than he meant to.
Then the boy made a sound behind him, and he turned round.
He went up for the grey. She had not moved from the lee of the rock. She stood there with the snow on her back and watched him come, and when he took her rein she pushed her nose once against his chest, hard, the way she did when he had been away too long, and he stood a moment with his hand on her face.
“I know,” he said. “I know. I was a fool.”
He brought her down to the boulders. The boy was still sitting where he had left him. He had stopped crying. He had got his belt off with one hand and was trying to tie it round his arm above the wound, and making a bad job of it, and his face had gone the colour of old snow.
Bayish knelt down beside him and took the belt out of his hand.
“Hold still.”
He cut the boy’s sleeve away with his knife. The bullet had gone through the meat of the upper arm, in at the front and out at the back, and missed the bone. Bayish had seen a great many worse. He packed the holes with snow to slow the bleeding, then with a pad torn from the boy’s own shirt, and bound it tight with the belt, and the boy bit on his lip and did not scream.
“What’s your name?”
The boy looked at him.
“I’m not going to shoot you,” Bayish said. “If I’d wanted to shoot you, you’d be sitting next to him.” He nodded at the big man. “Your name.”
“Nurdin,” the boy said.
“Nurdin who?”
“Nurdin Tölögön uulu. From the Chatkal.”
“Well, Nurdin Tölögön uulu from the Chatkal,” Bayish said, “your friends have left you.”
The boy said nothing. He looked down the valley where the dark stream of horses was going away into the morning, smaller and smaller, and his mouth moved, and then his face closed up like a door.
Bayish stood up. He considered the dead man in the sheepskin, and then the boy, and then the two ponies tied to the birch.
The sun came up over the eastern ridge while he stood there, and lit the whole south side of the Kenkol gold, and the snow on the pass above them blazed so bright that he could not look at it.
He did not look at it.