CHAPTER IV
SNOW
SPEEDING over the gray valley, Sir Hugh pictured to himself an English countryside, and the longed-for sight of a Christian stronghold, with lord and liege-men stretching their legs under laden tables by a roaring fire; tales of hunt and foray well told; the chant of a minstrel; a red-cheeked priest dozing over his ale; and white-skinned women, unveiled, giving zest to the night with their laughter or praise. Loneliness is like a fever, rising suddenly in the veins of a wanderer.
Not for a dozen years had he heard the ring of a Frankish voice. His comrades lay, some in graves, some shattered and forgotten.
Wrapped in his wolf-skins, Hugh smiled, beside the silent Georgian. He himself, most like, was forgotten now by all save the Greek emperor, who had hunted him out of the Holy Land. No wife or children or henchmen in Frankland would remember Hugh who had sewn the Cross on his shoulder when he was a lad in his 'teens.
The wooden runners squeaked over hard snow, and a bitter wind whipped the up-fling of the horses' hoofs into his face. The long twilight had ended, and clouds banked low overhead. Shotha Kupri peered about him and grunted when they changed horses at a village. The wind was rising, and the blackness above seemed to press down on the gray ground.
“Snow,” he muttered. “It will not be good, this night.”
Nevertheless he gave command to go forward, and the sledge circled down to the frozen bed of the river. Here they were a little sheltered, but even Arslan who had the eyes of a wild-cat, could not guess where the Road of the Warriors might lie. Dry flakes whirled down from the sky, and the manes of the horses whipped out to the left, while the riders turned up the collars of their burkas to shelter their faces.
Hugh's feet and hands grew chilled, and when he wrapped the furs more closely around him the warmth made him drowsy. His chin dropped on his chest and he slept.
How long, he did not know. When the sledge stopped in front of the lighted windows of a cabin, he roused and saw that the horses were being changed again. Bells jangled and the Georgian couriers shouted, and before he could ask a question they started off into the wind. White domes that might have been haystacks flitted past, and then the veil of snow hid everything.
It seemed to the crusader that he had more room in the seat than before, and that the out-riders were different men. Abruptly he turned and looked behind him. Arslan was no longer perched on the runners. And the horses that galloped after the sledge bore armed warriors. Of the other vehicle and the Mongols there was no sign.
Hugh clapped a heavy hand on his companion's shoulder, and then, with an exclamation of surprize, peered into the face hidden under its fur hood. Even in the storm he was conscious of a faint scent of jasmine, and in a moment more he was certain that the eyes looking up into his belonged to Rusudan, the Gipsy.
The horses' manes and tails still tossed to the left, so they were still going forward—unless the wind had changed. The mounted escort seemed to be Georgians and not Gipsies, and he did not think Shotha Kupri would have quitted the sledge unwilling.
“Where are my men?” he asked bluntly.
“Ai, your hand is heavy.” Rusudan's slender shoulder moved under his fingers and released her. “Are they my men?”
Sudden anger rendered the crusader heedless.
“Stop and wait for them or you will know pain.”
- - - Route of the Horde
.... Route of Sr. Hugh
The dark eyes under the hood searched his face, in the murk of the storm.
“Is this the courtesy of a warrior of the Cross? Your men were kept at the last village. Rupen and his abreks have care of them.”
Hugh stood up at once, casting off the fur lap-robes, letting in the drift and the wind, and Rusudan who seemed able to read his thoughts half-formed, mocked him.
“Go and seek in the snow! Neither road nor village will you find. Am I to bring spies into Tphilis? Nay, the agreement was that you alone should come.”
“If harm comes to them”—Hugh thought of Subotai and the Horde that was beginning to weary of eating and sleeping.
“You will be alone. Are you afraid? Fear is no friend in the Khaukesh.”
Hugh swore roundly under his breath, by good Saint George and the Archangel Michael.
“Then sit down,” quoth Rusudan, pulling at the robes. “You are letting in the snow, and my men will think you are afraid.”
Hugh resumed his seat and pulled the robe over the girl who was shivering under the bite of the wind.
“Hath all the Khaukesh,” he asked grimly, “sworn fealty to Rusudan?”
“To Rusudan. Is not every Georgian and Tcherkessian a Gipsy at heart. From the Gate to Tcharnomor[1] they bend their foreheads to my feet.”
“Even Shotha Kupri?”
“The thawad is my lover. And Prince Rupen—both of them.”
“And they also, who ride behind us?”
Rusudan gasped, and then chuckled.
“O stupid lion of the Nazarenes—they also, all twenty.” And she lifted her clear voice in a call, as a huntress might urge on the dog pack. At once a gruff shout came back to them against the wind. “O lion that sleeps and growls! Not Hugh but Gurgaslan the Tawny One should be thy name. Why did the Mongol chieftain choose you for envoy?”
“Because I can speak with the people of these mountains and the Greeks beyond, if there be need,” said the crusader simply.
“Why do you always speak the truth?”
A gust that swooped down from ice gorges fifty miles away buffeted them and drove the dry snow into throats and sleeves, and touched their bodies with utter cold. Hugh knew that it was true that he could not find a village or even keep to the road if he left the sledge.
When he could draw a free breath again he laughed.
“Such is the yassa, the law of Genghis Khan—”
“Who is he?”
“The most terrible of emperors, who hath conquered half the world. Aye, the master of the Horde.”
Rusudan found food for thought in this and asked an unexpected question—
“Is Genghis Khan with the Horde down in the lower valley?”
“Nay. Perhaps in Samarkand, or Ind or Cathay—who knows?”
“But you are a knight of the Cross!”
“Aye.”
“And what is the yassa of Christiandom, among the Franks? Do they also speak the truth always?”
“Not always, little Rusudan.”
Hugh laughed again and explained as if to an inquisitive child the vows that must be taken by a youth of western Europe before he could wear the belt and the gold spurs. And Rusudan, throwing her wide sleeve before her eyes, bent closer to the crusader, trying to read his face in the whirling white drift.
“Akh,” she made response, her mood changing as swiftly as the gusts of the storm, “to serve God in all things—that is good. And to render fealty to thy lord. But for the rest, to draw weapon for the weak in a quarrel or to utter only what is truth—one who did that would not live long here—” she swept her arm across the outer darkness—“here, amid Ermeni and Irani and the Roumis.”[2]
And she added thoughtfully:
“A camel must choose his own gait, and a lion his own path. But can a panther cease from snarling? This is surely true. I am taking you to Tphilis, but first to the king of the Georgians.”
Though the sledge lurched and creaked, and the horsemen went forward to search for the road they had lost, and all the devils of the storm screamed at them, Rusudan seemed pleased with events.
She sang under her breath in time with the jingling of the harness bells, until the ceaseless pelter of snow made her drowsy and she cuddled back in the fur robes, leaving the crusader to his own thoughts.
And Hugh wondered how little else she had told him that was true, and why she had taken Shotha Kupri's place. Bending over her to adjust the robe about her, he was aware again of the flower-scent of jasmine, more delicate than musk. Under long lashes deep in the shadow of the hood, eyes both eager and curious searched his face.
RUSUDAN was as good as her word. Late the next afternoon when the storm had drifted away over other ranges, they left the Road of the Warriors with its strings of long-haired camels, its bands of Circassians and wild Alans—all heading west and all truculent and quarrelsome, until they heard Rusudan's voice—and turned away from the river into a grove of evergreens.
When the out-riders dismounted, the singing girl left the sledge and motioned for Hugh to come with her.
Sword in hand, he walked beside her to a stone church hidden in the grove—a strange little church, for all it bore a cross carved above the arched entrance—with a round tower and only narrow embrasures for windows.
“Nay,” said Rusudan, “we of the Khaukesh follow Christ, as our fathers have done. See, the chapel is like to a guarded tower. Have we not defended our faith and our churches with the sword?”
Hugh looked up at the emblem chiseled in stone, worn with age and strange in form, and his eyes lighted.
“Surely this is the door of Christiandom!”
“Aye, the gate. They call us Malakites and heretics, but we give veneration to the Patriarch. Come!”
Rusudan pushed open the iron-barred door and closed it after them. The gray light of the winter afternoon hardly penetrated the narrow openings, but under the vault of the tower a huge candle gleamed and toward it the girl made her way, taking the crusader's hand to guide him.
The wall at the base of the tower was a pattern of tile and mosaic, brightened with holy pictures in their gilded frames. Rusudan paused beside a granite slab, and the knight, bending forward, saw that a helmet and shield and sword lay upon the stone. There was gold inlay on the steel casque, and the blade of the curved sword was clean and bright.
“I take care of them,” Rusudan whispered. “I come here more often than to the great Malaki by the palace. This is the tomb of George Lasha, my brother.”
Hugh bent his head.
“May God give rest to him. In life he bore good weapons.”
The girl tossed back the dark mane of her hair and smiled proudly.
“His foes knew his anger. Dear Christ, he was young, that he should be laid under the earth!”
Hugh understood vaguely that this girl of the mountains, who sang before the warriors and pried into secrets, could not be old. At times he though her a child of sixteen, escaped from the embroidery frame and the teachings of a priest; and again he told himself she must be a woman of mature years.
“Upon the road, Hugh,” she said gravely, “you did not trust my words. Akh, now you must talk with others. But tonight you will see my scarlet kontash and silver fillet. My brother was king of all the clans, scion of Karthlos, first among all the Georgians.”
“He was king!” The crusader stepped back a pace, and his brow knit in thought. “And who now holds the throne?”
“Ivan—John the Constable is Protector. He is the leader of the army. I have no other brother and I am too young to sit in the throne of Tphilis.”
Many things came into Hugh's mind: the girl's escort that had made such a fierce stand when the Mongols appeared; the anxiety of Shotha Kupri; the respect that greeted her upon the road.
“They call me,” went on Rusudan, who had an uncanny knack of guessing his thoughts, “a Gipsy forsooth. Because I go to the hunts and like the saddle better than a carriage and—because of many things.”
She sighed, as if there were many pleasant things that a sister of the king might not do.
“I was visiting Prince Shotha's family,” she went on, “at his castle on the Kur, when a shepherd brought tidings of the Mongols and their great camp. We were hunting boar that week through the Nakha forest and I begged old Shotha to let me go to the outer camp where some of his men watched the doings of your Horde. He would not consent, but I begged. At last he agreed, if I would not make it known in Tphilis. John the Constable is a harsh man, and he would not forgive old Shotha that I had been near peril. O good Saint Demetrius, Rupen and Shotha were wild when you came out of the forest!”
And she laughed so gleefully at the memory that Hugh laughed with her. In truth, he had come with scant ceremony before this child of a ruling family.
“Akh!” she cried, her mood changing. “Rupen has sworn he will challenge you to edged weapons and stretch you on the ground. It would be a sin to slay an envoy, and I told him that you were under my protection.”
“If he seeks me,” put in Hugh bluntly, “it is not my wish to claim protection. Tell him so.”
Rusudan's small lips puckered.
“Ei, I do not want either of you killed. Men are like stupid old boars that tear one another and do not care what happens to all the rest.”
“Khatun,” the crusader asked gravely, “Princess, why did you take Shotha Kupri's place in the sledge?”
“Why? The road was not safe for you. Shotha Kupri has feuds with other clans; even a Tcherkessian would not lift hand against me.”
“For thy favor I thank thee.”
“And now tell me the message of the khan. I wish to know.”
Hugh considered, frowning.
“I crave thy pardon. Princess Rusudan. I may not tell it, save to the ruler of the Georgians, and he, by thy tale, is one John the Constable.”
Rusudan's blue eyes flashed.
“O fool—thrice fool that thou art! Tall, bearded simpleton! At first thy bold bearing and great sword made me think thee a paladin, a wise and courteous lord—thy coming an omen—” she stopped abruptly, with a grimace. “Do you still think I am lying to you?”
“Saint George!” cried the knight with utter sincerity. “Not so!”
“Then,” went on the girl quietly, “come to the audience this night and deliver thy message to Ivan and the comptor and the strategos.”
Hugh sought for words, feeling as if he had plunged in full career against an array of mailed riders. Before he could speak, Rusudan had turned away from him and was kneeling before the candle, her hands clasped against her breast, her lips moving in prayer. From the wall strange saints looked down at her with expressionless eyes.
When she had finished the prayer, Rusudan drew the fur hood over her head and went to the door; nor did she again offer her hand to guide the crusader.
“I believed thy tale, when others did not,” she said, when he strode to her side. “Now I go to Tphilis. Thy road is clear—to the west, to Constantinople and thy home, once thy message is delivered. Wait, and one will come to guide you.”
When he had opened the door and would have followed her out to the sledge, she motioned for him to remain in the chapel. The waiting Georgians closed around her, and were lost to sight in the gray twilight among the firs.
Standing in the door, leaning on the broad hand-guard of his sword Durandal, the crusader waited, until a spluttering torch came into view down another path and disclosed a single warrior leading toward him a white charger, ready saddled.