The Wolf-Chaser
Author of “Rose Face,” “The Gate in the Sky,” etc.
CHAPTER I
Aruk and the Krit
Bouragut, the great golden eagle, was flying high over the snows and rocks of the Altai Mountains. It was a brisk day in Spring, that year 1660—eventful year for Central Asia. Six feet from wing to wing, the golden eagle soared, alone and calmly bent on his own business.
Rarely indeed was Bouragut to be tamed, to be hooded and shackled into a falcon, used by men to strike down prey. He went as he pleased, for he feared no one. Alone of the feathered folk he would sweep down, to attack with talons and curved beak foxes and even wolves. For that he was called the Wolf-Chaser, and men were proud to have him at their call.
Unlike the vulture, the golden eagle did not wait for others to make his kill. His telescope-like eyes sought for game on the mountain slope, peering down between the cloud-flocks.
He was Bouragut, the Wolf-Chaser; his brown, black-and-white-flecked coat of feathers glistened; his wings, moving lazily, supported him in the vastness where he had his kingdom by right.
Yet it was not a king but an old falconer, a native Mongol and Christian, who had made himself master of Bouragut.
From a thicket by the snow of the Urkhogaitu Pass, Aruk the hunter looked up, recognized the golden eagle and waved cheerfully. He was a young Tatar with alert eyes. His hut was in the thicket, nearly two miles above the verdant plains of Tartary, to the north, because he was the keeper of the gate. It was his duty to watch for enemies coming over the pass from the south, where was the land of the Kalmuck and the Turk.
Just now he was stringing his bow with fresh gut, in an excellent humor. That morning the omens on the mountainside had been good. A rainbow had come after dawn. Now the eagles were on the wing, and—yes; he cocked his head attentively—his horse neighed.
All at once Aruk was on his feet, his bow strung. Up the pass another horse had neighed. Now the snow in the pass was still unbroken, for no riders had come over the Urkhogaitu—the Gate of the Winds—that Winter, owing to the severe cold and the storms that swept the gorge between the rocky peaks of the Altai.
Still, a horse had neighed, and where there was a horse in the Urkhogaitu, there was a rider. In a moment Aruk had mounted his shaggy pony—a Mongol of the plains will not move afoot if he can ride—and had drawn an arrow from the quiver at his saddle-peak.
When he broke from a fringe of firs into the trail Aruk found himself facing a tall horseman. In fact the horse—the Tatar's eye made swift note of this—was massive and long-bodied—a bay stallion. Aruk had never seen such a beast nor such a rider.
The man who came down the pass had deep-set eyes under shaggy brows, eyes that held a fire of their own. Aruk's bow was lifted, the shaft taut on the string. A slight easing of the fingers would have sent the arrow into the throat of the stranger, above the fur-tipped cloak that covered his long body.
The rider halted when he reached Aruk, but apparently for the purpose of looking out from the pass over the wide plain of Tartary, visible here for the first time from the pass—the plain speckled with brown herds and adorned with the deep blue of lakes, like jewels upon green cloth.
Here and there below him were the tiny lines of animals that barely seemed to move, camels of the caravans that came from China to Muscovy.
Under a close-trimmed mustache the thin lips of the stranger smiled, as if he made out a curious jest in the aspect of the sparkling plain.
He looked at Aruk, and the hunter lowered his bow.
“This one is a falcon,” thought Aruk, taking counsel with himself. “May the eat me though if he isn't a Frank.”[1]
In the minute just passed Aruk had seen that another Frank, one of the two servants who rode after the leader, had drawn a long pistol and pointed it at him. The hunter had no great respect for Turkish pistols, but it occurred to him that the rider in front of him must be a personage of importance if others would fight to see that his path was cleared.
Surely the Frank was a chieftain from the west, from the lands of the Christians that lay beyond Muscovy—so Aruk had heard. Being keeper of the pass many tales came to his ears.
“Are you a khan—a chief?” he growled.
The tall stranger seemed to find food for mirth in this. He half-smiled, and when he did so his thin, dark face with its down=curving nose was likable.
“I am not a khan,” he made response tolerantly, and—to Aruk's surprize—in fair Tatar speech.
Yet his manner was that of one who was accustomed to pass sentries without being challenged, even to having honor shown him.
The stranger was a man in ripe middle age. His heavy boots were of finest morocco and well cleaned. The doublet under the torn cloak was rich blue velvet, and, above all, the hilt of the curiously thin, straight sword was chased with gold.
“Then you are an envoy from God.”
“I?” The Frank raised his brows. “No!”
Now the last traveler from the lands of the Franks, the only one who, to Aruk's knowledge, had come over the Urkhogaitu Pass, had been a priest. Those few among the Tatars that had been baptized by the priest called him an envoy from God. The lives of envoys were inviolate. So the priest had not been slain. Something in the face of the tall Frank reminded Aruk of the priest.
“If you are not an envoy or a chief what is your business in Tartary, Sir Frank?”
“'Tis the devil's affair, not yours.”
Aruk blinked reflectively. The stranger might be speaking the truth. There was an eagle's feather in his hunting-cap. And the lords of Galdan Khan, chief of the Kalmucks who were deadly enemies of the Tatars, wore such feathers. Moreover there were Franks among the Turks and Kalmucks of Galdan Khan, mercenaries from Genoa and Greece. This might be one of them, sent as a spy to gather news before a raid on the part of Galdan Khan.
That would be the devil's business surely. And that was why Aruk had all but shot down the stranger with his bow.
Yet Aruk, whose life hung on his wit, could read the faces of men. He knew that no spy from the Turks would come to the fair fields of Tartary wearing one of the feathers of Galdan Khan. Nor would he come boldly in daylight with blunt words on his lips and a contempt for the keeper of the pass.
Seeing that the stranger was paying no further attention to him, Aruk drew aside and spoke under his breath to the dog-faced Mongol who was the second servant.
The Mongol, a scowling, sheepskin-clad Dungan, answered Aruk's questions briefly:
“He was a paladin of the Franks. But now he has no tribe to follow him. Still, there is gold in his girdle and costly garments in the packs on the horses. I will tell Cheke Noyon, the khan of the Altai, in the city of Kob, to let out his life, so I will have some of the gold”
“Hai,” Aruk grunted, “where are you from, dog-face?”
The Mongol's eyes shifted.
“I was a captive of the Christian Poles. This warrior was fighting under their banner. He freed me, telling me to guide him to Tartary. When I saw first him he lived in a castle with servants. Now he has only one dog to follow him. As he makes his bed, he shall lie in it.”
Aruk's lined face twisted reflectively.
“You are a jackal, and the skies will spew out your soul when it leaves your body. Kai. It is so.”
“Nay,” the servant grinned surlily, “'I will tell my tale to the baksa, the witch-doctors, and they will make a sacrifice for me to the spirits. They have no love for the Krits[2] who come here and say that they can work wonders. It is so.”
“What is the name of the Frank?”
“He calls himself Hu-go.”
Impatiently the archer moved to the side of the Frank as the latter gathered up his reins.
“An hour's ride, Sir Hu-go, will bring you to the hut of Ostrim, the falconer. He is a Krit, like you, and he will not steal. Beware of the baksa, for they will strip you of wealth and skin.”
When the three riders had vanished around a bend in the gorge, Aruk settled himself in his saddle to watch the Urkhogaitu. He wanted to be very sure that no Kalmucks were coming behind the stranger called Hugo.
Although the spot was exposed to the icy winds that made a channel of the pass, the archer did not move for hours. He watched the golden eagle circling over the network of forest, muttering the while a song that was half a prayer chant:
“Oh, bright falcon,
My own brother,
Thou soarest high.
Thou seest far”
A slight sound on the mountainside behind him caused Aruk at length to wheel and ride swiftly down in the trail left by the three travelers. Other ears might have caught it as an echo, but Aruk was sure that a shot had been fired near the hut of Ostrim the falconer.
The reason for his haste was soon apparent. Half-way down the mountainside, where the snow lay only in patches in the gullies and the larch thickets, Aruk came upon a brown-faced maiden no larger than he.
From a clump of larches she was peering, bow in hand, her slant eyes intent on the trail, teeth gleaming between full, red lips.
“Ohai, Yulga, daughter of Ostrim,” he hailed her, slowing his pony at once in an effort to appear unconcerned, “was the devil firing off his popgun down here, or did a boulder crash from the cliff? I heard”
“A splendid protector, you,” the girl mocked him, unstringing her bow.
The sight of the hunter had relieved her fear and now she teased him.
“You come nimbly after the fight is finished, like a jackal instead of a wolf. Our heads might have been hanging to the saddle-peak of the robber band who just passed this way, for all the aid we had from you!”
Aruk grew red and muttered beneath his breath. Under Yulga's laughter the hunter always waxed clumsy as a bear cub. He despaired of ever gathering together the horses and furs necessary to buy Yulga for his wife from the old Ostrim. In like degree he had small hope that the fair child of the falconer would ever look upon him and smile without mockery.
“Perhaps,” pursued Yulga, tossing her long black hair back from her eyes, “it is because you are so tiny that you dare sit up yonder to watch the pass. You think that anybody will take you for a ferret, or a fox looking out of its hole”
“Peace, little woodpecker,” growled the hunter.
His lined cheeks grew red, for he was acutely conscious of his small figure. Although no man might belie Aruk's boldness, or hope to outdo his ready tongue, he was at a loss for words before Yulga.
“Did the Frank draw sword on Ostrim?” he demanded. “I will let the life out of him for that”
“Ohai!”
Yulga threw back her head and laughed delightedly.
“The big Frank would swallow you, pony and arrows, and only swear that his gullet tickled him,” she cried. “Nay, the robbers were black-boned Mongols with faces like dogs. Here they are”
They had come to a clearing where a thatched hut stood among the larches. At the door sat a white-haired Tatar, a small bouragut perched on his shoulder. On the rooftree of the dwelling a hawk screamed gutturally, flapping its wings so that the bells on its throat jangled.
On the grass of the clearing lay five bodies, distorted and sprawling. Aruk went from one to another, turning them over with his foot.
“Dead,” he commented. “Hai—here is that dog-brother who led the Frank. Well, the evil spirits from below will be the gainer by a dung-picker. No one need kill a horse for him to ride in the other world. He turned his back to the simitar, it is clear. Hum—this black beetle was shot in the face.”
“By the servant of the Frank.”
Ostrim lifted his venerable head and spoke quietly.
“The robbers were four. They sought to pick my poor hearth. As they came up the party of the Frank rode into the clearing. So the black-souled ones scented gold and attacked with their swords, slaying the follower and striking down the old servant, who had no more strength than a sick woman.”
“And the Frank—he let out the lives of three?”
“With the point of his sword that is long as a spear. He warded their cuts and thrust, once each time. The Frank wiped his sword in the grass and picked up the servant, who was cut in the belly, and rode off, saying that he sought a hut for the sick man and a doctor to close up his wound.”
“He is an old buck, that one,” admitted Aruk grimly. “He has a horned soul in him. Three dead with three thrusts! I could do no more with my arrows.”
“Aye,” responded Yulga, hanging up her bow; “you might do that, Aruk, among the suckling litter of boars up in the larches—if the old sow were away.”
“By the mane of my sire!”
Aruk bared his white teeth. He caught the girl by the luxuriant coils of hair that hung down her breast. Her round face he held close to his, while his anger melted.
“Ho, I will bind your tongue for you yet. Now bring me kumiss to drink, for I ride to Kob with news. This dawn there were beneficent omens in the pass.”
Curiously enough his sudden act quieted the girl, who looked at him long and withdrew for the mare's milk he sought.
Aruk emptied the bowl Yulga brought him at a gulp and wiped his mustaches.
“Ho, it would have been better for the tall warrior if he had left his body and that of his servant in your keeping. The baksa will make short work of him in Kobdo. They like not these Krits who come from the other end of the earth and oppose the baksa.”
“The other Krit was a holy man.”
A light came into the mild eyes of the Christian falconer.
“He was an envoy from God. And this one is like him, in face.”
“The other had dove's eyes; this one is a falcon,” Aruk retorted.
Aruk jumped into his saddle, pretending not to look at Yulga.
“He has a horned soul in him. Tfu! The killing of him would be worth seeing.”
CHAPTER II
The Candles on the Altar
The man called Hugo did not ride far with his wounded servant. The shattered body he supported easily in his arms, for he had a strength that matched his great stature. The bay horse bore them both easily.
But the life of the old servant was flickering out. Too many times had Hugo witnessed this passing of nature on the battlefield to mistake it now. So he turned the bay aside from the road into a faint path that ran among the pines.
It brought him to a hut of logs. Hugo carried the servant to the door, kicking it open with his heavy boot. As the windows were only slits in the logs, Hugo could make out the interior of the cabin only vaguely. Noticing that it was empty, he laid the old man on what appeared to be a long bench and covered his limbs with his own cloak.
He went out and presently returned with his leather cap full of fresh, cold water, taken from a near-by stream.
“A sorry bed, Pierre,” he observed in French, “and a poor drink to speed you on your way. Now a goblet of good Burgundy”
“Ah, monsieur le comte, no.”
Pierre lifted his thin head wistfully.
“If there were but a priest in this wilderness! Or—or a holy spot where the sign of the cross is to be seen.”
Hugo Arnauld, Count of Hainault, castellan of Grav, once captain of musketeers at the court of Paris, then colonel in the border armies of the King of France—the man who now called himself Hugo—tugged at the small tuft of his beard and raised one shaggy eyebrow without answering.
Having no good to say of priests or the houses of priests, he held his peace before the dying man. Seldom indeed had he failed to speak boldly to priest or minister, wherefore was he now an exile from France, publicly proclaimed an intriguer.
It did not make much difference to Hugo. It rather amused him that the worthy ministers should now be hoarding the revenues from Hainault which he had squandered so royally when he was young. Doubtless, he reflected, the very intelligent courtezans who were great ladies were drawing their tithes from the ministers.
“Ah, monsieur,” breathed Pierre again, his thought returning with the habit of a lifetime to his master, “there will now be no one to—to brush your cloaks, to set out your linen and clean your swords.”
Hugo laughed. Facing the gleam of sunlight in the door, now that his hunting-cap was off, gray was to be seen in his black hair. His dark countenance, on which the skin stretched taut over the bones, bore the stamp of pride; his wide mouth under the trim mustache was hard, his long chin stubborn. Women in other days had looked twice at the man who was Count of Hainault.
“One forgets, my Pierre,” he remarked gruffly, “that here there exists no need to wear fresh linen or draped cloak over a scabbard. Judging by the manners of the habitants, we have arrived at last in the land of Gog and Magog, so inscribed in the charts of the geographers. My faith, the end of the world—Tartaria. I have made good my promise.”
Pierre coughed and lay back weakly. Monsieur le comte had always been such a stickler for the niceties of dress. Even now, with the habit of a soldier, his coat and shirt were clean. The promises of monsieur le comte were always kept.
It had been at Zbaraj.
They had wandered, exiled, from France to the court of the Commonwealth of Poland. Here honest Pierre had taken heart again, seeing cathedrals and the retinue of great nobles. But his master had declared that the nobles reeked of fish, and the mead soiled his mouth after the red wine of Burgundy.
So, hearing that the Cossacks and Crimea Tatars were making war on Prince Yeremi, the champion of the Commonwealth, on the southern marches of Poland, they had enlisted under the banner of the prince, had marched for years through blazing forests and over the steppe that was like a sea of grass.
When Zbaraj, the stronghold of the Poles, had been besieged, Hainault, as castellan, had been called the lion of Zbaraj. Pierre remembered that one night when they had been eating horseflesh, the warrior-priest, Yaskolski, had made the round of the walls in the procession of the holy sacrament.
Map showing parts of Siberia, the Chinese Republic and the Pacific Ocean
Candles borne before the tall figure of the priest had shone upon gilded monstrance and swinging censers, even while cannon-balls plunged through the air overhead.
Pierre had fallen to his knees as the procession passed, and bared his head. Hugo, the doubter, rose from his seat in a trench, but kept his steel cap in place. Yaskolski had looked at him just as a flight of balls drove overhead with the scream of a thousand hawks.
“Those cannoneers should be herding cattle,” the burly priest had said to Hugo. “They can not aim.”
Hugo had looked after the calm figure of the priest curiously.
“That priest is a man. He has smelled powder before.”
When the war was over Hugo had waxed restless, as always. He had been offered a county by Yeremi himself, with an income sufficient to support a noble of his rank, if he would swear allegiance to the Diet.
“Be under the orders of swine who stink of ale? Pfagh!”
In view of his services, Hugo's insolence was overlooked, but thereafter he drank alone in Zbaraj, until Pierre brought to his chamber the warrior-priest, Yaskolski, who offered the exile the colonelcy of a regiment of armored cavalry.
Hugo had hesitated. He respected Yaskolski. Unfortunately he had been in his cups.
“So, you would buy a man's sword—the sword of a Hainault. Well, you are another breed from the shaven polls who prune their souls and nourish their bellies with tithes from the peasantry. But—death of my life—I will not do business with you.”
Then he smiled.
“Your words, Sir Monk, are an echo of my brother, who is likewise a priest. Doubtless he is still praying for my soul. I have not seen him for a dozen years. They tell me he has gone, probably with others of his cloth, to the particular demesne of the devil on earth. That is Tartary. Well, I have a whim to go and see how Paul and his brethren relish the devil's demesne.”
These words had been like wine to the faithful Pierre, who had yearned for a sight of the young son of Hugo's brother. Paul had promised Pierre that he and Hugo would yet sleep in the same bed. And Hugo's cynicism hid anxiety for the welfare of the priest, Paul.
Yaskolski raised his great hands.
“What, Sir Count? In Tartary are hordes of savages, and werewolves. That is a land beyond the domain of God. No man would go there, for he would be skinned alive and roasted by pagans.”
“Permit me to correct you. I would go there. These burghers and butchers are but tedious society. The domain of the devil would at least be entertaining.”
In these words, Pierre knew, monsieur le comte had declined a colonelcy to go to search for his brother. And from place to place as far as the Urkhogaitu they had had news of Paul, for few Franks passed over the caravan route that led from Moscow to Tartary.
Pierre came out of his stupor with a rattle in his throat. He caught his master's hand.
“You will be—alone, monsieur le comte,” he whispered. “There will be no one to laugh at your jests. If Monsieur Paul, your brother had not left you”
“The conversation of Monsieur Paul ceased to interest me years ago. These savages are, at the worst, originals. I learned somewhat of their speech in the Polish campaigns and more from the dog who led us on our way.”
On their way hither! Pierre groaned at memory of the endless steppe where wild Cossack bands attacked them, cutting down the rest of their followers, of the gaunt mountains that led to a desert of sand and clay, and then the snow of the Altai. All at once his eyes started, and he pointed toward the interior of the hut.
“A cross! I see the cross of the Redeemer hanging on yonder wall.”
He closed his eyes and clasped his frail hands.
“Monsieur—a holy spot to which we—have come.”
As his master continued to stare idly at the sunlight in the door at Pierre's back, a sudden anxiety clouded the pallid face of the old servant.
“Look, monsieur, and tell me if it is not true—what I see. There, in the shadows, over your shoulder. It is so dark I did not see the blessed cross before. And, look, Monsieur Hugo, there is the figure of the Mother of Christ and the silver candlesticks—on the altar. See”
The count turned his head casually. He felt that the fever-ridden old man must be the victim of a hallucination.
And actually his eyes, dimmed by the sunlight at which he had been staring, saw nothing in the shadows.
“There is”
He was on the point of saying there was nothing to be seen. But the cold hand of the dying man was on his wrist. Again Hugo shrugged and made up his mind anew.
“There is the cross indeed,” he responded. “And the altar, as you have said.”
So Hugo, to his own mind, deceived Pierre. It would make the dying man rest easier.
“Ah, monsieur, you have never lied,” the servant muttered. “Now I can believe the miracle.”
He began a litany under his breath. When his voice ceased his lips moved. Presently Hugo glanced at him, reached over and closed the eyes of the dead man. He freed his wrist from the grip of the clay that had been Pierre.
After drawing the cloak over the other's face he rose to seek some tool with which to dig a grave. A gleam of metal came from the interior of the cabin, and he strode toward it. He saw for the first time two silver candlesticks standing on a rude altar of wood.
“Peste!” was his thought. “Pierre has cast a spell over me, that is all.”
Still, a closer inspection disclosed the wooden effigy of Mary beside the skilfully carved cross on which hung the figure of Christ. Untold labor must have gone into the making of it.
Hugo glanced from it to the body of his servant, to the cabin of logs with the thatched roof, made after the fashion of peasants on his old estate. The floor was earth, strewn with pine needles.
He was glad that he had said what he did to the dying man. Probably, he reflected, there were some Christians among the Tatars here. Yes, that old Ostrim, the falconer up the mountain, was one. Well, this was their chapel.
And Aruk had said something about another Frank! That might well have been Paul. What had the Tatar hunter said? An ambassador from God? There was no one here, and the place bore no traces of occupancy.
Suddenly Hugo raised his head and adjusted the pistols in his belt, looked briefly to the priming, and went to the door. He had heard the tread of horses without.
The pine grove was filled with riders. Some wore the skins of beasts over armor. All bore weapons. They sat in their saddles gazing at him curiously. One held the rein of his horse.
“A strange congregation,” thought Hugo, freeing his sword in its scabbard, “has come to mass.”
For the first time monsieur le comte was face to face with inhabitants of the land in a body. His quick eye ran over the throng, noting the ease with which they sat their ponies, their garments of leather and coarse wool and furs, their wild faces and direct eyes. He picked out two that appeared to have authority—a huge, gray rider with but one eye, and a scrawny figure in a long purple tunic and square, yellow cap. Hugo suspected this last was one of the baksa, the witch-doctors.
This was the one who spoke first.
“I am Gorun,” he chanted, “of the baksa of the Altai. I know when a tongue speaks a lie. I can, without touching you, place a serpent in your mouth and summon it forth. If I do not take it out it will sting you to death. Have a care, Frank—” his eyes gleamed shrewdly—“for you have come to the place of the other Frank!”
Hugo did not see fit to answer.
“You are a spy of Galdan Khan,” growled Gorun resentfully. “You wear an eagle feather, like his officers.”
A smile crossed Hugo's lips. It was like child's play. But, much in this manner, he had heard himself accused by a great cardinal at the court of France. So, he was an exile. What next?
“You came to learn the secrets of the other Frank, who came to spy upon us—and tell them to Galdan Khan,” muttered the baksa. “I saw omens in the sky. this dawn and said that evil was afoot. It is so. You shall have your skin pulled off and the noble khan of the Altai will take your weapons.”
For the first time the one-eyed warrior seemed to take an interest in the words of the baksa. He glanced with interest at the silver-chased pistols and the long sword with its heavy hilt.
Just then a horse pushed forward into the cleared space between Hugo and the khan. Aruk bent down and touched his forehead.
“Grant me speech,” he chattered. “May the fires of Yulgen burn me, but this is no spy. He is a falcon, or I am a toad. He is a chief of warriors.”
“Proof!” screamed the witch-doctor.
“It is lying in front of Ostrim's yurt, feeding the crows. Aye, with four thrusts of his sword this falcon slew four robbers.”
Aruk bethought him of something else.
“Before his coming the omens in the sky were good.”
Hugo was surprized that the little hunter seemed to be speaking in his behalf—much of the meaning he lost, being rudely schooled in the chuckling speech of the Tatars. The exile did not know that a few hours ago 'he had unwittingly saved the life of Yulga, the beloved of Aruk.
At this Cheke Noyon, khan of the Tatars, raised his head and spoke for the first time.
“To the dogs with this squabbling. If this Frank is a chief of warriors, he is not a spy. Then let him use his sword so that we may see the truth with our own eyes. So, let him fight with all his strength. If he conquers our strongest, then he is a falcon and a chief, and no man of mine will raise hand against him.”
Ere the last words had left his lips, Cheke Noyon was off his horse. Stalking toward the French noble, Cheke Noyon drew a heavy, curving sword as wide at the head as two hands joined together.
Hugo, hand on hilt, bit at his mustache. This was something of a Gordian knot. If Hugo should by chance strike down the chief of these barbarians, his own life, he thought, would not be worth a broken ducat.
So he reasoned, not knowing the absolute obedience of these men to the word of a chief, living or dead. Cheke Noyon made no salute with his weapon, or any feint. His first stroke was a swishing lunge that would have cut Hugo to the backbone if that gentleman had not stepped aside.
In so doing he felt the logs of the cabin against his back.
“Horns of Panurge!” he grimaced. “What a duello!”
Well tempered as was his long campaign blade, he could not oppose it squarely to one of the Noyon's cuts without having it break in his hands, so great was the bull-like strength of the old warrior and the weight of his huge sword, which seemed to be designed for two hands rather than one.
Nor could Hugo step back any farther. True, a swift thrust and he could pierce the cordlike throat of the other. But the mail on the chieftain's body made impossible any disabling thrust.
Quickly, as the Tatar lifted his weapon for a second cut, Hugo's blade darted forward and its edge touched the Noyon on the brow over his good eye. Blood ran down into the eye, but Cheke Noyon merely grunted with rage and lashed out again, blindly.
Cleverly the tall Frenchman warded the other's weapon, before the blow had gained force. For all his strength the Tatar was a child before the master of a dozen duels who had learned the tricks of fence as a boy. Hugo's skill was the more in that he never seemed perturbed.
His long blade flashed here and there, and the Tatar's rushes were staved off. The blood in his eye maddened Cheke Noyon. He seized the hilt of his sword in both hands, raised it above his helmet with a roar—and stared about him, dazed, with empty hands.
Hugo had stepped forward and engaged his blade in the other's hilt. The curved weapon of the Tatar lay a dozen feet away on the ground.
“Hai!”
A yell burst from the onlookers.
Cheke Noyon peered at his foe. Then, shaking his brow clear of blood, he caught up his weapon, tossed it in air, snatched it in his left hand and struck as a wolf leaps.
But the gray eyes of the other had followed his movement, and the blow was parried. There came a clash of steel, a grunt from the Tatar, and his sword lay at his feet again.
Gorun spurred his horse forward with a shrill shout, seeing his opportunity.
“Sorcery!” he asserted. “O khan, no living man could do this thing to the greatest of the Tatars. A hand from the spirit world has helped him. He has bewitched your sword. How otherwise could he overcome the lion of Tartary? Let him die!”
Hugo stiffened, realizing the danger that lay in the appeal of the wily baksa to the vanity of the old chief. By agreeing with Gorun, the khan could wipe out the stigma of his defeat in the eyes of his followers.
Cheke Noyon puffed out his cheeks, and his bleared eye flamed.
“Dogs!” he bellowed. “Is my word naught but smoke? You heard my pledge. This khan goes free.”
He glared at Gorun.
“Liar and toad. That was no witchery. It was the blow of a man who can use a sword.”
As the chief mounted, Hugo stepped forward, drawing the Turkish pistols from his belt. He held them out in the palm of his hand to the khan.
“A gift,” he said, “to a brave man. In a battle you could strike down four to my one. I know, for I have seen the Cossack fight, and the Ottoman, the janizary, and the Russian hussar.”
With a nod the khan took the weapons, looked at them, pleased, and stared at the stranger. He observed the dark face of the Frank, the keen eyes and the long, muscular arms.
“By the mane of my sire, I will take you to serve under me. You are no nursling in war. Is it done?”
Hugo shook his head with a laugh. To serve under such as that!
The broad face of Cheke Noyon grew black with anger.
“Go your way, Frank, in peace,” he growled, “but keep out of my sight. You have made me angry.”
Hugo watched the riders trot out of the grove.
“Canaille—dogs,” he thought. “Cerberus, it seems, has left offspring on the world. Ah, well, the old chief has good stuff in him.”
He looked around.
“Ho, Aruk, you are still here. Tell me, where lives the other Frank who came before me?”
Aruk wiggled his mustache and pointed to the chapel.
“'Tis a queer world,” Hugo ruminated, leaning on his sword and looking at the wide vista of the mountain slope that already cast its shadow on the grove. “Here in the place of the giants—or dwarfs—ruled by a blood-lusting Œdipus—why, he must have been a Mongol, a misanthrope or a madman to come here. Paul—would he have come here?”
To Aruk he added—
“Did the Frank wear a long, black robe, and have a shaven poll?”
“Aye, my falcon! He was an envoy from God.”
“His name?”
“Paul, it was,” said the hunter carelessly, “and something else I can not remember.”
“Paul!”
Hugo lifted his head.
“Paul—of Hainault. Of Grav?”
Aruk rubbed his chin and yawned.
“Perhaps. How do I know? Yulga said it is written in the book of the Frank, under the altar.”
Hugo disappeared into the chapel. Feeling in the darkness under the rude altar, his hand came upon crisp parchment. Drawing the sheaf from its resting-place, he shook off the dust and opened the goatskin. cover.
On the parchment fly-leaf was the seal of a Carmelite and the name, neatly written in Latin—
Brother Paul of Hainault.
Well did Hugo know that writing.
Paul, who had spent his youth shut up with books of the Latins and Greeks; who had pored over the journals of the Fras Rubruquis, Carpini and the Nestorians who carried the torch of Christianity into Asia six hundred years before. He had come hither alone.
While Hugo had become notorious among the gallants of the court, Paul had given his life to priesthood. Paul had never been as strong as his brother, but he had the great stubbornness of the Hainaults. They had quarreled. Hugo remembered how the pale cheeks of his brother had flushed.
“So,” Hugo had said bitterly, “you go the way of the coward to pray for your soul. I go the way of the damned. The world is wide; one road to you, another to me.”
“Our roads will meet. Until then, I shall pray for you, Hugo.”
And now, Hugo reflected, they had come to the same spot on the earth; and such a place. It seemed, then, that he had wronged Paul. The youngster—Hugo always thought of him as that—had courage. If he had come here alone he was no coward.
All at once he was filled with a longing to see the yellow hair of his brother, to hear his low voice. They would talk of the wide, sweet fields of southern France, and the high castle from which one could see the river
And then Hugo remembered that there had been dust on the Bible.
“Where is the other Frank?” he asked Aruk, who was watching curiously.
“Under your feet, my falcon. Ostrim buried him beneath this yurt when the snow came last.”
Hugo's mustache twitched and an ache came into his throat. He questioned the hunter and learned that Paul had died of sickness; his body was not strong. Yes, he had made only a few Krits out of the people of the Altai—Ostrim, Yulga and two or three more.
“Leave me now,” said Hugo after a while. “I have something to think upon.”
“Will you stay here?” Aruk asked. “I like you, my falcon. But you have made old Cheke Noyon angry, and he is like a bear with a thorn in its paw. Come and share my yurt; then he will not see you and bite you because of his anger.”
Hugo waved his hand impatiently.
“I stay here.”
During that afternoon, when they had buried Pierre, Hugo walked moodily among the pines, twisting his hands behind his back. The words of Paul had come true. Their paths had met. But now Hugo could not say to Paul that he had wronged him—could not delight again in the gentle companionship of the boy with whom he had played in what seemed a far-off age.
“I am an exile,” he thought. “There was no roof where I might lay my head. So, I came here, where no one knows my name. But Paul, why must he come to this place of desolation?”
From the log hut came the murmur of a low voice. Hugo moved to one side and saw, through the door, that the candles were lighted on the altar. With a sudden leap to his blood, he made out a figure covered by what seemed a white veil, kneeling between the candles.
Straining his ears to catch the words that were neither French nor Tatar he at last made them out—for the murmur was only two or three sentences repeated over and over:
“Requiem eternam dona ei Domine—grant him the peace everlasting, O Lord,” he repeated.
Now the figure stood up to leave the chapel, and he saw it was Yulga, a clean white hood over her long hair. She left the grove without seeing him. Hugo reflected that she must be repeating the ritual she had heard Paul say many times, without understanding its full meaning.
So, he wondered, had Paul's life been taken that the souls of two or three barbarians might be saved?
Hugo's head dropped on to his chest as he sat on a bench in the hut. Weary, exhausted by hunger, he slept.
For a while the candles flickered. Then one went out and the other. The cabin was in darkness. Outside the night sounds of the Altai began—the howl of a wolf, the whir of a flying owl.
CHAPTER III
The Storm
One night in early Summer, from the fastness of the Altai, Aruk the hunter heard a whirring in the air, a rustle in the underbrush. Against the stars he made out the flight of birds, going north, down the mountain. Against a patch of snow—for in the Urkhogaitu Pass the snow never quite melts—he saw black forms leap and pass.
Aruk knew that those leaps were made by mountain sheep. They were running down the rocks from the pass. Near at hand several deer crackled through the saxual bushes. A soft pad-pad slipped past him.
That was a snow leopard, leaving his fastness in the bare rocks of the heights.
Aruk was on foot in a trice, and slapped the halter on his pony without waiting for the saddle. Snatching up his bow, he was off on the trail to Kob.
Behind him black masses moved against the snow, and horses' hoofs struck on stone. An arrow whizzed past his head. Another. The nimble feet of his pony carried him out of range, and presently to the yurt of Ostrim, the falconer.
Reining up at the door, he struck it with his foot and shouted:
“Up and ride! 'Tis Aruk that calls.”
Too wise to ask questions, the old man got together his several ponies and sprang upon one, the great bouragut, the golden eagle, on his wrist. Yulga carried the hawk.
“The Kalmucks are in the pass,” Aruk called to Yulga. “They are stealing through like ferrets, hundreds of them. Galdan Khan has loosed the vanguard of his dog brothers on our Tatar land.”
Yulga, at this, urged her pony the faster with voice and heel. Like three ghosts they sped down to the rolling slopes of the foothills.
“The Krit warrior said,” observed Ostrim after a space, “that ten could hold the summit of the pass against a thousand. Why did not Cheke Noyon post a guard in the Urkhogaitu?”
“Because the ten would be food for the crows by now,” grunted Aruk. “When did our Tatar folk ever post a guard ”
“The Krit!” cried Yulga suddenly. “We are passing his yurt, and he will be slain in his sleep if he is not warned.”
Swearing under his breath, Aruk reined in, calling to the others to ride on and take the news to Kob. He would go for the Krit.
“Be quick!” Yulga was alarmed. “Do not let them take you”
But Aruk was a fox in the night. The chapel in the grove proved to be deserted, Hugo having gone far afield on his horse that night; and the hunter edged down to the steppe by paths that did not meet the main trail on which the Kalmucks had already passed him in force. He did not fear for Yulga or her father.
“The hut of the Krit will soon be ashes,” he muttered, for fires were already making the night ruddy behind him.
The Kalmucks, seeing that their approach was observed, were slaying the people of the countryside and setting fire to their yurts.
Once, crossing a clearing in the gray of the false dawn, Aruk saw a patrol of the Kalmuck Turks surround a nest of tents. He could make out the black, quilted coats of the dreaded riders, could see their round, sheepskin hats and the points of their long lances.
They were driving the flocks of sheep in the clearing, and harrying out the tents whence men and boys ran, half-clothed, to be spitted on lances or hewn down with simitars.
The wailing of women rose on the air, to subside into moans. Aruk made out the small form of a young girl fleeing toward the trees. Three of the Kalmuck horde ran after her, on foot. The squat men of the Turks dragged her down as dogs pull down a hare.
Only a black blotch showed on the grass of the clearing. Safe within the screen of the poplars, Aruk hesitated, fingering his bow.
“Dogs and sons of dogs!”
From his pony the hunter fitted shaft to string and discharged his arrows swiftly, heeding not whom he struck; for he knew the sheep-herder's child was as good as dead already.
The unexpected flight of arrows from nowhere set the Kalmucks to yelling. Two fell writhing in the grass. Another began to run back toward the yurt. The girl lay quite still on the grass, a shaft through her body.
A last arrow whistled from Aruk's bow, and the fleeing man dropped to his knees.
“La allah—il' allah!”
Aruk heard his groan. Others in steel helmets were running out to the sound of conflict. The hunter turned his pony and was off again, changing his course to strike for Kob, leaving the sounds of pursuit behind him.
“I was a fool,” he assured his pony's ears, “since the only knows where I will get more arrows. There is small store of weapons in Kob, and Galdan Khan has mustered the hordes from the Kalmuck steppe and the Moslem hills to his aid. A Moslem cried out back there. This is not at all like a joke.”
Indeed, the dawn disclosed a forest of spear-tips streaming out from the shadows of. the foothills toward Kob. The black coats of the Kalmucks were mingled with the green and red of the Turks. Fur-clad archers from Sungaria rubbed stirrups with the fierce, mailed riders of the Thian Shan.
Behind these, down the broad, grassy trail, sheepskin-clad footmen escorted the creaking carts of the Kalmucks. A camel-train appeared when the sun was high, dragging small cannon.
Above the tramp of the horses, the squeaking of the wagons, the shouts of the drivers, rose the mutter of kettle-drums, the shrill clamor of the pipes and the hoarse song of disciplined Moslem soldiery.
Like pillars along the line of march ascended shafts of smoke into the transparent air of a mild June day.
On each flank dust rose where the masses of cattle were driven in and turned over in a bedlam of bellowing and trampling, to the butchers who rode among the wagons. Here and there prisoners were dragged in by groups of horsemen, to be questioned briefly by the mirzas and beys of the horde, then to be slain and tossed into ditches.
In this manner came the Kalmucks to the old mud walls of Kob and the moat that had been dry for an age. Before sunset the cannon were set in place, and a roaring, flashing tumult spread around the beleaguered side of the doomed city.
Before darkness served to reveal the flashes of the guns, the walls of mud bricks were caved in here and there. Like disciplined bees, the spearmen and horse of the Kalmucks swarmed forward into the openings.
A half-hour's dust and flashing of weapons where one-eyed Cheke Noyon struggled in fury with his groups of Tatar swordsmen, and the yelling mass pressed in among the houses.
Surprized, ill-prepared for defense, beset by a trained army of relentless fighters, Kob changed masters in the dusk of the June day. The standards of Galdan Khan were carried through the alleys, into the market-place.
Galdan Khan was preparing to write his name large upon the annals of inner Asia. Chief of the Kalmucks, ally of the Turkish Kirei and the “wolf” Kazaks of Lake Balkash, as well as the Moslem Sun-gars of the Thian Shan, the Celestial Mountains, he was reaching out from his homeland in the great Sungarian valley.
This Sungaria lay between the Altai on the north and the Thian Shan on the south. Galdan Khan vowed that he would seize for himself the fertile grass lands of the Tatars on the north before turning his sword upon the richer temples and caravan-routes of the south.
“I will take to myself the lands of high grass. I will take in my hand the herds, the cattle, the sheep, the furs and the weapons of the men of the North,” he proclaimed in the council of chieftains assembled. “Thousands of captives I will keep to serve my army and do siege work. The rest my men will slay, for a dead enemy can not strike again.”
Years after the events narrated here, Galdan Khan had carved for himself an empire out of the heart of Asia. He had driven the Chinese back across the Gobi; he held the northern Himalayas, Samarkand, Yarkand. His men had looted the lamaseries of Thibet. His “wolves” pushed the Russians back from Turkestan.
But his first step was toward the pastures and villages of the nomad Tatar tribes beyond the snow wall of the Altai. And in Tartary a strange thing happened.
“The van of my army,” he had explained to the mirzas of the Kalmuck and Kazak hordes, who sat picking their teeth and chewing dates, “will be under your standards. Your simitars will be resistless as the sword of Mohammed—upon whose name be praise.”
Galdan was not a Moslem, but saw fit to cater to his savage allies.
“I will supply you with siege cannon and mailed footmen. You will sweep through the Gate of the Winds like a storm and gobble up Kob. The clay walls of the city of the herdsmen will melt before you like butter. The sack of the city will fill your girdles. Your swords will exterminate the unbelievers, their wives and children. Then you will set the captives to rebuilding the walls, this time with stone.”
Nothing could have been more to the liking of the chiefs of the wolves.
“By holding the Urkhogaitu Pass, which is the only path into Tartary, and the near-by city of Kob,” Galdan had pointed out, “you will make clear the way for the main army which I shall lead to join you, and together we will rub off the face of the earth two hundred thousand Tatars; for, like. the plague, we will spread over the valleys of the North, through the lands of the Torguts and Chakars to the far Buriats before they can unite to defend themselves.
By this it might be seen that Galdan was a shrewd schemer, that he arranged to make his allies bear the brunt of the fighting, and that he knew how to appeal to the religious zeal and the lust of men.
Perhaps because of this the first part of his plan was carried out to a word.
At the first rumble of cannon the wise bay horse of Hugo of Hainault pricked up its ears. Long before dawn that day Hugo, unable to sleep, had mounted and galloped to the shore of Kobdo Lake, beyond the city.
Returning after sleep for the man and rest for the horse, they met lines of riders, silent women and tired children, bellowing cattle and disordered sheep. Often he had to turn aside into a grove to let a flock of the fleeing pass. There was no outcry. Pressing on with some difficulty and making his way toward the north wall, by avoiding the main highways that were choked with humanity, he caught the unmistakable rattle of musketry.
Mounting a rise in the plain his experienced eye could discern the lines of the besiegers on the far side of the city. He traced the cannon by puffs of smoke and the breaches in the clay rampart by clouds of dust. It meant to him merely that it would be difficult to retrace his way to the cabin in the grove.
This had been but a rude hôtel for monsieur le comte,and he had fared haphazard on game brought there by Aruk, and grain and fruits bought from Yulga. Still he found that he was unwilling to leave it. It held him. It was, he reflected, the grave of his brother.
Forcing his way through one of the gates, he beheld the scrawny figure of Gorun, the baksa, his cap gone, his eyes starting from his head. The priest, followed by a cavalcade of his kind, struck and kicked children and animals in a mad endeavor to clear the city.
“My faith,” thought Hugo, “he seems as anxious to leave as I am to arrive.”
On the heels of the priest came a sheepskin-clad rider, blood flowing from his forehead and his shield broken in two.
“Wo! The wolves of Galdan Khan are in the market-place!” the man was crying, over and over. “Fly, all who would save their lives. The wolves are here.”
Accustomed to tight places, Hugo twisted his mustache and shrugged. Ahead of him in the narrow streets of Kob, between the flat-roofed clay houses, he heard the clash of weapons, saw smoke uprise, to make of the sun a red ball. Behind him, the flood of the flying.
He had no wish to thrust himself into the crowd pressing out of the city. So he drew the bay into an archway and pondered. Soon the alleys around him were deserted.
A last bevy of Tatar riders galloped past—archers without bows, old men, wounded and silent. A man who carried a musket turned and flung his weapon at a group of helmeted, black-coated horsemen.
Hugo saw several Tatars struck down in the doors of the houses they tried to defend.
“The cattle!” he thought. “They are driven like animals. No discipline, no powder for their muskets, no leaders. Pfagh! The Turks at least know what they are about.”
A sharp-featured bey of a Kazak regiment led his men up to the alley, stared long at the quiet Frenchman, lifted his hand in a salute.
“Salamet, effendi!”
He called out to his men, who began to run into the deserted houses, laughing and jesting. Hugo, palpably not of the Tatars, remembered that there were Europeans with Galdan Khan, and that the feather in his cap was some kind of a symbol of rank. The bey must have thought him a man of Galdan Khan. Seeking to leave the alleys, he turned back through the arch, into a small square.
Here he reined in sharply with an oath. This was the quarter of the Chinese merchants. In the teakwood doorway of a cedar house sat a fat man in embroidered silk, a knife in his hand. Through the opened door Hugo could see the bodies of several women, some still stirring feebly. There was blood on the knife in the merchant's hand. His broad, olive face was expressionless. Having killed his women, according to the code of his caste, the Oriental was awaiting his own fate.
Hugo could go no farther in that direction. A group of Kalmucks were harrying a small pagoda. Others were intent on seeking out the unfortunates who still lived in near-by dwellings. Captives were being roped together by the necks. Children were lifted on lances, to guttural shouts.
Almost within reach, Hugo saw a Tatar's eyes torn out by a soldier's fingers.
A sound caused him to turn. From a post by the gate of the merchant's house the Kalmucks had cut a stake. Upon this they had drawn the passive Chinese. While Hugo looked he wriggled convulsively, his eyes standing from his sweating face.
Never before in the wars had Hugo seen the deliberate slaughter of a people. It sickened him, and he was beating his way through the square when a song arrested him,
“O, bright falcon,
My own brother!
Thou soarest high,
Thou seest far”
It was dusk now in Kob, a dusk thickened by a pall of smoke and reddened by mounting fires. The song had come from the entrance of the pagoda. Aruk was the singer. Hugo could see the little hunter clearly in the glow from a burning house across the square. Beside Aruk were clustered a handful of Tatars, women among them.
With spears and swords they were defending themselves, for they had used up all their arrows. Aruk, half-naked, was fighting desperately, swinging a simitar too large for his short arms. His broken body was streaked with sweat and shining blood; his teeth bared in a grin of rage.
Suddenly he caught sight of the tall form of the Krit.
“Aid!” called Aruk. “Aid, my falcon.”
For a space the clash of weapons had stopped. The Kalmucks, ringed around the pagoda steps, were waiting the coming of more men.
“Aid, my Krit,” urged the hunter. “Chase these wolves away before others come.”
It simply did not occur to Hugo to draw his sword in a quarrel between peasants and common soldiers. He was already gathering up his reins when his eye caught the anxious face of Yulga. She did not call to him, but her clasped hands were eloquent of appeal.
This made him ill at ease. Yulga had come daily to say her garbled prayer at the grave of his brother. She was a handsome little thing, and her eyes were tragic.
“Peste! What is it to me?” he grumbled.
Then he growled at the watching Kalmucks:
“Back, dogs! Back, I say. These Tatars are my prisoners.”
The soldiers hesitated at the ring of command in the voice of the tall Krit. They eyed the feather in his cap, the accouterments of his horse, sullenly. Were not the Tatars their legitimate prey? Who was this tall bey they had not seen before?
Aruk, Ostrim and his daughter and the other Tatars gathered about the horse of Hugo, fingering their weapons defiantly.
“These are prisoners, to be questioned by the chiefs,” Hugo asserted, watching the Kalmucks. “Would you taste a stake, that you disobey the command of a bey? Be off, before I am angry. Loot the temple yonder.”
Sight of the deserted doorway of the pagoda decided the Kalmucks. Here was easy spoil. The Tatars could still bite. Let the bey have them if he wished. They made off.
At a sign from Aruk, Hugo urged his horse toward the archway through which he had come. The fires had not yet reached that quarter, and once in the darkness they would be reasonably safe from discovery.
Abreast of the burning house he reined in with a muttered oath. Several riders paced out of the alley to confront him. He saw a stout officer in a fur kaftan and the round, white hat of a Turkish janizary.
In response to the man's question Hugo answered that he was escorting prisoners to be questioned. But the other stared evilly and shook his head. Prisoners with arms! They should be bound by the necks.
He peered closely into Hugo's bearded face and drew back with an angry hiss.
“You are a Christian. I have seen you before. What are you doing here?”
Without replying, Hugo edged his horse nearer the other. Suddenly the Turk snatched at a pistol in his belt.
“Caphar—dog!” he screamed. “You have fought against the believers. You were at Zbaraj. I was there”
Before the long pistol was fairly in his hand his words ended in a groan. Drawing his sword, Hugo had caught the Turk under the chin with the hilt while the point was still in the scabbard. The janizary swayed, choking and clutching his throat.
Putting spurs to his mount, Hugo rode down another rider, his big bay knocking the small Arab off its feet.
“Kill, kill!” cried the other Turks.
Before they could put their weapons in play, the Tatars were dragging them from their horses, slipping under their simitars. One or two of the Tatars fell in the short struggle, but the rest were now mounted. The feel of horseflesh between their legs put new heart into them, for a Tatar is at sea without his horse.
Under the guidance of Aruk, who knew every alley of Kob, they made their way unmolested to one of the gates. The sack of the city was beginning in earnest, and no guards had been posted as yet by the Kalmucks. A drunken cavalry patrol fired shots after them as they sped away in the darkness.
Some distance out on the quiet plain toward the lake, Aruk dismounted and came to Hugo. He seized the stirrup of the Frank and bent his head.
“Our lives are yours, my lord. Have I not said to these other jackals that you were a falcon and a wolf-chaser? Hai—they will believe me now.”
Out of the darkness came the guttural answer of the other men.
“Our lives are yours. We have seen you strike a good blow against the wolves.”
Hugo moved impatiently, wishing to be gone.
“Because of that- blow,” went on Aruk slowly, “you can not go back to your yurt on the mountain. The Turks would skin you alive and set you on an ant-hill. Besides, they have set fire to the yurt where you slept, and plundered your goods. Come then with us, with the men of the Altai.”
“Come,” echoed the others.
CHAPTER IV
The Gate of the Winds
The water of Kobdo Nor was like a mirror under the stars, a mirror that reflected as well the scattered glow of fires about the shore of the lake. Water-fowl, roused by the presence of men in the unwonted hours of darkness, flew about with a dull screaming.
Cattle lowed from the plain, whence riders came in on sweating horses, from the steppe, from the more distant tribes of Tartary, to learn what had befallen at Kob.
They saw the crimson spot in the sky that showed where the city still burned on the second night of the sack.
On his back near the reeds where the women and children from Kob had taken refuge, Hugo of Hainault lay, his head on his hands, his eyes closed. He was rather more than hungry. Never having accustomed himself to the kumiss of the Tatars, or the poorly cooked meat they ate, his one meal of the day had been black bread and fruit, washed down by cold water from a spring near the lake.
Above the whistle of the wind in the reeds and the murmur of a woman quieting her child, his quick ear caught a light step. Opening his eyes he saw a slim figure standing over him.
“It is Yulga, my lord, and I scarce could find you. I have some cold lamb's flesh and a bowl of wine. Aruk said that you have a throat for the wine of China, so I had this from a merchant whose caravan has wandered here.”
“Wine!”
Hugo sat up and brushed his mustache.
“You are a good child.
“The girl has manners of a sort,” he reflected, “and it is necessary to remember that here one is not monsieur le comte, but a vagabond of the highways. Even the remnant of my clothing and money is gone with my forest château.”
“My lord,” Yulga's low voice broke in, “the kurultai—the council of the clans—has been assembled since the setting of the sun. The wise ones among the noyons are trying to discover the road we must follow. They have heard that Galdan Khan has ordered the death of all the souls in Tartary. His main army is on the road leading to the Urkhogaitu Pass. Soon he will arrive with his banners in Tartary, and with him will be five times ten thousand riders.”
Yulga spoke quickly, almost breathlessly.
“My lord, we will not flee, for where would we go? Cheke Noyon yielded his breath in Kob, and others of our bravest are licking their wounds here. More horsemen are coming in from the Torgut and Buriat clans, and before long others will ride hither from the north.
“We have no khan like Galdan,” went on Yulga sadly, “for the kelets—the evil demons of the air—bring him news, and he is invulnerable. Gorun shivers in his tent and says that Galdan Khan has made magic. The priest can make no magic for us.”
She paused and then lifted her head.
“My lord, there is a magic that can help us. I heard of it from the Christian priest who is dead.”
“The one for whom you pray?”
“Aye, my lord. He told us that God opened a path through a sea, so an army of Christians could pass with dry feet.”
Hugo was silent. Once at a banquet at the Palais Royal he had made a jest of this, remarking that if the Israelites of Egypt had been monks and the Red Sea a sea of wine they would not have passed unwet.
“And an evil horde,” pointed out Yulga eagerly, “that pursued the Christian khans was swallowed up in the sea. Is not that the truth?”
Thought of Paul stayed the gibe that rose to Hugo's lips.
“If the Christian priest said it,” he responded grimly, “it is true. He was my brother.”
Yulga pondered this.
“Then you must be a Christian from God, because he was an envoy, and you are a khan, a leader of men. And you came to help us in our need. If we do not have a miracle we will all die.”
Breathlessly she kneeled beside the wanderer. He could hear her heart beating. So, he thought with a wry smile, a price must be paid for one's supper even in the wilderness.
“Then you will die,” he said gruffly.
Yulga laughed patiently.
“My lord jests. How else could the priest who was your brother live after death came to him?”
“Live? How?”
“In the yurt where we pray. When we are there we hear again the words he spoke to us. And how did you, my lord, find his yurt if you did not know where it was?”
Emboldened by the silence of the man, she went on swiftly,
“Tell us how we can overthrow Galdan Khan. In two days he will be at the pass. He has ten times the numbers of the riders that are here. Soon we will have as many as he perhaps, but then it will be too late. If he has powder and cannon and muskets.”
She pointed at the glow in the sky that was Kob.
“See, yonder the mirzas of Galdan Khan are building new walls. They are putting their cannon on the walls. Our horses can not ride over stone ramparts.
“Do you tell us what we must do, my lord,” she sighed. “And I will bear the counsel to Aruk, who is sitting in the kurultai.”
“My faith!” thought the Frenchman. “I would not care to go myself. They smell too rank of horse and mutton.”
He glanced at the near-by campfires, noting the anxious men who stood weapons in hand beside their sleeping women. Again he heard the plaint of the sick child and the murmur of its mother.
A blind man sat patiently, the nose-rope of a solitary cow in his hand. More distant from the fire, herders slept on their horses; fishers and skin-clad peasants armed only with sticks stood staring numbly at the crimson spot in the sky.
“What an army!” he thought. “What animals, that Paul should waste his life among them! Pfagh!”
Touching Yulga on the shoulder, he said:
“You have wit. How many Kalmucks and Turks are in Kob?”
“Aruk says four times a thousand. There were more, but many died in the battle.”
“Well, tell Aruk this. Say that your horsemen are useless except as horsemen, skirmishers and archers. Still, you can win back Kob. Spread a circle of riders about the place. Cut off all food. If the Kalmucks sally out, draw them off to the hills, or the marshes by the lake. Tire out their horses, then attack them if you will. It does not matter, so food is kept from their hands. They have but little.”
“Aye, my lord. But Galdan Khan will be at Kob in three days.”
With his hand Hugo turned the head of the girl toward the black mass of the Altai mountains.
“There is the barrier that will keep out Galdan Khan. Through one gate only can he come. You have heard the tale of the army that passed through a gate in the sea. Well, it is easier to close a mountain than to open it. Your khans can not spare many men, for a space until others come in from the north. But two hundred can hold the Urkhogaitu Pass, among the rocks, Let them hold it then until your allies are here.”
Yulga sped back with: her tidings, and whispered long into the attentive ear of Aruk, while the assembled khans talked and stared into the fire. When the hunter rose to speak he was listened to, for as the keeper of the pass he was well known.
When he had finished repeating the advice of Hugo, the khans gazed at each other grimly.
“Who will hold the pass?” One voiced the thought of all. “There is no man who does not fear Galdan Khan, who fights with the devil at his back.”
“I will try, good sirs,” spoke up Aruk.
“A pigmy to match blows with a hero?” The Buriat spat. “You are bold enough, but the warriors will not take you as leader.”
“What leader,” countered another, “could hold the bare rocks of the Urkhogaitu. against fifty thousand with artillery and—Galdan Khan?”
They were silent, uneasy, while the khan of the Buriats, who had ridden far that day, traced figures in the sand by the fire with his gnarled finger.
“It is a good plan,” he ruminated, “a wise plan, that of the hunter. For we could cut communication between Galdan Khan and his wolves in Kob.”
“But if the mirzas who hold Kob sallied back to the pass”
“Fool, they will not do that. They have orders to roost where they are. They will expect Galdan Khan to appear every day. When he does not come, they will be suspicious—likewise hungry. Then will they sally out, not before. Yet then our allies will be here; aye, we will be stronger than they, if Galdan Khan is held at the pass.”
At this, silence fell again. The chiefs who squatted, looking into the fire, were leaders of tribes but not of nations. There was no one to give commands in the place of Cheke Noyon.
They were not afraid. They knew not how to build a fort to oppose Galdan Khan, even if they all went to hold the Urkhogaitu. And if they did that, there would be no one to keep the mirzas hemmed in Kob.
So each one avoided the glance of the others, and the Buriat who was a famous sword slayer snarled in his throat as he drew lines in the sand.
At length Yulga, who had left the council-ring, reappeared at Aruk's side and whispered to the hunter.
Aruk looked surprized; but his eyes gleamed, and he rose.
“Good sirs,” he said, ““Hu-go, the Krit lord, will hold the Urkhogaitu Pass.”
The khan of the Buriats grunted and smoothed the lines in the sand with his sword.
“He is mad!”
“Not so. For the plan you have just heard, the plan I bespoke, was his. Yulga brought me the word.”
“With what will he hold the pass?”
“Noble khan, with twice a hundred picked men, bold men—he asks that they be from your clan.”
Pleased, the Buriat grunted and looked around.
“He must have likewise,” went on Aruk, “all the powder in our bags, and steel shirts for the warriors, and we must seize him cannon from the broken walls of Kob”
“This is a wise khan,” barked the Buriat. “He is no madman.”
“But,” pointed out Gorun, who squatted behind the council-ring, “he can not work wonders.”
To this old Ostrim from the outer ranks made rejoinder:
“Once, when the horde of the Krits in another land were being slain in battle by a powerful foe, the prophet of the Krits went to a mountain, and talked to God, holding up his hands the while. So long as his hands were held up, the Krits conquered; and before very long they had cut off the heads of their enemy and taken many horses. Kai! It is true.”
“But why,” asked the khan of the Buriats “will Hugo Khan go against Galdan?”
At this Yulga broke the custom of ages, and a woman spoke in the council.
“To me he said it. My lord Hugo would sleep in comfort in his own yurt. Galdan Khan is like a buzzing fly, that keeps him from sleep. He said that he was tired of the buzzing and would drive away the fly.”
For a space the flippant answer of Monsieur le Comte d'Hainault sorely puzzled the councilors. Then the khan of the Buriats struck the sand before him with the flat of his sword, roaring:
“That lord is a great lord. He is a hero. The men will follow him. He thinks of Galdan Khan as an insect. No fear of Galdan Khan has he!”
“No fear has he,” echoed others.
“I will go!” cried Aruk, and his voice was followed by many others.
In this way did Hugo offer to defend the mountain pass. The thought had come to him that these people were after all the people to whom his brother had ministered, and if they were slain the work that Paul had done would be lost.
CHAPTER V
The Bed of Monsieur le Comte
G{{uc|aldan Khan, general of the Turco-Kalmuck army, was not disturbed when for three days he received no couriers from the mirzas who had captured Kob. The mirzas were officers who would rather fight battles than report them.
With pardonable pride he watched the van of his well-trained army surmount the slope of the Altai, cutting away trees on either side of the trail through the timber belt to make room for his wagon-train, and bridging over the freshets. He planned to make the passage of the Urkhogaitu in one day, so as not to pitch camp in the snow at an altitude where sleep was hard to come by and horses bled at the nostrils.
The approach to the pass was a wide rock plateau, something like a vast Greek theater, from which the glaciers rose on either side to the white peaks that stood against the sky like the banners of Galdan Khan.
From the plateau the advance of his army—irregulars, supported by a regiment of Black Kalmucks—filed into the ravine that ascended to the Urkhogaitu. One curve in the ravine, and they would be at the summit of the pass.
Galdan Khan announced that the plateau was an auspicious spot—he would break his fast there while his men crossed the pass. It was a clear day, the sky as blue as the kaftan of a dandy of Samarkand. Pleased with himself, Galdan drank spirits and chewed dates.
Came one of the stunted, skin-clad irregulars who prostrated himself.
“O lord of the mountains, there is a great crevice in the pass that we can not surmount.”
“Bridge it,” growled the khan, “with rocks and the bodies of wagons from the rear.”
The man hurried off, but presently there was a stir among the officers under the standards, a murmur of whispering, and a helmeted bey of the Kalmuck regiment approached his leader. Men, hostile to Galdan, held the other side of the crevice. They would not be dislodged by arrows; horsemen could not get at them.
Angrily Galdan spat dates from between his sharpened teeth.
“Let a company of janizaries climb into and over the ditch; let the horsemen cover them with arrow-flights. Begone, dog, and if you value your head do not delay the march!”
But the march was very much delayed that day. The Kalmuck bey died at the ravine with many scores before Galdan decided to ride up and see for himself what was holding up his advance.
When he rounded the turn in the ravine he growled under his breath. Here the glacier sides rose steeply, and the footing—the bottom of the pass was the dry bed of a watercourse—was treacherous. Snow was everywhere save on a massive rampart of rocks built on the far side of the broad ditch, rising to the height of three spears.
Both flanks of the rampart were protected by rough towers of stones fitted together, as broad as they were high. Flanking the towers were the moraines, where no man could stand on the ice.
When Galdan saw that the ditch had been blown out of the frozen earth with gunpowder, he was puzzled. An organized force of his enemies stood against him. Yet there should be no enemies between him and the victorious mirzas.
He ordered a storm, by Turkish spearmen, and withdrew behind the bend in the ravine. It was well he did so. Cannon roared in the pass, and the groans of wounded rose into the air.
At noon the mirza of the Turks came to Galdan wrathfully.
“Lord,” he cried, “send your own men against the wall of rocks. Mine are lying in the pass, slain by arrow and cannon while they climbed the ravine. “The river of the pass runs again—with blood!”
Galdan snarled and laid hand on sword. Remembering that he must have the aid of the Turks, he stifled his rage. He learned for the first time that two pieces of artillery were in the hands of his foes—one in each tower, so that they cross-raked the narrow chute leading up to the ditch.
“Send men to climb the slopes above the rampart,” he ordered.
The Turk sneered.
“By Allah, the all-wise, do you think my soldiers are birds, to fly up a slope of ice!”
“Then stand aside,” growled the Kalmuck. “Tomorrow I will pitch my tent beyond the pass.”
After thinking for a while, he ordered scouts to be sent out on either flank to explore the near-by slopes of the Altai for another way into the plain of Tartary.
It was dusk when they returned, wearied, and reported that single men might perchance climb the snow summits here and there, but the army with its horses, its wagon-train and cannon must go through the Urkhogaitu or not at all.
The lips of Galdan Khan smiled, but he did not touch the food that was brought to his pavilion on the plateau. He had learned that there were but twice a hundred defenders in the pass. Well, he would crush them like ants upon a stone.
He wondered how the stone fort had come to be built. It was contrary to the custom of the haphazard Tatars.
He did not know that for three days and nights before his coming, two hundred men had grappled with the stones of the ravine, mortaring them together with moist dirt, thrown up by the explosion of mines in the bed of the ravine, and fixing between the stones the pointed trunks of trees, under the orders of a man who knew more about fortification than Galdan Khan.
For three days the big Buriats had labored, trembling with fatigue in the thin air, bleeding at the hands and ears, sleeping only fitfully and chilled by the cutting wind that swept the pass, scarce warmed by fires of pine branches. They had been cursed by their commander, beaten by the flat of his sword.
When the hundred paces of massive rampart had been built, and the wide ditch excavated, they murmured when he commanded the erection of towers for the cannon that, plundered from Kob, had just been brought up.
Whereupon the blue-faced commander ordered them to flog each other until they were exhausted. Under the lash of his tongue the bartizans had been erected laboriously. And in the evening of the third day the Frankish commander had approved the work.
“Our bellies are empty, father,” they said. “We can not fight with empty bellies.”
The Frank had foreseen this, and ordered them—all except a half-dozen sentries that he kept by him at the rampart—to repair to the abode of Aruk down the mountain where there was mutton and huge fires and liquor and a place to sleep in comfort. He wondered when they staggered off whether they would come back.
Before dawn they did come back, and he heard them from quite far away. They were quarreling among themselves, and staggering, though not from weariness this time. They sang guttural songs and roared a demand to be shown their enemy. They clutched their bows and heavy swords and surged round him.
Monsieur le comte drew back his soiled cloak from their touch and snarled at them. And then came Galdan Khan and the first day of the attack.
The dawn of the second day showed a change in the aspect of the ravine. During the night patrols from the Kalmuck camp had almost filled in the ditch with stones, small trees and bodies of the dead. This the Tatars had been unable to prevent.
It was just after sunrise had made clear the outlines of the rampart that the attackers came up the ravine, silently at first, then with a clamor of kettle-drums and wailing of pipes as if to frighten the defenders by the very noise.
They ran full into arrow-flights that splintered shields and tore through chain armor. Notwithstanding this they pressed forward until there was a yellow flash from each tower and a rain of small shot cut up the ranks in the rear. Now the Kalmucks were accustomed only to round shot, and they gave way with cries and oaths.
But they were reformed by the beys and advanced again, this time with picked men in the front ranks. These crossed the ditch and began to climb the steep slope of the rampart, despite the slow discharges of the cannon.
They were met with battle-ax and sword from above, and, clinging to the sharp rocks, could use their spears only at a disadvantage. Those who gained the top of the rocks were hurled back on their comrades.
It was, for a time, a hand-to-hand affair in which the steel helmets and mail shirts of the struggling defenders saved them from being cut to pieces by the spears and simitars of the Kalmucks and Turks.
The sun was high enough to cast its light full into the ravine, and Galdan Khan, seeing that the fort was on the verge of falling, had ordered up fresh clans from the plateau, when the explosion came.
The rock walls of the gorge echoed thunderously, and a pall of smoke rose from the center of the Kalmuck ranks. Stones hurled into the air fell back upon the bodies of dazed men.
As he had done more than once before, Hugo had constructed a mine midway down the ravine, bringing a powder-train, deep in the frozen earth where the moisture of the snows could not penetrate, back to the rampart. He did not know, of course, whether the powder-train would burn.
But the mine had gone off. Probably Hugo himself had not foreseen the full consequences of this. The shock of the explosion displaced masses of ice and rock on the morains at either side. Single stones falling from the buttresses that led to the peaks carried others along with them.
The echoes were still in the air when the crashing of the boulders began. One of the towers of the Tatar fort was wrecked. The Tatars themselves, protected by the stone mound, did not suffer greatly; but the havoc among the Kalmucks was a grim thing. Bodies lay where men had stood a moment before. Then the bodies were covered with glacier ice. Stones still muttered and rolled down the length of the ravine.
The thinned groups of Kalmucks that made their way back down the gorge looked like men fording a river of snow. They had no thought but to escape from the rocks before a second blast went off.
Never having experienced a mine before, it was a blow to their morale; and the avalanches seemed to them to be the work of demons.
Galdan Khan knew otherwise. After midday prayers that day, he sent a Kalmuck officer with a white flag up to the gorge and the rampart. For the first time it had come to the ears of the khan that a Frankish lord commanded the fort on the heights.
The message the Kalmuck bore was for the ears of the Frankish lord alone, and it was brief:
- The prayers and greetings of Galdan, Khan of the Kalmucks, of the Thian Shan, of Sungaria, to the lord commander of the fort. You, lord, have a hundred unwounded men; I have fifty times a thousand. If you keep on fighting beside the Tatar dogs, your bones will never leave the Urkhogaitu; if you surrender to me, I will give you ten thousand thalers and five regiments for your command. You area brave man; I think you are also wise. Salamet!
The Kalmuck added under his breath:
“Lord, there are Greeks and Wallachian officers with Galdan Khan. He will keep his word with you, and will cut off the faces of these, your men, so that no one will know what has passed. Otherwise he will bring up the cannon and make dust of the stones you hide behind.”
Hugo twirled his beard and raised one eyebrow. It was a fair offer, all things considered, and the cold of the Urkhogaitu had eaten into his bones. He had not slept for three days and his eyes were burning in his head.
Taking the Kalmuck away from the staring Tatars, Hugo led him a little down the ravine to the point where they could see the northern plain. Some herds of Tatar cattle were visible; but no smoke rose from the villages, and the quiet was ominous to the eyes of the invader.
“Tell Galdan Khan what you have seen,” smiled Hugo. “Say that he will never see his mirzas again. On the first clear night I will come into his lines and speak with him.”
But on that night, and for three days, no men crossed the rampart of the stone fort. Clouds gathered, above and below the pass. Snow came, and hail.
The loose snow in the pass was covered with an icy coating at the touch of the wind that screamed through the walls of the Urkhogaitu. The temperature dropped many degrees; and the few sentries on either side were changed often, or they would have frozen to death.
Truly was the pass the Gate of the Winds—the winds that brought with them the cold of outer space, and snow. Attackers and defenders alike retreated down below the snow-line and camped under the canopy of the forest, Galdan Khan going down to the main body of his troops among the foothills, and Hugo to the camp of Aruk, where his men slept, allowing their wounds to heal.
On the sixth night of the siege the stars were clearly to be seen. The snow-flurries passed from the peaks of the Altai, leaving the white pinnacles framed against the sky in the light of a three-quarters moon.
Promptly Hugo returned to his battlement with his Tatars and some others who had come up to the pass for news.
Hugo, his tattered cloak wound around his tall figure, stood in the snow of a tower-top and stared reflectively into the gleams and shadows of the ravine. In the half-light he could see no bodies; for the storm had blanketed the slain, and the dark outline of a frozen limb or a rusted weapon was softened by the moon.
The wind, gentle now, stirred in the ragged beard of monsieur le comte and caressed his hot eyes. He lifted his eyes to the stars, picking out the ones he knew.
It reminded him of a night when he had made the rounds of the guard on the walls of a mountain fort in the Pyrenees. There had been snow on the ground, and he remembered a chapel bell that tolled during an all-night mass. But he had listened, then, to the song of a woman in the château of the town—a fair woman, that.
He hummed to himself the air of the chanson, twirling his mustache with a hand that trembled from the cold—
“O mon amante—sachons cueillir”
Well, the woman, whose slipper he had kissed, was no doubt dead—as dead as the soft-hearted Paul who had prayed. for her soul.
“Paul,” murmured Hugo, making a sweeping bow with his hat—on which the plumes were quite bedraggled—“I commend her to you, a beautiful and a virtuous woman. There were few like her, my brother. Paul, will you tell me why in the name of the I should waste my life on these brats of yours back yonder, these Tatars who make but sorry Christians at best? That would be but a foolish end to a career that at least has had its distinctions.”
Replacing his hat, for he was cold, Hugo reasoned tranquilly, although the rarefied air, as always, made him a little dizzy. Galdan Khan would bring up his cannon. A slow and difficult matter that, and not much gain in the end. But another assault over the ravine floor, leveled by the snow, and over the broken rampart—Galdan Khan would take the fort, such as it was, on the morrow.
Well and good. Then why should Hugo stay where he was, like a cow in the butcher's pen?
“That is not how I would choose to be remembered at court,” he reflected. “Monseigneur the cardinal—if he is still monseigneur the cardinal—would laugh over his cards at such a droll thing. And then every one else would smile because, forsooth, monseigneur made a jest. That would be droll. Perhaps they have forgotten Hainault. By the horns of Panurge, if I should return”
Hugo laughed, reflecting that the soul of Pierre would be offended, up among the stars; for Pierre, the valet, had always believed that monsieur le comte would never break his word even to a Tatar.
Well, it was too cold to stand there any longer. So Hugo, his long sword clanking at his side, strode down to where his men had gathered in a black bulk behind the rampart. For the first time they had horses in the pass, one to each man.
They numbered a hundred and twenty, Hugo counted. Respectfully they waited for him to speak.
“Eh, my dogs,” he cried, “have you your weapons? Have you eaten well!”
“Father, we have.”
“And each warrior has a horse? Good. It is time—time. Will you come with me, my dogs?”
A guttural murmur answered him.
“Aye, father. We will go with the Wolf-Chaser.”
Tugging at his mustache, Hugo slapped Aruk on the back, a twinkle in his eye. He no longer minded the smell of sheep that exuded from the Tatars.
“You will do better in the saddle than behind a wall, eat me if you won't. You have called me Wolf-Chaser. Eh, we will look for the wolf.”
So saying, Hugo mounted a shaggy pony that made its way with some difficulty over the rocks of the rampart on the hard-packed snow. The others followed irregularly.
They headed down the ravine toward the Kalmucks. Keeping close to one side of the ravine, they were within the shadow, and the snow dulled the sound of the horses' hoofs. So it was some time before a shape rose in the shadow to challenge them.
Two Tatars spurred past Hugo and cut down the Kalmuck sentry, with only a dull clink of steel on mail.
Other figures were stirring, though, down the ravine, which was broader here where they neared the bend in the gorge. Hugo quickened to a trot.
A pistol flashed and roared, echoing from the rocks.
The Kalmuck patrol shouted and turned to run; but they were afoot, and the riders from the upper gorge caught them up at the curve in the ravine. A few blows, and the bodies of the Kalmucks sprawled in the snow.
“Swiftly now,” instructed Hugo.
The Kalmuck camp in the plateau into which the ravine gave, was occupied only by two regiments of foot. These ran from their tents, snatching up the first weapon to hand as the Tatar horsemen reached the lines of the encampment. A few muskets barked, and arrows flickered in the moonlight.
The Tatars shot their arrows as they galloped, for here the snow surface was level. Their beasts crashed in among the tents, trampling belated sleepers—for an attack from above had not been thought of.
Over the horses' heads sabers flashed and rose again. Men leaped to grapple with the riders. The fight was silent, except for the scream of an injured horse or the wild shout of a Tatar who felt death.
More slowly now, the horses pressed forward. Old Ostrim, shooting the last of his arrows, drew an iron war-club and laid about him.
“Hai!” he muttered. “Taste this, wolves.”
His arm was caught, and a tall Sungar warrior buried a knife in the chest of the falconer. Ostrim was pulled from his horse and disappeared.
Many had fled from the camp, believing themselves lost. But when the struggle had spread to the center of the tents, other warriors began to appear, running up from below where the main body of the Kalmucks had taken alarm. The tangled knots of men had been pushed almost to the edge of the plateau, and more than once a horse or man crashed off to fall on the rocks below.
The cries of “Hai!” grew fainter, and fewer horsemen were to be seen. Reinforcements came up to the Kalmucks, but the Tatars did not give ground, choosing instead to die where they were.
Galdan Khan, riding up with his officers, heard from fugitives what had happened.
“It is the Frankish lord,” they cried. “He has come to seek you.”
Starting, the khan clenched his fist. For three days he had pondered the message sent back by Hugo, wondering whether the Frank meant to come over to him.
“He has slain a score,” reported those who approached the khan. “His sword is like a spear, and we can not slay him. He looks for you, and shouts that he has kept his word to you.”
But, being a prudent man, Galdan Khan did not desire to face Hugo. So the chief of the Turks remained below the plateau until the fighting was at an end. Meanwhile it was only too clearly to be seen that the courage of his men was shaken, that they stared uneasily into the pass where they had encountered once too often the grim visage of death.
It was late the next day when a crowd of Tatars rode up the trail toward the pass, from Kob. They found the débris of the fort, on which perched Aruk, the keeper of the gate, his shoulder slashed in two, his armor cut and bloodied.
Beside him stood a single Tatar, a Buriat, looking down the gorge to the south. By the fire the two had kindled, a badly wounded man lay, moving restlessly. Yet the snow around them was unstained and marked only by the hoofs of scores of horses.
The khan of the Buriats strode to Aruk.
“The work at Kob is finished—the wolves scattered,” he said. “What of the pass, O keeper of the gate?”
“Galdan Khan has gone back to his own land.”
Galdan Khan was a shrewd man. News leaked in to him, brought by stragglers over the Altai, that the mirzas were cut up and their followers scattered. Including the affair at the plateau, he had lost two thousand warriors at the pass. Meanwhile he knew the Tatar clans had gathered in the northern plain, heartened by victory. His men, disheartened by the night attack, were murmuring.
So Galdan Khan knew that the hour for the conquest of Tatary had passed.
“What of Hugo, the Krit?” asked the Buriat khan, when he had heard the details of the defense of the pass.
Aruk pointed to the single sentry who stood over a figure covered by a cloak that had once been elegant with bows and satin lining. The khan of the Buriats drew back the cloak and looked into the dead face of Hugo. He lifted his hand toward the rocks of the gorge.
“He kept his word,” he said.
Aruk nodded.
“Aye, did I not say he was a falcon, a wolf-chaser? Kai. It is so.”
“It is so,” echoed the Tatars.
After consulting together they buried the body of Hugo beside that of his brother the priest, in the flame-blackened hut where the crucifix was still to be seen over the altar. In this fashion did Hugo and Paul come to sleep in the same bed.
In time the name of Hugo of Hainault, and that of Paul his brother, were forgotten in the stirring of the troubled land of their birth. But the children of Aruk and Yulga and their children after them came to the hut, repeating prayers that grew more indistinct with time because they did not know the meaning of the words.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in 1922, before the cutoff of January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1962, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 61 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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