The Wolf Master/Chapter 18

ADA could be surprizingly patient. Her father had taught her that there is an end to everything. She talked, low-voiced, to the big bay charger that pricked up his ears and surged forward gallantly when she noticed him; she crooned at the eagles that flickered past the forest mesh, and she hunted wild turkeys with a bow while she waited for the black rage to leave Kirdy and the ascent of the Earth Girdle to end.

At evening—for the Cossack pressed on, and cooked only one meal in the day—she plucked a turkey or roasted a deer's quarter and made barley and cheese cakes for them both, while Kirby attended to the horses. Only once did he speak.

“This companion of Otrèpiev—who is he?”

Nada, bending over the lire, made answer quietly.

“One of the Tsar's dogs.”

Then Kirdy knew that the man with the false Tsar was an executioner—one of the torturers kept by the Muscovite lords. Otrèpiev had chosen a motley court to go upon his exile, and now, except for the interpreter of dreams, only this man garbed in black and armed with a two-handed sword—Kirdy had caught a glimpse of him during the fighting in the Turkoman camp—remained at the fugitive's side.

Nada's quick eyes missed nothing of the ascent. She knew when the birches and alders gave place to blue firs that they were near the end of the tayga and near the spot where the fire had been seen. Ahead of them the mountain slopes closed in, and down this gorge a bitter wind howled as if it were a watch-dog chained in the cut of the mountain.

She knew when Kirdy found the scattered ashes of the fire two days old. For an hour he examined the earth in a wide circle about the spot, and though Nada could see nothing at all in the ground, a sudden tensing of his dark brow and flicker of the thin lips told her that he had made certain that Otrèpiev had gone up the gorge. She had learned to read his face, if not his thoughts.

“Sleep, Nada,” he ordered her. “We will rest and the horses will roll and graze.”

By this she was aware that the fever had left him, and she did sleep, drawing her sheepskins about her against the chill breath of that wind—the sleep of the young and weary. But at times she heard the Cossack moving about, and the crackle of a growing fire, and the neighing of horses led to water. Near at hand a stream tore down the mountain side between black boulders—a stream that foamed, milky white. And Nada, who knew nothing of glacier-fed streams, was astonished because this one had roared past when she lay down in the late afternoon, and did no more than murmur when she roused at sunrise.

Kirdy, who never seemed to sleep—after that first night in the storm when she had held his head on her knee—led the way into the teeth of the wind.

That day they left the last, stunted trees behind, and the short grass changed to a mossy growth that clung to the rocks, and the sides of the gorge became sheer cliffs that rose higher until the face of the sun was hidden. They saw the bones of a horse, from which foul-smelling vultures flapped up lazily.

Once they circled the pool under a thousand-foot waterfall—the source of the stream that had given them water for the last day. The sun's rays reached the sum- mit of the narrow fall, and tinted the spray in an arc of color that made the girl gasp.

Then, when the roar of the fall had dwindled to a distant reverberation, Kirdy heard her singing against the voice of the wind:

And, though he pushed ahead without a word, he was troubled. This was the song of Cossack captives, who went in chains to distant lands. He wondered why Nada had chosen it, and whether sickness had touched her.

That night she slept like the dead, and Kirdy tended the fire at her feet—the glimmer of a fire, fed by the wood one pony had packed up from the forest. And while he watched, he listened to the twin voices of the Earth Girdle—the strident cry of the wind gusts and the moan of the waterfall.

In spite of the wind's breath, the fire burned badly, unaccountably so. And when he filled the pot with water and tried to boil the Tatar tea brick in it, he could not do so. Kirdy set this down to the working of the evil spirits that must frequent such a place.

Although he got up, to walk stiffly up and down between the boulders, drowsiness clutched at him and was not to be shaken off. So, when at last he seated himself by the unconscious girl, his head slipped forward on his chest. He had to struggle for breath. Almost at once the two voices of the pass swelled in volume, and strange words came to the Cossack's ears:

''“Ai-a—come and see! The night birds await thee! Many have come! Come thou!”''

That was the cry of the night wind.

''“Oho-ho-o! What lies beyond the Gate? A grave. She will ride to the end of the road, but if ill befalls thee, what of her?” ''

Such was the warning roar that came up from the fall.

''“She will lead thee astray—wait and see. We have seen her before and we know—”''

''“Fool—she trusts thee. Turn back! What hope is there for the blind?”''

Then the wind's note changed swiftly to the clang of war cymbals and the monotone of the fall to the mutter of drums. The Cossack heard the clashing of shod hoofs on stones, the snapping of standards, the creaking of great wagons drawn by yoked oxen, and the roaring battle shout of riders.

The pass was filled with moving shadows and sound. Under the space of starlight above him gleamed the weapons of a host. He heard the snarling of laden camels, the snorting of horses, and the clang and clash of shields.

This, he thought, must be the Golden Horde coming up from its city. And surely he heard a deafening shout:

''“Make way—make way! He comes, the Khan of all the Hordes!”''

IRDY sprang up, his limbs chilled and stiff. He peered around him and saw that the line of sky between the rock walls was gray. The roar of the fall had dwindled to a whisper and the fitful wind was no more than a mocking whimper. At his side the horses were stamping and snorting, and Nada, roused by. his sudden movement, lifted her head and smiled at the dawn drowsily.

“If such be the watchers,” the Cossack thought, “at the gate, what will be the folk of the city?”

Before now he had slept on the upper slopes of a mountain range, and at such times dreams had troubled him; breathing had been difficult, and the fire had acted strangely. Whether all this were caused by evil spirits—dreaded by the Tatars—or by the wind and the cold of the heights, he neither knew nor cared. The night was past, the day at hand.

“Did you hear the cymbals and the drums, White Falcon?” the girl asked.

“Aye.”

“The Tatars say that is the Horde, marching through the gate. When they hear it, down below, they are afraid.”

“Nay, little Nada—it was the wind, and the thunder of the fall.”

“Listen!” She smiled at him in the gloom of the gorge. “Now the voice of the fall is only a little voice, and the wind barely stirs.”

“Then it may be that the city is near, and the guards upon the wall sound cymbal and drum at the dawn hour.”

“Do they drive camels through the pass at that hour? Nay, this is the gate!”

She pointed at the sheer rock walls, now growing gray, and Kirdy saw that the pass fell away, to the east. They had camped almost at its highest point. The thought struck him that Otrèpiev and the Muscovite might have turned back and passed them during the night and the two horses, clattering among the stones, might have made the uproar.

But this he did not believe. A man like Otrèpiev would not have passed a fire without investigating, or a half dozen ponies without trying to seize them. Also, the Cossack was certain that a horse coming p the pass—a living horse with a rider would have roused him from his stupor.

If it had been a dream, Nada would not have heard the same sounds, and his ponies would not have been aroused and restless before the first light.

No, he had listened to the passage of an armed host, an array not of mortal men but of ghosts. And it was this Horde of the dead that the Tatars feared. Whence came it, and whither did it ride? What matter? The dead were the dead.

“They paid us no heed!” Nada mused. “Ai, Kirdy, it was surely a warning.”

By now the light was strong enough for him to look closely into her eyes, shadowed by weariness and yet bright with a kind of fever. And he groaned, clutching both hands upon his belt. They were at the gate of the Earth Girdle; beyond might be a barren land where food could not be hunted down.

In his anger, a few nights ago, he had ordered Nada to ride on, with him. Better for her, if she had struck him down with the yataghan! Better, perhaps, if she had kept at Otrèpiev's side.

“Go back, then, little Nada,” he said gruffly. “Aye, the Cossack is mad—he has hurt you. How can you go on, in such a land as this where the spirits ride as a regiment? Take the horses, and—God keep you!”

He took her head in his powerful hands, pressing against the tangle of soft tresses; but his head hung upon his chest, and he did not see her eyes open very wide, or the sudden flush that darkened her skin.

“Whither?” she asked quietly. “Could I, a woman, ride alone with horses through the tribes?”

Again he groaned, thinking that Arslan, the ax-man, who might be relied upon to protect Nada, had run from them.

“Aye,” he said, touching the ikon at her bare throat. “The good Saint Ulass will guard you, as among wolves.”

“Foolish Cossack!” she smiled. “Now we are past the gate, and is there less of peril before than behind? Fool, to have crossed the Earth Girdle! Nay, I think we are near the end of the road. Come, and see.”

As Nada had prophesied, the sides of the gorge fell away, and the trail dipped sharply. Rounding a turn a little after sunrise they came out on a point of rocks and reined in, Kirdy silently, the girl with a quick cry of wonder.

Over the rim of distant mountain ranges the sun glared at them, and all the way to this far-off horizon were ridges and the purple shadows of ranges. Here and there in the nearer valleys the golden beds of lakes flared.

So great was the elevation of the point on which they stood, they could discern no trees or animal life below them. Instead of the gray-green steppes, they stared down at red cliffs and gorges still mist-shrouded. Red and gray, and barren, this land beyond the Earth Girdle might have been shaped by blind and tortured giants.

Nada shaded her eyes and looked down.

“See, my White Falcon, here is the city.”

Kirdy nodded; he had seen it at once and now he leaned on his saddle horn, studying it.

For more than a thousand yards the mountain fell away steeply beneath him—sheer cliffs, at places. At the foot of this descent a plateau extended out. The top of the plateau, or table formation, was fairly level, and he thought that it towered far above the lower valley.

At the plateau's level, the mountain was limestone. And the city of the Golden Horde was the same red and white stone, with bits of gray granite and other rock that glittered—quartz or porphyry.

It was a ruin.

From where the Cossack stood, the twisted streets looked like gullies—the dwellings, piles of crumbled stone. He traced out terraces and bastions, without being able to decide whether they had been wrought by men's hands or by nature. There were patches of green growth and glints of water.

But, running down in long zigzags from the point of rock, was a road, or rather the remnant of a road, covered at spots with rubble and fallen away completely at places. This road was the only way down from the pass.

Tevakel Khan's nomads would no more have built that ramp down the mountainside than nature itself could have done so. At one time men had hewn it out and built it up.

And so, at one time, men must have lived on the plateau. By now he could see the lower valley through the mist—the dense mesh of forest growth that seemed no greater than moss—the lighter green of the valley bed where the mist was clearing, and the brilliance of a lake that looked like a jewel.

The men who had lived upon the rock plateau could have grazed their herds thousands of feet below—or perhaps the plateau was a citadel, a refuge in time of war. Beyond doubt, there was water, wood and game in the valley.

But he could see no solitary sign of man.