Horsemen of the Sands Read online

  About half a minute passed and suddenly the white filly gave a joyous whinny, tossed back her head, as if sensing her master’s approach, shuddered, and under the sudden weight nearly sat back on her hind legs. Boliji realized that an invisible rider had swept into her silver-embellished saddle.

  “He’s here!” the lama exclaimed.

  One man, bow-legged, with the face of a half-breed, separated himself from the group of officers. Carrying a rifle, he walked straight at the crowd, which parted in fright before him, stopped twenty paces or so from the spot where Ungern was sitting, cocked the trigger, and turning around, standing, aimed at his chiang-chun.

  In the silence the clever uncle said, “I can’t look! I have to close my eyes.”

  Ungern’s pale eyes looked calmly at the officer prepared to fire.

  “Ready…fire!” he ordered, like a hero whose last wish was to give the command for his own execution.

  A shot rang out.

  Ungern remained sitting in the same pose, only a smile appeared on his face, which had grown a ruddy stubble.

  “Glorious shall you be, oh great one!” proclaimed the lama, raising his arms before the white filly.

  “Hoom!” the uncle responded.

  Many, in terror, chimed in:

  “Hoom! Hoom!”

  The Cossacks and Mongols were standing by the fires, and the officers were in a cluster smoking off to the side, but they were watching, too. Only one man, totally disinterested in what was going on, amused himself by aiming his knife at the tallest of the hitching posts.

  “Kozlovsky! Stop it!” one of his companions begged him, but he kept it up.

  The steel buried itself deep in the rotted wood, and the heavy hilt trembled when abruptly halted in flight. As it entered, the blade parted the wood fibers, pressing out the moisture from yesterday’s rain. The officer wiped it off the metal with two fingers, gripped the knife by the point, and hurled it again, as if he wanted to find out how many times the water would appear on the post.

  “Once more!” Ungern ordered.

  The half-breed who had fired at him looked around at the crowd.

  “Someone come to me.”

  The uncle, first to realize why, ran up, stood behind his back, craned his neck, and earnestly squinted with one eye in order to be convinced and to testify that the rifle barrel was aimed accurately at its target.

  “At the heart!” he announced, pounding the left side of his chest.

  A shot rang out again, but this bullet, too, disappeared as harmlessly as the first. The shot bolt clanked, and an empty cartridge somersaulted to the grass. Boliji wanted to pick it up, but the half-breed pushed him aside, picked up the cartridge, and put it in his pocket.

  Indicating to whom he owed his salvation, Ungern gratefully raised the silk gau with the image of the White Elder to his lips.

  “Sagan-Ubugun, oh!” the uncle said ecstatically. “We know!”

  The half-breed offered him the rifle.

  “Do you want to fire yourself?”

  The uncle took fright and hid in the crowd.

  “Who wants to fire at the chiang-chun?” the bespectacled lama asked.

  No one replied. He raised his voice.

  “Whoever wants to should be brave and come up! Don’t be afraid!”

  Boliji’s mother squeezed his hand tight from agitation.

  “Mama, don’t crush my hand like that, it hurts,” he asked.

  She relaxed her fingers and Boliji broke away and rushed toward the lama, but he couldn’t utter a word, merely pointed his finger at his own chest. His mother gasped and rushed after him but was stopped.

  “You’re a brave boy.” The lama smiled. “A child’s eye is sharp, a child’s soul knows not deception. Take the rifle, boy, and shoot.”

  Boliji took the rifle held out to him and nearly dropped it, it was so heavy.

  “Lie down. Shoot lying down,” the half-breed said.

  Boliji hugged the rifle and lay down with it on the sheep-cropped grass when he suddenly remembered that this was someone else’s rifle and he had to explain to it who it should obey. Once again he stood up, leaving the rifle on the ground and lowered his trousers in order to pee on the barrel, as his father always had before the hunt, but he couldn’t squeeze a drop out.

  The half-breed lay him on the ground.

  “Put a hand here, and this one here.”

  When the butt was resting on his shoulder, his index finger couldn’t reach the trigger, so he had to move the rifle back. The sight was jumping around, and Boliji saw before him the terrible white eyes of the mangys, the hungry evil spirit. He aimed between them and whispered, “Don’t protect him, Sagan-Ubugun! He killed my father, and I’m going to kill him. Go away from him, Sagan-Ubugun! Stand far away from him! All my milk skins will be yours. I won’t eat a single one!”

  The butt wasn’t poking into his shoulder and there was no recoil. After firing, Boliji jumped up and immediately buried his face in his mother’s belly, who leaned over him and wept, hugging him and breathing in his ear.

  “The demons protect him, my son!”

  “This is your son?” Ungern asked.

  “Yes,” the mother said.

  “Why did your son want to kill me?”

  She didn’t answer. Ungern shifted his gaze to Boliji.

  “Come here, boy.”

  He did.

  “Why did you want to kill me? What bad thing have I done to you?”

  Looking at the ground, Boliji rolled a pebble with his bare foot and said nothing. Ungern sat him down by his side and put his arm around his shoulders.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Boliji.”

  “Don’t be afraid, Boliji. Tell the truth. Did you want to kill me?”

  Boliji moved his lips without making a sound. Ungern started laughing and said loudly, “He says he wanted to kill me!

  “No!” his mother exclaimed, but Ungern didn’t even look in her direction.

  “Bezrodny! Shoot him!” he ordered the half-breed.

  His mother screamed and grabbed the rifle. She was dragged off. Boliji darted away, but Ungern held him firmly by the elbow, maintaining an arm’s length from him so as not to catch the bullet himself. Two Chahars twisted his mother’s elbows, she arched her back and wailed, and her cap fell to the ground. The shot rang out, and for a couple of seconds Boliji sat erect, until Ungern stopped holding him up. His eyes rolled back, his throat gurgled, and he fell face first on the mat. A dark patch of vomit spread on the light-colored felt.

  With one finger, Ungern lifted his chin, then slapped him on the cheeks.

  “It’s all right, boy. It’s all right.”

  They released his mother, and she picked up Boliji like a baby, in her arms, kissed him, and wiped his mouth.

  “Mama, there’s your cap,” he said. “You lost your cap.”

  Ungern tore up a clump of grass, cleaned his vomit-stained boot, and rose to his feet, saying, “The boy is alive because Sagan-Ubugun protects everyone I say to.”

  The half-breed shifted his rifle to the side. There was a shot, and a shaggy mutt wandering around nearby leapt up, yelped, and dragged himself across the sand, leaving a bloody trail. When he fell still, Ungern started untying his deel sash. Untied and shook it out. Lumps of metal sprinkled down on the mat with a weak jingle.

  “Come closer,” he invited.

  At first the boldest came up, and the rest started pressing forward little by little, crowding the daredevils who were using all their strength to hold on at the edge of the mat and not step on the felt, where only the chiang-chun sat. Lying on the mat were three spent bullets and one intact and shiny. Its tip wasn’t even blunted.

  Collecting them with the tip of his boot, Ungern said that these bullets had been flattened on the palm of Sagan-Ubugun and gotten caught in his sash, and in the same way thousands upon thousands of bullets aimed at him by the Reds would fall, powerless to do him harm. The war would be long, but how c
ould someone be conquered before whom the great Sagan-Ubugun himself holds up his palm? Today he had held it perfectly still and simply caught the bullets in flight, crushed them in his fingers, and tossed them behind his sash, but if a true enemy were to fire, Sagan-Ubugun would repel the fired bullet and send it back, straight into the shooter’s heart.

  “When I return,” Ungern promised, “that day will be a day of joy for good people and a day of grief for the evil people who have accepted the red faith and betrayed the yellow.”

  He put the three flattened bullets in his pocket but the fourth, the intact one, he rolled in his fingers with a disgruntled look. The omnipotent, omniscient White Elder understood, of course, what Boliji had decided to do and had saved him only at Ungern’s request, because he hadn’t crushed the last bullet, leaving it as it had been.

  “Catch!”

  Ungern threw it at Boliji, who managed to catch it, but his mother slapped his hand.

  “Throw it away!”

  Boliji shook his head.

  She tried to unclench his fist, but he jerked his hand away, sticking the bullet in his mouth and clenching his teeth. He suddenly saw Jorgal running toward him, but his mother hadn’t noticed him. Swearing and sobbing, she tried to get her finger behind Boliji’s cheek to dig out the cursed bullet, and he nearly swallowed it, seeing Jorgal fall to his knees before Ungern and touch his brow to the ground.

  “Who are you?” Ungern asked, not recognizing him.

  Jorgal pointed to Boliji.

  “His brother. My brother wanted to kill you because you killed our father. Our father didn’t want to give me my horse, and you killed him.”

  “Ah,” Ungern recalled.

  “I ran away from you, and now I’ve come back. I’ve seen your strength and I won’t run away anymore. Take me into your army, General sir!”

  4

  IN THE PHOTOGRAPH, Jorgal had fat cheeks, a small mouth, and a whimsically etched upper lip.

  “He was young,” Boliji said, “but smart. Born in the Year of the Snake.”

  He picked up an empty glass, turned it over on the table, and explained, tapping the knife tip against it.

  “Here’s the suburgan, and this is where Ungern was sitting. Our yurt was very close by.”

  Boliji pushed the tin lid we were using as an ashtray toward the glass, but then he changed his mind and instead put the saucer of blood pudding there.

  “A good yurt,” he added. “Big.”

  The lid couldn’t give me an idea of the yurt’s dimensions; only the saucer could do that. Around its rim, framed by a wreath of spikes of grain, there was an inscription: “Communal dining enterprises under fire from worker self-criticism!”

  Boliji laid the knife between the saucer and glass.

  “Here’s the road he ran down. I wanted to shout, ‘Jorgal!’ But the bullet in my mouth got in the way. We couldn’t understand what he’d got into his head.”

  I put the silk packet on my palm. The amulet was weightless, like a fallen autumn leaf, but from its incorporeality, and airy, aged dryness, which strangely contradicted the crude material power Boliji had ascribed to it, arose a superstitious doubt that the laws of nature have acted with equal inevitability throughout history’s entire expanse.

  THEY SLEPT A FEW HOURS, no more. It had barely grown dark, and Bezrodny, as ordered, woke Ungern.

  “Get up, Your Excellency. It’s time.”

  In order to confuse the trail, they moved eastward, but at about ten versts from Hara-Shulun they turned south. At first, the detachment stretched out over the steppe; some lagged behind, some rushed ahead, but soon enough the horses and horsemen were hard on each others’ heels. They rode closely, which made the detachment seem quite tiny, helpless, and lost in the night. A narrow, living stripe held together by human and equine warmth, outside of which there was nothing but wind and death.

  Kozlovsky whipped his horse and drew even with Ungern.

  “One question, Roman Fyodorovich. We overtake the division, and then where?”

  “Where would you like?”

  “Manchuria, like everyone else. I have a wife in Harbin.”

  “You mean you’re married?”

  “I got married last year.”

  “In vain. A true warrior shouldn’t have a family. Concern for your kin diminishes your bravery.”

  “Guilty, but you have a wife, too, after all,” Kozlovsky noted, knowing, actually, that the baron had married the Manchurian Princess Chi out of political calculation, not love.

  “Not anymore,” Ungern replied. “I divorced her before the Urga campaign.”

  Both fell silent. Under the moon, the wind drove the grass into waves of silver, and farther on everything drowned in gloom. The steppe was like a giant, blackened cauldron, hollow and resonant, and only on the very bottom did there remain a handful of millet grains from the already eaten skilly – forty horsemen.

  Among them, rattling in his saddle, was Naidan-Dorji. From time to time his eyelids would close and he would fall into a deep sleep that lasted all of a few moments, and then the singing of the wind, the burbling of horse spleens, and the even murmur of grass under hoof were transformed into the voices of people he had once known but were now thousands of versts away. Russian words interspersed with Mongolian and Tibetan, and then, all of a sudden, he distinctly heard French.

  A Siamese prince was speaking French, and in his dream Naidan-Dorji immediately recognized his voice. This elegant little man dressed in European fashion and, with knowledge of the Russian seasons in Paris and the Entente Cordiale, had paid an official visit to Russia before the war. He had been brought to the capital by French battleship and had attended the ballet at the Mariinsky Theater with greater enthusiasm than he did the hural in the Buddhist temple on Elagin Island. As a coreligionist, Naidan-Dorji accompanied him on his tour of Petersburg’s sights. It was slushy and one large puddle had flooded the entire width of the University Embankment, from which point the high-ranking visitor admired the view of the Neva. Before a motorcar drove up, two of his attendants, wearing matching jackets, blindingly white shirts, and ties, calmly lay down in the puddle while the prince, equally unperturbed, walked over their backs to a dry spot, after which he informed his Russian companions about the hermit who in his century-long isolation let his hair grow to the ground and at the necessary moment used it to cover the mud under Gautama Buddha’s feet.

  Naidan-Dorji had told Ungern this legend not long before, after bringing up the Prince of Siam. “All earthly lords,” he added, “make the identical mistake. They want people to cover the road before them with their own hair, but they don’t let them grow their hair out in peace and make do with a proffered back.”

  Unfortunately, the baron was deaf to these kinds of allegories. He listened to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, its Three Jewels, and its Eightfold Path to salvation, but it bored him. On the other hand, he was eager to learn everything about magical tantric ceremonies; he memorized the spells Naidan-Dorji wrote for him in Cyrillic. Of Gautama Buddha’s innumerable titles, he most liked this one: He who has sharpened the nails of his feet on the heads of the rulers of the three worlds.

  Naidan-Dorji suspected that his pupil dreamed of doing the very same thing but reassured himself by saying that you can’t let a bird go free without catching it first, and you can’t accord the world to natural development without first conquering it. They were both traveling the same road, together turning the wheel of the teaching, although they saw something different at the end of their journey. Untruth was a bridge over the gaping chasm after the defeat at Troitskosavsk, but Naidan-Dorji believed that he himself would destroy that bridge the moment he found himself on the other side.

  The three eyes in a peacock’s feather symbolized the three worlds, he thought. First was the earth, where soon, from sea to sea, the yellow religion would reign and where they were now galloping off into the unknown, trying to save themselves from the Reds. The second world was heaven, and th
e third the invisible realm. Whoever came to know all three would discover the truth in himself.

  Naidan-Dorji was fully awake. The moon was hidden in the clouds, and the invisible realm began an arm’s length away.

  Traveling on his left, tied to his saddle, was the white mare. With a swan’s neck and a mane like smoke, she flew lightly, playfully, and raced ahead – alarming Naidan-Dorji’s meek pacer. Jorgal riding behind did not take his eyes off her, trying to discern the silhouette of the invisible rider over her spine. He wanted to see Sagan-Ubugun and finally did see a transparent shadow rise from the saddle, expanding wider and wider, higher and higher – to the very sky. The darkness behind her faded away, and the rare stars became pale, blocked by this shadow.

  Ungern galloped ahead, and his back seemed like stone.

  “Get away from him, Sagan-Ubugun!” Jorgal pleaded. “You know he brings death. Why are you protecting him from death?”

  Dozing off, Naidan-Dorji’s head again dropped to his chest. Jorgal caught up to him and as he galloped, imperceptibly undid the white mare’s rein from his saddle. Freed, she joyously rushed forward, but didn’t go far, prancing at the head of the detachment until someone ran her down and handed the rein to Naidan-Dorji.

  Jorgal realized it wasn’t time yet. His heart sank from shame that he had destroyed his father and was powerless to take revenge on his killer, but even more terrible was the thought that the immortal man’s war would never end. Please, do battle if you yourself are also gentle, like all men. But if there is no death for you, stay home and do not call others to war.

  TOWARD DAWN the log roads, sheep yards, and octagonal summer huts of the wealthy ulus of Halgai appeared between the hills. Kozlovsky proposed skirting it so that the Reds wouldn’t be able to pick up their trail, but Ungern headed his steed toward the enclosure’s gates.