The Golden Sabre

‘You have a knack for putting people in their place,’ said Eden, still not retreating. ‘Are there any American Tsars?’

He grinned after her as she stalked off with the two children in tow. Goddam, he thought, how did General Bronevich keep his erection in the face of such scorn? She’d freeze the blood of a cantharides-crazy gorilla. How could he have wondered about her keeping a man warm?

Half an hour later Nikolai came back with two legs of mutton, two loaves of coarse bread, a small bag of potatoes, two full water-skins and three blackened and dented iron pots. And a load of high indignation.

‘Those villagers are capitalist robbers! They saw I was a stranger and everything doubled in price!’

‘You two kids peel the spuds,’ said Cabell; then raised his hand threateningly. ‘Get a move on! There’s going to be no loafers in this commune. Everybody works!’

‘Bloody Bolshevik tyrant,’ said Frederick and ducked just in time as Eden’s handbag came round in a swift whirl at his head.

The meal, when it was finally ready to be eaten, did no more than fill their bellies. ‘We eat much better than this at home,’ said Frederick.

‘Kid, stop complaining. You’re eating now what the workers in this country have been eating for centuries. Sometimes they didn’t get as much as this. If you don’t like it, just tie a knot in your digestive tract and live on air and your memories of what you had back home. But for crissakes shut up and don’t complain!’

The boy sat very still for a moment, then suddenly he sprang up and walked off into the trees. Then Nikolai said quietly, ‘Excuse me,’ and got up and went after Frederick. There was silence for a long moment and Cabell put down the plate of mutton stew. He had three tin plates in his own cooking gear and he had doled out the stew on them, keeping a plate for himself and letting the other four share the other two plates between them. He chewed on the last piece of meat in his mouth and it tasted like soft alum.

‘I’m sorry.’ He looked across at Olga, who sat as stiff and white as a china doll. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt Freddie like that.’

The child said nothing; then she, too, got up and ran off to join her brother and Nikolai. Eden put down her plate. ‘You say a lot of things that are right, Mr Cabell. You should learn to say them so that they don’t hurt people so much. Especially children. Freddie and Olga aren’t old enough yet to be blamed for what’s wrong with Russia.’

‘I know. I’ll go and apologize—’

‘No, leave them while they’re with Nikolai – he’ll comfort them. Talk to Freddie in the morning.’ She stood up, began to gather up the plates. ‘Perhaps it would be better if we went on alone to Tiflis. I don’t think we’re very compatible.’

He looked up at her. She was flushed by the firelight, strands of her hair had fallen down about her face: goddam, he thought, she’s beautiful at times. ‘I’ll sleep on it.’

Later the children came back, said nothing to Cabell but quietly went about helping Eden with the washing-up. Nikolai, also silent, brought in more wood for the fires. Cabell sat with his back against a tree, feeling as much an outsider as he had ever felt in his life before. Once, as Frederick passed by him, he said, ‘Freddie—’; but the boy ignored him and walked on. Cabell felt a flash of anger at being ignored by a child, but he swallowed it. He had learned diplomacy the hard way, but amongst men. Children were a whole new race to him and it was a wonder to him that he had ever belonged to them. He sat quietly against the tree till everyone had settled down for the night, then he got out his sleeping-bag and prepared to crawl into it.

‘Good night, Mr Cabell,’ said Eden from the rear seat of the car. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done today.’

She and the children were sleeping in the car, she and Olga in the rear seat, Frederick in the front. Nikolai, covered with the trailer’s dusty tarpaulin, slept on one side of the car; Cabell in his sleeping-bag was on the opposite side. None of them was comfortable or really warm; the children grumbled sleepily and Eden shifted restlessly. Only Cabell and Nikolai, the one grown accustomed to discomfort, the other born to it, went off to sleep at once.

Eden lay staring at the patches of stars showing through the tops of the firs. She could hear grunting and movement in the forest, but Cabell and Nikolai had lit four small fires around the car and she hoped they would prevent any wild beasts from coming too close to the car. On reflection she was surprised how calmly she was taking the possibility of a bear or wolf coming into their camp. But then the hazards of living had been building slowly ever since August 1914.

She had come a long way from Croydon. Her father and mother, school teachers both, had not objected when she had applied for the advertised job in the Daily Telegraph; after all, they had encouraged her to read about faraway places and other people’s customs. Of course, being Tories, they had been thinking of the Empire and good solid English-speaking stock such as Australians and New Zealanders and had seen her as the governess to some rich sheep farmer’s family; they had visions of her rounding the Australians’ sat-upon vowels and weaning them away from their aboriginal habits. Her mother had had a fit of the vapours and her father an attack of xenophobia when she told them, after the letter had gone off, that the job was with a Russian family in St Petersburg. Foreigners were best left to themselves to find their own way out of their ignorance; Russians were not only foreigners but barbarians as well. Better that she should become a missionary and go out and teach the Zulus or the Australian blackfellows; at least the Empire would gain something from that. But she was a stubborn romantic, the best sort; and in the end she had prevailed. The job was for two years and she had promised to return home at the end of it.

She had applied for a passport, something she had never heard of up till then; Russia and Turkey were the only two countries in the world that required travellers to have them. She had bought a steamer trunk and a suitcase and in September 1913 sailed on a German ship for St Petersburg. The adventure had begun.

She wrote home to tell her parents that the Russians, or anyway the Gorshkovs, were not barbarians. She told them that they would be surprised at how civilized the Russian middle and upper classes were. French (or sometimes English) was often the first language in a household; one spoke Russian only to the servants. The gentlemen bought all their clothes from English shops in St Petersburg; the women went to Paris to buy their dresses, their underwear and their cloaks; only fur coats, for men and women, were made by Russians for the Russian gentry. Why, Prince Frederick, the boy she was teaching, even wore Norfolk jackets, knickerbockers and Eton collars. She had been acclaimed as a gourmet chef when she had given the cook her mother’s recipe for English trifle; the French governess, from the house next door, invited to tea, had thought the trifle was some sort of culinary joke; but she did not tell her mother that. She had written them not to worry: she was in circumstances every bit as civilized as those in Croydon. She did not mention that she was living in a good deal more luxury. She did not think it fair to compare the 20-room house in St Petersburg with the semi-detached house in Croydon. Nor the Corot, Watteau and Fragonard paintings in the big salon with the Landseer and Holman Hunt prints on the parlour walls. Nor did she think it fair to tell them that she could not see herself ever coming home to Croydon to live there forever.

Then August 1914 had come and Igor, Lieutenant Dulenko, went off to war. Her parents had not known of him; she had still been feeling her way, if that was not too indelicate a way of putting it, with a particular man. Then he had gone away …

But now memory failed her, was not strong enough to keep her awake: she fell asleep, worn out by the day. She slept fitfully, memories nibbling at her like mice, and when she woke she was stiff and cold and for a moment completely lost.

Then she sat up and saw Nikolai warming up one of the legs of mutton on a rough wooden spit and Cabell going off to fill the water-skins from the stream. She woke the children and told them to follow Mr Cabell and wash the sleep from their faces.

Cabell had filled one of the water-skins and was dipping the second into the stream when Frederick and Olga came through the trees. He said good-morning to them, but they just nodded stiffly. They knelt down to wash their faces. And the wild boar, grunting and whistling with terrifying loudness, came barrelling down the slope straight at them.

Olga screamed and fell into the water. Frederick jumped across the stream, leaving the way open for the boar to come straight at Cabell. He swung the half-filled water-skin; it hit the boar on the snout and burst open on its tusks. The beast skidded to a stop, blinded by the water; it let out a horrible sound of rage, shaking its head to clear its sight. Cabell grabbed up Olga, flung her over his shoulder and raced for a tree that had fallen down across a gap between two big boulders. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Frederick haring off through the trees towards the camp and he hoped the boar would not follow the boy.

But the boar had already marked its target. It grunted and whistled again, then came straight after Cabell. He knew how fast the beast could move, had gone hunting them north of Baku; but he had never been as close as this to one before. He staggered up on to the nearest boulder, clutching hard at Olga as she slipped off his shoulder. He lost his footing and fell back as the boar came in beneath him. He landed on its back, heard Olga scream right beside his ear; somehow he managed to keep his footing and didn’t fall over. He leaned back against the boulder as the boar, thrown off balance by his landing on its back, went down on its nose and rolled over and over like a circus dog. Cabell scrambled back up on to the rock, hands scrabbling at its rough surface, his knees scraping against it, and fell on to the fallen tree, only just managing to hang on to Olga as she tumbled forward off his shoulder. She was screaming, seemingly without stopping for breath, and her hands were clawing at him like birds’ talons. Somehow he turned round on the tree-trunk, straddled it, feeling the rough bark against the insides of his thighs, and faced the boar as it came up on to the boulder. It paused, grunting and whistling at him, its tiny eyes red with hate, the tusks bobbing up and down as if already tearing into his guts.

It was no more than ten feet from him as he inched carefully back away from it; he could smell it, felt the heat of it. He was frantically trying to keep his balance on the narrow trunk as Olga still screamed and struggled in terror across his shoulder. He could feel his legs and arms beginning to tremble and he wondered if he was going to have the strength to get off the log if the boar hurled itself at him.

It kept putting tentative hooves on to the log, then drawing back. It wanted to be at him, to tear him to pieces with its tusks; but instinct told it it could not keep its footing on the thin round trunk of the tree. Frustration made it rage even more and Cabell, slowly easing his way back, the bark wearing away at the insides of his legs, never taking his eyes off the animal, waited for the boar to hurl itself across the intervening space. Which it all at once did.

He saw it coming at him like a giant blunt-nosed shell; then there was a shot. The boar’s head seemed to blow apart; the hurtling beast slipped sideways in the air. It hit the tree-trunk only two feet in front of Cabell, bounced off and thudded down between the two boulders. It twitched, then lay still.

Cabell, clinging to the still screaming, struggling Olga, saw Eden come out of the trees, one hand holding her shoulder, the other the double-barrelled shotgun. With her was Frederick and, some paces behind, easing his way cautiously out from behind a tree, was Nikolai.

Cabell brought Olga forward from his shoulder, sat her facing him on the log and gently slapped her face. She gasped, drew in her breath; then her screaming quietened to a soft whimpering. Cabell patted her arm, then nodded down at the dead boar beneath them.

‘He won’t worry us any more, Olga. Relax, honey – it’s all over.’

Olga whimpered, gulped, still trembled. Then Nikolai, overcoming his fear, certain now that the boar was dead, came in beneath the tree-trunk and Cabell lowered Olga down to him. Then, very conscious of his chafed thighs, Cabell lifted himself up and walked off the log and slid down the boulder to stand beside Eden and Frederick as they came up to him.

‘Thanks, Eden. We’re even.’ He looked at the dead boar. ‘He even looks a bit like General Bronevich.’

She was massaging her shoulder; trembling a little, too. She would never make such a lucky shot again; she hated to think what would have happened if she had missed. Or if her shot had been wide of the boar but not of Cabell and Olga. ‘I’ve never a fired a gun like this before, only a light one.’

She gave the gun to Frederick, went to Olga and comforted her, leading her away through the trees and back to the camp. Cabell looked at Frederick. ‘That was quick thinking, Freddie, getting Miss Eden here with the gun.’

The boy wanted to be a hero but he was too honest. ‘She was already coming this way with the gun. As soon as she heard Olga scream—’

Cabell put his arm round the boy’s shoulders; only then did he realize how much Frederick had suffered at seeing his sister in danger. The wiry young body was trembling as much as Olga’s had been; all the juvenile arrogance was gone. He wanted the comfort of an adult.

‘Freddie … About last night. I’m sorry. Sometimes my tongue gets away from me. It won’t happen again, if I can help it.’

‘Will you be coming with us then?’

Cabell sighed. ‘I’m afraid I may have to.’

They walked back to the camp, he with his arm still round the boy’s shoulders, while Nikolai, a coward but not insensitive, quietly followed them.

[2]

Pemenov rubbed the insides of his short thighs, feeling the chafing there. It was months since he had ridden a horse for such a distance; he had always travelled with General Bronevich in the car. But he would have to suffer the soreness till he became accustomed to the saddle again: there was a lot of riding ahead of him.

He had picked up the trail of the car he was chasing on the road that skirted south of Verkburg. He had pulled his horse into a farmhouse and, producing the General’s pistol and instantly wiping the derisive laughter off the farmer’s face, had demanded food, a water-bag and the farmer’s own straw hat. The farmer, aware now that this strange little man was quite capable of killing him and his family, had hurriedly obliged. Then, under questioning from Pemenov, he said yes, he had seen a motor car heading down this road. Yes, this was the only road till it joined the main road ten miles farther on. No, he did not know much about the main road except that his brother, who worked in Verkburg, said that it was the only road that went south and these days not many people travelled it.

So Pemenov headed south and now in the cooling evening he was making camp amongst some trees just beyond where the secondary road joined the main route. When he had eaten he wrapped himself in the stinking blanket that had held the soldier’s saddle roll and settled down to sleep between the two fires he had lit. The horse was tethered to a nearby tree on a lead-rope long enough to give it room to move if it was attacked by a bear or wolves.

Pemenov put the loaded rifle beside him, closed his eyes and went off to sleep at once. He would need an early start tomorrow and it would be a long ride. He knew that motor cars, though they travelled faster, broke down more than horses. He fell asleep absolutely certain that he would catch up eventually with the American.

[3]

‘We’ll have to get more food. Some fruit and jam and honey, things like that. And some tea or coffee. Mr Cabell, are you listening to me? You haven’t spoken since breakfast.’