Swords From the Sea (33 page)

"Sau bull!" I cried, seeing that he meant no harm. "Health to you!"

He waved his hand without speaking and the mist swallowed him up.

After he had gone I took off my kalpak and crossed myself, muttering the names of the Father and Son. For this man had the look of the dead who rise up from the sea. And surely the bells of Petersburg had been tolling miraculously.

That night Lieutenant Edwards said to me:

"Pavel has come. He sailed across the gulf in an open boat, and when the ice was upon them he held a pistol to the head of the chief boatman. For two days they had no food, but he changed his priming and kept it dry and said, 'Stuppai!`

The thought came to me that I had met Pavel, the pirate, on the riverroad, and surely he looked like a man who had drifted on the sea for a long time. I would rather have crossed the border on a bad horse; but the sea was his home and the steppe was mine.

Edwards was not pleased, and he said that Pavel knew only that one word of Russian. He said that Pavel was a rear admiral.

"What is that?" I asked.

"A field marshal of ships-a hetman, you would call him. But all the same he is a pirate and a lawless fighter. The take him! Not long ago he rebelled against his king and became an American."

I had not heard of that country and wondered where it was, in Russia or Poland. The officer laughed and said that it was a country of vagabonds, without money to pay for a ship-of-war or powder for soldiers. Instead of a king, it had a merchant for hetman, a merchant who grew tobacco.

I did not wonder then that Pavel had come to seek service in Russia, where the officers wear diamonds and silver cording, and have fine women in their houses, yet it was strange that he should have a Russian name, and I asked the Englishman why this was so.

"Pavel means Paul. His name is John Paul Jones, and he was hatched out of the same egg as Satan."

As the days passed I understood that they would not hang John Paul Jones in Petersburg. Instead he went every day to the court, and carriages drove up to his door sometimes two or three at a time. Always high officers were with him, and I grew very weary of saluting, for I was stationed at the door of his house. Every morning there was a heyduke with a letter from the Empress, and because heydukes like to lick up mead I learned many things.

The man from the sea was high in favor at court because he was to be sent down through the steppe to the far-off Black Sea, to take command of the Russian fleet and pound to pieces the fleet of the sultan who was at war with the Empress.

John Paul had pounded the English ships, and burnt them; afterward he had been given a gold sword for bravery for other deeds by the hetman of the French; so the Empress had called him and he had come. Time pressed, for he was needed by the Muscovites, who were expecting an attack by the ships of the Turks, down where Father Dnieper loses himself in the Black Sea.

This pleased me because it meant that we would soon show our heels to the accursed city of fogs and snow. Edwards gave orders to get together a half-dozen horses, with two Tatars to act as followers, and the necessary highway passes and order for post horses. He was to be John Paul's aidede-camp and he told me to go to Strelsky for the passes.

I found the ensign of the Guards sitting in his quarters by a tile stove, with his fur greatcoat thrown open and a glass of brandy near his hand. When he saw me he told me to close the door; then he took a pinch of snuff and dusted it off his silk neck-cloth.

"You start at dawn tomorrow, Ivak. This order is for yamshiks-the pick of the post horses."

He sharpened a quill pen and cleaned his teeth with it while I drew a wooden splinter from the stove and lighted my pipe.

"You're a golden fellow, Ivak. I warrant you've stolen Tatar horses from across the border. They tell me you can use a sword, too. Well, you're lucky."

"Allah birdui," I responded. God gives.

"Well, you're no skirted choir singer, blast me if you are. I like your sort, Ivak. You have a head on you as well as a sword hand. Tch-tch!" He shook his head admiringly. "Have you got together enough men and horses for the journey? Sometimes your Father Dnieper-that cursedly treacherous river-is a stepfather? Eh? Pirates and roving Tatars swarm like bees around a clover patch."

"We have a change of mounts and two Talmak Tatars for dragomen," I answered. "How large will the escort of soldiers be?"

Strelsky looked over at a high lacquer screen that stood in one corner of the chamber and wiped the brown dust again from his chin.

"No other escort goes with you, Ivak. Haste is imperative, and you must not spare the horses. A great number of followers would delay the march."

I bent my head as if that were most true. Instead, I was wondering why not even a vedette of hussars accompanied us. John Paul was high in favor with her Majesty, and surely the Empress would not let him ride forth without a retinue. But so it was.

Strelsky pushed the flagon of brandy toward me, and we looked at the bottom of the glasses several times, each busied with his own thoughts,

"You Cossack chaps like to go and warm up in the taverns on the road," he said after a while. "How would you like a hundred rix-dollars to weight down your wallet-eh?"

"Allah birdui!"

Without getting up he opened the lid of a box on the table and motioned for me to take what was inside. It was a sack of silver coins of the kind Edwards had used to pay his bet. I put it in my belt and the ensign nodded.

"Harken, Ivak," he went on in a lower voice, "we understand each other, I think. There is more to the order, about your journey, and it is secret. You serve the Empress?"

"We have taken her bread and salt."

"And silver. Good! Well, John Paul must not reach the Black Sea."

"How-not reach the Black Sea?"

For a long moment he stared at the painting on the screen, and I noticed the toes of a pair of boots showing underneath the screen.

"Do not our ships there wait for him to take command, aye, to show the gunners how to point the cannon, and the sailors how to guide the ships without running aground?" I asked.

"We have Muscovite commanders -better ones."

Strelsky scowled, because more than once the Moskyas had lost their vessels because they could not manage the sails and because the rigging was stiff. On the other hand the Turks were good seamen, and they were helped by the corsairs from the Barbary Coast.

"John Paul is a hireling; he would betray us. Why do you bother your head about such things, Ivak? When you have spent the rix-dollars and come back to the Winter Palace, I swear that you will have the rank of colonel and be at the head of the Don regiment. Your ataman, your colonel is a bad one, a wine swiller. He will lose his baton."

"Is the order about Paul Jones written and signed?" I asked, pretending to be pleased with all he said.

"Nay-deuce take you, Ivak. Are such things to be written on paper?"

I scratched my head, the way, my children, the warriors do when they are puzzled. Now we Cossacks weigh down a horse a bit, but because a buffalo is fat it does not mean he is a fool. Nay, the weasel is the greatest of all fools because bloodlust crazes him and he thinks only of killing, and the weasel is thin and sharp enough. Strelsky made me think of a weasel. I began to smell so much smoke that the fire could not be far away.

Strelsky was a fool. He thought to please me by promising me the promotion to colonel in place of our ataman. As God lives I would have liked to be colonel and hold an ivory baton on my hip, but our officer was our little father. Why should he not drink when there was nothing else to do in this city that smelled of the sea?

"True," I nodded again. "An order is an order. God keep and reward you, Ensign-I must look to the horses."

He stared and said farewell doubtfully, and I went out, taking pains not to close the door tight. I walked down the hall, thumping my boots, and came back again, moving gently, like a cat.

Without asking permission I pushed open the door. The screen had been moved and a man in a very fine silver coat was standing by the table, yawning. On his breast was the badge of the Order of St. Anne, and some others. He had very tight pantaloons and polished Hessian boots, the kind that Edwards wore.

Strelsky was speaking, and once he called the other "mon Prince." When they saw me they looked angry, and the pockmarked face of the prince grew dark.

When I took my kalpak in hand and bowed several times to the girdle as if greatly confused by sight of such a great noble, he swore in a language I did not know.

"Pardon, Excellencies," I muttered, "but I came back to ask again about the order. Is it the command of the Empress that Pavel-Paul Jones-is to be slain on the road to the Black Sea?"

Neither answered, and the full red lips of the prince-lips like a woman's they were-drew together as if he were hiring them. Strelsky began to curse, then he laughed.

"Can't you see beyond your horse's ears, sotnik? Haven't you silver in your wallet? See to it that the river brigands or a band of Tatars seizes the American and rubs him out of the world. If this happens you will be colonel of the Don regiment; if not, you would better flee to the Turks, to keep from being flayed. Do you understand now, you dolt?"

But the prince seemed thoughtful, and it was clear that he was not a fool like Strelsky. Taking out a lace kerchief, scented like a woman's hair, he waved it in the air and held it to his nose as if my sheepskins annoyed him. So it was difficult to get a good sight of his face again.

"If a word of this order passes beyond your lips, Ivak," he warned in broken Russian, "you will wake up with a pistol ball in your brain."

"Ekh!" I lifted the bag of silver and tossed it on the table. "Then I beg your Excellency to keep the money for me. A dead man can't spend anything, even a copeck."

The smoke had cleared away enough for me to know that the Empress had not issued the order, or the Moskyas would have been bolder with their words. Someone else had a quarrel with Paul Jones, and I thought of the English officers who loved him only as dogs love wolves, and whose ships he had burned, besides taking from their grasp a high command in the Russian service. Before his coming the Empress had listened to the advice of the English colonels of the sea when she wanted to make war with her ships.

Why did I return the money? Well, it weighed on my spirit. Better if I had kept it-much better. I saw the watery eyes of the prince blink as if something had come up out of the ground under his nose. And when I went out into the hall I heard the door close, tight this time.

At John Paul's lodging all was quiet; the two Tatars were snoring in the stable, the boxes of luggage were packed in the courtyard, and John Paul was writing a letter in his room upstairs. He was always writing letters, though none were ever delivered to him. He had no body servant in Russia, and so, the door being open and unguarded, I sat down on the sill to smoke my pipe and regret that the rix-dollars were no longer mine.

Presently to the door came two women, one old and bundled up and the other straight and young. She had a thin face, pale under the paint that the Moskya women use, and her hood was thrown hack to show coils of black hair.

They wanted to ask the American for work to do-sewing. I told them to go to another door in the street because we had no need of sewing.

Then they began to argue and the younger one said they had had nothing to eat that day. Overhead, the American stirred and came down to see what was happening. The old one drew back, but the girl addressed him boldly in some kind of French, I think, and he shook his head.

The girl took his hand and put back her cloak and smiled, trying to slip past him into the house. But he would not permit it, giving her some money instead-I do not know how much. Then she jumped up on her toes and kissed him, and went away to where the crone was waiting. John Paul returned to his writing because I heard the scrape of his pen.

I was glad the women had gone because every minister of Petersburg had a regiment of spies and the foreign nobles had nearly as many, and it is an ill place where a man can be watched without knowing it. The great clocks of the towers had struck many times when wheels creaked up to the house and an equerry of the palace reported that a tarantass belonging to her Majesty had been brought for the American to use on his journey.

As Paul Jones was asleep by then, I went out to look at the tarantass, which was a long, narrow wagon with big wheels, leather bound. In front and rear were places for footmen to stand, holding on by straps. A slop ing roof covered it like a house, and within was room enough for two to sit or recline but not to stand. The windows were small and heavy shutters closed them.

Two pairs of matched bays were hitched up, one pair to the shaft, the other to the traces. I was very sleepy by then, and dozed a bit until John Paul woke me up.

"Stuppai, Ivak," he cried with a smile. "Forward!"

I was angry that he should have found me asleep when dawn was streaking the sky, and I cursed the Tatars a bit when I found that he had been to the stables and had the horses fed before waking me. We were ready by the time Edwards rode up, yawning, with his body servant and a led horse with double packs. All the servants of the palace had gone except the equerry and the two postilions. For a while we delayed while the two officers talked, and John Paul went up to the tarantass and glanced inside carelessly, though he could have seen little in the faint light.

"Ivak," Edwards called to me, "here's a of a mess. The American will not ride in the carriage of the Empress. He wants to make the journey in a saddle. We cannot send back her Majesty's gift."

"Health to your Honor," I pointed out. "In that case we can throw the luggage in the wagon and use the pack animals as spare mounts for the servant and Tatars. Then, perhaps Pavel-Paul Jones can sleep in it when we halt."

In this way our progress would be swifter, and I was glad when the American ordered the packs thrown into the tarantass and we set out with three extra mounts, leaving the equerry standing at salute. Ekh, I was glad to ride for the last time through the muddy streets in the pale dawn and hear for the last time that clamoring, invisible ringing of the bells.