The Winter Thief (28 page)

K
AMIL AND HIS SMALL
army left Trabzon before dawn on the following day. A bearded, taciturn man in a fur coat named Sakat Ali had been recommended by the governor and hired as a guide to lead them through the mountains to Gabriel’s commune at Karakaya. He rode a short-legged gray horse that appeared, like its owner, to be all scrawny muscle. The thirty Ottoman soldiers wore kalpak caps and cinched coats, crossed with ammunition belts and bristling with weapons beneath their wool cloaks. They looked young and eager. Kamil thought that many of them were probably on their first field assignment outside the capital. He felt oddly cheerful, leading brave men on a challenging mission. He wished it were summer, so he could witness the famous orchids of Choruh Valley.

Yakup remained behind in Trabzon, which had a telegraph, to await any further messages. Elif rode at the rear with Omar, in charge of the supplies. The streets of Trabzon were deserted as they passed through. The road wound back and forth along the cliff face, becoming steeper and narrower so that the horses had to go single file. They would be easy targets for an ambush, Kamil worried, and hoped the road would improve. Instead it burrowed ever deeper into the mountains until it was no more than a slim pass between staggering cliffs. A distant boom announced an avalanche. The governor had warned him about the Zargana Pass, and they were prepared to dig their way through snow blocking the road. To their surprise, they found the road open. Someone had come through recently. The ground had been churned up as if by the wheels of many heavy wagons.

“Well,” Omar commented cheerfully, “I’m always happy when someone else does my work for me. Probably delivering barrels of wine. The customers couldn’t wait until the road opened.” He laughed. “Not too different from Istanbul.”

Kamil pointed out a smashed carriage and broken barrels deep inside a ravine. Next to it was the dark mass of a dead horse. Sakat Ali too halted and peered down at the wreck.

“Wine barrels. Just as I predicted,” Omar said smugly.

Kamil didn’t see the body of a driver. “It must have slipped off the road. What are those sticks lying next to the barrels. Can you see?”

“No.” Omar squinted. “It’s too far down. Probably wheel spokes.”

As they descended into the valley, they saw further evidence of a troubled journey, a dead mule and another smashed barrel. This time the barrel was closer, and Omar and Kamil clambered down to investigate. To their surprise, the inside of the barrel was empty and dry. “It says ‘cod’ in English,” Kamil noted. “Who would import fish into this area?”

“Foreign fish? That makes no sense. People just open their mouths around here and fish jump in.” Omar sniffed at the wood. “There were never fish in this.”

Kamil held up part of the smashed lid and showed it to Omar. It was marked with the sign of an ax.

“Allah protect us. The missing guns.”

“What would a small group of socialists want with a thousand guns?”

As they emerged from the gully, they saw Sakat Ali staring down at the wreck.

T
OWARD NIGHTFALL
, the road opened out into a valley, and they were able to proceed more easily. The air was milder here and in places where rock faces reflected the sun even felt warm. Small stone houses perched precariously on the hillsides amid barren orchards. They made camp in a sheltered area beside a meadow, and Kamil sent Sakat Ali and Omar to contact the residents.

After some time they returned. “No one’s home,” Omar reported to Kamil, a worried look on his face.

“What do you mean? There’s smoke coming out of that chimney.” Kamil pointed to a house in a high meadow.

“No one answers the door. Unless you want me to break it down?”

“Of course not.” Kamil sat on a folding stool and tapped his riding crop against his boot.

Omar squatted beside him. “Do you think a pack of armed socialists passing through here just ahead of us could have had something to do with the locals’ lack of hospitality?”

“Maybe. Or maybe they heard the news that Sultan Abdulhamid is sending troops. Everyone in Trabzon seems to know.”

Omar hunched further into his ancient wool greatcoat. “Maybe they’re already here.”

An orderly had set up Kamil’s tent and built a fire on the ground before it. A light drizzle chilled him, and he moved closer to the fire. He glanced at Elif, who had joined them, to see if she was fatigued by the ride or cold, and was relieved to see that she seemed fine and in oddly good spirits.

Kamil scanned the darkening hillside. No light showed on the green verges. He imagined the villagers lying in the dark, waiting for the army camped on their plain to ride on. He was angry at their stubbornness, but then wondered what he would do if he thought his family were in danger. Would he lie low, or would he join other men organizing a resistance? He imagined that these villagers were doing both.

The irregular Kurdish regiments the sultan had threatened to send to the region were tribal militias given the distinction of official rank by the state in order to keep them from rebelling against it. But they were paid little and lived off plunder. Would the Kurds break down the doors to this peaceful village? And why would the sultan countenance that? Was it possible that the padishah didn’t know what was being done in his name? Kamil found that hard to believe. An image of Huseyin, pointing a wineglass and calling him naïve, came into his head. “One knife has to be sharp,” he remembered his brother-in-law saying.

The soldiers rolled themselves up in their greatcoats near the fire. Wrapped in a blanket inside his tent, Kamil fell into an uneasy sleep, tormented by dreams in which someone cut Elif’s throat, then Feride’s, as they slept, and he tried to cry out to warn them but could make no sound.

They remounted before dawn, and it was with great foreboding that Kamil led his troop through the valley and back up into the mountains. Every village appeared deserted when they arrived. The weather was freezing at this altitude, so they slept in stables with the bawling, neglected livestock. They drew water from the village wells and slaughtered some of the animals to supplement their dwindling supplies, boiling the meat on abandoned hearths. Kamil left coins on the doorsteps of families whose animals they had taken, imagining the press of bodies on the other side of the door, hearts pounding in fear.

They traveled in the shadows of snowcapped peaks through a landscape of lakes and waterfalls, and crossed rivers seething with snow-fed rapids, the roar of which could be heard at a great distance. The forest was thick, with endless shades of green. The regular boom of avalanches kept them alert. Often they saw evidence of the group traveling before them, whether roads churned up by their wheels and hooves or splintered wagons and dead animals by the side of the road. They never saw any of the guns they knew the carts were carrying.

After ten days, hollow-eyed from fatigue, they neared Ispir, the closest town to Karakaya, where the commune was located. The continual change in temperature had made some of the men ill. While the weather in low-lying areas had been wet and misty, high in the mountains they were buffeted by icy winds and struggled through snow that at times reached up to their horses’ withers. The approach to Ispir was a steep switchback up a cliff face overlooking the Choruh River.

When they reached the plateau, the men and animals were spent. Elif, insulated in a fur coat and hat, had kept up without complaint. Kamil admired her calm endurance. He was looking forward to a warm room and a bath, and was about to send his orderly to see if the town had a hamam he could reserve for his men when he hesitated. What should he do about Elif? She was as tired as the rest, and he was sure she would like to bathe. They had not had a moment alone since they left Istanbul. On the ship Elif had suffered from seasickness, and during their one night in Trabzon they had spent the hours readying for their journey the following morning. Kamil had almost come to believe his intimacy with this severe-looking woman dressed in men’s clothing had been a dream.

The mayor of Ispir and the town dignitaries had hurriedly collected in the central square to welcome Kamil. They looked less dismayed than the Trabzon dignitaries at the sight of thirty soldiers under the sultan’s standard, he noted, perhaps because now his men looked so tired as to appear harmless. Whatever the case, Kamil was grateful when the mayor placed at his disposal a house that had a private hamam. He set up Omar and Elif in their own rooms, then had the servants throw wood into the stove that heated the baths. In the garden at the back of the house, Elif pointed out tracks of small animals etched in the snow. The sky was a brilliant blue, so hard it seemed it might crack.

After they had bathed, they shared a pot of soup made of dried yoghurt and mint and a dish of boiled cracked wheat with lamb. The blessed ordinariness of everything soothed Kamil’s jangled nerves so that he could almost believe that they were out of danger. He could almost believe in Gabriel Arti’s golden dream of paradise. When Omar retired, Kamil took a jar of wine and two cups into Elif’s room.

T
ANIEL IGNORED
V
ERA
for the entire afternoon it took to ride to the northern end of the valley, leading a string of mules laden with rifles, pistols, and ammunition. Taniel’s father, Levon, had taken half the guns to the south. He had ordered a reluctant Taniel to take Vera along and allow her to teach the village women how to use a firearm, but he hadn’t ordered Taniel to talk to her. This hadn’t bothered Vera or stopped her from talking, whether he answered or not. Astride her horse in woolen trousers, Marta’s hand-knit sweater, and boots, wrapped in a fur coat and hat, a rifle and a bag of ammunition across her saddle, she felt almost lighthearted, absolutely certain that this was where she ought to be.

In the first village they came to, the bearded headman categorically refused to allow Vera to teach the village women to use guns.

“Just leave the guns here and we’ll take care of it,” he told Taniel, eyeing the boxes and bulging sacks strapped to the donkeys.

But to Vera’s surprise, Taniel stood his ground. “My father, Levon, requires this of you,” he said firmly.

“Our men will never agree to it,” the headman insisted, glancing at the line of men squatting at a respectful distance. “It’s out of my hands.”

“Not if your wife is the first to volunteer,” Vera told him, ignoring Taniel’s irritated frown.

The clearing was so still that she could hear the wind soughing in the pine branches above her. Without another word, the headman walked away. Taniel threw her a disgusted look and went back to the mules. “We’re leaving,” he told his men. Seeing their incredulous faces, he snapped, “My father’s wishes are law to me. It’s not required that I agree.”

Ashamed of having interfered and, in her ignorance of local culture, wrecked this village’s chance to arm itself, Vera mounted and turned her horse back toward the forest. Thankful to Taniel for keeping his word, she vowed she would say nothing more.

The headman came rushing across the clearing, yelling for them to stop. A heavyset woman in tow was so thoroughly wrapped in a woolen shawl that Vera could barely see her eyes. The headman thrust the woman toward Vera and hurried over to Taniel.

Vera dismounted. “I want to teach you to use a gun to protect yourself,” she told her. “Will you bring the other women?”

The woman didn’t respond. In frustration, Vera wanted to pull the shawl away from her face but instead told her, “My name is Vera. Do you know Siranoush Ana?”

The woman nodded and let her shawl fall open, revealing a face leached of beauty by age and hardship but strong and resolute. Her eyes met Vera’s.

“Does Siranoush Ana desire that we do this?”

When Vera nodded yes, the woman told her to wait. Before long, she returned with twenty other women, some as young as fifteen.

While the men were unloading, Vera took the women into a meadow and showed them how to clean, load, and reload a rifle and a pistol. The women were shy and hesitant at first, but Vera found them to be physically strong, hardened from carrying water and baskets of firewood on their backs up and down the steep hills. The recoil of a rifle hardly budged them, and once they decided to learn, they put their backs into it. Some of them turned out to be very good shots.

Taniel and his men slept in the headman’s guest room and stable, and his wife took Vera into the women’s quarters that night. They fed her and gave her the warmest quilt, but despite sharing a room with a dozen women and children, Vera felt lonely. She was dressed in dun-colored man’s trousers, while these women wore brightly patterned gowns, torn and stained, but attractive nonetheless. One woman reached out and squeezed Vera’s breast, making her hot with embarrassment. “Just like us,” the woman called out approvingly.

The following day, Vera, Taniel, and his men moved on to another village. The mountains flung great columns of water from their flanks and breathed the valley full of mist. As they rode along the trail, Vera caught glimpses of flowers—magenta pinks, deep purple grape hyacinths, primulas, and others she couldn’t name. Her mood lifted at the prospect of spring and her own feeling of accomplishment. At each village, they repeated their transaction—the women learned to shoot, and the villagers received rifles and ammunition. A messenger had come from Levon telling them that the Kurds hadn’t attacked again, although their scouts had been seen near the monastery. They began to think that perhaps the danger was over. A week passed quickly. Taniel remained taciturn, but Vera began to think that he and his men respected her. He assigned one of his men to escort Vera back to New Concord. Before she was out of earshot, she thought she heard Taniel say, “Go with God.”