Kuniczak

THE YEAR 1647 abounded with omens. Strange signs and portents of terrible disasters appeared on earth and in the skies. A plague of locusts spilled out of the Wild Lands in the Spring: a sure sign of Tartar incursions, possibly even a great war. In early Summer the sun disappeared under an eclipse. Soon afterwards a comet trailed fire through the sky In Warsaw, people saw tombs and fiery crosses in the clouds, and so gave alms and fasted, reading in these signs a terrible calamity that would fall on the land and ravage all mankind. When Winter came it was so mild that the oldest people couldn't remember anything to match it. No ice gripped the rivers of the south; swollen with rain and melting snows they burst from their courses and flooded the Steppe. Rain streamed down in torrents of silver. The open Steppes became one vast, quaking swamp; and in the Bratzlav Territory at the eastern boundary, and all across the unpopulated Wild Lands, the noon sun burned with such intense Summer brightness that a green blanket of new grasses sprung up in December. Beehives hummed in the border settlements and herds of cattle bellowed the restless calls of Spring.
With all these signs and warnings, and with the natural order of the seasons so unnaturally reversed, all eyes in the eastern territories turned fearfully to the Wild Lands since peril of every kind could come from those untamed spaces quicker than from any other quarter. But nothing unusual seemed to be happening there in that extraordinary year. There were no battles, wars, raids, or killings other than those that were as common to that savage landscape as the immense seas of blowing, head-high grass where only eagles, hawks and vultures, and the fleeting grey wolves running in the night, could serve as witnesses and possible accusers.
Such were these Wild Lands: a continent of grass stamped with savage beauty Billowing pastures where a mounted man could vanish like a diver in a lake. Violent chasms torn out of the earth, gaunt breastworks of crumbling clay and limestone that opened without warning under a horse's hooves. A wilderness of forest, fallen timbers, sudden glittering lakes and rivers exploding into cataracts.
The last traces of human settlement ended at Tchehryn on the Dnieper River and in the Uman territory along the unpopulated borders. Beyond them lay the rolling emptiness of the Steppe that flowed like an uncharted, multicolored ocean all the way to the Black Sea, the Caspian and the Sea of Azov. Cossack life swarmed like turbulent wild bees in the distant Nijh and along the streams and pastures hidden in the coils of the Dnieper beyond the cataracts, but nothing human lived in the Wild Lands themselves. It was a land as vast as all of Western Europe, subject in name to the dominion of the Crown of Poland but, in effect, belonging only to those who lived by claw, fleet foot, and arrows shot out of ambush in the night. The Tartars grazed their horseherds there by treaty permission; and Cossack horse-thieves turned these pastures into battlefields where the sounds of slaughter, the screams of dying men, the drumming of hooves galloping out of ambush, the clash of steel, and the hiss of the Tartar arrow and the whirling lariat seemed to hang forever on the wind, carried from unknown beginnings into an endless future like the Steppe itself.
No one knew how many battles were fought there in the years gone by nor how many men left their bones scattered in the Steppe for the wolves and vultures. Armed travelers who heard the whirring of great wings, or saw the black swarms of carrion birds wheeling in the sky knew at once that corpses or bleached bones lay somewhere ahead and looked to their weapons. Men hunted each other in this menacing green sea with no more feeling than they'd have in running down a hare; everyone there was both the hunter and the prey This was the immemorial home of outlaws hiding from the law and the hangman's rope. Armed shepherds-as savage as their untamed flocks and herds-guarded lean sheep, fierce stallions and wild cattle. Bandits sought loot. Cossacks trailed Tartars and Tartars hunted Cossacks. It was common practice for entire vatahas of light cavalry to guard the immense horseherds while raiding marauders came a thousand strong; and all of them, no matter whom they served, were men for whom words like gentleness and mercy had never held a meaning.
The Steppes were wholly desolate and unpeopled yet filled with living menace. Silent and still yet seething with hidden violence, peaceful in their immensity yet infinitely dangerous, these boundless spaces were a masterless, untamed country created for ruthless men who acknowledged no one as their overlord.
At times great wars would fill these territories, and then the sea of grass seemed to become a real ocean in which lesser tides of crimson Cossack caps flowed between horizons. The grey Tartar tchambuls spread there in crescent waves, and the winged regiments of Polish horsemen rode in their leopard and wolf-skin cloaks draped over glittering armor, and then a forest of spears and lances and horsetail standards and a blazing rainbow of many-colored banners rose above the Steppe. At night the neighing of the warriors' horses and the howl of wolves echoed in grim prophecy through this wilderness, and the booming of the kettledrums and the blare of copper horns and bugles flowed all the way to the misty Lakes of Ovidov and to the shores of the Turkish Sultan's seas. At such times the desolate Black Trail and the Kutchmansky Track became human rivers engulfing everything before them, and terror flew on birds' wings before this flood of animals and riders.

* * *

But that Winter no birds came cawing to the southern lands with their raucous warnings. The immemorial routes of Tartar invasions were quiet and still. The Steppes crouched waiting, still as death in their shrouds of mist. And on this day, the day of a particularly breathless silence, the red light of late afternoon lit up a gaunt and skeletal land. Nothing moved on the tall banks of the Omelnitchek in the southernmost reaches of the darkening Steppe. The day was ending. The sun showed only the top half of its scarlet shield above the horizon and each passing moment sheathed the landscape in a deeper shadow.
On the high left bank of the river, gleaming in the reds and yellows of the sinking sun, lay the heaped and tumbled rubble of a walled stannitza, one of those lonely outposts that guarded these borders. It was built years ago, perhaps as long as a generation earlier, but whole decades of raids, assaults and tidal waves of war had swept over it since then; the hot winds of the Steppe eroded the fortress into bleached timbers and crumbling white stone, rounding it out as smoothly as a burial mound; and now a long, symmetrical shadow fell from this height of land and sunk in the broad waters of the Omelnitchek which turned towards the Dniester River at this point.
The sun set rapidly as if anxious to get out of sight. Light fled from the Steppe and seeped out of the sky where mournful flights of cranes were beating their way heavily to the sea. Night came, and with it came the Hour of the Spirits.
The soldiers of the Steppe stannitzas told stories about murdered men who rose from their graves and stalked through the Wild Lands after the sun went down, and muttered prayers for lost souls when the tallow candles burned down in the guardhouse to show the midnight hour. They spoke of ghostly riders who'd block the path of travelers and beg for the sign of the cross that might give them rest, and of vampires and werewolves leaping from their lairs. It took an experienced ear to tell the difference between the ordinary baying of the wolves and the howl of vampires. Sometimes entire regiments of tormented souls were seen to drift across the moonlit Steppe so that sentries sounded the alarm and the garrisons stood to arms. But such ghostly armies were seen only before a great war. Lone shades were met more often. They brought no good fortune, to be sure, but they didn't necessarily forecast a disaster since living men, as secretive about their business as the restless spirits, were just as likely to appear and vanish in that spectral country as genuine apparitions.
And so, that night, there was nothing strange about the dark rider whose shadow rose among the ruins as soon as night settled on the Omelnitchek.
Moonlight poured over him and on the ghostly ruin and streaked the shadowed wilderness with silver. Below the silent mounted man, among the nodding thistles of the undergrowth, other black forms appeared and vanished as the clouds boiled up between them and the moon. They crept towards the crest of the mound, their movements as forbidding as the Steppe itself The Dniester winds were hissing through the thistles, making their burred heads bob and nod as if in premonition. But then the creeping shadows went to ground and lay as still as the old scorched timbers rotting in the rubble and only the solitary rider stood in the dead white light on the crest of the mound.
Some sound alerted him.
He spurred his horse to the sharp edge of the crest and peered carefully into the darkened Steppe. The wind died down at that moment; its soft whispers ceased.
And suddenly the shrill reedy scream of a Tartar whistle cut through the deep silence, the creeping shadows leaped up with a savage howl and the lone rider vanished, swept off his horse by a whirling rope. But now fresh hoofbeats drummed out of the shadows, and fierce voices bellowed: "Allah! Allah! Jezu! Chryste! Kill!" and red muzzle blasts flicked out of the night like scarlet tongues licking at the darkness. There was a quick, sharp clash of iron and shrill cries of terror, and a new swarm of riders burst out of the Steppe as if a sudden storm had boiled out of the wilderness.
Then there was only the moaning of the wounded. And then there was silence.

* * *

The horsemen who had sprung so suddenly out of nowhere assembled on the mound with nothing much to say after the sharp, swift fight. Some of them jumped down to the ground and peered with casual indifference at the dark, huddled shape of the ambushed man, and then a hard, clear voice, young but ringing with authority, swept them into motion.
"Strike some lights! Jump to it!"
At once there came the dry rasping sound of iron striking against flint, and red sparks spilled upward, and a sudden flame leaped up among the bundles of pitch-soaked firewood that travelers always carried with them in the Wild Lands, and soon the firelight revealed clusters of tall, burly men who drove sharpened stakes into the ground and fastened burning torches in their iron sockets, and then the bright cheerful glow of a campfire began to sweep over the mound and dance among the ruins.
The men were soldiers, dressed in crimson coats with hooded wolfskin cloaks fastened about their shoulders. They peered at the prone, silent figure on the ground out of fierce, bearded faces, and made room for their leader who leaped lightly off his horse.
"Well, sergeant? Is he alive or dead?"
"Still alive, Your Honor, still breathing. But he's short on air. The rope's choked it all out of him."
"What's he look like to you?"
"He's not a Tartar, sir. Quality I'd say."
"So much the better." The young officer peered sharply at the man whom he and his troopers had rescued from the ambush and nodded with quiet satisfaction. "Looks almost like a Hetman, doesn't he."
'And his horse, lieutenant. That's a real beauty. The Tartar Khan wouldn't have anything better in his stables."
The sergeant pointed to an Arab thoroughbred held by two soldiers in the circle of light. The horse had pressed his ears flat against his finely chiseled head and stared nervously at his fallen master, and the young lieutenant grinned with appreciation at the trembling stallion.
"He's a beauty, alright."
"That'll be ours, sir, won't it?" A note of worry entered the old sergeant's voice. "That will be for us?"
The officer turned hard eyes on the bearded sergeant. "What's the matter with you? You'd take a Christian's horse away from him in the Steppe?"
"Well, Excellency it's a battle trophy right?"
Anxious not to irritate his officer, the sergeant was persistent none the less.
"What they call spoils of war . .
But a harsh, half-strangled cough came from the fallen man just then and they turned towards him.
"Feed him some liquor, sergeant," the lieutenant ordered. 'And loosen his belt."
'Aye, sir. Are we to bivouac here, then?"
"Might as well. See to the horses and get the cook-fires going."
The soldiers jumped up at once and started setting up the bivouac. Some got to work on the fallen man, rubbing his arms and loosening his clothing. Others sprang into the deadwood tangle of the riverbank, among the hidden caves and gullies at the foot of the mound, to hack at dry logs and to gather firewood. Still others brought up bearskins and camel robes and spread them out for sleeping.
Meanwhile the young lieutenant turned his back on the gasping man who'd been half-choked by the Tartar lariat. He loosened his broad embroidered sash and took out his weapons and threw himself down on the traveling robe that his men spread for him near the fire. The flames lit up his tall, broad-shouldered frame and the young, dusky face burned almost black by the hot southern winds that swept through the Steppes for most of the year, and his thick black beard and mustache glinted in the firelight. Seen in that sharp, crackling light, it was a harsh, adventurous face, fierce as a Steppe hawk's and proud as the Devil. But there was laughter in the eyes and a lean carefree youthfulness to the powerful body, and there was an untroubled cheerful confidence about him that went a long way to erase the hint of savagery.
He stretched out on the robes while the soldiers worked. Two servant lads set about preparing the supper. Whole sides of mutton were spitted across the coals and, next to them, a flock of birds and dozens of field hares; wild pigs and deer that the horsemen had shot during the day were swiftly ripped out of their skins and feathers and thrown over the fire.
The flames leaped and danced, throwing wide circles of light into the wilderness, and then the gasping, half-choked man began to revive. His bloodshot eyes sprung open and swept carefully across the grim, bearded faces that hovered over him. The sergeant propped him up and helped him to his feet. Another soldier slipped a slim, long-handled war club into his fist and he leaned on it heavily as if on a cane. His face was crimson and suffused with blood and the swollen veins bulged on his neck and forehead as thick as the plaited rawhide with which he'd been bound.
"Water," he croaked, and the soldiers handed him a gourd of raw spirits.
He drank long and deep. The fiery liquid spilled down the broken corners of his mouth, ran past his mustache that trailed downward in the limp Steppe fashion adopted from the Tartars, and glittered with reflected firelight in his long black beard. But when he tossed the leather flask aside his voice was clear and strong.
"In whose hands am I?"
The young officer got up. "You're in the hands of those who rescued you," he said.
"So it wasn't you who roped me like an ox?"
The lieutenant's proud young face darkened in quick anger. "We're soldiers," he snapped. "Our business is done with sabers, not with ropes. You were pulled down by some bush marauders dressed up as Tartars."
Then he shrugged and pointed to the row of corpses stretched along the slope.
"They're all down there, laid out like dressed mutton. Take a look if you're interested."
The stranger glanced quickly at the corpses, sighed and turned away.
"Well, in that case," he said softly. "Let me rest a little."
Two soldiers spread a quilted horse blanket on the bare ground and the rescued man lowered himself on it gingerly and turned towards the shadows. He sat withdrawn deep into his own thoughts and the young lieutenant studied him with interest. The stranger's face and bearing caught him by surprise, as did his poise and the rich cut and quality of his clothes. He was a man somewhere on the threshold of a hard-lived and vigorous middle age, not especially tall but with unusually wide shoulders, a heavily proportioned body and sharp, watchful features that seemed harsh and ruthless in his weathered face. His head was large, with a broad bulging forehead. His black eyes slanted like a Tartar's under heavy brows. A long black mustache swept past his narrow lips and hung straight down in a stringy line combed out at the ends.
It was a face that seemed at once compelling and repellent, stamped with ferocity daring and authority; it combined the pride and dignity of a Hetman with a Tartar's cunning, the young soldier thought.
The rescued man sat quite still, hunched over his own thoughts, and then he rose, and the young lieutenant prepared himself for the expected ritual of thanks. None came. Instead, the stranger walked abruptly down the slope and began to pace back and forth among the corpses, staring intently into each dead face.
"Lout," the lieutenant muttered.
Meanwhile, the stranger was studying the dead. Each frozen face, with teeth bared in terror and the eyes turned upward, drew his whole attention. He nodded thoughtfully like a man for whom there could be no more mysteries about anything and who'd resolved the last of his doubts. Then he turned slowly and climbed back to the crest of the mound-shaped hillock, and walked to the fire, his hands groping for his sash by instinct as if he wished to thrust a hand into it.
The young lieutenant shot him a disdainful glance out of the corners of his eyes and then stared hard into his wide, dark face.
"A man might think you were looking for old friends among those cut-throats," he said scornfully, and a cold, arrogant note slipped into his voice. "Or maybe saying prayers for their souls?"
The stranger's chilly smile was much like his own.
"You're wrong about that, young sir," the man said and nodded his large head slowly up and down. "Yet ... not entirely. No. I was, indeed, looking for an old acquaintance. Those people,"-and his bitter gesture dismissed his slaughtered captors as if they were offal-"belong to a certain gentleman, a neighbor of mine. They aren't just common bandits."
"Ah. . . I see that you don't drink out of the same well with this neighbor of yours," the young man snorted, quoting a local saying, while a quick, cruel smile flitted across the stranger's narrow mouth.
'And there you're also wrong," he said abruptly and grunted with amusement at something that only he would understand.
Then, as if he'd suddenly recollected more important business, his voice became both courteous and cajoling.
"But forgive me, young man, for not thanking you properly right away You've saved me from sure death and, I'd guess, not a pleasant one. Your courage, sir, made up for my carelessness in riding out too far ahead of my people. I hope my gratitude can match your brave spirit."
Smiling, he thrust his right hand towards the young man who, however, was in no hurry to accept it.
"I'd like to know first who I'm dealing with," the young officer said, still piqued by the other's earlier lack of manners. "Nameless thanks are not much use to me."
The stranger laughed.
"You're right. I should have started with my name. I'm Zenobius Abdank, a landholder in the Kiev Territory, and a colonel in the Cossack regiment of Prince Dominic Zaslavski."
'And I'm Yan Skshetuski, lieutenant in the armored regiment of Prince Yeremi Vishnovyetzki."
"You serve under a famous soldier," the Cossack colonel said and nodded with appreciation. "Let me shake your hand to show that I'm grateful."
This time the young lieutenant didn't hesitate. While normally the soldiers who served in the elite regiments of heavy cavalry the armored Husaria who charged into battle with long, curved frames of eagle wings fastened to their shoulders, looked down their noses at light-cavalrymen, Cossacks and Dragoons, and at contingents of Lithuanian Light Horse and hired foreign soldiers, he and the man he'd rescued were meeting in the Steppe where such distinctions didn't make a difference. Moreover he was dealing with a colonel whose rank was verified at once. The soldiers who ran up with Abdank's sash and saber also brought his regimental commander's bulava-a miniature mace with a short ivory handle and a carved round head of glazed horn stained to the color of dark cherry-wine and polished like a mirror. Such symbols of rank were widely used by colonels of Cossacks. And there was something else about the rescued man that testified to his authority and status: his rich clothes and haughty bearing, along with his well-formed speech and somewhat careless manner, suggested that here was a man accustomed to high thresholds, a noble used to dealing with the great, and not some rag-tag provincial boor like much of the rank and file gentry.
Satisfied about his guest's credentials, Pan Yan invited him to share his soldiers' meal: The smell of roasting meats and the hiss of juices dripping on the coals drifted from the cook-fires, along with the crackle of burned hide and the snap of marrow bursting from the bones, and rich red lights gleamed cheerfully on the edges of the copper bowls, and when the serving lads ran up with a full goatskin of Moldavian wine, everyone's tongue moved a little easier.
"To a safe homecoming," Pan Yan raised a toast.
"Home?" The rescued man looked up with quick curiosity "So you've been away somewhere? Where did you go?"
'A long way. To the Crimea."
"Carrying ransom, were you?"
"Not this time. I went to see the Khan."
"The Khan, eh? Well now, you keep exalted company, I see. And what did you go to see the Khan about?"
"I carried letters from Prince Yeremi."
"Ah! An envoy, were you?" Abdank leaned forward eagerly 'And what did the Prince have to say to the Tartar Khan?"
But at this point the young lieutenant looked at his accidental dinner guest out of narrowed eyes.
"Look, colonel," he snapped out coldly. "If you want to go peering into the dead eyes of cut-throats who roped you like an ox, that's your business and you're welcome to it. But what the Prince wrote to the Khan is neither your business nor mine."
Abdank sank back on his robes, his eyes sly and watchful, then barked with quick laughter. "Oh, I was just surprised that His Highness picked such a young man for an ambassador. But I see you're only young in years."
"How's that?"
"Young in years but old in experience. Mature in judgment, is what I want to say.
Still young enough for flattery, the lieutenant smiled with satisfaction and lifted his hand proudly to his mustache. But he thought that he'd do well to do some questioning of his own; he wanted to know more about this mysterious Pan Zenobius whose imposing features and drawing room courtesies didn't quite fit the image of a noose thrown around his neck out of ambush on a dark Steppe night.
"And you sir," he asked. "What are you doing all alone on the Omelnitchek?"
"I didn't come alone," Abdank cocked his head as if to listen to every word he uttered and guard his tongue against a careless slip. "I've a few men with me. But I left them a couple of furlongs back of me, a piece of carelessness I'm not likely to repeat. I'm on my way to Kudak with letters from the Hetman to old Pan Grodjitzki who commands the fortress."
"So why didn't you go by water?" the young lieutenant questioned. It was all sounding a bit mysterious to him. "It's faster and safer this time of the year.
"Such were my orders," Abdank said and shrugged.
"Strange orders, colonel, since it was out here on dry land that you ran into trouble. You'd have been safe enough on the Dnieper boats."
"Ah, the Steppe is quiet and peaceful nowadays, there isn't much danger." Abdank shrugged again and glanced away dismissing the subject. "I know my way around here well enough. And anyway what happened to me is a private matter, a bit of ordinary human jealousy envy and ill-will. Those can reach out for you anywhere."
"Who hates you so much, then?"
"It's a long story" The powerful, ringing voice was suddenly dark with hatred. "I have a neighbor . . . an evil, unforgiving man who burned my properties, robbed me of my possessions, killed a son of mine and, as you've just seen, hounds me even here."
"Why don't you stop him, then?" The young man's careless voice hardened with contempt. "Don't you wear a saber?"
Abdank's huge, swollen face flamed with sudden bitterness and a gloomy light burned darkly in his eyes.
"Oh yes. I have a saber," he ground out a curse. 'And, so God help me from now on, that's what I'll use to get some justice against my enemies.

* * *

The young lieutenant wanted to say something more; he opened his mouth and raised a finger to underscore a point that he wished to make, when suddenly the Steppe began to echo with the hurried pounding of many horses' hooves. There was a swift, urgent splashing among the tall, sodden grasses wet with heavy dew, and then a sentry ran up to report new riders coming out of the wilderness towards the encampment on the mound.
"That will be my lot," Abdank looked up quickly "I left them behind the Tasmina, not expecting any treachery We were to meet here."
A moment later a troop of horsemen surrounded the hillock. The firelight played on the bowed heads of the horses whose flared nostrils were snorting with fatigue. The animals had been ridden hard and over some distance. The horsemen leaned forward in their saddles, shielding their eyes with their hands, and peered into the light.
"Hey people! Hey there! Who are you?" Abdank shouted to them.
"God's children," soft sing-song voices called out from the darkness in Ruthenian.
"They're mine." The Cossack colonel nodded. "Come on then! Come on up here!"
The Cossacks leaped out of their saddles and came swiftly uphill towards the fire.
"Ay, how we hurried, Little Father. How we hurried. How is it with you, Batko?"
"There was an ambush. Hvedko, the traitor, knew the place and waited with some others. They got a noose around me."
"The son of a bitch!" Fierce curses crackled out in the chilly air. "The plague on him, then! But who's that little Polack over there beside you?" They used the Ruthenian word which carried at least as much respect as derision. "What's the 'Lah' doing here?"
The Steppe rovers stared like hungry wolves at Pan Yan and his troopers, their wolfish faces black and red in the light of the fire.
"They're all good men, good soldiers," Abdank reassured them. "By their help and God's mercy I'm alive and well."
"God's mercy, then!" the Cossacks called out. "God's will be done!"
They crowded forward then, and massed around the fire, rubbing their chilled hands and stamping booted feet on the ground to warm them. The night was clear but cold. An acrid stench of sweat, tallow grease and tired animals came from the men and horses who clustered on the mound, and Pan Yan stared curiously at the tall, heavy-shouldered riders and their small Steppe mustangs that had all but disappeared behind the billows of their own harshly steaming breath. Men and animals alike looked in that leaping firelight as if they'd been painted with alternating black and crimson stripes.
There were about forty men who came crowding up the hill to stare quietly at the Cossack colonel: rough, hard-eyed men armed to the teeth and wrapped in hides and furs. They didn't look at all like the enlisted Cossacks who served for pay in the Crown regiments of the Commonwealth commanders or in the private armies of the powerful Polish and Ruthenian magnates of the borderlands. There was a wild, untamed and challenging air about each of them, like that of wolves sniffing at fresh prey, and Pan Yan stared at them in surprise.
None of this, he thought, was quite what it seemed. There were too many questions that remained unanswered. Why would the Hetman assign such a powerful escort for a messenger to a friendly fortress? And if the Grand Hetman had, indeed, sent this Abdank to Kudak he'd have given him an escort of his household troops and not-as was clear at once to Skshetuski's young but war-wise and experienced eyes-from among freebooting Zaporohjan Cossacks who seldom enlisted with the Colors anyway having their own army.
And why order him to go by land from Tchehryn? Between that river town and the old fortress on the lower Dnieper-the last great bastion of the Commonwealth before the hostile, southern wilderness and the permanent Cossack war camp of the Sietch-lay a dozen tributary rivers, lakes and cataracts, all of them at full flood in that unnaturally mild Winter and all to be forded; it was a long and arduous journey full of dangers each step of the way and it began to seem to Pan Yan as if his mysterious guest wanted to slip past Kudak unobserved rather than go there.
But it was the man himself who poised the greatest question. His Cossacks, who normally treated their various officers with the coarse disrespect they showed to everybody else, stared at him with such unnatural deference, and treated him with such docile humility as if he were indeed that powerful royal general-or 'Hetman' as Crown commanders were known in those days-whom he resembled with his authority and bearing. Even now, Pan Yan noted with surprise, they were peering at him with the dumb, worshipful loyalty and obedience of wolf-hounds crouched at their master's heel.
This, he decided, had to be some great and famous warlord of the Steppes, a legendary knight of immense renown, and that was all the more astonishing for the young lieutenant because he'd never heard of him anywhere before. He knew the Ukraine on both banks of the Dnieper; he knew it because he was a part of it, sensitive to all the pulses that beat in its soil and familiar with all its legends and its turbulent traditions, but he had never heard a single campfire whisper of this or any other Abdank.
There was, moreover, a strange and rare quality in the man's stormy face, a poorly hidden sense of power pulsing like a flame, along with all the tell-tale signs of an iron will and an inner strength beyond anything that an ordinary man might find in himself Just such a natural aura of authority lay about Prince Yeremi Vishnovyetzki, the almost royal despot of the eastern lands, but what that magnate carried in his person as an inborn talent, due to his birth and station and office and position, seemed quite astounding in a man whose name meant nothing and who rode alone at night in the Steppe.
Pan Yan thought hard and long.
It occurred to him that this could be some powerful 'banita,' a high-born outlaw hounded by the courts, who may have taken refuge in the Wild Lands. There were many such. Or he could be the chief of some particularly fearsome band of Steppe marauders, but that was the least believable possibility. The way he spoke, dressed, moved and acted showed qualities impossible for a bandit, no matter how renowned.
Not knowing what to think, the young officer kept a watchful eye on his unusual guest and on his unnaturally meek followers as well, and in the meantime Abdank called for his horse and prepared to leave.
"Well, my young friend," he said. "It's time for me to be on my way Once more, let me thank you for your help. God willing, someday I'll pay you back in kind."
"I rescued a stranger in the Steppe," the young man said simply. "I didn't do anything out of the ordinary to deserve your thanks."
"Don't be too modest," Abdank cautioned. "You may have done far more than you know. And now accept this ring."
He held out his hand again towards the young soldier but Pan Yan aimed another scornful look at him and at the large jewel glinting in his fingers and took a step backwards. Abdank smiled. He nodded as if he'd expected nothing else. Then his voice softened. It became paternal. And then once more he held out the ring.
"Look at it carefully." His voice was strangely sad. "It's not worth a fortune. But it has other virtues. As a young man captured by the Tartars, I got it from a pilgrim to the Holy Land. Dust from the tomb of Christ is locked behind this stone. No one would need to feel ashamed to take such a gift even if it came from the hands of a criminal. You're still young. You're a soldier. And if even an old man can never tell what might be waiting for him from one hour to the next, what about you with all those years ahead of you? And with your occupation? This ring may help you, my young friend, when Judgment Day comes to these Wild Lands again. And I am telling you that such a day is coming."
Then he was silent, nodding into his own distant thoughts, and the stillness seemed so endless and profound in that telling moment, that even the darkened Steppe seemed to hold its breath like something that was both alive and crouched in expectation. And then the wind picked up again, and all the horses neighed, and the flames shot up wildly among the hissing coals, while from the far canyons shrouded by the darkness came the mournful baying of the grey Steppe wolves.
"Yes. Judgment Day is coming," Abdank went on heavily as if speaking only to himself 'And when it comes.. . God help everything that lives."
Pan Yan took the ring and held it as if mesmerized, hearing this strange man's even stranger words long after the silence fell again. He watched, still wondering about him, as Abdank walked slowly to his dappled stallion, as he mounted, and then as he sat and stared far into the black Steppe where a soft rain had begun to fall.
"Ride!" the dark, glowering man shouted suddenly to his followers. And to Pan Yan he said: "Keep well. We live in such times that a man can't trust even his own brother."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I didn't tell you who I really am."
"So your name's not Abdank, then?"
"That's my clan calling and the name given to my coat of arms. You don't know whom you rescued."
"So what's your family name?"
"Bohdan Zenobius Hmyelnitzki."
Then the man spurred his horse down the slope, rode off the hillock and vanished in the darkness. His Cossacks formed up behind him and followed like a pack of hounds. Night swallowed them. The wind brought back stray snatches of the plaintive Steppe song that trailed behind them for a time. And then their voices dwindled and died away in the harsh swift air that swirled up suddenly from the gullies below the mound.

© Jan Rybicki 2005