Half a dozen of them-four on ponies, two on muskylopes-waited in the center of town. They wore round fur hats, sheepskin jackets, and shiny black boots. Every one of them had a rifle on his back and a big showy knife on his belt. Cartridge-filled bandoliers crisscrossed three chests.
One of the Tatars, a fellow with a great beak of a nose and a sweeping black mustache, stared down from horseback at the townsmen who hurried up to meet him. "You are leader?" he demanded of Mladenov. His Russian was fair.
"I am Iosef Trofimovich Mladenov. I and Anton Avgustovich lead, da," Mladenov answered, pointing at P?ts. The Estonian wondered whether Mladenov wanted him to share the trouble or was really including him. The latter, he decided reluctantly. Whatever else he was, Mladenov was no fool. If Estonians and nomads made common cause, the Russians in the valley were doomed.
Did he want to lead his people in that direction? He looked at the Tatar. The fellow was studying Tallinn Town the way a fox-or on Haven, a tamerlane-studied a chicken coop. He said, "I am Isa Bektashi, son to Suleiman Bektashi, chieftain of the clan of Aydin. He intends to take you under his protection, to keep you safe from other, less kindly clans that are coming to roam the steppes."
"To protect us? To keep us safe?" P?ts repeated. Estonia had heard those words so many times back on Earth, usually from Russians, sometimes from Germans. "Isa Suleimanovich, tell your father we have no quarrel with him, but we can protect ourselves."
"That is so, by God," Mladenov said. He looked back and forth between the nomad and P?ts. P?ts wondered if he resented being upstaged. The Estonian bared his teeth in a humorless grin. Mladenov had named him a town leader-this was what he got.
Isa Bektashi said, "Think again. You would not do well to anger my father."
"We do not want to anger him," Mladenov said. "We do not want to serve him, either. Let us five at peace with one another."
"Not so simple," the nomad said. "Our women, they need the valley to give birth."
That was always a problem on Haven. Only in the lowlands was there enough oxygen to let a woman bring a baby to term and to undergo labor with a decent chance of living through it. P?ts said, "Your women will be welcome here, Isa Suleimanovich. We shall not molest them. We are civilized men, not savages."
Bektashi shook his head. "You say welcome now. What if, one fine day, you say not welcome? What happens to clan of Aydin then? How can we leave selves open to wounding by infidels? You come under our protection, let our riders into valley to make sure all goes well."
"Nyet." Mladenov and P?ts said it in the same breath. The Russian went on, "This is our valley, our land. We will protect it ourselves-from you, if need be."
One of the Tatars behind Isa Bektashi made as if to unsling his rifle. The Russian named Yevgeny brought his own weapon up to his shoulder. Mladenov glanced around to the houses by the square, as if to check warriors hidden in them. So far as P?ts knew, there were no warriors. He admired Mladenov's quick thinking.
Bektashi barked something at his follower in his own language. The fellow took his hand off the rifle. Yevgeny relaxed, fractionally. Bektashi glared at Mladenov and P?ts. "This is your final word?"
They looked at each other. They both nodded.
"You will regret it," said the nomad chief's son. He made his horse rear and spin round on its hind legs, then trotted north out of Tallinn Town. The other riders followed him.
P?ts looked at Yevgeny and Mladenov and started to laugh. Mladenov scowled. "I do not see anything funny here, Anton Avgustovich," he growled. "Nothing."
"No?" P?ts said. "Here is the war between us, all at once forgotten because we have a worse problem. From my enemy, the man who gladly would have killed me half an hour ago, you've turned into my ally and my friend. Do you see no joke there?"
"Put so, maybe I do," Mladenov said. "When the choice is between fair land and no land, it makes the choice between fair land and better land seem of small importance, doesn't it?"
So it does, Iosef Trofimovich, so it does. Your leading men and mine need to sit down and talk things over, I think. Those nomads look damnably well armed. If we want to keep this valley for ourselves, we won't hold them off with words alone. We'll need all the guns we can get our hands on . . . and we'll need to work together." The words left a bad taste in Pat's mouth, but he knew they were true.
So did Mladenov. "It shall be as you say, Anton Avgustovich." He looked no happier about the prospect than P?ts was, but went on nonetheless: "We will need sentries at the mouth of the valley, to warn us if the nomads come. We have a few two-way radio sets, to get word quickly back to town-"
"Do you?" P?ts said in surprise. "We tried to get some, but our applications went nowhere. Of course, we are not Russians, either." One more reason to be glad my people are not going to fight these Pamyat bastards, he thought. Walkie-talkies would have given them one more big edge. Fight the Russians . . . he looked down at his watch. "I have to go, Iosef Trofimovich, right this minute, or my own people will start the war coming after me."
"Can't have that, not now," Mladenov said. "Shall I come with you, to start working out a rotation for sentries?"
"Come if you care to," P?ts answered. The Russian leader was no coward, not if he was willing to beard a band of armed and angry Estonians in their den. He would have been easier to dislike as a more thoroughgoing villain.
The Estonians were almost out of their den when P?ts and Mladenov reached them. They were forming up by the flag in front of P?ts' house. Some carried spears improvised from knives and poles, a couple bore hunting bows, while all those who owned firearms had them.
"Wait!" P?ts shouted.
"Father of my wife," Konstantin Laidoner said in glad surprise. Then he saw who was with P?ts. "Why have you brought the Russian here? We were all getting ready to come and rescue you." He sounded disappointed at missing the chance to fight. He was still a young man.
"I am here, as you see. And all of us, Estonians and Russians alike, have a worse enemy than any who lives in this valley." P?ts used Russian so Mladenov could follow what he said. He went on, "I will let Iosef Trofimovich here speak of that."
Seeing the Russian leader as anything but a menace was new and different for the Estonians. Seeing him as someone who had important information, information that could actually help them, was not only different but difficult. But he spoke effectively and to the point-he did not lead his own community by accident. He finished, "You Estonians know I do not love you. I think you have acted unjustly by not sharing out the lands in this valley more fairly. Still, neither have you tried to enslave me or my people. That is what Isa Bektashi will do. If we don't beat back the nomads now, we lose all chance to quarrel among ourselves later."
The Estonians were not a people to show much of what they felt, not among themselves, still less to an outsider. They talked in low voices, using their own tongue. Finally Jaak Vilde switched to Russian: "Iosef Trofimovich, we are with you. As you say, we can always fight among ourselves. This other fight does not look likely to wait."
Mladenov crossed himself. By the gesture, he set himself apart once more from the Estonians, who were mostly Lutheran. Somehow, it did not matter now. P?ts said, "Let's start planning now, to work out how best we can hold what is ours."
Tallinn Valley's opening onto the steppe was several kilometers wide. Till now, that had not mattered; till now, there had not been enough people on the steppe for it to matter. But the gap was too big to fortify in a hurry. If the clan of Aydin attacked, they would have to be met inside the valley. The most sentries could hope to do was give early warning.
Accordingly, none of the young men who went out to stand watch carried guns-they were too vulnerable to being picked off by Tatar raiders, and the folk of the valley did not own enough firearms to risk them thus. The youngsters went forth proudly all the same. The Russians and Estonians who had rifles slung them on their backs as they went about their chores, ready to fight at a moment's notice.
But hour followed hour, and nothing happened. Cat's Eye joined Byers' Star in the sky, making the valley as light and bright as it ever became. Byers' Star slowly sank, leaving Cat's Eye alone in the sky for more than forty hours. Then Byers' Star returned and Cat's Eye sank. Finally, a hundred thirty hours after Byers' Star first rose, both it and Cat's Eye were gone from the sky-full night was back for another twenty-two hours.
That stretch worried Anton P?ts-who could guess what deviltry the Tatars might try when no one could see what they were up to? At his urging, Mladenov doubled the number of patroling sentries. The Russian wanted to light watchfires through the darkness, but P?ts talked him out of it: "They'll let Bektashi's men see where we are but they won't do us a bit of good, looking out onto the steppe."
For all the farmers' precautions, Nikita Tukachevsky's relief could not find him when he came out to take his place. The word needed a while to filter back into Tallinn Town, for Tukachevsky had one of the valley's precious radios, which he was supposed to pass on to his relief. The Estonian who was to replace him had to track down the sentry to the west before he could send word to anyone in the valley that something was wrong.
Armed searchers went out at once, but found no sign of the luckless Tukachevsky until Cat's Eye returned to the sky. P?ts was part of that search party. He carried his rifle at the ready, his hands tight on it in the nervous grip of a man who knows war only from stories.
"Over here," someone called, and P?ts, a couple of hundred meters away, trotted through mixed grass and native Haven shrubbery to here. He heard how much noise he made as he ran, and knew he needed to do better-he sounded like a herd of drunken muskylopes with the mating frenzy upon them.
Tukachevsky lay sprawled and dead. His trousers were around his ankles, and he had been mutilated. P?ts sucked in a sick breath. A word was carved in sinuous Arabic script on the young Russian's forehead. Something bloody had been stuffed into his mouth. P?ts reached down to pull it out. He found he was holding Tukachevsky's severed penis. With a groan, he dropped it by the corpse. His stomach heaved; he fought against being sick.
More searchers, Estonians and Russians both, came up and formed a circle around the sentry's maltreated body. Some looked frightened, some looked fierce. Most seemed both at the same time. Several Russians made the sign of the cross.
P?ts said, "This is a warning to us. The Tatars think to make us afraid with it." He remembered the feel of what he had just touched. He was afraid, all right. But he did not let that show in his voice: "The truth is, it warns us what we can expect if we give in to them-and not just we men, but our wives and daughters, too. You and you and you, take this poor lad back to Tallinn Town for burial. The rest of us, well, we will watch and we will wait. The time for revenge will come."
The men nodded, one by one. The fear had gone from most of their faces, and some of the ferocity as well. They just looked grim, as men will do when they face a dangerous job from which they cannot escape. P?ts had seen that look on old pictures of veteran soldiers from the days of the Great Patriotic War. He'd thought it obsolete. Now he suspected he wore it himself.
The nomads gave the folk of Tallinn Town another twenty hours or so to mull over the fate of Nikita Tukachevsky. Then horns blared an alarm from the central square of the town. A bonfire was kindled there, its column of smoke a warning the enemy was on the way. Anton P?ts was in his garden a few hundred meters out of town when the alarm went up. He swore in Russian and Estonian, got up from his hands and knees, and looked north.
Bektashi's men did nothing to conceal their presence. On the contrary-fires flared as they threw torches into the fields. P?ts swore again, horribly. Even if the nomads were beaten, Tallinn Valley would suffer on account of them.
The forward assembly point for the farmers was a couple of kilometers north of Tallinn Town. Alternating between a jog and a fast walk, P?ts hurried in that direction. By the time he got close, the rifle on his shoulder seemed to have doubled its weight. Other men hurried up with him-everyone who had a gun, and a good many who did not.
"What happened?" P?ts asked.
Sergei Izvekov said, "The radio let out a squawk. One of the sentries-I think it was your Eugen"-he pronounced it Evgen, trying to make it into the Russian Yevgeny-"said 'Help! They're-' and then that channel went dead." And Eugen, a good man with three little children, dead with it, P?ts thought.
"Form a firing line," Iosef Mladenov shouted. "Take cover where you can, and make every shot count. Think of your mother, think of your wife-"
"If that doesn't do it, think of your neighbor's wife," somebody broke in. Mladenov tried to glare every which way at once to find out who had interrupted his martial address. He had no luck. The tension-breaking laughter that rose from the amateur warriors said the gibe had done some good.