Pan Michael

Volodyovski rejoiced greatly indeed; he embraced Zagloba, and thinking a while said, —

"And I shall not tempt hereby the Lord God, nor the country, nor the hetman; for surely I shall accomplish much in the field. I thank you from my heart! I think too that the hetman will wish to have me at hand, especially after the letter. But not to abandon Kamenyets, do you know what I'll do? I'll fit up a handful of soldiers at my own cost, and send them to Kamenyets. I'll write at once to the hetman of this."

"Still better! But, Michael, where will you find the men?"

"I have about forty robbers in the cellars, and I'll take those. As often as I gave command to hang some one, Basia tormented me to spare his life; more than once she advised me to make soldiers of those robbers. I was unwilling, for an example was needed; but now war is on our shoulders, and everything is possible. Those are terrible fellows, who have smelt powder. I will proclaim, too, that whoso from the ravines or the thickets elects to join the regiment, will receive forgiveness for past robberies. There will be about a hundred men; Basia too will be glad. You have taken a great weight from my heart."

That same day the little knight despatched a new messenger to the hetman, and proclaimed life and pardon to the robbers if they would join the infantry. They joined gladly, and promised to bring in others. Basia's delight was unbounded. Tailors were brought from Ushytsa, from Kamenyets, and from whence ever possible, to make uniforms. The former robbers were mustered on the square of Hreptyoff. Pan Michael was rejoiced in heart at the thought that he would act himself in the field against the enemy, would not expose his wife to the danger of a siege, and besides would render Kamenyets and the country noteworthy service.

This work had been going on a number of weeks when one evening the messenger returned with a letter from Pan Sobieski.

The hetman wrote as follows: —

Beloved and Very Dear Volodyovski, – Because you send all news so diligently I cherish gratitude to you, and the country owes you thanks. War is certain. I have news also from elsewhere that there is a tremendous force in Kuchunkaury; counting the horde, there will be three hundred thousand. The horde may march any moment. The Sultan values nothing so much as Kamenyets. The Tartar traitors will show the Turks every road, and inform them about Kamenyets. I hope that God will give that serpent, Tugai Bey's son, into your hands, or into Novoveski's, over whose wrong I grieve sincerely. As to this, that you be near me, God knows how glad I should be, but it is impossible. The starosta of Podolia has shown me, it is true, various kindnesses since the election; I wish, therefore, to send him the best soldiers, for the rock of Kamenyets is to me as my own eyesight. There will be many there who have seen war once or twice in their lives, and are like a man who on a time has eaten some peculiar food which he remembers all his life afterward; a man, however, who has used it as his daily bread, and might serve with experienced counsel, will be lacking, or if there shall be such he will be without sufficient weight. Therefore I will send you. Ketling, though a good soldier, is less known; the inhabitants will have their eyes turned to you, and though the command will remain with another, I think that men will obey you with readiness. That service in Kamenyets may be dangerous, but with us it is a habit to be drenched in that rain from which others hide. There is reward enough for us in glory, and a grateful remembrance; but the main thing is the country, to the salvation of which I need not excite you.

This letter, read in the assembly of officers, made a great impression; for all wished to serve in the field rather than in a fortress. Volodyovski bent his head.

"What do you think now, Michael?" asked Zagloba.

He raised his face, already collected, and answered with a voice as calm as if he had met no disappointment in his hopes, —

"I will go to Kamenyets. What have I to think?"

And it might have seemed that nothing else had ever been in his head.

After a while his mustaches quivered, and he said, —

"Hei! dear comrades, we will go to Kamenyets, but we will not yield it."

"Unless we fall there," said the officers. "One death to a man."

Zagloba was silent for some time; casting his eyes on those present, and seeing that all were waiting for what he would say, he puffed all at once, and said, —

"I will go with you. Devil take it!"

CHAPTER XLVI

When the earth had grown dry, and grass was flourishing, the Khan moved in person, with fifty thousand of the Crimean and Astrachan hordes, to help Doroshenko and the insurgents. The Khan himself, and his relatives, the petty sultans, and all the more important murzas and beys, wore kaftans as gifts from the Padishah, and went against the Commonwealth, not as they went usually, for booty and captives, but for a holy war with "fate," and the "destruction" of Lehistan (Poland) and Christianity.

Another and still greater storm was gathering at Adrianople, and against this deluge only the rock of Kamenyets was standing erect; for the rest of the Commonwealth lay like an open steppe, or like a sick man, powerless not only to defend himself, but even to rise to his feet. The previous Swedish, Prussian, Moscow, Cossack, and Hungarian wars, though victorious finally, had exhausted the Commonwealth. The army confederations and the insurrections of Lyubomirski of infamous memory had exhausted it, and now it was weakened to the last degree by court quarrels, the incapacity of the king, the feuds of magistrates, the blindness of a frivolous nobility, and the danger of civil war. In vain did the great Sobieski forewarn them of ruin, – no one would believe in war. They neglected means of defence; the treasury had no money, the hetman no troops. To a power against which alliances of all the Christian nations were hardly able to stand, the hetman could oppose barely a few thousand men.

Meanwhile in the Orient, where everything was done at the will of the Padishah, and nations were as a sword in the hand of one man, it was different altogether. From the moment that the great standard of the Prophet was unfurled, and the horse-tail standard planted on the gate of the seraglio and the tower of the seraskierat, and the ulema began to proclaim a holy war, half Asia and all Northern Africa had moved. The Padishah himself had taken his place in spring on the plain of Kuchunkaury, and was assembling forces greater than any seen for a long time on earth. A hundred thousand spahis and janissaries, the pick of the Turkish army, were stationed near his sacred person; and then troops began to gather from all the remotest countries and possessions. Those who inhabited Europe came earliest. The legions of the mounted beys of Bosnia came with colors like the dawn, and fury like lightning; the wild warriors of Albania came, fighting on foot with daggers; bands of Mohammedanized Serbs came; people came who lived on the banks of the Danube, and farther to the south beyond the Balkans, as far as the mountains of Greece. Each pasha led a whole army, which alone would have sufficed to overrun the defenceless Commonwealth. Moldavians and Wallachians came; the Dobrudja and Belgrod Tartars came in force; some thousands of Lithuanian Tartars and Cheremis came, led by the terrible Azya, son of Tugai Bey, and these last were to be guides through the unfortunate country, which was well known to them.

After these the general militia from Asia began to flow in. The pashas of Sivas, Brussa, Aleppo, Damascus, and Bagdad, besides regular troops, led armed throngs, beginning with men from the cedar-covered mountains of Asia Minor, and ending with the swarthy dwellers on the Euphrates and the Tigris. Arabians too rose at the summons of the Caliph; their burnooses covered as with snow the plains of Kuchunkaury; among them were also nomads from the sandy deserts, and inhabitants of cities from Medina to Mecca. The tributary power of Egypt did not remain at its domestic hearths. Those who dwelt in populous Cairo, those who in the evening gazed on the flaming twilight of the pyramids, who wandered through Theban ruins, who dwelt in those murky regions whence the sacred Nile issues forth, men whom the sun had burned to the color of soot, – all these planted their arms on the field of Adrianople, praying now to give victory to Islam, and destruction to that land which alone had shielded for ages the rest of the world against the adherents of the Prophet.

There were legions of armed men; hundreds of thousands of horses were neighing on the field; hundreds of thousands of buffaloes, of sheep and of camels, fed near the herds of horses. It might be thought that at God's command an angel had turned people out of Asia, as once he had turned Adam out of paradise, and commanded them to go to countries in which the sun was paler and the plains were covered in winter with snow. They went then with their herds, an innumerable swarm of white, dark, and black warriors. How many languages were heard there, how many different costumes glittered in the sun of spring! Nations wondered at nations; the customs of some were foreign to others, their arms unknown, their methods of warfare different, and faith alone joined those travelling generations; only when the muezzins called to prayer did those many-tongued hosts turn their faces to the East, calling on Allah with one voice.

There were more servants at the court of the Sultan than troops in the Commonwealth. After the army and the armed bands of volunteers marched throngs of shop-keepers, selling goods of all kinds; their wagons, together with those of the troops, flowed on like a river.

Two pashas of three tails, at the head of two armies, had no other work but to furnish food for those myriads; and there was abundance of everything. The sandjak of Sangrytan watched over the whole supply of powder. With the army went two hundred cannon, and of these ten were "stormers," so large that no Christian king had the like. The Beglerbeys of Asia were on the right wing, the Europeans on the left. The tents occupied so wide an expanse that in presence of them Adrianople seemed no very great city. The Sultan's tents, gleaming in purple silk, satin, and gold embroidery, formed, as it were, a city apart. Around them swarmed armed guards, black eunuchs from Abyssinia, in yellow and blue kaftans; gigantic porters from the tribes of Kurdistan, intended for bearing burdens; young boys of the Uzbeks, with faces of uncommon beauty, shaded by silk fringes; and many other servants, varied in color as flowers of the steppe. Some of these were equerries, some served at the tables, some bore lamps, and some served the most important officials.

On the broad square around the Sultan's court, which in luxury and wealth reminded the faithful of paradise, stood courts less splendid, but equal to those of kings, – those of the vizir, the ulema, the pasha of Anatolia, and of Kara Mustafa, the young kaimakan, on whom the eyes of the Sultan and all were turned as upon the coming "sun of war."

Before the tents of the Padishah were to be seen the sacred guard of infantry, with turbans so lofty that the men wearing them seemed giants, They were armed with javelins fixed on long staffs, and short crooked swords. Their linen dwellings touched the dwellings of the Sultan. Farther on were the camps of the formidable janissaries armed with muskets and lances, forming the kernel of the Turkish power. Neither the German emperor nor the French king could boast of infantry equal in number and military accuracy. In wars with the Commonwealth the nations of the Sultan, more enervated in general, could not measure strength with cavalry in equal numbers, and only through an immense numerical preponderance did they crush and conquer. But the janissaries dared to meet even regular squadrons of cavalry. They roused terror in the whole Christian world, and even in Tsargrad itself. Frequently the Sultan trembled before such pretorians, and the chief aga of those "lambs" was one of the most important dignitaries in the Divan.

After the janissaries came the spahis; after them the regular troops of the pashas, and farther on the common throng. All this camp had been for a number of months near Constantinople, waiting till its power should be completed by legions coming from the remotest parts of the Turkish dominions until the sun of spring should lighten the march to Lehistan by sucking out dampness from the earth.

The sun, as if subject to the will of the Sultan, had shone brightly. From the beginning of April until May barely a few warm rains had moistened the meadows of Kuchunkaury; for the rest, the blue tent of God hung without a cloud over the tent of the Sultan. The gleams of day played on the white linen, on the turbans, on the many-colored caps, on the points of the helmets and banners and javelins, on the camp and the tents and the people and the herds, drowning all in a sea of bright light. In the evening on a clear sky shone the moon, unhidden by fog, and guarded quietly those thousands who under its emblem were marching to win more and more new lands; then it rose higher in the heaven, and grew pale before the light of the fires. But when the fires were gleaming in the whole immeasurable expanse, when the Arab infantry from Damascus and Aleppo, called "massala djilari," lighted green, red, yellow, and blue lamps at the tents of the Sultan and the vizir, it might seem that a tract of heaven had fallen to the earth, and that those were stars glittering and twinkling on the plain.

Exemplary order and discipline reigned among those legions. The pashas bent to the will of the Sultan, like a reed in a storm; the army bent before them. Food was not wanting for men and herds. Everything was furnished in superabundance, everything in season. In exemplary order also were passed the hours of military exercise, of refreshment, of devotion. When the muezzins called to prayer from wooden towers, built in haste, the whole army turned to the East, each man stretched before himself a skin or a mat, and the entire army fell on its knees, like one man. At sight of that order and those restraints the hearts rose in the throngs, and their souls were filled with sure hope of victory.

The Sultan, coming to the camp at the end of April, did not move at once on the march. He waited more than a month, so that the waters might dry; during that time he trained the army to camp life, exercised it, arranged it, received envoys, and dispensed justice under a purple canopy. The kasseka, his chief wife, accompanied him on this expedition, and with her too went a court resembling a dream of paradise.

A gilded chariot bore the lady under a covering of purple silk; after it came other wagons and white Syrian camels, also covered with purple, bearing packs; houris and bayaderes sang songs to her on the road. When, wearied with the road, she was closing the silky lashes of her eyes, the sweet tones of soft instruments were heard at once, and they lulled her to sleep. During the heat of the day fans of peacock and ostrich feathers waved above her; priceless perfumes of the East burned before her tents in bowls from Hindostan. She was accompanied by all the treasures, wonders, and wealth that the Orient and the power of the Sultan could furnish, – houris, bayaderes, black eunuchs, pages beautiful as angels, Syrian camels, horses from the desert of Arabia; in a word, a whole retinue was glittering with brocade, cloth of silver and gold; it was gleaming like a rainbow from diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Nations fell prostrate before it, not daring to look at that face, which the Padishah alone had the right to see; and that retinue seemed to be either a supernatural vision or a reality, transferred by Allah himself from the world of visions and dream-illusions to the earth.

But the sun warmed the world more and more, and at last days of heat came. On a certain evening, therefore, the banner was raised on a lofty pole before the Sultan's tent, and a cannon-shot informed the army and the people of the march to Lehistan. The great sacred drum sounded; all the others sounded; the shrill voices of pipes were heard; the pious, half-naked dervishes began to howl, and the river of people moved on in the night, to avoid the heat of the sun during daylight. But the army itself was to march only in a number of hours after the earliest signal. First of all went the tabor, then those pashas who provided food for the troops, then whole legions of handicraftsmen, who had to pitch tents, then herds of pack animals, then herds destined for slaughter. The march was to last six hours of that night and the following nights, and to be made in such order that when soldiers came to a halt they should always find food and a resting-place ready.

When the time came at last for the army to move, the Sultan rode out on an eminence, so as to embrace with his eyes his whole power, and rejoice at the sight. With him were his vizir, the ulema, the young kaimakan, Kara Mustafa, the "rising sun of war," and a company of the infantry guard. The night was calm and clear; the moon shone brightly; and the Sultan might embrace with the eye all his legions, were it not that no eye of man could take them all in at once, – for on the march, though going closely together, they occupied many miles.

Still he rejoiced in heart, and passing the beads of odorous sandal-wood through his fingers, raised his eyes to Heaven in thanks to Allah, who had made him lord of so many armies and so many nations. All at once, when the front of the tabor had pushed almost out of sight, he interrupted his prayer, and turning to the young kaimakan, Kara Mustafa, said, —

"I have forgotten who marches in the vanguard?"

"Light of paradise!" answered Kara Mustafa, "in the vanguard are the Lithuanian Tartars and the Cheremis; and thy dog Azya, son of Tugai Bey, is leading them."

CHAPTER XLVII

Azya, the son of Tugai Bey, after a long halt on the plain of Kuchunkaury, was really marching with his men at the head of all the Turkish forces toward the boundary of the Commonwealth.

After the grievous blow which his plans and his person had received from the valiant hand of Basia, a fortunate star seemed to shine on him anew. First of all, he had recovered. His beauty, it is true, was destroyed forever: one eye had trickled out altogether, his nose was mashed, and his face, once like the face of a falcon, had become monstrous and terrible. But just that terror with which it filled people gave him still more consideration among the wild Tartars of the Dobrudja. His arrival made a great noise in the whole camp; his deeds grew in the narratives of men, and became gigantic. It was said that he had brought all the Lithuanian Tartars and Cheremis into the service of the Sultan; that he had outwitted the Poles, as no one had ever outwitted them; that he had burned whole towns along the Dniester, had cut off their garrisons, and had taken great booty. Those who were to march now for the first time to Lehistan; those who, coming from distant corners of the East, had not tried Polish arms hitherto; those whose hearts were alarmed at the thought that they would soon stand eye to eye with the terrible cavalry of the unbeliever, – saw in the young Azya a warrior who had conquered them, and made a fortunate beginning of war. The sight of the "hero" filled their hearts straightway with comfort; besides, as Azya was son of the terrible Tugai Bey, whose name had thundered through the Orient, all eyes were turned on him the more.

"The Poles reared him," said they; "but he is the son of a lion; he bit them and returned to the Padishah's service."

The vizir himself wished to see him; and the "rising sun of war," the young kaimakan, Kara Mustafa, enamoured of military glory and wild warriors, fell in love with him. Both inquired diligently of him concerning the Commonwealth, the hetman, the armies, and Kamenyets; they rejoiced at his answers, seeing from them that war would be easy; that to the Sultan it must bring victory, to the Poles defeat, and to them the title of Ghazi (conqueror). Hence Azya had frequent opportunities later to fall on his face to the vizir, to sit at the threshold of the kaimakan's tent, and received from both numerous gifts in camels, horses, and weapons.

The grand vizir gave him a kaftan of silver brocade, the possession of which raised him in the eyes of all Lithuanian Tartars and Cheremis. Krychinski, Adurovich, Moravski, Groholski, Tarasovski, Aleksandrovich, – in a word, all those captains who had once dwelt in the Commonwealth and served it, but now returned to the Sultan, – placed themselves without a question under the command of Tugai Bey's son, honoring in him both the prince by descent and the warrior who had received a kaftan. He became, therefore, a notable murza; and more than two thousand warriors, incomparably better than the usual Tartars, obeyed his nod. The approaching war, in which it was easier for the young murza to distinguish himself than for any one else, might carry him high; he might find in it dignities, renown, power.

But still Azya bore poison in his soul. To begin with, it pricked his pride that the Tartars, in comparison with the Turks themselves, especially the janissaries and spahis, had little more significance than dogs compared with hunters. He had significance himself, but the Tartars in general were considered worthless cavalry. The Turk used them, at times he feared them, but in the camp he despised them, Azya, noticing this, kept his men apart from the general Tartar mass, as if they formed a separate, a better kind of army; but with this he brought on himself straightway the indignation of the Dobrudja and Belgrod murzas, and was not able to convince various Turkish officers that the Lithuanian Tartars were really better in any way than chambuls of the horde. On the other hand, reared in a Christian country, among nobles and knights, he could not inure himself to the manners of the East. In the Commonwealth he was only an ordinary officer and of the last arm of the service; but still, when meeting superiors or even the hetman, he was not obliged to humble himself as here, where he was a murza and the leader of all the companies of Lithuanian Tartars. Here he had to fall on his face before the vizir; he had to touch the ground with his forehead in the friendly tent of the kaimakan; he had to prostrate himself before the pashas, before the ulema, before the chief aga of the janissaries. Azya was not accustomed to this. He remembered that he was the son of a hero; he had a wild soul full of pride, aiming high, as eagles aim; hence he suffered sorely.

But the recollection of Basia burned him with fire most of all. He cared not that one weak hand had hurled from his horse him who at Bratslav, at Kalnik, and a hundred other places had challenged to combat and stretched in death the most terrible skirmishers of the Zaporojia; he cared not for the shame, the disgrace! But he loved that woman beyond measure and thought; he wanted her in his tent, to look at her, to beat her, to kiss her. If it were in his choice to be Padishah and rule half the world, or to take her in his arms, feel with his heart the warmth of her blood, the breath of her face, her lips with his lips, he would prefer her to Tsargrad, to the Bosphorus, to the title of Khalif. He wanted her because he loved her; he wanted her because he hated her. The more she was foreign to him, the more he wanted her; the more she was pure, faithful, untainted, the more he wanted her. More than once when he remembered in his tent that he had kissed those eyes one time in his life, in the ravine after the battle with Azba Bey, and that at Rashkoff he had felt her breast on his, the madness of desire carried him away. He knew not what had become of her, whether she had perished on the road or not. At times he found solace in the thought that she had died. At times he thought, "It had been better not to carry her away, not to burn Rashkoff, not to come to the service of the Sultan, but to stay in Hreptyoff, and even look at her."

But the unfortunate Zosia Boski was in his tent. Her life passed in low service, in shame and continual terror, for in Azya's heart there was not a drop of pity for her. He simply tormented her because she was not Basia. She had, however, the sweetness and charm of a field flower; she had youth and beauty: therefore he sated himself with that beauty; but he kicked her for any cause, or flogged her white body with rods. In a worse hell she could not be, for she lived without hope. Her life had begun to bloom in Rashkoff, to bloom like spring with the flower of love for Pan Adam. She loved him with her whole soul; she loved that knightly, noble, and honest nature with all her faculties; and now she was the plaything and the captive of that one-eyed monster. She had to crawl at his feet and tremble like a beaten dog, look into his face, look at his hands to see if they were not about to seize a club or a whip; she had to hold back her breath and her tears.