Now, quite suddenly, there he was, standing on a mound not fifteen paces from her. Even from behind, she recognized him – the Tatar with the missing ear!
He was alone. She looked up and down the path. No one was coming.
What brought him here? She supposed he must have come to see the tax gatherers, who were about to leave. Whatever the reason, providence had given him to her, alone and unguarded. Madness it was; but she knew, with absolute clarity, that she would never have another chance like this again.
Before her, her mother’s face suddenly appeared.
She crept forward. His horse was standing by a tree. On its back was a bow, and a quiver of arrows. Carefully she reached up, took the bow and a single arrow, laying the arrow across the bow and feeling the pull. How hard it was. She could hardly bend it. Her heart was pounding, but she began to move towards him.
The horse stirred and snorted angrily.
And now the Tatar turned.
It was him. There was the scar, running to the missing ear. She remembered his face as if she had seen him only yesterday. He looked amazed and began to raise his hand. He had no idea who she was.
She took a deep breath and pulled on the bow. She pulled with all her strength, her face puckering up as though in acute pain. He was coming towards her. She pulled, then released.
‘Ah.’
It was her own outburst of breath that she heard. Then she heard his cry.
He was still coming towards her. His hand was flailing wildly. She began to back away towards his horse. He was on his knees now. The arrow was sticking through him, in the middle of his stomach.
What was that noise? He was hissing something at her. She was trembling violently.
He stayed where he was, his hands on the arrow, tugging at it. Then she saw his face go very white, and he fell sideways. And now the thought came to her. It came with huge force, like a soundless thunderclap of fear in a nightmare: what could she possibly do now?
She looked around her again, and realized with sickening terror that someone was approaching along the path. If they will only kill me, and not my family, she prayed, as she waited, trembling, to face them.
It was Purgas. He took in everything with one glance, then gazed at her in astonishment.
She pointed to the Tatar, and Purgas examined him.
‘He’s not yet dead,’ he said calmly. Then, quietly, he undid his belt and throttled the Tatar.
For a few seconds, for the last time, Mengu, now called Peter, saw before him, and thought he smelt, the waving grasses of the steppe.
‘I thought you told us not to kill the Tatars,’ Purgas said with a soft chuckle, as he looked up at Yanka. ‘You knew him?’
She nodded.
‘Was this the one…?’
He knew a Tatar had killed her mother, but she had almost forgotten that she had told him a Tatar raped her as well. Whichever he meant, she nodded.
He looked around.
‘We can’t leave him here,’ he remarked.
‘They’ll kill us,’ she whispered.
‘I don’t think so. The tax gatherers have gone. That’s why I was going over to Russka. There’s no one to know.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘First,’ he said sadly, ‘we’ll have to kill this horse. And that,’ he glanced down at the dead man with disgust, ‘is a pity.’
Yanka never admired her husband’s skill more than on that day.
He seemed to know exactly what to do, and he moved with such speed.
First he placed the Tatar on the splendid horse. Then, speaking softly to the animal and calming it, he led the way deep into the marshes. There, in a deserted and hidden spot he dug a trench; and then, tethering the horse firmly so that its head was over the trench, he neatly slit open its windpipe. Completely taken by surprise, the horse started violently, tried to break away, and then crashed to its knees. When Purgas had gathered all the blood in the trench, he slit the Tatar’s throat too, and carefully drained the body.
An hour later, he had deftly cut up both horse and man into manageable pieces and these he began to burn on a fire. He also burned all the Tatar’s equipment except his cloak and lasso.
By noon, there was nothing left but a heap of burned bones, the skull of the Tatar, which for some reason he had not burned, and a heap of ashes which he pushed back into the trench as he filled it in. When he had done, and scattered debris on the ground, even if someone had ever found the place, they would never have known that he had dug there.
‘Now,’ he told her, ‘we need a tree. And I know of one quite near.’
About two hundred yards away he showed her a mighty oak. He pointed to a place, high up in its trunk, where there was a hole.
‘There used to be a bee-hive up there once,’ he told her. ‘I found it last year. It’s empty now, but below it there’s a deep hole hidden in the trunk. Now help me bring the bones here.’
Carrying them in the heavy cloak, in several journeys they brought the bones to the foot of the tree.
‘Now hand me the lasso,’ he said. And moments later he was high up in the branches by the opening in the tree. Letting down the rope he told her to tie the cloak to it, and one bundle at a time he dropped them down into the hollow. In half an hour they had vanished.
Then he burned the cloak and the lasso and scattered the ashes.
‘The Tatars will look in the river and in the ground,’ he said. ‘But they’ll never look up in the trees.’
‘But what about his head?’ she asked, pointing to the familiar face with its missing ear which was lying on the ground and gazing blankly up at her.
He smiled.
‘I have another plan for that.’
It was two more weeks before Milei the boyar returned from Russka to Murom. When he got there, he found the city much disturbed. There had been numerous refusals to pay taxes in the villages; several of the Moslem tax farmers had been attacked. The Tatar authorities were furious and retribution was expected. The Grand Duke Alexander Nevsky was said to be preparing to travel to the Khan to ask for leniency. Times were black.
And Peter the Baskak had disappeared.
Indeed, the very day Milei arrived a centurion came to ask him when he had last seen him.
‘He was on his way directly to Murom,’ he assured the soldier.
The investigation that followed was thorough. All the villages between Russka and Murom were visited and questioned. Since Russka was the place he was last seen, a search was made and the river downstream was dragged; but nothing was found. By late autumn, suspicion finally centred on a village near the Oka where there had been rioting; but there was no proof that Peter had even been there. It seemed that he had simply vanished from the face of the earth.
It was on the fourth day after his return that Milei told his great lie.
He had been thinking about it ever since he reached Murom. Indeed he guessed that, sooner or later, suspicion might even fall on him for the Tatar’s death. But since he could prove that he had spent his time innocently at the village, he felt bold enough to take a chance.
And he could not resist it.
So when Peter’s son came to him and politely requested to know whether his father had bought the land from him for the monastery, Milei shook his head.
‘Alas, no. He did not like the place. A pity,’ he added, his eyes staring blandly at the young man. ‘I should have been glad if he had.’
‘So he gave you no money?’
Milei shook his head.
‘None.’
They could prove nothing. If ever they found the Tatar’s body, they could scarcely expect to find any money left on him. And, by that stroke of incredible good fortune, there were no deeds to the land for anyone to find!
Peter’s son had left. Short of calling him a liar, there was nothing the young Tatar could say.