The sergeant sure didn’t actually look a lot like Slim otherwise. He had a strongly Oriental cast to his eyes, and a deep, ugly scar that ran from the top of his forehead down narrowly around his left eye and clear to the bottom of his chin. And something I’d never seen before, he only wore a beard on the right side of his face. I think he liked to keep the left side clean-shaven because he was proud of that scar and that way everyone could see the huge, ugly battle mark in all its glory.
Aside from their quickness to laughter and their big stomachs, there were two other things that made me think of them in the same way. Sergeant Nikolai Razin didn’t want to be called anything by anybody except “Nick.” And Slim was so much that way that most of us would have been hard put to remember his last name. Another similarity, it was Nick that I’d happened to see that one time before, giving his last drink of water to his horse.
As for the rest of the cossacks, they were kind of a mixed bunch. Not as mixed up as we were, with Shiny Joe and Link, and Natcho and Chakko, and even Purse. But you could tell they came from a lot of different people and places and times. Their eyes went from blue and green to dark brown and hazel. And tall or short, they ranged from a few sandy-haired ones to mostly jet-black hair.
Their full names were too hard to even fool around with. They had last names like Yevdokimov, Gordiyenko, Naumenko and Vishnevetski.
One night Crab Smith and some of the others got me trying to pronounce the few full names I could think of offhand. There weren’t many.
“Jesus Christ!” Crab’s hurt arm was nearly completely okay by now and he rubbed his head with it. “Ain’t one of ’em got a good, simple, civilized name like Smith? They must be crazy!”
“How’s your arm?” Old Keats was being sarcastic and Crab knew he was right, so he shut up then.
“Their first names’re generally easier,” I told them.
“Like what?” Mushy grunted suspiciously.
“Well—” I concentrated. “Essaul, Ilya, Ivan, Yuri, Dmitri, Victor—”
“Victor?” Sammy the Kid asked. “You sure you ain’t confused?”
“That sounds almost American,” Dixie said.
Shad was rolling a cigarette. “Go ahead, Levi.”
“Kirdyaga, Vody, Gerasmin, Pietre, Yakov.” I frowned. “That’s all, best m’ memory serves.”
“Talk about dumb fuckin’ names!” Rufe shook his head.
“Our names are just exactly as dumb t’ them!” Old Keats looked at Purse, Natcho and Link, who happened to be sitting near each other. “Want some real dumb names? Percival! Ignacio! Lincoln Washington Jefferson Jackson!”
“Hell,” Purse said, “no reason t’ get pissed off at us.”
“Shoot, no,” Link added. “We didn’t have nothin’ t’ do with gettin’ them names.”
“That’s exactly what I’m sayin’, goddamnit!” Keats told us.
“No point gettin’ all excited,” Dixie said. “Levi’s the only one who’s got t’ keep track a’ them dumb Russian names.” He added, with a kind of a mean, troublemaking look at me, “And friendly as he’s got with them, an’ with that stupid name a’ his, he’s the perfect one t’ do it.”
You could never tell about Dixie. A few of the others laughed, and as tired as I was that night, I started to stand up to fight if need be. But Shad was on his feet already. “My official given name ain’t Shad,” he said quietly and not too easily. “It’s Shadrack.” He looked around with hard eyes. “Anybody want t’ make a joke about that?”
Nobody wanted to, which was kind of natural under those circumstances.
He went on. “Nobody’s gonna make any fun of anybody’s name from here on out. Not the Russian names. Not our own. And it’s time t’ get some sleep.”
My bedroll wasn’t far from his, so we wound up facing each other a little away by ourselves while we pulled off our boots.
“You sure are good at savin’ me from fearful fights,” I said, pulling off one boot.
“Hate t’ get my messenger killed.” He pulled his first boot off.
I tugged on the second boot. My left foot’s always been bigger than the right one, for some reason. “I didn’t know your official given name was Shadrack.”
He pulled his second boot off. “It ain’t.”
“Well, then—”
“I didn’t like the way that talk was goin’, because it wasn’t fair.” He took off his hat and hung it over his saddle horn. “A name ain’t never nothin’, good or bad, until the man behind that name makes it so.” And then he laid his head down in the seat of the saddle and was asleep.
I thought about what he’d said for a while, feeling real good about it, and then before I knew it, I was asleep too.
In the days that came, Rostov kept teaching me things, and maybe just in general conversation learning a little bit, too. For example, he asked me about the leather chaps that most of us cowboys wore, and I told him they were mostly for protecting your legs in rough brush country where, if you were riding hard, scrub oak and snagging low branches and such could cut you all to hell without them.
Rostov said they didn’t have that kind of country over there. Mostly just grass and thick stands of trees going on forever, and sometimes willows where there were creeks or water naturally laid up for long times. But he still liked the look and the idea of chaps and thought mine were kind of artistic because of the brass studs I’d lined the edges with. I also had a hunch he thought they might be useful in protecting a man’s legs in battle.
Another time, he took an interest in the hard leather cuffs around my wrists. I told him that they were partly for fancy and partly to keep my wrists from being chewed up and rope-burned when I was working cattle and using the lariat on my saddle. He nodded politely at my answer, but there was no way for him to know exactly what I was talking about because he’d never seen anybody do any roping. I was tempted to lasso a tree branch or a rock or something, but it seemed kind of foolish so I just let it go that it was a way of throwing a rope and catching a cow, presuming you threw the rope right in the first place. Then he told me about the closest thing he knew of for that purpose. It was called an “urga” and it was used by herders in Mongolia and Siberia. It was a thirty-foot-long pole that was light and strong, and there was a loop hooked to the end of it. If you wanted to catch something, you just rode up near it, held out the long pole, and dropped the noose around the animal’s neck.
The very idea of lugging a thirty-foot-long pole all over the place struck me as being funny as hell.
But there were other things that weren’t so funny, like why the cossacks all wore those scarlet-red vests. That was so that if they got their bodies chopped up badly in a battle, the bleeding wouldn’t show so much. The vest would be the same color as the flowing blood it was soaking up.
Therefore, if a bleeding cossack rode on through a battle half dead, he’d look unbloody and unbeaten. And if he was just barely strong enough to stay in the saddle and sit up straight, he’d still look like the toughest horseman who ever bore down on you.
And then one day Rostov told me about the swans.
It was late in the afternoon, and we were crossing a wide plain, riding at an easy walk for a change.
Two huge, beautiful birds flew high over us, crossing gracefully under the lowering sun and then finally dipping and turning and at last disappearing far away in the northern sky. I’d never seen a sight quite like those big, white, lovely birds. It seemed as though they were almost softly playing together, and even teasing each other a little, while they were taking their own kind of a friendly, casual stroll a thousand feet up in the clear blue air. It was just too pretty not to watch, even though I was supposed to be searching the horizon, and I felt Rostov glancing at me before they flew out of my sight.