Morkin did not immediately answer, straining his eyes towards the group on the track, far ahead where it met the horizon. He transferred the reins of the horses to one hand and held the shotgun ready in the other, and his and the groom’s bodies were tense in every line. Then at last he seemed to relax. ‘Cossacks,’ he pronounced.
At the single word, Irina’s breath sighed out of her, and she looked towards Anne. ‘We are almost at the Line,’ she said. ‘This is the dangerous part of our journey.’
‘The Line?’ Anne asked.
‘It’s a line of fortresses, guarded by Cossacks. Travellers like us pass along it, and the Cossacks protect us from the Tcherkess – the Circassians,’ Irina said. ‘They are mountain people, and they live by war and plunder. They like to attack and rob travellers, but the Cossacks prevent them.’
Her eyes flickered towards the children to indicate to Anne that she did not want to make more of the subject in their presence; but Morkin, the shotgun across his knees now, said, ‘Sometimes they prevent them, Barishnya. When there’s enough of them, and they haven’t gone to the bad themselves. I’ve heard stories that would curdle your blood, about Cossack troops deserting to the hills and–’
‘Enough, Morkin,’ Irina said sharply, cutting his voice off instantly. But the damage had been done, and everyone was silent with apprehension for the next few minutes, until the horsemen waiting ahead were close enough to be identified as friendly. There were eight of them, in sheepskin coats, bearing red lances, and with muskets slung over their shoulders, mounted on small, swift horses. They were the first true Cossacks Anne had seen, though she had heard a great deal about them, mostly from Nyanka and Adonis, who held them in some respect. They saluted the travellers cheerfully, and whirled their horses around the carriage, inspecting the women frankly and joking with the children. They had high Tartar cheekbones and hawk noses, and fierce smiles under their long moustaches. Their Russian sounded very strange to Anne: she could only understand half of what was said.
Though a mood of apprehension kept the party rather subdued, under the escort of successive bands of Cossacks, they continued their journey without incident. They passed down the line of look-out posts, where a single guard watched the horizon, ready to light a signal beacon if a raiding band were sighted, and the fortresses themselves, which were little more than an enclosure of earthworks and ditches, but which provided necessary shelter, a barracks, a church, and the protection of a two-pounder gun.
A little before Georgievsk, Irina suddenly sat up straight, straining her eyes ahead, and cried out in a joyful voice, ‘Oh look, there’s Mount Kazbek! Isn’t it lovely? Look, children, the Caucasus at last!’
Mile by mile it grew more distinct on their horizon, the triangular white peak of Mount Kazbek cutting into the blue sky, and beyond it, the three-hundred-mile sweep of snow-capped mountains refracting a thousand colours from the sunlight, the spires and pillars and minarets of the countless peaks like some magical city of the clouds: awesome, beautiful, longed-for, and unattainable. It was a magnificent spectacle, and Anne and the children exclaimed over it again and again. But the Countess only gazed in silence, with her eyes shining with a joy that Anne had never witnessed before.
At Georgievsk they had to wait two days for the formation of the weekly imperial convoy. From here onwards, the risk of attack by the Tcherkess was too great for the protection of a single troop of Cossacks to be adequate. The convoy was guarded by seventy or eighty Cossacks armed with guns and some small artillery, and its purpose was to escort the Tsar’s mail and treasury through the mountain passes along the Georgian military highway to the Governor General of Georgia at Tiflis, on the other side of the Caucasus. So dangerous were the lands beyond Georgievsk that anyone who wanted to travel that way waited for the convoy and took advantage of the heavy guard, and the procession that the Countess and her party eventually joined was formed of more than a hundred vehicles, a very mixed party of travellers ranging from peasants to high-ranking government officials, and herds of cattle and roped teams of horses to add to the confusion.
Marshalling this unwieldy convoy into two columns for marching took a very long time, with officers shouting orders and Cossacks shouting abuses, cracking their whips, and riding up and down the lines on their sweating horses to prod stragglers into place. When they eventually got on the move, progress was as slow as it had been at the beginning of their long journey. They were reduced to the walking pace of the slowest ox: twenty miles took sometimes as long as twelve hours.
There was always something interesting to be observed, and the children were full of chatter, and thoroughly enjoyed the altercations between the Cossack guards and the travellers who strayed out of line or held up progress or allowed their cattle to graze. Anne noted one or two incidents to include in the long letter she was writing to her friend Emma Hatton in Petersburg: the description of the convoy and the colourful characters in it alone was likely to take up two pages.
One particularly noticeable figure was a man to whom Irina had first drawn Anne’s attention in Georgievsk, when he had arrived to join the convoy accompanied by an impressive number of servants and a quantity of luggage. She said he was a Tartar prince. He was tall, blackly handsome and moustachioed, and he wore pearls in his ears. His clothes were magnificent: a dark green and purple striped surcoat over silver-gilt chain mail that flashed in the sun; pantaloons of sky blue embroidered with silver, bound at the knee with scarlet leather garters; a leather cap shaped like a cupola, trimmed with a band of black sheepskin; and long boots of red and yellow leather with long pointed toes, fastened close all the way up to his knees by laces.
He carried a whip of crimson leather with which he made a great deal of noise, slapping the stem of it against his saddle flaps to make a path for himself through the crowds. He wore a sabre of Damascus steel with an ivory handle, and a short Circassian bow slung over his shoulder, together with a quiver full of arrows, ready for use. He rode a magnificent, curvetting bay horse, whose harness was decorated with crimson tassels and gold discs, and he was accompanied everywhere by his mullah, also on horseback, in a white turban, flowing scarlet robe, and yellow boots.
Anne had enjoyed looking at him, and memorising his appearance for her letter to Emma. Once or twice she had caught his eye and hastily removed her gaze, not to appear rude, but had thought no more about it; until one day while they were on the road, and Anne was wishing longingly that she could rest her bones by riding Quassy, the Prince appeared beside her, forcing his way up to the kibitka and pacing his horse to the cart’s speed.
He bowed towards the Countess, who had made an instinctive shrinking movement at his appearance, ignored the children, who were frankly goggling at him; and fixed his glittering eyes on Anne. In a strange and barbaric Russian, he said, ‘The mare – the black Karabakh – is she yours?’
Anne was too surprised at the question to feel much afraid. The bay horse close beside her fretted against the curb bit, making its harness discs ring, and spattering a little foam on the side of the kibitka, and the Prince checked it minutely with hand and foot. It was so close to her that she could feel its heat, and the barely restrained power of it; its bright eye and foam-whitened lips were on a level with her face.
‘Yes,’ she said. The black mare is mine.’
‘So he said,’ the Prince replied with a jerk of his head, evidently meant to identify Stefan. He examined her fiercely and without apparent approval. With his hard eyes and hooked nose, he reminded Anne of an eagle. ‘You are not Russian,’ he said finally.