‘Nothing. Anna Petrovna, will you really go back to England?’ She leaned her cheek against Quassy’s neck. ‘No, I don’t suppose so,’ she said. ‘What would I go back to? Everything I have, now, is here.’
He was silent a moment, contemplating her profile. Then he drew breath to speak; but at that instant a flicker of movement outside the box simultaneously drew his attention, and made Quassy prick her ears and snort.
‘Who’s that?’ he said sharply, drawing back the bolt of the door. Anne looked round, startled. ‘Whoever it is, show yourself!’
Quassy knuckered softly, and the moving shadow paused and returned slowly, coming into the edge of the light.
‘Nasha! What are you doing here?’ Anne said.
The child stood quite still, looking from one to the other calculatingly, like a cat judging a distance before a spring.
‘Don’t you know it’s dangerous to wander about tonight?’ Sergei said angrily. ‘There’s an armed guard, and if you startled one of them, they might shoot you by accident.’
‘They won’t shoot me,’ she said unemphatically.
‘Never mind – Sergei’s right, you shouldn’t be here,’ Anne said. ‘What were you doing?’
‘I heard Quassy calling. I came to see if she was all right,’ Natasha said. She stood facing them, hands down by her side, like a soldier on parade, her face expressionless, waiting to see what they would say or do. Such self-possession, it seemed to Anne, was unnatural in a child so young, and she shivered, suddenly convinced that Nasha was lying, or at least, not telling the whole of the truth. But to what purpose? She couldn’t imagine.
‘Well, you’d better come back with us now,’ Sergei said. ‘I expect it’s time you were in bed, anyway.’
Nasha waited patiently while they shut Quassy in again, and then walked obediently beside them back towards the lamp light.
‘What were you doing, Nasha?’ Anne asked after a moment.
‘I came to see Quassy,’ she said again. She flickered a glance upwards under her eyelids.
‘And what else?’ Anne persisted.
‘And the other horses,’ she said with the air of one admitting the truth, ‘They’re restless, because of the herd.’
‘How do you know? They aren’t making any noise,’ Sergei said suspiciously.
Natasha looked up, and now her gaze was limpid. ‘I hear them,’ she said.
At first light, while the revellers were still sleeping, the groups of tribesmen began to arrive at Chastnaya for the horse fair. By the time the family was up, considerable numbers had already assembled, had tethered or hobbled their horses, and were sitting on the ground eating, or setting out the wares they had brought with them to sell. This makeshift bazaar was always a secondary feature of the horse fair.
After breakfast, Sergei constituted himself Anne’s bodyguard in order to allow her to take a closer look. She viewed with amazement the diversity of different physical types amongst the tribesmen, which was to her far more extraordinary than their strange dress or customs. It was as if she had suddenly discovered herself to be living at the edge of a place where the Creation was still going on, where God was experimenting with the very stuff of mankind.
‘Those are the Eastern tribesmen – the Lesghians and the Avars,’ Sergei murmured to Anne, pointing them out. ‘They’re from Daghestan, and they’re the least civilised of the tribes – except for the Chechen, but I don’t suppose they would come to a fair like this. I don’t suppose they’d be welcome, either. Even the other Tcherkess don’t trust them.’
Anne thought they seemed closer to animals than men. They were short, stockily built, swarthy-skinned and black-haired, as if they had been hewn out of the black rock of the region they inhabited. Their dark, bright eyes were quick and cunning, and they kept close together and eyed the strangers amongst whom they found themselves with suspicion, snuffing the air for danger with their broad nostrils. The horses they rode in on were slender and fleet and beautiful, strange contrast to their atavistic ugliness.
‘When I first joined the Independents, we were warned never to underestimate them,’ Sergei said. ‘And never to be captured alive. They torture prisoners, especially Christians, in the most hideous way – or bury them alive.’ Anne shuddered, and he glanced at her, gratified at the response. ‘But they love their horses,’ he added. ‘Odd, isn’t it, that they have so little regard for human life, but so much reverence for a dumb beast?’
‘Why does Feodor allow them to come at all,’ Anne asked, ‘if they are so savage?’
‘For trade, of course. Who else would he sell his horses to? Of course, he sells some to Russians, but the bulk of his trade must be with the tribesmen. The Eastern clans in particular are great horsemen, and prize karabakhs beyond anything. And they pay good gold for them, which is more than the Russians always do. Of course, they’d sooner steal them than buy them, and sell them to the Persians and the Kurds,’ he added with a chuckle, ‘so it’s best to keep a sharp eye on them.’
‘Are all of them so dangerous?’ she asked, glancing round warily at the nearest groups.
Sergei shrugged. ‘On the whole, the Western tribes aren’t so bad, from living shoulder to shoulder with civilised Russians for so long. Some of them – the Kabardins and the Nogays of the plains, for instance, we talk of as “tamed tribes”, because we’ve held them in subjection for generations, and we trade with them as with civilised people. But even they are not entirely to be trusted. They may come openly by day to buy salt and gunpowder from you, and then slip back at night and steal your horses, and like as not put a knife between your ribs. The best plan with any of the Tcherkess is to keep your eyes open and your hand on your gun.’
He pointed out the Ossetins, red-haired, blue-eyed mountain people from the region of Mount Kabak. They wore a great many gold chains and discs which caught the light dazzlingly, and their surcoats of dressed leather were patterned in red and blue. They looked very handsome, but Anne soon discovered it was advisable to keep upwind of them, for they had a custom of rubbing their bodies with rancid mare’s milk to protect themselves from the cold and the bitter wind, and the warmth of Chastnaya’s summer sunshine, even so early in the day, had ripened it to a kind of cheese inside their leather garments.
The Nogays, she discovered, were small men, made shorter by the fact that they were mostly bow-legged, from having been upon horseback since infancy; and their yellow skin and high, protruding cheekbones betrayed their origins. ‘Their ancestors came to Russia with the Golden Horde,’ Sergei told her. The mountain Nogays were distinguished from the plainsmen by their shaven heads, and their heavy felted cloaks, which protected them equally from the burning sun, the bitter cold, and the torrential rain of the Caucasian heights.
‘And at night, they fling it over a heap of straw or brushwood, and it makes a very respectable mattress.’
One or two of them had spread their cloaks on the ground to display the goods they had brought to sell – objects carved from wood and animal horn, dressed and painted leather, harness, necklaces of polished stones. The plainsmen had brought flasks of oil, bags of sunflower seeds, salt, dried meat, lengths of cloth and – to Anne’s surprise – a great many sweetmeats: gingerbread and curd cakes and candied fruits. The wilder the tribesman, she discovered, the sweeter the tooth: the black-browed, grim-looking Lesghians from the bleakest mountain heights on the borders of Kakhetia crowded around the heaps of glistening sugar plums like eager children.
The Kabardins were the largest group, and Anne admired their proud bearing, and their slender, graceful bodies, which looked so well astride a horse. They were an aquiline-nosed, dark-eyed people, proud and cruel, living by war and plunder, reverencing above all the attributes of the warrior – steadfastness, physical courage, skill in arms. Their clothes were colourful and splendid, and their horses were as elaborately caparisoned as the riders.