“Just make sure it stays on a gamin’ level,” Old Keats told us. “Get yourself injured in some foolish way, and I got a hunch Shad’ll be just about mad enough t’ finish the job, includin’ a free burial service.”
“Hell,” Dixie said, “after all, they ain’t nothin’ but games.”
“War games,” Slim corrected him, “which has a different an’ somewhat more serious sound to it.”
That afternoon a bunch of us who weren’t on any kind of duty rode over a low hill near the camp and down to a broken part of the wide meadow where a bunch of the cossacks were doing something. The camp was only a minute away, but you couldn’t see it from here.
Shad and Old Keats were talking to Rostov and Bruk and didn’t take much notice of our going. I had the impression that Shad had a kind of a disdain for any sort of a war game, probably based on an instinctive feeling that everybody, like he was, ought to be a first-class natural-born warrior in the first place.
Slim and me and six or seven others rode toward where Igor was sitting on Blackeye near a big rock, and he grinned and waved. Some of the other cossacks were riding far out across the broken meadow, stopping once in a while to dismount and jab tall, thin poles into the ground so they stuck up about six feet.
“What they doin’?” I asked, as we pulled up near Igor.
“Laying out a racing course,” Igor said.
“Goddamn,” Slim grunted, studying the men out on the meadow. “That shapes up t’ be some kind of a rough track.”
“Ahh!” Dixie said with an edge of contempt. “It sure ain’t what I’d call rough.”
Igor glanced at Dixie without expression, and then went on explaining to the rest of us. “Right here, at this rock, is where the course will begin and end.” He pointed off, in a wide, sweeping gesture. “It goes in a rough circle of about three kilometers.”
“What the hell’s that?” Dixie asked, almost suspiciously.
A little annoyed at his general attitude, I said, “It’s a distance, stupid.”
Annoyed back at me, he gave me a hard look, and I suddenly realized I’d gotten myself out on a limb. Either Dixie or someone else was going to have to ask me the next question, which had to be, how the hell long a distance? And now, after calling Dixie stupid, I was going to be stuck with absolutely no answer. So I gave the track a swift glance and took a quick, hopeful guess before anybody could nail me down. “Three kilometers is—about two miles.”
“Yeah?” Dixie frowned.
“That’s right,” Igor said, backing me up so neatly that it looked like I’d known what I was talking about all along. “Three kilometers is one-point-eight-six miles.”
“Huh?” Link muttered.
Figuring fast as hell, I said casually, “Just a shade under two miles,” thereby ending my brief but enjoyable career as a genius.
“Just watch who you’re callin’ stupid,” Dixie muttered.
“I do, I do.”
Slim said to us, “Cut it out.” Then he looked off across the meadow again, where the cossacks had just finished placing what added up to twenty poles. “Goddamn,” he said to Igor, “that’s a mean couple a’ miles. You ain’t missed one rough spot in that whole busted-up field.”
“In a race a rider can take any route he wants,” Igor told him, “as long as he goes outside of every one of the poles.”
“Sure makes it more interestin’ than a regular race track,” Link said.
Igor grinned. “Wars aren’t fought on race tracks.”
Slim snorted with faint humor. “There ain’t even no good cavalry charges on ’em. ’Specially the horses I bet on.”
The poles all set now, the cossacks were riding back toward us. And the way they’d placed the poles did make a lot of sense for a hard, broken-country run. Going down the slight slope from the big rock near us, the first obstacle was the stream in the meadow, about a hundred yards away. The pole was stuck at the widest place to jump the stream. It was about a ten-foot leap from bank to bank, with a four-foot drop to the water below. You could circle fifty feet to the left of the pole and have no trouble splashing through the shallows there. But in taking that longer way, you’d lose time. And every one of those poles had been placed in a similar, tricky fashion. Wherever there were patches of rocky ground or thick stands of trees or steep gulleys, you were always given your choice. Racing just outside the pole was the fastest and most dangerous. The safer you wanted to play it, riding farther around outside the poles, the longer it would take.
And toward the end of the course, coming back in full circle, the last obstacle was once again the stream. If you wanted to take the long, safe way around, you had to go about three or four hundred feet downstream. Again, where that last pole was placed, it was about a ten-foot leap across, but the ground was higher there, with the stream cutting deeper, so if you were trying to make the best time, and jumped and missed, it was about a twenty-foot drop to where the swift, foaming water below had a whole lot of large, unfriendly rocks jutting up out of it.
“Jesus!” Slim finally said. “T’ take that run rightly, an’ fast as possible, is goddamn near out-an’-out suicide!”
“Ah, fuck,” Dixie grumbled. “It more’n likely takes them cossacks two hours t’ make a run like that.”
Igor said simply, “No.”
“Slim’s right.” Natcho shook his head grimly. And since Natcho was one of the finest horsemen ever born, even Dixie paid attention. “There are about fifteen places where a man on a good horse could go straight through at top speed without hurting either one of them. But there are about five—” He stopped and whistled low under his breath.
Igor nodded, understanding and agreeing. “Those are the ones you circle around as quickly as you can.”
The other cossacks, about seven of them, now splashed through a shallow part of the stream and rode toward us. Leading them, big as a bear in the saddle, was Sergeant Nick. They pulled up, facing us, and Nick looked back at the meadow, then at Slim. “What you think?” he asked in his growling, heavy accent.
“I hate t’ tell ya’ this, Nick,” Slim said slowly, “but I think you fellas’re outta your minds.”
Nick chuckled deep in his throat and started to fill his long-stemmed clay pipe. “Why?”
“That goddamn thing’s dangerous!” Sort of joining along with Nick, Slim took out an old plug of Red Devil Chewing Tobacco and bit off a chunk before offering it around. “Run like that’s bound t’ cripple ’r kill somebody ever’time.”
Dixie and a couple of others took chaws off Slim’s worn old plug, and then it came to me. I passed because I hate and can’t stand chewing tobacco, but I could see that Igor was curious. I held it out to him, thinking he only wanted to look at it. But he thought I was just being polite, and giving him first go. As he raised it to his mouth I quickly said, “It’s awful”—but he was already forcing his teeth through the tough plug, and I finished lamely—“strong.”
Nick, now lighting his pipe, looked at Igor. “You talk more good. You tell about games.”
Both the responsibility and the taste of the tobacco hit Igor at about the same time. He handed me back the plug, trying to keep the stricken look off his face. “The games—” he said, unable to go further at the moment.
Old Keats had once told me, in one of his moments of rare insight, “There is no hole that goes so far, or is so forever unending, as an asshole.” And though I should have known better, I fit that category right then. Because when Igor handed me back the plug, out of sheer idiocy or misguided loyalty or whatever, I went so far as to take a big goddamn chew off of it too. I guess I just couldn’t stand seeing him go through all that suffering all by himself.