Riders of the Steppes Read online

  © 2007 by the Board of Regents of the

  University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lamb, Harold, 1892-1962.

  Riders of the steppes / Harold Lamb ; edited by Howard Andrew Jones ; introduction by E. E. Knight. p. cm.—(The complete Cossack adventures ; v. 3) ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-8050-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-io: 0-8032-8050-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) i. Cossacks—Fiction. 2. Steppes—Asia, Central—Fiction. 3. Asia, Central—History—16th century—Fiction.

  I. Jones, Howard A. II. Title. PS3523.A4235R53 2007 8i3'.52—dc22 2006034006

  Set in Trump Mediaeval by Kim Essman. Designed by R. W. Boeche.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Editor's Note

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  An Edge to a Sword

  The Baiting of the Warriors

  The King Dies

  Men from Below

  III

  IV

  VI

  The Witch of Aleppo

  III

  V

  VI

  VIII

  X

  XII

  Bogatyr

  III

  VI

  White Falcon

  Chapter 5 The Hawk

  Chapter 8 The Pigeon

  Chapter 10 The Tabor

  Chapter 15 The White World

  The Winged Rider

  III

  VI

  Appendix

  About the Author

  Source Acknowledgments

  Contents

  Foreword vii Editor's Note ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv

  An Edge to a Sword i The Baiting of the Warriors 19 The King Dies 43 Men from Below 62 The Witch of Aleppo i33 Bogatyr 261 White Falcon 316 The Winged Rider 459

  Appendix 519 About the Author 525 Source Acknowledgments 527

  Foreword

  By 1920 Harold Lamb had written fifteen adventures of Khlit the Cossack and had seemingly concluded the series with the climactic novel "The Curved Sword." More than two years were to pass before another of his Cossack stories were published ("Sangar," a stand-alone that appears in volume 4 of this series), but Lamb was hardly idle. He had turned to writing of Crusaders and other historic adventurers.

  In 1923 Lamb revisited the Steppes with a new series, beginning with a short piece introducing readers to Ayub, a Cossack of great bravery and Herculean strength. A few months later Ayub was joined by Demid, a lean, hawk-faced Cossack from the Don. Demid has all the guile we might expect to see in a young Khlit, had Lamb ever drafted tales of his youth, and an eye for the ladies as well. In other words, Demid is a leading man, Cossack style, and over the course of his adventures with Ayub he rises from the position of newcomer to Koshevoi Ataman, leader of all the Cossacks.

  After four adventures as Demid's sidekick, Ayub meets up one day with a youthful bandura player accompanied by a shrewd, aged Cossack with long gray mustaches. The oldster is, of course, Khlit, and the youngster is his grandson Kirdy, whom Khlit wishes to see installed into the ranks of the Cossacks. First, though, Khlit wishes Kirdy to learn a few more lessons about the nature of men—and women—and battle. Fortunately those sorts of lessons seem never hard to find when you're a Cossack on the Steppes. Eventually Kirdy, Khlit, and Ayub join forces with Demid in another novel-length adventure that is one of the high points of the entire series, the rare "White Falcon."

  It was during these final years of Lamb's Cossack saga that Robert E. Howard was regularly reading Adventure. In a letter to H. P. Lovecraft,

  Howard named Lamb as one of his favorite writers, adding later that he had both respect and keen admiration for him. Patrice Louinet's excellent introduction to Lord of Samarcand already noted the similarity in tone and theme between Lamb and Howard, and in that collection Patrice introduced Howard's outline of Lamb's story "The Wolf Chaser."

  Patrice kindly shared another unpublished Howard document with me, rightly suspecting it was somehow connected to Lamb. It consisted of a long list of names and terms, mostly Cossack and Mongolian. A search through Lamb texts showed us that Howard had apparently gone through a stack of Lamb stories, writing down foreign terms and phrases in the same order that they appeared in Lamb's fiction, probably planning to use them in his own historicals. "Bogatyr," in this volume, is one of those Howard studied. If, then, you find yourself enjoying "Bogatyr" and others collected here, consider yourself in good company.

  Unless you happen to be a collector of pulp magazines or were alive in Howard's day, this volume is stuffed with hard-to-find treats. Three stories in this book have seen hardcovers, but two have been missing from bookstore shelves since the i960 s, and "White Falcon" has been out of print since the 1920 s. The rest have languished in obscurity since their appearance in Adventure, circa 1923 to 1925.

  As a result, most of you will be coming upon Ayub, and Demid, and the lovely witch of Aleppo for the very first time. I envy you. And for those Khlit fans out there who have never had the chance to read "White Falcon," well, I envy you that experience as well. Treachery, daring raids, races against death, skillful swordplay, loyal comrades, exotic and deadly cities and landscapes, dashing heroes and leading ladies—it's all here.

  As with the previous volumes, Riders of the Steppes features an appendix that reprints the essays Lamb sometimes wrote in issues of Adventure in which his stories appeared. They often provide a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the truth behind the fiction. Sometimes, as with "White Falcon," the events in Lamb's stories are solidly based in historical fact, fantastic as they may seem..

  Volume Four prints the last adventure of Kirdy and Khlit, a never-beforereprinted novel of Ayub's final adventure, a short series starring another Cossack duo, and a grab bag of exciting stand-alone Cossack stories.

  For now, though, sit back with this volume of grand adventures and enjoy!

  Editor's Note

  A big part of preparing manuscripts for these four volumes was the finding of them, for they were scattered through dozens of rare magazines and the longer stories were sometimes divided in parts over multiple issues.

  To our good fortune, Robert E. Howard scholars like Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet had access to many original manuscripts. In Lamb's case nearly all of his originals have been lost, leaving only the stories as they appeared in the magazines. (There is no "master list" of Lamb stories, either, except an unofficial one compiled by Lamb devotees, and previously unknown Lamb stories can still turn up in obscure old magazines.)

  One can only make guesses, then, if the spelling of a word like "scimitar" or "Circassian" changes from story to story. Likewise, if an out of place comma or dash appears, was it Lamb's preference or the magazine editor's or a typesetting error?

  From the start I was determined to edit with a light hand. Spellings of certain terms were standardized. Sometimes a comma or a dash was added or deleted, though only when it seemed absolutely necessary to improve clarity. I believe it the duty of an editor to present a work in the best possible light, not just to slavishly reprint a work as it first appeared, as though every punctuation mark is holy writ. Things might have been different had original manuscripts been found against which to compare the magazine texts.

  Only twice in the entire four-volume collection was it necessary to make significant changes to clauses in the text. One of the changes could not be helped: a typesetting error in the original magazine printing of "The Post in the Steppe" wherein several lines in the story's left column were duplicated on the story's right column, obliterating the end of a sentence. Lamb's original text is long since dust, so there was nothing to do but edit the
duplication out and insert what seemed a logical end to the interrupted phrase.

  Correcting the second error is more complicated. While preparing these stories for this collection I came again to a minor chronological inconsistency that had troubled me since I'd first read the Ayub and Demid stories. Lamb had earlier established that Khlit was adventuring near the end of the sixteenth century. He set the adventures of Ayub and Demid more precisely, in i6ii, so that Khlit is quite logically older when Ayub meets him. All fine and well, except that Boris Godunov, whom Ayub meets in i6ii, died in 1605. When writing historical fiction it is perfectly acceptable to have people live a little later or earlier than they did in real life—Lamb certainly wasn't the first author to change history's timeline to better tell a story. This wasn't the issue. The problem was the mention of Boris Godunov being dead in the earlier story "Men from Below" and then being quite obviously alive, a little later, in "White Falcon."

  Lamb probably never envisioned these stories being collected, and magazine readers would be unlikely to notice the discrepancy between stories that were printed many months apart. Lamb likely came upon the historical events that inspired "White Falcon" after he'd written the other tales, saw their fine potential as a story, and determined to accurately portray them with the right ruler of Russia. He also saw how to incorporate them into his saga, which would require twisting the timeline he'd established to fit his characters into the tale.

  As the editor of the work of a man long dead I had three options: leave the text as it was, alter a number of dates in several stories so everything synced up and trim the portions of some paragraphs that mentioned Godunov's death, or simply delete the troublesome sentences that declared Godunov deceased.

  I chose to address the situation with the smallest amount of text tampering possible by deleting part of some sentences. Casual students of history would be unlikely to know that Boris Godunov was dead by i6ii and would be untroubled by his living presence in that year. However, if I had left the text as it was, some readers may have wondered why a corpse in one story was ruling from a throne several stories later.I present the paragraph in its original form here. It is the ninth paragraph from the start of "Men from Below." The deleted portion begins immediately after the semicolon with the phrase "when Boris Godunov" and ends with the question mark: "Why not? When Dutch and English emissaries at the court of the

  Grand Turk gave him placating gifts of money and arms, seasoned with apologies? And why not, when up behind the frontier the Poles made war on the Muscovites, and the Muscovites made war on each other, boyar fighting peasant; when Boris Godunov, who had been tsar in the koshe-voi’s best days, was dead, and the nobles were clawing the flesh from the bones of the serfs? The whole Christian world, as far as the chief of the Cossacks reeked of it, was burning up powder and shouting for more." There you have it, a lengthy and likely dry look behind the scenes at the editorial process.

  The second paragraph occurs in chapter III of "Men from Below" and originally appeared as: "Whereas the first men of Khor had been sole masters of an estate the size of a small kingdom, and of all the souls upon it, times had changed. The empire had stretched its bounds to the Dnieper, and the old owners were taxed on their possessions. Now that the emperor, Boris Godunov, was dead, conditions were no better because the new boyars increased taxes and demanded levies of men for wars."

  Finally, in the same story, the Koshevoi Ataman refers to the tsar, Boris Godunov; in the original text, he said "the last tsar."

  I can only hope that all the wrangling and deliberation that took place— sometimes over simple commas—has helped create something like what Harold Lamb would have wanted to see had he been alive to champion this collection.

  As noted, the editors at Bison Books and I have chosen to leave the stories themselves as originally presented, with the exception of minor adjustments for editorial consistency. Certain attitudes expressed by the characters or used by the author remain just as they were printed in the early twentieth century. It should go without saying that what is privately and even publicly acceptable in one century may make for uncomfortable reading in the next. Some of Lamb's character portrayals would today be considered anti-Semitic, sexist, or prejudiced against certain ethnic groups. Though Lamb may have been trying to capture the biased attitudes of his characters, or reflect those of his society, he seems to have been uncomfortable with some of these portrayals later in his life, for he left stories with the most offensive of these elements out of the only collection prepared for re-publication before his death.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Bill Prather of Thacher School for his continued support, encouragement, enthusiasm, and friendship. I also would like to express my appreciation for the tireless efforts of Victor Dreger, who pored over acres of old maps to compile a map of the locations that appear in the final version printed within this book. Thank yous also are due to the tireless Bruce Nordstrom, Dr. Victor H. Jones, and Jan Van Heinin-gen for aid in manuscript acquisition, as well as S. C. Bryce, who kindly provided a timely and time-consuming last-minute check of some key issues of Adventure, and Dr. James Pfundstein and Doug Ellis for similar aid. A great deal of time was saved because of the manuscript preservation efforts of the late Dr. John Drury Clark. I'm grateful to the staff at the University of Nebraska Press, for their support of the project and for efficiently shepherding the manuscript through the publication process. I'm likewise appreciative and delighted by the hard work of cover artist and map artist Darrel Stevens. Thank you all for your hard work and dedica-tion—you have helped bring Khlit the Cossack and his world to life.

  Introduction

  E. E. Knight

  Don’t have a hundred rubles: have a hundred friends.

  Russian proverb

  If Robert E. Howard is justly named the king of "Sword and Sorcery" thanks to Conan, and my hometown icon, Edgar Rice Burroughs, is justly named the warlord of "Sword and Planet" due to John Carter's exploits on Mars, then it is only fair to crown Harold Lamb the tsar of "Sword and History" thanks to his Cossack stories.

  Before he settled into writing history and biography, Lamb was best known for his Cossacks (literally "wanderers" or "vagabonds," master-less men—or ronin, if you will) though he devoted the same attention to historical accuracy that he later would to his nonfiction. The Khlit tales thunder off the pages, so much so that the reader, traveling between campfire and battlefield, seldom notices just how much he has learned by the time the last page is turned.

  Lamb's worlds are rife with detail placed stealthily along the roadside rather than dropped into the median for the reader to plow through. Nor are his worlds ever in stasis; new powers are constantly rising as the old fade or change, far more dramatically than would be guessed at given the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century setting, when life supposedly moved slowly and change came to backwaters like the Russian Steppe and the Forest Castle of Tor in increments, if at all.

  And they are distinct worlds. The smoky, mud-littered kremyl of Moscow where the tsar sits under a howdah next to an ivory elephant is utterly different from the vampire-haunted banks of the Volga where pony droppings warm the camp and corn brandy inflames the Cossacks, which is again different from the princely kingdoms of India or a Turkish harem. We, in our age of iconographic traffic signs, cellular towers, and the worldwide corporation, can hardly imagine how alien cultures divided by geography and religion can become. In this time survival of one's narod (people), at home and abroad, often depended on the ability to fight.

  Lamb never forgets this, and as a mark of his skill he is able to work effectively in multiple cultural viewpoints in a single story. Van Elfsburg's thoughts upon seeing the Don Cossacks on the march in "White Falcon" picks out details that strike the Swedish professional soldier as strange, as strange as the sherbets and sweetmeats of Aleppo are to the Cossacks. It is a world where displaying the wrong color, as Khlit's grandson Kirdy does in "Bogatyr" by wearing green pantaloons, migh
t lead to a lingering and painful death at the hands of one's outraged enemies.

  For all his skill at world-building, Lamb's real strength is in his plotting. His stories have a tendency to fly off in any direction the compass may point, like a prowling falcon spotting a rising duck. The strange alliances and enmities that convincingly rise out of "Bogatyr" might startle anyone not used to Lamb's turns. Lamb makes new story lines appear with the facility of a three-card-monte dealer turning up and then hiding the red card.

  Because of his skill in these two areas Lamb's readers offered the highest compliment that may be paid to a writer: they demanded more of his work. But Khlit could only travel so far before his sword arm weakened as he aged—another of Lamb's strengths was his faithful recreation of the epochs of a man's life, and age brought its blessings and curses even to Khlit—though his essential Br'er Rabbit wiliness remained intact. Not every graying hero is vouchsafed a Wagnerian end in the manner of Tolkien's Theoden or Kipling's grey wolf Akela from the Jungle Book. Yet how does one keep supplying the readers with the thunder of Tartar hooves and the dissonant clamor of swordplay when their hero is too old to fight? Who would stand at the forefront of Lamb's cannon-cracking battles? He decided to give Khlit blood relations and allies.

  This volume largely deals with the adventures of Khlit's druzyak (friends, or pals). Kirdy, Khlit's grandson and deviser of stratagems that rival those of the grandsire; Ayub, the gigantic bearer of an ancient great sword; and Demid, the Falcon, leader of the Don Cossacks, came to the Lamb fan's rescue.

  Not that Khlit disappears from these stories. Khlit in his twilight years is all the more wonderful, for now that he can no longer win through on the strength of his arm and the courage of his horse he has to rely on the wit that has always been his real weapon. Whether bargaining for the lives of the Don Cossacks with the brooding Tsar Boris Godunov or for a handful of captured peasants with his ancient enemy of the Steppes, Gerai Khan, in this volume we see Khlit as resourceful as he ever was, even if his tactics must change.