Chapter XIV: We Visit the Border

We slept late next morning, and I was awakened by the men moving in our room. Dressing hurriedly, we went into the dining-hall to find Kyrlos and Stephnos. Aryenis was evidently enjoying to the full the delights of a real bed in a real house once more.

We made a short meal, for the Sakae live much as do the Southern Europeans--a light meal of bread and wine, with perhaps eggs the first thing in the morning, and a large breakfast at noon. I must say I longed for tea or some other suitable morning drink. Alcohol at that hour savoured too much of the rum with which we used to lace our cocoa for dawn battle stunts in the bad frozen frontier days to have any pleasant memories.

Kyrlos asked us how we had slept, and if we had all we wanted. We said we were more than comfortable in a good bed--their beds were good--after many weeks of hard marching. Firoz and Payindah were feeding with the soldiers, so we told Kyrlos of their prejudices in the matter of pork, and he said he would give orders on the point.

The Punjabis hit it off very well with the Sakae, whose mode of life was not unlike their own in many respects. In time they picked up some of the language with that facility which characterizes the people of India, accustomed all their lives to meeting men of different races. Some folk are of the idea that the inhabitants of India are one people, which may account for a lot of the idealistic rubbish we hear about the Indian nation. One might as well talk of the European nation. There is far more difference between the Punjabi and the Tamil than there is between the Russian and the Englishman, while the French are more akin to the Scotch than are the Mahrattas to the Sikhs. One meets more variety of languages, customs, religions, and, most of all, races, in India than in traversing Europe from Moscow to Dublin.

I asked where all the others had gone, and Kyrlos told me that they had ridden out to the villages to see the levies, and would be back with reports in the evening.

He said that he would be riding out himself directly to one of the border forts that covered an entry into his country, and asked if we would care to come. Wrexham and I said we should like very much to have a look at the country, but Forsyth announced that he intended to stop behind and learn something of the local language from Aryenis. He spent a very useful day, and when we came back he had long lists of words of some unknown language written out in Greek characters with the Greek equivalents.

Aryenis was evidently a good scholar, and Forsyth is a born linguist. He picked up their language amazingly quickly. As he had thought, it was not Greek at base, though there were many Greek words interlarded, especially as spoken by the more educated.

Much of the official written language was Greek, somewhat debased but comprehensible, and we discovered that a knowledge of the old tongue was a common possession of the upper classes, much as was Latin in mediæval Europe. He said the original language was quite unfamiliar to him, but had many and unmistakable traits pointing to its being some old Aryan dialect.

After we had finished the morning meal, horses were brought round for us, little stocky animals of the class of a small heavy-weight polo pony. The bridles were of deep leather, with single reins and a snaffle bit. The saddles were merely quilted pads with leather surcingles, and rather narrow stirrups, but comfortable enough to ride on.

The Sakae gave us the impression of a people to whom horses were a means of locomotion rather than a form of sport. But later we introduced polo, which was a _succès fou_ among the young bloods.

As we rode out of the belt of trees surrounding the house and outbuildings, we had our first real view of the country, which seemed to consist of a succession of valleys and ridges of hill, some steep and rocky, others more rolling, and covered with trees and verdure.

To our right lay hills, range after range climbing away to where the great snow-peaks filled the sky in the north, above the shimmering blue-grey slopes below. The air was cold and clear under the vivid blue sky, and a little breeze rustled the autumn foliage, splashes of warm colour in the bright sunshine. The track we followed sloped steadily down for a mile or so, and then up again on to a long ridge of hills higher than the ground we had left.

To our left, beyond a long expanse of more or less open plain, dotted with fields and cultivation as far as eye could see, were masses of sharp-toothed hills, clustering higher and higher in the direction we had seen the gate. Stephnos pointed it out to us as the Shaman country. I suppose the near edge was thirty miles distant.

The hillsides we rode over were fertile-looking soil, terraced in many places, like the terraces one sees all along the hills of the Italian Riviera, sprinkled with stone-walled orchards and vineyards, the trees now in the copper and bronze of autumn leaf, and dotted among them little villages, small clusters of grey stone houses, and some mud-built huts.

The houses were small and primitive-looking, but of a distinctly higher stamp than one sees in many parts of Middle Asia.

We passed through one hamlet, and as we rode by the women flocked out of the houses with an old man or two to touch Kyrlos’s bridle and speak to him. Fine-looking women most of them, typical peasantry of undoubted white stock. There were none there as dark as a Southern Italian, and the majority of them had light-coloured hair, while all had light-coloured eyes. With them a swarm of children, flaxen hair and red cheeks, that made me homesick for Sussex.

The women were all clad in rough homespun woollen garments, short full skirts, and bodices with short sleeves ending above the elbows. Some were barefooted, but the majority had heavy sandals with wooden soles. For the most part they were bareheaded, their hair coiled in thick plaits on either side of the head, and some--the more well-to-do--wore heavy necklaces of silver and turquoise, a favourite stone in the country. One I noticed had clasps of similar make in her hair.

This woman was, I fancy, the wife of the head man of the village, because she did most of the talking with Kyrlos.

It was refreshing to see women coming up and talking to men in this way after years spent in countries where the women sit with half-veiled faces in the background as you ride by.

They were evidently anxious, from the way they talked--not surprising, for, as we found a little later, we were but five miles from the border of the Brown Sakae.

They looked at us curiously, our clothes being obviously unfamiliar. The head woman asked Kyrlos who we were, and he told her that we were the people who had brought Aryenis back. They had heard of her return the evening before, the news having gone through that bit of the country like wildfire, for Aryenis was beloved of every man, woman, and child in the place. They took stock of us unabashed thereafter, and, I think, made remarks on our personal appearances.

I asked Stephnos why there were so few men about, and he told me that they had been called up to the fort to which we were riding, to guard the frontier.

As we rode on again between the silver birch trees lining the road, he explained to me that they had but a small army for police and frontier work against raiders from other clans. Raids were not infrequent even in peace-time. Small affairs as a rule, however, which were frequently stopped for years together by mutual consent. His father’s regular troops amounted to some two thousand men, including those under his uncle in the northern part of their country.

But all able-bodied men were liable to military service for fourteen days in the year, and in case of invasion or threat of invasion for as long as required. He said we should see the men of this district when we got to the fort, which lay on the far side of the hill up which we were riding.

As we came over the crest, riding through fields of lucerne, Stephnos pointed out to me a big winding river that ran below us in a wide valley perhaps six miles and more across, and at the foot, some two miles away, a low, square fort on a small hillock jutting up sheer above the river.

As we drew nearer, we could see the glint of the sun on the sentries’ caps just above the parapets, and from the top of a little central tower a blue flag waved in the breeze.

Below the fort was a little village with one or two shops. Most of the buildings were, however, shut up, clear evidence of prospective war.

Our ponies clattered up the steep winding path to the fort through a narrow gateway on the edge of a precipitous drop. Two sentries clashed the iron butts of their short spears to the ground as we entered (Kyrlos had sent one of our escort ahead to warn them of our approach), and at the inner gate we found the captain of the fort waiting to greet us, a tall broad man in close-mail jerkin and steel cap, with a silver device let in in front. Kyrlos introduced him to us, and he saluted each of us in turn; but, when he heard that I was the man who had rescued Aryenis, he offered me the hilt of his sword. I owe a lot of stout friends to Aryenis, it seems. He was a quiet, determined-looking man, his natural good looks somewhat marred by an ugly gash across the forehead, which gave one eyelid rather a droop.

But his mouth was straight and honest, and I think a man’s mouth is the best index to his character, although his eyes may show more of passing emotions. I liked him then and there--his square-chinned bronzed face with the short yellow-brown moustache under the slightly aquiline nose, his steady blue-grey eyes looking straight out below the dark rim of his grey steel cap under which his bobbed yellow locks just showed, all gave one the impression of a leader of men. His name was Henga, and we learnt that he was the younger son of a big landholder in the district. Among the Sakae it is customary for the regular troops to be officered by the sons of the smaller chiefs from whose districts the men are drawn, forming thus to some extent a professional officer class.

We dismounted from our ponies, and, while Kyrlos was conferring with Henga, Stephnos showed us round the fort with its high stone walls and battlements, and the quarters for the garrison and the storerooms all along the lower part.

He said there was a chain of such forts along the frontier, covering the most important entries into the country.

Each had its garrison of from fifty to one hundred regulars, and formed the centre of resistance for the surrounding countryside. When danger threatened, the officer in charge could call up the men of the district in such numbers as he required, either to defend the fort, or to hold the frontier, or to deal with raiders.

Each fort contained food and war stores, arrows and the like, for two months for twice its normal garrison. When men were called up for service, they had to join with four days’ food, a bow, a sword, axe or knife, and a cloak or sleeping-rug.

As we climbed on to the battlements he pointed out below us a company of men manœuvring, and said these were some of the men called up. The others, in small bands under the leadership of regulars, were watching the frontier up to where they linked with the next fort garrison some ten miles away.

I asked if all the clans had this system of military service, and he said that all had something like it; but for the last two years his father and uncle, feeling that war was inevitable, had been perfecting that of the Blue Sakae.

The regular companies had a very high percentage--in some cases fifty per cent--of what they call “double-pay men” (what we should call N.C.O.’s), who were specially trained, and drew double pay for their efficiency. Most of these were used to command the local levies in time of emergency. Thus expansion for war was easy with a nucleus of trained leaders. Living in the same districts, they were in touch with the civil population, and knew the men whom they would command in war.

Men were not paid when called up for service, their military service being part return for their lands, all of which belonged in theory to the chiefs, although, as long as the owner paid his taxes, and--in the case of able-bodied men--rendered his military service, he could not be dispossessed. Thus land passed down from generation to generation in the same family.

In the case of old or disabled men, women, or minor children who held land, the full tax had to be paid, while in other cases the amount of tax due was reduced by a proportion for each day of military service rendered. In the frontier districts, in addition to the normal fourteen days, each village was collectively responsible for turning out to repel and pursue raiders. For this no individual reduction of tax was made, but the whole taxes of the frontier districts were assessed more lightly.

I did not glean all this on the afternoon I am describing, but I mention it now so as to give a clearer picture of the country.

I climbed up to the battlements with Stephnos and stood by the sentry, who, with his long bow beside him, was gazing out over the country in front. There were other sentries farther along, one to each face of the fort.

It reminded me very much of a frontier post on the Indian border--the same loopholes, the same keen-eyed, Greek-profiled sentries, the same hills in front shimmering in the bright sunlight. But the country was far richer than anything along the Punjab frontier--more akin, indeed, to an English countryside than anything I have ever seen in the East.

In front toward the west stretched the plain we had seen from above, with the broad river winding its slow way through the rich fields into the fertile valley behind us, and then in the distance the fantastic, pinnacled, rocky hills of the Shaman country.

Stephnos pointed out a little irrigation canal some three quarters of a mile away, which he said was the boundary in these parts. I saw few people moving in the fields, and he explained that nearly all had withdrawn behind the line of forts.

To northward, beyond the river, lay a row of hills and a mass of undulating country, well cultivated by the look of it. The country all round here was in the main watered by the Astara, which, taking its rise from the high snow, came down first as a fairly fast mountain stream, and then, as the gradients got less, moved slower and slower, till it meandered through this part of the country, sluggish as an English stream in the Midlands.

Stephnos said that this was the richest valley in the country, and perhaps one of the causes of the jealousy of the enemy. But the Green Sakae country was almost as fertile; indeed, nowhere was the land really poor save the part of the Brown Sakae country round the Shamans’ territory, which we found later was in a way industrial, possessing metal mines which were worked. In consequence the Shamans were well off, being able to dispose of their metal-work for whatever they needed in the way of grain and other land produce.

There were other metal-workers in the country and one or two small mines, but the Shamans were reputed the best craftsmen, and their wares commanded a high price. They were particularly noted for their weapons and armour.

Before we left, Henga took us down to see the men drilling below. They were camped on an open space under the fort, some two hundred men in all.

They were of the same type as we had seen at Kyrlos’s house, save, of course, their equipment was somewhat sketchy. But every one had the long bow, which we discovered to be the national weapon. Most of them had some form of body protection, either leather jerkins, some covered with loose metal rings sewn on; some plain, or else thick wadded vests which might turn a blow. Not a few had steel caps; the remainder had close-fitting, thick wadded ones. I noticed that these last--although of harder and stronger material and of different colour--were practically indistinguishable in shape from the caps worn in the Punjab Salt Range, slightly peaked, straight round the brow, with low ear-pieces sweeping round to the back.

Almost every one of these caps was oversewn with either strips of metal rings or short lengths of iron chain.

It was easy to pick out the regulars, who were more or less uniformly dressed, all having mail jerkin and steel cap. The N.C.O.’s had small brass stars fastened to the front of their headgear.

Kyrlos chatted with some of the older men, and one could see that he was a popular ruler, for, although there was none of the exaggerated respect so common in the East, it was clear from his people’s bearing that they looked upon him as their natural leader.

I noticed that he shook hands with all and sundry on meeting them, and I put down his position as very much that of the patriarch of the tribe, an impression that later observations confirmed. Every one was free, and had the right of free speech where he considered himself aggrieved; but this freedom was tempered with a certain respect for those in authority, provided they stuck to the laws and--what was even more important--the customs of the land.

As we rode home, I remarked to Kyrlos that, save for the gathering of men, it all seemed very peaceful, and he said that that was because both sides were preparing for war--at least they thought the Shamans were preparing. For some days yet there would be nothing except minor raids here and there and perhaps but few of those. It took time to collect men and form them. His main forces were collecting at Miletis, where his brother had gone to supervise things.

“To-morrow we shall ride halfway there, some sixteen miles to Aornos, a fortified town. Then next day we will ride on and meet my brother, whose army by now will be reaching Miletis.”

As he was speaking, we passed three men--obviously called up for service--on their way back to the fort, and I noticed that all three wore something in their caps. One had a tassel of floss silk, another a little square talisman of turquoise, the third a gay-coloured bunch of ribbons.

“What are these things in their caps, Kyrlos?” said I.

He looked at them to see what I meant.

“Oh, that is a custom of our land. Whenever there is war and the men are called out, their wives or their sweethearts give them some favour to wear.”

“And if a man have neither wife nor sweetheart?”

“Then he must go ask some maid to give him a favour; or sometimes”--he chuckled--“it has been known, when a young fellow is rather bashful, that the maid herself will fling him one as he marches away.”

“And is he thereby tied to anything?”

“By no means, though frequently such things lead to more. But it is good when a wifeless man goes out to fight that he should have some special maid to think of. He is the more anxious to dispose of the enemy quickly and so come home again.

“If nothing comes of it when he returns, there is no harm. But if he return wearing a maiden’s favour and seek her out, he knows that she is not unwilling if her favour has been bravely borne in battle.

“The thought of a pair of white arms and red lips will make a man fight better than the thought of all the gold and honours in the land. Is it not so also in your country?”

“Indeed, I think it is somewhat this way the world over, and will be while men are men and women are women, though I have heard folk talk as though such things were dead and gone, and that women preferred gold and luxury to strong arms and brave hearts.

“Which talk must be untrue, since the thing that every woman desires in her secret heart more than all else beside is to bring forth straight-limbed children after the mould of their father: she does not desire to beget money-bags. Hence unless her nature be warped will she seek rather a clean-souled, strong-limbed man to father her children. Therefore I like to see my folk wearing their women’s favours. It is an omen for the generations to come.”

It was clear that Kyrlos and his kind had a refreshingly primitive outlook on life. I should like to have put him up to argue with a pacifist eugenist such as seem to swarm at home just now.

He was silent a space, and then he turned to me again.

“You said last night that you and your friends were wifeless men. It seems strange to me, for in our country it is uncommon that men of your years should be unwed. You are all close on thirty, I should say, while our folk marry mostly at twenty-five or six. Is the custom of your country other?”

“We marry somewhat later, Kyrlos. In our country it requires money to support wife and children, and but few young men have it. Further, since many of us wander much in strange parts, it comes that we marry later.”

“It seems impolitic that such a matter should depend on gold, for surely the State must suffer when men like you and your friends remain single.”

“But perhaps, O Kyrlos, we have not met with such as we would marry, or perhaps those whom we would marry would not have us! With us it is the woman who decides rather than the man.”

“With us also. It is not so in all lands?”

“In many it is otherwise, or so they say. Often it is the girl’s parents, and in some countries the parents of both, who settle these matters.”

“That is bad, methinks; such things should be for the man and for the woman. But I should be grieved to think of seeing Stephnos at your thirty years and still unwed.”

“Thirty-two--O Kyrlos. But, if I had been married, doubtless I should have remained at home, and then maybe the Lady Aryenis would not be with you now, so perhaps our customs have some value upon occasion.”

“Doubtless, my friend; all things are well planned could we but see ahead.”

Then he changed the subject, and for the rest of our ride back talked of the coming war. I could see that at heart his cares lay heavy upon him for all his cheerful talk to his people.

After a lazy afternoon spent with Aryenis looking round the grounds and asking questions about the country, we had an early evening meal, for Kyrlos had announced that we should start very early the next day. Aryenis went to bed soon after dinner, and we followed her example, since Kyrlos was busy hearing the reports of his officers back from the districts.

Before we went to bed, Payindah and Firoz plied us with questions as to the exact relationship between the Sakae and Sikandar, and hence with themselves. We gathered that they had settled down most comfortably, and Payindah in particular was the hero of the soldiers, since Aryenis had explained his share in her escape. Like all Punjabis, he was not devoid of swagger, and his locks were new-curled and oiled, and his leather new-cleaned, while I remarked that he had obtained a silk fringe for the end of his _pagri_.

During the afternoon they had accompanied some of the soldiers into the neighbouring village, where they had been the guests of the day, and referred with some gusto to the excellent sherbet that had been given to them. I fear their ignorance of the language misled them in the matter of the country white wine.

They were full of praise of the rich land they had seen, comparing it with France. Firoz, in fact, wondered whether it would be possible to take up a bit of it, and his eyes glistened as he described the flourishing countryside.

They considered the people as almost as good as their own folk, though how on earth they managed to converse with them I don’t know. Still no good fighting man is ever at a loss how to make himself at home, and these two hard-bitten, war-seasoned, hereditary soldiers were no exception to the general rule, as I knew from past experience.

Payindah’s handling of a portly French farm-wife and the resultant delicacies which appeared in my company mess in consequence in the muddy days of 1914-15 still linger in my memory as bright spots upon an otherwise murky horizon. So doubtless he had no difficulty in explaining his meaning to the Sakae, even more akin to the peasant soldier of the Northern Punjab than were the stalwart peasantry of Northern France.