The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

And what do you think? It all came out just as I wished: Khan Dzhangar’s pipe was smoking away, and another little Tartar comes racing towards him from the open, this one not on a mare like the one Chepkun peaceably took from Bakshey, but on a dark bay colt impossible to describe. If you’ve ever seen how a corncrake—in Orel we call him a twitcher—runs along a boundary through the wheat: he spreads his wings out wide, but his behind doesn’t spread in the air, as with other birds, but hangs down, and he lets his legs dangle, too, as if he doesn’t need them—it comes out as if he’s really riding on air. So this new horse, just like the bird, raced as if by a power not his own.

I truly won’t be telling a lie if I say that he didn’t even fly, but the ground behind him just kept increasing. Never in my life had I seen such lightness, and I didn’t know how to put a price on a horse like that, in what treasure, and whom he was fated for, what kind of prince, and still less did I ever think that this horse would become mine.

“So he became yours?” the astonished listeners interrupted the storyteller.

“Yes, sir, mine, by all rights mine, but only for one minute, and kindly listen to how it happened, if you want.”

The gentlemen, as was their habit, began haggling over this horse as well, and my remount officer, to whom I had given the baby, also mixed into it, but against them, like their equal, the Tartar Savakirey stepped in, a short fellow, small but sturdy, well-knit, head shaven as if turned on a lathe and round as a firm young cabbage, and his mug red as a carrot, and the whole of him like some sort of healthy and fresh vegetable. He shouts: “Why empty your pockets for nothing? Whoever wants to can lay down his money, as much as the khan asks, and flog it out with me for who gets the horse.”

For the gentlemen, naturally, that was unseemly, and they backed away from it at once: why should they go thrashing with this Tartar—the rascal would outwhip them all. And by then my remount officer wasn’t rolling in money, because in Penza he had lost at cards again, but I could see he wanted the horse. So I tugged his sleeve from behind and said: “Thus and so, don’t offer anything extra, but give what the khan asks, and I’ll sit down to contend peaceably with Savakirey.”

At first he didn’t want to, but I persuaded him. I said:

“Do me the favor: I want it.”

Well, and so we did.

“What … you and that Tartar … whipped each other?”

“Yes, sir, we also thrashed it out peaceably in the same way, and the colt went to me.”

“So you beat the Tartar?”

“Beat him, sir, not without difficulty, but I overcame him.”

“Yet it must have been terribly painful.”

“Mmm … how shall I put it … Yes, to begin with it was; I really felt it, especially since I was unaccustomed, and he, that Savakirey, also had a trick of hitting so that it swelled and didn’t let the blood out, but against that fine art of his I applied my own clever trick: as he lashed me, I hitched my back up under the whip and adjusted it so that the skin got torn at once, that way it was safe, and I finished Savakirey off.”

“How, finished him off? You mean to death?”

“Yes, sir, through his stubbornness and through his politics, he stupidly let himself go so far that he was no longer in the world,” the storyteller replied good-naturedly and impassively, and, seeing that all his listeners were looking at him, if not with horror, then with dumb bewilderment, he seemed to feel the need to supplement his story with an explanation.

“You see,” he went on, “that came not from me, but from him, because he was considered the foremost battler in the whole Ryn Sands, and on account of that ambition he didn’t want to yield to me for anything, he wanted to endure nobly, so that shame wouldn’t fall on his Asiatic nation on account of him, but he wilted, the poor fellow, and couldn’t hold out against me, probably because I kept a copper in my mouth. That helped me terribly, and I kept biting it so as not to feel the pain, and to distract my mind I counted the strokes, so it was all right for me.”

“And how many strokes did you count?” they interrupted the storyteller.

“I can’t say for certain. I remember that I counted up to two hundred and eighty-two, but then I suddenly reeled in something like a swoon and lost count for a moment, and then went on without counting, but soon after that Savakirey swung at me for the last time, but couldn’t hit anymore, and fell over onto me like a doll: they looked, and he was dead … Pah, what a fool! To hold out that long! I almost landed in jail on account of him. It was nothing to the Tartars: well, if you killed him, you killed him, those were the conditions, because he could have beaten me to death as well, but our own folk, our Russians, it’s even annoying how they didn’t understand and got riled up. I said:

“ ‘Well, what is it to you? What are you after?’

“ ‘But,’ they say, ‘you killed the Asiatic, didn’t you?’