At midday I met my five remaining Wallachs come to find me. They saw me coming down the cliff-hugging path and waited for me in the stony depression at its base. ‘Hallo, Thibor!’ the senior man greeted me when I joined them. He looked beyond me. ‘Ehrig and Vasily, they are not with you?’
‘They are dead.’ I jerked my head towards the peaks. ‘Back there.’ They looked, saw the column of white smoke reaching like some strange mushroom into the sky. ‘The house of the Ferenczy,’ I told them, ‘which I have burned.’
Then I looked at them more sternly. ‘Why did you wait so long before coming to look for me? How long has it been, five, six weeks?’
‘Those damned gypsies, the Szgany!’ their spokesman growled. ‘When we awoke, the morning after the three of you left, the village was all but deserted. Only women and children left. We tried to find out what was happening; no one seemed to know, or they weren’t saying. We waited two days, then set out after you. But the missing Szgany menfolk were waiting along the way. Five of us and more than fifty of them. They blocked the way, and they had the advantage of good positions in the rocks.’ He shrugged uncomfortably, tried not to look embarrassed. ‘Thibor, we’d have been of use to no one dead!’
I nodded, spoke quietly: ‘And yet now you have come?’
‘Because they are gone.’ He shrugged again. ‘When they stopped us, we went back down to their so-called “village”. Yesterday morning, the women and kids started to drift off in ones and twos, small parties here and there. They wouldn’t speak and looked miserable as sin, as if they were in mourning, or something! At sun-up today the place was empty, except for one old grandad chief — a “prince”, he calls himself — his crone and a couple of grandchildren. He wasn’t saying anything, and anyway he looks half simple. So, I came up the trail alone, sticking close to cover, and discovered that all the men had gone, too. Then I called up these lads to come and look for you. ‘Truth to tell, we’d long thought you were a goner!’
‘I might well have been,’ I answered, ‘but I’m not. Here —, I tossed him a small leather sack, ‘carry this. And you —, I gave my loot to another, ‘you burden yourself with this. It’s heavy and I’ve carried it far enough. As for the job we came to do: it’s done. Tonight we stay in the village; tomorrow it’s back to Kiev to see a lying, cheating, scheming Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich!’
‘Ugh!’ The spokesman held out his sack at arm’s length. ‘There’s a creature in here. It moves!’
I chuckled darkly. ‘Aye, handle it carefully — and tonight put it in a box, sack and all. But don’t sleep with it next to you. .
Then we went down to the village. On the way down I heard them talking among themselves, mainly of the trouble the Szgany had given them. They mentioned putting the village to the torch. I wouldn’t hear of it. ‘No,’ I said. ‘The Szgany are loyal in their way. Loyal to their own. Anyway, they’ve moved on, gone for good. What profit in burning an empty village?’
And so they said no more about it.
That evening I went to the ancient Szgany prince in his hut and called him out. He came out into the coolness of the clearing and saluted me. I stepped close to him and he looked hard at me, and I heard him gasp. ‘Old chief,’ I said, ‘my men said burn this place, but I stopped them. I’ve no quarrel with you or the Szgany.’
He was brown and wrinkled as a log, toothless, hunched. His dark eyes were all aslant and seemed not to see too clearly, but I was sure they saw me. He touched me with a hand that trembled, gripped my arm hard above the elbow. ‘Wallach?’ he inquired.
‘That I am, and I’ll return there soon,’ I answered. He nodded, said, ‘Ferengi! — you.’ It was not a question.
‘Thibor’s my name,’ I told him. And on impulse: